When I began working with VideoShops, there was no product leadership. A VP of product was being headhunted and would arrive several months later. A revolving door of freelance UX designers had come and gone, leaving little continuity and giving no voice to user experience. There was nobody around to do user research.
I was hired when the chief data officer identified the neglect of UX as a primary cause of the product challenges.
VideoShops needed to launch
As a startup with limited resources and a rapidly dwindling budget, VideoShops wanted to get its product to market as soon as possible.
With no product leadership, there was no clear picture of what they had actually built. There was a lot of code, but no sense of how it fit together into a functioning product.
The objectives were:
scope out what functionality would be needed to serve the business model
identify what had already been built
identify what still needed to be built
identify what hadn't even be designed yet
design it
Start feeding design requirements to the development team right away so they could plan sprints
Everyone had been doing their own thing, with the journeyman UX consultants largely disconnected from one another, and even more from the branding/creative team. Each team member worked in isolation, syncs were rare, and there was no single source of truth.
The above shot from Figma is just one of countless examples of the chaotic design environment. There were screens that were built but not documented, multiple files documenting the same thing, and every file was in various forms of disarray.
The questions I had set out to answer would be difficult to answer with such fragmented documentation, but that's what I set out to do.