We in the user experience field know that user-centered design and usability activities have the most positive impact when they're carried out early in the product/service ideation, design, and development cycle. And our stakeholders - those colleagues in neighboring disciplines such as product management and product development - are often eager to become more customer-centric, and would like UX practitioners to help achieve this. However, our colleagues, and more importantly our executives, don't always know just how disruptive it can be to successfully integrate UX processes and people into the organizational culture.

This presentation will describe the setbacks and successes experienced by the UX group at Sage Software as we drove the adoption of user-centered design and user research processes across multiple product teams in North America over the last three years