Forming UX teams

How to balance what people offer and what teams need

Matt Griffin
Shopify UX

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This article is part two of the Building UX teams series. Read part one, Understanding UX teams, or part three, Developing UX teams.

A team of 11 people at Shopify. Photo: Sarah Pflug, Burst.

Whether you’re hiring for a new role, scaling a team to keep up with company growth, or starting a new team from scratch, finding the right mix of people is a big part of creating a great UX team. There are likely as many variations on great UX teams as there are people, but there are a few truths that have stuck with me over the years. The primary one has to do with the relationship between the shape of the person and the shape of the team.

The shape of the person

Let’s start with the most fundamental unit of teams: the individual person. Whether a new hire or veteran team member, a person’s strengths and skills need to be directly compared against the needs of their role. Now when we talk about role, there are a number of ways to do that. Let’s start more general and talk about a title. For instance, we can talk about senior product designers, and what’s expected of them.

All the skills, all the things

When we talk about expectations for a senior product designer, we’ll probably talk about different areas of competency: craft skills (like user interface design or information architecture), tool mastery (like personas or wireframes), soft skills (like written communication or coaching), and subject matter expertise (like payments or design systems).

At this more general level of senior product designer, this will quickly become a dizzying list of competencies which few humans have both broad and deep coverage of. Luckily, we can narrow this down to what we expect from the more specific role the person will play on their team — say a senior designer on Payments, or a senior designer on Insights.

Photo: Matthew Henry, Burst.

Different roles, different needs

People are remarkably unique, with different strengths and weaknesses, styles and interests. And these variances aren’t holes to pave over, but rather foundations to build on.

In The Feedback Fallacy by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, the authors drop all kinds of mind-blowing knowledge, but their reframing of strengths, weaknesses, and growth particularly stuck with me:

“… neurologically, we grow more in our areas of greater ability (our strengths are our development areas). The brain continues to develop throughout life, but each person’s does so differently. … According to brain science, people grow far more neurons and synaptic connections where they already have the most neurons and synaptic connections. In other words, each brain grows most where it’s already strongest. As Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University, memorably described it, “Added connections are therefore more like new buds on a branch rather than new branches.” Through this lens, learning looks a lot like building, little by little, on the unique patterns already there within you. Which in turn means learning has to start by finding and understanding those patterns — your patterns, not someone else’s.”

People aren’t blank slates. When they arrive on your team (or you arrive on theirs), they have a certain shape that makes them more suited to some roles than others. And this, fascinatingly, is also their direction of growth.

If I look at those Payments and Insights designer roles as examples, I see different design needs. Shopify Payments is a mature product that, for UX, is mostly concerned with ferreting out, understanding, and solving for a myriad of experience variations. These variations result from regulatory and compliance issues, international commerce and cultural differences, and the different needs experienced by Shopify’s largest merchants and partners. It’s highly technical and requires a lot of planning, thoroughness, and organization. The UI changes that result from all this work are often visually minor, but highly impactful.

Insights, on the other hand, has far greater opportunities to utilize strong visual design skills. Shopify has a wealth of data to surface to its merchants, but what is done with that data is up for debate. An Insights designer has the opportunity to interpret a merchant’s data in new and useful ways. These could include data visualizations, trends, forecasting, or recommendations, among other things. The final experiences will be heavily influenced by the designer’s imagination and ability to innovate. In addition to solid information architecture (IA) experience, this will require a background in the visual interpretation of data, something our Payments designer won’t have a heck of a lot of use for.

For each of these roles, we’d assign a human with the title “senior product designer.” But they require different strengths and interests, and each role can handle different holes in the designer’s skillset. Match the designer to the role correctly, and the product will be in good shape. Mismatch them, and you’re likely to waste a lot of human potential that could otherwise be well-realized elsewhere, which could both hurt the product and that person’s career development.

Now this doesn’t mean that each designer is a unique key that only fits in one lock, or that they stay that shape forever, never growing or changing. But neither is there a single product designer or content strategist or researcher archetype. The truth is somewhere in between, and where people fit exactly will change over time.

Which begs the question, how do we even know what a person’s shape is? How do we assess their strengths and weaknesses? Knowing each member of your team and where their talents lie is one of the most essential tasks of a UX manager. And I wish I had an easy answer for you. When interviewing candidates, this is one of the things you’re trying to discern: “Where would I put this person so they’d thrive and succeed?” Can you always do that accurately in a day of interviews? Of course not. But you look at their portfolio, do varied activities, have conversations, and talk to references. And you’ll likely be in the ballpark.

Once they’re on your team, there won’t be a single conversation or working session that clearly defines their strengths and weaknesses, either. But over time — through many one-on ones, pairing with them on their work, celebrating their successes, and helping them where they struggle — you will develop a clear picture. And of course, this is a two-way street. Once you’ve built a relationship based on trust, you can talk openly about these things. You can ask in a one-on-one: “What are you best at? What are your greatest strengths?” You can have honest conversations that become empowering, and help your report see themselves for all that they bring to the team.

