Building Teams for Better Process, Retention, and Delivery

at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/hRIpo1g4Ugs

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and the three pillars of product design

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, I'm Mike Brown, and today I'm going to be talking to you about building teams for better process, retention and delivery. First a bit about me. I've been working for over 20 years in design, and a large part of that leading design organizations across the world, but most recently in the UK, building large in-house design organizations at quite large places like BT and EE, Eurosport and Discovery, and most recently at reed.co.uk, one of the UK's largest recruiters.

[00:00:33] Obviously my background and where I work is in design, and in previous talks I've spoken a lot about product design and what it actually is and how we define it. That relates to this a little bit. I'm talking about wider product teams here, but I think it's important to come back to product design, what we ask. We ask a lot of product designers now. This is just an example of many of the tasks that we give product designers to work on within product teams, which used to actually be spread out amongst multiple roles, and that's largely the same across product teams now.

[00:01:08] But this isn't a problem, because what I've found is that when you really concentrate on these three pillars of product design, ensuring that designers can be efficient, focused and enabled, then you can achieve great results with all product designers across all teams. And again, I think this can relate to wider product teams as well. In design, under efficient, it's really making sure that they're using the right systems and processes, and that everyone knows them and understands them. Focused, really user focused, and understanding user outcomes and business outcomes. And then making sure they're enabled, that the product team is their first team, that's the team that they work for, and that their leadership is empowering rather than prescriptive.

[00:01:55] So today's talk is really about how we can build, from our experience obviously with a design slant, but how we can build better product teams. Really looking at, through the planning, how can we create efficient, focused teams. The structure: how can you structure it to ensure that you are building properly enabled product teams. And then lastly, we do a lot of research around hiring and recruitment at Reed, so I'm going to share some tips from that. And then how, with everything that I've learned, we're building teams over at Reed.

Planning: the BT story and planning for growth

[00:02:28] To start with, I'm going to start with talking about planning, how to build efficient and focused teams. What I'd really like to start by talking about is the large design team that I, with some other leaders, built at BT. This is quite a few years ago. It was a really exciting time. This was the first internal design organization BT had ever had. Prior to that they outsourced almost all of their design to agencies. Different departments would outsource to different agencies, but I was brought in as one of the initial hires to build out an internal capability, and it moved much faster and better than anyone expected.

[00:03:08] So we started with the initial design leader, very quickly built out a relatively large in-house team, moving quite quickly. This is quite a while ago, so we still had separations, UX designers and visual designers rather than product designers. And then in a matter of time we kept expanding, kept expanding. A lot of this growth happened by moving away from the agency model. Other bits of design, other outcomes that were being provided by external partners and consultants, were all brought in-house, so we expanded the team quite quickly.

[00:03:42] As I said, it was a really exciting time, producing a lot of great outcomes, producing really great things. But as a huge and growing organization we really struggled to measure our success. While there were some of our designers working in agile processes, the majority were working in waterfall processes or something in between. And while we were working hard, a lot of it was focused on output and outcomes, and really, in the way that we built the team, we were constantly reacting, being told, okay great, we just need this many people for this many teams, which we did. And as I said, we delivered some great things, but when I look back on this, if we'd just been able to plan a bit more and look ahead a bit more, we could have achieved so much more.

[00:04:32] So really what I've learned from that is it's very important to plan for growth. We grew so much faster than we expected, but that's not something that should catch you by surprise, because if you're building a good team it's probably going to be successful and you're probably going to grow faster than you think.

[00:04:47] What I've learned from that experience, and subsequent to that, is when you're planning for growth it's really important to establish a strong culture and your ways of working first. In that sense, really concentrating on your initial hires, particularly the ones at senior level, because they will help you to establish that culture and those ways of working, and that sets the bedrock, the foundations, which can then allow you to move quite fast after that. You can take some more risks with later hires, because you can be confident that you can train people and bring them into a strong culture and ways of working.

[00:05:21] What I've found, at the example in BT and then in later experiences as well, is that contractors are incredibly useful to scale quickly. So we use contractors and consultants when necessary, if we have a short-term need and we need to scale up quite quickly. It's obviously the fastest way to do it, you can get some pretty clear results, you're hiring people with a certain amount of experience which they'll deliver to you. But long term this is not a great process.

