Developing people and creating career paths for individual contributors

Crafting an individual contributor career path involves a tailored approach emphasizing leveraging and developing individuals’ strengths. This dynamic paradigm’s alignment with global, industry, and business requirements is pivotal. Rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all model, the emphasis is on carving out space for each individual to cultivate and excel in what they do best. The approach fosters a finely tuned workforce to meet global and industry standards and enhances overall organizational effectiveness by allowing each contributor to shine in their unique strengths.

Team Norming

Aligning a team is challenging, especially as the team grows. This template and morning activity serve as a valuable tool for initiating team formation and onboarding new members effectively. Recognizing the significance of a unified start, this approach provides a structured yet flexible foundation for team members to collaborate harmoniously. Whether forming a new team or integrating new members into an existing one, the morning activity fosters cohesion and sets the tone for productive collaboration.

Creative Recharge

A “Creative Recharge Day” is an essential initiative recognizing that creatives, like everyone else, require dedicated time to rejuvenate. It’s a deliberate effort to carve out space for mental health focus within the team. By providing this day, it acknowledges the universal need for periodic rejuvenation and underscores the team’s commitment to the well-being of its members. Discovering how to leverage and implement such days effectively can be instrumental in fostering a healthier, more energized, and ultimately more productive team.

Research Ops

Democratizing user research is a controversial word. Undoubtedly, there is a tremendous benefit to establishing a user research team. But sometimes companies do not have the headcount, so we need to provide a platform, a process, and training for designers to run research. In this case study, we dive into how to establish ResearchOps practice to help the design team.

Identify platform
Training
Build template
Building panels

Tools are for people (DevOps conference talk)

Design team members often expressed dissatisfaction with Jira, initially designed for engineering teams. While documenting design progress posed challenges, aligning with cross-functional teams necessitates using the company-wide project management tool. This case study showcases our process evolution, detailing incremental changes in Jira to effectively track and manage design team progress.

(A talk at DevOps conference)

Hiring is match-making

Navigating the intricate terrain of hiring, especially for creative roles, is often a time-consuming endeavor marked by multiple interview rounds, including one-on-one discussions, group presentations, and whiteboarding challenges. Recognizing the inherent challenges in this process, our group diligently designed an approach that not only prioritizes the candidate experience but also considers the valuable time commitment required from our team members. In our quest for a streamlined and effective hiring process, we aim to balance the thorough evaluation of candidates with a respectful consideration of everyone involved.