“Prototype” vs “Prototype” Q&A
Follow up questions I got after my DesignOps Summit 2019 talk
I gave at talk at the DesignOps Summit 2019 about our design team at Intel, which is the product of a #re-org.
Before jumping into Q&A, here’s the summary from the program:
“Prototype” vs “Prototype” — Breaking Down and Rebuilding Our Understanding of What We Do
Re-orgs are inevitable, where the first pain point people encounter is terminology clash. It may feel trite to discuss labels when there are bigger issues to tackle, except that words matter. Words represent processes, methodologies, philosophies, and our values. In this talk I’ll share our story of two multi-disciplinary design teams merging into one. Our pain points, and the exercises we used to break down barriers and create a new team framework for talking with each other about what we really do. Learn how to lead your team from affinity diagram to building a bespoke skills wheel self-assessment.
TLDR: Words matter. Don’t ignore the pain. Make the intangible tangible. And… It’s not about the diagram, it’s about the dialog.
Slides and more information about the presentation available at Notist.
Q&A
I got asked a few questions after my talk and many more during conversations during breaks. Here they are, now with the additional benefit of having time to reflect on them and look up some details.
Make your own!
Several people commented about how they want to leverage the skills wheel that my team did, to which I emphatically replied that they should make their own! The whole point is to go through this process together with your team, and not to take something off the shelf (off the internet). Every team has nuance to what matters to most to them. What words mean to them.
Can you use this for building a career ladder?
Maybe? Improving our career ladders is one of our team’s upcoming initiatives, and it’s something I want to learn more about myself. That’s why I chose the career ladder DesignOps Summit workshop.
I think it’s a really interesting idea to tie together skills wheels and career ladders. Based on the discussion we had in the career ladder workshop, I would probably change the scale in a skills self-reflection like this to match the wording that tends to be used as you move up the career ladder.
Meaning, instead of (1 = weak, 2 = fair, 3 = good, 4 = very good, 5 = outstanding) to so something more like (1 = beginner, 2 = enough to be dangerous, 3 = solid IC [individual contributor], 4 = teacher/mentor, 5 = strategic/leader).
You could even stretch out the number of levels to match the number of applicable career ladder levels. The exact wording to use could be it’s own team exercise to figure out what language people associate with each level in a career ladder.
Which other words did you ban?
In addition to “design” and “prototype”, I think we banned the words “research” and “engineer.” Looking at the group photo where we had the banned words in the background, I can make out “usage” “UX” and “manage” as well. I never took a clear photo of the banned words stickies, so I can’t say for sure what the full list was. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which ones we banned, but that we agreed together which ones to ban.
How long did it take for the whole process?
Off the cuff I estimated about three months from re-org to the end of the skills wheel exercise. Roughly November through January.
Just for fun, let me check the actual dates:
- Nov 9th = Re-Org welcome chat (the first meeting)
- Nov 13th = Proposal for affinity diagram exercise at F2F
- Dec 5th = New team F2F (affinity diagram exercise)
- Dec 7th = Re-ordered affinity digram & pulled out team framework
- Dec 12th = 1st skills initiative sub-team meeting*
- Dec 18th = Rolled out individual skill assessment with request to fill out by end of year, and sharing planned for early January
- Jan 3rd = Check in with skills initiative sub-team about next steps (how to do sharing and discussion in a safe environment)
- Jan 7th = Oregon studio small group session
- Jan 9th = Santa Clara studio small group session
- Feb 1st = Received remaining photos of people’s skill wheels and completed data (candy) analysis
- Feb 4th = Requested written blurbs** to accompany people’s skill wheels
- Feb 21st = Poster complete!
Footnotes:
*This meeting is when I first reference Jason Mesut’s work as inspiration:
I would like to stand on the shoulders of others and build off of some Jason Mesut’s work in the area of understanding and mapping the diversity of designers:
Dec 2018 (updated article): https://medium.com/shapingdesign/shaping-design-and-designers-intro-df9e78bf845f
Nov 2017 (original article) https://medium.com/amplify-design/shapes-of-ux-designer-ad047bddac7f
Step 1 would be updating the frameworks for our unique ECD organization, which we can do with the help of our ECD team affinity diagram! ☺
**Here’s what the request for blurbs looked like:
Thanks for doing the skill circle exercise! I’m working on getting a team copy to print out as a poster to share in both studios. In one of the group sessions we talked about having the option to write a blurb about your wheel so other people who were not at your session would get some insight about your skill circle.
Do you want to write a blurb to print alongside the photo of your wheel? The audience would be for each other within ECD.
I made a little ad libs template to fill out, or you can write something freeform:
The area I am most excited to grow in this year is _______(growth area). I am happy to spot coach anyone about ________(skill/sub-skill/topic/domain). When you look at my skill wheel you might be surprised to see _________ because __________________.
When I look back at the actual dates, I see long slow periods of waiting and a short flurry of doing a lot of things really quickly. There was a huge sense of urgency to find our shape as a new team, and to act on the momentum we started at our face-to-face meeting before getting absorbed back into our day-to-day projects with the new calendar year.
How did you really go from sticky notes to the skills wheel?
I felt bad when I couldn’t answer this one with specific steps. It falls into that black box of “design” where you are taking in inputs and conjuring up something new. If I had to guess, I would say it involves lots of information architecture and some content strategy skills. Making lots of decisions about what is important and what should be collapsed and what can be left out.
The main advice I can give here is to take your best shot, and then get feedback from stakeholders and representatives from the team.
From a much more tactical point of view, the answer is Adobe Illustrator. I used the transform tool to rotate the spokes at even intervals, and to create the concentric circles for the initial worksheet. And then the data analysis was a labor of love to create a grid of all spaces in the wheel (expanding the circles and spokes into shapes, and using the pathfinder tool), and then copying a full grid into a layer for each team member and then recreating their input using the standardized notation (blues and yellows for the current skill and growth areas. To get the stacking effects the colored areas are at 20% opacity).
What has your team done since then?
As we learned at the DesignOps Summit: it’s about better, not perfect. This set of exercises helped our team make progress as a team, but we still have a long way to go.
We have had more face-to-face team meetings since that one where we did the affinity digram exercise. Each time we are able to tackle another slice of something the team is struggling with. For example, at our spring face-to-face we focused on culture. And at our recent fall face-to-face we did an exercise that was focused on bringing some clarity to the question: “what are we all working on?” (in other words: project transparency).
Culture was another team initiative (similar to the skills initiative), where the lead put together an anonymous survey as a way to collect feedback on what our current culture is and where we want to go. At the face-to-face we had a discussion along with a start-stop-continue exercise, and then something I proposed: rapid prototyping a culture badge. I’ll share this really fun exercise in a separate article (which I started writing a long time ago and have yet to finish).
Our most recent face-to-face exercise involved multi-colored push pins and string to create our team’s subway map of projects, with the subway lines representing which disciplines are servicing each project station. Again, something I’d love to write up and share with you all.
Saara Kamppari-Miller
DesignOps, Design Strategy, User Experience Design, Interaction Design
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