[00:05:48] We found at BT, partly because of the scale of the growth and just partly because we didn't really think about it, we kept contractors in place for a very long time, sometimes in the same role for a long time. And what I've found over and over again is the very best consultants and contractors in the world, they behave differently to people that are full-time and working within a business, within a large in-house corporate team. Because contractors, understandably, are thinking about where their next job is coming from. Things could change at any moment, so they're very focused on their latest work, the relationships with stakeholders. They're less willing to rock the boat and make a hard decision now to advance your strategy or to advance a better outcome in the future.

[00:06:35] So while that could be great in the short term, it's always important to be planning. If you have contractors and consultants in your team, you need to be planning, when you're able to, if they're going to be around for a while, when are we turning these into full-time hires, when are we making these community members of the team?

[00:06:50] And as part of that I think it's really important to plan for progression as well. This is something that I've really learned over the years. Within every product team that I've ever worked in, everyone would like to have seniors at all levels. We'd like to have senior product managers managing everything, senior developers, and obviously I'm always being asked for senior designers, because everyone would like to have a senior in there. But it's important to understand that in an organization of any size, not all the workers can be at senior level, and it's not going to be satisfying to seniors, and it's not going to be satisfying when you're building a larger organization, to have a team of leaders, a team of people wanting to do senior work.

[00:07:38] So it's important to have that balance in the team, but crucially you can plan to add some of the seniority through internal growth, which is what we do now. The advantage of that is it's much cheaper, which is always much easier to get your business case signed off if you're not asking for senior level, and as if you change it the whole time. But crucially this leads to happier teams. When you have a balance in the team, when you have younger, hungrier people wanting to learn from other leaders, it creates a really nice balance in the team and makes overall the teams happier, less likely to churn and more likely to collaborate and work together.

What the research says about why people stay and leave

[00:08:11] And this isn't just an abstract concept. We do a lot of research at Reed around employment and hiring. This is a survey that we did recently in June with 2,000 active job seekers and over 250 hiring managers, and what we found was really interesting. We've been talking for the last couple of years about the great resignation, that with all the changes with COVID, a majority of workers were looking to leave their jobs. The cost of living crisis has really changed these things. We now find the majority of people are planning to stay in their jobs, they're not looking for new roles.

[00:08:52] What's interesting is that the main reason they're doing that is they're happy. They're happy in their current role, they're worried about other factors. But why are they happy in their current role? The vast majority say because of the people. It's not because of other factors. Salary is always important, but in this area the people are the most important. And if people were planning to leave, salary again, it's always a strong driver, I'll be talking about that throughout this presentation, but toxic culture and poor management are some of the biggest drivers with people leaving. So if you can create a happy culture, create a happy working environment, that will lead to less churn.

Planning at Reed: careful planning and looking outside your own area

[00:09:30] So how do we do it at Reed, how do we build efficient teams? Really careful planning of roles based on requirements across the entire business, looking to achieve in a fast growth environment. We have achieved that, I've been able to really increase, within our design organization, really increase the skills and abilities across the team, led to several promotions, and that's a really nice way to get to the levels you want to be, internally, organically.

[00:09:57] And that's just an example of careful planning. One of the advantages was a designer that we brought in who works in marketing for our team. In previous organizations I've worked in, the large organizations, quite often marketing was a separate org, and not in direct competition, but it was quite hard to get alignment between the product parts of the business and the marketing parts of the business. Sometimes from a design perspective they have separate design teams, often very separate metrics for success, and we'd often find that our designs and the experiences we were producing were at loggerheads. Sometimes within the same journey we'd be delivering different experiences, trying to deliver different outcomes.

[00:10:42] There was an opportunity at Reed to bring more of the design in-house and actually do that, create a new role for someone who'd actually work closely with our marketing organization, deliver a lot of the outcomes they were looking for. And that's been a huge success. So one dedicated designer is now producing five times the outcomes that we were delivering before. It's obviously saving the business a lot of money, but the biggest thing for us is it now means that we can deliver really consistent experiences from start to finish. For things like our marketing, for our customer relationship management, for our emails, we're now ensuring that all of those things are working from our design system, that all the experiences are aligned across the entire business.

