Building a mature design org.
Design needs
My team was responsible to support 4 product squads and a prolific marketing team. Two product squads and the content team were based in France and the rest of the teams were spread in 3 US timezones.
Hiring the right people
In my hiring process, aside from the basics, I tried to evaluate how visionary, technical, or entrepreneurial each candidate were to make sure they are the right fit for the job. I ensured the hiring process was fair and inclusiv. Ask me about those considerations.
Geographic proximity was not a factor for our remote-first company but designers needed to be in the same or close time-zone as their PM and engineering partners. I build a happy and world-class team across 5 different timezones.
Building the culture
Having a team with different cultural backgrounds and spread in different timezones imposed certain challenges. Heare are a few things I did to overcome them.
Values
With our timezone differences and low time overlaps, it was crucial for the team to feel autonomous and empowered to make decisions. I understood that team values should not be a one-time team activity to be forgotten. Instead, I aimed to make them a living narrative that aligns the team and guides our approach to work.
Standard process
A uniform process ensured that everyone understood the baseline and expectations for handling each project. By abstracting that away, we were able to use our group meeting times to focus less on operations and more on the creative side of the work.
Cross communication
Here are a few things I established to avoid becoming designers' single point of reference and direction:That sharing and communication in our offline channels are healthy and lively.
Team members have their own sync sessions with each other.
Peer review is a part of our process.
Team spirit
Maintaining the quality of relationships can be challenging in a completely remote work setting. Our organizational structure also placed designers on separate projects, which could lead to increased work isolation. To enhance team spirit, in addition to our communication strategy, I implemented the following initiatives:a. Set up coffee chats to facilitate conversations beyond work and share some laughter.
b. Created shared goals and collaboration opportunities. Ask me about the design initiatives I defined for this goal.
c. Encouraged a culture of mutual support, making it clear that team members could reach out to each other for help when needed.
Promoting data-driven design
Before CoderPad had any UX designers, it already had a researcher. My challenge wasn't to introduce CoderPad to the value of user-centered design but to make them excel at it. To achieve this, I implemented several strategies to make research more accessible and an integral part of our processes. Here are some of the initiatives I undertook:
Discovery
Ensured all designers had access to:
Daily customer reviews
Tools and resources that shows customer interactions with our tools or usage trends.
Have the option to attend customer calls and review gong calls
Accessibility of research
Adopted tools to enable more ad-hock and JIT research.
Usability hub (lyssna) for answering more simple questions and making quick decisions.
GreatQuestion so everyone could launch unmoderated research.
Org-wide training on research and usage of those tools.
Recruiting
Difficulty of recruiting had an impact on the frequency of research in our org. I addressed the problem by:
Separating usability from discovery and started to use Upwork as an easy way to recruits for our usability research projects.
Utilized offline surveys whenever possible.
Created something we called it Research Jam, a monthly internal research. Ask me about that!
Adopted experimentation
You want designers to have full conviction on their solutions but ultimately nothing beats hard data on how users react to changes.
We fully embraced the concept of experimentation. Many of our changes were released to a small subset of users before they become accessible to all.
We also relied heavily on A/B testing to optimize the messaging and design in our marketing site.
Transparancy & promoting design
Transparency was one of our organization values and I constantly asked myself how can I make everyone more aware of what we do. Here are some of the things I did:
Depending on the importance or impact, I made sure the result of our important design decisions, the milestones we had reached or the result of our discovery or usability research were shared with everyone.
Posting regularly in public channels was one of the ways I exposed everyone to our design and encouraged an offline dialogue.
Made everyone aware of our our bi-weekly design review agenda and opened the sessions to anyone who were interested to learn about any topic.
I wrote and published a monthly design update covering what we've done and were planning to do within each product squad.
What was the impact?
I claim my contribution helped building a highly capable and productive design team. In less than two years:
We were able to merge CoderPad and CodinGame products.
Completely refresh our brand
Support over 60 large and small product initiatives
We were completely in sync with our customers. In 2023, we did not initiate any new product unless more than one customer requested it and we further evaluated the needs through discovery research. This approach reduced waste and led to features that saw immediate adoption.
But unfortunately, despite all those efforts, our business still shrank by 10%. Why?
Many of the tech giants, mostly CoderPad customers, had layoffs in 2023 and that directly impacted our bottomline. Our business was simply at odds with the macroeconomic trends. But with the team’s attitude and culture, CoderPad is destined for success. I believe if we pass these strong headwinds in the tech industry, CoderPad will be back on track for growth again!