Design Team Modeling

Vildana Lojo Babic at UXDX Community: Simplifying Design Processes for Team Efficiency. Video: https://youtu.be/f_PTpxGbK9o

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: balancing individuals, team and strategy

[00:00:00] Hello everybody, greetings from rainy Amsterdam. My name is Vildana and today I want to share some of the thoughts and a framework about developing and executing organizational strategy, with a specific focus on individuals but also the team skills, and how to identify different capabilities and needs to support them in the best way.

[00:00:25] Before we deep dive into the topic, let me introduce myself. I'm an architect who fell in love with product design and service design for the last 10 years, and currently I'm a design manager at Booking.com, while I previously led and managed design teams in various startups and a product design agency. I'm very passionate about design community, and that is why even today's talk. At the time I built the largest design community in my hometown of Sarajevo over two years, through the Sarajevo Designs project.

[00:01:01] What I wanted to share with you is a reflection in terms of generally thinking around, if you are managing a design team, or any team to be specific, how essentially sometimes on a day-to-day basis it can become a struggle to balance support for the individuals but also support for the team, while supporting the strategy on the other hand.

[00:01:22] What I also observed for craft leaders and lead designers: sometimes you have successfully pitched the project and then you are in the phase where you need to deliver and make that project reality, and you need to deliver it with people. It comes down to understanding what is best to make sure that the team and that project is successfully delivered.

[00:01:47] So what worked for me, and this is something that I want to share with you, is setting up a continuous practice of design team modeling that actually focuses on the career framework as a tool, to assess both individual and team capabilities, that can ensure that you have better strategic and operational impact. Besides that, if you are a manager, or thinking about management, it can also ensure that you have full ownership of your areas of control and of your area's operational strategy, that you are aligned much better with the overall goal of the company and operational initiatives. But most importantly I would say it helps you to set up a practice to have a sustainable way to support individuals and the team and the company.

[00:02:35] And for leaders, the benefits of practicing it can result in a strategic and much more proactive approach when it comes down to people: what kind of capabilities you need for a project's success, and even having a clear articulation of needs, either from the people's side or the ways of working and expectations.

Design team modeling as continuous storytelling

[00:02:57] So today we'll cover the key principles of continuous design team modeling as continuous storytelling. I'll guide you through the key elements and the process itself, and we will deep dive essentially into the assessment phase, of how to identify individuals but more specifically team and collective needs, and to articulate them into opportunities that you can work on later.

[00:03:23] So continuous design team modeling essentially is you setting up a vision or a story and identifying what the story is going to be, while delivering and orchestrating it in a way that is very much rooted in reality, in the needs of the company, in the current state of your craft maturity, etc.

[00:03:49] And when you think about it as a story, it has three key principles. Even though it's a continuous effort, it does have a specific time frame and a challenge, which is essentially the context of all of your modeling exercises. Meaning that you understand and think about it in a time constrained way, for the next three months, six months, one year, two years, anything that is related to strategy, and so it can give you a specific when, where and why for either a specific project or a vision that you want to deliver successfully.

[00:04:23] One of the key highlights of the concept is thinking around the team as a hero, or like a team persona, which we will discover how to articulate and identify later on. That will essentially help you understand what is the current snapshot of individual skills and necessary needs that are adequate for a specific challenge. And as all the story goes, every hero has its superpowers and kryptonites or challenges, and by identifying and assessing these challenges you actually frame the point of view, or the what, in your team story for that specific challenge and time.

[00:05:02] So the process of design team modeling is pretty straightforward. It starts with understanding and also aligning with what the expectations are from the team and individuals, and then goes into the reality check and identifying and assessing where your entire team is, while also then, as a next step, reflecting and articulating on what are the operational opportunities that you can tap into, and then develop some actions or support team members also to execute the actions.

[00:05:32] The framework itself has key elements and they are divided in essentially two key groups. The first group is generally understanding and aligning on the things that either influence your work or you can influence through your work, and that's the context, or the why you are essentially modeling a team. That's understanding what is the current state of the company, where does it sit in the industry, what is the company strategy, even craft strategy, department strategy, or the setup or craft maturity.

[00:06:04] But on the other hand, and something that we will focus on later, is the operational group, and this is essentially answering who and how the work is being delivered and done. It can start from understanding who are your individuals, what are their skills, responsibilities and mission, but also who is your team or that team persona, with their skills, responsibilities and mission. And last but not the least, also what are their ways of working, on the individual level, within the team, but also with the outside of the teams. This is something that you can actually control if you're managing a team or if you're leading a project. So using this framework can actually help you understand and assess and have some kind of a checklist that you can use to set yourself and the project and the team up for success.