[00:11:23] That's been a great outcome, and that came from looking, when we're planning, just outside our own area. What are the other opportunities to work with other departments, other opportunities, as we're planning our organization, planning where we want to be expanding, making the business cases, what are some other areas which could add value? So it's really important to look outside your own places as well.

[00:11:43] And then it's really important to have clear processes and ways of working, to really plan these things from the start, work hard on them at the beginning. So within the design organization we have our processes and ways of working. These are things that we've spent a lot of time building collaboratively, and things that we're constantly looking to update, examine and iterate on whenever necessary.

Focus: user outcomes and business outcomes

[00:12:11] And how do we, the biggest thing as I said before, is to be really focusing on ensuring that all the product teams are focused on their user outcomes, and that comes from really deep user knowledge, constant research. We are constantly researching at Reed, and we use a dedicated user research team which supports all product teams. Rather than having researchers sitting within a team, we actually train and facilitate and support all our product teams to be able to conduct their own research, so they're self-sufficient. And this is really useful for teams who might have less UX experience in there, they have that support from the dedicated user research team.

[00:12:49] And then on the other side we just ensure that business outcomes are always understood for everything that we do. We work very hard on ensuring the company mission, purpose, goals and strategy are all understood from top to bottom. It's a work in progress and something we're examining constantly. And then we have clear product outcomes and we're measuring them for success.

[00:13:11] At Reed, on the user's side, that's something where we've been able to drive a huge change in the time that we've been building up the team recently. Year on year we've seen a 1,300% increase in the amount of user research that we're doing. We're now testing every week, and that ensures that every product team is communicating with their users, testing with their users at least once a month, usually more than that. And more than that, we're constantly measuring the value of our research. Partly we're measuring that through measurable statistics like customer satisfaction and NPS, but in a more direct way we actually look at it from the other side as well.

[00:13:55] By constantly researching, by constantly testing our experiences before we build them, we're lessening the risk. There's one example that we had with our mobile app, where we'd been getting customer feedback and multiple customers had been suggesting the same feature they'd seen in a different industry. We've got a similar app to the reed.co.uk[?] one that you can get, and they're asking for a feature which made sense, and most people agreed, so this actually entered the roadmap and the backlog and we were going to go ahead and build it.

[00:14:32] In design we asked if we could just quickly test this experience and just find out if this was what our users actually needed. So just one designer, one researcher, one day of testing with five users. We actually managed to contact a couple of users we tested with, the people that actually suggested this feature to us. What we found when we actually prototyped and brought this feature out is that no one used it. It didn't actually solve the problem that they had. We'd been suggested a feature from customers which sounded like a great idea. It didn't actually solve the underlying problem, and we found that very explicitly once we tested it.

[00:15:08] If we'd gone ahead and built this, that would have been two weeks of wasted development. And when we looked at it, we saved almost 10 times the labor involved: one day of testing, so two weeks of development, the number of people involved in building that. We find these examples constantly in our weekly testing. So by constant user research and really understanding user value, you don't just add positive value, you're lessening your risks and potentially making huge savings in the path not followed.

[00:15:40] And then on the business side, we use OKRs. We plan them annually, tracking them weekly, monthly and quarterly, to ensure that everything we're doing can be traced back to the strategy. Any large piece of work, we understand why we're doing it, it's all feeding into our wider strategy.

Structure: the BT agile transformation

[00:16:01] So now I want to talk about structure, and how by structuring teams properly you can then ensure that they are properly enabled. But let's return again to the example I've been talking about from my time at BT. When we left the story last time, we'd built a large team producing a lot of work and producing great outcomes, but not really in a structured or measurable way.

[00:16:27] So what happened next? At the time BT actually brought the BT and EE and Plusnet design teams together into one huge new organization, across the whole digital realm: all the developers, all the designers, all the product teams. And at the time they took the exciting decision to move everyone into a new agile workflow. So rather than trying to match what was happening previously, everyone in the organization was now moving into new, fully agile, fully enabled product teams.

