DesignOps at Cisco Umbrella: Team
By: Claudia Love
Tags: UX, Designops, User Experience, Ux Leadership

Team Overview

I lead a team of product designers distributed across San Francisco, Vancouver, and London. We have a mix of principal designers, senior designers, and junior to intermediate designers. They all have been with the company for at least a year and they all work in the same product.

We have a hybrid structure: there is the central design team that we all belong to, but at the same time each team member is assigned to one or two feature teams. Feature teams consist of a group of engineers, a product manager, and a designer.

I report to the Director of UX who at the same time reports to the Head of Product, so UX is part of the Product organization.

DesignOps and People Management

I haven’t really changed my approach to people leadership since I transitioned from a “regular” product design manager to a DesignOps-focused role. I read somewhere that DesignOps is an evolution of design management and I couldn’t agree more. All I did was to become more intentional about things like the hiring process, career path development, team rituals, and measuring engagement.

Hiring

I started by documenting and standardizing our hiring process, which consists of 4 steps:

Phone screen with recruiter Portfolio review with the hiring manager and a senior team member Design challenge On-site design challenge presentation and cross-functional one-on-one interviews

After a candidate completes the process, I send out a questionnaire to each interviewer to collect feedback. If there are conflicting opinions, I schedule a follow-up meeting with all interviewers to discuss. Everyone involved in the process has a voice, but at the end of the day, the hiring manager makes the decision on whether to make an offer or not.

The profile that we look for as far as skills is someone with a strong foundation in interaction design that is also comfortable doing basic UX research and a solid command of visual design. Coding chops are a big plus.

Culture-wise, I like to consider culture fit and culture add. A good culture fit is someone who shares our same values and the passion for what we do. A good culture add is someone that has a different background and consequently brings something new and interesting to the team.

Career Path

The career path was discussed and formalized with the UX leadership team. We all agreed that designers should have the ability to choose between a technical leadership path (Design Lead) or a people management path (Design Manager) once they reach a senior level.

I go deeper into this topic in another post: UX Career Path: Manager or Individual Contributor.

Team Rituals

Given our hybrid structure and the fact that all designers are working on different part of the same product, regular team check-ins are critical. We start the week with a 15-minute standup on Monday mornings and we have our “show and tell” meeting on Wednesdays where everyone gets a chance to present the work they are doing and get feedback from their peers.

Every month we have a team retro where we discuss what’s gone well and what could’ve gone better. We also use that meeting to discuss house-keeping items and get a pulse on how the team is feeling about our rituals.

Messaging apps are a big part of our efforts to stay in touch with each other — we have a very strong emoji and gif game.

Last but not least, I meet one-on-one on weekly basis with each team member. I let them set the agenda — sometimes we review designs, sometimes we talk about work and sometimes we chat about random topics that have nothing to do with work.

Measuring Engagement

There is an internal tool that we use to send engagement surveys and give team members the ability to “check in” with their managers on a weekly basis. During check-ins, they type down what they loved, what they loathed, and what they need as well as their priorities for the week. Some folks prefer to discuss that during their one-on-one meetings with me so they find the tool redundant, while others like to write it down and find it helpful, so we make it optional.

Everything Else

Creating some structure and operationalizing important aspects of team management is certainly beneficial, but at the end of the day, it’s the spontaneous interactions that build the sense of team and culture: joking on the chat tool, grabbing a drink after work, an impromptu lunch, or a birthday card. As a manager, I see it as a critical part of my mission to create the opportunities for these interactions to occur.