Design / Team / Strategy
Team Development
Culture and team enrichment
A team that is able to reliably execute is a daily priority of a manager. But it is crucial to proactively think about ways to ensure people are not only delivering: ideally, they should also be challenged and motivated, and have enough tools, resources and support to continuously become better professionals. These are some of the contributions I have made in this regard.
Career Ladders
In collaboration with the design managers team, I developed a growth framework that, fairly, provides paths to grow through different design skills and persoanlity traits.
Problem: Growth was a for our leadership design practice for three reasons. First, we wanted to make sure there were many, and not only one way to grow in the company. Second, our team members have always been active and passionate about growing as professionals and continuously learning, so we wanted to provide a system that would support that attitude. Third, we needed to make sure that as managers the performance evaluations and promotions were being done fairly and explicitly, and would not give advantage to either introverts or extroverts, as both types provide value.
Solution: In collaboration with two more managers and our design director, I worked on creating our design career ladders. Distributed among levels from Associate to Senior Design Director, we specified the expectations for each role and level with focus on core competencies - Business, Workflow, People, Practices, Self, Design Skills (e.g. Interaction Design), and Non-Technical skills (e.g. Negotiation). We also described more than 10 design skills that were valid as experience to apply for a promotion.
Result: The team clearly understood the expectations for growth and every member was empowered to develop their own growth plan. Since this growth framework was published, more than 20 people have applied for a promotion to an independent committee and gotten it (100% success rate). Becuse of the clarity and effectiveness of this initiative, currently all of the other company's departments now base their rubrics on our original framework.
As we receive feedback and identify new trends in the market, we continue iterating on it.
Psychological Safety
I created a psychological safety tracking program for our design team, and have maintained it since 2017.
Problem: The design management team realised the impact psychological safety had on collaborative and creative teams as our design community grew larger, and the need to break silos and maintain a high level of mutual trust became apparent. I looked for a reliable way to track it.
Solution: I created a management psychological safety framework, based on Amy Edmonson’s initial questionnaire - her work is seminal in measuring psychological safety in teams. I have been tracking the psychological safety of the design team since 2017 to this day - initially the survey was performed every quarter. As our numbers stabilized and people got familiar with the process, I lowered the frequency to every six months. Every time the study is done, I create a report for all design managers and directors, which includes recommendations, suppors strategic decisions and makes health risks visible before they became a problem.
Result: Over time, more than 250 responses have been obtained and analyzed.
While values for specific attributes have increased or decreased over time, the team has maintained total averages between 5 and 6, on a 0 to 6 scale (Overall, either "Very good" or "Excellent" attitudes). To note, the survey is completely anonymous.
This initiative has uncovered invaluable insights for the managers team. For instance, thanks to the psychological safety program we discovered:
The true impact that remote work was having because of the pandemic, on morale and well-being.
The level of trust in managers.
Their perceptions about how inclusive our team was.
How supported they felt by their peers.
Useful actions to perform in all of these regards!
Note: Examples below were modified and the report is intentionally not readable for confidentiality purposes.
Managers Onboarding
I created a Design Managers Playbook for my company.
Problem: As the managers team started to grow at a faster pace, we realized that it was becoming chaotic to onboard new people: Knowledge was siloed between different managers, and subtleties about the role were discoverable only through experience and asking the proper questions to the right people (call it luck?). This was not a guarantee that all design managers would be able to perform to the same standard.
Solution: I created a Design Managers Playbook. To do this, I interviewed all managers, design leads, and our people operations business representative, in regards to how they viewed the role and what was most important to them. I added my perspective as well. Then I identified our patterns and synthesized our knowledge.
Result: A resource document was created, which included topics as:
All the necessary links to documents to have at hand, as employee handbooks, politics and company and design resources.
The meaning of a higher responsibility representing our team values.
Explaining how we are a design-centered team, with examples of how design managers had used design-thinking techniques to solve our own problems.
Clearly laying out the expectations of the role in different dimensions:
Mental discipline, including critical thinking, problem solving, active listening and context sensitivity among others.
Business savviness.
Being a shameless representative of your direct reports and their needs.
Technical capability: Design managers themselves are able to facilitate groups, practice whiteboarding, execute design and create client reports.
Dealing with difficult conversations. For instance, poor performance, or the loss of a family member.
Developing employees for growth.
Managers and soon-to-be-managers use this resource as a guide, which reduced their mentoring needs and ensures all of us share a knowledge base.
Sell the Value of Design
I created a guide that allowed designers who were inexperienced in sales, to properly scope projects for new clients.
