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Building know-how from the ITX team blog

Our Practiced Approach to Problem-Solving in UX Dynamics

The ITX User Experience (UX) team has grown steadily in recent years, not only in number, but also in breadth and depth of expertise. It’s a growth that reflects the continued recognition of the value of UX, and in turn, the investment businesses are making in UX, including research and discovery.

As we have grown, so too has the need to evolve our teams’ norms and practices. More people mean more experiences to learn from, which requires more time that we required to share and discuss our work. This post zeroes in this one area that required improvement – our Design collaboration meetings.

 

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Objective Prioritization is Impossible

The prioritization of anything complex must be a collaborative process.

According to Dictionary.com, the first two definitions of priority are listed as:

  1. The state or quality of being earlier in time, occurrence, etc.
  2. The right to precede others in order, rank, privilege, etc.; precedence.

We use the term a little differently in the software development industry.

In our world, prioritization is –

The art of combining everything we think we know about the past with the fixed resources we have right now to predict the order in which to do things to improve our collective future.

It is complicated, imperfect, and messy. The most powerful prioritization schemes are those which align our teams and empower them to make better decisions.

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Great Visions Unlock Human Potential

Getting the Vision Right is Hard Work – But It’s Vital to Team Success

A great vision is one that unlocks human potential and creativity by painting a clear picture of what is possible. Stewarding, adapting, and continuously refining the product vision is the top priority of successful leaders because it is a key driver of the organization’s strategy.

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Where Are The Innovations?

In this blog, ITX EVP of Innovation Sean Flaherty explores where innovation comes from, obstacles that stand in its way, and a simple technique you can share with your teams today for capturing ideas that lead to more innovations.

This blog is a refreshed version of the original, which was first published February 15, 2022, on Medium.

 

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Maximizing Developer Value: The Intersection of Tech and Business Domains

In his role as Principal Software Engineer at ITX, John Roets knows the value engineers bring to the table and describes it in the blog below. Leaning on content curated from thought leaders like Amazon’s Jesse Watson, SVPG’s Marty Cagan, and others, John offers words of caution and support to his fellow engineers and their teammates: “If you fail to see beyond technical skill as what makes developers valuable, you’ve got it wrong.”

My new favorite article is The Hard Thing About Software Development, from Jesse Watson, a software development manager at Amazon. I discovered it through James Coplien, an Agile influencer, who has labeled the article as ‘profound.’

The article itself isn’t new – it was written in 2017 – but its message is as relevant as ever.

In the article, Jesse is responding to an independent remote developer – a freelancer, gig worker – who is lamenting the fact that gigs don’t pay well.

On the surface, this seems contradictory. After all, developers are in high demand and are paid well. Right? What’s going on here?

 

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Bridging the Gap: Highlights from ITX’s 2nd Annual Product + Design Conference

ITX hosted its 2nd Annual Product + Design Conference on June 22-23 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel Ballroom in downtown Rochester. The 2023 event’s 225+ Keynote Day attendees included every fashion of product maker and leader.

They may have entered the conference as product managers, designers, engineers, QA specialists, and content strategists. But they exited as members of a product team – collectively responsible for solving one shared problem: how do we improve the lives of our users

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