Building a mature design org.
Design needs
My team was responsible to support 4 product squads and different marketing activities. 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
Based on the role, in addition to accessing 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 designed a hiring process with fairness and inclusivity in mind. Ask me about those considerations.
For better collaboration, designers needed to be co-located with the team that they were getting hired for. I build a happy and world-class team across 5 different timezones.
Building the right culture
When your have a team spread across continents, you will deal with different challenges. Among them, team building and smaller time overlap were the hardest. Here are a few things I did to address those challenges.
Values
When you are running a full remote team in multiple timezones, it's important for them to be autonomous and feel empowered to make decisions without needing you to be there. Unlike my previous experiences, I made team values not just artifact that collects dust but a live narrative that aligned the team views and approach to work. That allowed designers to effectively lead their own projects while maintaining the team cohesion.
Standard process
A uniform process helped everyone to know how to intake and treat each project. It allowed us to focus our group meeting times less on the operation and more on the creative side of the work.
Building the right culture
When your have a team spread across continents, you will deal with different challenges. Among them, team building and smaller time overlap were the hardest. Here are a few things I did to address those challenges.
Values
When you are running a full remote team in multiple timezones, it's important for them to be autonomous and feel empowered to make decisions without needing you to be there. Unlike my previous experiences, I made team values not just artifact that collects dust but a live narrative that aligned the team views and approach to work. That allowed designers to effectively lead their own projects while maintaining the team cohesion.
Cross communication
I tried not to become designers’ single point of reference for different decisions by ensuring cross-team communications are strong. A few things I made sure:Sharing and communication in our offline channels were healthy and lively.
Team members have sync sessions with each other.
Peer review is a part of our process.
Team spirit
The quality of relationships could easily be the target when the work is completely remote. Our org design also put designers on separate projects that could lead to more work isolation. Beside the communication strategy, to elevate the team spirit, I did the following:
a. Set up coffee chats so we can talk beyond work and sometime laugh together.
b. Created shared goals and ways for the team to collaborate. Ask me about the design initiatives I defined for this goal.
c. Who needs help, who can help? Made everyone know that they can reach out to each other for help if they needed it.
Making research accessible
CoderPad, before having any UX designer had a researcher so my battle was not how to make CoderPad more user-centered but how to make it excel at it. I tried a few things to make research more accessible to the whole organization and make our design process more data driven. Here are some of the things I tried:
Discovery
Ensured all designers had access to:
Daily customer reviews
All the 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 research by everyone.
Usability hub (lyssna) for answering more simple questions and making quick decisions.
GreatQuestion so everyone could do unmoderated research.
Org-wide training on those tools.
Recruiting
Difficulty of recruiting had significant 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.
Did 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.
Promoting design
I made a few things to ensure everyone in the organization is aware of what we do and how we do them. To name a few:
Made design projects accessible to everyone
Ensured everyone in the organization can see our work by posting work and key decisions in public channels and allowing everyone to comment on them.
Monthly updates
Wrote a monthly design update and outlined all the things we've been up to, our process and how we arrived at every decision.
Claiming stage 6 of UX maturity 🥇
did we achieve 2 to 1 business performance of McKinsey's famous report?
Hard to tell. CoderPad had the highest level of maturity at the time I left, not only for what I did but because the way the whole leadership approached work and conducted business.
In 2023, we did not start any new product initiative unless more than 1 customer had asked for it and we performed additional verifications. But our business shrunk by 10%. Why? Almost every tech giant that you heard their lay-offs news was a customer of Coderpad. Our business was simply at odds with the macro-economy trends. I beleive once we pass these strong headwinds, CoderPad will once again be back on track to grow!