First Steps
An insight into my first few days as a Head of Design including some tips and ideas on finding the balance within a new team and company.
When starting a new job as a Head position, the first week is always an important milestone. It’s not just about the impact you set out to make but firstly, it’s crucial for your colleagues to embrace your attitude and also take on board your design processes in order to progress. Here are a few considerations and objectives that I believe to be useful.
I spent 30/45 mins with each designer and asked them a series of questions in order to have a deeper understanding about both the general and personal feelings within in the team. I observed their perspectives about their future to understand how I can best facilitate these goals.
1. How can I help you to do your job better?
2. What do you think is working/not working in the design team?
3. As a designer, how do you see your future/what are your long term goals?
4. Are you facing any particular issues to reach those goals?
By taking detailed notes, I was able to see some patterns forming between the answers of different colleagues. Building upon the results from the initial one to ones, I’ve generated some ideas on moving forwards.
The four axes I decided to use are:
- The designer
- The Team
- The Design Team within the company
- The Design Team outside of the company.
✏️ The Designer
Structured Design Reviews
Providing support to designers individually during streams of work is important and providing structured design reviews in order to make them grow is fundamental. Also, the time needed for the design review needs to be taken seriously and requires context to seriously help designers to improve their outputs. I often noticed I was dedicating a few minutes providing answers from one meeting to another one and found out that it was generating processes of which I wasn’t aware.
Development Matrix
Having climbed the ladder from a junior designer, I know how frustrating it can be asking for money, getting recognised and gaining the job titles you think to deserve. Seeing this point from a current perspective, I know also how complicated it be for a company to manage all of that simultaneously.
By building and implementing a Development Matrix it enables one to view a designers growth of skills, salary and responsibilities within the company.
👨👩👧👦 The Team
Daily Standup
Its essential when the design team is working in parallel and I’ve implemented a daily touchpoint to share what people are doing. By staying connected on a daily basis, together, designers are stronger and contain a greater knowledge in solving design issues rather than individually.
Weekly Team Meeting
A fun way to end the week by sharing some knowledge and building culture.
Biweekly One-to-One
Especially when starting something new, having a biweekly 1:1 is useful to build trust and to understand certain dynamics in the team and some personal expectations.
Quarterly team event
To have a bit of fun together outside work every four months without impacting the outside life of the team too much. 🎉
🤝 The Design Team Within The Company
Unless you are working in a company where the members all come from a solid design background, you will easily find out how different the perspective can be of people who may have never worked within the UX industry. By organising in a common area, an internal event where designers can speak is a useful resource to increase the overall awareness of the team and it also gives the individual designer the spot they deserve.
🕶️ The Design Team outside of the company
Recognition from the outside is something that has direct benefits for the company. However, It’s always hard understanding the quality of a design team based solely on a company’s online status. By having a respected design team, it helps to recruit and approach talent whilst improving the overall feeling within the team.
There are many ways to do this and all of them make sense:
- Writing articles on Medium
- Research about futuristic visions
- Speak in and hold Meetups
- Organise Hackathon
It’s also important to remember this requires quite an amount of time, and that time needs to be found constantly within the week. But, these tasks are in no way wasted and will repay you by saving effort and energy in other parts (like recruiting).
📝 Notes
Draw inspiration for and from the physical work space. The place you are going to spend a large proportion of your daily life. In there, you should be able to find unique ideas. This can be re-imagining an event room to organise something motivating, an empty/spare room envisioned into a UX Lab, an empty shelf — the beginnings of a small library or from just a suitcase a Sprint Toolbox Kit is born.
Thanks for reading,
Sabato
