I have been leading UX team in PropertyGuru for 2 years. We are a small team of 5. We use Design Thinking upstream and Lean downstream, I wrote about how we combine and apply both methods in an earlier article.
This article is about managing the team that drives it. PropertyGuru UX team is made up of 2 designers, a designer/data analyst, a UX researcher and a front-end engineer.
Design and people management are entirely different. While I get swamped by articles, opinions, and books about UX practices. I find resources somewhat lacking on how to manage UX teams. Through a variety of alternative sources (such as parenting books), personal experiences in both managing and being managed, and learning from other great people managers. I’ve cultivated a few principles, that are designed with UX teams in mind, but it may be applicable to other teams too.
1. Train Jedi Knights, not clone Stormtroopers
I’m not a micromanager, nor do I like to be micro-managed. I look for people who are intelligent, driven and empathetic. That’s enough to make good and fast decisions, so they have the authority to do what they want. Each person in my team leads an area. For example, one may be leading consumer design and the other agent design. And they have the final say in their area of expertise.
Will they make stupid decisions? Sure, we all do. The good thing about practicing Lean is that it is a learning process. It is designed for improvement. When you trust the process and you trust your people, what else is left to do?
You’ll end up with motivated people who are better than you in their area of focus. This adds tremendous value to your organisation. You want to train Jedi Knights, not clone Stormtroopers. This makes you Yoda, and Yoda is very cool.
2. Create Opportunities for Mastery
Every good designer wants to be better in their craft. You can only get better by practising. This is the reason why I love Lean so much. Like what the name suggests, Lean is designed to be fast. Every sprint, you will ship something out to consumer for testing.
Unfortunately, many organisations are not lean. Even if you’re in faster organisations, speed might not be consistent. Giving designers an area of focus helps because designers can go deep on a topic and learn more out of it. For example, a designer who focus on Android App design needs to learn about material design principles, native interactions, Android devices. As well as Web and iOS guidelines and their interactions because PropertyGuru supports all of them, and we want to ensure a consistent PG experience across the platforms.
One of my designers was asked to lead quantitative research for a quarter and he discovered a passion for it, it was also a game changer for the team, to have someone truly passionate about data.
If people felt they learn enough, they can move on to something else. What I love about UX is all the skills you can develop. Research, facilitation, design, data analysis and communication etc. Some say designers should learn to code, some say designers need to write… So here I am, practicing.
3. Have Regular Conversations
I think performance reviews and KPIs have gotten a bad reputation due to misuse. They are very important, to create organisational focus and ensure everyone is going on the same direction.
However, if you confine performance review to just business KPIs. The whole conversation can be summarised as “You meet your KPIs, I pay you accordingly”. It is like buying groceries. Why bother meeting when it is purely transactional, just complete a form.
Individual growth needs to be part of the conversation. KPIs are for employees as much as for the business. Your role is to understand and guide them along their career plan. If they are interested in more leadership roles, add in opportunities for communication, stakeholder management etc.
Lastly, cadence. If you’re doing a review only at the end of the year, it is not going to be effective. Have at least a bi-weekly 1 on 1 meeting. I like using biweekly since our sprint cycle is 2 weeks.
4. Care Genuinely
This is rather tricky. There are articles that tell ways you can care for your team. The top result in Google for “Care for Employees” states 11 Simple Ways To Show Employees You Care. There are some good points there but I also felt a little uncomfortable reading it. Because it teaches leaders how to fake it.
Caring comes from the heart. If you care about people, showing care becomes instinctive. Do you read about how to love your child, how to have fun with your friends or how to care for your parents?
I care about the people who reports to me, it is a relationship that is important to me. It may not be reciprocated, but that doesn’t mean you should stop. If you don’t genuinely care for the people who works for you, should you be leading people?
Jack Ma says that Female Executives are Alibaba’s “secret sauce”.
“Men think about themselves more; women think about others more. Women think about taking care of their parents, their children.”
I don’t agree because caring isn’t gender specific, but the point is, it is important. However, I have to acknowledge that in ways I can’t explain, I became a lot better at managing people after becoming a mother.
How far can you go
How far are you willing to go? Being a good leader isn’t black or white. There is a spectrum where most of us are somewhere in the middle.
At the minimum, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This means no back-stabbing, lying, two-faced, unethical type of bullshit.
Giving people authority (Jedi Knights) and opportunities for progress (Mastery), genuinely care about them and having regular conversations would make you a nice person to work for.
Yet how far can you go? We’ve all heard stories of war heroes dying for their men. Would you go that far? Would you risk your job for your team?
Let’s assume everyone in your team wants your job, a likely scenario. How would you encourage their progress when you’re in the way.
If that’s what they are aiming for, acknowledge that and if you believe they are ready, groom them for your role. Have confidence that you will progress too. Having a strong successor will give you the space to take on more challenges, isn’t that a good thing. Your only competitor is yourself. Don’t let yourself get in the way.
True Value
Finally, once you’ve built a great team, you’ll realise that you gain so much more from the team. A lot of ideas, processes, techniques and tools that we use today were initiated by the team. Beyond that, we share an affinity and it is something that will outlast tenure, jobs or even companies.
Thank you Mitushi, Ruohan, Kitja and Czarnie.
// End notes
If you’re managing a design team too, I would like to trade stories, leave me a note or connect with me on Linkedin.
