How to build high-performance design teams

How do you define high performance design teams?

The first thing to look at is the design maturity of a particular product team and that is the maturity relative to their product management and engineering. So look at their roadmap, is it just focused on integration for the next two years, or is the tech stack about the user experience and improving the customer experience?

Trust is also a massive factor for high performing teams. Building trust with with product partners and with engineering.

Based on your experience and knowledge of the industry, what would you say are the some of the top performing design teams and why?

Shipping doesn't necessarily mean that it's a high performing team. I know plenty of good quality experiences that have really toxic cultures, so I can't judge. And there's also some really subpar experiences that have great design cultures.

When she was at Palm there were some really great innovative interaction designs but the business didn't know how to market it or how to sell it and the product failed in the market as a result because it was priced too high. They had a great product experience, but it didn't matter. The lesson for her is that you have to have the business aspects taken care of too, which is why she has looked in her career for companies that understand the value of brand and of product design - where marketing and business partner closely with product development. If there's a if there's a gap, it doesn't matter how great the experience is.

What conditions do you think need to exist in organisation for a design team to flourish?

She once had a creative director that was a huge procrastinator which was terrifying as the producer as he did his best work came when he sat for a week on the beach and then went and pulled three all nighters in a row. Lesson for her was in being able to say “you do what you need to do to be creative”. Comes down to treating people as adults and treating people with trust; a belief that they will do good work and follow through. If they don’t then the trust erodes and you have to work on it.

Also great work environment where people can bring their true selves to work and have creative freedom. That's first and foremost and to really allow them to not only focus on the roadmap, but imagine the possibilities. The biggest piece is in fostering a creative work environment and giving designers autonomy, and giving designers the authority to make decisions; they're not just order takers, they're collaborators.

Before COVID hit she used to send people in her team around the globe to collaborate. Her teams do not work on certain things in certain countries and so it was extremely important for them to speak constantly. So they would travel and workshop together — teams would come together then break apart and repeat. It is one of the most important factors and so they still do it but now collaboration and communication is predominately done in Miro boards and with other digital tools. Takes a bit longer but can be done effectively.

How have you found designing in a remote environment? What advice do you have for people to get the best work out in a remote environment?

Again, it comes down to trust of believing that people will do the work that they need to do.

What we have been experiencing is working remote during a pandemic and that's very different. It's not just a remote environment, it's a remote environment with children distance learning or children not in school. People being in multi generational homes and homes that were not supposed to have entire families there 24/7.

As a result you have to make accommodations for people - eg. working parents being able to keep their cameras off or not being able to attend calls while they take care of their kids - but she just trusts that they will watch the recording of the meeting after and follow through.

It is important especially now to be really smart in choosing when you have a synchronous conversation where people need to get together and when you can be asynchronous. With the latter, it is a matter of setting clear deadlines and telling them when feedback is needed by and sending out reminders that people need to make comments.

Do you think the pandemic and the remote way of working is hindering juniors / people early in their careers? Do you think that the lack of an open office environment is creating a gap in the industry where juniors are being held back with employers looking for seniors who can just crack on?

The people that are new to the industry are going to have to adapt but we all have to adapt. The old side conversations in the kitchens and hallways that we use to have and being able to look over somebody's shoulder or seeing body language, allowed you to tell if they're frustrated or if they're just cranking; you don't get to see that now.

The folks that are newer in the industry are going to miss out on that. But we're all going to have to adapt, and we will find new ways. I'm hopeful that there might be newer software tools that can address it also. Slack is good for some things but it's not perfect.

A lot of people in our in our Slack community have been talking about the evolution of tool sets. How do you encourage designers to be up to date with the latest tool sets? How do you assess tools and when is the right time to bring in a tool?

When hiring people there is the what so that’s the toolset and the skills; back in the day there was Photoshop and Illustrator and then Invision and now Figma and soon there will be something else. These are always changing, the what is always changing and learning. The how though, the how people show up to work, how they problem solve, how they collaborate, how they handle conflict, all of that ‘how’ requires a high level of emotional intelligence and that is harder to train. So when she hires people, she expects high level of EQ, if they don't know a particular tool, she doesn't care as she can train them. But it's really hard to train people in having empathy for the customer and having empathy for their co workers.

So she hires for the how and trains for the what because the what always changes.

