Harnessing New Starter Super Powers
When new starters join Redgate (and presumably any company!), they are imbued with a super-hero power to see oddness. For example, there’s only a few times you can explain to a new starter that although the company is called “Redgate” all namespaces are “RedGate” before repeatedly face palming yourself. How can you harness this super power to try and find the complexity in your organization?
The answer, for me at least, was empathy maps.
“Empathy Maps are research artefacts that are generated from talking to real users. Often times we’ll use them to help gather results from an interview. And a lot of the value of an Empathy Map comes from participating in the creation of it TOGETHER — as a group. We’ll use it to build empathy for our users, align ourselves, and figure out our collective understanding about our users at this point in time.” (IBM Design Team.)
An empathy map helps us describe our collective understanding of a user.
I worked with UX (thank you Natalia Rey!) and I learnt a few things about how to build a successful empathy map.
The first bit was being really clear on the persona of the person at the centre of the empathy map. To try and harness the new-starter perspective we described our persona as:
It was important to me that this was an experienced engineer — someone who has worked elsewhere will bring a different perspective that someone who hasn’t (for example a graduate). The more vivid the description the better. We want everyone in the workshop to use the persona to give them a fresh perspective on the problem at hand.
What is the problem? In this case, it’s solving her first bug. It’s week #2 at Redgate for Gina and she’s itching to solve a technical problem and write some code.
And now for another twist. It’s really easy to describe what’s wrong is an organization and it’s even easier to spend considerable time getting caught up in the oddness (ever had a 47 minute debate on the origin on tab vs. space differences?). We tried to solve this problem by fusing a futurespective with am empathy map.
So now the question is, it’s some years from now. Redgate is renowned as one of the best development organization in the world. How does it feel for a new starter to join such a company? What conversations is Gina hearing? What’s she thinking?
Above is an example of an empathy map we generated. What I found super interesting is that it highlighted a number of things that feel like first steps without getting caught up in bikeshedding (such as what does good code really look like?). Approaching from a fresh perspective gave me new insight into the problems new starters have and (much more importantly) it helped generate some first steps to making things better.
So, if you want to approach something and harness the power of new starters you could either wait for them to come along or give empathy mapping a try!
