In enterprise software development, user experience operates in a reactive role, diagnosing problems and offering improvements and changes that will address symptoms reported by users. Unfortunately, this rarely addresses the root cause of the problem. By taking a proactive role in shaping business cases, UX can work with product to prevent issues before they arise and addressing the heart of existing issues.

This talk details how moved from using design as a band-aid for user problems to including them as a partner in business case development. Challenges and solutions will be outlined and discussed, including tracking and quantifying work effort in an Agile environment, educating stakeholders about research and UX deliverables needs and timelines, and crafting a persona-based cross-product roadmap. Finally, we will look at how to put together an impact analysis and multi-year roadmap to show how UX will address existing issues long term.