I participated in a podcast with Christian Vasile to talk about Deel, Design and everything in between.
Design by Deel
Read the interview I did with Tom Scott on his substack
Designing up podcast
ECOM Design conference 23′ – Editing commerce
UX Live 22′ – Connecting to others
How we Shape up our product process at iwoca
Recently, I talked at the Fintech Design Summit about a new way of working we have in the User Journeys team at iwoca. In the past, we worked in Agile — now, we’re using the Shape Up methodology (by Basecamp).
Here’s our team mission statement:
Helping customers by building an engaging, personal and creative experience for them — with a focus on impact.
When deciding on a process, there are always tradeoffs, but we’ve found ways to balance the tradeoffs we weren’t happy with.
We’re happy with replacing flexibility (we’ve changed priorities and now this is the big focus) with deep thought (if it’s that important, let’s work on a pitch for this, size it and make sure it’s well thought through).
We’ve covered the urgent things that come up (like bugs) using our ‘A-Team’, who cover projects like these for two weeks at a time.
🤓 Check out the slides
More in the talk 👆
The Shredder framework
The Shredder is a method I’ve developed to try to unravel strategies whether they are for companies or products. The process of understanding requires gathering information and information in the world can appear in many different formats, it’s almost like going through a company’s shredded confidential paper bin and trying to connect it.
The Shredder can help you:
Understand your own company – Let’s face it, most of the employees in most companies don’t understand the company’s strategy, and are trying to suggest things that seem to be randomly accepted by management. Using The Shredder you’d be able to understand decisions better.
Be clear about your own strategy – If you work in a startup or any fast pace situation you might not have a strategy and are developing it gradually whereas your employees are thirsty for clarity. The Shredder will help them give you feedback, and together you’d be able to identify actions and lead them towards a tactic (the series of actions you do instinctively). From there it’ll be logical to measure what worked and develop that into a strategy.
Understand other companies’ strategies and anticipate their future actions – No one works in ether, we all have competition and we all need to understand where they are at and where they are going. The Shredder would allow you to understand your competitors’s strategy better and identify what worked for them and why.
The Shredder helps people identify the pieces and figure out how to connect them. This isn’t an exact science and you’ll create informed theories, but as time progresses you will be able to improve your accuracy of predictions, and in any way, this is a great way to get a team up to date with a situation in a company or another and align between people.
The Why
The Shredder session is a strategic analysis framework I created a long time ago and in this constellation, it was catered to help our newly born product function at iwoca to learn how to think strategically by analyzing competitors. Analyzing other companies is essential for self-improvement and is a muscle that when used right can yield massive improvements in how we approach product development.
In preparation for a Shredder session, you select a company or a product to focus on. The participants will get specific homework in preparation for the session. The homework will include researching the company and documenting it in a very specific way that will later on feed into the overall framework. This is plainly healthy meeting culture, set agenda and come prepared. The company that we choose isn’t necessarily competition, but rather a company we can learn from. At times we will focus on public companies which allows us to get more pieces of information together. In the end it’s about the construct of the people in the room and the area we want to explore. The parameters I consider when preparing for a session is how macro is the thing we are shredding in relation to the time we have.
No matter what role you do in the product team it’s always good to escape from the day-to-day product activities to look at other products, different user needs, doubting things and asking the five whys – to get to the source of actions, and ways of operating. A strategy is an organization’s set of choices of what to do and what not to do. Exploring these leads to tradeoffs that we want to find and take advantage of.
Framework
The metaphor I want to use for The Shredder session is of a tree (sapling). Even though what we find at the end are shredded pieces of information they all come from the tree. During the session, we are trying to understand and map the company as a life form. Essentially we are doing reverse engineering, therefore we can’t start naturally from the trunk. In fact, we will start with everything but the truck in order to find out how it looks and what flows inside.
The company’s world / parts
Reproduction [visible]
Fruits – These are the product that the company launched. They can be either fertile or premature. Inside the fruits, there are seeds that breed more trees. This is what companies sell.
Flowers – pre fruit are pollination mechanisms and can be investors, customers, API endpoints, partners. This is how companies have sex with others.
Collection [visible]
Leaves – Every successful meeting or relationship creates leaves. This is how people photosynthesise from one another on the way to the products that are built.
