How to create a great design team
Edited highlights:
How measure success?
- Happy clients, designers, great output
- Your designers sometimes need to make clients nervous (ask hard questions, push them our of their comfort zone)
- How often and early clients WANT to bring your team in to discuss ideas, rather then just sending your team a completed brief
- People who “go all the way” and do what’s necessary, as opposed to just strictly what’s in their job description
- People who can handle business and client constraints – but don’t let that stop them
- People who can accept feature cutting and changes
- Direct mentorship and coaching (don’t get too far from them that you can’t give real,honest and regular feedback)
- Their not gentle little flowers - so don’t treat them like one!
- Design reviews at the end of each projects – highs and lows, strength and weaknesses
- Build a community- share best practices, makes sure teams work together
- Avoid big personalities taking over or ruling the roost, it;s not healthy
- Must allocate part of your team to thinking ahead
- One strategy is to put junior people on “production team” that deals with fast, less strategic projects that are still learning opportunities
- Outsource
- Bottoms up- “google tech talks”, toilet ads, build user-focused culture
- Top down- project reviews, feed juniors good questions to ask
- Need inspirational leaders
- Get client feedback
- Telling people we “own” the design
- Whining/ complaining about other internal teams or the client not understanding
- Empire builders, egos and emotions – thesed aren’t natural ‘designer’ characteristics
- First make sure you hire top designers AND employees, don’t go for second best
- Identifying who you want is 50-60% of it
- Learn to sell, understand what motivates someone and offer it
- Share the glory- big/ good projects
- Build a team from great junior people (hire from universities)
- Get really good at interviewing- build a great interview team that is well trained at identifying the characteristics you’re looking for (and not looking for) & recruiting
- Check references- people are usually quite honest about strengths and weaknesses
- Know the behavioral skills you’re after and the one’s you’re not!
- Look for passion, intellect and relationship management skills – they’re all important for a kick-ass team!