[00:17:11] Now this led to massive changes to the design organizations, for every part of the digital organization across BT Consumer. If you looked at the design organization before, it obviously grew to a huge extent by adding all the EE designers, and also made huge changes to people's roles. We moved them all from people who used to be quite specialized, UX designers, visual designers, they all became product designers. Now this was the right change, that was the right thing to do, but a hugely disruptive and stressful change for a lot of people.

[00:17:44] As part of it we did a big agile transformation. I was very, very involved in that. We did large training and workshop sessions to ensure that everyone had the skills to work in these new ways of working, produced exciting tools and all sorts of ways that we would be building everyone up into our new agile squads. Just some fun, interesting training sessions to try and build up those collaborative ways of working, making people understand how different the ways of working would be, especially for a lot of people who'd moved from non-agile ways of working.

[00:18:19] And then the end result was the new organization. A huge number of people were mapped into the new agile squads, using a modified version of the tribes and squads model from Spotify. This is obviously a huge, great, necessary change which led to immediate improvements across the board, in terms of efficiency, outputs, the outcomes that we were achieving. But the problem was, it wasn't really ambitious enough.

[00:18:49] We'd made this big disruptive change, but we hadn't really looked enough at all the changes that might have to be made, and it was mostly remapped using the existing structure and resource, mostly driven by the number of product owners, or POs, we might have, not really by what the products needed or what the product teams would need.

[00:19:06] And what you could really see there is that while each team tended to have a dedicated product manager, almost every team was sharing their other resources. Sharing product design, sharing developers, sharing content designers. What that meant is that very few people working in this new model were actually focused on one product and were actually able to keep their context in one place. They were constantly having to switch context, work across multiple products, and this didn't lead to the right outcomes. This didn't lead to product teams having focus, delivering what they should be, and, crucially, the people there being happy with what they did. And this is something that, I'm aware it's been a while since I've worked at BT, I know they've been working on this model ever since and redoing a lot of what they did. So it was a good start, but the structure wasn't quite right.

The product team comes first, and empowerment

[00:19:55] So one thing that is absolutely vital, and something that I've been pushing for everywhere that I've worked since, is that the product team should always be first. So product designers need to be embedded within product teams, all working from one backlog, working on continuous product discovery together. And that goes across the entire product team, not just for the product designers. We need to ensure that the teams are self-sufficient.

[00:20:23] And then that really comes under empowerment as well. Do the teams have all the resources they need? Do they have all the elements that they need to produce the outcomes that they're being asked to do? At Reed we're doing quite well with that, I think we have that across the board. The one probable exception, which is the case in I think every company that I've worked in, is that there's never quite enough analytics resource. But that's something that we're working on as well. That is something that's probably shared and could be better, but I think it's a function that dedicated analysts do such great work that there's never going to be enough of them.

[00:20:58] But crucially, we have to understand, are our teams empowered? Are they really owning and accountable for their outcomes? It's something that when we're planning and structuring teams, it's something that can be thought of but not necessarily followed through. And then this all ties into, is the leadership supportive, not prescriptive? Servant leadership is hugely important in modern workplaces, to get those outcomes. Because in my experience the best results always happen when product designers and their product teams truly own their work, they're truly accountable for their outcomes, and they are the ones devising the solutions to these problems. That's when you get the best outcomes.

[00:21:41] And this is something that you can look at from an outcomes and efficiency side as well. Again looking at our research, this is some other research with 2,000 job seekers and 250 hiring managers we did in February this year. What we actually found is that this is what people are expecting in the market as well. So, what kind of manager would you like to have? People want to have supporting and developing managers who are focused on people. And we found a staggering 73% of people said they've left their jobs due to poor management or bad leadership style in the past, which could have been avoided. So this is something that's an ongoing problem. If it's not something that is front of mind when you're building or structuring your teams, this can lead to problems with retention and churn.

