When I joined the Develop UX team, the team had gone through a lot of change and faced with several back-to-back quarters of tight timelines, missed deadlines, and product direction pivots. A side effect of this was the team had drifted away from even the most basic rituals like design critiques, and shared team time.
I spent my first month or so evaluating the state of the UX team’s practices and rituals, talking to team members about what they’re missing, and getting a sense of where the team could benefit from introducing new processes and reviving old ones that seemed to work.
Weekly Critique
Though standard on most design teams, DevUX had not done regular crits since almost 8 months. The team relied on 1:1 conversations and team slack channels to get feedback.
I reintroduced and facilitated the team’s design critiques. Starting with bi-weekly, and through surveys and gathering feedback from the team, I iterated on the format and duration, reminders mechanisms, and feedback capturing to finally land on a weekly cadence that saw 100% attendance with at least 1 presenter and high engagement from others giving feedback, asking questions, and often following up after.
Bi-weekly roundups
As I worked to understand the gaps and concerns of the teams, I saw a recurring theme in my conversations about lack of clarity as to where certain projects are in the lifecycle. Team members would either have to go out of their way to get updates from their peers on ongoing projects and often hesitated to “bother” them with their curiosity, or sometimes only find out about projects after they were shipped.
I introduced design roundups to help folks share what’s been top of mind for them, do it in under 90 seconds to keep it brief, and use that as a jumping off point for collaboration or offering feedback async.
Staffing Plans & Bandwidth Management
The DevUX team leaned heavily on the high end of senior to staff level of IC which meant everyone was very good at saying yes and trying to manage competing priorities. While this was the default mode for folks for the better part of a year before I got there, ICs had started to get worn down by the ever-expanding list of projects, not having enough time to work on projects that helped their career goals, and sometimes lacking clear deadlines that would take up their time.
What started out as a document for myself to manage upcoming projects and keep track of my directs’ bandwidth with ongoing projects eventually became a team-wide shared sheet that mapped each individual’s projects to the org goals, aligned with shipping cycles, and a tool to escalate blocked projects.
Team health
Shopify regularly administered Pulse surveys to maintain a strong understanding of team health, well-being, and perception of processes and performance of the shipping cycles. I was responsible for evaluating our team’s results, identifying gaps, and addressing them with process changes.
DevelopUX struggled with a few areas spread across 3 key axes:
How we ship (processes, quality, decision making)
Opportunities for career growth
Belonging & social engagement
I facilitated workshops with the team and had 1:1 conversations to better understand the root cause of the results and introduced new elements into our team’s operating rhythm like
A new process for how we ship UX that added new checkpoints for blocked projects
Democratizing the staffing doc to expose upcoming opportunities and keep track of bandwidth so ICs could spot projects that help with career growth or make time for professional development
Casual drop-in coffee chats twice a week and monthly team hangouts with planned activities
