CASE STUDY:
UX Leads Transformation
UX Leads Transformation
Cirium was created from the merger of 5 independent aviation and aerospace data companies -- each serving a key segment in the market -- with a goal to become the first 360 degree data provider for the industry.
Each company used ad hoc product design & discovery methods that worked for their narrow service offerings, but these approaches weren’t proving to be successful as Cirium worked to unify and scale the business.
- Led discovery revealing the reasons behind declining ARR and delivered product design solutions reversing that trend
- Developed trust-based stakeholder relationships at every organizational level and built enthusiasm for UX excellence across disciplines
- Organizational design and strategy: made the right hires at the right time, including Director-level talent
- Defined Experience North Stars aligned with Product and Engineering and co-led Cirium's first company-wide OKRs
- Launched and scaled a design system to >150 engineers
I joined Cirium as its first UX Director, leading a team of only 3 junior Interaction Designers on day 1 who had been reporting to a Product Manager (note: the team would grow to 20 over the next 24 months). As is often the case with UX teams of that size and maturity, design work was limited to the screen level with product managers, engineers, and the marketing team assigning tickets to the interaction designers to create buttons, mock up layouts, complete graphic design tasks, and the like.
Cirium had only formed as a company and brand 6 months prior to my arrival as the result of its parent company RELX acquiring data companies across a range of aviation and aerospace segments, with a goal to deliver a comprehensive pipeline of data spanning every aspect of the industry in a way competitors couldn't match. Each of these companies had their own brand, their own ways of doing product discovery and development, and their own approach to interacting with customers.
As with many companies in the aviation industry many of the staff had been doing this work for their entire careers and had developed long-standing personal relationships with their customers, which was proving to be both a benefit and and a risk to innovation.
Because this was an exercise in establishing UX as a discipline where it hadn't existed before and where many stakeholders weren't familiar with the ways design drives business impact, it was important to identify opportunities to demonstrate value in a measurable way while also introducing the foundations and benefits of evidence-based discovery.
As luck would have it, the Marketing team launched Cirium's website shortly before my arrival and it was performing below expectations; although the team had success driving traffic to the site most users didn't make it past the home page and customer feedback was critical. I offered to do an expert heuristic evaluation to identify any easy fixes, which was enthusiastically received by our CMO -- the product of my analysis opened conversational doors about the different ways UX can help optimize the business and set the tone for how the company thought about measuring success. Some key results of that initial evaluation:
- I asked what success looked like for the website: was the goal to attract new customers, was it to help us get more media attention, was it going to be the front door for our cloud-hosted products, was it helping current customers understand our new brand? Although the website was ultimately planned to become the authentication portal for all of Cirium's online products, it had been exclusively driven by the marketing team to this point and didn't have any associated OKRs; the marketing team wasn't able to confidently answer any of these questions.
* Opportunity for UX to demonstrate value by helping the business describe and prioritize use cases and establish metrics for measuring success - The evaluation extended beyond layouts, interactions, and user flows and examined content strategy, tone, and voice: how did we want to represent ourselves in print to our customers? What kinds of content did we want to foreground -- was the site an online brochure, did it want to show thought leadership, was it part of the product experience?
* Opportunity for UX to demonstrate value by defining content strategy - Evaluating CTAs, buttons and interactive components, fonts, use of color, and the like opened up a conversation about component standardization and reuse at just the right time, as teams were realizing that 10 or more squads were building things like identical date pickers and registration flows from scratch and that coordination to ensure all of these individual efforts worked together was becoming a increasingly burdensome tax.
* Opportunity for UX to demonstrate value by reducing duplicated effort and complexity
At this point there was growing interest on the team at the potential for UX to contribute across a range of domains, but it was still too early to set our North Star; I kept the team focused on building trust and demonstrating what UX can do, and began thinking about staffing strategy and priority hires.
The website analysis was a great first step, but we still needed to define the goals for the website and we needed to get real customer feedback to understand if we were on the right track.
I ran a workshop with internal folks to align on website priorities, and the results were:
- Describe what Cirium does and make our unique value clear; the individual companies that merged to form Cirium had very loyal customers and we needed to both make them feel good about the change and potentially upsell them to additional products and services.
* Rephrased as value to users: customers feel that the website helps them understand how Cirium can enable them to do more and better than they could before - Invite prospective customers to explore our solutions in accessible and engaging ways.
* Rephrased as value to users: prospective customers who visit the website are inspired by all the things Cirium can do to help them achieve their business goals - Increase our presence in media citations as an expert source by providing timely and relevant content not available elsewhere.
