When I joined Siemens a couple of years ago the UX community was more siloed. This week we came together for our annual internal UX event and it was a good time to observe the change that happened over the last years and reflect on the impact it made in the company.

One driving factor to fostering this change was bringing the UX leaders of the different teams together to exchange on their challenges on running a UX team in an organization as complex as Siemens. This helped to introduce team leads to each other that don’t share an org code, but similar challenges.

Second we worked on creating a sense of community for every UX contributor by enabling a series of events. The yearly Siemens-wide UX conference is the biggest, but there are smaller knowledge-sharing and learning activities that are open for everyone to participate in and contribute to.

Over the last years the tool landscape in UX evolved in a way that fosters more collaboration. Gone are the days where everybody worked on their wireframes in Visio, OmniGraffle, Balsamiq, or Axure on their computers but using Figma on a company-wide level allows us to easily get more insight into the work of others. In addition to design, tools like Condens, TheyDo, Dovetail, or Maze help to collaboratively share insights from user research or work on research projects together.