I relation to choosing tools it always came down to what the designers needed and the evaluating the tools to ensure that they ticked the boxes. As the team grew, it was important to ensure that the right tools were in place to mange their needs and manage the different assets. But that is just one piece, they are currently moving over to Figma and they have a dedicated person that is part of design ops to manage the assets and the archives because 140 of the designers rely on that job to be able to do theirs. From a. Design system perspective, you have to ensure that assets are all transitions over correctly, are stylistically accurate and sometimes it might only be 90% accurate so you have to go back in and retool some things. So it is often a big effort.

How do you assess designers when you're interviewing them and their emotion intelligence?

There is definitely a lot of focus on the “tell me a story when” type of scenarios and it also comes back to being able to see from the in an interview or in a portfolio aspects of who the whole team was. When they say in their interview, I not we, that's a sure sign of a little too much ego and not enough collaboration. If they can clearly say, my team did this and I took this role and I collaborated with these other folks, then you can see that they're good collaborators.

Also you can look at their answer when asked a challenging questions like: tell me a time when you had a conflict with your product manager, how did you resolve it? If the answer is “I went around them and told their boss or I ignored them”, it’s very revealing about how they'll handle situations and you can assess from there as to whether they can handle the team that they're joining.

Zendesk has Danish roots; the founders are Danish. There's a lot of consensus, a lot of collaboration and a lot of humility. They created a word a number of years ago which is “humbledent" — humble and confident, so they hire for humbledence.

We don't hire tall poppies. It's important to find people who have humility. Being humble is part of having a high EQ.

Retaining top design talent:

Think of designers as humans who have other obligations outside of work whether that is parenting or caring for siblings or for elderly parents and give them that flexibility. The pandemic is not going away and so giving them that flexibility is a great way of retaining talent.

Someone should be able to work at a company and build a career and a family at the same time, whatever that looks like for the individual whether it’s children, cats, dogs, plants. Acknowledging that people have a life outside of work is really important for retention.

Zendesk have very good parental leave. After five years you can take a six week sabbatical. They pay well. There are little perks also; little perks matter to people; eg. reimbursement for internet and for a phone.

There are a lot of benefits around mental health and wellness also which are really important right now and if people need mental health leave, there should be no questions asked and it is most importantly respected. It is not good enough to just be able to take ay sort of leave if taking it is frowned upon in any way.

How do you measure performance of your design and measure designers that managing things / others?

Guidance around how to be a people manager boils down to three things: leading yourself, leading your team and leading the business.

There are attributes within all of those. It all comes from a place of relationships being important. Playing nicely and assuming good intent, with your product partners, stakeholders…etc are things you look for.

In terms of how you how you evaluate folks it comes down to whether they are delivering what they're supposed to be delivering? Are they thinking beyond just their little world? A lot of managers only think about their team because that's all they can focus on. But to grow, you have to start thinking about your region or about the global impact of your designs.

What is the most common element you would add to your team that can really facilitate results but tends to be missing a personality, trait skill, anything?

Confidence. Again, it goes back to trust. Confidence comes from feeling like you can take a risk and the way you can facilitate that is providing a sense of confidence that they will not be fired for doing so.

As a manager, figuring out the calculated risks, the intelligent risks that you can take. The only way staff learn is through making mistakes and trying things out. So as a leader you have to figure out what are the things where you can let them take the risk and fail.

I've definitely had managers come to me and say, I want to do this thing. And I'm just like, Oh G-d, crash and burn, I could just see it. But I have to say tell me more about that, would you like my advice? I can take a suggestion but they will still go on and then they fail. Then they come back, and say now I understand what you meant but they wouldn't believe me, unless they failed.

Having that confidence comes from making the mistake, learning from it and growing.

What do you think the biggest issue in design teams is? Is it ego?

I stopped hiring egos a long time ago. I once made the mistake and hired two. They took so much energy out of the team, out of me out of HR. Now I don't care how incredibly talented these people are. They're not worth it.

How do you partner with external suppliers? When do you then go out to external design partners and what are best practice of working with a design agency?

Working with agencies can be difficult when it comes to keeping them abreast of changes happening internally and as a result a lot of the time whatever gets delivered has to be refactored. Another approach is to just give agencies the more conceptual / vision setting work. But the problem with that is that is often the in house team then feels like crap because the fun vision stuff is being done by somebody else.