* Rephrased as value to users: media folks know they'll get timely and relevant information they can't get elsewhere when they visit Cirium's website
This was a big step for Cirium as the company hadn’t articulated any product objectives in terms of customer value before. As with many of the website initiatives I was able to naturally extend this approach to our product squads as well; whereas business objectives were historically focused purely on increasing sales we began implementing OKRs that clearly spoke to the value we were delivering to our customers.
After we aligned on the business objectives for the website the UX team recruited a range of customers and industry contacts to participate in card sorting exercises for navigation categories and observational studies to collect feedback on pre-production prototypes, which we were again able to extend naturally to product discovery as the team started seeing the value in this kind of iterative validation.
There was a desire to create seamless experiences across Cirium's product portfolio but the team didn't know where to start, so as the UX team was working with engineering and marketing on the website I spent time on an educational roadshow with cross-discipline leaders in an effort to build awareness around the importance of thinking about design as a unified journey across products and channels. This was again a right-message/right-time phenomenon, as all squads were working to support unified single sign on authorization and integrate into a Cirium-wide customer portal.
I’d been making some key hires during this time as well, bringing several senior IC UX Designers with experience in discovery to supplement the interaction design skills of our junior staff, hiring our first dedicated UX Researcher to start building our research repository, and adding a data visualization specialist onto the team to explore opportunities to modernize our product experiences (more on this below).
The success with Cirium’s website redesign ignited a number of conversations with product squads who had been struggling to figure out how to scale after the merger; we had a roster of loyal customers who were telling our product teams that our current offerings were fine, but growth was almost completely stagnant and a number of competitors had begun making inroads with new products that were extending into our core value proposition. Many of our core product experiences hadn't been meaningfully updated in nearly 20 years!
I wasn’t confident that we were getting the full story from our users, so I asked to sit in on some of the customer discovery calls our product team conducted. On the very first call I observed one of our Directors open the questioning session with “I know you know this is our baby and we all work incredibly hard to make it perfect, but we want your honest feedback on what we can improve.” Unsurprisingly the response was “no, really, it’s great just as it is”.
I asked one of our product squads if they’d be OK with me running some customer inquiry sessions and they were curious to see if I'd get different results. I focused on learning about users' end-to-end workflows both before and after they launched our product, and then did some digging into what they wished our product would also be able to do even if it seemed silly; that opened floodgates of feedback for the first time.
Common responses clustered around a few themes:
- Most used other tools to get the information from our tabular lists into a human-readable format, often using Tableau as a front end to visualize the data;
- Most of Cirium’s products had far more filters and options than were needed, and there were significant differences in formats and language use between products that increased the risk of misreading results (e.g. US date formats in one product, EU date formats in another)
- We were great at showing the data, but competitors were starting to offer analysis and insights as a value-add
At this point I introduced the team to user segmentation and journey mapping to help folks begin thinking more broadly about the specific users we were serving and the larger context around how our products fit into their daily workflows.
Customers were very quick to tell us what trends they monitored and what information they needed the most, and the team was ready to jump. Customer satisfaction scores increased dramatically when we rolled out these changes, which we were also able to do 5x faster due to the adoption of rapid prototyping methods.
Once we identified that visualizations were a high priority across nearly all of our customer segments the team was also quick to make the leap that we could begin providing insights into the data. This was revolutionary for Cirium and represented a fundamental shift from viewing itself as a data-first company to an analytics company. In fact, Cirium logo even changed to include "aviation analytics" as a tagline.
UX was significantly though not solely responsible for changing Cirium's perception of itself as a data-first company to a data and analytics company; most product teams at Cirium got their start in an era where simply offering access to data was high-value, but the data was rapidly becoming commoditized and the emerging value was all in what kinds of insights we could provide to our customers.
In just 2.5 years UX at Cirium advanced from almost entirely absent to confidently "emergent" on the Nielsen Norman scale, where customer-driven discovery and development was increasingly baked into our product philosophy. We’d succeeded in demonstrating UX impact by:
- Raising NPS, SUS, and CSAT through UX methods and practices
- Building customer advisory boards to strengthen lines of communication and build long-term relationships with our key clients and customers
- Growing the install base for every product with a dedicated UX presence, reversing years of stagnation
- Accelerating development by introducing no and low-code prototypes and reducing MVP development time from 15 months (average) to 3 months.
- Every Product and Engineering Director in the company requesting full-stack UX support in their product areas.
- Sales, Support, and Marketing teams contributing to product design workshops & design sprints.