Branches – These are the paths that teams take to breed products. Not all paths lead to successful products, some just to leaves or nothing. Sometimes companies need to cut branches to focus on core products.
Base [invisible]
Trunk and what’s inside – This is the strategy and how teams function internally. It’s all hidden inside a thick layer of protection and even if you cut through it it’s hard to understand exactly how things really work inside. The only way to do that is to penetrate which is illegal.
Roots – These are the founders, the c-suite, the team and how they are orchestrated to feed into the strategy and the company goals.
Effectors [visible]
These are a sum of external things that affect the growth of the tree.
Eaters – The tree can feed a lot of things, but this refers to customers across their types.
Fertilizers – investors, partners.
Parasites/Insects – These are life-sucking creatures that feed on the company but don’t contribute to its growth.
Soil – This is where the company seats in terms of industry, addressable market etc.
Weather – These are a set of conditions that allows the company to grow, from regulation (air), to how other companies operate (water), hype (sun).
Notice I labeled what is visible and what isn’t. Everything that is visible is out for grabs and can be researched and utilized in our path towards understanding a company’s strategy.
The process
In order to shred a company, we first gather information through different lenses, by different disciplines of people. This happens in the homework phase, but even more when we lay it all out in the open and people look at it through different lenses. When we conduct sessions, we’ll bring product managers, analysts, designers, developers, etc. This allows us to break down a company or a product into the smallest bits. It’s similar to mimicking their org inside our room. Breaking their organization down to these pieces allows us to estimate where they invest and where they need to improve.
Information top & bottom
This is where we look at anything we can find out in the world. It’s also plausible to call and ask the company different things if these types of methods are up in hand. In this section we will use tools to analyse org charts, to see investments and growth of team etc.
Theorising distribution / Make connections
Based on the fruits and roots, we can theorise how the branches look like and what connects to what. We essentially categorise and are searching for where we see coherent streams of investment. We cross-match what we gathered in order to produce a set of assumptions and look for validation.
Think of it as a detective trying to figure out a crime. A detective would construct a picture and look for proof to support their theory. However, unlike a detective we’re working as a group which allows us to look at a situation from different angles. What we end up with is a lot of information and some possible theories. Even though we conduct the session once in a sprint or in parts, it is still valuable to update and look at a company again once in a while, especially if we see that something interesting and new is happening there. Then, we can follow and keep building up in the future while we keep collecting and validating.
Match to known flows and identifying dependencies
After scoping and breaking down an organization top to bottom, it’s always good to switch lens and look at it horizontally across services, customer needs, pain points, and flows. Changing this lens allows us to see gaps in a different way, map value chains and see where there are dependencies internally and externally. Looking at these stream allows us to see where the branches connect to the trunk and can help us see where they don’t connect and how that tension affects the tree.
Finding impermants and leakages
There will always be things we cannot connect, or explain. It is important to highlight them and single them out as anomalies. This section can teach us a lot about motivations inside the company and things that don’t work well or are perhaps about to change. These are essentially seeds or branches with weird growth trajectories.
Strategy
This is where we try to figure out what decisions were made and why. Moreover, this is where we try to understand what they can and can’t do based on their strategy. There are reasons why branches grow the way they grow. They are related to different external conditions but mostly to how resources are distributed from the roots.
Where do they go next?
Looking at their strategy, what’s out there and where the market is (which is a different story) we can start scoping where we think they can go to next. This helps us inform our own strategy and update it based on movements in the market.
Summary
Companies are live organizations that need steering and have a planned growth trajectory. The parameters that affect the growth are derived from leadership, strategy and how the market reacts to them. In order to analyze and inform our own strategy we shred other companies in a session, looking through different lenses to see as much of the picture as possible. The end result of the shredder is a map of a company in the form of a tree. We start with a question mark in the middle and end with a few assumptions to validate. Even though we will never know exactly what happens in other companies, we use time to tell us if we were right and we act based on facts and information we gathered.
This article is a part of a series of articles about Shredder which will dive down into the details of each session and tell you how to do it in your company.
How we categorize our work
What’s this document?
