How to use teaching and skill transfer rituals to make learning part of your team culture
This article is part three of the Building UX teams series. You can also read part one, Understanding UX teams, or part two, Forming UX teams.
Assembling a group of complementary, collaborative individuals whose overall skill shape matches the problem set is an incredibly important step in building UX teams. But getting those people together is just the beginning. It takes a lot more to help a team realize its greater potential. Encouraging individual growth, skill sharing, and a culture that supports all that is ongoing work.
A group is what happens when you put a bunch of individuals together…
How to balance what people offer and what teams need
This article is part two of the Building UX teams series. Read part one, Understanding UX teams, or part three, Developing UX teams.
Whether you’re hiring for a new role, scaling a team to keep up with company growth, or starting a new team from scratch, finding the right mix of people is a big part of creating a great UX team. There are likely as many variations on great UX teams as there are people, but there are a few truths that have stuck with me over the years. …
Identifying the skills that make a group greater than the sum of its parts
This article is part one of a series called Building UX teams. You can read part two, Forming UX teams, and part three, Developing UX teams.
There was a distinct point in my career that I truly embraced being a manager of UX teams, even though I didn’t call it that at the time. Somewhere around the four- or five-year mark in my UX consultancy, Bearded, we sat down as a team and tried to visualize the direction of the company. …
An American family’s first 18 months in Ottawa
In July 2017, I moved from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Ottawa, Ontario with my family to start a new phase in my career, as a UX Manager at Shopify. We’ve now lived and worked in Ottawa for a year-and-a-half, and have just been approved for permanent residency in Canada. Looking back, my wife, son, and I all agree — coming here has been one of the better life decisions we’ve made.
But that doesn’t mean it was an easy decision to make. Moving to Ottawa and working for Shopify meant leaving our home…
Matt Griffin
🇺🇸 in 🇨🇦. Sr UX Manager, Financial Solutions, Shopify. Director What Comes Next Is the Future; founder, Bearded. https://matt-griffin.com
