"When I was a strategy manager, I worked on a project to improve customer call center satisfaction. The project had failed a couple of times, and the COO asked me to take a crack at it. I spent a few months speaking with hundreds of people trying to understand what the underlying issue was. My team and I realized that the customer service wasn't the issue; the root cause was the product. There had to be additional knowledge/support functions embedded in the product. Suddenly, I was working on product design enhancements with which I had no experience. So I took Stanford design courses, learned about UX / design thinking, and practiced hosting UX workshops for customer journey mapping. I also bought Interactive Design, a 1500-pg book, for more technical guidance. There weren't appropriate resources that could take the lead on the project, so I decided to teach myself UX so we could finally fix the problem that's been affecting customer satisfaction for years."