The team’s success was due to a combination of good luck (our Engineering VP was a UX superfan and was instrumental in helping to remove roadblocks and win hearts and minds) and staying focused on delivering demonstrable, measurable wins for the business at each step of our progression. UX is fundamentally an enablement discipline, using our methods and techniques to help the business make more informed decisions by keeping the focus on identifying and solving the most valuable customer needs.
CASE STUDY:
UX Leads Transformation
Cirium was created from the merger of 5 independent aviation and aerospace data companies -- each serving a key segment in the market -- with a goal to become the first 360 degree insights provider for the industry.
Each company used ad hoc product design & discovery methods that worked for their narrow service offerings, but these approaches weren’t proving to be successful as Cirium worked to unify and scale the business.
- Led discovery revealing the reasons behind declining ARR and delivered product design solutions reversing that trend
- Developed trust-based stakeholder relationships at every organizational level and built enthusiasm for UX excellence across disciplines
- Organizational design and strategy: made the right hires at the right time, including Director-level talent
- Defined Experience North Stars aligned with Product and Engineering and co-led Cirium's first company-wide OKRs
- Launched and scaled a design system to >150 engineers
I joined Cirium as its first UX Director, leading a team of only 3 junior Interaction Designers on day 1 who had been reporting to a Product Manager (note: the team would grow to 20 over the next 24 months). As is often the case with UX teams of that size and maturity, design work was limited to the screen level with product managers, engineers, and the marketing team assigning tickets to the interaction designers to create buttons, mock up layouts, complete graphic design tasks, and the like.
Cirium had only formed as a company and brand 6 months prior to my arrival as the result of its parent company RELX acquiring data companies across a range of aviation and aerospace segments, with a goal to deliver 360 degree insights into every aspect of the industry in a way competitors couldn't match. Each of these companies had their own brand, their own ways of doing product discovery and development, and their own approach to interacting with customers.
Because this was an exercise in establishing UX as a discipline where it hadn't existed before and where many stakeholders weren't familiar with the ways design drives business impact, it was important to identify opportunities to demonstrate value in a measurable way while also introducing the foundations and benefits of evidence-based discovery.
As luck would have it, the Marketing team launched Cirium's website shortly before my arrival and it was performing below expectations; although the team had success driving traffic to the site most users didn't make it past the home page and customer feedback was critical. I offered to do an expert heuristic evaluation to identify any easy fixes, which was enthusiastically received by our CMO -- the product of my analysis opened conversational doors about the different ways UX can help optimize the business and set the tone for how the company thought about measuring success. Some key results of that initial evaluation:
- I asked what success looked like for the website: was the goal to attract new customers, was it to help us get more media attention, was it going to be the front door for our cloud-hosted products, was it helping current customers understand our new brand? Although the website was ultimately planned to become the authentication portal for all of Cirium's online products, it had been exclusively driven by the marketing team to this point and didn't have any associated OKRs; the marketing team wasn't able to confidently answer any of these questions.
* Opportunity for UX to demonstrate value by helping the business describe and prioritize use cases and establish metrics for measuring success - The evaluation extended beyond layouts, interactions, and user flows and examined content strategy, tone, and voice: how did we want to represent ourselves in print to our customers? What kinds of content did we want to foreground -- was the site an online brochure, did it want to show thought leadership, was it part of the product experience?
* Opportunity for UX to demonstrate value by defining content strategy - Evaluating CTAs, buttons and interactive components, fonts, use of color, and the like opened up a conversation about component standardization and reuse at just the right time, as teams were realizing that 10 or more squads were building things like identical date pickers and registration flows from scratch and that coordination to ensure all of these individual efforts worked together was becoming a increasingly burdensome tax.
* Opportunity for UX to demonstrate value by reducing duplicated effort and complexity
At this point there was growing interest on the team at the potential for UX to contribute across a range of domains, but it was still too early to set our North Star; I kept the team focused on building trust and demonstrating what UX can do, and began thinking about staffing strategy and priority hires.
The website analysis was a great first step, but we still needed to define the goals for the website and we needed to get real customer feedback to understand if we were on the right track.
I ran a workshop with internal folks to align on website priorities, and the results were:
- Describe what Cirium does and make our unique value clear; the individual companies that merged to form Cirium had very loyal customers and we needed to both make them feel good about the change and potentially upsell them to additional products and services.
* Rephrased as value to users: customers feel that the website helps them understand how Cirium can enable them to do more and better than they could before - Invite prospective customers to explore our solutions in accessible and engaging ways.
