SXSW: How to Create A Kickass In-House Design Team

[Notes from this panel with Jon Wiley, Lisa Anderson, Irene Au, Edward Garana, and Tjeerd Hoek]

How do you measure success?

By meeting customer demands and keeping them happy. Delivering the work is the baseline but it is also good to have some tension with the organization. Causing trouble is a good sign of impact.

The measure of success is part qualitative and quantitative. There is something of a marketplace where success is about how much other teams want to work with you. The more that other people seek your help the more successful you are. Pull within the organization is incredibly important. If people don't ask you for advice then you aren't fulfilling the potential of your role.

If you are part of the culture and conversation you are making progress.

So how do you structure your team? Generalists or specialists? What variables impact the decision?

From a small team perspective you are left going to a generalist approach (T shaped people). IAs know visual design and vice-versa. It is important that the team knows that whatever they are working on they must take the holistic view. If you are a generalist to a degree you can take your holistic view and make sure that you aren't reinventing the wheel or making something that will be destroyed in two months because someone else doesn't realize that it exists.

Design is qualitative and everyone thinks they can design. It is important to hire best-of-breed regardless of generalists or specialists. Look for people with potential for growth.

Are there skills that matter more in-house?

The element of follow-through is critical. When you hire an agency you have decided that you want to work with design. In-house you need the ability to influence and draw people in who might not have an interest in usability. This is a key skill required for a successful team.

You have to go all the way. You can't have a team where anyone says that they only do "X" and not other things. You want people who can go all the way to meet all the constraints, to meet the whole nasty process head-on and deliver on the original concept.

You can have success with a team of specialists but they must be integrated with product teams and business. They must have their feet both in their work and in the work of the organization. Generalists are better kept looking at the long-view.

You want a continuum of abilities. The skills you want to look for are leadership, communication, drive, the yearning for influence, the ability to ask hard questions. You don't want passive people. You also want engineers who are excited about technology and working with designers to make exciting things happen.

In organizations that aren't centered around technology it is very important to find people who can operate in that environment and are OK with it. With an agency you will get an engagement, build a product or a design, and walk away. In-house teams have to answer questions and keep working all the way through.

If you are in a smaller company with a smaller team, you are going to have to find the diamonds in the rough. Look at the people you have and what they bring to the table and help them grow. You can turn these people into the best of the best with careful fostering. Let your people get engaged and do wonderful things.

How do you manage designers and stimulate them so they can kick ass?

Take responsibility for your team. You want a team that will be there for you and who can influence product quality. Managers must take responsibility for the people with potential and take care of people who are holding the team back.

The interaction between members of the team is very important. You want to avoid competition within the team. You want to get to a point where everyone shares what they are doing. Do design reviews. Put designs up on the wall and talk about them openly.

Managers should not just do email or people management. They should get their hands dirty and take responsibility for making the team better.

One-on-one coaching is very important.

Part of what you are doing is building a community within an organization. Share best practices and case studies. Have teams of people work together to solve problems and then take the time to share this openly.

Say you have a great team and you are at point where you don't have buy-in. How do you get a seat at the table while cranking out great work?

You are never going to get away from the tactical stuff. You can't just outsource it. You get a reputation from it, you get a reputation for connecting to what is happening by churning out great work. Make it better than what the client wants. Give them innovative ideas and they will start coming to you more and more ahead of time. Get them to a point where they can't imagine how they did it without you.

As an in-house design team you aren't really billing anyone. If you don't communicate teams can suck time from your designers so you run behind. You need to get a handle on how people use the team. You have to learn how to say no and forcefully generate the time for the team to do research and be creative enough to deliver something visionary. This is a delicate process but is very important. Keep an eye on what work is needed and what is not.

You can't have a great team without organizational influence. A good team by definition asks hard questions to the organization and find the pain points for users. Advocate for the users without abandon.

The team must think about the future and be ahead of the curve.

Be direct up from when someone asks for work so they know how much time each client will get and what the deliverables will be. Tell them how many meeting they get and hold firm to protect your team.

We've talked about building credibility. How do you continue to do great work while maintaining quality?

One thing that is important to hire production people into the design team. Use them to do the quick jobs as a chance to learn and grow. Use junior staff for these projects so they can help keep the business moving.

Infrastructure is key to eliminating low-value projects and one-offs. Have an asset library or a design pattern library so these projects are easier to turn-around. So much time is wasted just in the churn of figuring out why something is happening and who it is happening for.

If you see that churn and ambiguity are happening there is no reason that a design lead should wait for someone else to solve this. There is opportunity for what is best for your team and what is best for vendors. Build a budget to buy time for building this kind of asset library that you can use the rest of the year.

How do you manage the relationships with 3rd party vendors?

You have to build this relationship and be very clear from the beginning. If you are smart about how agencies work you want to constrain the work to design work. You want their design leads working with your design leads. Get the account manager out of the picture and get on the same page with people who are doing the work. Also, always get an out clause.

Some of the best work with an outside agency is when that agency is an extension of your team. You can't keep outside agencies in the dark. You want everyone to understand what's happening so you can get the best work from everyone.

