When work with a medium sized design team within a large corporation you need to make sure the work you produce is the best after all you have the better knowledge of the business than an agency. This session reaffirmed the strength of my own team and had some useful points that will help to cement that going forward.

Moderator: Jon Wiley User Experience Designer, Google
Jon Wiley User Experience Designer, Google
Lisa Anderson Director of User Experience, Intuit
Irene Au Director of User Experience, Google
Edward Garana Creative Services Manager, Hoover’s Inc
Tjeerd Hoek Director of User Experience, Microsoft
The session was run as a question and answers With Jon posing each question the the panel in turn.

How do you measure the success of your team?

• If the designs you team produce are understood by the users, the products sell and it is understood what you are trying to communicate.
• Getting the solution right, designers should make business teams nervous and keep them on there toes, designers need to have impact
• By the relationships you build if product and marketing teams ask your advice and understand your teams expertise.

How do you structure your team?

• For smaller teams it is necessary to employ generalist that have broad skill ranges. This also creates a holistic view of work and do not need to recreate the wheel.
• Design is subjective and everyone thinks they can design so hires the best of breed to overcome that.

What skills do you need for an In house team?

• One key element is the ability to follow through, When you hire an agency you already know you want a design, in house you need to influence the product teams so they do the correct job.
• You want people that can go all the way and do as much as possible as handing over between teams always loses some of the essence of what you are doing.
• Teams members that have sight across products and do not have single view so that learnings can be shared.
• People that understand corp life and internal customers unlike agencies in house teams can not walk away.
• Find the diamond in the rough, they might not be the best but you can guide them to the jewels your team needs.
• Along with skills in leadership, communication, drive, influence, engineering focused, non passive.

How do you manage designers, and grow the team by developing their careers

• You have to have an end goal of where you want you team to be.
• Build people with insight.
• Share knowledge.
• Have design reviews.
• One on one coaching
• Create a community.
• Share best practices.
• Work as a team to solve problems not on your own.
• Do not get to distance from the work as a manager, its not just about people management.

How do you balance strategic work with tactical work.

• You can not get away from tactical stuff and shouldn’t try it builds reputation and secures relationships with clients. Once you have those relationships they will ask your opinions on strategy work.
• Need to communicate what you are doing otherwise the business will suck resource by doing tactical work and that will stop you doing strategic work, but do not push work away.
• As you build the team and expand, broaden the thinking of the business so that get use to your work levels and demonstrate your proactive skill abilities.
• Be clear about what time the client will be getting on a project so that things don’t drag on using up your resource.

How do you continue produce high quality work and maintain quality?

• Look at creating a production team to do the quick hit jobs to allow others to do the strategy based work. Assign more junior staff to the low priority work and allow them to build skills that way.
• Utilise the available infrastructure by creating reusable components to save time.
• Map out processes for the churn type work to allow understanding of what goes on.
• Go outside of the team for specialised skills you do not have in house.

How do mange third party relationships?

• Build relationships with the vendor, be smart about how agencies do not waste money on skills you do not need like account management. Make sure you have a “get an out clause” on all contracts.
• Use the agencies as an extension of the team. Treat them as a member of the team and kick them when they are not working and praise them when they do something good.
• Use agencies to bring a freshness to the team.
• Invest time in the agency so that they understand the work you do and don’t go off track.
• Don’t leave agencies to drive, as the project will fail.
• Only rely on the agencies if it is a area you have no knowledge in.
• Both parties need to understand the relationship and work together.
• Do not demoralise you own team by bringing in agencies to do their work.

How do you communicate your success and value to the company?

• Hold design stakeholder reviews, build this as a culture within the company.
• Use bottom up communication, i.e focus on the customers and your successes with them, champion work that can change problems you can control.
• Educate people when you meet and deal with them.
• Go to them, create your own ad campaign.
• Know what your teams qualities are and weaknesses, project a positive attitude outwards.
• Be part of the solution.
• Be inspirational.
• Create your own brand and values for the team.
• Know what your success ratio is and communicate this.
• Tailor your communication to the market you are dealing with, use language they understand.
• Get feedback from the customer.

What should you avoid?

• Always remember that no one owns the design and everyone has an opinion.
• Don’t knock people back, be constructive.
• Don’t whine and complain, if you want respect you need to respect others.
• Don’t stop being innovative.
• Always keep trying and keep putting ideas forward.

How do you attract great people? and keep them?

• Sell you team, give people great projects and share the glory, but getting the right people first is key.
• Get people excited about what they do and make them excited about getting out of bed in the morning.
• To take the team forward remember to build on people to get the skills you need.

How do you employ good people?

• Know your team values, think about the other skills you require, leadership, communication, etc.
• Find Passion.
• Have a baseline skill set that they must exceed and then measure their interpersonal skills.

When you have spectrum of skills how do you transition between them all?

• Try to define what the priority is of the work is and assign the people accordingly, i.e.Low priority work should allow team members develop.
• Don’t pigeon hole skills sets.

How do you communicate priority back to the business?

• Push back and let the originators define which is the priority between them.
• When priorities are informed by business but run by design team you need to get involved as early as possible and understand what changes might occur.
• Priorities rely on trust, the business needs to have trust in your decisions.
• Provide clarity to the business so they understand why.

How do you work with other teams within your business area?

• Simply Communication.
• Meet and speak early and often.

How do you maintain morale?

• Get to know the problems and your team.
• Find the source, rarely is not enough away days the real problem.
• You most act on the problem.
• Foster an environment to be approachable.

How do you deal with agile working and employing people capable of agile working?

• The only way is to learn on the job,
• Give people time to think, agile does not mean dive straight in.

For me this session reinforced a lot of the problems I see on a day to day basis and although they make a lot of good points, the most difficult part is always trying to implement these ideas in to a large coorporation.