Creating a Strategy 153 5.1 FIve MANAgeMeNt dIMeNSIONS IN MANAgINg A USABILItY deSIgN teAM By Mark S. Hoffman, CPE, Director, Store Operations, Technology, and Ergonomics, Business Strategy Group-Retail, Dover, OH Managing a usability design team that is responsible for developing user experience solutions for commercial business is challenging, in today's engineering and manufacturing environments with fast product life cycles, of new technologies in consumer IT products on future product experience expectations, and the trend of large companies to share design and development process with lower cost off-shore resources. As the pace of technology growth and adaption continues to increase, the role of usability developers, human factors practitioners, and ergonomists are challenged to improve the effectiveness of usability product design process, and market knowledge about end users in the markets served. During my management tenure, I had the opportunity to develop and manage a human factors/ ergonomics organization that was chartered with the responsibility of usability design for products and systems used in global commercial environments. During this time, the company changed ownership several times, frequent changes in the senior management team. The design and development of products and systems for commercial industrial markets is unique in the IT industry, because new solutions have to accommodate legacy hardware and/or software technologies and provide improvements in usability and systems performance. Unlike personal consumer technology where radical innovations in design occur in very short life cycles