This is as a framework for categorizing our tasks. Hopefully, it should make it easier to reflect on your past projects and better prioritize your future ones. Each bucket comes with an ideal process, level of engagement and type of communication.
My team includes Graphic Design, Research, and Product Design and therefore everything that is written here is related to all of them. I will refer to all of them as Design.
Why do I need to read it?
As designers and researchers, it’s tempting for us to just do what we’re asked to do. But those tasks aren’t always the best place for us to prioritize our time and effort. We should always think: ‘is there something more useful I should do now?’ – including coming up with our own projects.
All of these buckets – even the lowest-priority ones – should include space for reflection, though: time to prepare at the start, evaluate as you go and reflect at the end.
So what are the buckets?
- Urgent – just do it – well.
- Support – plan, and execute with full attention.
- Lead – own the project and use others to take it from zero to one.
- Self serve – help others do a great job.
- Overlook – empower others to take full responsibility.
- Wrong to do – don’t do it, and flag if others do.
Finding the right bucket
To be able to decide where your projects and tasks land, it might be useful to ask yourself:
- Who’s the best person to do this? What kind of support will they need?
- How can a growth mindset help make this project scalable and repeatable?
- What happens if it doesn’t get done (impact, effects, risks)?
- What role do I need and want to take in this project?
#1: Urgent
Planned or unplanned, these are the jobs we have to do swiftly – to the highest standard possible.
It’s normally something that has a big impact on an important metric we track, or something with a reputational risk (company or personal).
Before you start:
Either we have an amazing opportunity or something went wrong. Find out what and why.
As you go:
Do it now, do it well. Talk to anyone you need continuously and chase people furiously to execute this properly.
When you’re finished:
Summarise the project, and get feedback – is the urgency over? Was the result good?
Do a retro if needed.
#2: Support
Roadmap, prioritize, plan and execute with precision.
These are strategic projects done by agencies, freelancers or our in-house team. Normally they’re big impact and well thought out.
Before you start:
Preparation is key. These projects cost a lot of time and money, so they need to be successful and measurable.
Set a deadline (and agree on it with the team). Make sure any risks or delays are highlighted in the brief and decide who’s accountable for mitigating each of them.
As you go:
Meet once a week with the team, project owner or involved stakeholders. Meet at least once every two weeks with the direct manager. And at least once a month, update the boss’ boss (or even the rest of the company).
Actively ask for feedback, and communicate delays as they happen. If something looks wrong, help your team refocus, revisit the brief – help them keep their eyes on the ball.
Be flexible enough to change if you need to, but document why and what the impact is.
When you’re finished:
Make sure you have a retro and get a feedback form to make sure we delivered a valuable service.
#3: Lead
Projects that drive business impact: something that’s uniquely in the design and research team’s skill set.
Only we can (or should) do these projects, so we should lead them. They have a high impact either on business or culture, and sometimes your manager will have asked you to take care of it. Even if you’re a manager yourself, sometimes you’re the best person for the job: you should know which projects these are and own them.
Before you start:
- keep a backlog of projects like this
We won’t be able to prioritize all of them, but we should record them. If none of them ever happen, we know something’s going wrong: these are the projects that are best for self-improvement even though their impact is much more than that. If you’re stuck in a rut, you’ll stop doing your best work, so a project like this can lift you out. - get inspired
How do others do this sort of work? Use that to guide your planning; these tasks call for fresh thinking. - spot your sponsor
These projects might not have a business stakeholder, but they will have a sponsor: someone who sees the importance of the project and gives you time to do it. They’d also like to see results, like in any project.
As you go:
Communicate clearly when anything changes: other people in your team are also investing their time and effort in this. And keep getting feedback as you go: these projects tend to get less scrutiny because they’re done by like-minded folks, so challenge yourself: put it somewhere public for opinions, ask for comments.
Remember to keep checking in with your sponsor and support team: often, these people won’t be in your function. Celebrate incremental goals with them – important projects can sometimes take forever. And be nice to whoever helps you! They don’t have to.
When you’re finished:
- Measure what you achieved
- Get feedback to find how clear the process and goals were
- Make sure everyone knows it’s finished and you’re now shifting priority
- Put the work somewhere it’s easily accessible to empower other people.
#4: Self serve
Help people achieve their goals on their own.
