How Do You Operationalize Relationship Design as a Skill Set?
In DesignOps, we have to figure out how to make ideas a reality. We help design teams scale their vision and deliver on their promise. There are so many opportunities for how we support our teams and the possibilities will keep us busy for a long time.
For individuals, we provide guidelines for career growth across our design disciplines. We use an internal career ladder that we call the Product UX Career Competencies. The DesignOps team refreshes the competencies annually based on changes in the industry and other considerations. In the 2021 refresh, not only did we analyze the language of existing attributes, but we determined we needed to add a new skill set to accurately convey the full range of expectations for someone who works in our department.
Our new skill category is labeled Relationship Design. Relationship design is an emergent philosophy and practice of design, which harnesses the power of design to build relationships with customers, employees, and community. It’s a way to emphasize that your work is not just what you do, but how you do it.
Read the Building Relationships by Design article or skill up on Trailhead and check out the Get to Know Relationship Design trail.
We’d already observed people demonstrating relationship design mindsets in our organization. We needed to ensure the growth path reflected them appropriately. This way we could set the new standard of expectations and start having the right conversations to help people assess their growth opportunities.
Measuring new skills
We added relationship design skills to every level on the career ladder across disciplines. It’s in addition to our other role-specific skill categories, such as design logic, problem solving, presentation and product knowledge. And although it was one new category, the individual attributes really shine at the different grade levels. The distinct attributes build upon one another, so employees have a stepping-stone framework to grow from entry- to higher-level positions. This gives them clear expectations for what they’re supposed to work toward.
Relationship design is based on four interconnected mindsets: compassion, courage, intention, and reciprocity. We want all our product designers to practice relationship design, which can show up in a variety of attributes that all map to the same parent skill. A few examples:
Compassion mindset:
- Expresses gratitude and appreciation to those who offer help.
- Bridges new connections by finding common ground.
Courage mindset:
- Tries new things, including when failure is a possibility.
- Learns from mistakes and can articulate lessons learned.
- Challenges the status quo and empowers others to do the same.
Intention mindset:
- Follows through on commitments. Words and actions are consistent.
- Researches the impact of actions on non-users and non-customers.
Reciprocity mindset:
- Demonstrates empathy for partners, seeking to understand their needs and contextualize feedback from their points of view.
- Engages in shared learning beyond your product team, the UX organization, and Salesforce.
How we assess
To kick off a competencies discussion, an employee completes a self assessment of their current skills compared to the level standards. We have four assessment labels: improving, achieving, excelling, and non-scoring. The employee’s manager then completes the same assessment. The manager and employee meet to discuss strengths (top attributes), opportunities for improvement, and how the manager might support that development. It’s also a time to discuss any discrepancies in the assessments. To deepen understanding, managers and employees are encouraged to share observations and/or stakeholder feedback, with a focus on specific situations.
This system helps initiate performance conversations between employees and their managers. It complements ongoing dialogue in forums such as weekly one-on-ones and quarterly career check-ins, and helps align understanding of the employee’s performance and potential.
These assessments are not scientific and they should not be used as an indicator of promotion-readiness. It’s also not expected that employees get “excelling” scores across their level in order to advance — even strong assessments may not translate directly into a change in title or responsibilities.
And “non-scoring” is a neutral assessment. It might represent an attribute that hasn’t yet been observed, or an attribute that isn’t relevant to that particular employee.
Adding new skill sets
What’s the right way to go about adding a new skill set that hasn’t been defined before?
It’s likely the pieces have been defined, but it takes looking at things from a different angle to understand how best to proceed. So let’s shift perspectives from what we added to how we added to our competencies. These best practices apply regardless of the specific changes. It boils down to the steps you take as you revise the skills and after the updates. Consider the following as you start your process:
- Get many perspectives: We began with a few one-on-one interviews to ask about possible improvements to the competencies and followed-up with open-ended questions. With these insights and suggested changes, we asked for volunteer domain experts to review and edit for accuracy. Making sure we were inclusive in this process was a difficult piece for us: Although I personally was able to focus on these edits full-time, my coworkers were stretched in other directions. It was important to include diverse perspectives and we were grateful for what time folks could contribute.
- Don’t be too prescriptive: We didn’t start the feedback process with a list of fully-vetted changes. So much of this work involved ongoing discussion from the review team. We asked them to “flag anything weird.” If something was unclear or uncomfortable even for one person, it was an indication it needed to be revised in some way. We allowed flexibility in how much time our volunteers committed to the review process. For quality control, we had a copywriter do a final edit to provide consistent grammar, tone, and voice.
- Be perceptive: We need to be mindful of how many new changes we are adding to an employee’s career discussions. Since this is a living document, employees will have been working toward certain expectations before our refreshes. We didn’t want to change role expectations entirely by adding too much, too quickly. We are intentional about making gradual changes over the course of several years.
Promoting the changes
Once we finished our updates and got sign-off, we needed to build awareness and enable adoption. We started with a one-page guide listing background details, FAQs, and additional career resources. Then we planned our internal release campaign, highlighting the new changes and following up with the resource guide. We shared the guide via email, at our monthly town hall, and on key Slack channels. Plus, we held a live demo, Q&A, and panel discussion with design managers so they could then host inclusive conversations for all their direct reports.
Participants from the manager panel shared some of their thoughts about the new competencies:
Ensures consistency: “Everyone across the organization is looking at a similar set of standards. These give me a balance for repeatable conversation over time with my team. And I know that other managers are doing similar things with their teams.”
Celebrate individuals: “We’re all differently shaped humans, with different skills. Being mindful of equity and being inclusive of how people show up differently makes it a tool that can flex. We don’t have to deliver in the same way for everyone. We create a shared foundation, but everyone can deliver on it differently.”
Consider opportunities: “It’s a reflection back to me [as the manager]: Am I giving equal opportunities where I can elevate my team for visibility to demonstrate specific skills? We have the talent here. [Managers] need to give them the opportunities to show that they have it.”
How we do our best work is a partnership: DesignOps helps redefine processes and individual team members are the ones who put them into practice. It’s imperative to measure how well our employees work with others internally (peers, partners, managers) and externally (customers, users, colleagues). Having a shared framework and language for this process means we can have more meaningful discussions — and build better relationships.
Acknowledgments: Special thanks to Hsiao-Ching Chou, for her story direction and editing support. My Salesforce DesignOps team, especially Jason Kriese and Rachel Posman. A few Salesforce UX’s DEI Council members who have supported creating this new skill set, specifically: Donielle Berg, Noelle Moreno, and Liz Fox. And Salesforce UX leadership for their commitment to DEI within our organization.
Salesforce Design is dedicated to elevating design and advocating for its power to create trusted relationships with users, customers, partners, and the community. We share knowledge and best practices that build social and business value. We call this next evolution of design Relationship Design. Join our Design Trailblazers community, become a certified UX designer, or work with us!
