Product and Design at Bloomberg: A 15-year Evolution
Summary
Key Insights
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Bloomberg’s UX evolved through four phases: innovating processes, taking on special projects, embedding UX in product teams, and fostering UX skills across the organization.
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Initial UX efforts focused on methodical user-centered design techniques like wireframing and storyboarding to reduce bias and increase value delivery.
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Embedding UX designers alongside product managers and engineers leads to more strategic, continuous collaboration rather than reactive design fixes.
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Product managers benefit from designers who ask curious, probing questions and are open to exploring multiple solution options.
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Providing detailed context and understanding business goals enables designers to deliver more effective and relevant user experiences.
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User research and usability testing are critical to validate hypotheses and inform product pivots before development.
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Successful collaboration needs mutual trust and respect, treating UX, product, and engineering as equally important partners.
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Healthy disagreements are constructive and should focus on shared outcomes rather than individual ideas or territoriality.
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UX is not just about consistency but tailoring experiences to different platforms and user contexts, such as mobile attention spans.
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Good design directly impacts business value by increasing usability, adoption, and customer satisfaction.
Notable Quotes
"Good UX is good business."
"If it’s not usable it’s not valuable."
"UX success equals team success."
"We are like three legs of a chair: product, engineer, and UX all contribute to stability."
"Curiosity and asking lots of questions helps push boundaries and improve solutions."
"Providing context to designers leads to much better design outcomes."
"Design needs to balance business strategy and technology limitations but always keep users centered."
"Healthy debate is key, and we should be biased toward a successful outcome, not our own ideas."
"It’s important not to fall in love with a feature but stay open to new information and feedback."
"Investing time upfront in user research and discovery avoids rushed fixes that don’t meet clients’ needs."
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