These are projects you can (and want) to teach someone else to do. They’ll work better in scale if more people can do them, and the impact is lower if something goes wrong.
You need to give support at the beginning, middle and end. Forgetting one of those will lead to bad results, lack of self awareness (if it’s good or not) and misinformation (because these things will be shared with others).
Before you start:
Find out:
- if a thing you do can work better at scale, if others do it
- if it’s risky for others to do it
- whether you can create templates or explainers to empower others to do it.
Then set some expectations: explain exactly what you’ll do and how you’ll help. Often designers and researchers get landed with admin or production for these sorts of projects – that’s really because we can ask the right questions.
Try not to get landed with the admin or production for these projects. It’s time-consuming and not a design skillset even though we know how to ask the right questions. Depending on the job, that’s where Design Ops comes in handy.
As you go:
- train people in skills, not tasks
When we’re helping people self serve, we should aim to give them professional skills: for example, writing a research brief. So yes, we can train them, but they could also use books, courses, and freelance trainers, then come back to us for feedback on their new-found talent.
Sometimes they’ll be iwoca-specific skills, in which case, they’ll hopefully have all the right context already (or can ask their manager).
- support, don’t shame
We should be supportive with training and feedback we give. If someone’s trying something they don’t usually do, we should give them private feedback first (not public). If they’re someone with a designer in their build team, we should get that designer’s help giving feedback.
Criticizing someone in the wrong way just means they’ll end up avoiding you, hating you or complaining about you – not learning.
- third party projects count, too
In these projects, we need to act as advisors and not waste too much time on it. At the same time, we should expect to be involved all across if we are even remotely accountable. Get involved early: we don’t want to feel like a rubber stamp.
When you’re finished:
Rank people’s skills and their development in self serving for the respected function. If someone self serves for the first time they need more support. This will allow others who self serve to also know how they can help that person.
#5: Overlook
Put the right guard rails in place and you won’t have too much to do on these projects.
These are the projects that with guidelines and templates, won’t take too much effort on your part. That said, ten minutes of explanation will always get better results than no explanation.
Before you start:
- agree these projects in advance with the other party
Make sure everyone knows who does what on this type of work: we don’t want anyone to feel like we don’t care. Speedy third party projects fall in this bucket, too: we just need to know what they are or where they’re posted. - be detailed but flexible
Flexibility is important, but so are guard rails: explain what’s a big no and inspire people with what works. Be on the lookout for a need to do something different. Brand guidelines or templates are guiding rather than blocking. We can change our approach: for example, updating slide templates because certain people are asking for things.
As you go
- if it’s going wrong…
Don’t bitch about it in public. Talk to that person, suggest useful things and elevate it to Self Serve. If we just slow things, mess things, annoy people and want to feel good about ourselves, we shouldn’t get involved.
Even though these projects “aren’t our job” we should still flag appropriately if we see something really wrong that could cause brand damage.
#6: Wrong to do
Something that’s already done (or we already have something that could be used instead): tell people they’re wasting their time
New people don’t know where things are: help them find those things (or find where something similar is).
Ask questions like:
- ‘have you looked at this?’
- ‘have you talked to X person?’
- ‘isn’t it a bit like X project?’
We could be wrong, but we could be on to something.
Sometimes people will do projects to justify their existence by hitting a metric or creating one. In the midst of low self-esteem, they’ll forget that they got hired for a reason. Justifying isn’t measuring or improving, it stops people from doing their job. Help them be the better them.
Some projects are done for the sake of doing and provide no value other than passing time and wasting others’ time. Question enough to let people see and escalate if needed. Try to understand them throughout this process. At the same time, we shouldn’t question too much so that our time is also wasted.
A stab at building a better design leadership org
This article started as an answer to a task I did during my interview process for a company a while ago. While I can share the task I’ve adjusted the article to perform as a
I’d like to confront the challenge of scaling a design and product team in a startup. It’s a great challenge to have. Here are a bunch of things that can happen when you scale rapidly.
