Day 3 Session Notes–Fair and Effective Designer Evaluation

— Thank you and appreciate being here

— Associate director at digital design agency with 18 designers and I take on operational duties

  • Duties helped with evaluating career growth for designers in company and collaborative effort for people in company

— Our system for positive impact is across org

 

— Evaluations can be awkward at times and nebulous

  • Even with ambiguity of design industry, and lead designer means different things across places
    • Solutions come from process that loops back in forth
    • Collaborative nature of design further muddies the waters

 

— Here’s a tool we developed for evaluation process to make it more fair and effective for behaviors that lead to positive impact

  • Helped with retention, staffing, and mentoring
  • Roadmap for growth at studio

 

— Imagine you’ve had similar challenges in your organization

  • Want to do right by company and designers regarding career growth

— Usually solving problems for us, so let’s design our belief systems and tools that work for us

 

— System to encourage people to develop expertise, deliver growth across teams, and create consultants to solve problems across projects and clients

 

— I’ll share takeaways and how to improve

  • Framework regardless of size and whatever is done, the goal is to create a positive impact on people, teams, and businesses
  • A demo of the tool
  • Overview of process
  • Discussing learnings and implementation

— Time for questions

 

— Overview of how evaluation works

  • Continuous feedback and evaluations twice a year and promotion to determine evaluated and alignment from leadership
  • Career Managers to mentor and advocate on behalf for staffing and promotions

— Continuous Feedback is a key element:

  • Teams and individuals share goals at beginning of project and work at each step aof way
    • UXD and UXR support each other
  • Anonymous feedback via survey and prompts giving feedback to career managers and share with mentees
    • Con: Quality can vary across individuals— so need to outline helpful feedback. Time to do this, along with everything else
    • Pros: Close collaborators in timely fashion, and goals restrain feedback provided to what’s important

 

— Performance Evaluation

  • Do every six months and any lead who worked with designer will make evaluation
    • Build career guides to outline and facilitate conversation for what to do
  • Outline how reviews work across studio and across roles
    • Minimizing creative interpretation along career path to make process as fair as possible

 

— Career path is main thing that guides impacts

  • Traits determined for designers to focus on, and define success and promote company values to defining how we work externally and internally through our client and team

— Designers can grow as consultants regardless of project

  • We want generalists, not specialists

— Skills to promote behaviors across people, teams, and business

 

— So what does this look like in practice?

  • Let’s look at tool and find out

 

— Can see all categories within skillset matrix and accumulation of progression and that person is halfway through track on designer level role

 

— Let’s view craft tab and design areas to focus on at the studio from research to design

  • We are now filling out content from second half

— We think about a project, i.e. how did Ignacio perform with supervision, and growth area in specific trait

  • Answer question of excelling, staying the same, or not meeting expectations

— Means completing track for designer level role

— Other include

  • How designers connect decisions to end-users
  • Are designers iterating multiple concepts

 

— Returning to summary tab, you can show how change in one tab translated across different goals

  • Certain skills are weighted for categories for each role, and designer level role expected to contribute to design work
  • Client and team focused more on design leads as that is the main focus and items
    • Like prioritizing items and pushing project forward

— Skillset matrix, see all categories to full up, and career dev did change, and part to show i ready for promotion

  • Not just one review, but every project-lead, career manager, and team-leadership

— Used blank Google Sheet to implement structure, and know how model works under the hood, so can make adjustments and changes as needed

 

— Example of evaluation levels, and marking down certain categories, and how you work across teams and adapting for project as a unit

  • Designer should reference this

 

— So what has been the impact? We have a new system to influence behavior across teams

 

— People assured by presence of plans

— Team culture has still continued despite client demands

— Business can work with variety of clients thanks to diverse skillset of designers

 

— Not entirely smooth

  • Have to remove whole categories of development, and often consolidating based on business needs

— Modify evaluations for designers leading projects

Develop robust training from IC to leadership role, and making people comfortable with transition— beyond initial perception

— Perceptions can vary from one person to another, and don’t expect people to excel in all traits

 

— What does this mean outside the studio?

— Roadmap of growth for designers, and ask for teams what company values were will make teams successful

— What is value design brings for business and what traits does organization need to provide impact

 

— Something about instilling confidence by having transparency, creation and maintenance

  • Design teams to have parity with existing systems that are out there

— Being open to flexibility by people using the systems

  • How to know if system implemented working

 

— Look for learning curve, and risk of too much effort o implement

— Tool is abstraction of actual performance, so compare stats across designers

— Facilitated worthwhile conversation for career growth

 

— Conversations are structured and mean to function as being fair and effective

 

— Thank you. Any questions

Q&A

  1. How to manage expectations when talent expects a promotion?
    1. Career Manager and mentees have that conversation, and get them opportunities where they will have most growth and research project and also mentorship
  2. Not specific to evaluations, but deal with phenomena of assessment changing based on criteria that’s used?
    1. Great question, and we try to keep the definitions consistent through a project when we can
  3. Impetus behind custom framework?
    1. No formal evaluations were defined, and categories were there, but had open interpretation and nothing robust existed
    2. Expectations for traits and each of levels
    3. Sense of transparency brought comfort to designers at studio and brought sense of what to do
  4. How to manage non-linear careers and lateral moves through system?
    1. Way we fill out career path is more linear and expectations are different and still trying to figure out
    2. Retooling evaluations for this
    3. Someone might not go all the way there so trying to figure it out
  5. Who contributes to client tab? Do you survey client?
    1. How much of client time to take and overall studio and individual
    2. Retros and what went well and what didn’t — all evaluators
  6. How does this support adjustment in role like a disability?
    1. Haven’t run into issue, but something to work on