If U Seek continues with another sharp and honest conversation. This time with Karen Manhas, a UX designer with engineering background and experience across telecom, pharma, media, and now, enterprise UX at Tesco.
Karen brings a practical, no-fluff view into what it means to design internal tools used by thousands of people daily. If you’ve ever worked on a product that wasn’t customer-facing or want to understand what that’s like, this episode breaks it down in a way that’s refreshingly clear. From legacy systems and working without formal authority to making a real impact on operations, Karen shares what enterprise UX looks like behind the scenes and why the work matters.
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Preview
What’s in this episode:
- What makes enterprise UX different from customer UX
- Why internal tools don’t always look good (and why that’s not the point)
- The big challenges of redesigning legacy systems
- How to influence decisions without a title or a budget
- Why systems thinking, clarity, and curiosity matter more than you think
Transcript
[00:00:00] What we seek shapes what we build, this is If U Seek by Useberry.
Hello everybody and welcome back to If U Seek. Today we’re here with Karen Manhas, who brings a collaborative, research driven approach to ux, someone who focuses on solving root causes, not just symptoms. With a background in mechanical engineering and experience across industries like telecom, pharma, and media.
Karen has consistently worked on impactful data informed design from improving internal tools at GSK to leading product features at Eurosport. Now at Tesco, focused on enterprise UX helping optimize internal processes for over 350,000 store colleagues. In this conversation, we’ll talk about what makes enterprise UX unique, how it supports large scale operations, and how you create UX influence without authority.
[00:01:00] Karen, welcome. It’s great to have you here.
Hello. I am incredibly excited to be on the podcast today.
Great to have you. Let’s start from the basics and set the stage a bit. For people who may not be familiar, what is enterprise UX and how would you describe its role inside large organizations? What makes enterprise UX unique?
So enterprise UX is an interesting one because it is known, but it’s not as well known as customer UX. So enterprise UX is all to do with the tooling and the system that’s used by employees within a business, and it’s more for the employees within a business, so they don’t get a say in the tooling that they use for their day-to-day responsibilities or their day-to-day job.
[00:02:00] Whereas, in customer UX, the customers can choose whatever platform or whatever they want. And in terms of metrics in customer UX, you’re very much focused on retention or engagement or increased revenue. But in enterprise UX, you are focused on optimization, you are focused on productivity, or you are focused on efficiency and with customer UX customers, habits and behaviors are ever changing and designers have to adapt their apps or their websites to change according to that behavior.
But in enterprise UX, it’s very much around long-term usage because these tools are going to be used for years and years by employees internally, and they’re using these tools to do their jobs.
[00:03:00] And these jobs could be complicated. They could be multi-step processes. Enterprise UX. I’m coming in from the perspective of internal tooling because that’s where a majority of my experience has been, but it’s very much in the name as well, like enterprise means large or you know, large corporations and they have the luxury, should we say, to build their own in-house capabilities.
And that’s some of the differences between enterprise UX and customer UX.
Yeah. Yeah. That gives a solid bank foundation. And uh, that actually leads into something I’ve been curious about. Unlike customer facing design, enterprise UX involves more complexity, legacy systems, internal workflows, regulations, what challenges come with that?
Can you share an example from your work?
[00:04:00] Improving tools for colleagues. Enterprise UX has such deep challenges and you’ve touched upon them as well, Nikol. From Legacy systems to complexity, to slow processes, to working in a low UX design maturity environment, from politics to resistance to change to metrics, to managing stakeholders.
Like you can see that there’s so much like already, but if I deep dive into them, like some of the challenges are definitely complexity. So for example, you need to have deep domain knowledge, like these are business processes that have existed for a very long time and you need to be familiar with why these workflows exist.
What are the terminology that’s being used? Like what’s the context around these processes.
[00:05:00] So it takes time to build up the fundamental knowledge in order to do your role as well. And then there could be a project where you are working on, where you have to work with or understand, should I say, multiple users with multiple different levels of permissions.
Like not everybody is going to have the same permission, and that’s something that you need to think about as well. Like why does that exist? What each user is trying to achieve in its own permission group as well. And then the main one that I’ve seen from my experiences when you are changing a legacy process into a non legacy process.
