Building teams

Building and scaling a design team can be hard at the best of times. I’ve build teams at both WorldFist, Charlotte Tilbury and MachineMax, growing not only the man power, but also defining the place of UX within the business, the ways of working, and introducing research as a key part of the process. This combined with a clear focus on team and individual career development led to two highly effective design teams, set for success.

I’ll share the journey I went through at WorldFirst as the transformation during my time there was far beyond what I anticipated and my work during this time at WorldFirst saw me nominated for Top50TechWomen.

A Brief history

I joined WorldFirst as employee number 120 (ish) and by the time I left, we were over 600. Dramatic growth in a 2 year period, lots of change and a huge big shift in focus with a lot of attention on product and experience design. I joined as the first and only UX’er, the key focus highlighted to me as being an improvement to the marketing website and registration process. It’s worth saying here that there was no intent to scale a UX team, instead it was seen as a marketing function to get more people to convert at the very beginning of the funnel. Soon after getting my feet under the table, I realised how much of our operating systems and customer facing platforms were built in house… everything! Given this golden opportunity of having in house developers being in control of all of our digital products and the execution of all our experience, I found my new best friends and started to plant the seeds of UX at every opportunity.

How did the team form?

It wasn’t until I understood the scale of the digital product suite at WorldFirst that I could start to solve the problems. Volunteering my support and advice to engineers and stakeholders gave me the perfect opportunity to run a proof of concept to share the impact of proper research and design on the performance of product. New collaborative ways of working, thinking about problem solving rather than solution finding, and actually talking to our clients, got people from all over the business engaged and shouting out for more.

This was the perfect time to business case for more of me. The initial approach was to look at the riskiest assumptions at play across the business, understand the scale of these, and do a bit of resource planning to understand growth rate of the team. If my proposed team could validate assumptions and show value on a small scale then we would be set to grow in the future.

The initial business case looked at recruiting 1 researcher and 1 designer. If we were going to do this properly, we needed to make sure we knew our customer back to front and could continuously validate design decisions to reduce the level of risk. During the recruitment phase, my focus was on setting the team up for success so they could hit the ground running. Outlining the best ways of working based on my experience from the proof of concept, understanding the full customer journey for both clients and internal users, understanding our customer types and starting to build a customer panel, and getting the tool to enable design and prototyping.

As I finished recruitment for my team, the company hired a Head of Product. With this, the intent was set to grow a team of product managers and adapt our current way of working, moving more towards a squad formation.

With this restructure, I transition the UX team from Marketing, into Tech and started to look at the next steps for scaling the UX team. I phased the growth over an 18month period, ensuring alignment with existing roadmaps, a new focus on China , and the expansion of the Product team.

Where did the team end up?

3 UX Designers and 1 UX researcher later, we had a UX professional sitting in every customer squad. Whilst we had the customer facing applications covered, I was focusing my attention on the back end systems and initiating part of a larger tech transformation project and how experience could impact decisions and direction. With this, recruitment for a 4th UX designer to join the team was approved. The team as I left it was a highly functioning customer centric product design team. Owning the discovery process, design, testing and iterations. Focused on pushing forward the right success metrics, and continuously showing value fed the fire for greater investment on a global scale for UX and the tools and capabilities required to continue building out this global strategic and operational arm of the business.