Ignite 2024: Jasmine Patel

I'm gonna start with a question and I'd like you all to respond by cheering. Alright? How many of you are parents or caregivers? How many of you know caregivers or parents? How many of you were birthed by another human? Alright, pretty much everyone.

You'll understand why I'm asking soon. In 2017, I started redesigning the Philadelphia Museum of Art's website with an entirely in house team. I had also just returned from my dream honeymoon to realize that I was pregnant. Uh, this is when things really got real. Cue panic attack. So, today I'd like to share five things I learned about delivering babies and websites and how to deliver babies and websites in a relatively same timeline, in the hopes that it helps you, or gives you just a laugh, you know. If you're in a similar situation with your job or baby, honestly, they're incredibly alike sometimes. Number one, expect that your expectations will change, and they should. Naive little me planned as if everything would go according to my best laid plans.

Website, baby, all of it. And as a soon to be mom, I thought, pregnancy, labor, breastfeeding, sleep training, you know, life in general could be planned for. With digital projects, we go in with the best of intentions. We're thinking that we have consistency, firm timelines and budgets, but in the world of digital, nothing is sacred.

So repeat after me. Plan for the unplanned. Flexibility and adaptability are crucial. So keep that ultimate goal in mind and prioritize what matters to you most. Use your research or sleep in the case of designers and parents. Number two, research. Lots of it helps me feel mentally prepared and like I've got a bit of control.

And, come to find out, I don't really know much about babies. There's strollers, diapers, birth plans, doctors, baby proofing, baby showers, bottles. Thank goodness for the boundless internet reference material. For our PMA website, we spent three months researching before starting design. That was user surveys, data and analytics review, user testing, landscape analysis.

stakeholder interviews. So here's a pro tip to help you move through that efficiently. You can workshop anything, features, components, data models, navigation, get your constructive feedback. They're also really great for picking a baby name. And yes, I am married to a designer and that's how we picked our baby's name.

Number three websites like babies have a lot of stakeholders, both the solicited and the unsolicited. As a project lead and caregiver, you have to wrangle them all. I was lucky to have a fantastic network of friends and family to get me through my pregnancy, but there was also, you know, the random folks on the subway or in the grocery store that will give you advice about your child.

At the PMA, we had 60 cross functional stakeholders, our internal team, senior management, you name it. It was an exercise and expectation management unlike any other. So I suggest you define responsibilities clearly, early, and often. Get the feedback you want and then synthesize it where you feel it makes sense.

Probably not the grocery store or subway, um, but that's just my recommendation. Number four. In the ways of babies and projects, you have to approach it all iteratively, because they're going to continue to grow and change. Nothing ever stays the same, and even though each change brings its own set of challenges, it's going to bring new learnings and joys, too.

My life has changed a lot since 2017, my first daughter is now 6 years old and I have a second daughter who is now 4. And there's a lot of changes and all the feels about those changes. And yes, this is a shameless plug for me to show you pictures of my kids and I'm totally okay with it because you'll see where it's going next.

The PMA website also continued evolving. We really focused first on modernizing for driving visitation and then we did a huge update to increase engagement with the collection. And there were so many tiny iterations along the way, all informing the next. So lastly, number five. To get through and successfully deliver a baby in a website, you're gonna need support.

It's technically feasible to do either of them on your own, but definitely not recommended. In the case of a baby, get your people together and prepped. Because sometimes your baby takes three days to arrive. For digital projects, assemble that multi discipline team of staff across your org, and then augment it with talented contractors and vendors when possible.

And then lean on that network. Accept new people on your team, like the angel OB that saved me from a C-section two times, or the rockstar SEO, analytics consultants, management and contact strategy vendors that we had at the PMA. They're necessary. Let them help you. So I can imagine that connecting these two, um, seems very odd to you at first, but honestly sometimes even the most disconnected seemingly topics can be connected.

So I'm going to urge you on your next project, whether that's personal or professional, to embrace change. Do your research, hold those stakeholders close, iterate, iterate, iterate, and lean on your network. Thanks so much for indulging me in this topic, MCN. I'm Jasmine Patel. I'll be at the ForumOne sponsor table all week, so come talk to me about your websites, your babies, or both.