So for example, there was a project recently within Tesco where they had to change a paper-based process, like a legacy paper-based process. Into a digital process. And can you imagine the complexity with that? Like sometimes you would go to different stores and they’re all saying different things and you’re thinking, wait, isn’t this meant to be a standardized process?
[00:06:00] And then, because it’s paper-based, you can’t necessarily measure everything because there was no analytics there. And then you’re working with the stakeholders and you’re trying to understand, okay, this is the best way that we’ve mapped this current process. You then have to start to think about edge cases.
You then need to think about other scenarios, and then you’re thinking about, okay, how do I convert this workflow into a digitized process? And then you need to think about, okay. What analytics do we want embedded because now we need to measure this new process. So you can see the complexity already.
And then another one is resistance to change. So, because enterprise ux, uh, from the perspective that I’m speaking around is more internal tooling. These employees, they’ve, they’ve used these tools day in, day out. It’s. It’s like muscle memory. They develop their workarounds. They know how to work these tools, and then you come along and you’re changing a bit of their process and they’re thinking, why is this changing?
[00:07:00] But, there needs to be change. It could be because of a legacy process. It could be because the tech stack is outdated, or it could be due to a law change. And then you need to think about, okay, what does that change management look like? How can we best help the employees go through this change? And then the final one, which is quite a big one, is metrics.
Metrics within enterprise UX is incredibly challenging because unlike customer ux, you can quantify everything to some extent, but in enterprise UX, you can’t quantify everything. Like how do you quantify, reduced cognitive load, for example? Like how do you quantify efficiency because it’s not always a one-to-one match.
And one example is, for example, I could add in an extra step, or I could add in an extra tab.
[00:08:00] Now, most people would think, oh, that adds more time. And if you add more time, that’s more money. But then the trade off could be, you could have better data, you could have better analytics. Right. So it’s like these trade-offs, and then you need to think about how can you quantify, sometimes you can’t quantify metrics.
So there’s so many different challenges from the complexity to metrics to, resistance to change. And then another one that comes to mind is working in a low design maturity environment. Because like I’ve said, these. These tools haven’t been touched for 10, 15, 20 years, and you’ll have stakeholders who have no idea what user experience is because they value function over form. Whereas in the customer side, it’s form over function sometimes.
[00:09:00] So then you’re trying to work with stakeholders who have no idea around user experience or even agile ways of working to some extent. So then it becomes the case of, okay, how do I showcase, you know, the impact of the user experience of design?
How do I showcase the value? How do I relate this to the business metrics? How do I bring the stakeholders on this journey? So you, you can see that there’s just so many different challenges and I could probably talk about that forever, but like, those are some of the, the touch points.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, that sounds like a real balancing act.
I could say. Uh, it’s the kind of the behind the scenes improvements, that can make a difference in how smoothly things run. And even though users don’t always notice it right away, but it does show, I guess, absolutely. Yeah. Uh, let’s talk about the value of this kind of design,
[00:10:00] especially when it’s not tied to things like sales or engagement metrics.
Like you mentioned, you’ve said that customer UX is about making money and enterprise UX is about saving it. What does that look like in practice? How do business goals shift when you’re designing for internal tools? This is such a difficult question because like you mentioned, in customer ux, it could be around increasing engagement.
It could be around conversions. So it could be around signups or purchases. It could be around the average basket value, it could be around add-ons. So these are metrics that are quite established and easy, easy to measure. In enterprise UX because companies are building their own software in-house. Each company is gonna have different objectives and outcomes and goals.
[00:11:00] But one example that comes to mind is if enterprises are using a lot of. Third party tooling. Eventually they would want to save on licensing costs and they want to save on support fees, for example. ’cause for enterprise, there’s like hundreds and thousands of employees and you can imagine a third party tooling can be quite expensive quite quickly.
So they may decide to bring that software in-house, like they wanna build that in-house and that’s, that’s saving money for example. So they’re trying to reduce costs in that perspective. And then another one could be reducing friction in the way that colleagues work because as we know, time is money.
