I have been working at Onshape since 2019 on the UX/ Support team. I first started as an intern and am now a Senior Product Manager. My position consists of three main areas: managing projects following a 3-week SCRUM release timeline, leading UX on multiple projects in parallel, and providing technical support to users. As our projects are propriety, I can lay out my general workflows and duties.
As a manager, I am in charge of leading projects from its initial ideation phrase through their release. I tend to focus in the Assemblies area of our web product, and lead all mobile app projects; however, I will work on projects in other areas of the product to make sure I continue to have a deep understanding of Onshape. I am usually managing 10-12 projects in parallel.
I start by gathering information about user's needs and feedback in a specific area of the product. I look through user's improvement requests in our ticketing system and the forum, feedback gathered by our Product Management team, and investigating what other products do. I then lay out the objectives for our project and create initial mockups on Figma. From there, I communicate with assigned developers and QA to determine a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for release. I then guide the vision of the project through development. I iterate on the mockups based on our MVP to come up with what the product should look like for initial release, and the long-term vision of that feature. I document how the feature should work and send developers a workable pixel perfect click-through prototype to ensure the final product matches our objectives. When developers get the project to a semi-finalized state, I run usability tests. I will reach out to a variety of users to test this new feature. I have them go through a variety of objectives using the new feature and get feedback on their workflows and thoughts on how the feature worked. After using the feedback, we finalize the feature through QA and release it to the public.
For the UX part of my job, I am in charge of creating mockups for new features, adding components to our design systems, and provide technical feedback to others on the UX team. I use Figma to build out how the new feature should work within our existing products. I will create rough initial ideas of how the feature should look in order to define our objectives. Using the User-Centered Design process, I constantly iterate and finalize prototypes so that the development team and non-technical teams can understand the new workflow. As a manager, I continuously create new dynamic components for our web design system. This allows other members of the UX team to re-use the components as templates for their projects. I am also in charge of creating our mobile design system. I have been converting icons and components of our web system to make them ideal for mobile. We want to create an integrated system where all platforms are seamless. In addition, I will run long-term research projects to propose new areas of the product. Usually, these are larger areas of the product that need a refresh or is a more complex feature to be added. Lastly, I will provide feedback to other UX members on their projects. I provide them feedback on technical aspects of their prototypes and mockups, ranging from workflow to mockup layouts.
The last aspect of my position is Onshape Support. Users can file tickets within the Onshape product asking for support, improvement requests or provide feedback. They can also give us access to their projects so that we can investigate their issue further. In Support, I am regularly interacting with our customers to help them through our software, whether it be asking how to do a certain feature or providing feedback on something the user is doing. I specialize in troubleshooting performance issues. I can dive into backend data and development portals to find in-depth information about their problem and come up with a solution. Support allows me to understand how users interact with our software and areas where we can improve.