LEADERSHIP / STRATEGY / RESEARCH / UX / DESIGN OPERATIONS / DESIGN ENABLING
Building the right team and capabilities for design to flourish.
How to grow a small startup team in a large gov organisation?
DURATION
3-6 months
MY ROLE
Internal team research, Design Ops
WHEN
2020
IMPACT MEASUREMENT
Quantitive: NPS, Survey, Skills-mapping
Qualitative: User interview, User Feedback, Mind-mapping, Affinity Analysis
Background
Joining the design innovation team of 10 in 2019, together it was the pioneering team made up of engineers and graphic designers who are passionate about user experience. Most of us did a career switch to UX architects and UX designers. As a startup team in the government organisation, the DI team grow and evolve with new complex problems. We work vertically as design pairs in projects and horizontally with other design pairs with the central team in a flat structure.
Problem
Due to the gap in experience and diversity in technical backgrounds, the team members started to struggle in articulating their individual roles and strengths to each other. As such, confusion started to emerge in the team over communication of design decisions.
Despite the initial role descriptions, many design pairs (1 Ux architect and 1 UX designer) often find themselves still dealing with lot of ambiguity in job scope delineation in their design process. Issues like overlapping of work, unable to leverage on their strengths and juggling learning on the job in the projects.
The design team started to feel frustrated with the misalignment expectations between aspirations and capabilities, pay disparity and lack of support and growth opportunities. New hires are thrown right into complex projects without proper orientation and on-boarding.
Career growth paths became unclear and I noticed the amount of work required of the design team was unsustainable. Designers are often bogged with other admin work besides on the main research and design work in projects.
1
Promoted multiple team members to more senior and management positions within the course of 6+ months. 🎉
2
DI team grew its capacity by 3x+ during my tenure. 🌱🌱🌱
Impact
Research Goals
1
Understand the work dynamics of each design pairs, overall team's strengths and weaknesses
2
Identify and validate growing pangs within the design team
3
Prioritize and define opportunities where design ops can help
4
Design an action plan to improve identified areas.
Team profile
Internal Team Research
Fueled by the desire to take care of these talented, smart, and passionate people who were critical to defining and building our flagship products, I decided to conduct a internal ground research with the DI Team to identify empathic areas of opportunities for improvement within the team at the height of the pandemic when WFH was default, team engagement and morale plummeted.
Duration of each member with the team
> 5 years
0
UX Designers
6
2-5 years
4
< 1 year
3
> 5 years
4
2-5 years
4
UX Architects
11
< 1 year
3
Length of DI/UX training
5 UXD
3 UXA
1 UXA
1 UXA
1 UXD
1 UXA
1 UXD
5 UXA
2 UXD
1 week NNG -
UX knowledge
3 Mths
Uni Module - UI Design
1 week GA-UX
1 week SUTD-DI
10 weeks GA - UX
Specialised
in HCI
Team members rate themselves 1-5 in terms of their own skills for current and future (1 year).
Research Activity 1: Skills-mapping
Insights for Current:
-
Overall Team Weakness: Facilitation (>2.5) Almost Novice
-
All areas except visual design, both Architects and Designers are rate themselves slightly above Novice (>2) but not yet Immediate Proficiency (>3).
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Team Shape
The current and future team shape made up by UXA and UXD overlaps almost exactly except for visual design. Despite the different roles, both currently perform and want to progress in the same areas which might be why it is confusing and frustrating for some design pairs.
Based on aspirations, UXDs are more eager to grow compared to UXAs. One contributing factor is most senior UXD went through a more rigour training in UX and are more exposed to the industry.
Team Growth Insights
-
Team’s UX maturity: Both UXA and UXD are currently struggling in-between novice (Learnt UX) to immediate proficiency (Applied UX) on projects.
-
Most in the team went through light trainings in UX/DI and have no prior work experience to real UX application.
-
Being trained does not equate to effective application in the organisation. Regardless of seniority in the organisation, most in the team cannot be functioned as SMEs in UX yet,
-
The current main weakness of the Team is Facilitation.
-
Most in the Team lack sufficient ops domain knowledge which takes time to build.
-
UXA and UXD are not confident to take the lead in facilitating with enough ops domain knowledge and Tech to be speaking ‘right’ language.
-
Out of 6 who have been on the team for 1-2 years, it’s avg 5.33 (scale of 1-10) on confidence level for ops domain knowledge.
-
It’s going to take more than 2 years to train new hires only to get to neither confident or inferior in speaking the same domain language.
Quantitative: Team Sentiments
Top 3 main reasons to leave the Team:
-
Lack of management support
-
Constantly managing ambiguity
-
Slow progression in career growth and lack of clear pathway to success
How we get work done
How we work together
How our work creates impact
Qualitative: Mind-mapping, Affinity Analysis, Interviews
Actions
From the activities done, insights gained from research were used to align expectations with team and higher ups for more support and growth. I also collaborated with peers to create well-defined career paths for the DI team, and helped to promote multiple team members to more senior and management positions within the course of 6+ months.
As a result, the DI Team is able to pivot and make new changes to team structure as well as better support the overlooked areas (e.g onboarding of new hires, lack of engagement and mentorship and growth opportunities for hard and skills) within the team that we identified.
I partnered with executive peers across the company to drive visibility for design org and to model standards for inclusivity of design. This catalyzed a sense of mission, purpose, and belonging for my team, which grew its capacity by 3x+ during my tenure.
Ongoing
With the constant changing landscape, we are constantly exploring new possibilities and making changes to meet our growing challenges in the team.
