Understanding UX teams
Identifying the skills that make a group greater than the sum of its parts
This article is part one of a series called Building UX teams. You can read part two, Forming UX teams, and part three, Developing UX teams.
There was a distinct point in my career that I truly embraced being a manager of UX teams, even though I didn’t call it that at the time. Somewhere around the four- or five-year mark in my UX consultancy, Bearded, we sat down as a team and tried to visualize the direction of the company. As a group, we looked back at our past projects, and tried to understand what kind of work we valued the most.
During that process I had my own private revelation. When I thought back on the projects we’d done, I was proud of them all, but none of them really felt like my biggest motivation. When I thought about the team itself — how everyone had grown as individuals and collaborators, how our work had steadily improved over the years — that’s where I felt like I’d done something important. And from that moment on, I started consciously focusing my energy on the team itself. I didn’t build the projects, I built the team that built the projects. I wasn’t a designer, I was a manager.
The job of a UX manager is to empower the team to realize its full potential. We see the best in people, and help them capitalize on their strengths and passions. We assemble teams of people that balance each other’s differences, and encourage cultures that allow the team to grow and thrive. By doing all this, we help individuals grow and succeed in their careers, while creating teams that are far more than the sum of their parts.
Great managers are accelerators and multipliers of success. But it’s a tricky job. We’ve all suffered under bad management at some point in our careers, and know how damaging that can be to individuals and teams. The people on your teams may be wildly different from each other in motivation, communication style, and skill level. Humans are both incredibly rewarding and endlessly complicated. Which is why one of our most challenging tasks — building great UX teams — requires serious thought and reflection.
Management style
Before we dive in here, and I start sharing my experiences and perspective on UX management, it’s important to acknowledge something. My way to manage is not the only way to manage. Each of us is, in fact, unique. We bring our whole selves to work, not just our job titles. And the goal is not to be like another manager, it is to realize our best self as a manager. What that looks like for you is likely quite different than it does for me.
In that way, being a UX manager is like any other role on your teams. You focus on your strengths and motivations, and use that to fuel your success at managing teams in your own way. In the Gallup book First, Break All the Rules, they open with how dissimilar successful managers can be:
“The greatest managers in the world do not have much in common. They are different sexes, races, and ages. They employ vastly different styles and focus on different goals. But despite their differences, these managers do share one thing: Before they do anything else, they first break all the rules of conventional wisdom. They do not believe that a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help a person overcome his weaknesses. They consistently disregard the Golden Rule. And yes, they even play favorites.”
You will find your own style and approach that works for you. My hope is that my perspective will be useful to you as you find your way. Take the parts that help you, discard the parts that don’t, and use that to strengthen your own unique collection of tools, methods, and philosophies for managing UX teams.
Teamwork and collaboration
As soon as the scope of work being done grows beyond the ability of a single UX person to do, we’re dealing with UX teams. And as those teams grow from one to many, there are noticeable shifts that happen in how those individuals function, and what’s required of them.
The first scaling effect we’ll look at is specialization.
Cross-functional teams
As groups get larger, you tend to see the individuals in that group become more specialized. For instance, if a person is a UX team of one working on software products, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for them to be highly specialized in evaluative research like usability testing. Who would design the thing? Plan and write the content? Do the front-end development? This is why individuals and small teams tend to be heavier on UX generalists. And if you’re managing a small, self-contained UX team, you’ll likely have more of those, too. Designers who do their own research; content strategists who create their own wireframes.
At Shopify, our UX organization is now over 300 people, with four official disciplines within it: content strategy, design, UX development, and UX research. Each has different roles to play on the team. To help my teams understand these relationships, we created these simple heuristics:
- Design and Content Strategy use problem-solving skills to create solutions to merchant problems. Some of their tools are different, but their goals are the same.
- UX Research reveals the needs and desires of our users through conducting primary research, and exploring their behaviours and motivations.
- UX Development translates design into the final implementation, adjusting and filling in the gaps in the designs where necessary using sound UX judgement.
Seems pretty straightforward, right? But it’s not that simple. Each of those roles has a great breadth and depth of skills and experience, and — yes — different kinds of specialization.
At different sizes, and with the right mix of project challenges, your teams might need further specializations. Content strategists who are more experienced UX writers, or content strategists that have more experience with taxonomies or audits. Designers that are more experienced in UI and visual design, perhaps even icon design or illustration, or designers who are more inclined to information architecture.
Knowing when a team requires a generalist or a certain kind of specialist, and identifying those specialties in potential or existing team members is a key part of scaling teams.
Another is making sure the individuals on your teams have the skills to work well together.
Soft skills in teams
If we were to put together a group of diverse UX specialists, and then quantify and add up their technical skills, they’d have a pretty great chunk of the full UX skill set under their belts. So that’s it. The team is balanced, and their manager can receive many high fives and go home — job well done. Right?
Unfortunately not. To have that emergent total skill set materialize, the individuals on the team need to work well together, collaborate efficiently, and give and accept help and instruction from each other.
This means we need folks who have, in addition to killer UX chops, sufficient interpersonal and communication skills to enable collaboration. In isolation, a person’s labor impact tends to be fairly linear: they can do as much good work as they have hours in a day. But plug them into a system of other people (a team, an organization, a company) and their net impact can quickly become exponential. For good or for ill, teams can transform individuals into catalysts or blockers of the people around them.
There can be no lone wolves on a team. Unhealthy communication methods, bad behavior, and poor relationship management have a way of causing a cascading effect of time wasted in a group. Think of a conflict that spills over into multiple peer discussions and manager consultations. Then imagine this happens multiple times per week, filling up hours of the group’s time and energy. This sort of exponential problem adds to the layer of pointless sludge that can build up between people and the important work they have to do. This is rot in the system, and left unattended it can not only ruin a team, it can permanently damage the culture.
Now, before we all curse the ever-expanding system of ripple effects that is our teams (and ship all our individual contributors off to work in lead-lined bunkers where they can’t destroy everyone else’s productivity) let’s look at the other side of things.
When human networks are utilized poorly, they amplify time wasted. But when utilized well, they do the exact opposite. Good soft skills can leverage the network effect of teams, and act as a multiplier of individual craft work impact. When we do good work, and can explain the process that generated that work, articulate the rationale for decisions made, and abstract concepts that are applicable in a wide variety of scenarios, our work can take on a life of its own. In this way, one UXer’s work can help dozens of others do their jobs better, and push their craft forward.
Having teams of people that can harness that amplification system by interacting well with each other — collaborating, sharing, and transferring knowledge and discoveries? That is a team that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
Up next: part two, Forming UX teams.
