Creating a unified admin experience

I normally like to start a project off by leading a design kickoff. This kickoff includes Product Managers, Front-End & Back-End Engineers, and QA Engineers. Once I lay out user stories and get feedback from the engineers on the technical limitations, I often ask them to sketch out some ideas of how they think it should look/function. Then I go off and design a few different solutions getting feedback from other product designers before landing on a couple designs to test with users or internally. But sometimes a project lands on your plate with a tight deadline that was set by another department and you have to roll with the punches.

My Product Manager and I still created user stories but we had to move much faster than usual to ensure we could get it to the front-end devs as soon as possible. The upside to this was that I was interacting with the developers much more frequently, bouncing ideas off them and then iterating; meeting with the Product Marketing team multiple times to really understand the new plans & how users could interact/adjust them and then iterating; collaborating with Marketing as well as Leadership, then iterating; thinking through future phases of the new pricing plan rollouts and how these designs would scale, and then iterating. Due to time constraints, we had to mostly focus our user testing internally. I, along with another product designer, sent out research surveys to get a consensus on various parts of the new experience such as a consolidated navigation and on-boarding expectations. I was able to redesign and reorganize the Administration site's side navigation based on the information I gathered from a particular survey.