One of the things that makes startup products so amazing is that they start as extremely manual pieces of software. Doing stuff manually helps everyone in the startup to know all the funnels and cover them well enough MVP to make it work and profitable. But the past is not scalable and when you do hit a certain scale you run out of time to do stuff in the way you did it before. In the tech world it comes in the form of automation but in the product and design world, it comes through processes and more people. But both processes and new people create tension in the old system. Suddenly people who did many things find that other people are starting to do some of their jobs, the processes slow things down and there’s a lack of communication.
Once you start inserting seniors and experts into your team they will aspire to leave their mark and to raise the profile of their teams. In the aspect of design and product teams, you could end up with some of these more specific problems:
- Levels – The need to move from a flat hierarchy to levels, which in bigger organizations is supported by progression ladders. The tension between seniority and work experience is natural. In a flat hierarchy, everyone’s equal even if some do more or are better.
- Employee growth – The introduction of new people and the fact that the company as a whole grows fuel self-confidence. But if rapid scaling makes everyone super busy, then assessment, nurturing, and growth opportunities could become an afterthought as managers are slammed with things to do.
- Critique – Design critique is an integral part of the life of a designer, it is how we improve and do better. When the team grows a lot sometimes there’s not enough attention per project and designer.
- Painful retrospectives – Let’s face it, retrospectives are usually painful, but when a team is growing and you have more ambitious people joining it they want to grow the power “of design”, for example, and to do that there have to be big changes.
Easing through processes and structure
A designer is not necessarily a generalist. We need to embrace these differences and use them to drive the team as a whole to succeed. In the design below you can see how a designer has extra training and a variety of improvement opportunities throughout a year.
Company growth and output control
Switch and per – Moving designers around will create growth and levels for designers naturally. As a manager, you’ll be able to hear different people’s opinions on your designers and at the same time, you’ll create friendships. It is ideal for a designer to have the opportunity to switch teams every year. Switching meaning that the organization will work more closely together, more people will know each other and that the people who stay will have a lot of knowledge. This is also important when they onboard new-comers. If there is more than one designer per team it’ll allow the flexibility to make specific designers senior and allow them to lead the project rather than simply participate in it.
There is a natural tradeoff between being everywhere at the same time and doing a few things extremely well. As budget increases, design management can create better, more supportive design structures similar to Spotify and Google. In such big companies, there is usually more than one designer per team and there are function leads and product leads.
Collaboration – In a fast-growing, well-funded startup there are new ideas springing up every second which will tempt design directors to put a designer in each project. Adopting a design-led approach everywhere will help promote positive growth with less waste of tech resources and it’ll keep the design team involved. But to be able to make the most of being design led it is ideal to have multiple designers working together on a product. Having just one designer per team creates a risk of inconsistency and mediocre results due to silos and lack of brain spurring.
Design leadership should form a small yet powerful creative direction team which will include:
A system designer – to create reusable components and make them bulletproof so they don’t need to be broken by other designers (if it doesn’t fit their goal).
Guideline guardian – who will create guidelines and adapt them based on communication with the team (similar to the Material design team at Google).
DesignOps – a design producer who will make sure that everything is accessible, organized correctly and that will help to break barriers for designers.
Research coordinator – controls qual and quant researchers’ time and helps distribute them between different teams depending on the needs of the organization.
This can grow into even more specialized teams for illustrations, icons, typography, modules, grid etc. based on the organization’s needs.
Champion design – Designers should be encouraged to present their work within the company and promote the design team at any given opportunity. They should also be measured on these presentations, as Design is not just the act of designing but also the act of communicating it and advocating it.
These are all great opportunities to measure the designers and it’s also a positive way to push them to be better at all levels. Across these activities, it will be easy to grade designers and measure them against the progression ladders.
Incentives and extracurricular activities – To promote design within the organization and have projects and products be design-led, the designers must do more than just their day job. There need to be: design hackathons, writing, demos, research, and presentations. Many of these can find their way to Dribble, Behance and the company’s blog. Working and hitting social promotion goals and attracting other exciting designers to your company should be rewarded. It is quite common practice to offer financial incentives for recruitment but less so promotion and speaking at events. Raising your designers’ profiles will also raise the company’s profile and is fully supported in companies such as Google and Revolut.
Product goals should also be incentivized. For example, at iwoca, we have the rocket reward, which is money to buy cool things for the office and is based on our quarterly success in hitting the goals.
