Most of us know the story.  You start your career as a front-line designer, researcher, coder, or writer.  You love what you do.  You love being a part of the process of making new stuff.  Or making old stuff better.  By some random series of events – some might say misfortune – someone eventually suggests that you have leadership potential and gives you a team of anxious/ambitious new grads to manage.  Or perhaps your freelance work is so successful that you’ve begun to hire junior designers to take on some of the load.  Either way, your responsibilities have broadened significantly.  Now there’s less time for you to do what got you here in the first place – doing the work yourself.  Your calendar is now jammed with meetings.  You have little time for yourself.  Forget hands-on project work.

It feels like a rat race.  But does it have to be this way?

I don’t believe so.  The answer lies in how you manage your calendar.  Calendar planning tactics seem like an odd topic for a UX manager blog, but for me at least, it’s the most essential tool to enable me to create the space to work … at the level I want to work at.

Here’s a typical week in my calendar:

At a glance, my calendar looks like a mess.  But there’s a method to the mess-ness.  Before turning to the calendar, I should talk a little about goals.

Start with personal goals

It’s extremely easy to get caught up in the day-to-day politics or firefighting or water-treading of any job that you can easily lose sight of why you’re working in the first place.  To prevent myself from getting sucked into this vortex, I have goals.  They keep me honest.  I’ve written them in Evernote so that they are with me at the desktop or on the road.  I don’t look at them every day, maybe once a month.  But they remind me of why I’m here, why I’m working.  Without them I’d be lost.  There’s nothing earth shattering about them.  They’re pretty simple: spend as much time with my wife and kids as I can, be the best manager I can be, eat my brussels sprouts, etc.  I have about 20 of them.

When planning my calendar, one goal is particularly relevant: I will design.

There’s an aspect of management philosophy here that some will disagree with.  I believe that by doing hands-on work, by cranking out design deliverables, by launching projects, not only am I meeting my desire to design, but I’m also gaining a better sense of what my team members are going through – because I’m going through it with them.  Hopefully I’m a better manager as a result.  The challenge, of course, is to get the time balance right so that you’re able to effectively support your team members, support your stakeholders, and successfully deliver on project work.  My calendar is a direct reflection of my attempt to get this balance right.  Even if you don’t believe in this approach, or if you believe that UX managers should be purely people managers, you’ll still need to balance time for yourself, your team and their stakeholders.

Let’s take a deeper look at a typical week and you’ll see what I mean.

Daily activities

Every work day, I attempt to maintain 3 time zones: “me time”, “make time”, and “meet time”.

Me time

Every morning I have a personal routine.  I try to do something that I’m interested in beyond project or management work.  I’ll collect articles that my wife might find interesting and forward them to her.  For myself, I’ll read about jquery, game mechanics, or baseball trades.  I’ll listen to Jon Kabat-Zinn, Amy Goodman, or AC/DC.  “Me time” is replenishment time.  If I’m going to successfully drive myself through the rest of the day, I need to make sure that I’m personally on a full tank of gas, oil changed, tires rotated, etc.  That’s what “me time” is for.

I’m a morning person so I – um – do this in the morning.  6 till 8.  You could do it anytime.  But I recommend doing it … every day.  It makes a huge difference to my level of motivation and excitement about work and everything else.

Make time

From 8am till about 11am I have “make time”.  This is when I design.  It could be conceptual work or detailed production work.  It could be a new idea I’m working on or a specific deliverable for an in-flight Google project.  It doesn’t matter.  All of my design work – or at least the stuff that doesn’t require anyone else – happens during “make time”.  I used to distribute this time across my work day – an hour here, an hour there.  That didn’t work (although I occasionally still do this when crunched on a deliverable).  I need to have at least 3 hours of continuous, uninterrupted time to really get deep on the work and make significant progress or produce something that I can feel good about.

