Keep having those 1-on-1s

Airbnb's Brian Chesky got rid of his standing 1-on-1 meetings. He says they're fundamentally flawed, and "you become like their therapist." I get that. But if you're a design leader thinking about canceling all those 1-on-1s and reveling in all that free calendar time, take a breath.

Chesky speaks from the perspective of a CEO who has very senior leaders as direct reports. If you're like most design leaders, you have middle managers or individual contributors reporting to you. And if that's the case, here's my case for keeping those 1-on-1s.

Your team still need you

They're still growing in their career, learning to manage up and down. That means they need more hands-on time with you and other leaders to ensure they're growing in ways that benefit the employee, the team, and the company. You invest in them, and the ROI takes shape in the team and product quality.

Build relationships for a better team

Regular 1-on-1 meetings help build closer relationships with your direct reports, which leads to better conversations, stronger results, and longer employee tenure. As the saying goes (but isn't always true)—people leave bad managers, not bad jobs. Staying connected to your team also helps you spot signs of burnout or other issues before they become serious problems.

Stay connected to the work

Regular 1-on-1s also help you stay better connected to the work. Suppose you condition your team to wait for you to check in before surfacing updates or problems. In that case, you might not get looped into projects until a problem gets bigger than it should.

Mentorship to grow them into better leaders

As a design leader, part of the 'product' you're building is the team. That means you're investing time and knowledge into your team so they can grow into those executives who one day report to the CEO. Part of the mentorship is enabling and teaching them interpersonal problem-solving skills so they don't use the CEO as a therapist.

While it's tempting to pump the brakes on your 1-on-1s, remember that if your team isn't learning good habits from you, they might be learning bad habits from others.

Change Means Progress, Sometimes

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”

— Winston Churchill

Lately my team has been getting frustrated from the shifts and changes in their projects. New constraints, priority shifts, change in project goals, and so on. When it came down to it, the team expected to be able to follow a perfect design process, without shifts.

I see this more often in young designers. Because that’s what design school teaches you: Discover→Define→Develop→Deliver. There are no curves in the double-diamond.

But, sometime change is good. Quality research should inform your direction, and yes, sometimes that means changing direction, tactic, or scope. Often times, change is a sign of progress… a job well done.

However, there are some changes that are not so great. These are priority changes—pause this project, start this one, now pause that, go back to the first one, and so on. This is a result of a lack of strategy and well-defined goals.

As a design leader, part of your role is to see around the corners and separate the good, expected changes from the bad, demoralizing, tiresome changes. The better you get at telling the difference and intervening when needed versus giving a good ol’ fashioned pep-talk will help your team stay engaged and avoid burnout.

5 Tips to Improve Your UX Team

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.

Links for Week 40, 2019

GV’s Guide to UX Research for Startups
Great roll-up of topical articles from Google Ventures team.

How Trello’s Remote Design Team is Using Figma
A peek into how Atlassian is using Figma. The Design Annotations labels are genius.

A Guide to UX Leadership
A practical approach to starting a new leadership (design or other) role.

Links for Week 35, 2019

Why Design Systems Fail in Product Design
Good intro to common design system pitfalls…

Everything you need to know about Design Systems
A primer on design systems…

How to design a well-designed offsite
Offsites can be key to building team camaraderie, aligning on team missions, or just buckling down to crack a tough problem.

How to Kick a Mindless Scrolling Habit
If you’re hooked on the scroll, here’s how to separate you from your phone…

From Sketch to Figma
One team’s journey on how to seamlessly transfer design assets from one design tool to another