Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Asmita Kunwar

It was the 28th of June, a day before my birthday. I boarded a one-way flight to Amsterdam to work with the largest accommodation booking website on the planet, Booking.com. Coming from a startup in Berlin with ten people seated in 3 rooms, and being the first and only UX Designer there, I knew this adventure would be different.

Many of us move on to work from a small startup to a huge corporate company. Thus after five months at Booking.com, I’m happy to share some learnings from my experiences. I hope this would help many of you out there who are looking to make a similar switch.

It’s okay to be lost.
Feeling lost during initial weeks? That’s ok! Huge companies have a lot going on, and one feels mandated to know everything. Don’t stress, take your time to know about the company. Have a great support or mentoring system to reach out when necessary. At Booking, I had fantastic leads who helped me through my onboarding process.
Don’t aim for productivity straight away.
Don’t aim at being productive straight away. Take some time to understand the product. Use every opportunity to see how users use it. Learn about its legacy. Sync up with your team lead/manager, explaining why this learning process would be crucial for you to be successful in your role. Once you increase your understanding of the product and its users, productivity would slide in automatically.
Be a listener.
Listen to people. During my initial months at Booking, I grabbed every opportunity to hear people from various disciplines, fellow designers, and industry experts speak about a variety of topics. Not only did I learn a lot, but I also soaked in the company’s mindset and attitude, speeding up my learning process by two folds.
Get a mentor.
Booking has a huge design community. I get the opportunity to learn from some of the best professionals in the industry. So far, I’ve been able to find three mentors that I get along with. They offer a wide range of mentoring in areas they specialize, ranging from onboarding issues to developing analytical approaches to solving problems. I feel it’s a great combination that has helped me push my self forward.
A large user base, smaller scope.
With a bigger company comes a narrow scope. You would most likely work on a team that focuses on a really small product area. However, the user base would be way larger. What does it mean for you? It means that the stakes are higher. A minor change in a margin or padding can have a major impact on users. For me, this opened up a huge opportunity to dig deeper into data. I started considering more complex user scenarios, that would relate to geographic locations, languages, user lifetime etc.
Establish communication channels with different teams.
Team coordination is absolutely crucial. What helped me a lot was to create a scope map that traced all possible teams that might possibly interact with my team. I used this map as a starting point to establishing viable communication channels.
PO/PM will be your best friend.
A big company has a lot more teams than a small startup. This generates a need for efficient coordination. Here is where my PO plays an important part. I always try to keep my PO in the loop. I discuss my UX methodologies, newly discovered opportunities, and coordination issues. He/she is instrumental in forming the right connection with the right teams.
Data, data, and more data.
Established companies are a gold mine when it comes to data. Take this opportunity to dig deep into data to identify usability problems, while learning to balance qualitative feedback techniques with quantitive information.

To sum it up, a big company poses a different set of challenges. Embrace the changes while keeping the user in the middle of everything you do.

Leap of a UX Designer: from a startup to a corporate giant was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Leap of a UX Designer: from a startup to a corporate giant

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles