Product Design and Research Guild at Kingfisher Retail Group
What is a Guild?
It’s a monthly team event where we take it in turns to host creative activities for the benefit of the team. It’s a chance to learn new things, share something you are interested in and to get together in person with the whole team. It’s relaxed, fun and an opportunity to take part in something outside of day to day projects.
Recently the team have been creating content on what we do and, as part of that, interviewed me. So I have included the video below as a snap shot of this article
Why Guilds?
We are a large team full of talented creatives from different backgrounds. Within the squads, amazing work is done for our customers, shared through project meetings such as Show and Tells. However, we didn’t have the opportunities in place to boost our connections and collaboration across our total team. This is where Guilds came in.
I wanted to create an opportunity for everyone to get together and collaborate with designers they wouldn’t usually be able to — we need to avoid silos. We have lots of amazing people with loads of experience and interests, and our team size is only valuable and more impactful if we share that knowledge with each other in fun ways.
The Guild also creates extra opportunities within the team. For example, your day to day project may be light on flexing your UI skills, or large format workshop faciliatation, or you want to share your knowledge on something else. The Guild makes these possible in a fun, low pressure event with a large group that others benefit from too. In short, it’s about team bonding and multiplying knowledge — something I will write more about here in future.
If someone comes away from a Guild session having done something a bit different, spent some time with someone else in the team and had fun doing it, then it’s been a success. The three metrics don’t need to be more complex than that.
How are Guilds run?
Individuals in the team volunteer some of their time to create interactive activities, presentations, workshops and training for the rest of the team.
I block out a chunk of time once a month with the team for the Guild to take place, and lead a small group of people who help shape the format, organisation and any admin. We find this takes some of the pressures off of the volunteer hosting and facilitating the Guild session, allowing them to focus on the content.
The working group has a representative from Service Design, User Research and Product Design so we capture the different perspectives and skillsets in the team.
As you may expect, everything is shaped by feedback and new ideas put forward. One of the challenges we’ve had is the locations of our team members. We have offices in London and Southampton, so we trialled remote, hybrid, in one office and in both offices. After some iterating, we found the combination of making some changes to the day’s start and finish time, and securing some travel budget for those 10% not based at London office, gets the best quality session and feedback from both the attendees and hosts that volunteer.
What’s next for Guilds?
At the moment the Guilds are for the design and research department, but in the future I will be extending the format to other departments. This will be for a different intention though; it will be predominantly for training and strengthening connections.
We want to share what we do and can offer to other areas of the business, and there’s a huge appetite for design thinking particularly. So it’s an opportunity to build closer relationships and create better experiences across our business. We’ll test it.
Thinking of setting up a Guild?
I would suggest a few things to get a Guild going…
- Create energy around it
- Sell the different benefits to everyone involved (hosts, attendees, senior leadership)
- Block time out well in advance
- Stay empathetic and inclusive — what considerations do you need to make for each individual hosting and attending the session
- Start small, embrace making mistakes
- Actively capture feedback, listen and act on it, then play back
Want to find out more about our team?
- Follow our Kingfisher Medium account where you will see many articles written by the team
- Connect with me and the team on LinkedIn
- And if you want to work with us, check out our careers page too
Thanks for reading! Please comment and share if you wish
