Empowering and Growing Teams as you Scale

Seiya Ohta, Yolanda Martin Olivas, Pamela Mead, Matti Klasson at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/M13o4iYY1qY

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.

Recruiting and onboarding remotely

[00:00:00] Matti: Today we're going to discuss a really interesting topic: empowering and growing teams as you scale, especially in these times when many of us are still working remotely or in a hybrid model. How do you do that in a good way? Today with me I have brilliant minds who are going to give some of their insights into how they have tackled different challenges during this time, and how to grow and empower your teams in a sustainable way. We will kick it off right away. Pamela, you are the VP of design at SumUp. Can you tell us a little bit about how you're working to build your teams and scale your organization, especially now when you are both in a remote setting and also in the office?

[00:00:52] Pamela: Great, Matti, thank you very much for the question. Great to be here. Scaling teams at this time has been quite challenging, as you can probably imagine. We've been doing a lot of our recruiting remotely, of course. Frequently we haven't even seen people until a recent offsite, where we've been able to bring some people back into the office, get together and really bond. There have been a lot of challenges, especially since we've been doubling in size. I very much believe that in order to grow a community and a culture, you need to have a bit of that time together, a bit more organically, to be able to transmit it. So we've been spending a lot of time looking at how we actually do this virtually.

[00:01:33] There are a couple of topics related to this. One is the recruiting and the onboarding: how do we really bring people on board and get them to understand how SumUp works and what our practices are? We've been doing a buddy system, so we can have some people matched up, especially to get to know the organization, because we are quite complex. We're also spending quite a bit of time on onboarding. We've put an extensive presentation together that we'll actually share even beyond design, so people can really understand the history, what's important, the complexity of the products, what the design system is, what our meetings are, and who to reach out to.

[00:02:10] Now that we have a little more flexibility in coming back, we are encouraging people to come and spend some time in the office, so we can get a little bit more of that organic social dimension reintroduced, if you will. I can really see that it introduces a lot of the richness that we've been really missing. Working remotely and bringing people on board remotely, we have to pay a lot more attention to the individual, which I think is one of the things that's really important for us: to understand, are they struggling? Do they have some needs? Do they know who to reach out to? And we keep bringing people back into the fold. We're trying a lot of different things. Some work better than others, and we just have to continue to adapt, especially since we're a very distributed company and not everybody has a chance to come back to the office.

Creating emotional connection

[00:02:59] Matti: Thank you, Pamela. And Yolanda, you're working as the director of platform ecosystems design at Kaluza [?], and you mentioned earlier to me that you have people who really don't want to come back to the office. Can you explain a little bit how you're working to create this emotional connection between team members? From my point of view, it's really important to have that personal connection when you're building and growing teams.

[00:03:30] Yolanda: Hi. Yes, we are trying really hard in the last few weeks to start getting people more and more used to physical connections. But for the past months we have created team events online, just to get people to connect. I have a team that started about 16 months ago with six people. We are almost 36 now, and they barely know each other. So it's been a really challenging time to start the team and hire people. Creating all of these virtual events, workshops, lectures, master classes, and buddying each other in smaller groups or pods around small pieces of work or interests, is really helping the team to bond and join each other.

[00:04:28] But over the last few weeks, all of our work has been put into trying to get them back into workshopping together. Nothing beats the smell of a good Sharpie and a new packet of Post-its. So it's trying to lure everybody with interesting problems to solve or interesting workshops, starting to visit all the offices we have in different parts of the UK, and bringing them together, just to get used to it. I think we have all lost the habit of being with each other, so that is a bit difficult to bring back if you don't have a very good reason for it. Giving them good reasons for it is the important part.

Aligning around company objectives

[00:05:17] Matti: Yeah, I agree with that. And Seiya, you're working at Trustly as VP of UX, and I know that you're working a lot on trying to both align people around the company objectives and also give them some space to be empowered. Can you explain a little bit how you're working with that?

[00:05:45] Seiya: Hold on, I was muted. First, thank you for having me here. I'm thrilled to be here with you all. Trustly: probably not many people know it; probably none of you have used Trustly before. We are a growing company. We started as a small startup, and we are growing rapidly. With that, we're bringing in a lot of people, not only in the UX team but in every part of the company. Going from a growth-oriented startup to a more mature growth company, there's a need to establish a common goal and align activities with business objectives.

[00:06:26] As a startup, you want to do everything that can serve the company, and whenever someone asks you to do something to make things better, you do it. So you get into this can-do mindset and attitude; you want to do everything to serve the company and the end users. As we grow, it's more difficult to say no than to say yes. There's a tendency to say yes to everything. So to help team members really delineate what's important, what's meaningful, what's impactful, versus things that you could do but maybe shouldn't, the company deployed OKRs.