Protecting “make time” has been tough.  Really tough.  As you can see from the calendar, some meetings end up creeping into “make time”.  Sometimes I’ll allow an important meeting to settle into this space, but I try to do so as little as possible.  Caving in and scheduling over “make time” can be a sign to others that you’re not really serious about managing your time.  It’s a battle, but it’s definitely worth it.  Every day, I feel like I’m productive.  Certainly some days are more productive than others, but every day is productive in some way, thanks to “make time”.

Meet time

The rest of my day is dedicated to meetings.  Many people, including many Googlers, believe that all meetings are a waste of time because they suck time that might be better spent working.  I’m not one of these people.  Yes, some meetings do waste time, but this is avoidable – and a topic for another blog article.  But if you ever want to achieve anything of a significant size, you need to do so with a team of people.  And if you’re doing anything with a team of people, you need to talk with them, which in many cases means meetings.  Sorry to be so basic, but not everyone gets this.

There are a handful of “meet time” categories that I allow onto my calendar.

I put a premium on 1 on 1 relationships with my team members, my fellow Google UX managers, and of course, my own manager.  So a good chunk of “meet time” is allocated to these 1 on 1s.  Right now, I tend to do 1 on 1s every other week – sometimes every 4 weeks – for 30 minutes each.  If people need additional time, I have office hours on Monday afternoons.  If no one comes to my office hours, I have a 2 hour block to process email.  Sweet.

Here’s my 1 on 1 schedule for the sample week:

As I’ve already mentioned, I attempt to make design work a priority.  To successfully execute on design projects, you obviously need to meet with business partners from product management and engineering to discuss project strategy and to present and discuss work.  So, another chunk of my meet time is allocated to these kinds of activities.  These are projects which I’m either directly responsible for or contributing to.  I avoid meetings for projects that my team members are working on without my direct involvement.  I let them own their work and their relationships and give guidance during 1 on 1s or reviews.

Here’s my project meeting schedule:

If you care about the quality of work being done in the world that you manage, design reviews are a must.  And if you care about how your team’s work is communicated to stakeholders, participation in engineering and product reviews can be key.  My research partner and I check in on the week’s schedule of reviews every Monday and determine what we’ll attend and what we need to take last-minute action on.

Here’s the sample week’s review schedule.  No product reviews this particular week:

If you have a plan on how to grow your user experience team and its members, you occasionally need to check in on how that plan is performing, make adjustments, weed out problems, and such.  Management team meetings perform this function.  Some are weekly, some quarterly, some yearly.  Some are at 50,000 feet level, some at 1,000, and some on the runway.

I have a few blocks for these kinds of meetings:

Working at Google has its perks.  But you’ve got to show up to enjoy them.  So some weeks, I schedule an hour or two to check out a tech talk or grab a beer at TGIF.

And believe it or not, we actually get to go home at night.  I check out a bit earlier than most people because I want to get home before the kids get too sleepy.  Googlers can be night owls so I’m sure to schedule my commute time to make it clear that I’m not going to be around.

It works for me

So that’s my strategy for making my calendar work for me.  What looks like an insanely chaotic schedule is actually a somewhat-structured plan to maximize my personal productivity while meeting the needs of my team and stakeholders.  If you’re thinking about trying a schedule like this, be warned that your colleagues may be quite annoyed by this at first.  You’re no longer available according to their schedule.  That will be a tough nut to swallow for some.  But if you prioritize according to your personal goals, and you make room for some flexibility (with time blocks such as office hours), you can keep your most important colleagues happy while fulfilling your own desires, needs, ambitions.  In summ, the plan is to schedule:

• * Me time: get refueled so that you can perform to your potential
• * Make time: continuous, uninterrupted time to design
• * Meet time:
  • - for 1 on 1s,
  • - project team meetings,
  • - design, eng, product reviews,
  • - management team planning meetings, and
  • - googley fun time.

I hope you find this system useful. And let me know if you have any suggestions for improving it, or if you have a better system.

- Graham

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