I wanna talk to you about how over the last a little bit more than a year now, I have been transitioning from UX to product management and other extended role, and I've

been really focusing on how are we shaping AI operations in my organization. Right? So it's it's gonna be a lot of, like, tips and tricks of how what I have done to this transition, and I'll just jump right into it. About me, I my name is Pilar. I am a UX UI designer. I have been working for almost ten years in tech in tech, eight years as a UX designer, Pure UX. I I focus a lot on data driven employee experience and process optimization. I've been working with really large Fortune 500 companies, multinational companies, really old companies with old processes, and where it's kind of, like, a lot of work to modernize and to change.

And within that is where I have found a lot of, like, my my happy zone, let's say. And over the last year, as I mentioned, I have been transitioning as a UX and product manager. Today, I'm working with a global AI of service line at ThoughtWorks, enabling all of our teams on how do they how do you integrate AI into operations, manage services, and how can you experiment on that? So, further ado, let me tell you bit how did I get here. I love UX, but it was never my first, it was never my first option for career. I majored in animation, and I don't think it's gonna be my last. I'm a person that really drives on challenges, learning new thing. And I think with a lot of careers, you either go into specialization. Right? Like, you become an expert on it, or you go horizontally and try to expand.

I think for me, for my personality, it's about expansion. And the talk today is gonna be how have I looked into expanding my role and going beyond what is defined without forgetting what I love about UX and what about about my skills so far and my strengths. So I'm gonna walk you a little bit through, like, different chapters of this transition and how I've been managing it. So first one, UX was never the limitation. It is my baseline. The beauty of user experience is that the core of it is learning. You're consistently learning, adapting, and acquiring new knowledge. Right? So depending on your users, I focus a lot of employees, so, you're always learning about the new ways of working, their industry, their technical terms, their expertise. And this is ongoing process that I have been taking into also how do I apply it into my own career, into my own growth?

And now with the new WaveAI, how do I leverage it there? And then the other hand is that with UX comes with opportunities. Right? You're always constantly working with engineers, developers, product managers, with sales, marketing, global leaders, and you really embrace how you really learn how do you develop software, let's say. You'll embrace how do you develop solutions, and you start getting, like, matches of how do you mix, how do you leverage, like, tech, business, and design and user needs, like, in the center. So when I started to explore how can I expand my role, I thought UX was, like, a great position because I have, like, all of its exposure already, and it was not, like, transitioning to products from scratch? I had, like, this baseline. Alright. So how did I start expanding? I started embracing a lot of odd jobs at work. I started working with a couple of projects that I would have never been in touch with as a designer.

So for example, modernization projects, developing platforms, a lot of, like, data migration. I started working just with a team on helping them prep their presentations, right, and prep their material and prep their blocks communication, doing copywriting, graphic design. And with all of these, what I was doing actually in the background was that I was learning so much about all these other areas. I was learning about how do you manage a data project, how do you manage automation project, modernization. When you're talking about, like, what is on prem, like, was something I what is on prem? What is cloud? Like, how do you manage a project leveraging from on prem to cloud?

All of these are things that I started just learning through exposure and just embracing, like, really good jobs. Mhmm. Other kind of projects that I was taking, I'll let you a little bit more because this is how I started embracing catching up with the AI wave. Around this time when I started doing this expansion, AI started to be the buzzword. Right? Everybody was panicking about it. It's gonna come take our jobs. It's replacing all of the design work. It's replacing all of the copywriting. And here's the thing. I have been working on designs since I was a little girl. My mom was a designer. I have seen technology change how design changes every day, every so often. And if you're not on top of it, I don't think I think being on top of it is, part of being a designer. So I started, alright.

So what is the new role with AI as a designer gonna be looking like? And started catching up. So what I started doing, I started just experimenting anyway with ChatGPT. I took a really great course in in interaction design foundation on UX for AI and AI for UX. They gave me a lot of, like, a really core baseline. And and discussing what we were discussing before, I started embracing, like, all jobs. So I started working with a lot of, like, the service lines that were developing, like, proposals and demos and products for clients on AI and start working with them on how can we resolve something, how can we reimagine our journey, how can we reimagine what this industry could be with AI, in the mix, And, also, like, developing small demos or small proof of concept, it helped me, like, learn how do you actually develop an AI solution.

How do you define acceptance criteria? How do you slice? How do you evaluate? What what does QA look like? Right? What are, like, the trade offs, the limitations, the benefits that you can get that you wouldn't get otherwise? And this was how I started catching up. Like, again, for me, it's a lot of how you do it through experience because I think Hudson is the best way that I can learn. And how do I find myself these opportunities even if it sometimes it took like working extra hours. Sometimes it took like working on the weekends. But for me, was like, how can I actually start getting learning through experience to complement what I had been learning from theory? Alright. Okay. The next thing that I was doing to do the transition was stepping into gaps.

So one of the projects that I that I joined as a proof of concept, it was a project that lasted, like, couple months. It was an agentic search solution. And the first two weeks, the there was, like, a complete analysis paralysis in the team. There was no really I was running as a UX. And when I was seeing that there was, like, just this slowdown, I jumped in to fill in the gap for the role of SAP of a product manager and a business analyst. So So I started organizing the team, writing stories, slicing down, managing stakeholders, and just jumping into the tasks, at the end, helped me to get recognized as a product manager by the stakeholders that were leveraging that project. So in here, I started capitalizing what I had learned before into actually how can I put it into practice and actually start playing with all the roles? Because at the end, what if I tried it and I didn't even like doing product management? Right? So this was, a great way to start jumping into that.

And all of this started paying off because soon after I was one of the leaders that I was working with pulled me into, like, this new proposal, which was the like, working with him in the global strategy for AI ops in managed services. It started there as a UX. There was a plan to do a lot of, like, different AI based solutions for the teams. And here's where things the actual role actually needed to be expanded way beyond that. It required for me to learn all aspects of how do you be able to scale this up for an organization. So from I can go to marketing training, sales, solution architecture, and how do you define how can you reinvent what's a services? Right? So I started using a lot of, like, my UX skills to define use cases, how can we innovate, how can we communicate to the end user, How can we communicate to our teams?

How can we train them? How can we create a hype for everybody inside the company and out? And how can we re like, have everybody catch up to the wave? Not even catch up to the wave. Live the wave. So so these kind of, like, boundaries blur, I love this this idea because with AI, what's happening is that all of the roles are getting reinvented. Right? So I think if you stay within the exact constraints of your role and you don't expand is when you start really limiting yourself, and this is where I decided I really wanted to expand and grow. So today, we are leveraging agentic platform for operations. We're developing, like, a modernization platform where we have a lot of, like, different, like, AI agents that can be implemented in Teams, and that's the solution that I am right now managing.

I'm running a small team, and I think it's getting to to a point where I am actively acting as a product manager. But as always, I am acting also as UX. And I wish this was the end of the story, but, actually, challenges I feel that challenges are really static. So a lot of the things that are happening also with AI is that there's a lot of ambiguity. Nobody really knows what's happening or knows where it's going to, and it's about embracing this learning, embracing the unknown, and finding your way through it. And I think I'm on time, so I'm just gonna say Ravi's up saying that as a UX, I always consider myself a UX because that's where my advantage is coming from. That's where my strength is coming from.

And even if I run as a PM or any other role, that's something that I have found as my leverage and my core, and that can act as my own differentiation even within their own organization. And thank you very much. This is around time. No. Thank you. Thank you,