Building a great UX team is more than just hiring ‘better designers’. Even the best designers will fail if their work environment doesn’t set them up for success. Over the past decade of leading, building, and growing user experience teams, there are five key areas I focus on that result in noticeable and speedy improvements.
Resourcing
It’s hard for a UX team to be successful if you don’t have the team to keep up with the demand. The backlog only gets bigger and the design debt builds up. You need to ensure the UX team is staffed appropriately to the Product and Engineering teams you’re working with.
If the Product team is bigger than the UX team, the workload demands will quickly surpass the team’s capacity. From there, the UX team could get a reputation for being slow or the bottleneck, or worse, teams start to work around the UX team resulting in poor experiences making their way to your users.
If the Engineering team is bigger than the UX team, then they’ll quickly burn through the work that has been properly researched, designed, and validated. Now engineers don’t have anything to work on, and again, the UX team gets a reputation for being slow.
My rule of thumb for UX team staffing is typically 1:1:1—one product manager to one UX designer to one engineering team. This is only a starting place; you may need to increase or decrease those numbers, and it may vary by team. For example, one team might only work on a set of APIs, so they’re not likely to need a dedicated UX designer.
Team Culture
A UX team one of the few jobs where 25% of our role is criticizing others’ work. If the team doesn’t have a healthy culture and strong guidelines for healthy critiques, then the team will spiral out of control. There are several great resources on creating a healthy environment for critiques. Below are two of my favorite:
- Book: Discussing Design: Improving Communication and Collaboration through Critique
- How to Cultivate Healthy Design Feedback
Beyond critiques, the team has to like and trust each other. That means you need to create time and space for people to connect at the human level. I found that a monthly happy hour or brunch (for international teams) helps, as long as the time is engaging and helps build connections between each other.
Streamline Processes
Every new design hire brings their ideas of how work should be done. Right or wrong, those ideas are typically different from how the team is currently operating. When teams aren’t operating under the same processes or quality standards, you have a misalignment. With your team, define your design processes, critique processes, escalation process, file storage and labeling, documentation standards, meeting cadence, etc. Write it down and have the team all sign off on it. Now the team can work on fun parts of the job and solve real problems and make users happy.
And by the way, you just wrote 95% of the onboarding docs for all your new hires. Good job, you.
Prioritization
There likely will never be enough designers to do everything, which means you need to work with your counterparts to determine how the UX team can deliver the most value for the company and users.
Now, prioritization isn’t just saying ‘no’ to people. Every decision has to have a reason, and you have to realize that you’re not a dictator… others have to agree with your decisions.
Your team should focus on projects that move the needle on your business KPIs. That’s it. That is the framework that should be used with all your Product cohorts when prioritizing design workstreams. You should be asking:
- What KPIs does this project support?
- Is it more important than X, Y, or Z?
- Do we have the skillsets to deliver a quality outcome?
Be Visible
Make the design work visible to the company. This could be regular newsletters where you share design prototypes or research insights. Or it could be smaller, maybe a regular email to the senior leaders of the top 3-5 design wins or outcomes. It could also be presenting at the company All Hands meetings, or giving your team shout-outs regularly in front of others. The important part is to socialize the work and impact the UX team is doing.
It’s That Simple… in Theory
Easy, right? Of course not. That's why they pay you the ‘big bucks’. Not all of the areas will be problem areas for you and your team. But hopefully, this can serve as a guide for areas to evaluate and look for hot spots or areas you can improve.