One solution is to just not hire anyone from outside and take the stance of if we can not hire for it, we will not do it. Another is to find very specific projects for consultants. At Zendesk there was one for growth and monetisation and it was a very defined project that could be handed off. Or looking to pick up heavy lift work like auditing which the internal seem does not have the capacity for.

How to respond to the business asking for OKRs for designers?

The whole ROI for design is a little silly as a concept. It is not a question we ever have about engineers.

The person or people that are asking the question are likely inexperienced and you have to train them and tell the story that there is implicit value in design. It is a matter of asking them, do the want a great customer experience? Not all companies need or want it, they can make money without it.

Recent report about why McDonald icecream makers are always broken. It comes down to the fact that most of their income comes from service contracts that were set up which mean that all Francises have to use them. So they can have awful interfaces and customer experiences and people still have to use them. If they improve the interface, they will lose money.

So some companies don’t want a better customer experience but for those that do, they need to bring in experts to build it. So you need to create a dialogue to understand what they are trying to achieve. An ROI but be better customer retention or better customer satisfaction and that can be documented.

What are the biggest difference between team members from small start up companies vs big companies?  Any strengths / weaknesses?

There is a difference between those from different companies.

Those from bigger companies are used to dealing with more complex and political environments. They also understand scale and how to partner with data science and engineers that are doing big back end work that takes a lot of time and therefore are able to pace themselves.

Those from starts up though are used to wearing many hats. So when hiring, it is important to try and hire people that have a mix of backgrounds so when you put them all together you get innovation and variety. If you only hire from one, you will get a certain approach and you would not achieve the innovation and success.

Zendesk recently brought in a speaker, Vivian Ming, a neuroscientist who spoke about diversity and inclusion but in particular diversity of thought. Which is incredibly important. It is not just about skin colour but getting people from a community college or someone that doesn’t have a degree as well as those from pedigree schools — that is the type of diversity that will drive innovation.

How to deal with a low performer that is a strong culture fit:

It is very difficult. It comes down to just having very honest and frank conversations with them about their performance. First is a matter of helping to train them and give them areas of focus to show them what they are good at.

Also about getting tot he root of the issue. Low performance could be due to them having personal going on. Once had an amazing top performer who just started tanking and through a back channel she learnt that the woman had broke up with her boyfriend so anyone that asked was just told to give her space. It took 4 months to get back to her normal standard and pace. There was no performance conversation or evaluation, the woman had no idea anything happened, just respected her space and gave her the time that was needed.

In other cases low performance might be because someone does not like their job so it is a matter of picking it apart. Another example was a guy who did not like the job he was doing and there was no alternative for him. So in that case it was a matter of just having a heart to heart conversation and saying that it wasn’t the right place for them.

Sometimes you have to do performance management but others don’t need to know. Before you get to the formal documentation just connect and find out what is going on.

Expectations of what to see in a product design portfolio and one where the person manages a design team and cross functional teams:

Break out practice ares within the portfolio: people management, product strategy, product design execution…etc. Or create a case study that describes aspects of all of it. It is not about the end product per se but about the journey so create the story to show off all the aspects that you want to touch.

How to be considered for a leadership role when you have not had any direct reports

Work with a manager to expand your role to involve more mentorship and coaching. Those people can then provide feedback as to your abilities.

Screenshot messages from “fans” or get them to write reviews for you. Could be from product managers who provide praise on Slack - save those.

Advice on team members complaining about creative block:

Block of time for creative flow. Think about the best time, is it the morning or the afternoon. What do people need to be creative? What brings people energy or happiness? If people are creatively blocked, they might have too much or too little challenge / expertise. Give people the opportunity to unblock themselves.

Random quotes:

“Product design or user experience design has finally gotten that seat at the table. But a lot of us haven't really been trained on what you do once you're there.”

“If you have a team of more than 30, you need design operations. As a design leader you need to focus on the design and the people that are doing the design, not all the operations; that should be handed off to somebody who's really good at that.”

“Designer happiness is my job.”

Zendesk hiring:

Website: Zendesk.com/jobs

Instagram and Twitter: @zendeskcreative

Roles are mostly in North America (all 50 states) and providences in Canada. They are opening more remote work in AMEA. Also have opportunities though in Dublin, Krakow, Australia, Singapore, Copenhagen and Montpellier with more to come

In terms of the roles themselves. As a priority, she is looking for a principle level visual designer to work alongside her the Chief creative officer and the head of product. Also looking for a design architect and soon will be looking for 10 roles around for design systems — research, content design and designers.