Personal growth
In most big companies there are progression ladders. These progression ladders usually have two routes. Management and Individual contributor. By introducing a ladder, designers can measure themselves and see what they need to improve to grow and hit the next level. Such a structure encourages growth via skill development and initiative rather than just rewarding the amount of time someone spends in a company.
In the progression ladder, there is a combination of soft and hard skills and the design management should have a course or a method to improve each of these skills. For example, for developing a designer’s skill to give constructive feedback you could build a curriculum that breaks down the psychological and technical aspects of feedback such as patience, active listening and constructing arguments. Whereas if a designer would like to improve in prototyping he can go to Kick festival in Belgrad and be in a few workshops there.
This diagram represents an initial breakdown of skills that designers should be skilled at. It is divided into Soft skills, Leadership skills, and Contextual skills. If I had included all the technical skills here as well it would be a lot larger, as these can start at Telling a story and end in Pixel perfection or High fidelity prototyping.
Ranks on the ladder don’t have to be reflected in titles. Facebook has an interesting take on how to do that whilst keeping a flatter structure. In the end, it’s about the designer’s career progression and self-fulfillment. If the designer has enough responsibilities and they gain knowledge and feel that they are valued and nurtured they will be happy and grow. Landing new people from the outside can be a challenge sometimes but as long as they are thoughtful and they support this attitude the results can be amazing. In the end, designers are always happy when they have another person on their side especially if it helps them learn and do their job better.
Critique
A designer’s job is always criticized by everyone. Design is a social role and because it’s very visual it makes people who are not designers think that it’s easier than it is. In reality, it’s way easier to react to a piece of design compared to a class of code. We all have eyes and we all use the product.
Because designers get critique so often they should be better at communicating their design and also at defending it. Designers have a bullshit detector for comments like “make the logo bigger” or “my wife doesn’t like this color”.
What designers don’t have is a valuable, data-driven, researched constructive critique. By valuable I mean it’s actually helping them learn something new or look at their design in a different way. Data-driven and research are about the justifications for the critique. And constructive is about being able to make it actionable quickly without demoralizing them.
Fellow designers and design management are the best sources for such feedback. But such feedback takes time because you need to research it and you also need time to communicate it.
Design critiques are powerful rituals and for them to maintain their culty status they should be held at the same time for everyone. Even if it means splitting the team into groups so that it’ll be more efficient. In the design, leadership should shift between teams, to allow them to get to know everyone and for everyone to have a good scope of the projects and learn. This shuffling should not be random, it needs to be based on the stages and progress of the projects and the skills of the designers. Like every meeting, they should be prepared for it. If the designers are preparing their presentations and demos then management should prepare the shuffle and look at things in advance.
Good meetings are ones when you spend more time preparing than the actual meeting. Meetings should not be top-down (management giving information) or bottom-up (designers showing stuff to management). Meetings should be about discussions, critique, and learning for everyone. If the meeting has an agenda and an order of showing the demos there will be much less time wasted and far more valuable learnings. Everyone will feel more valued and everyone will know more about the products that are in the making. Looking at things in advance will also help the designers feel that management is less detached from them and that they care.
In every meeting, there should be a scribe (the Google way of saying note taker). People think differently and sending a summary of the meeting is a great opportunity to spark discussions again and flag up misunderstandings. There have been many times when I thought I understood one thing in a meeting, only to later realize I actually missed a very important point. Meeting summaries help everyone to be on the same page and give transparency.
Management distance
When an organization grows the employees will start feeling a detachment from management. Design management can be very demanding and very high-level focused while trusting the designers with the details. Good communication and a clear interface with the designers are all that is needed to bridge that gap.
In the communication between the two, there should be a mix of official and unofficial communications. It’s about being curious about your people, learning from the colleagues around them and really dedicating time to their needs. If you see a piece of inspiration that is linked to a specific designer then send them a link. It’s about helping them manage their time (one of the hardest things to do by oneself), and genuinely caring about their well being and their aspirations.
These are the things that set great leadership apart If you are passionate and are contagious in your positivity and growth mindset. If you are honest and communicative and don’t make things too political. And if you set an example and show that you care, personally and professionally.
