In an Agile environment, all the teams came together to flesh out the platform, features and needs for us to build a useful and power tool for our customers. While the Dev teams started working on the backend structure and platform, my UX team met with the Product Owners to flesh out what we could accomplish in the amount of time that we had. We decided what was required, and what was nice to have and elements that would be slid into phase two.
 

The process for this project in the beginning was developed in the first few weeks as all the teams discovered their speed and groove to work together.
 

The Process:

• Meetings were held with Product Owners to work on each piece of the platform, with three major elements, the shop area where customers could review products that were added to their carts. The checkout section where customers would purchase their apps. Then the dashboard where all the apps could be managed.

• Once the user stories were created, they were handed off to our UX team. I was the Lead UX Designer that would take these stories and start to flesh them out in high fidelity wireframes and comps. We learned quickly that leadership and Product Owners understood designs that were more than just boxes and lines. While this was a bit more work than normal, it actually sped up the process as decisions were made quicker because of these demos.

• Once I had final sign off on the start of the flow, this was handed off to the other designers that would expand the complete flow. We would work back and forth with their designs and functionality to reach the final presentation piece. That was sent to leadership for their review. Any changes were sent back to the designer to update so that we could reach final approval.

• With final approval, the comps, redlines and functionality was sent to the dev team. Though all this there was always communication between all the teams. This made for a good flow of work even though the timelines were so compressed.

• Once one flow was handed off, our team would work on the next. When the work that the dev team had completed was ready, UX would review it to make sure it was pixel perfect and functioned as the redlines had indicated.

• With approval of the functioning flow, it was ready for deployment when the entire platform was ready.

• There was some challenges as some members of leadership and product wanted last minute changes to work that had been completed weeks before. UX would listen to their needs, where we would make the changes or inform them that it just wasn’t a must have for the initial release.

• With a awesome collaborative environment, the AT&T Business Console (ABC) was released within the six month goal that was provided in the very beginning.

• With the first few months, ABC created a 52% increase in customer awareness of AT&T sales and management of apps for their business customers.