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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Being a manager is difficult enough.  Layer on top of that the challenge of managing a team of user experience professionals, and the degree of difficulty goes up by an order of magnitude.  While there are plenty of resources out there for managers in general, there are few signposts or guides available that help us [...]