Contributors:
Myself: Director of Experience Design
Michael Collins: Sr. Experience Director
Rayn VonderHoya: Experience Director
Jon Riley: Principal Designer
The Seattle Design Team
When I stepped into the leadership role for the design practice of a struggling office, morale was low among the few designers left, and I had a steep mountain to climb in terms of building trust. There was no sense of ownership of projects, the practice, or the business overall, and confusion about roles and responsibilities. Furthermore, there were no established processes for important tasks like pursuing projects, conducting interviews, or handling raises and promotions. My task was essentially to rebuild the design practice and its culture from scratch, drawing on my past experiences while recognizing that there would be a learning curve for both myself and the team.
Below is a list of principles I believe we embraced, and were crucial for building a strong design culture. We leaned on these principles as we designed the practice and office.
Each person should feel like they can lead at something, and have a meaningful impact on our culture by expressing their opinion or pitching in.
People should feel like they are each important contributors to a community, and they can draw on the experience of that community in times of need.
Each person should have a sense of ownership for the health of projects, the practice, and the office.
People should share early and often, and assume their colleagues are intelligent and capable of dealing with incomplete states.
People should be present in conversation, leverage active listening to fully understand points of view, and not just wait for their turn to speak.
Always assume good intent. Our team should be ready to give and receive feedback, in the spirit of getting better together.
We should create a safe environment for expressing ideas and concerns, where there could be open discussion and no judgment.
We should bring diverse backgrounds and opinions into the design space through staff, client, and user participation.
We should ensure the team has a work-life balance, sense of well-being, and is mindful to avoid burnout in an industry where it is all too common.
Everyone, at every level, should be continuously learning and the whole team should feel their career is benefiting.
The team should be proud of their work, by striving to deliver the highest quality possible even when constraints make it difficult.
People should understand that plans can’t predict unforeseen challenges, and that adaptation is part of the challenge and thus part of the fun.
In addition to the social work, there were several processes and policies we needed to put in place to ensure everyone understood the rules we were all playing by, and felt they were being treated fairly.
I had previously contributed to an initiative to think through career progression for the design practice at my former office, so I would bring that framework with me in my new role. While the framework was a great starting point, I would need to clarify it, teach it to my team, and give them a chance to contribute to its logic. The shortest way I can describe these levels is to say that it is based on the level of contribution, including the production of simple assets, producing of difficult assets, leading low-risk projects, leading high-risk projects, leading at the program level, and lastly leading at the portfolio level. This model would attempt to connect business contribution to the compensation model. No model is perfect, but this one made sense for our business.
I brought an interview process from my previous office. My new team would need to learn it, formulate their insights about it, and evolve it over time. The basic structure was a resume and portfolio review in Slack, a recruiter screen and scheduling, a craft interview executed by relevantly leveled craftspeople including an exercise designed to demonstrate important characteristics, and a hiring manager meet and greet. Every designer in our practice would share interviewing responsibilities, assess the candidate's level, and ultimately make the hiring decision, while I ensured the hire happened. This structure ensured the team had some control over the culture and was committed to their colleagues.
I needed to research my new market to ensure I could pay my team fairly and retain them long-term. My goal was to remove compensation from the employment conversation as much as possible. I created pay ranges for each role/level, with room within each to give performance increases even if a team member had not increased their responsibilities. Additionally, I would implement a policy within my practice that I would never pay anyone outside of the range for their level, which translated to no salary negotiations when making new hires, and would ensure there was equity in pay regardless of any biases that might exist.
Luckily, once again, I was previously part of an initiative to build better manager reviews at my previous office. The principles behind this self-assessment were a series of expected behaviors, where the employee would reflect on themselves based on those expectations, and get alternative perspectives from their manager. This document would be used as a basis to set goals, take on new responsibilities, and build skills.
Promotion conversations could be broached by either the manager or the direct report, at which point they would build a document that rationalized how that report had already taken on responsibilities of the next role, at which point I would review and adjust titles and salaries.
For my team, I stressed that in-office work was only necessary when they needed to be present to collaborate. I was not concerned with where people accomplished their work and encouraged them to work where they were most productive (unless our clients required them to be on-site) and to take all of their time off. Later in my tenure, due to COVID-19, the company would implement a hybrid working model and an unlimited vacation policy which aligned pretty well with our office's view on the subject.
The sales process in the new office was non-existent. I ran multiple design thinking workshops across practices and other officer leaders to narrow in on what we felt would be effective. From a cultural point of view, I wanted to make sure that my designers could participate in pursuits when available. When not able the participate, they were given all the information they needed to execute the work and were given the ability to pivot as they encountered unforeseen issues.
office revenue
growth
person team from 3
over a 3 year period
FTE retention
over a 3 year period
unified
team
FTE’s who would
work for me again
people left during
“The Great Resignation”
Problematic Lead Generation: The nature of consulting is that a lot of policies and decisions are built on your ability to close deals and create a diverse portfolio. While filling the pipeline was not my wheelhouse, or my responsibility (I was responsible for closing a percentage of deals that were brought to me) the office continued to struggle to produce leads. I wish that I had advocated harder for an investment from the corporate team in lead generation. Maybe stepping further outside of my wheelhouse and learning more lead gen craft would have resulted in better advocacy for that need.
Truly Fulfilling Experience: This opportunity was an incredible learning experience, and I am grateful for all of the leaders, peers, and reports who trusted me, invested in me, and were patient with me as I embarked on this journey with my team. To my team, thank you for buying in, I am filled with pride when I think about the culture we built.
Social WOrk
Some principles would take time to root themselves, and there would be a pile of work to build trust and set expectations. We implemented multiple social moments at different cadences to build on our principles and create the design community we wanted to be a part of.
One-On-Ones
I met with each of my direct reports bi-weekly. I did a lot of listening and transformed those learnings into advocacy and moments for collaboration. It was also a chance for me to give direct feedback and perspective on their strengths and how to lean into them.
Bi-Weekly UX Day
We primarily used this time to have open discussions about internal initiatives and solutions for the betterment of our office and practice. Additionally, we would use this time to socialize recent learnings from individual designers or industry discussion trends.
Manager Round Table
As the team scaled, I needed to hire and promote new leaders. Those leaders and I used this time to discuss their leadership journeys and challenges. Additionally, we used this time to plan subject matter for weekly practice meetings and discuss future social events.
Account Reviews
This series of meetings gave us the time to discuss project issues and strategies on every client account. This was a really important meeting for our cornerstone client, with whom we had many designers embedded across a myriad of projects.
Account Share-Outs
Useful design feedback is difficult to get without context. Account share-outs were a space to get feedback on work with people who were at least working on the same account if not the same project.
Social Events
The team I inherited was not social, primarily because the nature of their client work didn’t require them to be around each other, so we started doing monthly social events. We wanted designers to be exposed to their fellow designers as much as possible, even if they weren’t on the same project.
Delegation & Shared Ownership
As new processes and initiatives were being worked through and rolled out, I would identify people on my team who were passionate about specific subjects and either have them lead or make them collaborators on those issues. This would allow me to create collective ownership over our practice and office.