UX As The Ultimate Unifier

Seiya Ohta at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgGVD5XIfOY

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.

Growth means change

[00:00:00] Hello, my name is Seiya Ohta. I am VP User Experience at Trustly Group. Today I would like to share with you my personal journey of starting, building and growing teams, and how I faced various challenges that came along the way.

[00:00:20] Over the past 30 years I have worked for many companies, large and small, in various stages of growth, living in eight countries, working with team members in numerous locations distributed around the globe. As a design professional, I consider building and growing teams as design challenges, and I applied many of the design tools I picked up over the years. There's no formula to ensure success, but there are many sure ways to fail.

[00:00:56] One thing that became very clear to me at one point in my journey is that any growth requires changes: changes in processes, mindsets, cultures and personnel. So growth really means change management. I also realized that starting and growing a team is like starting and growing a business, and they go through very similar growth paths.

The startup phase: building a family

[00:01:26] Starting a team from scratch is like starting a family, be it building a new function, starting a hack team, starting a new business, or initiating an entrepreneurship project inside the company. Even the largest companies in the world today once were startup teams.

[00:01:49] For any startup team, the future is not guaranteed. The team needs to deliver results very quickly with low overhead. The team needs to build credibility with investors and sponsors, explore opportunities, learn and iterate, or pivot when needed. Survival is the name of the game at this point.

[00:02:16] It takes a unique group of people to be in the startup team. You need people who are driven and ambitious, are self-managed with a sense of urgency, risk-tolerant, action-biased and flexible. You need people who are hands-on, with a whatever-it-takes, can-do attitude. You need people who are fun to be with. You'll be spending a lot of time with these people, so you really need somebody that you can connect with.

[00:02:51] For any startup team, a failure in building a team successfully at this point often means the end of the journey. A dysfunctional team with demoralized team members can destroy the business. Wasted energy and resources can really lead to the end of the journey at this point. Even when you're successful building a team, you can still fail. For example, a successful in-house startup team can create conflicts and frictions with the existing team's norms and processes. At any moment you can be out of the game.

[00:03:38] I have been involved in numerous startup teams over the years and have built many teams from scratch myself, and I've learned a few things through my mistakes. It is really important to emphasize the personal traits of the team members as much as the skills they bring to the table. After all, you're building a family. The fit to the family is as important, if not more so.

[00:04:08] As a team leader, you need to be present and aware. You need to be personally involved and know what's going on. It's also really important that you're in control of building the team, able to select the team members joining it. You cannot let others build a team for you. As a startup team leader, it's very difficult to manage team chemistry without control over the team you're building.

[00:04:47] Often getting the right people on the bus is talked about, but getting the wrong people off the bus is probably more important, because one wrong fit, one team member who doesn't quite fit, can destroy the whole team. So get the wrong people off the bus quickly and respectfully, and find the right people. At this stage, a service design thinking framework can really help, because you're looking at designing an organizational team, and design thinking itself also helps with empathy.

The scale-up phase

[00:05:28] The next phase in the growth path is the scale-up phase. With increased demands for you and your team, you need to scale up. You need to continue to deliver results. You need to meet increased demands from others. You need to grow the team at treaty [?] and you need to grow leaders. You need to start driving efficiency and still need to be able to respond quickly to business needs.

[00:05:58] The people you need for this phase of the growth continue to be like-minded people, family members, who are flexible and open-minded, and new team members need to be ready to hit the ground running. To get to this point you did many things right. You got a success or two under your belt. You and your team are appreciated and expected to deliver more. This is a very critical stage in your journey, and mistakes can be very costly.

[00:06:36] Onboarding new team members is very, very important, because you want to have them hit the ground running. I have tried a buddy system, or shadowing, so that you don't invest too much in training, but you help them get trained on the job. This creates rapport by forcing collaboration that may not happen otherwise.

[00:07:11] You may want to start planning ahead for the next phase of the growth. You do that by consciously building an inclusive culture, so you can keep growing. And don't be complacent with initial success. You may feel that you have done well and you can just continue to do the same thing, and pride in past success can kill your future success.

[00:07:53] Empathy can be really, really helpful at this point, to understand the frustrations and challenges of both existing and new employees. And to start building the future team, or future team state, you may want to use design thinking to start planning.

The growth phase: from family to organization

[00:08:20] As your team continues to grow, simply doing more of what made us successful in the past will not be enough to continue delivering the success needed for the business. The business may face new competitors, enter new markets, or acquire a new company to continue to grow. Your team will need to respond to those changes very quickly.

[00:08:47] In this phase you need to meet new business needs and build new capability to do so, drive efficiency, and grow an organization, not just a team. As you bring in new skills and new people, you need to embrace and leverage a diverse workforce. You need to build high-performing teams, not just a family.

[00:09:22] The people you're bringing in will have diverse experiences and competencies, with mixed maturity levels. Some may be experienced managers, and some may be lawyers, or some functions you never had in your team. The people you bring in need to be bridge builders. They can't just try to repeat their own past success in this new company or your team. With diverse personal traits [?], you will see real diversity start to happen.

