Scaling Design Beyond Designers
Scaling design is hard. Scaling design across an established enterprise with more than a century of history and a global workforce of over 70,000 non-designers is even harder. To scale design at that level, you need to anchor people’s identity in design: that’s the power of community.
Communities bring people together around a shared vision and purpose. By embracing community, you can create more scalable, human-centered experiences regardless of your industry, location, or expertise. I’m excited to share what I’ve learned building and scaling ExxonMobil’s Design Community and share how you can do the same.
Why Community Matters
People know a good company culture when they experience it, but the larger a company becomes, the harder it becomes to maintain and embody that culture. Culture shapes enterprise identities by defining core values and beliefs. It’s a philosophy: an organization’s commitment to society, customers, and employees. However, without a way to translate that philosophy into practical action, it’s difficult to maintain that commitment. That’s the challenge my organization faced in 2015 at ExxonMobil.
Leaders stressed the importance of valuing everyone as a customer and designing intuitive, easy to use solutions, but there were only a handful of designers in tens of thousands of employees back then. Shifting towards a culture of human-centered design required non-designers to embrace that mindset. That’s why ExxonMobil’s Design Community was created.
How to Build Community
Communities are a living, breathing manifestation of culture because they are made up of real people that embody a company’s core values. Culture is like a north star, guiding people towards a greater goal, and communities enable people to work together to achieve it.
Step 1: Work towards a greater goal.
Working towards greater goals forms the foundation for communities. Even if you aren’t sure how to achieve those goals, planting a flag to signal desired outcomes shapes your community’s journey. To get to that flag, you need to determine what problems to solve first.
Design leaders transformed our organization’s vision into three main problems to solve for ExxonMobil design practices:
How might we…
- Promote design: make the value of design clear to ExxonMobil
- Embed design: make design work within ExxonMobil
- Support design: make design more impactful at ExxonMobil
My team knew that achieving these objectives wouldn’t be easy, but we planted flags to achieve them. We defined our goals, but we needed someone to help people achieve them. That’s why my job was created.
Step 2: Have a tour guide.
Tour guides offer people direction while participating and investing in their journeys. As ExxonMobil’s Design Community Manager, I’m the company’s design tour guide. I’m not anyone’s boss: I don’t have direct reports, and I don’t tell people what to do. Instead, I guide people through the design process, teaching them why it’s important and how to do it.
I joined my current team in 2018 as a Design Enablement Advisor. ExxonMobil design leaders created this role to help people practice design across the company by providing tools, education, and resources. In my previous role, I transitioned from a Software Engineer to a UX Researcher because I was so passionate about design. Enabling design, especially for people transitioning into design careers and people who wanted to apply design in non-design roles, really excited me.
My title and responsibilities changed as design grew and matured at ExxonMobil. I pitched my current title (Global Design Community Manager) and responsibilities to my manager after we formalized our Design Program Office in 2020.
How My Role Changed from 2018 to 2020
Even though my job scaled with design at ExxonMobil, helping people practice design and achieve greater goals together continues to be a core part of my job. Regardless of where your company is at in their design journey, if you welcome everyone within it to participate, people are more likely to invest in your community and make more of an impact together.
Step 3: Set an example.
Showing how design can help your colleagues and customers creates strong roots for your design practice. Instead of telling people what to do, set an example by collaborating with them to define opportunities, create and improve ideas, and act upon them. When you treat community members as co-owners, they have a stake in your processes and become advocates for your community.
Creating a playful, fun environment helps establish psychological safety and increase enthusiasm too. Want to teach people the power of “Yes, and” and storytelling? Why not play a roleplaying game together to spark creativity and channel your inner unicorn?
Demonstrating the Power of Storytelling with Roleplaying Games
Step 4: Learn from each other.
Learning is key to design, and it’s equally important for design communities. Creating opportunities for people to learn from each other enables people to more effectively practice design, regardless of their skillsets. Providing opportunities for people to showcase work also increases their confidence and credibility, and these opportunities helps connect like-minded people across the enterprise.
