I’m delighted to be teaching a 3 hour workshop at Adative Path’s Managing Experience Conference. Here are some of the materials I will be distributing at the event:

Leadership Cards Exercise

Career Planning Worksheet

Design Job Ladder

Leadership Planning Worksheet

Personal Mission Statement Templates

Performance Assessment Journal

Margaret’s Prioritization Tool

Graham’s Project Queue Tool

Team Training Request Form

More details after the event. See you in San Francisco!

In August 2008, we conducted a workshop at Adaptive Path’s UX Week in which participants formed teams to solve key problems faced by UX team managers. Following is a rough summary of the output of one of these teams.  

Manager? Leader? Which am I?
However can
I succeed as both

How do we go from being just a manager to being an inspiring leader?  Here’s a quick summary of what this team came up with:
* You don’t have to be a manager to be an inspiring leader
* Model good behavior
* Craft a vision with and for your team
* Value your team as resources and as people

Raw notes

Discussion
How to inspire at the onset?
How to sustain inspiration?
Tools to inspire?
Create a timeframe/structure to implement
Roadblocks: no vision, no confidence, no authority
You don’t have to be a manager
“Influencer”, “Persuader”
Big picture thinker
Don’t sweat small stuff
Setting a good example
Empowers others to do the details

Best Practices:

1. Articulate and communicate the vision - craft a vision statement to from abstract to tangible

2. Cultivate your “emotional ntelligence”
Create transparanecy & trust
Respect for individuals – feel valued

3. Define success critera – lay the path
Create a “success agreement”
Alignment

4. Think big picture
Assess what you really “need” to do
Empower others

5. Motivate others – incentivize others; tools to manage over time

6. Identify and manage expectations
Define job responsibilities to individuals and entire team
Clarify how each person fits into big picture

We’ve been a little slow in responding to our great session at UX Week in San Francisco in August.  In our 3-hour journey to create a user’s guide to managing UX teams, our brilliant participants agreed on a list of UX team management issues to tackle.  We started them off with the first four chapters: 

… and we collectively came up with the following ten:

Chapter 5: Inspiring Leader
Chapter 6: Measuring UX Impact
Chapter 7: Fostering Innovation
Chapter 8: Team Dynamics
Chapter 9: Integrating Process Across Team
Chapter 10: Agile Development
Chapter 11: Working with Distributed Teams
Chapter 12: Evangelizing UX
Chapter 13: Business Conflicts
Chapter 14: UX Seat at the Table

We’ll be sending out our summaries and raw notes from these sessions in up-coming posts.  There are plenty of great ideas coming out of the workshop teams, so keep your eyes peeled for updates …

Anyone who knows Margaret knows that she loves haikus.  As she says, they’re the original elevator pitch - a fun, yet powerful way of concisely making a point.  They also make a great ice-breaker at a “managing ux teams” workshop … and that’s what we did last week at UX Week, where many brilliant haikus were unearthed and unleashed by an inspirational crowd of ux manager types.  

Here’s one created by Jenna Langer.  Truly a UX haiku for the ages ..

Visit my website

Explore and browse with freedom

No! Do not click there!

More UX haikus to come …

We’re still recovering from our fantastic session at UX Week in San Francisco last week.  At the session, we set out to create a user’s guide to managing UX teams, and our intrepid participants didn’t disappoint.  They collectively agreed on a list of UX team management issues to tackle, brainstormed best practices for each, and reported their ideas … and somehow managed to squeeze in a haiku or two.  Thank you to everyone who contributed.  Here are some photos from the session …

Voting for your top UX team management issues

Brainstorming better ways to manage our teams

Post-its, dots, innovation ... we love this stuff

See Margaret’s Flickr set for more.

We’ll be publishing content from the session here in the coming weeks.  Lots of great material.

