Background

In 2017 I started out as a design leader responsible for the Com Hem e-commerce and Play team containing of 8 designers. A few years later Com Hem and Tele2 merged their businesses, to be a full service telecom company. As an effect of that came the decision to centralise many functions. Since there were 2 different design teams back then, we needed to become a central team. I got the opportunity to manage the team and lead the transformation, going from 8 to 16 people overnight adding Tele2 and Comviq to the portfolio.

Challenges

• Build trust to new designers, and find new role for the former manager

• Create an organisational structure, clarify roles and expectations.

• Build culture and an inspiring vision.

• Implement human centered design to work with agile development.

My plan

• Team assessment

• Create structure for key activities

• Identify strategic focus areas to work on
  
  

Team assessment

After assessing the team in 1-1 conversations I got a picture on how to organise and create roles for the team of 16 designers.

I created a design leadership team with me as a team leader, one design manager and one creative leader. Rest of the team had a smooth setup with 3 product designers per product area (4 in total) and they worked closely to developers, product owners and other stakeholders. The last person was a UX researcher who helped out in user testing and other research related areas.

Structure for key activities

Since 75% of the team worked really close to their development teams, I added only critical activities like: weekly design reviews, bi-weekly department meetings, lunch and learn sessions and quarterly retro’s.

Most important from a work process perspective was the User Test Tuesdays. From a culture perspective the design studio sessions on Wednesday afternoons where important and an opportunity for people to collaborate with other designers to get fresh perspectives.

Strategic focus areas

Together in the design leadership team we focused on how we could improve creativity, process, tools, culture, skills growth and make the company more design driven. We planned things on operations level as well as where an how to make kickoffs and similar activities.

VISION

Inspired by the McKinsey report on design maturity levels and how that could effect business value, we focused our first team kickoff on assessing where we were and where we wanted to be as a team in the future.

CULTURE

The design studio was a physical space in the middle of an open space with tv screens, sofas and other furnitures than the rest of the office. It invited to collaboration and had a lot of walls to put up sketches to be transparent with the design ideas in the making but also a space to make it more relaxed to hang out. We used the space to perform design reviews and presentations.

PROCESS

My ambition was to combine human centred design with agile development, inspired by Marty Cagans iterative Discovery and Delivery process. A key step for that was to bring in regular user testing, since I had great experience of that before. The former Tele2 team was not used to that, so there was some job in setting up the structure and teaching designers on plan and perform the tests. The UX researcher participated in all tests facilitating either the test and/or debriefing with light documentation of the test results.

CREATIVITY

Our lunch and learn sessions helped inspire the team. On a more daily basis I shared the responsibility with our Principal Design Lead, where I focused on the Play team and let go of E-commerce. In practical terms we did sign offs and coached designers to create even better work.

OPERATIONS

The design manager helped everyone in the team with planning work in meetings and slicing scopes. She was also responsible for assessing our tools and structure. This resulted in a switch from tools like Sketch, Abstract, Invision and Dropbox into Figma and OneDrive (since Tele2 uses Microsoft tools overall). We built new UI-kits from scratch in Figma for all product areas using symbol libraries inspired by Atomic design structure.

SKILLS GROWTH

My main focus soon became strategy and staffing and how we could grow the skills of the designers in the team. I used a tool called Progression to assess the skills of everyone in the team and to clarify expectations even more in the different design roles. I introduced a dual track designer career model to clarify ways to grow as a designer over time at Tele2.

Organisation down scaling

Due to the Covid situation we needed to down scale the team. My job was to reduce the team to 12 people. This was really hard since my vision was to grow the team, but also on a personal level, since we all had a strong connection and trust. To make the challenge even harder, the amount of work and product areas (4) was still the same. I had no other option than to reduce central functions such as user research and the leadership team members. Left was me and 12 hands on product designers.

This worked surprising well from a operational perspective, the only thing missing was someone responsible for the holistic experience. 6 months later I tweaked the setup to make one of the designers in each product area to a lead designer, to solve this.

Reflection

THE GOOD STUFF

My manager gave me this chance to lead a larger team, which was a step in the right direction, since I believe design should be an own unit in the organisation. I learned a lot as a leader from the designers in the team and the feedback sessions we had over time. It was fun to realise I could make things happen in my new role as a manager. My background as a designer helped me a lot to get credibility as a leader and helping designers grow through honest and constructive conversations. I have matured as a leader and learned how to become a better listener and to let others speak first.

THE BAD STUFF

There were some tough situations when we merged the team and some conflicts that I needed to handle, which is part of management, but I wasn’t really prepared for that. I learned that the hard way through really bad reviews as a manager in the beginning in our yearly surveys. The cool thing though is that I managed to turn that around a year later and was among the top rated managers in the whole company. We worked together as a team to improve this, with feedback sessions and clarification for my expectations on roles and behaviours within the team.