I invite anyone in our Design Community to reach out to me with potential learning opportunities, and I work with them to take their ideas to the global stage. Some ideas need more nurturing and care, but that’s part of my job as a community manager. Every person matters in our community, and I work with them to find the best fit among our different platforms and make sure that everyone has a voice.
One of the first things we did for ExxonMobil’s Design Community involved creating an internal webinar series called Exploring Design. We feature topics from community members across design disciplines and locations, ranging from introductory series to advanced topics. Anyone at ExxonMobil is welcome to join and present these sessions: over 90% of our Design Community includes people who aren’t on design teams, and we love sharing lessons learned across the company.
Featured Webinars from Internal Exploring Design Series
I treat Exploring Design like a professional external webinar or training. My team and I work with speakers to create slides, conduct dry-runs, and provide feedback to prepare for the sessions. Because we are a global community, speakers present at least two live webinars to cover time zones around the world. Each talk lasts between 25–45 minutes with 15 minutes at the end for Q&A. We record all webinars and share materials internally so that anyone at ExxonMobil can access them at a later date, and our library features over five years’ worth of completed webinars so far. We’ve even inspired other disciplines within ExxonMobil to take the same approach based on the quality of our speakers and content.
Step 5: Inspire action.
People give a community life, and when people are inspired to create change through design, it increases enthusiasm and builds momentum. That starts movements. Working towards greater goals with your tour guide, demonstrating desired behaviors, and learning from each other along the way helps shape where that movement should go.
To inspire people to embrace design, we created an internal design education program. ExxonMobil Design Education Lead, Jeff Henrichs, created User-Centered Design 101 and Design Thinking 101 classes to teach this new way of thinking across the enterprise. Framing design as an approach to solve complex problems opened the door for design at ExxonMobil, and it encouraged non-designers, from engineers to medical professionals, to adopt a human-centered design mindset.
How to Apply Design Thinking to Inspire Action by Jeff Henrichs
Whether it’s in our classes or community events, we celebrate applying design to do something awesome at ExxonMobil: from short-term, small-scale accomplishments to incredible long-term change. Regardless of the magnitude, it’s making a difference that matters to our community, and we work together to help people do that through design. That mindset enabled us to scale our community, changing people’s hearts and minds along the way.
How to Scale Community
Rallying people around design takes time, especially when it involves thousands of non-designers across the enterprise. Scaling design at that level is a monumental task. Although design hasn’t made its way through the entire company yet, we are a lot closer now than the start of our journey in 2015. Here’s what I’ve learned scaling our community since then and where we’re headed next.
Step 1: Start small. Dream big.
We launched our Design Community in the United States because that’s where most of our designers were located in 2015: we knew that wasn’t enough though. Our design teams were expanding to our global business centers, and with the success of our internal User-Centered Design 101 class, we recruited local team members to teach and sustain it the following year. We established local communities of practice at each of these locations, and we encouraged class attendees to join them for hands-on opportunities to practice design and connect with community members.
We knew that changing hearts and minds would take time, but we planted that long-term flag and focused on short-term goals to demonstrate progress. Having an end goal in mind helped us plan community strategies and activities each year, and we continued to scale as our design practices matured. That mindset helped us grow from a handful of people in the United States to thousands of people in over 30 countries today.
Growth in ExxonMobil’s Design Community from 2015 to 2021
Step 2: Recruit champions.
Champions drive design forward in enterprises, and like tour guides, they bring people along the journey with them. They believe in human-centered approaches, and they inspire others to do the same by communicating and demonstrating the value of design.
As my team traveled around the world to teach design classes, we recruited attendees who were passionate about design to become our design champions. They became our local trainers and design community leads. They aren’t my direct reports: we are collaborators, working together to make experiences better by connecting people around the world.
ExxonMobil Design Community Leads and Educators
Local community chapters are self-sustaining. Although I guide and advise community leadership teams as the Global Design Community Manager, they own their local chapters. We collaborate to create site-based strategies, tailor events to meet site-specific needs, train new instructors, and celebrate local practices and perspectives. These chapters range in size, from a few employees to hundreds, and all primarily consist of non-designers. Some have been around since 2016, and others are just getting started.