How am I doing?  Most managers aren’t able to answer this question, and the ones that can are delusional … or, if they’re serious about improving as managers, they’re surveying their stakeholders, including their team members.  And it’s not just about determining how effective you are as a manager, but how effective you are for the individuals that are on your team.  We’ve found that the better we’re able to align our management style to the personalities and strengths of our team members, the more effective we are as UX team managers.

Here are some tips to help you get effective feedback on your ability to lead:

1    Be clear about your goal in getting feedback
If your objective is to get open honest feedback in order to improve as a manager in general, try an anonymous survey of your team.  Asking what you should start, stop and continue doing in a freeform text survey works reasonably well.  If you’re aiming to tailor your management style to align with team member expectations and needs, you’ll need to have a dialog with individuals.  This form is a useful enabler for this discussion.

2    Show that you were listening to the feedback
Distribute the results of your survey or discussions to the team.  Rather than summarize, try to be as complete as possible, including even outlier comments.  This will show your team that you were listening to all that was said, and gives the feedback process a greater sense of integrity.

3    Make yourself accountable by publicly committing to take action
Developing a list of action items in response to the feedback and send them to your team.  Ask for any additional suggestions on ways to improve your performance as a manager or to better tailor your management style to their needs.

4    It’s okay to get a little help from your friends
Some changes in behavior are difficult, but you can stretch to achieve them.  Others won’t budge not matter how many manager workshops you attend.  It’s okay to hold off on, say, improving your excel pivot table skills.  Heck, why not make that a leadership opportunity for someone on your team who has an interest?

5    Track your performance
This is critical.  Add your action items to your quarterly objectives and key results.  Score yourself (honestly of course) on your performance on a regular basis and send your self-assessment to your team.  This will show that you’re truly genuine about making change.

6    Thank your team members
You may think that you’re doing this for your team, but you’re actually benefiting yourself by gaining insights to your own behavior and actions that you would have never captured otherwise.  By having these discussions with your team, or by them filling in a survey on your performance, they’re taking time to help you be a better manager.  Show them that you appreciate that time and effort.

Need a survey tool?  Try: http://www.surveymonkey.com/

Download: Leadership feedback form

See also Mags’ presentation at Adaptive Path’s MX Conference

We’re all too busy working on projects to spend time arguing about whether people are low performers, high performers, or rock stars in-the-making.  Right?  Wrong.  You don’t need to run a survey to work out that, when team members get feedback and coaching on their performance, they’re happier and perform better.  But we do, and lack of feedback and coaching is a top pain point.  So taking the time to carefully evaluate and improve team members will ultimately make your ability to execute on your vision that much easier.

Here are some tips to help you set up a performance management process for your team:

1    Be clear about what’s expected
An obvious statement, but how often do we fudge our way through this?  Publish a ladder of levels for UX practitioners, with performance expectations for each level.  AIGA gives you a summary of the various roles, but you’ll need to add detail that’s specific for your org.  Meet (at least) quarterly and set objectives and key results for the quarter based on these expectations and on what your business needs to achieve.

2    Factor in your team member’s career goals
Certainly, work has to get done.  But once you’ve set team member goals and expectations that support the business, you’ll need to factor in what the UX practitioner wants to get out of his/her experience with your org.  Add these goals to the mix of quarterly objectives and key results.  (See Career Development)

3    Get peer and client feedback
It may sound obvious, but when evaluating your team members, collecting data from those who work closely with them is the only way to get rich feedback.  Ask your team members’ peers about their strengths and areas of opportunity.  Be transparent and share everything you get with your team member (and don’t forget to let their peers know that you’ll be sharing the feedback with them).

4    Use a consistent scoring system
Break down expectations into categories based on the predefined expectations (like “quality of work”, “ability to lead projects”, “complexity of projects”).  Taking peer and client feedback, as well as your own observations, score your team members on each category.  Once you’ve done this for everyone at one level, compare scores to ensure that they’re well calibrated.

5    Track results over time
Maintain scores and your notes on team member performance over time in one document.  This will allow you to monitor trajectory and to catch any areas of opportunity that were previously addressed but are creeping back.

