[TMA] The Design Executive's Starter Checklist

In my practice, my watchword is 'effectiveness.' Though perhaps not sexy, it's crucial to success in design. It's why we wrote an entire chapter on The 12 Qualities of Effective Design Organizations.

Reflecting on my past 5+ years of independent consulting, one project comes to mind as a kind of pinnacle for me. A ~7-month gig where I partnered with a new VP of UX who inherited an understaffed, underappreciated, and disempowered team.

Embarking on the work, we had no set plan, just a mandate to improve the organization in any and every way, and C-suite commitment for reasonable staffing levels. When my work was finished, I looked back on what we did, and realized it could serve as a kind of checklist for any design executive / head of design as they establish their new or inherited design org.

What follows is a lot. Especially to tackle in your first 6 months or so. That said, you need to make progress across all of it, or you'll find yourself struggling to keep up later. (And... if you'd like help with any of these, don't hesitate to reach out!)

Org Design

Being me, it all begins with org design. These are roughly in order, and all are worth addressing in the first 6 months of the job.

• Design Org Health Assessment
  Organizational Health is a way to understand your team's collective mindset, their morale and engagement. A combination of survey and follow-up discussions will reveal which parts of the org are 'sick' and need attention.
• Crafting a Team Charter
  Defining your Design Org, it's purpose, what it stands for, and it's norms
• Establish Quality Standards
  A robust framework for being able to clearly define what "good" means across your organization. Importantly includes how you connect the work of design to delivering what the business values, and how to run critique.
• Shape Your Design Org 
  Where you make decisions about decentralized, centralized, and hybrid structures, and how you group and define the teams within. (You can get a taste of this in the Emerging Shape of Design Organizations.)
• Flexible and Robust Career Frameworks 
  AKA "career ladders," but they can be so much more. You staff seeks clarity in how they can grow as professionals. This masterclass description unpacks their core elements.
• Effective Recruiting and Hiring Process
  Doing this well is way more involved than people realize: leveraging the career framework; writing the job description; assembling the interview panel; guiding the panel on how best to engage the candidate; creating rubrics to for fair assessment; and more. This level of effort is required to ensure quality fits make it through the process.

Design Management / Running the Design Org

In addition to the foundational organization design work, there are leadership and management practices to embrace at the outset. The following draws from the first steps in the UX/Design Leadership Demystified masterclass, with some augments.

• Understand Your Context
  Navigating executive spaces means you're not just 'leading design,' but helping run the company. This requires industry knowledge, market knowledge, awareness of technology, subject matter expertise of your product, understanding your customers, the core business model, and the broader organizational structure. Closer in, understand the implications of where your team is situated, what are the standard ways of working, what expectations others have of your team.
• Map Your Relationship Ecosystem
  Who are the people who have most influence on your ability to succeed? Chart them, and understand their motivations so you know how to best engage them.
• Articulate Your Agenda
  Every leader must have a point of view of the change they seek.
• Craft Your Leadership Plan
  With that Agenda in place, figure out how you will execute against it.
• Assess Your Leadership Team
  I'm an advocate of Lencioni's 5 Dysfunctions of a Team as a way to identify what's working and what can be improved within a leadership team.
• Shape an Initial Communication Strategy
  Aligned with your Agenda, every leader should approach their new role with a set of top talking points that they stress when given the chance. When I joined Groupon, I wouldn't shut up about customer journeys and user-centricity. At Chase, I saw Kaaren Hanson go far with her messaging about the Double Diamond.

...And, that's about it... For the first 6-to-9 months. Again, if you're seeking help getting through it, I'd love to talk to you about it.

Design Leadership Demystified Cohort Course - Last call!

This is my last call for my Design Leadership Demystified cohort course, which officially starts May 26th (though, you can start engaging with the material as early as May 22). Last week I presented a 15-minute "Lightning Lesson" drawn from the course, providing a taste of what we'll dig into over the two weeks.

I also suspect many don't understand how cohort courses work, so here's my take. While two weeks sounds like a big commitment, this course is structured to fit within a busy work life. All lessons are pre-recorded: 3 hours of video to be viewed when it's most convenient for you. The allows students to get the most out of two 90-minute live sessions: in-depth dialogue on the lessons and project work.

Live sessions are timed to work across 🇺🇸US, 🇬🇧UK, and 🇪🇺Europe—8am Pacific, 4pm UK, 17.00 CET. And if you cannot make one, it will be recorded, so you can still benefit from the conversation.

Also, Maven features a Slack-like discussion board to support conversations throughout our time together (and when it's convenient for you... sense a theme?).

If you're interest, enroll with this link (and get 10% off the full price).