Developing UX teams
How to use teaching and skill transfer rituals to make learning part of your team culture
This article is part three of the Building UX teams series. You can also read part one, Understanding UX teams, or part two, Forming UX teams.
Assembling a group of complementary, collaborative individuals whose overall skill shape matches the problem set is an incredibly important step in building UX teams. But getting those people together is just the beginning. It takes a lot more to help a team realize its greater potential. Encouraging individual growth, skill sharing, and a culture that supports all that is ongoing work.
A group is what happens when you put a bunch of individuals together. But a team is something more than that, and it doesn’t happen automatically.
Let’s begin by looking at individuals and their professional growth, before we expand outwards to the team and culture.
Individual growth
The best advice I’ve ever received about career direction was from the great UX and design leader Irene Au. She recommended finding the intersection between what you’re good at, what you love, and what the world needs. The center of this overlap (and the resultant Venn diagram) is often labeled as the Japanese concept of ikigai, which is sometimes translated as “the reason for which you wake up in the morning.”
What I really enjoy about this idea is that there are all sorts of career pitfalls in the other areas of this diagram. Each one is a kind of trap:
- You’re good at it and you love it, but the world doesn’t need it: this is a hobby, not a job, and it’s dangerous to confuse the two.
- You love it and the world needs it, but you’re not good at it: this is heartbreaking, because it involves admitting that you lack the talent to make a successful career out of something you love to do. Pursuing this path will only lead to disappointment.
- You’re good at it and the world needs it, but you don’t love it: this can be the most dangerous path, as you will perform well and be rewarded with praise and compensation, but will be secretly unhappy doing it.
This is one of those useful tools that seems to come up again and again in my one-on-ones. It can really focus discussions about career path, or which team someone should be on. Having this conversation with reports can help guide their growth in a productive direction, and focusing on their areas of strength and passion will help clarify their self-image as a professional and what their path is. The overlap of what they’re good at and what they love is their unique drive and skill — the things that get them up in the morning. Then, what does the company need in that area? That’s the job they should be doing or working towards, and as their manager you have additional knowledge and perspective to help them identify that.
A simple, practical way I get at this is to ask my report to talk to me about how they see their job. What are they best at? Where do they really excel and shine in their work? Then we talk about motivation: what excites them most in their work? What makes them get out of bed in the morning, even when things are hard? What is that inner fire that drives them?
Then the job is to listen, and reflect back what you’re hearing, and then listen again. There is no real roadmap for these talks, as they will take the shape of the individual, which is inevitably varied and unique. But you can look for signals and signposts, and most importantly make it a conversation. This is their job, their career, and their life. You’re there to listen, facilitate, and ultimately help them see their best self at work, and clarify the journey that will get them there.
Improving their T
In my previous article, Forming UX teams, we looked at how each person’s skills and experience create a unique shape. And this shape is largely defined by their primary area of skill development and focus. Knowing this area of focus is essential, because then we can talk about improving on that person’s T-shape. Generally speaking, in growth we’re looking to deepen our expertise in our primary area of specialization, while also broadening a set of generalist skills and experiences to become more well-rounded. In my experience, both of these are most easily done with pairing and collaboration.
To increase depth of expertise, it’s useful to pair with someone in your field who is more expert than you. Your lead, a mentor, or a more senior member of the team, for instance. To increase breadth of skills, however, you want to collaborate with people outside your discipline or specialty area. And this is where collaborating with a diverse set of peers becomes particularly rewarding.
At my old consultancy, Bearded, this is one of the fundamental premises under which we operated. Our teams were made up of specialists — designers, front-end developers, back-end developers, and content strategists — working in a highly collaborative environment. After enough time together pairing on projects, our designers were writing CSS and HAML, and our developers were making a lot of solid design decisions in the browser. Everyone was becoming better at project management skills, and more people were writing solid first drafts of their own content. We all became more well-rounded outside of our area of specialization, thanks to working closely with people who had different knowledge and skills.
Now tossing a bunch of people in a room together is part of the process of skill transfer. But unfortunately, it’s not all of it.
Teaching and training
Something Ben Horowitz makes very clear in The Hard Thing About Hard Things is that managers need to train their teams if they want them to be high-functioning. But how do we, as managers, go about it?
In my experience, the most effective teaching in the workplace is focused on applied learning. Rather than workshops that show people how to perform a task or use a new tool in a theoretical situation, we look for practical applications. After all, we’re surrounded by projects every day, with real pressing issues that require our skills.
Finding real live project work to pair on does a couple of beneficial things. It gives us something tangible to talk about, get answers about, and examine data for. This makes the learning more real, more relatable, and more memorable. The second benefit is we’re not just learning, we’re getting our work done.
Teaching methods
In many ways teaching is the process of bringing increasing reflection and clarity to how we work, and then articulating and communicating that to others through a variety of techniques.
The most basic form of instruction is purely demonstrative. We can examine a problem together, and I can demonstrate my process to you by showing you how I would solve it. By walking through the steps of solving the problem together, and vocalizing my thinking to you as I go, I am exposing the steps I go through to perform the task, in the hopes that you can repeat it later.
A second layer that will increase the effectiveness of that instruction is to recap what happened at the end, and try to abstract the process we just went through together. We can step back and describe the steps we went through and why, and talk about other problems where a similar approach might be useful.
As a teacher, this approach requires very little in the way of understanding how you work. You’re simply doing what you do, and then rationalizing it afterward. Which makes it a great place to begin your teaching development.
This approach also maps pretty well to the S1 quadrant of the situational leadership model (i.e. directing), and is particularly useful as a first step with someone who is inexperienced at that skill.
