How I develop successful design teams
10 minute read
OVERVIEWOrganizations are boosting in-house design capabilities to meet customer expectations. But, design organizations are complex and demand an experienced and thoughtful leader to set a course that allows these teams to achieve their potential. As a builder of great teams, here are four plays I make that deliver better customer outcomes and strong business results.
1.
Hire the right designers
Building or scaling a UX team? Bet you're searching for and favoring designers with solid portfolios of work like your own products that have worked in similar organizations, perhaps even competitors. I've seen many managers extend an offer once they’ve been sold on a designer’s portfolio, but experience has taught me that solid past work is just an invitation to look deeper.
Look for curiosity, empathy, & comfort with ambiguity
Three traits are consistent in the best designers I've led. First, they are innately curious. Designers wrangle with a fantastic variety of problems to solve. Many concepts will be new, and being naturally interested in understanding how something works is critical to success. Second, they easily empathize with others. Naturally, empathic designers seek out and recognize how others think and feel. Third, they must comfortably navigate ambiguity. Design can be messy and unclear. Find designers who can move forward even when they don't have all the answers.
Seek a diversity of backgrounds & perspectives
Innovation works best when a wide variety of ideas are generated. However, homogeneous teams risk delivering safe and stale solutions. Teams rich with a variety of ages, races, genders, nationalities, and abilities approach a problem from different directions. That diversity leads to a much wider variety of thought which drives breakthroughs and better design. For example, designers with visual impairments, such as color blindness or low-vision, strengthen the debate around design direction resulting in more universal experiences.
Represent the target audience on the team
Staffing designers who match your target audience can lead to better design outcomes simply because they more easily relate to, and can help other team members better understand, the challenge. In addition, this approach is impactful when your target audience is underrepresented in the organization. Of course, it's likely not desirable for all team members to mirror the target audience (see the point on diversity) but having some representation proves valuable when trying to present authentically.
Appealing to a new audienceThe target customer for Fidelity Go was new to Fidelity. Research showed that millennial women were curious about investing but faced resistance when exploring options. When staffing the design team, I sought talented designers who also matched the target audience. This approach proved invaluable when debating what hero image was best to adorn our MVP landing page. The lead designer, a millennial woman, curated her top choices and validated those selections with pre-market research. Some in senior leadership were understandably hesitant given the images departure from Fidelity's traditional brand. However, the lead designer was persuasive in advocating for what resonated with her and eventually swayed senior leadership. Once live, we used A/B tests to challenge the hero image against a myriad of competitors. Again, the design lead's hero image persisted, driving more conversion than the challengers.
2.
Build a solid foundation
Design operations, aka DesignOps, includes everything from the structure of a design organization to budgeting, headcount, infrastructure, education, workflow, tooling, and more. Think of DesignOps as a foundation that allows teams to scale design excellence across the organization via a standard and repeatable approach.
Foster a culture of experimentation
Good experiences that result from talent and luck may risk a short shelf-life. Great experiences require a constant stream of experimentation and must constantly evolve. High-performing UX teams reside in a broader company culture comfortable trying things out, failing, revising, and trying again. To foster such a culture, a team must be data-driven. Designers who participate in this experimentation cycle tend to be happier as they can see first-hand their improvements become tangible.
Create a reasonable & representative design system
A Design System consists of standard, reusable components, and guidelines for their usage in its simplest form. Such a system allows teams to focus on solving customer needs instead of whether the font is right or the styling of a button is correct. Plus, a healthy design system can afford quicker iterations and baked-in goodness such as accessibility. Keep design systems reasonable by focusing on the parts with the highest value-add. Keep design systems representative by co-creating them with others, especially technical partners, out of the gate.
Leverage collaborative design tools
Favor tools that make it easy for designers to collaborate with others - be it another designer, content writer, or developer. The ability for multiple designers and other content providers to work in the same file simultaneously allows for more cooperation and less gatekeeping. Also, consider how well your toolset can simulate the desired experience. The more gaps that exist between what a designer can render and a developer can deliver, the greater the chance that what ultimately appears in code will fall short of design intent.
Establish clear & actionable design principles
Design principles are immutable values that teams use to guide and evaluate their product design direction. Awareness and agreement of these principles ensure that what customers ultimately see reflects what a product team intends. As an illustration, one of Apple's principles is "Aesthetic Integrity", essentially how well an experience presents itself given its intent. For example, say you're designing an application doctors use in a clinical setting to triage patient conditions. Keeping that experience visually subtle, with predictable interactions, would be critical.
