Doug Powell’s Post

Pay It Forward — A powerful initiative from the folks below 👇 We need more initiatives like this that focus on empowering people through skills and career development. Whether you call it charity, paying back, or paying forward, this approach creates real change by helping people build their future, rather than capitalising on people’s unfortunate situations.

Interesting session for leadership folks on the job market!

What does it take to create a design team that doesn’t just deliver but consistently redefines success? Many companies underestimate the complexities involved in building a high-performing design team from scratch. It’s not just about hiring talented individuals — it’s about fostering collaboration, clarity, and continuous growth. ✨ Starting with a clear vision ✨ Hiring for collaboration, not just skill ✨ Building a culture of continuous learning ✨ Structuring teams for both speed and quality ✨ Investing in onboarding and beyond Design teams are more than a department—they’re a strategic driver of innovation and growth. Whether you’re scaling an existing team or starting from scratch, the lessons in this article will guide you toward lasting success. 📖 Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/dhxjRqxh Have thoughts or experiences to share about building your own design team? We’d love to hear them! Let’s keep the conversation going. #DesignLeadership #ScaleCoach #DesignTeams

Fun thought exercise: Which of these five designs best represents craft to you and why? The topic of #craft is bubbling up in a lot of online conversations about #productdesign and #UIUX, but it has always been a part of my design experience. It is a part of how I was taught to create a standard—a piece of communication a human cares to interact with. I see recruiters often post VP, director, or senior manager-level roles where businesses/hiring managers are looking for a "focus on craft". Sometimes I think this is the design leadership community looking to carve out space where we have been pushed out, but often I think it is code for companies looking to save money by hiring younger talent. The evolution of the term over the past few decades is probably worth a longer convo. Another time, another place. Anyway, yes, these are all from projects I led, and had a chance to work with fantastic humans and organizations like Adriana Gunczler, Bigtincan, Jose Arenas, Luigi Nista Piccolo, Misha Gravenor, Metropolis Magazine, and Eames Demetrios. Thanks for looking. I dare ya to comment.

Bouncing back from recently being laid off from Smart Design, alongside nine other fantastic individuals. Looking on the bright side: I'm enthusiastic about the fresh opportunities, career growth, and leadership guidance ahead. If you're aware of any openings or simply want to connect, don't hesitate to schedule a chat -https://lnkd.in/eGANbArP Let's hold off on "I'm sorry" messages, as I'm looking to forge on with positivity & active support! Hopefully, more updates soon! #designresearch #userresearch #designthinking #openforwork

This!!! ✨ Having had the privilege of collaborating with the Rubrik design team, I've been part of an extraordinary 2.5-year journey where leadership played a pivotal role in fostering a culture deeply rooted in User-Centered Design. This journey wasn't just about advocating for a mature design process but also about embedding the essence of design thinking across the organization. However, in the past, I'd also been in a position where I played as the only advocator for the value of user experience in a company, shifting product value and processes one step at a time for a better collab framework. ---- The challenge for design leadership often lies in advocacy of the alignment between the design impact and the overarching success of the product. This nuanced role distinguishes design leaders from design managers, and is crucial for gaining a strategic seat at the decision-making table. Unfortunately, the absence of such advocacy often leads to not just personnel layoffs within design teams but also inexplicable dips in product conversions. --- The emergence of a new wave of mission-aware designers who possess a profound comprehension of human-centered thinking is at a high! As IC designers, It's crucial at a time like this for us to secure our career advancement by looking for these identifiers of visionary design leadership. As design leaders, our mandate extends beyond mere execution; it's about challenging the status quo, reimagining pre-established norms, and advocating for the intrinsic value of design. This approach is not just vital for organizational growth but is essential for the advancement of today's society at large. ❤️ #uxdesign #productdesign #productdesigner #design #humancentereddesign #designcommunity #uxleadership #layoff #layoffsupport

Building a design team isn’t just about hiring talented individuals —it’s about crafting a group that aligns, collaborates, and delivers impact. Whether you’re building a team from scratch or scaling an existing one, these insights can help you elevate your approach to team formation. Read the full article here 👉 https://lnkd.in/dUVW4vdd Let’s keep the conversation going: What’s been your biggest challenge when building or scaling a design team? I’d love to hear your thoughts! #DesignLeadership #TeamBuilding #ScaleCoach #DesignTeams #Innovation