It is also important to know what you know and what the agency knows and really work together. You will always know the organization better but both sides need to feel that it is great partnership. You cannot use outsiders in a way that alienate your design team.

How do you communicate success and value of your work to the company?

It is important to be aware of the mechanisms within the company that you can be aware of. Whether it is a public talk or a design review, take advantage of it. Look at the culture of your organization and come up with a strategy for how to fit into it and influence it.

Google has open tech-talks that anyone can schedule and this is a great way to share and champion user-centered design. You want to reach out to people wherever you can find them. At Google they teach unit testing with screens in the bathrooms.

Managing the brand of your team and what it means to the company is very important. Know your added value and market it. Always feed the key questions that you want decision-makers to ask you to them so they understand what you are doing.

It is essential as the leader of a team to understand what your teams qualities are, where the weaknesses are, and to always project an excited visionary attitude to the rest of the organization.

Many teams fail at this by getting caught up in focussing what they don't control instead of looking at how they can change what's around them. Always be part of a solution. Don't wait for someone to hand you the golden key. As a leader you must be a visionary.

Looking inward to create your own aspirations and values is very important. You want the whole team to go out and espouse the values. Everyone needs to be on board with this. Set metrics for yourself and promote them. Get your designers to do this and then decide in advance what you will do if you don't meet metrics.

You want to always come across as the group that can get things done.

One thing that can work to communicate value is when management staff actually hear from users about the product.

What behaviors should design teams avoid?

Don't ever think you own the design. Let good ideas come from everywhere. Embrace other people's ideas and build on them.

Even if you get an idea that clashes with your vision don't just dismiss it.

Embrace > Extend > Bend

Whining and complaining does nobody any good. Provide air cover for designers as they need to learn better skills. If anyone folds their arms and won't get better they are not part of a good team. Everyone should always respect the team including the manager.

Don't ever stop trying and innovating no matter how many times you get shot down. Never say "forget it" if you want to have a kick-ass team.

How do you grow a small team into a big team without losing quality? How do you get them and keep them?

If you have identified great people in other organizations you are halfway there. Figure out how to compensate them well, give them great projects, and share the glory with them. Focus on why people get out of bed in the morning.

You have to be willing to find people who you can build up and can then attract other people to build up. You can't keep them forever but you want to be able to hire entry level designers who will get better while they are with you and give you the benefit of this investment.

How do you know a good designer is a good employee?

Quality of portfolio is baseline. You need to know your team's values and what other attributes you are looking for. How do they handle ambiguity? How do they communicate? Passion goes a long way.

Get good at interviewing and always check references.

In an in-house environment being a great designer isn't enough. Your people need to be able to be good at being account managers.

What are the boundaries of the team? Development? Research? etc.

You always have too few resources to cover all the work so you look at how much "traffic" each area gets. How much is "X" part of the product experience, how much will be touched by consumers, etc. How does something connect to business priorities? Where is user pain? Staff to solve these problems. Some work might important but not to the end users.

Emphasize research, visual and interaction design, writing, and prototyping. Partner on other things where it is available in the organization.

In the old days you looked more at cool interfaces. Now you need to focus on every aspect of the experience. Get enough people to be able to pay attention to the more mundane aspects that easily break down.

It is also important to be agile. If you are the only internal shop you need to be able to respond to every need. Be able to do whatever it takes. This requires agile people who can operate in the gray area. People who see just black and white won't fit very well.

Be able to take information from other groups, add value, and pass it back to them in a meaningful way.

Don't ever show your silos to your users.

Where you have cross-functional people what are you doing to optimize the flow of a project?

It is different depending on the size of a team. In a large team you have the luxury to put people where they kick ass and then pass it to someone else. In a small team you have to decide what is a priority with high strategic value and what isn't. Treat them differently in how you staff them. Staff important projects as if you were a larger team.

If you are trying to grow someone in a particular way, pair them with someone who they can learn from.

Be flexible enough to match skills with tasks instead of filling boxes. Always be aware of what people's strengths are and keep them away from what they are bad at.

How do you communicate your priorities internally and how you decide what to do when?

This is a very common problem. Sometimes it helps to force the people asking your for things to fight it out themselves and then come back to you.

Make sure that your team is set up for success. Look out how early you can get involved and focus on work where you can get involved earlier rather than later. How open is the client to really working collaboratively with you. Have a clear strategy for what you do and sell that to people. If you have a rational plan people will understand what is and is not a good fit.

Sometimes you are the messenger for the organization's priorities and this is hard. Teams will always want more no matter how much you kick ass. Executives need to set priorities and should not leave it individual teams to set priorities for the organization.

How do you handle relationship between the design team and peer departments like editorial or development?

ALways have open communication with your partners. Make them into your partners. Speak early and often.

How do you watch morale and how you recover morale?

It depends on the source of the problem. Are people leaving or not feeling effective? Get to know your team and go right to the source of the problem. If you have a bad apple you must act quickly to deal with it. Removing the bad apple will protect the team from contamination. Deal with the real issues always. Open and honest communication within the team is essential, there is no other way to do it. You are all working together, not against each-other. Avoid competition inside your team.