Step one: setting the structure with a career framework

[00:06:54] So if you're a manager, I do want us to focus and share some of my insights on assessing the individuals and the team. For a manager, the assessment process and identifying where we are as a team is pretty straightforward. It consists of three steps. The first step is setting the structure, and the best way to set the structure is to reflect and rely on any career framework if you have it internally. If you don't have it internally, we will deep dive a little bit more into what the career framework is, and maybe this could be a good kickstart for you to start pitching to assemble the career framework within your organization. Or you can also reference some external and open source career frameworks that are there on the internet.

[00:07:39] After that there is a next step of assessing individuals, deep diving into specific skills and their current state against those skills, and then zooming out and assessing the team and detecting the patterns.

[00:07:51] So the first and the foundational step is setting the structure, and essentially, to me, the most relevant and efficient way is to reference the career framework as a tool that helps not only you as a manager and leader but also individuals to identify and align on what are the craft skills, expectations and progression between specific individuals but also as a team and organization, and outside, in the industry, what are the best practices and the expectations.

[00:08:19] In a nutshell, there are a bunch of very useful resources on different approaches to a career framework, especially for design, and even some articles. But in a nutshell, all career frameworks consist of three key dimensions. The first dimension is essentially hard skills, and reflecting on the proficiencies and hard skills articulates expectations for individuals and different roles in terms of what will be the output and what is going to be considered quality.

[00:08:50] The other dimension of every career framework is soft skills and proficiencies around those skills. As you know, all work, but especially the type of work that all of us do, is something that is not done in isolation. It's not done in a bubble, and essentially it addresses expectations of how the company, it could embed also the company values, how something will be achieved with others and through others. When it comes to proficiencies, it also starts from general awareness for maybe more junior roles, but then becoming a master and enabling others for more senior roles.

[00:09:26] And the third dimension of every career framework is essentially progression, impact and responsibility and complexity. It paints the picture of the expectations, or outlines the expectations, of how a specific individual or role is expected to navigate challenges that are more or less defined, like a task is more defined versus some systemic problems, or how successful will they be in terms of executing and knowing things with less or more definition.

[00:09:57] In a nutshell, a career framework is really good in outlining and bringing clarity in terms of what the team and individuals, and how the responsibility, complexity and quality is seen. And it can go from understanding that a specific individual or even a team is more focused and expected to support and deliver the what, like more junior to core roles, and then scaling to being able to enable other teams and thinking about more complex problems and the whys.

[00:10:29] So the key structure that you can use, and that I also use for myself, is following through these three key dimensions of a career framework. It usually goes like setting the structure, listing out all the called out hard skills, in terms of design that could be prototyping, interaction design, and then another section of soft skills, it could be communication or decision making or stakeholder management.

Step two: assessing individuals

[00:10:56] Then you are actually ready to start deep diving into assessing the individuals. There are three essential components of the individual assessment that I do want to call out, and those are capturing your own observation. It goes without saying, this is something that you can capture in your day-to-day relationships and work with the individual person, but also it can be collected feedback that you gather from other stakeholders.

[00:11:28] The other essential component of this individual assessment is capturing the individual's reflection, which is their own reflection of the expectations of their role but also where they stand right now in terms of that. And ideally, design team modeling should be as much as you can a collaborative effort. So ideally you would have some moments like one-on-ones or development or improvement plans where you could calibrate on these observations and discuss them and capture them also there.

[00:11:59] Before we deep dive into assessing and rating specific skills for the individuals, it is important to clarify the definition and rating of all of these skills. So this assessment can be focused on specific career expectations, like critical needs for support, or the individual is delivering as expected. But it can also be in relation to a specific project or a team, like ready to stretch for a specific project or something like that.

[00:12:29] What I also want to call out is that this assessment tool, and generally the design team modeling tool, is something that is internal. It should not be formal and it should not be the only source of performance, 360, any kind of formal rituals that you have within your organization. It can inform it in a way that you capture the feedback and then you discuss it, but it should never be used as a sole source, it is not a source for official and formal performance cycles.

[00:13:00] And one thing also to call out is always to capture the context. So while assessing and rating specific skills for individuals, this is a fast way to generate the heat map, which we will talk about later, but try to always capture the anecdotes and feedback to it, because it will then give you the essence and understanding of how important that specific area is to address or not.

[00:13:27] So this is an abstracted example of assessing individuals. For example, you have a team member who is a John Smith, and then I would usually start with deep diving into assessing their expectations. For example, they are a core designer in terms of prototyping, communication, and then capturing the examples.