Problem: When design experts were asked to support solutions architects or sales people, they often had to inefficiently re-create existing resources and proposals could lack coherence between different projects.
Solution: I created a step-by-step guide that allowd expert designers who were inexperienced in sales, to participate with predictable effectiveness, in critical scoping estimations.
Result: This contribution strengthened the collaboration between the Design and Sales departments, and multiple projects have been sold on the basis of the guidelines I defined and the templates I made. Some of the guidelines include:
Gathering internal context before the first designer-potential client encounter, to avoid making them repeat themselves if they had already given free information to any sales person or solution architects in previous conversations.
Discussing with the potential client any previous experiences working with UX or design teams, to assess their expectations and any pitfalls to avoid.
Exploring all of their burning questions about the relationship between their product or service, and their customers, to be able to better recommend specific methodologies.
Categorizing the client to use the proper templates.
Thanks to this document, designers were able to access design-sales templates both in English and Spanish, with visually appealing photos and diagrams, as well as clearly established instructions that they could follow for a potential opportunity. This allowed more members of the team to work in parallel, supporting sales estimating projects more accurately and explaining the importance of each methodology.
Team Values
I designed and led an exercise to align the team about its values.
Problem: In 2020, our team had grown more than 100% in comparison to a couple of years before. Our team values needed to be updated to truly reflect how the team was then. Organizational leaders know it’s particularly challenging to redesign a list of values when more than 10 people are involved: The larger the group, the larger the thought diversity. Our team was about 50 people.
Solution: I had to innovate. I designed a cooperative activity in which every member had time to reflect personally on the most valuable experiences they had inside or outside the company, and their ideal of a successful team, not only in business terms. Then I had everybody working on an affinity diagram to make the strongest patterns visually salient. In a second session, a smaller group of volunteers shared their stories in turns. When It was their turn to listen, they would write down inspiring statements on the basis of what they were hearing. Lastly, a volunteering participant would merge very similar ideas, and select the final values in collaboration with the small group.
Result: We were able to create a list of six new core values and some statements that would describe how we live each value in our team. These are part of our everyday conversations and strengthen our sense of belonging.
Objection Handling
I created multiple challenging scenarios for the team to reflect about.
Problem: As designers grow towards seniority, they commonly find themselves having an unbalanced skillset that favors design execution and leaves behind an effective communication of the rationale of their recommendations (specially in business terms).
Solution: In collaboration with another design leader, I created a team exercise in which, weekly, we would provide a scenario for the participants to discuss. Scenarios were based on real internal or client problems, and were not only centered on design decisions, but also on conflicting human perspectives. Designers were encouraged to discuss how they could respond to the situation in terms of which arguments to bring and who to talk to. Their strategy had to be described in four ideas: Three steps that they would follow and one single thing they would avoid.
Result: By recurrently having this exercise, the team improved their confidence dealing with other departments and defending crucial issues with clients, such as the importance of validating a solution or the scope of a project.
Offsites
I have designed team bonding experiences that marked our design team.
Problem: As a manager who is deeply involved with people, increasing team bonding and breaking silos between designers who do not belong to the same projects has always been a crucial matter to me.
Solution: I have organized five offsites for our team. These have always been culturally enriching and promoted deeper personal connection through specific exercises. Offsites included a trip to La Primavera forest, in which an environmental engineer gave us a talk about the impact of the forest on our city, an oil-painting master-class (with beverages and food) and a visit to a brewery in which they explained the brewing process in detail.
One of the exercises that I used (and developed myself) is called “Meaningful objects”. The team was instructed to bring a meaningful object that they were comfortable sharing and talking about. Objects included anything from a passport, to a dog leash, to a hammock. Each participant talked about why they chose that object: Some stories were unexpectedly intense. For instance, there was a toy that was the last gift a designer got from his sister, who had passed away. Or a toy ring from a childhood romance that eventually was replaced by a real proposal ring to the same person. Stories were humbling and humanizing.
The second part of the exercise was to re-frame those objects: Participants received a bunch of funny scenarios. For instance:
“You’re in a “Hackers and Founders” event and nobody believes you’re a real designer. Prove them wrong.
“You’re traveling to the year 2121 to steal future human’s advanced technology and come back with it.”
Their second task was to act out those scenarios to the rest of the team, and they had to use the objects that they brought with them as utilery.
Result: After a moment of respectfully hearing deep stories, people had so much fun and re-used the objects as different things with imagination. An old diary became spy evidence. An old letter became a Designer diploma. Hitler and Alien impersonations occurred. I planned for people to get creative while relaxed but I learned, serendipitously, that laughter is probably the best catarsis.
