How I implemented a series of initiatives to maximise the potential of designers at Jigsawxyz.
Mapping the team's capabilities
As I got to know everyone on my team I used a chart by Jason Mesut that plotted skills against key areas of competenance. By the end I had a clear picture of where skills were concentrated and where they were not. I immeadiately saught to hire a person able to write great content.
Personality mapping
I experimented with various tools and techniques to help me build a picture up of my team's needs. One experiment involved taking personality tests based on a neuroscience framework called SPARK.
The framework, like many others purports to understand the abstract of a person's personality and juxtapose that against other profiles to guage team fit.
I saw the team's clear distaste for process. That gave me evidence to reduce the amount of process in the team. I focussed on making any process put in place to be low touch and low effort on the behalf of the designers it was designed to serve.
A training framework
I believe that continued professional development is an essential part of professional life. I built a investigative framework that plotted the employees need's right back to their personality and life goals.
Only once a detailed picture of their needs was established could I go ahead and map those needs to the business needs and seek out suitable training.
All training started off small, as small as a youtube video. As employees progressed, continued to show interest and apptitude so too did the level of investment from the business to support the development.
Designer type
We identified together if the employee considered themselves individual contributors or people managers. We looked at this from the perspective of the now and the future.
I also identified them as rockstars or superstars, borrowing from Kim Scott's categorisation from her book Radical candor.
Motivational needs
We looked at what motivated individuals and mapped them against Maslow's hierarchy of needs as framework to help extract these motivators during the interview.
Career path
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Designer type
We identified together if the employee considered themselves individual contributors or people managers. We looked at this from the perspective of the now and the future.
I also identified them as rockstars or superstars, borrowing from Kim Scott's categorisation from her book Radical candor.
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Motivational needs
We looked at what motivated individuals and mapped them against Maslow's hierarchy of needs as framework to help extract these motivators during the interview.
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Career path
Mapping out potential career paths helped us form both vertical and horizontal moves in the organisation and beyond. I used this as the last piece of the puzzle to understand the person and what combination of training would work best for them.
A progression framework
In the earliest days of my tenure there was no company wide progression framework, so I developed my own. Or at least a mental model of one in order to help support employees develop their training programme.
Each employee had an initial session where we talked open and frankly about any goals they may of had, what motivated them and whether they saw themselves as individual contributors or people managers.
Meanwhile I helped HR develop the demonstratable characteristics we expected to see in individuals at different levels of competency. These levels and their descriptions form part of the performance reviews each employee now undertakes bi-annually. Although I would highly recommend these being quartlery if you can.
I stand enamoured at the way the team conducted itself during the pandemic. Individuals were going through challenging times in personal life but still managed to adapt and continue to develop professionally.
After few weeks working weekends on a side desk project in support of COVID-19 called Proven Patient I got the team to vote on a care package. They asked for Tamagotchis so I ordered 10 Tamagtochis out of pocket and got them delivered to their homes. The image here was the 'switching on' event, which was probably the highlight. As a team we can safely say the nostalgia wears off after about 15 minutes.
TYIT Ltd provides a full stack UX consultancy that designs accessible digital services. We've helped complex organisations like BEIS and DfE achieve digital transformation by running Lean and Agile discovery processes.