What’s most useful about this to you as a teacher, however, is that the act of explaining how you work has forced you to try to make sense of it. You have taken the first steps in becoming more conscious and deliberate about how you solve those kinds of problems, which will ultimately enable you to better teach, train, and transfer your skills and ideas to others in the future.
Once you’ve tried direct demonstration a couple of times, the next logical variation is indirect demonstration. When a problem is presented, pick a problem similar to the one at hand and demonstrate solving that. Then point back to the original and suggest that now your colleague try that approach with their problem. This tactic of demonstrating, then handing over the baton (or the whiteboard marker) can be a powerful tool.
As a person’s skill and independence increase, the demonstrative nature of the teaching methods need to back off in proportion. We can see this sort of increase in independence as we walk through the situational leadership quadrants:
- Directing: “I decide.”
- Coaching: “We talk, I decide.”
- Supporting: “We talk, you decide.”
- Delegating: “You decide.”
We could adapt this to a teaching methodology as well:
- Directing: “Here’s how you do it.”
- Coaching: “Here’s how I’d do something similar, now you do it.”
- Supporting: “You do it, then I’ll show you how I’d do something similar.”
- Delegating: “You do it.”
As with everything, different approaches will work with different people at different times. You can use this as an opportunity to talk with your collaborator about what is working and what isn’t, and what might work better in the future.
Growth culture
As a UX manager, training people is a vital part of your role, and one of the more impactful things you can do with your time. But as your teams grow, you can become the bottleneck for growth. This is worrisome, but if you’ve been working towards team balance, there is a solution at hand.
Skill transfer
Once your team as a whole has a balanced skill set, your problem isn’t a lack of skills, it’s a lack of skill transfer. It’s getting the people on your team to teach and learn with each other — which is a much more solvable problem than not having the skills in the first place. Not only does this help with your training bottleneck, it provides great opportunities for future leaders to practice at leadership, while seeing immediate positive effects on their teams.
Looking at your team as a whole, you should be able to identify what each of your team members is particularly skilled at. One of my jobs as a manager is noticing when people could use help with a skill, and connecting them to others that are strong in that area. In other words, I’m looking for opportunities to pair up people with complementary skill shapes.
For instance, I have one senior designer on my teams who has particularly deep expertise in information architecture (IA). When one of my other designers is struggling with an IA problem, I’ll suggest that they pair with her, to both improve their work output on that project, and sharpen their skills in that area.
As a manager, your job is to help carve the channels that allow ideas and experience to move freely throughout your teams. This means coaching your senior team members on teaching, and building a culture that is receptive to, and efficient with, learning.
Rituals of learning
On my teams, we’ve been creating a culture of learning in a number of ways. Some of them are subtle and constant. We talk about learning a lot, and it’s encouraged in one-on-ones and in individual growth planning. I particularly encourage leads and senior crafters to pair with other team members on things they’re highly skilled at. When I see someone struggling with a skill, I direct them to someone else who’s good at it.
Wall of craft
One of my colleagues on Shopify Plus, Raquel Damas, has taken this skill connection idea a step further by externalizing it as something called a wall of craft. Each member of Raquel’s UX team fills out a profile with their strengths and skills that they can help others with, and they literally fill a wall with these profiles. This gets everyone’s strengths out in the open, and removes the lead as a bottleneck for skill transfer facilitation. Not only that, but the product managers and engineers in Raquel’s organization are doing it, too, so the effect is both intra- and interdisciplinary. It’s a great idea, and something I’m thinking of trying on my own teams.
Design jams
We also bake these values into our design rituals. Rather than design feedback coming through a traditional presentation / feedback model, we’ve moved to a system we call design jams. In design jams, designers from across our teams in a given city bring their work to the group. A project that’s still in progress and messy, or has hit a particularly difficult stumbling block is a great candidate. But the rule is, don’t bring things that you think are solved and finished, and don’t bring polished presentations about the work. Bring the group something to work on. The group assembles as a temporary collaborative design team to work together on the problem at hand. At the end we recap what happened, to summarize the process we went through. This has multiple desirable effects:
- The work gets better
- It’s demonstrated in a specific way how the work gets done, so it sticks with everyone better
- The whole team has the chance to be exposed to and learn those skills in a single session
These adjustments to rituals and talking points help bring about some powerful emergent changes in the culture. But there are also times when the culture might need a bit of a direct nudge.
A push in the right direction
At my team’s 2019 kickoff, after a number of exercises driven by team input and participation, I gave a brief talk about learning, teaching, and growing. I asked the team to take away four main points that would help them further close the gap between them and their most important work.
Each point had an important message about creating an environment where we are more likely to grow and succeed at doing our best work. Each was prompted by patterns that I and the other leads on my teams had noticed over the previous months. These points were about having a growth mindset, not confusing our projects and solutions with ourselves, the importance of hard work, and the need to learn the basics before getting weird.
These are not mind-blowing revelations, but as a group they helped reinforce our shared beliefs about the team culture of learning. We are all always growing and improving, every day. We can critique our work more efficiently by not taking it personally. We grow the most by working hard on project after project. We stay humble, and know there are still important fundamental skills to learn from our fellow teammates.
Presenting these ideas to the team directly helped formalize some of our values, and give our cultural growth a bit of focus. It also sets some expectations from leadership, and gives concrete form to ideas that we can come back to in our one-on-ones together.
My hope, as a manager, is that all these practices — from the way we talk to each other, to the rituals we build, to the values we formalize — will slowly refine our team culture into an environment where the exchange of skills and knowledge is as natural as breathing. A place where the team becomes its own teacher, and the team balances itself.
