Managing a UX team: How to begin?

Four things to start doing from day one

(This is an ongoing series of posts intended to both relate some of my own experiences and learn from others who manage UX teams. Comments welcome.)

When I started this job, the sum total of my experiences with management consisted of mentoring a few summer interns. I find hosting an intern to be a useful but limited set of training wheels for management: you prioritize and scope a project, socialize the intern with the team, and do what you can to help him or her see it through. Then you have a poster session, organize a farewell happy hour, and say goodbye.

From interns to a team

While I’d recommend hosting an intern to anyone interested in managing, the experience lacks a number of things that I see as job-critical. You aren’t really strategizing much beyond the scope of the internship. You worry less about interpersonal relationships because the timeframe is so short. It’s hard to have any sort of actionable conversation around professional development (an intern isn’t vying for promotions or raises, unless you count angling for a full-time gig after he/she graduates).

So, once I started managing a team, I couldn’t help but feel that I had little idea what I was doing. Moreover, I wasn’t sure how I was going to learn other than to just start making tons of mistakes. While one can certainly learn from mistakes, my worry was that I’d lose credibility by saddling the team with frequent, ill-advised decision-making and/or weak leadership.

Based on conversations with my own manager as well as my counterpart first-line manager, I went about some activities that would hopefully make me feel less inept. Knowing what I know now, here are four tasks I would recommend for anyone just starting out:

Learn the administrivia

While the least glamorous aspect of the job, being familiar with how your organization handles expenses, performance reviews, promotions, transfers, legal oversight, and the like is critical to making these processes work for your team. Within UX, there may be budgets for research equipment and incentives, and rules around design software licensing. I figure the better I know these rules and processes (short of becoming the team’s administrative assistant), the less important it is for the team to worry about them.

As an example, during my first year I helped one of our contractors go through the process of interviewing and converting to a full-time role. This required knowing not just the steps in the process, but mentoring him through the portfolio presentation, setting up mock interviews, and making sure that everything would be decided before the contract was up. My goals were to shield the administrative tasks so he would only have to worry about his presentation and interviews, and to leverage my own experiences as an interviewer to help him understand the process. He’s now full-time on the team and has since become a mentor to others who have joined since.

Read and train

My manager insisted I use my 20% time (yes, we still support it) to train up as much as possible on the job. Working at a big company with a strong “People Ops” team, we have no shortage of trainings, workshops, and coaching to learn more about our jobs, meet people in similar roles, and get some background on the science and theory at play in managing teams. If you are at a company with similar resources, make use of them and make it a priority. It is a rare profession that can be done well without a great deal of training, and this is not one of them. So resist that urge to open up your laptop during training to check email or to skip out for a quick meeting.

If you don’t have access to the resources of a big place, there are good books and courses out there that I can recommend, and I’ll try to keep adding more as time goes on. In addition, some of the trainings we have are actually modified versions of externally available courses (Stewart Diamond’s Getting More is an example). Good mentors (see below) can also help guide you to the resources that served them well. My hope is that all this stuff I’m writing will someday comprise one of those resources.

Start building relationships

This last part is kind of a no-brainer but (for me at least) can be surprisingly difficult to actually make happen. You’ll need to set up regular meetings not just with your team but with all of the stakeholders who have an interest in your team’s output: product managers, engineering managers, directors, VPs if necessary. Anyone who will likely need your team’s help, implement their work, or otherwise review their designs should be considered.

This can be a hard step; not all of us (including myself) are inclined to reach out to so many people that we don’t normally work with that closely. You might also worry that you are needlessly chewing up someone else’s valuable time. Here’s how I deal with it: First, your team will suffer if you don’t do it. They will either miss out on important information as the product moves on without UX’s help, or find themselves swamped with requests for UX support as stakeholders circumvent you. Time-wise, it becomes clear after a few meetings just how often they need to happen, if at all. And that first meeting is incredibly helpful regardless; when you have had a chance to meet someone face-to-face, they see you as a real person and not an email address or chat bubble. So play a little calendar Tetris and set up some meetings. Honestly, if you hate meetings, I’d suggest another line of work.

Find mentors, plural

Some people are naturally able to empathize with seemingly anyone. Others are innately effective at starting and maintaining work relationships. I have to believe, however, that while these abilities can drive an interest in the role, very few people are just inherently good at every aspect of management. Books and training (see the next section) can help, but nothing beats finding real people in your field, and preferably your organization, who can teach, advise, and discuss the job with you. Moreover, there are so many different styles and situations to encounter, you should try to find multiple people whom your colleagues hold in high regard to chat with from time to time.

Because I work for a large company that has multiple layers of UX management, it’s a little easier to find seasoned managers that are willing to provide guidance. I realize, though, that there is a long tail of places where such a role doesn’t exist, where UX roles report up to another function such as engineering, or where UX designer, researcher, and manager all resolve to one business card. In these cases, a good starting point might be an informal professional group (I belong to a great design research group) or your local chapters of professional societies such as SIGCHI, IXDA, and UXPA.

To sum up:

• Become your team’s process wonk. Find out how you can get them through promotions, legal hurdles, budgets and the like while letting them focus on their work as much as possible.
• Read up and train on the role. While there isn’t a ton on UX management specifically, there’s plenty of guidance from general management research that applies. See the links at the bottom for some resources I thought were helpful.
• Meet all your stakeholders straightaway. Quickly establish yourself as the point of contact for project assignments, recruiting, and budget if applicable. This is the first step to building good relationships and protecting your team from excessive or less important requests for UX support.
• Find mentors. Find out which managers are held in high regard in your organization and talk with them. If your UX team is small, look to external mentors and professional groups.

References

Books
While it’s focused on software teams, I’m a big fan of Team Geek by Brian Fitzpatrick, and Ben Collins-Sussman. It’s a quick read filled with lots of great insights about everything from interpersonal skills to team culture to organizational hurdles. It also doesn’t get bogged down in pages of “why you should read this” that characterizes so many business books.

Some other books that are a bit bogged down in that regard but are still worthwhile reads are Strengths Finder by Tom Rath and Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. These books are a good starting point to understanding the different interests and capabilities for both yourself and your team, and staying mindful of your own emotions to read and work with the emotions of others.

Articles/blogs

Managing UX teams, a blog started by Margaret Stewart and Graham Jenkin while both were still at Google, stopped updating near the end of 2011 but the information contained within remains relevant. Of particular relevance to this post is “Your First Month as a UX Manager”.

Just what is a UX manager? from Adaptive Path. Some good points here as well as some stress on the value of strategy, something I hope to write more about later.

How to effectively manage a UX team from Joe Dickerson. Great, succinct tips that I pretty much entirely agree with.

The Year of the Looking Glass by Julie Zhuo, a design manager at Facebook. Engaging and enlightening articles on design, management, and leadership.

Courses/training
In terms of training, I have taken modified versions of True Colors and Getting More and found them both useful. I’ll reiterate that you really have to treat these kinds of classes like they are your primary job: do any prework for them, come prepared, and pay attention. Almost all of the management/leadership training I’ve done in the past few years involved hands-on exercises that put the course material into action. If you aren’t prepared or otherwise distracted, it’s a waste of your time as well as that of any classmates who have the misfortune of being partnered with you.