Retrospectives
Retrospective comes from SCRUM, which is sometimes referred to as “the art of the possible”. It is very important to focus on things that can be improved rather than just a critique, especially in a team forum. When the latter happens, to me this signals that there is a communication problem and management should be proactive about it rather than reactive. In addition, it might mean that there is a facilitation problem in the session. In retrospectives, it is really important to let everyone speak. The facilitator should know in advance what some people want to say and that will allow them to divert towards other subjects and get different opinions. It’s also useful to timebox discussions on specific topics. Overall retrospectives are not the place for rants or rebellions, they are a forum for incremental improvement; if the story is too big, let’s break it down into something achievable within a sprint.
In addition, when there is shared accountability between designers, managers, and directors there is more mutual understanding and the chances of very negative retrospectives decrease as the team hopefully is continuously working to solve their problems.
Design tasks are here to stay, and I like it
Recently I’ve encountered a lot of conversations around design tasks, for and against, pros and cons. I support giving tasks during the interview stage in most cases, and I’ll try to demonstrate why it is important. Bear in mind that most companies who hire a lot and dedicate tremendous amounts of attention to their hiring process have tasks in their pipelines for candidates.
Let’s define a design task:
Usually, tasks are the second stage in design interviews. The first step is usually some sort of phone or online screening. Designers usually prefer to see their future boss, see the atmosphere in the workplace and then consider whether they are willing to invest the time in doing a task. That is statistically different to developers who on average prefer to know if they can do the job and come confidently to an interview. Designers would also prefer to know what they’re destined to work on, so they can assess it and see if that is interesting for them.
What’s a task good for?
In an interview process, there are a few unknowns about the designer you are seeing. The goal of the task is to decipher these unknowns. It is true that you can potentially dig into a person’s behavior, idea generation and problem-solving in an interview, but I would argue that 60 minutes isn’t enough time and that someone put on the spot would yield mediocre answers at best unless we are talking to a really senior, thoughtful designer.
The things I find out from a task:
“Great portfolio, what did you do?” — It is standard procedure for designers to send over their CVs and portfolio and get filtered towards a first interview using these. I’ve noticed designers can talk for hours about their projects, which is expected. The explanation for this is that they have spent a lot of time working on them. Additionally, they’ve heard other people pitching these projects and are therefore able to reiterate that. Hopefully, these are successful projects (otherwise they wouldn’t have ended up in their portfolio). Moreover, the designer has probably pitched the projects in other interviews, so they are fully trained in talking about them. Consequently, this can make it hard for an interviewer to tell what they did in these projects as opposed to what others did. What elements were they truly responsible for?
To counter that I’d usually try to structure the interview and limit the time for portfolio walkthrough. After 15 minutes I’d start digging into a specific project. I’d expect candidates to have prepared a case study (which most don’t). I prefer to see three projects in depth rather than 20 one-pagers. I’m also going to be quite disappointed if the candidate just takes me through the portfolio they’ve already sent. I expect a different, more detailed version; after all, I’ve looked at it and read through it thoroughly before I invited them over.
Change of context — I find that many times people who are good at communication can speak very eloquently about anything they know. They can sell the case study even if it doesn’t exist. Putting them in a different context helps flesh out their improvisation skills and shows how they approach a design problem rather than a communication problem. It’s the difference between seeing a Jony Ive narrated advert and seeing how he speaks in an interview. The gaps are outstanding! (sorry Jony, you are still great).
Assess speed — It is always good to know when things got done and how long they took. But time and estimations are a slippery concept for doers (ask any PM). There is also a huge difference between a sketch and a finished product. Designers sometimes spend weeks on their portfolios, which are the accumulation of years of experience. When you set a task you can really see if there is a gap between the time someone spent on a task and what they say they did, and whether they can measure time accurately. Because it’s an after work hours activity, it forces them to spend less time and focus on speed. Measuring scrappiness is an important skill as some projects they’ll encounter will have tight deadlines. Dealing with scrappiness is also an ego measurement. How does the designer deal with the fact that they’ve submitted something half-baked? That, later on, helps you assess their approach to feedback when you ask them about the details in the task. If every answer is “well I didn’t have time” rather than “I think that my next steps should have been XYZ,” you can tell what kind of attitude they have.