[00:13:46] There are a couple of tips when it comes to assessing individuals. The career frameworks can be very extensive, they can have a multitude of skills, so my advice would be to start with one skill at a time. Try to leverage your one-on-ones to discuss one skill per meeting. But also, if you have them in your company, try to leverage official performance cycles and 360s. If you have them, you should have at least a kickstart point with some of the strengths and maybe development points for your team members, and you can start building on top of that. And of course try to do it together on a continuous basis, just to calibrate and empower also your team members to proactively think about their own performance.

[00:14:36] And this is a depiction of how it could look if you have a full team, where you can also identify specific opportunities for specific skills, and you will start gathering and seeing the heat map for the entire team.

Step three: zooming out to the team persona and heat map

[00:14:48] And now we are in an interesting part, or let's say zoomed out part of the process, where it's time to identify what the team persona is that needs to be modeled. Assessing these collective skills will help you essentially move from individuals and a zoomed in perspective on performance and expectations and skills, towards more of this team hero idea of what are their strengths but also needs to develop.

[00:15:18] And as you zoom out, you will start to detect specific patterns, or as I call them, heat maps of specific areas that need to be focused on. There could be a situation where you could have, let's say, two core designers, and maybe one is performing as expected for example for a storytelling skill and the other one needs some support, but also something similar happens for senior designers. You can start, because again, this is not an official performance tool, this is more like a heat mapping and assessment of the team and needs tool, you can either call out a specific state for a specific craft, for example needs some support for all core designers, and in this case that's why capturing the context and examples is important.

[00:16:06] In this fictional case, maybe you have a team with three levels of different designers, but then core designers and senior designers, they are struggling sometimes with visual storytelling and their narrative is not clear to non-designer audiences, or sometimes they miss establishing a clear structure and focus too much on the visuals versus on the solutions. And with capturing the context and examples, now you have more essence to understand on what specific part of the core skills you need to address and communicate.

[00:16:42] When it comes to the team, there are a couple of tips for assessing it. While you're in the assessment process, you are, let's say, wearing a researcher's hat, and try to think about detecting the patterns, what is happening across all the skills, all the team. And also try to reflect on the urgency and relevancy of these specific needs and challenges that you have, so you can prioritize and maybe put your focus on something that is more long term or short term. Again, always try to capture the context, always try to deep dive into why something is rated at a specific level, and then try to reflect it and share it with the team. This is a good team building exercise but also a good collective reflection exercise that you can do with a team.

[00:17:32] If you are a craft leader on the other side, I did want to call out also the process of what happens for craft leaders. The process is the same, so you do need to start with the structure, usually a career framework if you have it. But then the assessment phase for a craft leader is more around what kind of skills specific individuals, that you either already work with or will come to your team, need to have. It starts with self-reflection and going through the career framework skills and the structure, and reflecting on expectations and what you personally needed, or what do you think is essential for project success.

[00:18:12] And as a step three, it is also important to calibrate these expectations not only with your craft managers but also with other stakeholders like product managers, engineers. This is a powerful tool that actually can help you calibrate expectations overall from design, lead by example, and even increase the maturity of your design organization.

Articulating the opportunities

[00:18:36] Before we wrap up, I did want to share a couple of thoughts around articulating the opportunities. We don't have too much time to deep dive into it, but what I usually do, I have a four-step structure to easily articulate opportunities when it comes to operational and capability needs.

[00:18:57] So if you have identified some need that needs to be worked on at a team level, I always try to outline what kind of higher level strategy this opportunity supports, and then I would deep dive into what specific skills. In this example that we shared, it's more like we want to focus on developing a new value proposition or new features, and we need storytelling skills to be impeccable or on a high level, because we will discuss with a lot of cross-craft stakeholders across different levels. So this is why this essential capability needs to be developed further.

[00:19:31] And ideally I would wrap it up with an explanation of how we are going to know that we are successful, how we are going to know that we grew. You can reference some quantitative measure if it makes sense, but you can also add something descriptive, like what the success is going to look like.

[00:19:50] There is one step in this articulation phase that we didn't cover, but if you have questions I would gladly answer them. Besides just specific skills that individuals and a team can have, an additional part of this framework, as we mentioned, is thinking around the ways of working. It also starts with the assessment of the ways of working. So maybe you have also identified that some specific written communication or decision making needs to be evolved along with the storytelling, and you can also call it out in this articulation phase.

How to start the practice, and takeaways

[00:20:25] And something that I want to share with you as a wrap up from this presentation, but not the last wrap up, is how to essentially start making this a practice and incorporating some of the concepts from the design team modeling framework in your day-to-day work. Essentially you can start small. Start with what is the most imminent need for your individuals and the teams, and definitely leverage your one-on-ones. Try to structure them maybe around either individual or collective reflection around specific skills and expectations and needs for the team and individuals.