[00:09:59] At this stage, growth means change. Change is no longer optional. Without change, you cannot grow. What's often forgotten is that nobody likes change. An organizational antibody can be triggered, and anything new can be rejected. Anything new may include new employees, new structure, new business opportunities, a new company that is being acquired.

[00:10:34] This can be very unhealthy. Instead of being able to create synergy with newly acquired capabilities, an organization may become internally focused, with conflicts and confusion. This can create a very toxic environment and also business failures. It's like trying to perform acrobatic acts with team members you don't trust.

[00:11:03] Through the startup and scale phase you built and grew a family with like-minded people to deliver success. And you get to the point where, to grow further, you need to build a robust organization with diverse skills, personal traits and needs. Building a family is no longer an option, and the family you built in the past can get in the way of change. This creates a huge conflict, a very painful change conflict.

Navigating the transition

[00:11:39] How do you transition from the startup and scale phase to the growth phase, and eventually to the maturity phase? How do you navigate this most challenging time in the growth phase? The team you built in the beginning can get in the way. The new people you invest in may not want to stay around. The conflict between the legacy team and new team members can lead to a disaster.

[00:12:13] So how do you deal with that? You can start preparing the team for future success by starting to bring in different kinds of people in the scale-up phase. Instead of building family-like teams of people who think and act like you, you can start diversifying the team. You can bring in people with a learning mindset, who will accept changes and embrace changes, and people with strong team orientation who will embrace new employees in the future. People with humility, who understand that past success doesn't guarantee future success and that they will need to embrace changes. And you want to bring in more empathetic and open-minded people, so that your startup team will be able to embrace new people with new skills.

[00:13:22] There are a few things you can do to navigate through this most difficult part of the growth journey. If you can plan ahead and start building a diverse and resilient team to anticipate changes, the growth stage is much easier to manage.

[00:13:44] As you bring in new people, invest heavily in integrating them into the existing team. Just bringing in new people and expecting them to integrate with a legacy team that may be fearing changes is not helpful. And removing fear is very important. Change is scary. Change brings fear, and the legacy team may fear losing their jobs, or not being successful in this new phase of the organization. So removing fear is very important.

[00:14:32] Removing fear from new team members is also important, as with organizational antibodies, new employees may feel unwelcome. So remove fear consciously when you invest heavily in integrating new team members.

[00:14:54] You need to consciously build an inclusive culture, because in the startup and scale-up phase, especially with a successful team, you might have created a very exclusive culture that doesn't welcome new people or changes. So you need an inclusive culture that can navigate changes successfully. Service design thinking and design thinking can be really, really helpful at this point, and driving empathy is very important.

[00:15:37] Often the pains of the growth stage do not get noticed and manifest much later. You couldn't future-proof the team, the team was not ready for change, and the pains continue to grow. But you can still heal the team. You can still fix the problem that you couldn't anticipate.

Applying design thinking to employee engagement

[00:16:07] I'd like to share with you one example of how I applied design thinking to address employee engagement gaps caused by growing pains. Usually when an organization tries to address engagement survey gaps, they see employees as problems, problems to be solved. They see groups of detractors, promoters and neutrals, and usually try to problem-solve the detractors. The design thinking approach is really to look at employees as people: people with diverse needs, people with diverse aspirations. They are not problems to be solved.

[00:17:04] We held a management workshop, a design thinking workshop, in this case with over 100 senior managers of the company. We developed personas after interviewing employees extensively. During the workshop we deployed typical design thinking tools, in this case a story share and capture exercise, where senior managers put themselves in the shoes of the employees they manage. They went through a needs ladder exercise to understand the deeper needs of employees.

[00:17:49] Based on understanding the needs, they made many prototypes, in this case experience prototypes: the experience of how managers and employees engaged. They tested many scenarios, and at the end they presented the final prototypes to employees to get their feedback. At the end, they developed deep insight into how diverse groups of people require different ways of being recognized, and how management needed to be in touch with the team members. This exercise started to create the healing process much needed for this organization, which was torn apart by changes that were forced upon them.

UX as the ultimate unifier

[00:18:47] UX is a discipline unapologetically, shamelessly and single-mindedly focused on people and their needs. UX is a powerful tool, and by democratizing UX you can help the organization grow. Design thinking can help employees embrace changes, with the human centricity and empathy it drives. Many of the UX toolbox items: co-creation, inclusive design, prototyping, testing and iterating.

[00:19:24] Involve employees in every step of the way. You can involve employees in designing processes or new organizations, get their feedback and iterate as needed. This can be quite powerful. And you can drive employee engagement through a service design framework. You can develop personas, employee personas, jobs to be done beyond the tasks, and with journey maps you can identify the pains and gains of employees.

[00:20:00] Let me conclude this presentation by sharing my favorite story, by David Wallace. There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

[00:20:29] Imagine that UX is like the water in the story. It's ubiquitous. Nobody notices it, but it's everywhere, supporting the team and the organization to grow, every day, everywhere. Imagine that. Thank you.