Building UX at Molson Coors

Molson Coors Beverage Company (MCBC) knew they needed UX, but they weren’t sure what that meant. I was hired to measure and scale user experience across the technology organization.

  • Expanded team influence from just internal Salesforce to most of Commercial Tech (sales and marketing)

  • 100% retention of team since founding in Jan 2022

  • Skills matrix used as starting point for other teams to build their own career progression frameworks

How I scaled the team

Benchmarking team &
organizational maturity

Creating skills framework to measure iterative progress

Expanding team by identifying and hiring for skills gap(s)

Hosting educational sessions to upskill all teams

Understanding current state

Product teams already collected feedback and regularly interacted with end users. They used varying fidelity mockups to gather stakeholder buy-in before developer implementation. However, efforts were inconsistent between teams, and we still had a fractured, confusing experience.

What I did

  • Ran a remote workshop leveraging Miro to get to the root of the problem, prioritized ideas, and centered around our “Future of UX”

  • Conducted a heuristic evaluation of our most significant products and presented findings to senior leadership

  • Proposed persona-aligned metrics framework to start measuring our UX

Fishbone diagram from our remote workshop

What my team did

  • Started a design system and templates for two of our largest platforms

  • Expanded our personas from US-focused to include CA and UKI

  • Supported product teams by embedding into teams and picking up features

Building up the team

We had job descriptions but lacked a formal progression path and way for team members to measure their skills growth. Through a series of brainstorming and card sorting, we ended up with a list of skills plotted in Miro. I then expanded each skill to add progression from levels 0-4.

What I did

  • Brought back our future state to analyze what skills our team would need to demonstrate repeatable, measurable success

  • Built a skills matrix, based on research and internal discussion. (Feel free to steal ours to start discussions for your own)

  • Used the skills matrix to analyze our current team capabilities; hired additional headcount based on our skills gaps

What my team did

  • Filled out skills matrices and decided on a several skill-related goals. We meet at least once a quarter to discuss career progression and progress towards their goals

Expanding team influence

Our UX team was able to start measuring their career progression, but that wasn't enough. As a small team, we still could not take on all projects within Commercial Technology. We needed to expand the entire department’s UX acumen to increase our organizational UX maturity.

What I did (and still do!)

  • Host design workshops to help other teams learn how to facilitate and problem solve differently

  • Run educational sessions on topics within UX

  • Consult with different teams and explain why UX is essential

What my team did (and still does!)

  •  Set goals bi-annually to focus on where they want to grow

  • Provide mentorship to our emerging talent network: internal employees, interns, and college students

Lessons learned

Start small, but not too small.

MCBC heavily uses SAFe, so I initially took a "snowball" approach to team growth, looking for small, buildable wins. We were able to build some momentum, but I wish I had pushed for a Big Idea to make a Big Splash. That would have helped make the case for additional headcount sooner.

Your boss might not care about your skills matrix, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

My boss was the one who required everyone to have a completed skills matrix. I was excited to pick up the work and develop a meaningful series of skills to show team progression. I assumed they would be just as excited, but nope. They didn't care about the details of being a Senior UX versus a Junior UX person -- they trusted me to make that distinction.

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Using UX as a catalyst for building a scalable team framework