Design manager’s toolkit for hiring Product Designers
A framework to put together a mighty design team for product and service-based organisations
Based on 3 distinctive and yet related parameters & insights from practical experiences
Preface
Building a team is not a one-time act of recruiting the right people for the job. Neither a group of extraordinarily talented individuals cannot automatically be high-performing contributors thereafter. It is rather a byproduct of conscious decisions made by its leaders on a daily basis(not overnight). A great team is consciously designed, and not automatically evolved.
Let us look at sports for example. Winning teams often have the right blend of different competencies within. Every member has a distinctive role to play and the competencies of its members are never homogeneous in nature. It is such diversity that helps teams to perform well during unpredictable situations as it allows coaches/leaders to change the team compositions and strategy depending on the challenges in the game. Meanwhile, the only objective of the team is to focus on winning the next game together.
It is not much different when it comes to building high-performing teams outside of sports. When no two challenges are alike, and there is no intent to compromise on quality and innovativeness, homogenous hiring cannot be an option for building high-performing teams, especially when working in agile environments. This article would be best understood after its two pre-reads.
The two pre-reads
Understanding the 3 fundamental pillars within a competent product design team
All product design activities can be grouped within one of the following three key responsibility spaces
- Problem Space
- Solution Space
- Execution space
Now, all we need to do is combine these 3 responsibility spaces with the previously discussed 4 Project types & competencies and 2 design mindsets at an individual level to plot a designer’s contribution to the team.
Plotting multiple team members in one spider chart will help in understanding the weak and strong areas of the team. This can also help the individuals to understand where they stand in relationships with their peers and what they need to work on.
Plotting competencies of a design team & guidelines
Here is an example that shows a small team of three designers at different levels, and how it would look if we were to put them into one team.
The above team composition is clearly heavy on the execution front with an experienced designer(A) with Q3, and Q4 as their primary competencies, at the same time, it lacks maturity and experience in the problem understanding space and solution space. So if the team needs to hire a new member, the leader would know the competencies they should ideally be looking for to have a balanced team.
However, the risk for a team with the above composition would be, that their problem diagnosis is weaker in general. But something is better than nothing, hence in this scenario, the team will be better of by relying on what person C brings on to the table even if he/she may be not as experienced as the other two. On the other hand, whatever the solution may be, the team has the capacity to excel in execution by the virtue of having a higher experience person in the execution space.
I have used a 0 to 12-point scale in the graph where 0 shows the lowest competency and 12 means the highest. Here it covers six levels with a unit of two. One can define the units and the number of levels depending on the team’s structure.
While plotting the competencies of individual designers, their core(peak) competencies must be plotted first within the recommended unit ranges of a particular level of maturity. At the same time, the design mindsets(Hunter/farmer), and the secondary and the tertiary competencies should be plotted anywhere below the Primary.
For example, a senior designer who excels in Q3 can possibly be at a fresher level for Q1 due to lower competency in that quadrant and it is perfectly alright and normal.
In the above-illustrated graph, person A’s Q1 is NOT their primary competency despite having high competencies in Q3 and Q4. So they may be an expert in Q3, and Q4 but not in the other two in this particular case. At the same time, the primary competency(peak) of an individual should not exceed the units decided for that particular level of maturity, doing so would limit the individual's perception of the potential growth they can potentially achieve with new benchmarks.
Plotting of these competencies is a relative measurement within a particular team. A fresher’s exceptional ability in their primary competency can make a senior’s tertiary competency of the same quadrant look negligible or null in comparison.
One should start with plotting the outliers in the team first, and then plot the others in a relative fashion. Considering a lot still remains highly subjective and relative, any two graphs plotted by two people should not be compared with each other. A great deal of it may also vary depending on the business needs and the unique problem at hand.
Conclusion
This framework is intentionally made to bring diversity into design teams, and it is the right balance of diversity that does the magic.
The nuances of creative fields like design are often underestimated by many non-design folks when approached from the outside without the wisdom of having practised design themselves.
To many, it may appear like common sense and something that can be understood easily through objective frameworks. Hundreds of unique sub-competencies of creators on different levels make the whole game highly unpredictable and ambiguous when it comes to exact planning and preparation.
Seasoned design leaders who understand the building blocks of design and human sciences will be able to navigate through these uncertainties to produce the best outcome in their own unique ways. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to creating a design team and there will never be a perfect state.
No team can be replicated exactly the same way ever. After all, building a winning team is never an overnight activity or something that can be completely objective in nature. That is exactly what makes any leadership challenging and fun.
Cheers,
Dhaneesh Jameson | LinkedIn | Twitter
(Product Design Leader, Filmmaker)
Appendix
There are many influential factors that together contribute to creating a winning team. Information in this article alone cannot magically transform teams’ performance overnight. It is only an attempt to share the knowledge from my personal experiences over the last 20 years of working in the creative industry at different levels and capacities.
Whatever may be the strategy and plan, it doesn’t matter how competent your team finally is, nothing can be achieved without enthusiasm.
In today’s highly competitive environment people look for a positive culture where their work is valued and given equal respect despite any differences. A team must provide its members not only with an inspiring environment to thrive and grow in their area of expertise but also good enough reasons to stay beyond the exposure. A great team must encourage a culture where members can truly belong and trust each other.
