my job is to hire great people, help them grow, and give them reasons to stay on our team as long as possible—so I’m a huge believer in internal mobility and growth.
Only show portfolio work that demonstrates your design leadership
focus on the projects you’ve led and their results.
(regus as an example of really bad job leading to positive learnings)
No one is equally great at all things: Communicating your strengths and weaknesses is a crucial part of the interview process.
- we decided what needed to happen
- we found the right people to make it happen
- find ICs to act as ambassadors, to establish the voice and the need
I want our internal customers, colleagues, and stakeholders to yearn for Design like the hunger of a young love:-)
How much of a voice the design team has in your organization tells your interviewers a lot about your maturity as a design leader. Before your interview, consider these questions:
- Does design have a role in generating new projects, or is it just executing a product leader’s vision?
- Who’s responsible for discovering and upleveling customer problems (e.g. design, research, customer support)?
- Are ideas from across the company heard, or is work primarily originating with product managers?
- What’s one project that wouldn’t have happened without your leadership?
Great design leaders understand that the most important work happens at the confluence of user needs and business objectives.
Being a design leader is only partially about knowing what good design is and how to ship it. Getting a sense of where you naturally focus (and how that fits with the needs of your current organization) is incredibly important, so I always ask candidates:
- What gives you the most energy, and what drains you?
- Are you more of a creative director who loves details and polish? Or do you get energy from mentoring a team and helping them do their best work?
- Do you set the direction then allow your team complete autonomy? Or are you an active leader working alongside your team every step of the way?
- Does the prospect of presenting to the CEO excite you? Or would you rather focus only on your team?
- No one is equally great at all things: Communicating your strengths and weaknesses is a crucial part of the interview process.
Whether they’re psychological (wide open space for exploration, assignments for discrete projects), physical (remote teams, co-located teams), or scope-related (individual apps or features, designing services, complex ecosystems), I love hearing leaders talk about the circumstances that have led to great work.
Think about where and how you do your best work, articulate those needs to your interviewers, and be prepared to discuss times you were required to work outside of your ideal environments. Learning how you operate in less-than-ideal situations says a lot about how you run a team.
UK High-street bank
Lead design team as part of a lab
Part of the LT for the wealth and pensions business
Team is a "squad" of 5 people
- Service designer
- IxD
- Content designer
- BA
- Architect
My role as a leader in the wider XD leadership team has been about seeking out opportunities for design to become business-critical
- We are part of or lead strategy and planning
- We lead problem space explorations
- Business stakeholders come to us with problems not solutions
My squad is regularly engaged on tactical 'business as usual' engagements, but we are regularly presenting to stakeholders in the business and am a trusted partner and advocate for design thinking across the wealth and pensions business unit.
Most recently, my team has been responsible for delivering coaching and strategy to the c-suite team members leading our unit. We guided them through a refresh of the wider adviser startegy, bringing new skills and methods to help them make progress more quickly and generate better outcomes.
Joined Currys as Head of Customer Experience
Team was aprox 30 - 35 people
My team set up:
- Service design
- Content design
- UI and interaction design
- User research
- Front development studio (remote - in Paris)
Doted line relationship with
- Customer insights
- Attitudinal research
- Digital marketing studio
I joined as part of a turnaround leadership team. The Dixons Stores Group (dsgi) had a massive turnover (£5.4bn) but an apalling margin (under 3%). The business was in effect becoming irrelevent.
Main drivers for my engagement were
- Team was broken. Culture missing, levels of motivation and engagement rock bottom. My team leads were great people in a terrible situation, only one of them didn't buy my plans for progress but the rest helped us through the transformation and have thrived.
- Delivery processes broken and victim of silos between ecommerce and marketing and between London studio and dev in Paris unit. Poor attitude, poor comms, poor performance.
- Commerce site performance terrible. I joined as we started to replatform the three businest ecommerce websites in the UK market
What I brought to the team
- Strong manifestation of narrative and culture: I was able to land my vision of a better place and bring (almos the entire team) along with me on the journey
- Took a "leaders eat last" approach to new ways of working. I personally sat in a car-park talking to strangers while holding a clip chart before I asked my research team to do it (we needed to move fast).
- I established both both quant and qual approach to research and evidence base service improvements, combining the efforts of my User eesearch team with marketing's attitudinal outputs
- I'm a native French speaker and have a strong technology background. I was able to spend time with the devs in Paris and literally speak their language, smoothing the process and performance gaps
- I was able to help hold the teams together by diplomatically bridging the high-accountability world of the commercial director's Monday morning perfomance updates with the slighly hazier and slower design thinking, user-centred community progress updates
Outcomes
- The ecommerce relaunch was a huge success resulting in improved basket sizes and frequency
- The teams thrived under their leads who ran with the permission I gave them
- The changes we made lasted years and the business has turned around completely
Amazon
- How to ensure that design teams support the organization both tactically and strategically
- How to develop a healthy design project intake mechanism and define scope for projects
- How design can embed itself into organization’s methodologies and influence product direction
Paypal
- How to set up tools and environment that empowers teams to deliver useful and usable products
- How to gain a common understanding with product teams around what impacts UX and who's responsible
- How to hold engineering and product teams accountable for delivering a good user experience
Other
- Get practical tips to use when designing mobile websites
- Understand the right mindset of the UX team
- Drive urgency to change the company culture for product excellence