Scaling design at the speed of light
In mid-2021, after more than 10 years living in Sydney, my family and I decided to move back to France. I started to look for opportunities in the scale up world and quickly came across Akeneo. I did multiple remote interviews the week which happened to be the company offsite in Barcelona. I thought, what a great initiative — a week away from the keyboard every year with the whole company to change it up and think big — I want in!
Fast forward to November 2022. The year is almost over and everything went really fast. I felt it was the right time for me to pause and reflect on a few things. In this first post, I will talk about the main operational challenges the team and I tackled this year.
Growing the team
I joined Akeneo in January 2022. There was about 300 employees at that time, with the objective to add another 150 by December. That’s a huge growth for a company of that size. A growth that comes with multiple challenges. At that time, the Design team was made of 3 Product Designers. By the end of 2022, there will be 12 designers — a mix of Product Designers, User Researchers and Design Ops.
The challenge
When I started at Akeneo, the ratio was around 0.3 Product Designer for 1 squad. A squad being made up of a Product Manager, Engineers and up to one Designer. Basically, Designers were stretched between at least 3 squads, sometimes up to 6 at a time. That was insane. It was not only putting pressure on Designers, but their lack of availability was creating frustrations within the squads.
While recruiting Product Designers was an obvious priority, the introduction of specialist roles also became a necessity quite quickly. Starting with Amandine, our first User Researcher, who joined us toward the end of March. I will talk about the dimension of the Research role at Akeneo in a separate post, but in a nutshell their mission is critical at both a tactical and strategic level.
The approach
By the end of the year, the ratio will land around 0.7 Product Designer for 1 squad. Moving from 3 to 12 designers in a year is exciting but also fairly risky. Akeneo’s culture is very special and when you grow that fast, it’s easy to break the connection and harmony that exists in a team. The good thing is that the whole team was very conscious of that. So we decided to put a few guardrails in place, by:
- Designing a solid recruitment process: we iterated a lot on this process to make it bullet proof, but also more ethical for our candidates
- Creating dedicated OKRs: we defined design OKRs focussed on eNPS and collaboration between designers
- Spending quality time together: team offsites in nice locations, a trip to UX London, and at last but not least, having regular social time together at our very unique Akeneo bar: the Chaquip 🍻
Key take away for me
Despite the pressure of growing the team quickly, we were not ready to compromise on the quality of new team members, and it paid off. Acknowledging and working on this challenge as a team, actually brought us closer together and made us stronger.
Providing clarity
I’ve always believed that in order to succeed, teams need to be:
- Clear
- Capable
- Motivated
So, first things first: clarity.
Defining our mission & vision
With the team growing quickly, it became critical to all to align on our foundations. Who are we? Why are we here? What do we want to become in 3 years? What do we do as a team that helps achieve our vision?
We crafted together our team mission and vision. To do so, we spent two days in the beautiful town of Noirmoutier, where we came up with the following statements:
🚀 Mission
Using human-centric practices, we contribute to defining Akeneo’s vision and designing seamless end-to-end Product Cloud experiences that drive value for the business.👓 Vision
3-year vision, to be achieved by end of 2024
To be recognised as a crew of game changers in Akeneo and a source of inspiration in the B2B design industry.
The exercise took longer than expected as we wanted to make sure we got it right. Each word was carefully discussed with the team. As a few examples:
- More than just a ‘team’, we see ourselves as a ‘crew’: working closely together to drive the ‘design ship’, having each others back, and ensuring our energy funnels toward the same direction.
- Our ambition to contribute to Akeneo’s vision is clear: we want to have an impact at all levels of the company, not just at the operational level. That’s where strategic research comes into play.
- Impact in the B2B design industry: a lot have been said and written about designing for B2C, but not that much for B2B, which has specific design challenges of its own. We want to gain a strong visibility outside of Akeneo by sharing our lessons learnt which hopefully will help others working in the same industry.
Progressing toward our vision
Having a vision is all good, but how do we make sure we stay on track with achieving it? At Akeneo, we use strategic intents and OKRs.
- Strategic intents are defined and reviewed each year. They are milestones toward the vision.
- OKRs are defined and measured each quarter. They are milestones toward our strategic intents.
So in a nutshell, it goes like this:
Key take away for me
Building all these blocks collaboratively with the team has been a fantastic experience so far. This is just the beginning of the journey. I can’t wait to take some time with the team in November to pause and look back at what we’ve achieved in 2022 and see how we are tracking toward achieving our 3-year vision.
Switching from output to outcome
With most of our customers now using our SaaS product editions, we are able to get more visibility on their behaviours and understand better how they use our products. This transition is a great opportunity to ensure that all the squads systematically measure the impact of their work and answer the most important question of all: did we manage to solve the customer problem identified in the first place? That’s where success metrics come into play.
HEART
In March 2022, Antoine — VP Product Management — and myself selected a framework to roll out to the teams. We went with the HEART framework, which is a series of user-centred metrics defined to measure the user experience of a product/service. This framework was developed by Google and what I really like about it, is that it covers both quantitative and qualitative metrics. Why is that important? Quantitative metrics, such as adoption rate or engagement rate, are essential but won’t tell you if users are satisfied with your product. Users might be using the product because they have no other choice, and that doesn’t mean they’re satisfied with their experience. The combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics is quite powerful and really helps us get a good understanding of whether the solutions we deliver are successful or not.
Ownership
Clarity around success metrics ownership was something we defined from the beginning, in order to avoid any confusion.
- Designer and PM are both responsible for defining the success metrics together.
- They are also responsible to follow up on those metrics and socialise them. One of the challenge being that in our industry, it often takes weeks, if not months, before users start adopting features we release.
- Ultimately, the accountability sits at PM level, and that’s because we believe there should be only one team mate accountable, and PMs are the best positioned for this.
- Engineers are responsible and accountable for implementing tools to measure the metrics.
Making it work
Old habits die hard. Support, repetition and practice were key to accelerating adoption of the success metrics framework.
- Support: until this day, I make sure to be available to work with PMs and Designers on defining their metrics, when needed.
- Repetition: Antoine and I often communicate internally on this topic, across various forums.
- Practice: We conducted a couple of practical workshops for designers and PMs to upskill and exchange on this topic.
As a result, each squad is now systematically defining a set of metrics based on the HEART framework, for each of their projects. And as time goes on, those metrics are getting easier to define and are becoming more accurate.
Key take away for me
Getting success metrics right is hard. It requires practice for everyone. We still have improvements to make when it comes to ensuring each squad follows up on those metrics regularly and communicates about them. However, what’s exciting is that everyone is committed to learning together which gives us the confidence that we are moving towards the right direction.
👉 That’s it for now, more to come from the design team on this blog in the near future, so stay tuned!
Cover pic by Image by Freepik
