Why is it worth considering building a balanced Product Design team

An interview with Sandra Gonzalez, Product Design Director @ notonthehighstreet

Most people’s path into Product Design leadership starts by getting some managerial responsibilities as they get comfortable in a senior role, sometimes by mentoring members of the team or leading the team when the manager is on holiday, just to name a few. Early in my Product Design career I knew I wanted to go into leadership, so I made the decision to not wait around for the opportunity in my day job and instead to proactively create my own leadership experience by funding and leading a meetup.com group called UX for Change. My mission was to bring the nonprofits sector closer to the UX community with the goal of providing pro-bono opportunities to designers at any level while solving new exciting challenges in the nonprofit sector. The concept for the meetup was simple: I worked with nonprofits to identify at least one UX Challenge they were facing and then I organised afterwork events in London where UX designers would work on tackling the UX Challenge during the event. As predicted, my plan worked like a charm. Within less than two years after launching UX for Change I landed my first corporate Design Leadership role. Fast forward six years to today and not only I am leading UX Design and Research teams, but I’ve also had the pleasure to work with dozens of nonprofits helping them bring social impact to five different cities across the world with the backing of over four thousand product designers as members of UX for Change.

There are numerous lessons I have learned from this unique approach to shaping my own leadership skills. One of the most important lessons I have learned is the value of balanced teams, something that has helped me make difficult but impactful decisions in my Product Design Director role at Notonthehighstreet.

On September the 30th I was asked some interesting questions in regards to this lesson at the Espresso Webinar Series, where I reflected on some of the decisions I made when creating my current team at Notonthehighstreet. Below are a few excerpts from that talk, and questions from the audience.

I would love it if you can talk us through how you set up your team at Notonthehighstreet?

Notonthehighstreet is a fifteen year old business that disrupted the market at the time. From their kitchen table, the two women Founders saw an opportunity to bring small businesses online. Back then there was no such thing, as a result it has done incredibly well. Mainly because of the opportunity it brings to so many UK small businesses. When I was approached for this job, the company wanted to take the product to the next level, and really figure out how to excel using certain disciplines in order to bring a strategy of change into the business. Product Design was one of them. So it was a really exciting opportunity for me and I found myself in a position that required me to create my team from scratch. At the time, there was no one doing either product design or research. In the past I have mostly inherited small teams and then built them up, but this time I had a blank canvas. So when it comes to Design Organisations, there are three major models, one is the centralised one, then there is a decentralised one, where designers are reporting to someone within their cross functional teams, and then there is a centralised partnership. This means that designers report to a centralised function but then they get deployed into different cross functional teams. I like to work in a centralised partnership where the team has a sense of belonging to a design team. But also, given that we work in cross functional teams, just like most of the industry, the designers also get a sense of belonging in the team they are partnering with. That was what I decided to do when it came to the makeup of the new team. After the interview and offer from notonthehighstreet I started working on getting some of the roles defined and began talking to the recruitment person to figure out how to go about recruiting these people. However, once I actually got into the business I realised that I needed to tweak my original thinking. One of the things I decided to do was that given the amount of head count I was given, I realised it was not going to be enough to have the coverage I was looking for across all cross functional teams, therefore I flipped it on its head and instead of thinking from a head count point of view, I approached it a budget perspective.

This allowed me to balance things out a little bit more. So originally I was given X number of Senior Product Designers and a Researcher but after changing my approach I turned that X number into a bigger number. So the sacrifices are around seniority, and sacrifice is a strong word, it’s just that usually there’s a tendency to go for Seniors. So long story short, I decided to go for a well balanced team where there was mostly the opportunity to bring extra headcount.

The final make up of my team was, one Junior who was coming from a career change, two Mid-weights, a Researcher and a Principal Product Designer. So that’s how I made the decision. I have to say that I feel quite lucky to have founded UX for Change almost seven years ago because I have the opportunity to talk to thousands of people, and this has helped me get a sense of the potential people have and that made me really comfortable when I went for hiring an extremely different team. I know people talk a lot about potential, but I think it’s important to bring it to the table when it comes to making such decisions. I just want to highlight that when I say junior team it’s mostly a contrast against the teams I had formed or inherited in the past where literally there was not even one mid-weights designer, everyone was a Senior or Principal. So beyond the financial aspect, there was a strategic aspect to it. Looking into what needed to be done from a Product Design team and taking into account that the business didn’t have the Product Design foundations to build upon, some of the decisions were about the amount of foundational work that needed to be done. I wanted to make sure that I had enough hands to do that. So really balancing the tactical and the strategic and understanding that there was a window of opportunity to do this, as we were moving to a more technology-led, product-led organisation. I felt like there was enough breathing space to mentor these Juniors and Mid-weights.