Assess commitment — Commitment is a provocative concept since some managers would argue that workplaces should respect people’s free time and not hammer them with tasks. After all, people have families and can potentially be doing other workplaces’ tasks too. It can become a burden on people’s lives.
However, it is essential and useful to question their motivation, and to know how much a designer would like to work for you; for their sake and for the longevity of their employment in your company. I’d specifically look at this factor if I’m hiring for a company that the candidate hasn’t heard of. Is the designer looking for a job because in your industry you pay more? Is it because you are just one out of hundreds he applied for in his search (it can be easy to click the apply button)? On the contrary, is it because your company is famous? Some companies have more fame and status in comparison to others. In these companies, people may come to gain a reputation rather than because they really want to work there. Not every company is Epic or Nike. It might be interesting to know how long that person would stay in your company but that is really hard to guess.
Commitment is measured unfortunately by how much time people spend on the task and your ability to see it in the result.
Assess market understanding — Some designers will have pre-knowledge that is useful to you. Perhaps they’ve worked in your industry or fields. But usually, designers move horizontally and don’t stay in the same industry for very long (curious bunch). A task can show how fast the designer can get up to date with the quirks of your industry and how thorough their research skills are.
Process and planning — Since the task time frame is short, the manager can measure how systematic the designer is. Seeing how far they took it when they stopped helps to understand the designer’s planning skills. It is also important to see if the designer flagged open questions, what assumptions they made and whether they thought of what’s next (if they could have spent more time on it).
Related or not related to your business? — Many designers will feel used if you ask them directly about your business. “Oh, they are just trying to source ideas from us”. However, if you design a task that is completely unrelated to what you do it might destroy your chances of measuring how they do research about your industry or understand your domain. So my advice is to set a task that’s kind of related, but detailed enough for the designer to feel that you’re not just going to take their ideas and implement them tomorrow without giving them a job.
Tasks also always have cons to them
Too big or vague — that’s on the company to figure out. A task’s goal is not to trip up the designer, it’s to learn more about them and flesh out your understanding of them. Unfortunately, sometimes you’ll need to throw the task over to people to see how well it’s understood and then improve it as necessary.
No time — it’s hard to assess how long candidates spend or will spend on it. It is very important to be very specific about the time needed or the results we expect. For example, are you looking for pencil sketches or a high fidelity prototype?
No place — consider giving designers the option to have a room in your company’s offices for them to do the task and for you to see that it is done in the time required.
Flexibility — tasks are not flexible, you give it to someone and they complete it or they don’t. Consider accepting different people’s processes. Some designers might not be able to do a task because of a physical disability or a true lack of time. I suggest you have a different route that supports such cases (if you value diversity).
Exceptions
As a designer, I’ve seen people invent tasks or send materials before the first interview. That helps to leapfrog ahead in the interview process. Obviously, this demonstrates a lot of will power and extreme excitement and commitment towards your company. Not sure I’d recommend to always ‘try this at home’. But there are better ways to approach it if you want to be noticed. I would also argue that people who do personal projects — through which they demonstrate that they are passionate about design in their free time and that it’s not just their way to make money in this world — deserve to be cut some slack when it comes to doing tasks.
Ideas on alternative approaches to giving a task
I always love places that tell me who I will meet and what we will talk about. It seems to be a recruiter’s thing but I think it should transition to the business side too. Based on that I think that it might be a good approach to give talking points to someone rather than a task and have them do research so they’re prepared to come in to talk about it or take on a small thought process task on the spot.
I don’t see tasks disappearing anytime soon. It’s a good way to see how someone thinks in a scenario where you can’t hire them for a week to test how they might fit with your company. Converting freelancers to perms would be too hard in that respect. The benefits of tasks are too big to ignore. I would also argue that the designers themselves can learn a lot by doing a task; such as whether they’d like to work for the business, how smart the task is, or what interaction within the workplace looks like.
Yes, you need to do stuff that is out of your normal routine if you want to work for a particular place. Transitions require time and attention, as well as resources and that’s only fair. If someone doesn’t have holiday days, weekends, free hours then they should just dedicate themselves to what they want to do, self-select, do one task rather than ten. Sure, that will mean it’ll take them longer to find a job but very much like a relationship, if you invest you yield and if not then…you don’t.
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