Hiring top Product and UX designers has been a central piece of my career for over 10 years. I learned how to build teams, and retain staff, from the best-of-the-best at Robert Half. Scaling teams to drive outcomes in multiple problem spaces is one of my greatest strengths. My approach to attracting and retaining design talent has always achieved at least a 95% retention rate, in every design organization I've led.
I'm a servant design leader, and a proponent of the leader-leader model, best defined by L. David Marquet, in his book "Turn the Ship Around". This model has paid-off, by helping me build, scale, up-level, and keep engaged, every team I've had the pleasure of leading.
My method for giving designers the confidence to solve hard problems and navigate ambiguity, is to take them along as I do it myself. I openly and transparently share my approaches, techniques, and tricks I've learned over the years. I have designers shadow me, as I work along side them, and then support their progress, encouraging them to find their own tricks and techniques. I often learn as much from my team as they do from me. Here are a few of my techniques.
I'm a confident FigJammer during ideation sessions. It helps me explain design ideas and concepts through sketching. I use the FigJams to communicate ideas to the design team in an easily consumable format.
I have extensive experience in facilitating 5 Day Design Sprints, and Design Thinking workshops, and have created a huge repository of templates to facilitate both processes.
People respond to storytelling. As a design leader, storytelling is one of my strongest methods to communicate a plan, the importance of a design idea, a user's pain point, or a user's behavior. Owning the whiteboard is how I lead by example. It enables me to communicate ideas to designers, product and engineering partners, stakeholders, and executive leadership. It's the best method to get everyone aligned in the quickest way possible.
Throughout my career as a design leader, I learned the importance of fostering a design culture that promotes both personal and career growth. To ensure a positive designer experience, I establish a formalized definition of what each functional role is to the organization, and a clear career growth path. I incorporate consistent checkpoints with each designer, to ensure they are always on-track to achieve their desired growth goals.
At Reliance Matrix, I collaborated with executive leadership and HR to create a clear, measurable, way to communicate levels in the design organization. I created a matrix with functional roles and expected outcomes, along with examples of feedback the individual might receive if they were doing a great job, and the impact their work should have on the products they build.
I believe the most important element to building a design team, is building the organization's design culture to support it. Here are a few highlights showcasing how I build and establish a design culture, wherever I go.
In order to foster a culture of individualized/personal growth, I've created a program to reimburse employees for all book purchases & lead a monthly UX Book Club meeting.
It's common practice for me to create a formal budget to pay for employees to obtain leading industry certifications, to enroll in training programs, attend industry conferences, & pursue other educational opportunities.
I establish monthly events for employees to gather and talk about topics important to them, like emerging technology, design & product trends, innovation, and anything else they'd like to share with the team. Additionally, I create special activities, outings, and collaboration sessions, when we gather together in person, making sure we have the opportunity to do-so at least twice per year. I've also developed special hack days, every quarter, where team members can collaborate together on special innovation projects.
At Reliance Matrix, much like I've done elsewhere, I engaged executive HR stakeholders to establish a comprehensive recognition and rewards program for the PDE organization, in order to show team members how important their contributions are to the organization, the products we build, and the user's who utilize that which we create.
No matter the company, I take pride in ensuring the design organization is a leader in the company's broader DEI initiatives.
