Designed to Grow: How to Manage and Retain Top Design Talent

As designers, we design experiences for many different end users. In a time of rapid change, we also need to design a support system for us, the designers and practitioners.

At Wayfair, we’re doing that through equitable assessment, skills development, and support for design managers.

Wayfair Experience Design is a 160+ strong community. Our team represents three disciplines: Content strategy, product design, and user research. We also have two career tracks: Individual contributors and managers. Here’s how we commit to professional development and world-class design management across the team.

1. Equitable assessment

Equitable assessment uses objective criteria, transparent ratings, and calibration. This helps managers and direct reports set clear expectations about performance.

For all disciplines and roles, we evaluate designers according to the same set of objective criteria. At Wayfair, we call this set of criteria competencies. These competencies set out behavior and discipline skill expectations for each level. For example, we expect lead-level designers to be autonomous and provide recommendations for an ambiguous project.

Each competency is rated in the same way for all levels. Transparent ratings define whether someone is meeting expectations. Or maybe they’re flexing into the next level! These ratings are consistent across all of Wayfair and clearly communicated in performance reviews and regular development conversations. Competencies and ratings are tremendously helpful to identify and take action on development areas.

Wait a minute. With the different disciplines and career tracks, how would managers assess with the same criteria and ratings? This is where calibration comes in. We’re not calibrating our team. We’re calibrating our managers. We hold each other accountable for applying the criteria and ratings consistently, objectively, and equitably. It’s an intense, org-wide process to eliminate bias, politics, and misalignment in performance reviews.

2. Skills development

Wayfair believes in dedicated and regular feedback for skills development. We have templates for managers and designers to meet at a regular cadence, usually monthly. They talk about successes and learnings for the next month. Feedback also goes both ways: The designer also gives feedback to the manager. This regular dialogue helps build trust. These structured conversations are used in performance reviews. We also continually tweak and improve these templates based on feedback from the team.

Sometimes, someone needs a new role to stretch into new challenges. You don’t need to leave Wayfair to keep growing. Internal mobility, colloquially called the “career jungle gym,” is actively facilitated and celebrated! The jungle gym is open to anyone meeting expectations and has been in a role for at least one year. When our design org members move to a new internal role, support ongoing learning for employees to up-level and cross-train in multiple areas. We consider it as an overall reduction in attrition for Wayfair because we foster expertise in many disciplines and support job satisfaction.

3. Support design managers

Wayfair also believes in supporting design managers.

Our hypothesis is that if managers feel supported, they can better support their team. This will then level everyone up. An employee survey showed that our managers have a different experience than our individual contributors. We then followed up with manager-specific surveys and workshops to understand current gaps and ensure constant improvement. We learned that managers spent a lot of time creating documents for development and 1-on-1 meetings — and operationalized this support! We now have a central repository for meeting templates. We also have new manager training to give all managers a common set of expectations.

In the last nine months, we rolled out many initiatives to address the gaps. For example, a central repository to hold document templates, an onboarding session for new managers to set common expectations, and a dedicated Slack channel for managers to support each other. Managers thought these templates and sessions were “very helpful” and they can “pass along resources to their teams.”

We’re not declaring “done” yet! But a continued commitment to equitable assessment, development, and support for design managers lays the groundwork for us to embrace uncertainty and rapid change.

Joyce Wong is an Associate Director of Product Design at Wayfair. She supports content strategists, product designers, and managers creating consumer-facing experiences for Wayfair’s customers on web, mobile, and app.

About Wayfair’s Global Experience Design Community

Global Experience Design at Wayfair is a cross-disciplinary function including product design, user research, and content strategy. We create experiences for all of our end-users, including suppliers, customers, agents, field champions, and internal employees. The Wayfair experience supports our mission to be the destination for all things home, helping everyone, anywhere create their feeling of home. 🎉