[00:07:11] This helps us focus on key results instead of key activities. It's not about running around looking for things to do, or just having requests coming through. Aligning on key results, and aligning through the organization, up and down, from the business objectives to day-to-day activities, really helps people understand where they are contributing, and gives clarity and transparency around where they fit in the company. It provides a clarity that's quite helpful for rapidly growing organizations, which tend to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Balancing autonomy and alignment

[00:08:01] Matti: Thank you. And Pamela, Yolanda, how do you work with this balance between autonomy and alignment in your organizations?

[00:08:16] Yolanda: We also use OKRs as a way of getting everybody to focus on the same problems. After the company OKRs for the half or for the quarter have been decided, it's up to the teams to come up with the initiatives that they are going to be working on to achieve those objectives. We leave quite a lot of autonomy to the teams to decide what these activities are going to be and how many resources they're going to use to tackle them. Of course, there is a lot of juggling in between. We are right now in that fantastic first week of the quarter, where a lot of this juggling is happening, and you just need to lay out the teams and start moving the resources around to whatever activities seem to be the most valuable. But in general there is quite a high level of autonomy for the teams once OKRs get set.

[00:09:27] Pamela: We also use OKRs, but we actually have a bit of an interesting history. When we formed tribes several years ago, just before I started, the company really emphasized, almost to an extreme, the autonomy of tribes, these larger teams, to the point where everybody was really focused on their part of the ecosystem, their part of the experience, and there was very little alignment across the organization. Historically that's actually been okay, but we are starting to develop products that need to be much more integrated into a cohesive experience. As I always say, the interface doesn't lie. The interface starts to show where the seams are unless we have a level of alignment.

[00:10:17] So I've been very much focused on articulating alignment across the company, across these teams, especially at the design and UX layer, because if we can at least create a level of cohesiveness and alignment in that interface, we have a bit of a chance to really create something that's cohesive. To that point, we have a design system that we're really working on, and we've just articulated a shared vision of where we want to go as an end-to-end experience. The reality, though, is it's not only at the design or interface level. It really depends a lot on the technology, on the back ends and the shared data sets. So we've been moving towards a more integrated narrative as a company, so we can start to connect the dots.

[00:11:02] It's a journey. I'd say we're getting a lot better and a lot stronger, but it's a really interesting tension between the empowerment and velocity that we're really looking for, and figuring out how you still do this kind of alignment with velocity, so that at the end of the day the journey experience is really delivered on. It's a challenging state to be in, but we're making progress.

[00:11:31] Yolanda: I'm sorry, I agree with Pamela. It's impossible to have this alignment without all of those tools and frameworks: the design systems, UI tooling, service mapping. We have been growing our team a lot with those kinds of cross-section practices, where we have our content design practice and service design practice, and the visual design tools are like the glue for everything. We use them as a conduit to make sure that we keep that consistency. Without it, the velocity wouldn't be there, or we would just be designing completely different experiences. Beyond that there is autonomy, but without it, it wouldn't be possible. It would just be a complete disaster.

Stable teams versus flexible resourcing

[00:12:27] Matti: Thank you. Going back a little bit to you, Yolanda, you talked about how, when you set OKRs, it's up to the teams to rally around them and form themselves around those different objectives. I also hear a lot that you should have stable teams, that teams should be autonomous and you shouldn't split them up too often, so they can be high-functioning teams that can take on whatever problem they're facing. This is also more of an open question to all of you: do you have any mechanisms for when and how you split up your teams, or add people to the teams, to make sure they have what they need to deliver on the objectives or the problem they're going to solve?

[00:13:22] Yolanda: I think it's a fantastic theory when it comes to mature companies, to have really steady teams that work on a problem for a long time, bond together, and are relatively well-known structures. But in my case, I've been working in several relatively young companies, and that is an impossibility. Your products change, your objectives change, and teams can never get steady enough to say, oh, we're never going to move these structures, or combine them together or split them, or even move resources from one thing to another. Because you never have enough of certain things, service designers for example, or writers, and you have to share them between several teams. So you have a centralized organization and deploy them to the teams that need them at that particular moment.

[00:14:20] In an ideal utopian scenario, that's obviously a fantastic way to work. But at least I haven't worked in one yet. Although I have worked in big organizations, they were all at a level of digital transition, or platformization, that was not yet mature enough to say: these are the teams, and this is how the teams are going to be, and they have a bit of everything and can work completely on their own as self-standing units. So far there is a lot of change, and I think teaching or coaching resilience within the teams, and making them understand that these changes are likely to happen, is part of keeping teams happy and focused, because it's impossible to give that standardization, at least in my experience.