Empowered teams can create silos

[00:22:26] Another point which I found really important, as you're structuring your team for an empowered model where teams do really have the authority and the accountability for their own solutions, is that this can implicitly create silos within your business. Wonderful things happen when teams are really focused on their product outcomes and have the focus and the empowerment to get there, but it means that they can lose sight of what other teams are doing. You can create silos, you can create redundancies, duplication, teams working across purposes, because they're not as motivated to communicate.

[00:23:04] So as leaders, as people who are planning these things, it's really important to create the avenues for communication. And particularly now in our largely remote workplace. This is probably not new information for anyone watching this, but it is so much harder now in a workplace where, where we're currently at at Reed, our entire product organization is working in a hybrid model. Most of us are in the office for a couple of days a week and remote the rest of the time. That means that in reality almost every meeting is a remote meeting, where there might be some people in the office, some people working remotely.

[00:23:41] That means you can't be relying on the communication, the random meetings, the random conversations which used to happen in the office when people were working side by side and encountering each other all the time. So those things have to be created now. So obviously dedicated cross-functional meetings in any area which seems to be important. But then in addition to that, one thing that we really work on is ensuring that we're having continuous workshops across all our product teams, really involving ourselves and other teams, showcasing our work constantly, and then discipline and guild meetings, as much as it makes sense in your organization. Without planning these things, silos will develop, and you'll lose those efficiencies from the empowered product model.

[00:24:30] So at Reed, the way we work is to try and get everything self-sufficient, with all members focused on one product. Largely successful, but something that always needs to be worked on, there's always exceptions. Really working hard on the collaboration across the business, with planning the capacity. And then another area which gives us great success is really focusing on our career progression framework as well. Across our entire organization we have these set up in engineering, in our product organization, in our design organization as well.

[00:25:02] This has been really successful for us, since we've been able to quickly develop people within our teams, because we can identify where the gaps are, where they need to be working on their personal development. They can develop quite fast. And then another great thing for our teams, which I think leads to increased satisfaction and reduced churn, is that people in our organization have a really clear understanding of what's required for the next level. They can see very clearly where they are and what the expectations are for the next level and what they need to do to get there. So it makes expectations very clear and it makes progression feel fair. And within Reed as an organization there's a staggering number of people who've been there for a very long time. That has advantages and disadvantages, but it shows a really strong culture and a place that people would like to work for and like to remain at.

Hiring: salary transparency

[00:25:52] So lastly I'm just going to talk about some tips largely from my research at Reed about hiring teams. We do a lot of thinking about this, we do a lot of research within all industries, just how people are hiring and what matters to people who are seeking jobs, and for those that are putting the job ads out.

[00:26:13] So, unsurprisingly, salary is most important to job seekers. It seems an obvious point, but one that isn't always recognized. You can see here, this is again from our survey in February of 2,000 job seekers and 250 hiring managers. What's most important to job seekers? Salary is the most important. After that, location, commute time, there are these things, but salary always remains the most important.

[00:26:38] But despite that, employers still aren't always transparent about salaries with their jobs. 44% of hiring managers don't always display their salaries, and there's a number of reasons for that. You can see here the reasons that people don't choose to show salaries. It's not for one reason, they have multiple reasons why they do that, and they're all understandable in isolation. What's really interesting is that these attitudes are out of sync with what job seekers are looking for now. So 62% of hiring managers think a lack of salary has no impact on applications, whereas 78% of candidates see this as a really negative attribute of a job ad or a recruitment process.

[00:27:22] So it's something that those hiring, those advertising, and even in the way that they structure their communications in the business, something that people have to realize is that it's an outdated way of thinking. And it's not just a perception thing either. These numbers are taken from reed.co.uk in 2021 and 2022. What we've actually found is that job ads that display a salary get 37% more applications than those that don't. So if you're advertising roles online, if you're advertising for your role, showing a salary will have a huge impact on the number of applications and potentially the quality of candidates that you'll eventually hire.

[00:28:08] But it's more interesting beyond just the immediate benefits of salary transparency. It was an area that we've thought about a lot. This actually enables greater diversity, which is a key thing for us and for many companies today. Because when we don't display salary, that can have an adverse effect on a diverse workforce, as you can see from these numbers here. And crucially what we found is, when salaries aren't displayed, it puts the onus on negotiation, bringing the subject up, because people have to discuss it and get to an area they'd like to. This has an adverse effect on women over men, and then this can contribute to a gender pay gap.

