Building up your UX team

As time goes on, I’ve seen my team go through a few waves of growth, preceded by periods of intensive recruiting. Amid a sea of resumes, portfolios, and interview feedback, a set of strong candidates will rise to the surface. Of course, these aren’t carbon-copy designers or researchers that fit a single profile. They vary along all sorts of dimensions, including skill sets, experience levels, personalities, and domain knowledge. I’m often faced with tough choices about who will make the best additions to the team. For this post, I’ll focus mostly on experience, since it’s one of the more important criteria when roles are being filled. Consider two candidates, each of whom has met the hiring bar for your company:

Candidate 1: A 10-year veteran who knows your products’ space, worked with several of your colleagues to rave reviews, and took a few major products from figment to launch.

Candidate 2: A new grad with some impressive student projects and a strong but short portfolio. This person is less familiar with your product area, but eager to add some product design experience and learn new skills.

When I started out, I would have thought to go for the veteran regardless of my team’s current composition, projects, and priorities. I would have assumed the veteran would just produce higher-quality deliverables faster with a minimum of supervision. A new grad hire might be riskier in terms of working in a real product development process. More time would likely be needed for ramping up, critique, and mentoring.

What I’ve learned, however, is that exclusively adding more experienced people might not give you the highest-performing team. Their career goals might include leadership opportunities such as setting strategic vision or even people-managing. They might have expectations about “owning” design or research for a product area. Do you have enough of those opportunities available, or will some team members have to settle for less?

The immediate goals of someone just starting a career in UX will typically be different. While there might be a longer-term plan to lead or handle increasingly wider scope, there is more of an understanding that it takes time to develop a foundation for reaching those goals. Experience and skills development are the means to get there. Note that this does not imply menial or “grungy” work; cool projects come in all shapes and sizes, and those (along with the grungy work) should be distributed as evenly as possible.

I do my best to keep a mix of experience levels on my team. For the larger product areas my team covers, I need experienced people to set strategic vision and drive complex projects that might have a number of other people from various teams working on them. But I also need people at the beginning of their careers to provide fresh ideas on both our products and our methods, and to question the processes we use and the assumptions we make in our designs.

This also sets the team up to have strong mentoring relationships between the veterans and the newer folks. This way, new hires can inhabit the team’s principles, situate themselves in the product development process, learn from veterans, and grow. By donating time to train, critique, and advise, veterans can use their experience to make new team members better and better. And that, in my opinion, is a great use of their time.

A few references that touch on this topic:
Team Geek by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman
This is What Impactful Engineering Leadership Looks Like, From First Round Review

Thanks to @jennism and @kyungmink for their thoughts on this article.
The opinions expressed here are my own and do not express those of Google.