[00:15:22] Pamela: Maybe to add to that a little bit: this is in a lot of ways the way I've grown the design community at SumUp, and it's a bit of my fundamental philosophy. In order to scale, we'll never have enough designers. It would be impossible for us to scale UX writers immediately into every single team; we would be exploding as an organization. So I think it's a balance of having enough resources to be dedicated, and then having some resources also available to provide some level of flexibility in the organization. Again, never having enough, there's always somebody who's a bit stretched. But I do think that's the only way you can really grow an organization. Otherwise you create a tremendous amount of overhead and cost that doesn't necessarily reflect the kind of impact we can be driving. And I also don't believe that allows us to build community, which we talked about a bit earlier, and that's super important for us to be efficient, empowered, aligned and also impactful.

[00:16:23] Seiya: In my experience, a flow-to-work kind of organization, where you have a resource pool where capabilities are developed and managed, and then you assign these pooled resources to initiatives based on priorities, worked better, with individuals having autonomy in driving some initiatives. OKRs and processes and all that are means to an end. We often forget that these tools are deployed for some purpose. OKRs drive transparency and drive alignment across organizations. But if you focus too much on key results and just make it a checkbox activity, you start to lose the transparency and the alignment you want to have. So use tools and processes as ways to drive the purpose.

[00:17:26] With that, we're having a clear shared vision that's not coming top-down, but that involves team members in creating it, and also aligning their passions with what we do in focus areas. That tends to help deal with dynamic times. Change is coming all the time. Objectives change, priorities change, and some initiatives get killed. Things that they spent days and nights working on may get cancelled at any given moment. It's difficult for team members to face that change all the time unless there's a bigger picture they can really rally around. I'm not sure if I'm answering the question directly, but the growing pain really is all about helping teams cope with changes with a positive mindset. That's why we put a lot of focus on that.

Supporting individual development remotely

[00:18:24] Matti: Thank you, Seiya. On that note, you talked about the passion of people, and that you need to know what people are passionate about. Also an open question: how do you work with individual development, especially in this setup where we are remote and you don't really see how people are doing on a daily basis? How can you support your teams, or individuals in those teams?

[00:18:55] Seiya: When we recruit, we recruit for potential, and also mindset, like a learning mindset, a growth mindset. And then we really understand where they want to be, let's say five years or 10 years from now, not necessarily in the industry, but in their career, their bigger picture and all that. As we grow together at work, I really emphasize understanding individual needs, their needs to grow in certain areas. If somebody wants to be a cook five years down the road, well, how can we align some of the work we do in fintech to help him or her develop in areas where the job doesn't feel like nine-to-five constraints on achieving their goals, but where the nine-to-five feels like it's leading somewhere they want to be?

[00:19:49] So it's understanding individuals, and really understanding what's driving them individually, what triggers them waking up in the morning and feeling good about coming to work: the motivation, what floats their boat, if you will, at an individual level. And when they have to do some work that doesn't quite align with their visions and passions, explain why it's needed and how it can help others and teams, so that can help the individuals too. The other one is team orientation. If you have team members who feel that they're not in it for themselves, but for the bigger picture, be it the customers and consumers we serve or the teams they support, that team mindset and orientation also helps align their passion with the things that are important for the company, consumers, and what have you.

[00:20:55] Pamela: Maybe just to add: we've been spending a lot of time with people one-on-one, unfortunately everything being reduced to Zoom meetings, because I don't have the ability to observe people or catch people in the moment, or notice when they're tired or maybe have a need, or they just come to me. So we're spending quite a bit of time in this kind of one-on-one relationship with them, to make sure we understand what their needs are, not only where their projects are but where they themselves are struggling. We spend time on the more personal side of conversations, not only focusing on work.

[00:21:32] We've also recently rolled out a new career development framework, and I think it's quite a robust one, a bit different from what I've had in the past. I'm using it to do much more in-depth feedback cycles. We've written lots of different criteria in terms of what we expect at the different parts of the career development. And I'm finding, with every feedback conversation I'm doing now, I'm spending up to an hour and a half with the individuals, and it's really helping us drive a level of detail and care in the conversation that is richer than what I've had in the past. I find that's also a really valuable and helpful way to spend time, especially right now, because moments are dynamic and we don't have that kind of informal ability to connect. It's something that's currently working really quite well for us. It is intensive, so it's not necessarily something that scales forever, but especially since we're still not out of COVID completely, it's a really important investment.

