Design at Scale 2021-An Education on Design Education for Orgs (Wendy Johansson)

—> Thank you for warm introduction, and very global so

 

—> I’ve been building teams and products for long time

 

—> I’m currently working at Amazon and am doing something different with their to UX apprenticeship program
  • I’m still continuing to build design education throughout my whole career either in building out junior talent or teaching design to other organization stakeholders
—> I’ve worked with large organizations to build out teams, so it’s interesting to look at design education at scale

 

—> I’ll talk through my experience and past models I used for design education, to think how you can scale design in your organization

 

—> I started scaling design with my own design teams
  • I began with graphic designers and created a UX academy to train up my team members
—> I then started teaching research, IA, brand and content, and helped generalists grow into specialists
  • Always start with scaling in my own teams
—> Once designers grew with their own momentum and were learning from each other, and teaching back what they learned, I scaled design for cross-functional teams like marketing, product, engineering, customer success, and even people operations
  • As I continued to scale, it was important to work with peers who had different mental models on approaching problems and their day-to-day
  • We all had the same goal to give customers the best experience possible, but used different tools to get to that goal
—> As cross-functional organizational development continues, I started to push design education to executives, clients, and stakeholders
  • People needed to assess design maturity, either by advocating for their own design team in their organization, or helping clients advocate for design in their own orgs
—> However, scaling design is very difficult to do when doing orgs and clients across maturity spectrum

 

—> But why do all this education?
  • Anyone in the proximity of design has creative opinion, and wants to share their thoughts
  • A dissenting opinion often comes down to stakeholders, asking “Why wasn’t I consulted?”
—> So how do we give our stakeholders a voice?
  • Through design education

 

—> The design educational model can be top-down:
  • Executive sponsors who want to be fluent in design, and push for design as a differentiator within the company
  • All of that can work to build a voice that pushes things forward
—> The educational model is also bottom-up:
  • Running grassroots campaign to engage peers with the discipline
  • Exercises can be as hands-on as Stanford d.school design thinking exercise, which involves taking 10 or 20 people, asking them to design their work partner’s ideal wallet
    • Hands-on experience made experience of design real
  • Grassroots helped win hearts and minds individually
—> Grassroots doesn’t scale design to the entire organization though, and neither does executive sponsorship
  • So how do we close that gap and make design relevant to all?

 

—> We use the design methods we employ to solve customer problems
  • I used a service design blueprint to understand opportunities and dependencies where our team had impact, but no influence
—> I found the UX team interacted with everyone in the company from marketing and sales, to even building operations.
  • No one was untouched by design
  • We even had a touch-point with the company caterer
—> I saw that the team touched everyone and created a service design blueprint for service touch-points to visualize gaps to cover everything that was missed in existing design gaps

 

—> I connected things back to design, from, onboarding learning and development and whatever it might be

 

—> Now that we’ve talked about the model, where do we go from here?
  • Is this all we need?
    • No, the model is just a skeleton for us to start thinking  about how to apply the work to our team

—> So let’s look at models applied at various teams

 

—> There are three phases of maturity
  • Surviving: Design is struggling to prove value to the organization as an equal partner
    • Design education at these orgs is minimal, and outreach doesn’t go beyond engineering and product teams
    • Design wants proof that we matter
  • Defending: Design teams have been identified as providing value, but now we want to show the quant returns to design
    • Here numbers are key for more investment in design
    • This is a self-fulfilling cycle. Once you provide ROI, you can continue to grow your team
    • However, there is a risk of the organization budget getting cut, and we saw that happen in many teams across 2019 and 202
      • Designers were the first to be laid off
    • Organizational buy-in also has it’s drawbacks, as design is still seen as superfluous in some companies
  • Operationalizing: Connecting the dots for the org to see the problem, and scaling up design methods to solve problems outside of design and seeing where we can continue to improve and growth across different teams
    • There is a career matrix for designers to grow within the organization
    • We are democratizing and operationalizing design at this level
    • Design is consulted with non product-design problems
—> So is this framework the holy grail?

 

—> No, as I’ve built UX academies across various countries and organizations
  • In particular, I’ve worked on the OnDeck design fellowship, where for eight weeks there is a safe space for aspiring design leaders to speak with each other and grow together, with organizational design problems
—> When the cohort model is applied to design education, it allows team members to become allies with each other, level up together, and find ways to apply design and design problem solving

 

—> Cohorts leverage all tools that came before it, from the operationalization, survival, and defensive stages of a design team

 

—> So how to start building aspects of cohort-based communities?
  • Asses the fluency and needs of your org. Research the deficits and commonalities.
    • Ask: What gets people curious about design?
    • Help figure out design level taught at org
  • Leverage existing channels and organization.
    • Learning and development program for new manages is an example, such as onboarding new hire every two weeks and evolving into existing channels
  • Be generous with your team and tim
    • Reach out to teams and orgs, and show value of design tools from teams ranging from marketing to HR
    • These are opportunities to upskill individual designers to learn methodologies they don’t practice
  • This treats groups as a cohort, with the support of the team
    • Open channels within the design steam
—> And remember if human, you are creative

 

—> Treat everyone like a designer and let them unleash their creativity.

 

—> Make sure design is not siloed into something that only applies to your team

 

—> Design education is inclusion and bringing everyone in org in journey with you so that they can all realize the same goals

 

Q&A

  1. Do you have tips for showing the ROI of design in concrete ways?
—> Models I’m a fan of include Ryan Rumsey’s model of business Value of Design of course
  • He also has an e-book distributed through InVision

 

2. How do you help non-designers with confidence in their creative abilities?

—> It comes down to giving opportunities to practice and let them practice these things and see where they can contribute and see outcomes

 

—> Help them recognize where they have wins or have made progress
  • Job as leaders to help celebrate wins
—> Cohorts help support each other

 

3.  Can you talk more about turning design generalists into specialists?
—> This is my favorite topic
  • In start-ups we hire generalists who can do it all
  • So how do we take generalists and make them specialists to help them find their footing and natural alignment and what interests them
  • Question is:
    • What are you, as a designer, really good at?
    • Do you like being good at something and sticking with that? Or are you driven by challenges and learning?
    • Understand your people and skills they actually have helps determine whether specialization makes sense