All this balancing of differently shaped people sounds complicated. So why can’t you just find a bunch of perfect, well-rounded UX people on your team? Where are your mind-bending virtuosos? Here’s a secret of building great UX teams: you rarely ever get virtuosos. But thankfully, you don’t need them. You’re building a team. You need ensemble players, not soloists. Which means no individual will ever have everything you want, but the team… the team absolutely must. And the members of that team, more than anything, need to learn to play well together.

The shape of the team

Knowing that you never get the full skillset with any human, you need to balance the team skillset as much as you can, and have a set of people that work well together. Which means you’re looking to have a collection of individuals with spiky technical skill sets, and solid basic soft skills to help them work well with others (something I discuss in more depth in Understanding UX teams). You also need to house those awesome folks in a team culture that encourages and fosters collaboration.

A team of people at Shopify. Photo: Matthew Henry, Burst.

Skill balance

Let’s go back to our hypothetical Payments and Insights designers, and imagine we manage to hire one of each. Our Insights designer’s data visualization and UI skills are really strong. They can dream up and execute novel ways to bring information to life on the screen. They’ve never worked in the commerce world before, so they’re still growing their product context.

Our Payments designer, on the other hand, comes from an information architecture and human computer interaction background. They love following the many tendrils of user problems, tracking down requirements, unearthing dozens of use cases and user profiles, populating spreadsheets that feed into workflow diagrams, which ultimately result in small interface changes with big impact. They’ve spent a number of years working in the payments field. They get how tricky this world is, and know a lot of the common pitfalls to avoid.

This sounds ideal, right? Our two designers’ strengths are well matched to the needs of their roles. But life is rarely so simple, and though we may have a great 80/20 match on skills to role, that extra 20% can still get us in a lot of trouble.

Luckily people’s thoughts and ideas are not entirely trapped in their heads. As managers we can facilitate collaboration between complementary people on our teams. When our stronger visual designer struggles with an information architecture problem, we can point them to our stronger IA designer to pair with, and vice versa. Helping the team to identify these different individual strengths, and encouraging appropriate pairing and collaboration, is one of the manager’s roles. (More about this in the third part of this series, Developing UX Teams.)

Culture balance

A balanced team culture is the result of varied individuals with different approaches and perspectives, and some shared common beliefs. For instance, on my teams we have shared beliefs around the ideas of teaching, learning, and collaboration. But we have plenty of variation in personality, experiences, and approach within that culture. Let’s have a look at why that variance is useful.

We all love working with nice people that we can get along with, right? But if we only hire agreeable peace-makers, we’re at risk of drifting into passivity, complacency, and conflict aversion. We can create a team where everybody’s OK with what everyone else is suggesting, even when those suggestions are far from optimal. Peacemakers need some challengers in the mix to keep everyone on their toes, and chop up the ideation process a bit. Clearly the reverse of this situation (a big group of challengers disputing and questioning everything at every stage) would be equally unproductive.

Similarly, order and chaos need a good balance, and too much of either is going to be a problem. Michael Lopp describes this well in his article Stables and Volatiles. I’ve come back to this 2012 blog post again and again over the years, because I think it holds something valuable, and not necessarily intuitive. After grouping individuals on his teams into two categories, Stables and Volatiles, and talking about the benefits and challenges of each, he concludes:

“I believe a healthy company that wants to continue to grow and invent needs to equally invest in both their Stables and their Volatiles.”

“These factions will war because of their vastly different perspectives. Stables will feel like they’re endlessly babysitting and cleaning up Volatiles’ messes, while Volatiles will feel like the Stables’ lack of creativity and risk acceptance is holding back the company and innovation as a whole. Their perspectives, while divergent, are essential to a healthy business. Your exhausting and hopefully never-ending job as a [leader] is the constant negotiation of a temporary peace treaty between the factions.”

– Michael Lopp, Stables and Volatiles

This cultural balance is one of the many considerations you need to keep in mind as you consider the shape of the team, and how new individuals will influence that shape. Over time people will both join and leave your teams, and as a manager, you must work to find the right balance of people, and encourage a culture that allows those different perspectives and approaches to coexist, and compliment each other.

Something that’s been incredibly helpful with this at Shopify is the use of staff profiles where everyone can add their Meyers-Briggs and Enneagram types (full disclosure, I’m an ENFJ and a type 2). I’ve found the insight provided by Enneagram types, in particular, helps me communicate with different folks, while also building empathy for our differences. Not only that, but when I look at my org chart and see a big patch of nines or twos or eights, I know my team’s personality balance is likely going a bit lopsided. These things are all just shortcuts, of course, and people are far more than their profiles. But when time and resources are limited, as they always are, a shortcut can be a fine place to start.

Up next: part three, Developing UX teams.

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🇺🇸 in 🇨🇦. Sr UX Manager, Financial Solutions, Shopify. Director What Comes Next Is the Future; founder, Bearded. https://matt-griffin.com