And the more work that’s being done in the sense of, uh, if it’s non automated, so if you have. Manual workarounds, like that’s gonna cost the business money. So how do we make that more efficient? How do we automate that process? Or how do we [00:12:00] make it so that there’s less manual workarounds, for example, and then you are wanting to have the task completion time.
Maybe you want your employees to work a bit more quicker, a bit more efficiently, so. That’s, that’s, those are some of the best examples I can come with in terms of enterprise and, and saving money. At the end of the day, you think of everything in cost centers, whereas in the customer side you think of things as revenue and with cost centers, you are always trying to reduce, I guess, your overhead costs and that’s how enterprise.
UX is thinking, right? So how can they reduce that cost? How can they reduce that friction? How can they make sure that there’s fewer manual workarounds, for example? So it’s all around saving cost and, and that’s gonna look very different to each enterprise. Um, so one example I can give is, I wiped on an internal time sheet tool at a large enterprise.
[00:13:00] And the business owners, the business owners of this tool. A lot of employees were asking them, can you extract my data for my time sheet? It turns out that a lot of them were using their time sheet data for their personal development plan to show how much they had worked on a particular project. Now you can see how for the business owners, that’s a lot of manual, manual work.
That’s a lot of admin, and that’s a lot of their time being spent on something that should be automated, for example. So I ended up building that feature into the time sheet tool so that employees could log into their time sheets, they could extract how many months worth of data that they needed, and that freed up the business owners.
To do more of their day-to-day responsibilities. So that’s like an example of trying to save time and to save money as well, because now the business owners are working more on their day-to-day responsibilities, and now the employees are able to extract their day that they need from the time sheet tool.
[00:14:00] So that’s like an example and it’s gonna look different. Future enterprise because each tool and each system does different things. But that’s just an example from a time sheet tool that I had worked on.
Yeah. Uh, it’s really interesting how much of the value lives in those operational details. Not flashy, but incredibly meaningful as you explained.
Yeah, that time sheet tool was hilarious because when I looked at it for the first time, I was like, what in the Windows XP is this interface? And that’s.. I’m going off topic, but even with enterprise tooling, the problem is, is that a lot of them look outdated. And, they don’t look aesthetically pleasing because it’s function over form.
Whereas on the customer side, you’ll definitely see a high emphasis on aesthetics because it’s form over function sometimes. Um, just something I wanted to mention around enterprise UX.
[00:15:00] Great point. Great point. Yeah. How do you show the value of your work when the impact isn’t always visible. No conversion rate or sales metrics.
Like what are the signs that enterprise UX is really working? This. This is a difficult one because like I said, with metrics, some things just can’t be quantified, but there’s two ways that I can think of. The first one is every enterprise company will always have their own ticketing system. So if there’s been a change, you are going to anticipate within the first week or first two weeks an increase in tickets.
Oh my goodness, this is not working, this isn’t great. Or we wanna go back to how it was before that. Eventually that should plateau.. Pluto.. Plateau. And the idea is that if there’s no more tickets being raised. You could conclude that this is not working.
[00:16:00] Another way is, and most recently with some of the projects we’ve, we’ve pushed a few changes to, to colleagues in store. And what we will do is we will pick a sample size of stores from different areas so that it’s representative and we will go into those stores and when they’re doing their routine. So for colleagues in store when they’re doing their routine or when they’re doing their processes, we will actually ask them a lot of questions.
So we will interview them, we will ask them. Show us how you do X, Y, Z. And from those total number of store visits, we will conclude if it’s successful or if it’s not successful. So it’s a bit of a combination of, you know, internal tickets, but then also going out and visiting on the shop floor. These processes in actions where we have made changes to some of the workflows.
For whatever reason, we will speak to the colleagues. And we will do a number of store visits. [00:17:00] So across a number of my projects that I’ve worked on, once we’ve released something into the wild, as we say, we then have a representation of stores that we will go visit and we will go interview the colleagues and we will ask them to show us, like I said, how do you do this? How do you do that? And then we conclude if, if something has been successful.