Each local chapter has at least one community lead, and some locations have up to three leads based on the number of community members, like our Bangkok and Buenos Aires chapters. Community leads guide their local chapters and are responsible for all events and activities within them. We work together to define strategies, but they are responsible for executing and delivering them.
Most leads do not manage their community full-time: they balance community work with other responsibilities. Some people are also designers, but many are non-designers, such as software developers and scrum masters. They typically work with their management to allocate time for community responsibilities, but I collaborate with them as needed to align expectations.
When community leads decide to transition off the team, they nominate their replacements, typically other active members of their local chapter, and we work together to onboard them. Local trainers train new trainers to sustain the classes too, and each trainer is encouraged to adjust classes as needed based on their expertise and local needs.
Our global Design Community is open to anyone at ExxonMobil, whether they have a local community in place or not. Anyone who is interested in starting a local community can become a design champion by working with me to formalize chapter guidelines, recruit community members, and create meaningful experiences for them. It doesn’t matter if they are a designer or not: if they are passionate about driving design forward at ExxonMobil, I do my best to work with them to make it happen.
Step 3: Share rituals.
Rituals symbolize communities’ identities and the values they share. They enable our Design Community make intentional space for themselves and design at ExxonMobil. Rituals also help reinforce emotional connections, establish empathy, and encourage people to bring their whole selves to work. Doing these things can be especially challenging in enterprises, but communities create a safe space to celebrate authenticity and learn from each other.
My Team’s Ritual of Celebrating Our Manager in Different Art Forms
Creating that safe space can be challenging for a global company, especially with remote work across time zones. We aim to be as inclusive as possible in our community: we want everyone at ExxonMobil to feel welcome in it. We’ve adopted asynchronous collaboration when possible, and that’s the primary way I work with our community leads around the world. Everyone has access to our virtual whiteboards and networking channels, and we encourage people to collaborate on those platforms.
Seeing people’s faces, even in a virtual setting, is important when it comes to scaling community though. For most of our global community events, like Exploring Design, we offer multiple sessions to cover different time zones so that everyone can participate. That means that speakers will have to hold sessions at nighttime sometimes, but it’s important when it comes to impacting culture on a global scale. For recurring virtual meetings, we try to alternate times based on typical office hours across time zones so that it’s less inconvenient for people too.
Creating that safe space takes time. We’ve been practicing some rituals for over five years, and in corporate settings, sometimes it takes years to make a measurable impact on culture. At first glance, you probably wouldn’t expect wall art of my boss, alongside comic book superheroes, to be in our workspace at ExxonMobil, but it helps create a playful environment to spark creativity. Each local chapter and team may have different rituals, but we all share common goals: enabling people to learn, share, and practice design together.
Some of these rituals include:
Celebrating Learning
- Exploring Design: watch once a month to learn from ExxonMobil’s Design Community and grow design skills
- Design Book Club: discover new design books, discuss topics, and share ideas across design disciplines each month
- Storytime: listen to creative, inspiring talks by external storytellers at the start of each week
Recognizing Accomplishments
- Shout outs: start each meeting with shout outs and encourage people to share them
- Gong showcase: feature people’s work and ring a gong to celebrate (so that everyone nearby hears and can cheer each other on)
- Tokens of appreciation: send and receive virtual tokens to show gratitude and thank people for doing something awesome
Building Relationships
- Donuts + Design: get together once a quarter to meet design practitioners, eat donuts, and have fun
- Community reconnect: meet once a month to receive the latest community updates, share learnings, and celebrate design
- Mid-week check-in: check-in with your team each Wednesday to see what they are working on, what they need help with, and occasionally wear fabulous hats
Step 4: Level up.
Professional development opens people to new ideas and increases their design expertise. We have multiple internal design classes, and we encourage people to participate in external conferences and classes to learn from industry leaders. As our work environment changed in 2020, we transformed our classes to a virtual environment, and we launched our first internal design conference, ExxonMobil Design Week.
