Problem

At the end of the Pandemic the Design team had been uninspired and fractured due to lack of leadership or representation for ~2 years, high attrition without hiring, and no clear development paths for individuals.

Role

As Product Design Guild Lead, I led the team through a series of workshops, diagnosing issues and opportunities to empowering each individual to implement change towards a shared vision, while circling back with other leaders.

Outcome

I defined a strategy which the team rallied behind. This led to successes including our design system, a new UX Engineering capability, team growth of 50%, improved satisfaction, and the team’s first year with zero attrition.

I knew that I could not transform the team by myself but only help us do so together. This is why I placed an outsized role on group activities, taking everyone on a journey together.

I launched the team on a 6-week workshop program towards defining: What the focus of the team should be overall and what their personal focus should be and where they could lean in as leaders.

To keep our work aligned with broader organisational goals, I used the department's strategy as input and regularly solicited feedback from leadership team members.

To make sure I deployed the right tools, I simultaneously obtained UX Management certification from the Nielsen Norman Group.

An open and safe team retrospective provided a space to commiserate and celebrate. Affinity mapping of contributions provided themes to focus on going forward.

Playing back the organisations overall vision as well as key themes from our retrospective allowed me to guide the team towards defining its own. I reduced complexity of coming up with a complete vision statement by crowd-sourcing its key components:

• Who stands to benefit most from our team’s work?

• How do we help them?

• Why does this make a difference?

Building on the vision-definition activities, I developed an actionable strategy outline that set the context and demonstrated the roadmap for the year to come.

At the end of this exercise, members volunteered to take ownership of one key strategy pillar each.

Together we identified the skills we needed to nurture as a group in order to enact our strategy. I asked each individual to anonymously share their skill level and goals. The aggregate view showed which skills we could develop in-house vs. hire for. With that information, we focused on three key areas: supporting individual development, optimising Design operations, and identifying desired skills for team growth. Continued reflections on growth helped colleagues develop learning and development plans, which I used to match them with training opportunities and suitable projects.

The workshops helped individuals identify leadership opportunities that would provide unlocks for the practice as a whole. I sponsored volunteers who leaned into opportunities to help improve our practice through four work-streams:

• Design system

• Research repository

• Best practices

• Tooling

In addition, I drove recruiting, creating a new role profile and hiring three new UX Engineers in addition to one Product Designer.

The solutions we created to scale design have been enjoying broad adoption, raising the profile of Design throughout the organisation.

More wins include:

• increased colleague happiness and satisfaction

• several blog posts published and external talks hosted

• re-introduction of initiatives such as inspiration sharing sessions and design critiques

• fun team socials including killing countless zombies in VR

teams enabled by the new design system