’cause as you can imagine, at Tesco, we have thousands and thousands of stores, we can’t go to all of them. So we make sure we have a good representation and we will go in and then we will see if it’s, if this change has been successful or not. And those, those are the two ways that have worked quite well for us. And also looking at the analytics that, again, analytics is, can be quite tricky within enterprise.
Great, great points. Um, so let’s shift gears and talk a bit about the people’s side of the work. What skills or mindsets do you think are especially important for someone working in enterprise ux?
[00:18:00] How do those differ from the skillset you’d need for more consumer facing work? I have always said, and I still stick by this, that when you are an enterprise UX designer, it is a different skillset for a customer UX designer because you are designing for completely different audiences. So for me, within enterprise ux, one of the main skills is definitely systems thinking.
You’re thinking around how do all of these different, um, systems talk to each other and you’re going to be dealing with multiple people across multiple different departments, across multiple different areas who sometimes may have competing priorities or not. So you need to be able to think from a holistic perspective.
[00:19:00] And then on top of that, you need to be able to zoom out and you need to map the data flow across all of these different systems, especially if you are changing a part of the workflow that impacts all of these different areas. And then you need to understand what are the dependencies, what are the downstream impacts, what are the upstream impacts?
So systems thinking is such a core skill, I would say. And then the next skill is definitely communication and influencing. Like I said, you have to speak to so many different people across so many different areas, and you need to be able to communicate with clarity. You’re going to be working in such a messy area.
There’s going to be a lot of unknowns, a lot of gaps, and you need to be able to, to make sense of that, and you need to be able to communicate with clarity around what all of those things are. And then you need to bring.
[00:20:00] Stakeholders along the journey, you need to be able to story tell. You need to be able to uncover the unspoken needs as well. Like going back to some of these tools and systems, they haven’t been touched in 10, 15, 20 years. The time sheet. Example that I gave, that tool had not been touched in 15 years, which is why I said, what in the Windows XP is this interface? So you need to be able to also uncover the unspoken needs and, and at the end of the day, push for what’s needed, but not at the expense of the stakeholders.
So. Communication is such a vital and critical part of that. And then the last one I would say is, is comfort in the complexity. Like you have to be comfortable navigating all of these bulky challenges. You’re going to be speaking with multiple stakeholders, like I said, there’s going to be gaps.
[00:21:00] There’s going to be unknowns. Not everyone’s going to know the answer. You’re going to have to work together to try and uncover, okay, what’s our North star? What is our strategy? What is our vision? What are we going to do? And you just need to be able to embrace the complexity, but seek the clarity and you have to be patient and resilient as well, because. I have worked at large enterprises and I’m yet to work out one that moves very quickly.
Like things work very slowly. There’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of processes, so you can just see already like the type of skills that you need. But to me, those are the fundamental ones. The system thinking, the communication, and just embracing the complexity and ambiguity as well.
You know, uh, when you mentioned communication, the sirens, the ambulance, sirens went off outside your window and it was like, it was exactly on point.
[00:22:00] So I guess it was a sign. Communication, people communication.
I do apologize. I live on a junction and I live near a hospital, so they just all come out at once.
No, it was on point, on point.
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[00:23:00] Now I’d like you to take us around UX influence without authority. You’ve talked about working without a budget, without a title, and still creating real momentum. What’s your approach to influencing decisions in that kind of environment? What does leadership look like when you don’t have formal authority?
This is something I’m very passionate about because one of my core principles in life is to lead by example. And you can always lead by example because you don’t have to hold a management title, you don’t have to lead a team, like anybody can lead by example. And what I mean by that is if you are working in an environment where.
You don’t have the title, you don’t have the seniority. What I would say is, first of all, be curious, like ask and uncover and ask the right questions.
[00:24:00] Because what I’ve learned is many people are thinking it, but they’re too afraid to ask. Or maybe sometimes the stakeholders, they’ve not thought about a different perspective.
They have a bit of tunnel vision because they own. The KPI or they have it as their annual goal to do X, Y, Z. So they’re gonna be very honed in and focused on something very specific, and it’s my responsibility to make sure we are going broad. So instead of saying that that’s a UX problem, if we were to change this part of the flow, what impact would that have on that person’s responsibility, or what impact would that have on the system?