Principles for a new affordanceWith the popularization of touch interfaces in 2010, the design team at Thomson Reuters needed to evolve their design principles to consider novel ways of interacting. Initially, many saw the tablet as a read-only device, but our research revealed unique opportunities that shaped the principles used. Principles such as "Be Beautiful" and "Know Your Moves" helped guide the team to think beyond the copycat consumption apps of the day. One perennial challenge was how to augment market news and data with commentary and notes. The principle "Also Create Content" led to exploring nested video commentaries that analysts could easily record and share.
3.
Commit to their development
There are many familiar reasons to emphasize development for any team, including remaining competitive and reducing turnover. However, when considering designers, a consistent focus on developing soft skills and providing quality feedback yields the most significant returns for the individual and organization.
Build their people skills
Great designers are master communicators. Table stakes skills include presenting and communicating designs and receiving and processing criticism of those ideas. Beyond, designers should develop more strategic skills, such as Design Thinking or Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), that can help larger teams navigate the creative process. To sharpen these skills, have each team member take a turn leading facilitation during weekly design critiques or add to a personal development plan where a manager can provide guidance and resources to up-skill.
Provide consistent & grounded feedback
Grounded feedback is factual, behavioral, and specific and can be tied back to a big picture theme and strategy. Sharing that a designer “nailed that presentation” is less valuable than including the specifics, e.g., or “demostrated how this project moves us closer to a business goal.”Additionally, a regular cadence of 1:1s is typically best for this, as you can set the expectation that part of that meeting will include feedback. Designers come to 1:1s expecting feedback and better learn how to be more open and reflective when consistently delivered in the same manner and forum.
Building skills and team camaraderie My team of designers within Fidelity Wealth Management collectively wanted to improve their presentation skills in a supportive environment. Taking turns at our weekly group meeting, two designers would present slide decks the other had created for them. The twist was the topic, nor the content, was known to the other player until they had to present it cold. The exercise taught participants how to present effectively and think on their feet and served as excellent team-building with everyone cheering on the players.
4.
Shape the conditions for their success
Design is a team sport. Not only do better solutions arise from many minds, but great design requires the right conditions to flourish. As a result, much of a design leader's day is spent not practicing the craft of design but rather setting the requirements for the design to succeed.
Connect team activity to strategic objectives
Effectively communicating and contextualizing how the organization's strategic objectives shape the design approach is paramount for team success. A primary way to ensure that business and technical strategies are known and understood by the design team is by connecting the dots during project kick-offs, design critiques and retrospectives. Lead with the objective first, then show the design and end with evidence of how the design best serves the objective. The same dynamic applies to any design team action. For example, rationalizing an expenditure for a new design tool, expanding staffing, or hiring an external research firm should show clear ties to the strategy.
Invite others into the design process
Over the years, I've surveyed product teams about what they would like to understand better about design. One theme that surfaces consistently is some flavor of “why does design seem so obvious once done?” This sentiment suggests that the design process remains mysterious and foreign to others on the product team. Things that are not well understood are also easy to dismiss. Great design teams can communicate and welcome others into the design process through focused workshops, such as Google Ventures-style Design Sprints or Design Thinking. Once one understands the origin and evolution of a design, the mystery around the process recedes, allowing teams to flourish.
Make the intangible tangible
I've often heard that a designer's “superpower” is turning ideas into images. Once someone can see the thing, it offers a common starting point for communication and debate. Most designers will primarily use this superpower day-to-day by creating screens, flows, and interactions, but I encourage them to think more broadly. The same skills are just as powerful in expressing business processes, conversion models, or customer journeys, really, any abstract concept that others need to understand to make decisions. Illustrating an idea is especially powerful early in the product design process when deciding which customer outcomes to tackle first.
Demystifying designWhile working with Fidelity Institutional, I often noted resistance to ideas originating from the design team. Speaking directly to the teams revealed that many engineers distrusted the designer's output because they didn't understand how we arrived at the direction. Design was a "black box" for whose inner workings were a mystery. Over the next few quarters, I lead a series of Design Thinking sessions with key engineering groups. Participants learned the process of design and applied it to real challenges they faced in their work. Design Thinking proved to be a very effective way to bring non-designers into the user-centered design process. Once engineers experienced the nature and methods of user-centered design, the UX team's ideas were more welcomed and accepted. Where disagreement still existed, Design Thinking gave teams a language and framework to find common ground resulting in better relationships and better outcomes.
TakeawayAs companies turn more toward customer obsession to win their marketplace, strong design capabilities are essential. As a result, in-house design organizations have grown and matured from rendering images to leading the charge in understanding and advocating for better customer outcomes. Forming the right design team, laying a solid foundation to design from, investing in their development, and curating their conditions to succeed is a complex endeavor that requires design experience and leadership.