[00:28:56] Which is another area which is something that all companies should be thinking about. Because if there is a gender pay gap within your business, or it's something that any of your practices are contributing to, most people aren't looking at this, but a significant number are, and once this becomes apparent, once people become aware of a gender pay gap within a business, that has an almost uniform effect on their willingness to apply for a job there. So it's something that companies need to be aware of, and they need to be conscious that even their recruitment practices could be contributing to this.

Flexibility, perks and the four-day week

[00:29:31] So again, just another tip from Reed. Pay is really important, but flexibility and perks are still very important as well. Pay is always going to be the biggest driver when people are looking for jobs, whether they will be willing to apply for it. But what's interesting is that flexible hours, other perks and benefits are very important. This is from our research in February this year. What we found, even compared with similar research done six months before that, we found a big difference in how important people found flexible hours. That actually went down, so flexible hours were much more important six months before that.

[00:30:04] Our hypothesis is that's not because it's less important to people, but it's actually now becoming more standard. We believe that with so many more companies now, flexibility is expected. People expect to be able to work remotely, people expect to have a hybrid or fully remote setup, so it's now becoming a standard feature rather than a nice perk. And so, companies and employers, obviously we work in a hybrid environment, there are some employers still pushing to have people in five days a week. As a leader of teams I can see some advantages in that, but I think the reality is that most people, when they're looking for a job now, are expecting to be able to work flexibly, and businesses hiring and building teams need to be aware of this.

[00:30:53] Related to that, this is almost more of a fun suggestion at the end: consider introducing a four-day working week. We found, when we asked a range of job seekers and employers[?] about this, 89% of job seekers are in favor of this. What's interesting is that there's been a big study in the UK testing the four-day week across a variety of industries, across the whole nation. That hasn't completed yet, but as they've checked in with that study and that trial, what they've actually found is similar to the satisfaction here. 86% of the companies who are conducting the trial are planning to continue it afterwards. So far the results have been so good they're going to move permanently to a four-day working week. It's something that is obviously a business-wide decision, there's a lot of things to think about, but it's certainly something that we've learned from our research could be a very powerful recruitment tool.

The qualities we hire for

[00:31:48] And so lastly I just want to talk about how we hire people at Reed, what we look at, the qualities and the behaviors that we're looking for. The biggest thing is that we look for self-starters. Obviously our best endeavor is for everything always to be clear, and for the work to be clear and easy, but when it's not, we want people that will push through barriers, that won't accept things not being right, that have an internal drive to have all the information they need and to drive for the best outcomes.

[00:32:19] And as part of that we look for, if given the choice, it's not always a choice, but ambition and passion is always more important to us than extensive experience. So if we can see that someone has a real passion for what they do, a real drive, and that can be demonstrated from their previous experience, or even from the qualities that we can get from the recruitment process, that's a big driver, and that's something that is more important than someone who has a lot of experience in a role. Because experience can be taught. We can build up experience, we can close the gaps in what people know and potentially the way they work. But passion for a role, passion for a job, ambition to get better, that's something that can't really be taught, and that's the quality we always look for.

[00:33:04] Then this is more on the design side, but I think it's all across the whole product organization: empathy, curiosity, and a really demonstrated ability and desire to collaborate are hugely important. If you can find these qualities out, and all those things are in there, then you'll have a really strong, high performing team. And as mentioned before, diversity is absolutely key for both teams and the wider business. It's been very clear in design organizations for a while, I've had other design leaders speak about this, that diverse workforces deliver better outcomes, because you are getting a wider range of thought, a wider range of ways of doing things. So that's something that we take a conscious effort to be promoting, diversity, to be trying to build diverse teams both within our product teams and across the wider organization. We think it's very important.

[00:33:56] So thank you, thanks very much, I hope you've enjoyed the presentation. We have a wide range of vacancies at reed.co.uk, for internal ones as well, so if any of these jobs or any other ones take your fancy, please do visit our website. Thanks very much.