Downstream from a data perspective, or can you tell me more about what you’re trying to achieve on this project? So when you start to be curious and you start to uncover, I guess the unspoken needs, then, then people are going to see, oh, okay, like this is something we need to be a bit more broader about.
[00:25:00] We need to think a bit more holistically about like, oh, I can see the value of user experience. I can see the value that Karen is bringing to this team. So being curious is an absolute. The next one I would say is around speaking the business language. I’ve learned recently that it’s fascinating.
The higher up you go, quite obviously the more business language or business stuff they want to see. So instead of saying, this flow is confusing, you could say something around this flow is adding X amount of time. And X amount of time multiplied by y amount of stores, that’s z amount of hours are needed hours, unnecessary hours, and that’s costing the business eight thousands of pounds, for example.
So when you start to speak the business language, then you’re like, oh, you are really there. [00:26:00] Like you, you’re starting to influence things because you’re converting the UX needs into now the business.
Mm-hmm. And then the last one I would say is relationships. I cannot emphasize enough relationships, the power of one-to-ones, the power of aligning before going into a meeting. You need to build relationships because at the end of the day, yes, we are a bunch of people working together on a team. But it comes back to credibility. It comes back to trust. And those things need to be built and they need to be earned.
And the best way to do that is by building relationships and the best way to build relationships, whether you are in the office, whether you are remote, is one-to-ones. And those are the three key areas I would say, in terms of you know, sometimes you can’t make the final decision.
[00:27:00] You know, especially when you are on such a multidisciplinary team or you’re working on a project that involves multiple departments, sometimes you can’t make the final decision, but that doesn’t mean you can’t influence the final decision.
And for me, that’s around making your work visible. Showing your work early and often bringing your stakeholders in on that journey. If for whatever reason, you know, your stakeholders or your product manager cannot join a discovery session, share snippets of the video from whoever you were speaking to.
Share the quotes in Slack or Microsoft Teams, or your communication tool of choice, making sure that you are bringing everyone on that journey, making sure that you’re proving your value. Making sure that you are being strategic, that you’re creating momentum, and at the end of the day, you need to do all of these things without waiting for permission.
[00:28:00] So even if you can’t make the final decision, you can always influence it. And you can influence it by, by relationships, by being curious, by seeking the business language, by bringing the stakeholders and the team on the journey, having your work visible, sharing early and often, and all of those things will compound and it will make you quite powerful in a way.
Yeah, that, that kind of influence feels durable because it’s based on trust and understanding, not just titles. Exactly. Okay. Um, next question up. How do you keep things moving when your success depends on others, people you don’t manage or control? Is there a tactic or mindset you rely on consistently?
For me, it’s around keeping people accountable and relationships, so relationships and accountability.
[00:29:00] So as I mentioned, you can’t control everything, nor should you want to control everything and you can’t make the final decision, but you can always influence. So whenever you have your team meetings or whenever you have those ad hoc meetings or your ceremonies or whatever it may be, just always remind whoever the, the accountability.
So for example, uh, I noticed we had agreed to this action. Is there any update you could provide on it or if you have your one-to-one just. Mention around how were you able to to get this done? It just comes back to accountability and it comes back to the relationships that you’ve built. It can be quite difficult, especially since somebody doesn’t report into you or you might not be in the same team.
But I guarantee you if you have that sense of accountability, if you’re continuously reminding them of these open actions or decision points, or even providing a workshop,
[00:30:00] if there’s so many things that are left unopened or things are not progressing, run a workshop. It just goes back to not waiting for permission because at the end of the day, I have a job to do as well, and sometimes I need these things to get done.
And you have to do that in a strategic way. And that’s where the relationships and the accountability and not waiting for permission, like really kicks in because what I don’t want to happen is we come to the end of the project. And somebody says, well, you know, Karen didn’t do this. Karen didn’t drive that.
Karen couldn’t show this. Right? So you want to not wait for permission. You want to utilize your relationships and you want to keep people accountable. ’cause at the end of the day, we all have jobs to do and we all have responsibilities to do, and nobody’s going to do that for you. Yeah, it’s such a good reminder that relationship building is just as important as design itself.
