Setting foundations in a new team
Madhumita Gupta
Head of Design, Author, Speaker, Honeywell, Ex Reliance Retail, Myntra, Atlassian, Nationwide Insurance, Philips, Corporate member of Design@Business
When you join a #new #company you either inherit an existing team or start building a new one. In either case, aligning on the purpose and ways of working is a crucial first step within the team and with #stakeholders. Micheal Watkins, the author of the book First 90 days, emphasizes the importance of achieving alignments, creating alliances, and negotiating success among a few more.
In a recent 3-day #workshop, my team huddled together to set the foundation. The first day focussed on defining our #waysofworking, the second day was on understanding the current products, and the third day was focused on understanding strategy and expectations from other multifunctional teams.?
In this article, I'd like to touch upon a set of tools we used and thought of sharing with you all.
Team Canvas - This tool helped us articulate our purpose, core values, skills, and, goals in a collaborative manner. For a small team, we could quickly conclude in an hour. A bigger team would have needed more time to process the output.
5 Bold Steps Vision Canvas - This helped us identify the top 5 broad design goals to frame our vision as well as identify challenges to reach these goals. In a larger team, we would have used affinity diagrams to align from a large set of inputs.
Strategic Plan Template - This helped us in defining our short-term and long-term focus areas and tactics. This is crucial for the team to understand the immediate goals, and activities around those goals as well a glimpse of the future. This helps a lot in managing non-project-related activities without thinking they are ad-hoc asks of the leader.
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HEART Framework - This helped us define the signals and metrics against the goals. Instead of reinventing new signals, we decided to carve out metrics that the org is already chasing but UX efforts can be attributed to their values.
Round-robin brainstorming - We used this to arrive at our design principles. I have never used this tool for this purpose before. But it was fun. While defining the principles we worked on the do's and don'ts first followed by summarizing them in design principles.
Product understanding exercise included heuristic evaluation and feature analysis between our and competitor's UX offerings. Although there isn't a standardized template, we took inspiration from?Hsin-Jou Lin?and Aha!.
Even though these exercises were done by the design team, any new team could also benefit from these exercises. Arguably there is much more to do in setting up a new team. Playbooks, engagement process, hiring, delivery, budgeting, and operating plans are the next steps. We will need to conduct training, art direction, and set up dashboards. It's a long journey. A lot of ideas and inspiration is also coming from the book Org design for design org.
I am curious to know what has inspired you in the past to set up foundations within a new team that you have just joined.
UX Design Lead. Strategic thinker. Engineer at heart.
1 年Hey Madhumita Gupta! Been quietly watch you blaze a trail in your career :) - don't know if you remember me from our CUA class. One thing I've found useful in the past is also understanding what others have in mind for their products - their "vision for the future". While business goals, user needs and tech strategy may already be established, what the product will evolve to is often locked up in different people's heads and is never exactly the same. As they describe their vision of the future, it is also interesting to see what they mean by specific words or terms they use - even these are often interpreted differently by different team members leading to different imaginings of what the vision is by others who hear it. I've found it incredibly useful to align on a shared understanding of where we want to head together through defining product design principles as early as we can to help channel our efforts better. I do this with design, product, and engineering teams, and also the sponsors of the products so we are all on the same page. These principles then become our guide even 5 years into evolving the product, helping it stay true to its intended purpose and brand.
Influencing leadership at Atlassian to transition the design culture to a user-centred way of working
1 年Madhumita Gupta, seeing you at Tuesday's dinner was so lovely. Thank you so much for come and say "hi". You are a fantastic team leader, designer and friend. To the above question, "what has inspired you in the past to set up foundations within a new team that you have just joined" - I would say you! You have been my inspiration and a role model as a true design leader during your time at Atlassian ??
Senior Manager @ Think of Us
1 年You’re one of the coolest I know ;)
User Experience Architect
1 年People, always people. Last time I had to build a team I had the luck to have a clear focus on our users. So that is what we did first and foremost. All the designers we handpicked have the ability to empathize. But also the company is people centric and had a real strong social bond. Collaboration is in their dna. So in all we did as a team we looked out for each other and for our users. That helps a lot.