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Team Management
Indeed Hire, Indeed
Austin, TX / Remote
For the last four years, I have served as a UX manager. I directly managed UX and Content Designers while also supporting UX Research and Design Engineering as a "dotted line" manager and the person in charge of maintaining team ceremonies and health.
Most recently, I worked at Indeed for six years where I led a team of up to 8 remote, distributed designers (UX and Content Designers) on Indeed Hire, a recruiting agency within Indeed. This UX team was responsible for supporting 7 product teams spanning all client-, job seeker-, and recruiter-facing surfaces including web apps, emails, and SMS.
During this time, I grew the functional team from 2 to 10 UX practitioners and successfully coached and promoted 3 designers.
A few of the practices that I have found beneficial for team management include:
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Transparent capacity planning
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Clear deliverable definitions
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Encouraging feedback early and often through UX critique sessions
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Facilitating weekly connection with the recruiting team (our users)
Transparent capacity planning
A key part of both product planning and team management is being able to estimate how much time a project will require to complete. Estimates should always be taken with a grain, or maybe a heap, of salt, as complexities can creep up when you least expect them. Still, it is critical for a design and product team to make tradeoffs and prioritize the level of UX involvement in their various initiatives.
The image above is a sanitized example of a capacity planning spreadsheet that I have used to help teams gauge capacity, analyze workloads, and facilitate transparent conversations and negotiations around quarterly commitments.
Additionally, this practice helps to identify areas of under- or over-utilization so you can make adjustments to optimize both team and product health.
Clear deliverable definitions
My team gained a new Product Director and several new Product Managers, and, with this, came the need to codify a shared understanding of different types of experimentation along with the costs and requirements that come with each.
Some tests may be quick and scrappy to elicit feedback on a hypothesis while others are monumental investments, and there is a spectrum of potential experiments (or releases) in between. To provide guidance, I worked with our Product and Engineering Directors to create a “product maturity matrix” with expectations of rigor for all functions (product, engineering, and UX, as well as UX Dev or accessibility requirements and data capture requirements) across four experiment types: proof-of-concept, alpha, beta, and general availability.
Encouraging feedback early and often through UX critique sessions
Critique is fantastic tool in the arsenal of design practices as it is one of the quickest and cheapest ways to improve design quality.
One of the ceremonies that I facilitate for design teams is a weekly or otherwise regularly scheduled UX critique session where all UX disciplines are invited to participate. At Indeed, this meant the entire UX team (UX Designers, UX Researchers, Content Designers, and Design Engineers) gathering to share work-in-progress and offer each other feedback.
I adapted this practice over time and with input from the team. The latest iteration was a weekly critique session with two rotating presenter slots and one open slot for anyone in need of immediate support. This schedule also blocked off some weeks in advance to give the team adequate time for things like quarterly planning and evaluations.
Critique harnesses the collective knowledge of the team. It builds connection, which can improve team dynamics, and it can ultimately save a business time and money.
Facilitating weekly connection with the recruiting team (our users)
One of the most unique aspects of my job at Indeed was the proximity of our core users: our team of internal Indeed Hire recruiters. On Indeed Hire, the product team worked to better enable Indeed recruiters to make hires on behalf of employers. Since these users were internal Indeed employees, we benefited from much greater access to our users than is typical.
In "the before times," a Hire UX Researcher invited the UX and recruiting team to an in-person "Coffee Talk." Invitees were encouraged to grab a coffee from the office barista, sit in a conference room, and engage in a casual chat. Recruiters often mentioned bugs, challenges they faced in their workflows, and sometimes their own design ideas for how to improve a given experience. UXers often brought questions for the recruiting team, topics for discussion, or work-in-progress in the hopes of getting feedback.
When I became the UX Manager for Indeed Hire UX, I took over the facilitation of Coffee Talk. I partnered with the recruiting team leadership to adapt the meeting over the years as our team (and business) scaled and it made sense to do things like focus in on particular segments of recruiters. Over time, we adopted a semi-structured format to accommodate the growing interest from Product Managers and Engineers. In fact, one of the challenges of managing Coffee Talk was attempting to limit who could attend because so many people enjoyed it and wanted to be a part of the conversation.
These weekly connections not only benefited the product teams but the recruiting teams benefited as well from an increased awareness of UX principles and the inner workings of product development. Two recruiters were so impacted by these interactions that they pursued their own paths into UX and eventually were offered full time roles as a UX Researcher and Product Manager.
What started as a coffee break became a tradition that reinforced our commitment to user-centric design.
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