When my former CTO asked me to create a UX Guild, I was skeptical. Yet another obligation to sink my time. Today my UX Guild is one of my favorite intrapreneurial passion projects. I want to share my experience with you how this project turned out into a successful UX maturity booster in my organization.
What is a Guild?
The guild framework is part of the well-known Spotify Agile model. Cross-functional team members are passionate about a topic, yet not working in that field can form a Guild like a community of interest. For a UX Guild, the Spotify guild framework is hard to adapt if you don’t have a big design team and a low UX mature organization. You need to adjust the guild’s strategic focus based on the organization’s UX maturity level.
A UX Guild can work as a strong pillar of a company-wide UX strategy to improve UX maturity in a B2B organization.
Here are projects I did myself, and you can do with your UX Guild.
Teach UX to Everyone
The best way to multiply UX knowledge is to teach it to your colleagues. You are planting tiny investment seeds into the future of UX maturity. (Besides, it’s also simply nice to share your knowledge with everyone interested.) Everybody who joins my guild will get training in UX fundamentals and Design Thinking. Once a UX enthusiast learns some skills, you can involve them in real design projects and workshops.
Facilitate Design Workshops with your UX Guild
You can enable your UX Guild in any design workshop format, e.g., the Design Sprint. Design Workshops are a great way to demonstrate the value of design practically to non-designers. Exactly what we want to increase overall awareness about Design Thinking, isn’t it?
I treat the UX Guild like an in-house design workshop agency. Advertise for your service and look out for opportunities within your organization where the guild could help. Almost like a creative in-house SWAT team who comes in to ignite an inspiration fire.
Multiply your knowledge times ten
A Product Owner once told me, “the problem is that so many people don’t know what UX can do for us.” This stroke a cord on me. Why not use the guild as an internal loudspeaker for debunking UX myths?
My UX Guild is making a UX fundamentals training course on your internal learning platform. Everybody newly hired in the Technology department will automatically get an email to take our UX course in their inbox.
It can also be a be weekly newsletter or video with UX best practices. Any multiplier of UX awareness is gold.
Conclusion
There are a ton of other projects you can do with your guild. As a design leader, my point is that you can use a UX guild as a strategic instrument to get closer where you want, especially in B2B organizations.
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