I knew landing this balanced team properly was going to be difficult but coming from an educational background I had previously developed corporate training. In fact, UX for Change is led from the belief that training people has so much potential for everyone to be in a win-win situation. My thinking was around setting up the right opportunities for training the team. It was incredible because at first I did some of the training, but then one of the things that happened was that the team was training itself, and it was really helpful to have a Principle because that person really helped me with that. And also I do have to say that one of the reasons I wanted a Principal in my team was because when you’re in a leadership role and you’re the only leader within that discipline, it can get quite lonely. So I wanted to have someone very senior who I could bounce ideas off and challenge me when needed, and I could not have picked a better person than Simon Coxon for that. He has been amazing supporting my role and also being that bouncing board not to mention helping out with upskilling the team. Finally, it is’t just beautiful to see, everyone has different skill sets, so we have come together and really elevated each other to figure out how to move ourselves forward.

Touching on the agile way of working because perhaps that would be something that you would have to rely on more for a senior team to be able to do that effectively. So how was that affected by having a slightly more junior team and was there any massive cost on that or just trying to run agile projects?

That is one thing I have wanted to be very vocal about in the past few years in a very honest and transparent way. The reason I haven’t had junior team members in the past is because of the way cross- functional teams are set up, which makes it difficult to have juniors members. So when you have a cross- functional team usually there are a few engineers, and because there’s a few engineers there’s an opportunity to have a junior engineer but they are usually supported by a lead engineer. Then there’s usually an analytics person, a product manager and then a product designer. Depending on how agile is practiced in a cross-functional team, the opportunity to have more junior members is also impacted. Some companies approach the concept of a cross-functional team as if it was a fully self-sufficient company and the product person is the CEO. With this approach, it can get really tricky because what it is at the end is four disciplines coming together, trying to balance each other and trying to challenge each other and trying to help each other. But also they’re all going to have their own biases. And this is the reason why I would usually just want to hire a Senior Product Designer, so they can hold their ground, talk about the value of design, challenge in the right way and produce really high quality work. I feel like in a way we get really comfortable going, okay its a cross functional team, another Senior in there and that has created a complete unbalance in the industry where there’s a lot of people training to be product designers, but most of the job available are for Seniors and I know this first hand also because of UX for change. Bringing the UX community closer to the non-profit community and figuring out if there are opportunities for doing pro-bono work. And we set it up as mostly three hour events. But sometimes the people who come want to connect with a non-profit and amazing things have come out of it. So because of that I have a pulse on the UX community and I get so many juniors coming up to me and saying, look I have spent all this money training, I have this portfolio and I can’t get a job. Can you help me and this breaks my heart. We have all been juniors at some point of our careers. They just don’t have that opportunity to go into work because the industry it’s mostly very heavily weighted towards the seniors. So I want this conversation to be a little bit provocative. Are we doing the right thing by our own community? When do we implement other ways of working and what does this mean for growing juniors in a cross-functional team? So yes, that’s one thing I wanted to have a longer conversation with the community about it.

What trade offs have you actually made to do this ?

We only have 24 hours a day. So the trade off is usually the amount of time I spend upscaling, training, doing design critiques, keeping the high quality of the work of my team versus the time I have to manage up. So working with the executive team, helping them to understand different opportunities for the business within Product Design to be more specific. It has been a bit painful at times because I can see that I can be doing some things better but my team needs me, and how do I make that call? But I am happy with how it turned out because as I said, I saw a window of opportunity, as the product team was putting its own roadmap and figuring out best ways of working with the Engineering team. It is fine because what’s most important is to create the foundations. I’m not going to be a great leader if I talk about all these things we have to do and my team is not ready from a foundational point of view, like not having a Design System, or not having a good UX Research cadence and so on and so forth.

What would you say are the key benefits for having juniors in your team?

