My name is Xavier and I lead the design team at Wijs. I would like to give you insight into how a design team is formed. How we hire, how we guide and how we focus. Not a lot of designers talk about this stuff, but I would have wanted to know this when I was 21. So I would like to share some of my reasoning with you today.
That is an awesome Sea Monster by Miet.
Hire for Premier League
It is almost a platitude, but you need to hire premier players if you want to play premier league. Make no mistake: a company of 50+ people is not a place for soloists. In our company, the key thing that differentiates a great designer from a good designer is that he or she works well in a team.
Second, you want to hire someone with unique skills, but with a shared vision. Some people in the team are really good at coming up with ideas, others excel at guarding consistency, some thrive on optimizing technically. Those are all equally astonishing skills, but they can only flourish because they are supported by some basic principles we agree upon. Look for those principles when hiring.
The question on your mind is: “How can you tell?” Most of it comes from the gut, but I will give you some hints anyway. You can usually tell the instant someone applies: do they send a portfolio, or do they send a curriculum vitae? This simple distinction shows whether someone is coming to do work (good), or add another line to their CV (not so good). People who send both, are usually the most interesting. With a portfolio and CV in your hands, it is easy to review whether someone actually does what they say they do. Bonus points if they indicate the areas they have not mastered on their CV. This shows honesty and self-knowledge, which I believe are great traits for a designer.
Guide
You can hire the best people, but without guidance, things will go wrong.
We work in project teams. This means people with varying objectives work together as a team. I think this is pretty nice: it allows you to have the necessary discussions with for instance a developer, marketer or information architect. Furthermore, it allows you to foster a culture where every person in the team realizes there are more aspects to a project than just SEO or just a pretty button.
I also discovered a downside. A new person enters the company and is assigned to a team. In that team, the Project Manager hands out assignments to the new person. Big mistake. I cannot expect a project manager to follow up on the training of a new designer. We once hired a very talented but inexperienced designer who almost instantly had to work on some very complicated projects. That resulted in an extremely steep, unguided and unfair learning curve. Needless to say, the projects went awry and the designer went on to make beautiful websites, at another company. We fixed that so it will never happen again.
Moral of the story: allow and plan for enough time to give new people proper training. If they want to go fast, excellent. But never count on it. People also need to feel at home. They need to know who to go to when they have a problem. So now, when someone new arrives, they are trained by a different designer each week for at least four weeks. This way they get to know everyone in the team fairly quickly so they know where to go when they have a design-related problem.
Share a Vision and Principles
People need to be able to express their identity. This is true for everyone, but it is probably even more true for designers. Everything we do revolves around better expressing the identity of companies or individuals. I could ask every designer in the team to design the way I would design. I could personally approve or reject every design. I could ask every designer to name their Photoshop layers a certain way. But I don’t. Because it serves nobody. Hiring remarkably talented people in order to put them under the reign of some design buffoon (that would be me) is just wrong.
What we do have is a shared vision and an implicit set of principles. Every designer on the team is convinced that design is more than adding colour to a prototype. Every designer on the team thinks designing (parts) in the browser is the way forward. And every designer on the team knows at least the basics of HTML & CSS (if you know Dutch, read why I think this is important). Our principles and vision may change over time; not because I think it is the right way forward, but because someone thinks it is the right way forward and most of us agree.
Ask Questions
We have regular meetings called Design Labs. In a Design Lab we openly discuss things like design experiments or new technology. My voice is equal to that of others. The agenda is defined by everyone in the group and when there is a debate, my job is mostly to ask the right questions so we can come to the right conclusion. Remember what I said about hiring smart people? This is one of the areas where that plays out nicely.
Ban Titles
My official title is roughly translated to English as “Head of Design”. Sounds fancy, right? It doesn’t mean a thing. I do not like titles that imply hierarchy. Something like “Head of Design” very subtly implies that the bearer of the title is der Überdesigner. Nothing could be further from the truth. So the first thing I did was throw the title out the window. The entire team consists of extremely talented people (Ad, Dieter, Jonas, Louise-Lotte, Simon & Tom, you are amazing). Part of my talent just happens to be looking to the future and figuring out a way to get there.
Stop Wondering, Start Changing
When I first took on this role, I was hesitant to change stuff. My predecessor was an incredibly smart designer who I look up to. I had some big shoes to fill. Call it impostor syndrome if you like, but it felt wrong to change things that were so carefully put into place. Not to mention the effect working in a 50+ people company had on me. I felt like I needed approval from at least five people before I could change something. Not true, it seems.
If I look back at the things that have changed in a year, we have accomplished some pretty amazing things. We switched from writing vanilla CSS to Sass; we introduced the use of style tiles into our process; we are designing fairly large parts in the browser; we are working closer with our beloved information architects; we are experimenting with responsive HTML+CSS prototypes; and we are now effectively working with our own front-end framework in every new project. That is only the tip of the iceberg.
This may not sound very exciting to you, but it is a big shift in how we work. I am profoundly proud of all the people involved in making the necessary incremental changes every day. I didn’t do this. This is what real teamwork looks like. And if you take some perspective, you can do more than you think. Which brings me to the next point.
Focus
You will need focus to accomplish things as a team. We are a group of highly motivated designers. It is our nature to constantly question the status-quo. We are easily excited about new design techniques or the latest thing Eden Spiekermann created.
In fact, we are sometimes so enthusiastic that we do not know where to start. Especially in a group, where seven excellent ideas can come up at the same time. Yes, we want to make full-blown HTML5 Web Apps. Yes, we want to help sales people sell design better. Yes, we want to think strategically about design with our clients. But client work needs to get done, too. And there are only so many productive hours in a day.
So you need focus. In order to have focus, you first need to agree what you are going to focus on. We have meeting reports of all our Design Labs. I analysed a year’s worth of those reports and highlighted recurring themes. Turns out one of those themes was that we were constantly re-writing things that could easily be standardized. So we created our own front-end framework to free up time so we can go the extra mile where it really counts. Without focus, we would still be shooting arrows in all directions. Not very effective.
Ask for Feedback
Ask for it in person, ask for it via e-mail or ask for it anonymously. But ask for feedback. I basicly openly asked in a Design Lab whether people thought if I was useful at all to them. We had an interesting discussion which effectively improved the way we work together. I also set up a voluntary Google Form which gathered anonymous answers to these two simple questions: “What is going well?” and “What would you improve?”. Those open-ended questions yielded concise answers. It took me five minutes to set up and people were not bugged with a three-page questionnaire about my personality. Most important: I actually learned how I could support the team even better.
And while I am asking for feedback: do you think this makes any sense at all? How do you feel your design team is being led? Or how do you lead your team?
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This was written on a sunny Sunday afternoon to the tunes of Jon Hopkins, Baths and Willie Dixon.
