<aside> 🍡 Considerations for a director+ / head of design looking to effectively scale and lead a healthy design team.

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Building a balanced design team

Leading a design team involves a continual evaluation of your current strengths, gaps, and hiring needs. Establish a quarterly practice which includes:

• Retro-ing your team’s previous quarter → Were there any big wins or misses?
• Review the quarterly plans for the upcoming quarter across squads → Can you anticipate any staffing gaps or risks?
• Advocate for headcount where necessary → Proactive > reactive
• Share an update with your cross-functional partners which covers the previous quarter and hiring targets for the next quarter → Builds cross-functional trust and accountability

Elements to consider when building a hiring plan for a balanced design team:

• Immediate needs across squads → If these needs are not met, it will be challenging to make progress in other areas.
• Design verticals → There is a tendency across the industry to focus on full-stack product designers which often leaves large gaps in Content Design, User Research, Visual Design, Service Design etc. Establishing these practices early will save you and your teams a lot of frustration later.
• Hiring for inherent diversity → An industry wide challenge, make it a goal to introduce a diversity lens into your hiring practice early. There is ample data to support this from a business perspective - diverse teams tend to outperform and out innovate more homogenous ones. Work with your recruiting team to tap into under-represented design communities.
• Hiring for acquired and levelling diversity → As a team scales up there is often a tendency to focus on senior level designers and up which can result in a top-heavy team over time. Adding younger or less-experienced designers to a team can create opportunities for internal growth and mentoring while also increasing a team’s acquired diversity by bringing on designers with different generational perspectives on design and technology.

Pillars of a thriving CX team

In addition to your teams direct skillset, strengths, and gaps, for sustainable success look for ways to measure and improve your team against the following 4 pillars (borrowed from Trello):

• Team health & wellbeing: Our team is motivated by their work, growing in their careers, and doing the best work of our lives. We’ve built a balanced, diverse team, and a strong sense of community and belonging.
• Strategy & vision: We are actively contributing to our product and experience strategy, and inspiring our team by shining a light on our brightest possible future. We have created time & space for creativity and ideation to flourish.
• Design ops: We have established a balanced, intentional set of processes and rituals to support our teams. Design crits & reviews are integral to how we work and we contribute as partners to x-functional processes and practices.
• Experience quality: We are the champions of experience quality across our teams, advocating for customer-centric processes and ensuring that we are collectively Proud to Ship.

Design your team processes

Be intentional about your team processes and rituals and be prepared to adapt continually to a changing scale, environment, and organization needs. Team processes should be scheduled for review at least twice per year as well as anytime there is an re-org that shifts teamwork across Monte Carlo. Some processes that are essential to every design team include: