Growing a product design team from 1 to 9
To scale fast enough, we needed contractors. To deliver consistently high quality work requiring deep technical knowledge, we needed amazing full time designers who could become SMEs over time.
So, we hired both. Concurrently.
For contractors, we assessed a variety of vendors before landing on Toptal. The balance of speed and quality was a perfect fit at the time. https://www.toptal.com/
For full time designers, we needed to attract stellar talent to our less-than-well known company.
First and foremost, I re-wrote our job posting to align with our culture and values.
Job Responsibilities:
Drive clarity from ambiguity.
Capacity to bring others along in your thinking.
Prototype rapidly and iterate based on feedback.
Understand our customers and serve as their advocate when making design decisions.
Own design problems end to end, from initial concept through shipping and beyond.
Drive strong product outcomes, especially innovative ones, in close partnership with PM/Engineering leaders.
Collaborate and communicate effectively (cross-functional, cross-org).
Aptitude for shipping and able to balance quality and time.
Understand how your work fits into the larger picture; collaborate with other designers to ensure a consistent user experience.
Must Have:
Strong portfolio of design projects
Proficiency with a design tool, demonstrated by your portfolio. (We love the collaborative-first nature of Figma, but we’re confident that if you’ve mastered another design tool, you will learn Figma in a snap).
Experience as a key member of a design team through the product development cycle of successfully launched web, mobile and/or software applications.
Bachelors in design or equivalent experience.
Nice To Have:
Experience in financial technology.
Experience with data visualization.
Experience conducting usability tests and other design research activities.
Experience with mobile.
The applicants trickled in. S l o w l y.
So, I tapped my network.
Who do you know that I should know? Let’s talk.
I offered to personally call anyone who might even possibly be interested in a new role with us.
I brought in 4 stellar candidates, 3 of which we hired. Our amazing recruiters sourced the rest.
Getting folks in the door was (almost) the easy part. Cultivating culture and training a team at warp speed was the real challenge.
How do we ensure product approved the work? How do we ensure tech writing’s feedback is incorporated into the copy? Quickly, I realized that we needed design workflow 101 training. I worked with our engineering partners to develop a Jira workflow that worked for the team. Later, when we combined two smaller teams, we incorporated the team’s feedback and ended up with a “best of” solution. Read more here.
How do we create a culture of feedback? How do we get designers who were all on-boarded remotely talking to one another? A peer review step in the workflow worked wonders. Happy hour didn’t hurt. And the chance to visit one another and share a meal in person? Priceless.
How do we scale a brand new design team across a product and engineering organization that doesn’t have experience working with design? That’s a post for another day. 😉
