Building Your Design Team, One Community at a Time
UX Team Lead, Lee Jeffery explores how you and your team can identify and build communities within your design team, aiming for a broader impact on your people, culture, development and ways of working.
The Power of Communities
2023 has been a busy year, bringing significant changes for me. A new role at Sage and a year filled with planning and hosting events with NUX (Northern User Experience).
Upon reflection, one key takeaway stands out — communities.
Reigniting the design community in Manchester has taught me a lot about how people connect, interact, learn and how best to support them.
Inspiration
I’ve been inspired this year to learn more about how communities are formed. How people work together, team dynamics and shapes. It’s led me to create and share a talk on ‘Team Flow’ which covers:
- analysing team relationships, responsibilities and strengths
- how to empower people and build trust
- creating the right environment that helps people grow, succeed and foster a culture of collaboration
- creating flow which enables high performing teams.
Looking back there were two events that sparked my enthusiasm, reading The Team Onion and meeting Paul Bailey at NUX.
The Team Onion
I can’t remember how I stumbled upon Emily Webber’s work and how I’d not found it sooner. From reading the team onion model and her work on communities of practice things started to piece together very quickly.
Smaller cross-functional teams to deliver quicker but stay aligned through the right levels of collaboration and communication. Plus kick-offs to help steer direction in your communities and advice on how to mature and keep them self-sustaining.
References:
Meeting Paul Bailey
Paul, the Head of Design at SPARCK, expressed interest in talking at our NUX meetup in June. It was a pleasure to meet Paul and listen to his talk on ‘The Power of Practice’. Coincidently his talk referenced Emily’s work and she kindly donated a copy of her book to give away as a prize to one of our attendees.
We continued our conversation over a drink in Salford Quays, sharing stories about his work with Service Designers Connect and talking about his experiences when building and leading design teams. I remember going home that evening and feeling inspired to learn more.
Reflection
With this newfound knowledge and understanding, I started to analyse and think about what this meant for a design function. Asking myself how communities help shape direction and a culture.
As teams, we focus on problems and move through the design process, breaking down complexity. The support network around us enhances those capabilities, bringing in specialist skills across our disciplines. For example accessibility, research, content and service design.
A designer’s skillset can cover many areas across their matrix, but we don’t have teams full of design unicorns, nor should we. It’s key to utilise the expertise around us and communities help us achieve that.
- How do we gain confidence to facilitate and share our design direction?
- What templates and workflows are in place to help run projects effectively?
- How do we share, gain feedback and stay consistent across product areas?
- How might we share knowledge and help grow our skills across our various disciplines?
- How are we giving back to our local communities and nurturing our future talent?
Exploring our Community Circle
I started to sketch down my thoughts and tried to visualise what this could look like. How could we convey this to the team in a way which was understandable and would help drive conversation and exploration within the team.
As I started to map out these areas the concept of a circle formed, made up of different layers which translated the different skills and attributes of a designer and their role.
This became our ‘Community Circle’.
People versus Craft
When analysing contribution I divided the circle in half, one side concentrating on people and the other on craft.
Craft
This side focuses on supporting the team with frameworks and clear processes. Sharing good design practice and patterns to improve consistency across our services.
Helping onboard new people to teams and projects. Providing access and guidance on the tools we use and utilising our different specialisms within the team.
People
This side focused on how we grow and develop the team. Through training and mentorship. Sharing knowledge and allowing the team to gain new insights from conferences and in-house expertise.
Looking at how we raise awareness and share what we do to our internal colleagues and external design networks. Sharing through mediums such as blogs and talks, also supporting the local community through volunteering.
Quadrants
The framework helped form four quadrants— Ways of Working, Tooling and Specialisms, Development and External Community.
Accessibility became the centre focus of the circle as it touched everything we do. At Sage our ethos is to knock down barriers and do the right thing.
Not only does accessible design form part of our culture and how we build products, but it also aligns with our ways of working and how we support our colleagues in workshops, meetings, working practices and at our office locations.
Areas of Focus
Our next action was to identify all the building blocks in each quadrant to understand where communities already existed. People in our teams were already connecting and making an impact through working groups or initiatives by members with a passion in that area. Here the key is to capture the areas which need new focus to add balance and understand how you promote these opportunities to your team so they know where and how they can contribute effectively.
We ran this exercise as a leadership team, but you could run this activity as a workshop with your design team.
Building Communities
Our goal is to empower our team to make an impact within our XD Community Circle. We aim to support existing communities while fostering new ones in other quadrants to introduce fresh perspectives and balance.
Our OKR framework for performance and personal development enables team members to embed goals and objectives into their daily routine and the output is recognised and supported by management and leaders.
I’m excited to see how our communities grow and the benefit it has through both team contribution and the impact our communities have on our people and delivery.
Making an Impact Together
Building a community can make a huge difference to your team and help influence change or improvement. But the power of communities is when they build and support one another. By keeping your communities small and focused you can be effective across multiple areas, it allows people to utilise their skills and passion to have a wider impact on your design culture.
Once you’ve identified your areas it’s time to start building your communities. Find ways to highlight and promote these opportunities to members of your team. Align them with your team members strengths and passions. This is where your communities of practice come in handy, aiding maturity to keep them self-sustaining.
What Does Your Circle Look Like?
The best way to understand what your circle looks like is to get started. Start by mapping out your quadrants and align them with your organisation.
Identify where you are already having an impact and how you can take this further. Find the gaps and prioritise those areas that will add the most value to your team — helping increase engagement, team morale and performance.
Have fun exploring and building your communities.