I would say the key benefit is: they are very hungry, they have incredible energy. They want to have the opportunity to learn from other people and one of the ways that has worked really well for me is to pair them up. Co-design. Sometimes between Product Design team members, sometimes with the Product Managers. We have amazing Product Managers to pair them up with, as well as Researchers. So just giving them that opportunity and helping them channel that energy with more senior members of the team. They come with great new ideas because they are coming in fresh, they understand the latest generations. They’re looking at the world completely differently. There are fresh straight out of Uni but then there are also juniors doing career changes, with this you get the benefits of different skill sets. So when someone switches careers like in my situation, I actually switched careers. Suddenly they understand this other aspect of the world. I came from engineering and education and I can tell you my role benefits from my training in those two disciplines. Also, because they are very curious they gain domain knowledge quite quickly because they’re doing competitive analysis all the time. They’re really trying to prove themselves. Suddenly within a year, you have this domain expert in the company, even though they are quite junior, but just because they’re very keen to get up to speed. Then the company benefits because this person is going to be with them for a long time, with not only the domain knowledge but the business context. It really is a win win if you set it up right and you get the right support.

In terms of user research, how have you implemented that to help upskill the team and what part has the UserTesting.com platform played in this?

I have a saying for design and I have a saying for research. When it comes to design sometimes it’s quite tricky because people pick the colour of the shirt that they are going to wear that morning, and suddenly they feel like they can design. Whereas with research, everyone can ask questions so everyone can do research. So for me it’s about keeping the quality and making sure that it’s always of at a really high standard. The UserTesting platform was already up and running when I came in, which was great. So I started to work with the UX Researcher to upskill the Product Designers. In the beginning we agreed that it wasn’t the right thing to just let them start putting up usability tests, so just making sure that there were the right training opportunities. And once they were trained the way we got them to do good UX research was by giving them constant feedback on their approach and encouraging them to continue. Also being very honest on questions that could have been leading. Now we are in a really good place and we feel quite comfortable with their skill sets when it comes to mostly evaluative research. Then the next thing we want to do is to have product designers test each other’s work just to ease out some of the biases.

What are your top three tips for product designers considering bringing junior members into their team?

So number one is one of my favourites and a personal one. Be brave, be brave. I know sometimes it’s easier to just go with what you know is going to work. But be really brave when it comes to this decision, people will surprise you. Secondly, make sure you communicate this decision at different levels. So one of the things that was really important for me was that when there were really senior stakeholders in the meetings with my team, I just let them know how I built this balanced team, and then just kept reminding them to keep it in mind and reassuring them that we’ll work together to get to the right solution at the highest quality. But always keep the quality of the work in your mind. The last tip is to celebrate, I love this one. It’s like every little milestone with your team is so important, especially for recognising that the team is going through different stages so the forming, storming, norming and performing, and every time a stage moves on or even a good presentation happens, celebrate, celebrate, it’s really important for people and makes them feel like they’re on the right track.

Do you have any guidance for a junior UX design, who would like to get external mentorship if there is no senior within the company?

Firstly it’s so good for a junior to be aware of that, and being comfortable in saying, “I need a mentor’. I do think there’s programmes and I’m sorry I don’t have them on top of my head. I do believe UXPA has mentorship programmes, but I know there’s other places where you can find mentors. But within reason try to understand the community and reach out to people. I get emails sometimes and sometimes I’m like, yes, you know what, I have this opportunity. Sometimes I am like, I am too busy, but I can put you through to another person. Also, really networking is super helpful for you to find a mentor.

How do you maintain UX quality with the junior designers output?

In the past I have done it very rigidly but I have a better version now. But to be honest I love how it works right now. I have office hours at the end of the day. My whole team knows that they have that time with me.

It’s a sacred time for us. I actually don’t have a sign off process because I want my team to reach out to me or whoever in the team, because the quality of the work is something they own. It is not for me to put a stamp of approval, it’s for them to go, do you think I missed something? What do you think of this? So when a team member comes to the meeting and shows me where they are at, if there is a need for feedback I give it. But there is never a sign off, and we just keep talking until I can say, I think this is great go for it! . But never sign off. Then also sometimes there’s stuff that made it too far without me seeing it, and it could be a little bit better, but it’s ok, because we’re fine with failure, and next time we try a different approach. But this is why I communicate within other teams in the company and then people know the story behind my team, so they can be gentle and kind.