[00:31:00] To wrap up, I want to make it a little, a little bit more actionable for designers listening who want to have more influence, whether in enterprise UX or not, uh, what are a few things they can start doing right now to lead more, uh, effectively?
This is such an interesting question because depending on who you speak to, you will probably get a different answer. But for me it’s around going back to the point of you don’t need to run a team to be able to lead, like you don’t need to be in a management position to be able to lead more effectively. As I mentioned, one of my fundamental beliefs is to lead by example, and if you don’t know how to do that, you can also put yourself forward for small things.
[00:32:00] So if your team is running a design critique session. Volunteer to run it. You could always mentor someone junior than you. So for example, I’m a senior. I could mentor a mid-level or I could mentor a junior. If you’re a junior, you could still mentor. Everybody has experiences and knowledge to share.
Obviously, you’re not gonna mentor a senior, but you could mentor somebody who is, I don’t know, a fast time. Career switcher, for example, into user experience design or somebody at, I don’t know, secondary school or university. You could, you can always find opportunities to, to lead. You could volunteer for leading a stakeholder playback.
Like there’s so many small steps you can take and there’s so many opportunities that you can do to start leading effectively. The next one I would say is stay curious and not defensive. It’s incredibly important to keep an open mind and to keep that collaborative nature.
[00:33:00] As soon as you start to become defensive, you are given this idea that it’s either your way or the highway, and that’s not something you want to do, especially in enterprise where there is multiple people across multiple departments, across multiple disciplines, like you are going to have to collaborate. You’re going to have to keep an open mind, and that’s why I would say it’s incredibly important to stay curious and not defensive. And then the other one is just making sure you are asking the right questions.
And that goes back to curiosity as well. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned is people appreciate when you are asking questions. The reason for this. As I mentioned, stakeholders can sometimes have tunnel vision or everybody is so focused on their objective or their goals. You need to bring that sense of alignment and you need to bring that sense of, okay, this is what we’re working towards.
[00:34:00] This is a project strategy. This is our north vision, and you as the UX designer, you can ask all of these questions that uncover the unspoken needs or those edge cases, all these scenarios that we haven’t, haven’t thought about, so just making sure you are asking the right questions. And then I think the last one would be, and quite importantly, is just making sure that your designs or your work or your discovery or your research goes back to the business goals.
Because in order to lead more effectively, you need to understand what you are trying to achieve on your project. And you need to be un, you need to be able to, to explain that in a way that everybody can understand. Whenever you’re working on a project, you always want to progress it, right? And the best way to progress it is how is that getting closer to our business goals?
How is it getting closer to what we’re looking to achieve? And you always need to make sure that any work that you are doing links back to the business goals.
[00:35:00] So if you found something to do with, I don’t know. The naming of this button is incorrect. Again, don’t say that’s a UX problem, or that’s a UX writing problem, or, I don’t know, something else.
Just say that this incorrect naming of the button is increasing errors and because it’s increasing errors, that means we’re getting slightly skewed analytics and that skewed analytics could have downstream impacts on budgets for the business. For example, like, can you see like how that’s changed already from the way that I’ve explained that.
So build credibility, think long term. And I just really want to emphasize that anybody can lead, but you have to lead in a way that’s, that’s by example, by, by covering all of those different points.
Yeah. Yeah. That’s super helpful and I think a lot of people will appreciate how tangible and doable, uh, that advice was.
[00:36:00] Yeah. Thanks so much. Alright. Karen. Thank you so much. You’ve helped shine a light on a part of UX that’s often invisible, but deeply important and shown how influence can come from clarity, not control. We’ll link to your mirror reverse, templates, LinkedIn and more in the show notes. Thanks so much.
Thank you for having me. Thanks to everyone listening, this is If U Seek by Useberry. See you next time. For more exciting content, follow us on our social channels. Your reviews mean the world to us, so don’t forget to leave one. And of course, hit that subscribe button to stay updated on our latest episodes.
If U Seek is a platform for discussions and personal insights. The opinions presented by guests are independent and do not represent the official position of the host of Useberry or our sponsors.