[00:21:02] And as you start collecting and practicing it on a more regular cadence, you can start expanding, and you will see and start detecting the patterns and start understanding the broader strategy, not only from product and services design but also from the organizational side. And you will be able to reflect that through the community but also with your manager and cross-craft leaders.

[00:21:28] And as you become more comfortable with the process and have more data, the entire framework is assessed for all the team members, all the teams, you see the patterns, you will be able to articulate a bit longer term operational vision from your side. I think this is an even larger call out for managers, and for craft leaders this is also understanding what kind of skills you need in your team to support the projects that you have.

[00:21:56] And before we wrap up, I do want to share a couple of takeaways. If there's anything to think about from this call: think about design team modeling, or any team modeling, it could also be applicable for product and engineering teams, think about it as a continuous and storytelling practice. Think about how you can actually continuously create stories and challenges for your team and how you can help them grow and exceed.

[00:22:31] Also try to consider reviewing all the elements. We only had a deep dive into the skills, individuals and the team. Maybe try expanding and thinking around how you can continuously assess context like strategy, craft and maturity, but also operations, with a specific call out to ways of working. And try to do it together with the individuals, with the team, with your partners, cross-craft stakeholders. And always start to think about impact and significance and relevance for a specific project. There are so many prioritization frameworks, but it's a good litmus test to think about how significant or impactful is something to your project or current time frame and timeline. And that is all, thank you very much. If you have any questions I would love to answer them.

Q&A

[00:23:22] Host: That was really great, thank you so much. I have too many questions here to get through, but I'll start with the last one. How frequently should people have one-on-ones?

[00:23:34] Vildana: It really depends, so I can share my personal experience on that. It does not have to be weekly. Again, it depends on your context. So for example, if you are onboarding to a new team, onboarded to a new company, or if you are assembling a new team, or depending on the stage of where your team is, or you have a new team member, then having that weekly cadence is completely okay, because you want to give yourself some time to meet and understand each other. But bi-weekly or even sometimes monthly can work, again depending on the context and the priorities and how much support you need or your team members need. It's up to you. I change it from time to time, again depending on the context and what I'm doing and working on with a team and at which stage they are.

[00:24:26] Host: Great. And here's a nice follow through question: what is the ratio of management to individuals at Booking?

[00:24:36] Vildana: I'm not sure if I can share that due to confidentiality, but I can share the general thoughts on capacity as a manager. I think the healthy teams are okay from four to eight people. Again, this is my personal perspective, four to eight people is the optimal number of design members. Again it can depend on the context, and at a different stage maybe you are expanding very fast, so at some point you might have more than eight, or you are still hiring and assembling the new team so you can have, I don't know, two team members. It really depends. But based on my experience, not only from Booking but also in other companies, I think the optimal number, so you can focus enough on your team and give enough support for the team but also the strategy and partners, is something between four to eight people.

[00:25:33] Host: Fantastic. And what happens when there is a disconnect between management and the individuals on this?

[00:25:43] Vildana: That's why I mentioned the three key elements of individual assessment, is to sit down and discuss it. It can happen in different settings and for different reasons. This entire presentation came with an assumption that you have a work relationship and good communication with the individual, and regular one-on-ones where you can deep dive into these specific things. But again, this is more like an informal way to capture the needs for the individuals and the team from a craft and skill perspective.

[00:26:10] Vildana: Depending on the company or organization, there are formal 360 check-ins, performance reviews and other tools and methods where you should calibrate and test those discrepancies. But essentially, deploying the design team modeling is something that you can preventively do to align on the expectations, because since it's not the official part of the performance, you can discuss the expectations in a more, let's say, relaxed setup and try to align on the expectations and work.

[00:26:46] Vildana: But usually my principle is, it's better to work and prevent things than to wait for things to pile up and then you have a big huge discrepancy between the team members. So if you continuously talk about the expectations and let them, individuals and the team, have control and pick the topics, maybe this could be a good way to mitigate those potential discrepancies.

[00:27:16] Host: Yeah, that's really fantastic. Thank you so much. If you have any templates it would be great, that was another question. If you could share anything after this, we can send it out to people.

[00:27:26] Vildana: I might have something, if not I can send it later, and then make it into something that is more digestible for the community.

[00:27:37] Host: Yeah. And another piece, someone wanted a blog post on this exact topic. They thought your slides are fantastic. So thank you so much, Vildana, that was just really, really great and really insightful. A lot to unpack, I'll definitely be rewatching again. So thank you very, very much for that.