6    Delivering the news
Deliver feedback quarterly.  Very important: Write your feedback prior to meeting with your team member, and do so in the context of the expectations and goals that were set.  Having a trajectory of scores will help color your commentary e.g. you’re continuing to improve in this area, but have leveled off in this other area.

AIGA’s list of designer role definitions: http://www.designsalaries.org/definitions.html

Downloads: Performance management tool

These career planning tools are intended to help you and your manager collaborate on a plan to get you where you want to be, both in the short term and long term.

A career development plan is a written plan or schedule that sets forth, with some specificity, goals and actions that will aid in your overall career development. The plan should span a significant amount of time, most often 1 year. Reviewing progress on them each quarter with your manager would be a good way to ensure your career goals are being met.

They can address either building on exhibited strengths or further developing areas for growth in your skills set. The plan can help you meet developmental objectives for either improving your current performance or preparing you for positions of greater responsibility. Your career development plan isn’t a binding contract but is rather a flexible ongoing development plan that should be updated as often as needed. Initially, you can plan for a year-long time frame and make adjustments as necessary.

Use this as an opportunity to plan training and developmental experiences (training, conferences, project selection) to fulfill specific career objectives. Your plan can change from year to year. Its main purpose is to help you set reasonable goals, assess your strengths, and chart developmental activities and training.

Here are some steps you can take to get started on your career develop:

1    Gather data
Do some type of self-assessment (StrengthFinder, Edge Colors, Myers Briggs, etc) to gain self-awareness about your strengths and work style preferences.
Review past performance reviews and look for themes.
Review the Career Planning Worksheet.
2    Plan
Review gathered data and Career Planning Worksheet with your manager.
Draft career plan and review with manager.

3    Take action
Choose your conferences and training to align with your career development goals.
Seek out project work that allow you to fulfill your goals.
Plan to report back quarterly on your progress towards your goals.

Download: Career planning worksheet

Some people may yawn at the thought of having to manage and prioritize a set of projects.  But if you have a vision and goals for your organization and your team (and you should), then determining priorities – determining who works on what – is a highly charged and motivated activity.  Every effective user experience team manager should have a solid system in place to allow for repeatable, predictable project prioritization and resource allocation.

Here’s a set of steps you can take to get control over your list of projects:

1    Hold a regular project queue meeting
Invite your key staff – discipline leads, senior folks.  If your team is dealing with new project requests every week, meet weekly.  Split the meeting in three: new project requests, in-flight project issues, closing projects.  Project prioritization tends to happen in the “new project requests” part, on which the rest of the steps focus.

2    Maintain a project queue
Of course!  But the key word here is “maintain”.  It’s not easy to keep a queue current.  Holding a regular queue meeting helps.  As new requests come in, get them into the project queue for “processing” at your next project queue meeting.  When you have a queue document, publish it, make sure everyone on the team has access, and did I mention keep it current?

3    What’s the priority? – Use a project priority scoring system
If you’re getting more requests than your team can handle, you need to have a systematic way of determining what you work on and what you can say no to.  You have a vision for your team.  You have goals.  Create a scoring system that uses those goals to evaluate every project request and come up with a priority score.

4    What’s the effort? - Use a simple sizing system
Determining priority is one thing.  Determining the effort required is another.  That’s right.  Effort is separate from priority.  Sizing the effort to complete a project is not easy, and comes with experience, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a system that uses consistent criteria to determine the hours of designer or researcher time required to get the job done.

5    Who can work on it? - Track the capacity of your team
If you’re allocating team members to projects, you need to know how many human-hours you have to work with?  In one quarter, a team member may have something like 700 hours available to work on projects.  If you’ve been estimating the size of projects, you have an idea of how many hours have been allocated and what’s left.

6    Draw the line
Now you have a project queue, priority scores for each, sizings for each, and number of hours to allocate.  Sort your projects by priority, and start allocating team members to projects based on hours available.  When time runs out, you draw the line.

Download: Project queue tool