Strengthen design team culture
Mold individual designers into a cohesive team. Establish a design process that is repeatable and scalable.
It’s important to focus first on team culture. How does the team interact with each other? What are the norms that everyone must follow? What about team ceremonies? Investing early in team culture is critical. Without it, very little else you do to build the team will matter.
Culture is important for how people treat each other, how they communicate and how they show up. It’s often overlooked for seemingly more pressing concerns (design execution, urgent deadlines, whatever). Here’s the thing though: culture will form no matter what. Norms are constantly being established. So one can focus on it and nudge culture in different directions, or it can grow wildly and hope that it serves your needs.
There’s a study I read 8 years ago that has had a profound impact on my leadership style. Google conducted a massive study to determine what factors most contribute to a successful team. They looked at every possible factor — experience, past success, training and background, length of time together. What Google found is the biggest determinant of team success was talk time.
If each member of a team spoke in group meetings roughly the same amount of time, that was the biggest predictor of team success compared to any other factor. This finding has always stuck with me and I think about it constantly. When I’m in meetings with my team, I notice who’s participating and who’s not. How can I create an environment where people feel safe to share and ask questions? How does my role as team director encourage — or shut down — conversation?
You can read about the study in this New York Time piece.
Often a design team is understaffed compared to the organization. Rarely can a design team dedicate a designer to a single squad, let alone multiple designers. But designers work best when they can collaborate with other designers, share ideas and feedback. It’s important to build into your team opportunities to collaborate and share work, through design reviews, working sessions, etc.
Typically, I’ve established several recurring meeting types to aid with team cohesion:
UX Team Standup — Occurs once Monday morning. Team shares what they’re working on and any potential obstacles. Announcements and updates also shared. The rest of the week we will usually have Slack standups where people post each morning their update.
UX Design Review — It’s important to provide regular opportunities for individuals to share work and get feedback. So instead of a single 1 hour (or longer) block occurring once a week, I’ve opted for 20–30 minute standing review sessions that occur 3 times a week. If people have work to share, they bring it. If they don’t the meeting is canceled.
UX Workshop — This is dedicated time, once per week, where a design team member can request help on a particular problem. The team gathers for a workshop-type session where designers can collaborate. The person requesting the time has to organize the activities. If no one requests the time, the session is canceled.
typical design team calendar