Everywhere I look, investment in design is increasing. The UX job market is on fire and I’m observing friends and former colleagues leaving positions in droves to build design teams elsewhere.
If you’ve been hired to build out a UX function, congratulations! Here are five tips for tackling this challenge, pulled from my personal experience.
Hire experienced generalists
For your first few hires, seek experienced user experience generalists who can operate independently with minimal oversight. The ideal candidate will have proven expertise leading engagements in a human-centered way. They should be able to frame a problem, conduct generative research, iterate on design solutions, create wireframes and prototypes, test and refine them with users, and work collaboratively with others to bring projects to life.
Because fighting for headcount can be challenging, you might be tempted to hire more junior talent or even make do with interns. While I love bringing interns into established teams, neither you nor your intern will have a good experience if you don’t have time to invest in their professional growth. At this stage, you should be hustling to find projects and build relationships; mentoring junior talent can come later.
Align talent to high-priority initiatives
This one seems obvious but is always harder than it sounds. With a small team, you’ll need to carefully choose strategic projects that your company values. If you’re doing good work that nobody sees or that nobody cares about, your growth – and that of your team – will stall. To identify candidate projects, find out what initiatives are deemed mission-critical by C-level leaders. Introduce yourself to the individuals in charge and suggest an approach for how you can reduce risk and make the project more successful.
Ideally, because you were hired you to build a design capability, inserting yourself into strategic projects should be welcomed. The all too frequent reality, however, is that sometimes, people aren’t comfortable attempting high-visibility projects in a new way. These leaders are carrying too much risk to experiment with new operating models. If you find yourself in this situation, identify a smaller project – or create one – and make the most of it.
Get scrappy with your engagement model
I believe that following the full, human-centered design process leads to magic. That’s why I’m in this field! I also know that as UX practitioners, we don’t always have the time, resources, or buy-in to follow a textbook process for every project. Especially in the early stages of building a design capability, don’t get precious about methodology. Start where you can and show how even a little involvement can go a long way.
Especially in the early stages of building a design capability, don’t get precious about methodology. Start where you can and show how even a little involvement can go a long way.
For example, if a leader approaches you to “review these designs because development starts next week,” you might be tempted to explain that you can’t engage at this late stage because you need time to fully understand user needs and business goals. While this is true, you’ll lose an opportunity to build a relationship with someone who is actively seeking your expertise.
In this case, I recommend taking a scrappy approach. Review any available background material on the project. Spend 2-3 hours with a subject matter expert on a detailed wireframe walkthrough. Grab someone from Sales or Customer Support for guerilla-style usability sessions. Draft a 3-5 page slide deck explaining your findings and recommendations using wireframe callouts, separating them into quick fixes and longer-term considerations. Review this with the project leader and the development team, focusing on urgent fixes that should happen before development starts. Once the development team is moving, proactively set up additional meetings with the project leader to discuss how to work together moving forward. Use this as an opportunity to explain what a true user-centered engagement could look like for their project (not in the abstract) and how you can get started.
If done well, this gradual approach eases people into a new way of working, allowing you to incrementally demonstrate value without demanding that the entire engagement model change overnight. If this approach continually leads to deeper and better UX engagement, run with it. As your team grows, however, ensure you don’t become trapped at a low level of UX maturity.
Focus on people and outcomes
Now that you have generalists aligned to high-priority projects, focus on demonstrating value and building relationships. If people are engaged and collaborating successfully, and design outcomes are providing value to the organization, things are going well. The process might be messy and chaotic. There might not be perfect alignment to best practices from project to project. There might not even be perfect UI consistency within your product suite. In the early stages of UX maturity, however, all of this is acceptable. Process discipline can come later, especially if you and your team are becoming trusted advisors on human-centered methods.
Communicate the impact
It’s incumbent on you as a leader to talk about what you’re doing and what kind of outcomes you’re achieving. Don’t assume that anyone outside of your immediate team has visibility into the work you do and what you helped create. Lean in to your role of evangelist and spread the word about the results your team is achieving.
Because every organization is different, figure out what communication channels are most effective and involve your team in sharing content. Schedule meetings to review insights. Create a Slack channel and post links to work in-flight, such as interview summaries, usability test recordings, wireframes and prototypes. Host brown bag lunches. Even emails can work!
These approaches served me well when building out design teams to about 15 people. Once your team reaches a certain size, however, you move from building a function to expanding one. Because scaling a design team is quite different from establishing a design team, stay tuned for my next post on taking design teams from 15 to 50 people.
In the meantime, what approaches have worked for you when building design teams? Please share your expertise in the comments.
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