Team Development
My Role
To develop a visual production design team into a fully functioning UX and brand design organization that put the customer first utilizing a data driven mindset.
Skills Used
• Organization structural planning
• Design philosophy and UX best practices
• Design Operations integrations
• Human resources legal compliance
• Individual team member development
• Speed to market best practices
The Result
A team that could design with the customer first and knew how to include brand imagery, illustration and UX design best practices.
Original production style design (left) produced for transactional emails, the new (right) customer first direction with brand imagery, illustration, and UX design system.
Putting the customer first in supporting business needs
In order to have a successful marketing design organization we needed to ensure we had coverage in all disciplines. By dividing the team into three separate business focus areas that cross collaborated we could insure proper coverage for all projects/disciplines.
Team 1
Merchandising/Loyalty site experience
Team 2
Merchandising/Loyalty email experience
Team 3
Merchandising brand design
Team structure
The team was originally structurally flat having everyone as IC’s and reporting directly to me. Over the course of a year I developed the team members into leaders for their relative areas of expertise that best suited their career goals and met the needs of the business.
Roles included
• Creative Direction
• IC Senior Design Leadership
• UX Design Management
• Design Production
• UX Design
• Content Strategy
• Copywriting
How I got there
When I started, the team was focused on production design. An example of this would be, a stakeholder (merchandiser) would submit a ticket/task and the designer would complete the task as requested. What needed to happen in order for the design and merchandising organizations to positively affect change within the site experience was that I needed to implement UX and Product management best practices into a marketing organization. I started by having a series of educational presentations around UX design best practices, how to give design feedback, how to write a brief that puts the customer first and trained the design team on how to implement these practices on a daily basis with partners.
I also changed the mindset of design supporting stakeholders into a mindset of design partnering in business. This gave design a seat at the table early on in business decisions and helped produce customer first design solutions.