Design Week featured over 60 internal speakers and events, and it was open to all ExxonMobil employees and contractors. Thousands of people attended across 30 countries to celebrate human-centered design, see the impact of design in a constantly changing environment, and equip themselves with design skills, methods, and approaches to solve challenging problems. An event of this scale didn’t just happen overnight though. It required a lot of planning, an amazing team, and a human-centered approach.
Design Week 2020 Timeline and Deliverables
I planned, organized, and executed Design Week like an external design conference. About half of my time was devoted to ensuring it was a success, and my team consisted of a handful of volunteers who contributed a few hours each week to help out with different activities and deliverables: these included custom virtual backgrounds, video highlight reels, communications, and more.
Design Week enabled design professionals and non-designers to connect with each other, and it provided an open, safe space to practice design. In a year of unprecedented challenges and constrained training budgets, it gave people a platform to showcase their skills and share learnings across the enterprise. Even our most skilled designers had an opportunity to learn, and it inspired organizations across ExxonMobil to rethink the way we approach training.
Tying these opportunities back to our vision, designing the future of energy, and demonstrating how they create business value helped us succeed. Quantifying the value of these activities and collaborating with multiple organizations along the way also helped achieve incredible results.
Step 5: Iterate and improve.
Communities don’t happen overnight: they take time, and it’s important to continue to learn and improve along the way. One of the ways we do this is at ExxonMobil is by constantly collecting feedback from our community members so that we can make more of an impact together.
In a recent engagement survey, we asked our Design Community members how much they agreed with the following statements:
- The Design Community creates business value for ExxonMobil.
- The Design Community contributes to a positive work environment.
- Being part of the Design Community helps me do my job well.
- When I do a good job, it’s recognized within the Design Community.
- Design Community members collaborate and help each other.
- Design Community members value my input, feedback, and suggestions.
- I would recommend being a part of the Design Community to my coworkers.
- I feel like I belong in the Design Community.
We also asked these questions:
- How involved in ExxonMobil’s Design Community do you consider yourself?
- What three words would you use to describe our Design Community?
- What are the greatest strengths of our Design Community?
- What areas need the most improvement in our Design Community?
- What else would you like to share with us.
We gave people an option for us to contact them too with these selections:
- No, I prefer to remain anonymous.
- Yes, if you have questions (with name comment box).
- Yes, I have more to say (with name comment box).
2021 Design Community Engagement Survey Responses
Even though our results were very good, we had many improvement opportunities. In particular, people who transitioned off design teams to pursue other roles (like product owners) felt disconnected from the Design Community and that they had less opportunities to leverage design to do their job well. Although no one disagreed with the statement that our Design Community creates business value for ExxonMobil, some people weren’t sure. As a result, we are focusing efforts this year on showcasing the impact of design, quantifying value, and improving communications.
What’s Next
We’ve come a long way with ExxonMobil’s Design Community, and we still have room to scale and grow. Whether you are just getting started or building upon a community already in place, remember:
- Transform your enterprise’s vision into goals for your community and work together to achieve them. Start small by focusing on short-term goals, but dream big to achieve long-term change through design.
- Have a tour guide to participate and invest in your community members’ journeys and recruit design champions to do the same as you scale.
- Set an example to create strong roots for design and share rituals to reinforce those connections.
- Learn from community members, celebrating each other along the way, and level up learning opportunities with professional training and events.
- Inspire people to create change through design, build momentum, and start a movement in your enterprise. Iterate and improve by collecting community feedback and acting upon it to make more of an impact together.
I hope I’ve inspired you to embrace community to scale design, from design professionals to non-designers. In doing so, you can create more scalable, human-centered experiences that bring people together and make an enterprise-wide impact. I’m excited to share more about each of these lessons learned at Design at Scale and create more Medium posts throughout our journey.
If you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn at http://bit.ly/LonaMoore and reach out to me to chat more.