Slack, Miro and the water cooler

[00:22:42] Seiya: Pamela, do you use Slack or real-time communication? Because what I found out was that Slack is almost like walking around the office casually talking to people, a kind of tool where you don't want to wait a few hours or a few days to respond, like with emails.

[00:22:58] Pamela: Slack is actually more dominant for us than email. I've come to the point where I barely even check email, or try to at least look at anything on fire once a day. But it's still not quite the same thing. Yes, I have informal conversations with some very specific people, but I've also had people tell me that they are afraid of reaching out because they know I'm busy and my calendar is ridiculous. So I've recently set up office hours, so people don't hesitate to say, hey, I need to talk to you. And I've encouraged people to always send me a Slack message, and if somebody says, hey, I need to talk to you, I'll immediately free up my calendar to do so.

[00:23:37] But it's still not the same thing, because I'm working in a much more contained environment. Yes, I pay attention to the design community, we send out kudos, etc., but there are also other people not in my immediate community who are really quite important. As a leader in the company, I need to be available, and I want to be available to them as well. And that's a bit more the water cooler, coffee pot conversation than it is necessarily a Slack message, unless I think about them at that moment in time. So it's not the same thing for me.

[00:24:13] Yolanda: We do the same. We use Slack a lot, probably the most of the three of you. I literally forget to check my emails. Almost nothing really important comes to my email anymore. We use Slack to exchange documents, to track projects, to do everything, and we have created communities for anything, from people who like chocolate to people who have pets, to try to recreate in Slack some of those water cooler conversations that you would normally have with your peers and your group: I have a new puppy, or I just picked up a new hobby, or who has some extra yarn, because I want to do this new art project, or whatever it is.

[00:25:02] It's a great tool for that, and also for education. What we were saying about career paths and growth and education: encouraging bonding between people and creating pairs to learn new skills. When we have somebody who comes from a very strict UX background, we try to pair them with a content designer or a service designer or any other practice, to start creating the type of education you would get if you sat down next to somebody in the office who had a different practice to yours, and you curiously asked, what are those service maps about, or what are you designing over there, or what tool are you using to do wireframes, or whatever it is.

[00:25:52] We're still far away from it being the same as being in the office, but we try. So far Slack and Miro have been the best tools we have found to create those kinds of common spaces and collaboration and learning environments. We have done some pretty fun and pretty cool stuff with Miro, where we create an island or a city, and we have areas where we can share anything from pictures of our working spaces or our slippers to other kinds of important information, and people can visit these different bits of Miro digitally and try to have a conversation. Some are working better than others, I guess.

Information overload

[00:26:46] Matti: Thank you. One question on this topic. This is something that we have a challenge with at Viaplay: we have a bit of an information overflow, or overload, in communication, because we have lots of different tools. We're using Teams, we're using Slack, we're using emails. Sometimes it's really hard, especially when you're onboarding new people, to know where to go to find certain information. The information is there, but it's sometimes all over the place. Do you have any strategy for that, for how you store certain information or how you're using those kinds of tools?

[00:27:41] Yolanda: I'm literally coming out of two projects in this case, for internal and external documentation. As I said, Kaluza [?] is a really young company, so our documentation and information has been growing organically for the last 18 months, and you feel like Indiana Jones trying to find a piece of information, digging around folders and files and pieces of Confluence. We have Confluence, but it was probably never information-architected, so people were just dropping in areas and creating pages, and they're all over the place. This morning I was reviewing a new information architecture for our Confluence, to get all that information into meaningful sections with meaningful names and so on, and organize it a little bit. Confluence is a great tool, but obviously if you don't give it love and attention and a structure, it ends up like everything else, just really unorganized.

[00:28:46] Creating a system of tags and some sort of taxonomy also helps. A common language, because people might not use the same words to categorize the same thing, so having a common glossary or a taxonomy helps a lot. We have done the same with our external sites. That's why I say it's two projects: we are doing it for our internal information and also for our external information, because we've been creating pages for external use. As with what we were talking about with autonomy versus alignment, there comes a moment when some type of fencing, some guidelines, needs to be put in to help people with efficiencies and toil. Otherwise it ends up being a lot of chaos.

[00:29:35] Seiya: We are almost in the same boat. Slack actually had a negative impact here with information overflow, and at times we observed some initiatives getting done outside of the system, on a Slack channel where only some people are involved. We have Confluence too, and tickets kept flowing in without a clear process or governance around them, with most of the tickets saying "urgent, due yesterday" kinds of things. We got to the point where we just couldn't deal with it all, not just the information overflow but tasks flowing in from everywhere. So we're trying to put a process in place, an improved process, a better way of working.

