(Overview) AstraZeneca: Incorporating Design Strategy within Project Governance

Business Context & Design Challenge:

With an IT department of more than 2,000 people struggling to balance a highly-standardized development approach with the ambiguous demands for HealthTech innovation, a more comprehensive set of flexible approaches was needed to achieve product success..

Working with members of the Global UX Team, IT leadership, and executive stakeholders, I was tasked with forming a more modernized set of IT product development policies. During this process, I worked collaboratively with subject-matter experts to outline product strategies that identified market factors, minimized risk and waste according to those conditions, and provided educational resources to leverage these updated approaches.


Project Profile & UX Strategic Approach:

With several disciplines contributing to this leadership & mentoring effort, I adopted a hybrid UX strategy, spending the first few weeks researching established practices and building collaborative relationships. Once my findings were shared and validated with that cross-disciplinary team, I worked in quick sprints to build and refine the necessary guidelines and educational tools to update organizational approaches.


Competency Highlights & Results:

Leveraged product domain expertise & thought-leadership to establish more effective cross-functional collaboration:

  • Identified governance shortcomings that resulted in inflated costs and wasted effort across the entire IT division.
  • Introduced flexible product strategies to account for user needs, market conditions, and business constraints.

Provided a tiered delivery strategy to expand engagement with Global UX Team:

  • Increased RFPs for Design Team by 30% (first 6 months).
  • Engaged with over 500 participants (first 6 months) via new UX Strategy training courses, “lunch & learn” sessions, and product workshops.
  • Established earlier engagements with project teams to address the “problem definition & ideation” stage.

Offered operational design expertise to help product teams identify innovative solutions quickly and inexpensively:

  • Conducted “kick off” ideation sessions to create project alignment quickly, reducing guesswork, rework, and project “crunch”.
  • Reduced ineffective planning activities by 40 - 50% through guided requirements mapping seminars.