Building a design team
Internal program, 2016 - 21
WHERE EVERYTHING STARTED
In 2016 Futurice opened a new office in Munich, a highly competitive location. The goal was to become profitable and successful in the southern German market and build a strong design team and culture to drive innovation and compete with strongly established agencies.
OUTCOME
After five years of adventure in managing role and design leader of the Munich office, the design team is strong, competent, and diverse as never before. The contribution to the success of the company has always been remarkable.
I have guided the growth of a team of up to 20 designers in Munich. The team expertise entails the entire service creation process: Strategy, Culture, and Business Design consulting, Service Design and Research, UX/UI Design.
I have established programs and a team structure to facilitate learnings in self-organised teams: different career paths allow for the team's growth in different directions and enable designers to grow as competent leaders.
CHALLENGES ALONG THE JOURNEY
“Nobody knows us in Munich. We have no design team and no design culture, period.”
When I joined Futurice, the Munich office was four desks in a co-working space. As a result, the company feeling, the design culture, and the team identity were completely missing. Moreover, the company name was unknown in town, which didn’t help the recruitment and growth of the design team. The types of projects and challenges we had to face as designers were extremely diverse and often unpredictable.
To address these challenges, I’ve decided to grow a flexible design team by hiring young designers with a broad spectrum of expertise (from service design to UX/UI). We organised inviting and inspiring events and presented our work publicly (conferences and web presence) to spread the company's visibility and convey the culture to attract new design talents.
“The team is getting bigger. How can we maintain our identity?“
With the growth of the team, the familiar feeling of a small group was fading. It became essential to bring more structure and rituals to keep the team aligned and live the same value.
We introduced weekly rituals to inspire, align and plan as a team the weekly design activities. In addition, we organised yearly offsites and larger meetings to reinforce the design culture on an office and company level. Finally, we established continuous programs aiming to empower our design team by growing new leaders and organising working groups that, in a self-organised way, drive innovation and learnings in the design team.
“Designers want to design, not to manage. So how can we enable growth for everybody?”
Often the nature of the projects and the team's needs pushes designers to grow their role as manager: leading teams, managing projects and driving business, with less focus on the design craft.
We have identified the need to diversify the career paths and allow talented designers to find opportunities and grow in different directions. We have defined an expert path for designers who wants to focus and develop their core design skills to become top-quality experts. Part of this role is the teaching responsibility to transfer the knowledge to more junior designers. The leader path is conceived for designers who want to grow their managerial skills by leading projects and teams, managing clients, and growing new business opportunities by bringing the design mindset and experience.
These separate paths provided more growth opportunities to the team and lead to the retention of great talents.
“I don’t like this project. Give me something that fits better my skills.”
The complexity and type of challenges we face do not always respond to the learnings and impact our designers would like to have.
Therefore, we have decided to approach this challenge collaboratively by involving the design team in shaping the company strategy.
Designers have actively launched new business initiatives (Health theme, Accessibility initiative) and developing tools/methods (LSC, Connected Health Kit). In this way, they are contributing to drive the business in the preferred directions. Each program is supported by the leadership and has ownership of the topic. At the same time, each initiative has the responsibility to create value to continue and grow its activities. In this way, we have developed an entrepreneurial mindset in our design team, boosted personal growth, and engaged our designers with interesting challenges.
MY ROLE
Design leadership
Leading design teams inside and outside projects. Ensuring design quality in different phases of the creative process (research, concerting, UX/UI, prototyping, testing, documentation, etc.).
Growing a new design leadership and coaching senior designers in their growth (taking over more responsibilities until full project ownership).
Defining internal growth programs for designers.
Building internal design capabilities
Defining the hiring strategy and expertise needed. Managing hiring costs.
Setting up the Futurice design team and managing the staffing process (rotation, team scaling).
Interviewing designer candidates and scale the design team.
Coaching and mentoring designers in their career growth.