[00:30:26] That's a behavior change, so you have to change behavior. To do that, you can't just deploy a new system or a new process, publish it and send an email telling people to look at it. People don't follow that. They just go with what they're used to, what's easiest. So when we deploy changes, when we want to consciously change behaviors, even OKRs, we do a few pilot projects and then show the success. And whenever we deploy, it's actually doing things in new ways, with new processes, and actually using new tools, albeit Confluence pages, so that it's not just something going out there adding to the information that you're already flooded with. So practicing new ways, practicing using new tools, and piloting to demonstrate success, that the team can do it and teams are already doing it: I think that's a good way of shaping a path forward to change how we work, and also to put some clarity around how things should be communicated and where to get information.

[00:31:55] Pamela: Maybe just a couple more things to add. I think we all struggle with Confluence at some point or another. As I mentioned a bit earlier, when we bring new people on board, we have a once-a-month, in-depth onboarding session where we walk people through really important information to know, and also channels and communications and emails and everything else. Then the additional, more personalized onboarding that we do is that over time we have created a bit of a cheat sheet for people, where we create the links to the various Confluence pages that are impossible to find, and really give them the pointers to who to reach out to for what, and also who to meet in the organization to build some of the relationships that are going to become really important.

[00:32:49] We keep adapting that, but I think it's a way to fast-track people a little bit in the first couple of weeks, when they're trying to adapt to a new organization and want to understand how to do things. That's one of the ways we've found really quite useful. SumUp as a company actually has a several-day onboarding that everybody goes through, and we're looking at enhancing that a little bit. So it's multiple facets to try to get people oriented and situated: what's the pattern of communications, and what are the places and practices that people should be aware of.

[00:33:26] Matti: I really like that, Pamela, and that's something we also have at Nordic Entertainment Group, Viaplay. It's not a full week; it's two days of introduction where you meet lots of different people, with presentations from the C-level and such, so you have a better understanding of how things work in the company and how you can navigate it. But I really like it too if you have, as you said, a week-long boot camp, so you really go in depth into the different things in the company.

Closing thoughts: know when to pause

[00:33:56] Matti: We just have a few minutes left, and that was a really nice conversation with you. Do you have any final words for the audience if they're considering growing and scaling, and how they can do that in a sustainable way, especially now that we will be in this hybrid working model, both remote and in the office? Pamela, let's start with you.

[00:34:27] Pamela: Closing words: I think it's knowing when to slow down scaling and pause. We grew quite a bit up to the spring, and then we needed to pause a little bit to see: do we have all the practices in place? Get that settled, focus on the teams, focus on the vision, focus on our alignment, before we start scaling again. So I think it's being really empathetic to that, and then paying attention to the individuals, and doing all of that, of course, in light of the organization and the organizational needs and the organizational language. I think that's really, really critical.

[00:35:02] Matti: Yes, thank you so much. And Yolanda?

[00:35:06] Yolanda: Same as Pamela: understanding when you need to stop. There is a kind of onboarding tiredness, especially when you go from a very small team to a very big team. There are only a few people who can take on onboarding new members, and it gets exhausting at some point, interviewing and onboarding and adding new people to the team. So pause and take a break before you start again. Make sure that in that period you review your onboarding materials, your interviewing procedures and so on, to make sure you're doing it right. Do a bit of a retro, fix everything and continue.

[00:35:50] When it comes to it, what you want is for everybody who joins the team to have a great experience. If you are rushed and trying to get everybody in at the same time, and you haven't put time and effort into the processes and the frameworks to do so, it ends up being a really bad experience for everyone. What we all want is for the effort we put into hiring amazingly talented people to end up being a great experience for everyone, for the team you already have and the people who are joining it. There is nothing worse than starting at a new company and spending, I don't know, three weeks trying to find where your computer is or where the folders are, or having no meetings with people to talk to you, or not having a very structured onboarding. So put your house in order before you grow. That would be my closing words.

[00:36:48] Matti: And Seiya?

[00:36:50] Seiya: I'd like to reflect both Pamela's and Yolanda's point that it's all about people, and we need to put more effort, personal effort, into getting to know people. But also slowing down: that's a time to reflect and to hear back from the team. We tend to put in effort without getting feedback, so the effort may be misplaced. So really slowing down, reflecting, and involving new employees and team members to get to a good place. Reflecting, I think, is very important, especially at this point.

[00:37:24] Matti: Thank you for those final words. To recap: it's about starting by stopping, basically. And as we do in product development, reflection is super important to have when we develop our organization as well. Pamela, Yolanda, Seiya, thank you so much for participating in this panel. It was a pleasure. Thank you.