Bring positive changes to the team, Leadership Chevening Essay

describing my Leadership abilities

A good leader is the one who brings positive changes to the team. Those positive changes that will bring good outcome for the squad and company as well.

Changes can start from anyone on the team. I began my career as a UX Researcher in a startup company at the end of 2016. Working as the first UX Researcher in the company challenged me to introduce my role on the team. Some teammates were unfamiliar with my part since it's new in the company, so I decided to present UX Research and how UX Researcher contributes to product development through some sharing sessions. Previously, the team developed products based on stakeholder assumptions without considering user behavior, leading to useless products. I want to show them that UX Research is an essential part of successful outcomes by sharing my studies. After some sharing sessions, some reached me to discuss and even consulted about product flows and design. The sharing sessions and conversations enlighten the team, especially the product and engineering team, about our user behavior and even push the mobile development team to make a huge revamp on our mobile applications in solving user problems. That was the first time product development driven by user insights.

The next challenge came when my product design team grew slightly from 2 members in 2018 to 3 members at the beginning of 2020, but the engineering team grew so fast, from around 20 to 40 members in the same time frame. Significant engineering team growth effect on increasing product design team workload makes the product team have to make adjustments since it led to inefficient and ineffective processes if workflow remained the same. I started the discussion with the product design team to adjust the workflow by making a new bi-weekly meeting called product grooming, attended by the product manager, UI/UX designer, and UX researcher. Hopefully, this session makes the product design team deliver excellent product design by communicating the product design team capability. And to ensure that this communication continues, I set a bi-weekly schedule for a product grooming session in Google Calendar to ensure everyone allocates the time, never miss the session. The product grooming session enables my product design team to communicate the workload we can afford to our product manager that drives him to set product development priority.

My initiatives on sharing my research result in the team cultivate a user-behavior-driven mindset on the product development process. It ends up some of them considering how the user will use the product while developing the product. Besides, starting a discussion to do a product grooming session brings the product design team a bearable workload with an immense engineering team. The positive changes that happen after some initiatives I took encouraged me to improve my leadership and influence skills. Becoming a Chevening scholar will foster my leadership and influence skill in bringing more positive changes to my surroundings.

in my opinion, your essay flows very smoothly. however, in this sentence:

And to ensure that ... never miss the session

since you are the one who initiate the session. i think it would be more convincing if you also explain how you lead the other colleagues to follow your idea.

Though grammatically incorrect, this essay has just the right balance of influencing (first) and leadership (second). The way that you managed to reach out to the department members to help them become familiar with your work and also show them how they can improve by collaborating with you is an excellent influencing example. Then, the way that you managed to the increase of the work team, along with the resolution to the problems that existed show a light, but effective leadership ability. I wish the experiences has a deeper and more national connotation but the references you made here will work. Just make sure your networking essay is stronger than this essay to create a solid foundation for your application. The presentation could be grammatically improved to help with the clarity of the presentation, but that is another story. Good work though. You understood what the presentation required and delivered on all fronts.