* Rephrased as value to users: prospective customers who visit the website are inspired by all the things Cirium can do to help them achieve their business goals - Increase our presence in media citations as an expert source by providing timely and relevant content not available elsewhere.
* Rephrased as value to users: media folks know they'll get timely and relevant information they can't get elsewhere when they visit Cirium's website
This was a big step for Cirium as the company hadn’t articulated any product objectives in terms of customer value before. As with many of the website initiatives I was able to naturally extend this approach to our product squads as well; whereas business objectives were historically focused purely on increasing sales we began implementing OKRs that clearly spoke to the value we were delivering to our customers.
After we aligned on the business objectives for the website the UX team recruited a range of customers and industry contacts to participate in card sorting exercises for navigation categories and observational studies to collect feedback on pre-production prototypes, which we were again able to extend naturally to product discovery as the team started seeing the value in this kind of iterative validation.
There was a desire to create seamless experiences across Cirium's product portfolio but the team didn't know where to start, so as the UX team was working with engineering and marketing on the website I spent time on an educational roadshow with cross-discipline leaders in an effort to build awareness around the importance of thinking about design as a unified journey across products and channels. This was again a right-message/right-time phenomenon, as all squads were working to support unified single sign on authorization and integrate into a Cirium-wide customer portal.
I’d been making some key hires during this time as well, bringing several senior IC UX Designers with experience in discovery to supplement the interaction design skills of our junior staff, hiring our first dedicated UX Researcher to start building our research repository, and adding a data visualization specialist onto the team to explore opportunities to modernize our product experiences (more on this below).
The success with Cirium’s website redesign ignited a number of conversations with product squads who had been struggling to figure out how to scale after the merger; we had a roster of loyal customers who were telling our product teams that our current offerings were fine, but growth was almost completely stagnant and a number of competitors had begun making inroads with new products that were extending into our core value proposition. Many of our core product experiences hadn't been meaningfully updated in nearly 20 years!
I wasn’t confident that we were getting the full story from our users, so I asked to sit in on some of the customer discovery calls our product team conducted. On the very first call I observed one of our Directors open the questioning session with “I know you know this is our baby and we all work incredibly hard to make it perfect, but we want your honest feedback on what we can improve.” Unsurprisingly the response was “no, really, it’s great just as it is”.
I asked one of our product squads if they’d be OK with me running some customer inquiry sessions and they were curious to see if I'd get different results. I focused on learning about users' end-to-end workflows both before and after they launched our product, and then did some digging into what they wished our product would also be able to do even if it seemed silly; that opened floodgates of feedback for the first time.
Common responses clustered around a few themes:
- Most used other tools to get the information from our tabular lists into a human-readable format, often using Tableau as a front end to visualize the data;
- Most of Cirium’s products had far more filters and options than were needed, and there were significant differences in formats and language use between products that increased the risk of misreading results (e.g. US date formats in one product, EU date formats in another)
- We were great at showing the data, but competitors were starting to offer analysis and insights as a value-add
At this point I introduced the team to user segmentation and journey mapping to help folks begin thinking more broadly about the specific users we were serving and the larger context around how our products fit into their daily workflows.
UX was significantly though not solely responsible for changing Cirium's perception of itself as a data-first company; the companies coming together to form Cirium got their start in an era where simply offering access to data was high-value, but the data was rapidly becoming commoditized and the emerging value was centering around the insights we could provide to our customers.
In just 2.5 years UX at Cirium advanced from almost entirely absent to confidently "emergent" on the Nielsen Norman scale, where customer-driven discovery and development was increasingly baked into our product philosophy. We’d succeeded in demonstrating UX impact by:
- Raising NPS, SUS, and CSAT through UX methods and practices
- Building customer advisory boards to strengthen lines of communication and build long-term relationships with our key clients and customers
- Growing the install base for every product with a dedicated UX presence, reversing years of stagnation
- Accelerating development by introducing no and low-code prototypes and reducing MVP development time from 15 months (average) to 3 months.
- Every Product and Engineering Director in the company requesting full-stack UX support in their product areas.
- Sales, Support, and Marketing teams contributing to product design workshops & design sprints.
The team’s success was due to a combination of good luck (our Engineering VP was a UX superfan and was instrumental in helping to remove roadblocks and win hearts and minds) and staying focused on delivering demonstrable, measurable wins for the business at each step of our progression. UX is fundamentally an enablement discipline, using our methods and techniques to help the business make more informed decisions by keeping the focus on identifying and solving the most valuable customer needs.