A week in design leadership - #8 In this week’s post, I share: 1/4: Cooking a Design Meetup We are working on re-starting our community engagement activities at Coditas starting in April. The goal is to assemble designers from various skills and backgrounds, have a nice chat, share contacts, and discuss opportunities, experiences, and tips. We’ll start rolling out invitations soon. Very excited to get going again. 2/4: Continuous interviews Finally, I gathered the bandwidth to start the continuous interview plan I designed last year! Through this process, we plan to look for great designers to join our team in the coming quarters. Another focus will be on improving gaps in our candidate experience side of things. Lucky to have a really solid recruitment team who understands how to adopt a human-first approach in our work. We plan to continue making improvements in our process. The hiring bar will be high. We’ll be selective. But we’ll ensure the implementation of a transparent process. And learn from feedback. 3/4: Lost opportunities Lost opportunities teach you a lot. But only if you’re willing to learn. Last week, we lost an opportunity we had been chasing for months. 4/4: A running list of challenges I have this habit of maintaining a running list of problems to solve. The list has items across personal as well as professional challenges. The majority have no deadlines but are essential. This allows me to utilize any available bandwidth in the right direction and for the right things. Last week, I brought the same process to document a running list of problems to be solved, hoping to open it up to the rest of the team and encourage people to pick a problem they would want to solve. These problems are generally identified via on-floor surveys (1:1s and feedback sessions), client feedback, process improvements, culture improvements, and quality improvements. #uxdesign #designthinking #startupstories #designleadership

A week in design leadership - #14 In this week’s post, I share: 1/4: Hiring We continue to look for new designers to join the team. This time, we have upped the bar of our expectations regarding visual design skills. After scanning through hundreds of applications, I managed to respond to each and every applicant. If you haven’t heard from me yet, please follow up. It is turning out to be a more difficult task than I had imagined. Few really strong candidates are available, but a majority lack strong visual design skills. 2/4: Conflict resolution As and when your career grows, you realize how important it is to learn to resolve conflicts. Without diving into too many details, a few situations have led to external and internal conflicts in the last couple of weeks. Focusing on facts and objective data points is a shortcut to resolution. Stear away from arguments. Focus on what matters. Try it out when you find yourself in such a situation. 3/4: New services I was considering adding a layer of senior designers who contribute to a specific type of service (more on that later). As we work towards establishing a structure for how seniors and lead designers will contribute to our long-term growth and how the team will contribute to their growth, we are establishing a framework and an expectation document. Once this comes to life, we then move towards specific upskilling/hiring activities. 4/4: Design maturity The last one and a half years have been a real test of character for leaders across domains and industries. Design is a skill that is often either misunderstood or misrepresented. As we continue engaging with new prospects, startups, and large companies, I am re-realizing the gap between understanding what design can deliver and what design is expected to deliver. Turning things around is often a long grind. It is even more challenging for an external agency to come in and change things without a strong buy-in from decision-makers. This problem is less prevalent in more mature organizations in understanding design strategy and operations. #uxdesign #designthinking #startupstories #designleadership Coditas

A week in design leadership - #13 In this week’s post, I share: 1/5: Picking up hiring We had to cut down hiring drastically in the last 18 months. We had a swelled up team and business opportunities were a few. As we pick up hiring again, there are few things we are overly cautious about: A. We must hire for long term fitment. B. We must utalise the clarity of skills and their importance which we have developed now. C. And lastly, hire for a good cultural fit. We are hiring in the brackets of 2 to 4 and 4+ years of experience. If you or someone who fits, please reach out! 2/5: Prospect meetings What an excellent sight it was to watch Monu Kumari, Damini Parihar, and Parul Sharma blow it out of the park, as they went about presenting their design research findings and proposed design approach in front of a prospect. Specially considering the timeline under which this had to be accomplished. Proud of the team I have! 3/5: Visual designers Over the last few years, it has become increasingly difficult to hire people with a very strong visual design skills. As a community, have we made a mistake of overly emphasising one aspect of our deliverable over the other? As we work on amping up our hiring, I hope to onboard designers with equally strong visual design talent. 4/5: Are design processes too long? The old question came to bite again! Now a days, design teams design processes based on multiple factors, such as: A. What’s the current stage of the product? B. What are the immediate priorities? C. What are the long term goals? Each of these, and many more, factors have influence on how design can deliver the most. Since there is often a dependency on designers to reach a stage where development teams can pick up, we found ourselves trying to walk a tight rope. Last week was a reminder of the same. 5/5: Bad project management and designers One of our core belief is giving and expecting respect. Since we are an agency, we do end up coming across people who aren’t culturally aligned. Unfortunately, last few months were tough on one of the teams. I can’t thank Coditas enough to always, unconditionally, back it’s people. And we could finally put an end to the problem without impacting the client and the work. #uxdesign #designthinking #startupstories #designleadership