September 2015

There were 5 posts published in September 2015 (this is page 1 of 1).

Lessons Learned at Adaptive Path: Project Team Dynamics

Four years ago, as I left Adaptive Path, I wrote a series of emails about things I learned during my time there. One of those was in response to a request from a colleague, “How about some knowledge about managing challenging team dynamics, both on the client or internally. Basically project leadership tips.” Team dynamics is among the most important determiners of project success, but also among the least understood and discussed. What follows is very much consulting-oriented (and at some point I’ll write it out from an in-house point of view), but I still think has plenty of general relevance. Just replace “Client Team Dynamics” with “Cross-functional dynamics” and it pretty much works. 

Internal Team Dynamics
Let me start with internally. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but I haven’t had a challenging internal team dynamic for, well, years. I would attribute this to a few things:
  • I do not tell people *how* to do their work.
  • I expend my effort creating a space (figurative or literal) where great work can happen.
  • I nip negativity in the bud — criticism and expressing concern are good, but when it gets into a truly negative place, where conversation and exploration is getting shut down, I tackle that directly.
  • I acknowledge my faults and shortcomings (i.e., you don’t want me opening any Adobe tool).
  • I don’t take things personally.
  • I’m pretty laid-back in a project environment.
This is not to say I am not super concerned with quality, or I’m willing to let substandard stuff go out, because I’m too groovy to get up in people’s business. But my critique and feedback style, which the Yeti Skyway [a project code name] team saw, is less about, “This sucks, make it better,” than it is, “Hey, I think we all recognize we could push this to a better place. Let’s reframe the problem, and poke at it from a different angle.”
Client Team Dynamics
This gets a little trickier. I’ve been lucky in my last few projects where I’ve had the fortune to work with delightful client partners. That said, I’ve definitely had my share of challenging clients. One key thing, which I mentioned with internal team dynamics is:
  • I don’t take things personally
This is so huge. As Chula pointed out at lunch yesterday, it’s probably the thing that allowed me to work well with all the original founders, even when some of them couldn’t work well with one another.
We cannot let ourselves get caught up in our clients’ shit.
I also find being open and honest with clients has served me well. What have we got to lose? They’ve hired us to challenge them. I sometimes have to remind them that if we’re not making them uncomfortable, we’re not doing our job.
With client team dynamics, I have found that it can be powerful to engage with the emotional aspects of the relationship. Too often we think that because this is a “business” relationship with our clients, we have to shut down those elements that make us human, and be a bit more like automatons, focusing on the work product, and ignoring emotional factors. But emotional factors directly affect our work, and, if handled respectfully, it can be quite helpful to address them.
A key to successful client relations and team dynamics has been to keep the client in the loop. Even if the updates are brief, daily or semi-daily updates, communications through Basecamp, etc., go a long way.
Other Aspects of Project Leadership
Something project leads need to have, and which takes a while to develop, is swagger. Swagger is that confidence in yourself, your team, and your approach. It’s a belief that you are *probably* right (though it’s important to recognize when you are not). It’s a certain charisma that gets the client comfortable with you, and to believe that you’re doing best work for them.
Swagger doesn’t have to be some masculine strut, it just has to be the confidence of your convictions.
The other thing to remember about project leadership is that it is a consulting role first, and a design role second. This is probably the hardest part for folks to understand and embrace as they become project leads. You need to let go of some of the design work, trust the team to do great work, and instead focus on creating the space for great work to happen, and engaging with the client in such a way to make sure they’re supporting the great work.

Personal update: Self-employed, writing a book, and looking for lunch

Not long ago, I wrote about Design at Jawbone. How quickly things change. Due to organizational restructuring, which lead to the elimination of all executive design roles, Friday was my last day.

There’s a big silver lining, though, as I’m co-writing a book on building and operating design organizations, and now I can do that during the day, instead of stealing time on evenings and weekends.

I’m considering management consulting gigs around design and product management. If you’re building an in-house design team and need sage advice and an outside perspectives, don’t hesitate to reach out.

And, I’m passively looking for my next full-time gig. I want to focus my time on the book, but if there are interesting conversations to be had about new opportunities, I’m always willing to talk.

Finally, given my new status, I’m up for all manner of breakfasts, lunches, coffees, and early ‘after-work’ drinks. If you’re not in the SF Bay Area, happy to hop on Skype or Google Hangouts. Let’s catch up!

Lessons Learned from Adaptive Path: The Evolution of UX Consulting Practice

In 2011, I left Adaptive Path after being there for over ten years. Before leaving, I wrote a series of emails on things I’d learned. These recently came back to my attention, and I thought I’d share them here.

When Adaptive Path started, in 2001, most companies had no UX competency, some had 1 person doing UX, and a very small number actually had UX teams.

So, when we were brought in, it was to be the ones to deliver on user experience. Clients recognized that this emergent practice was important to their success, but didn’t have the people in house to do it.

In that period, our work tended to live in this squishy space between strategy/planning and detailed design and development. In pre-UX days, it was common for product development to go right from product definition into detailed design. One of the values of UX practice was to recognize you needed to bring more of a systems thinking approach to product development, to understand the structure of the product, how the piece-parts related to one another, and how someone would move through it.

Now, in 2011, most companies have a decent UX competency. They don’t need us to come in and do the architecture diagrams, workflows, wireframes, and the like, because they have staff members who do that.

Instead, UX consulting work seems to be bifurcating.

On one end, UX is being recognized as an approach that can inform, if not drive, strategy and planning. The work we’ve done for [various big multinational clients] is in this vein. Companies recognize it’s no longer sufficient to have spreadsheets and checklists driving their product strategy. They need to add research and experience strategy in the mix as well.

On the other end, there is an emerging requirement for new modes of UX execution and delivery. [Startup clients] are indicative of this — trying to figure out how UX can best be performed when the product is already defined, in a time-constrained environment, and collaborating with development.

The squishy middle, where Adaptive Path initially staked its claim, seems to not be a viable consulting service any more.

I’ve been talking with some people about this for the past couple of months, and so it was interesting to see the reframing of Adaptive Path service offerings presented at the company meeting last week:

        – Experience Strategy

        – Service Design

        – Detailed Product Design

The first and third map directly to the bifurcation that I am talking about.

And after the meeting, I realized that

        service design:2011::ux design:2001

Service design is now the squishy middle that companies are starting to realize they need, but don’t have the people in-house to deliver. And it is reliant on the kinds of deliverables (journey maps, service blueprints) that have fallen out of favor in the UX world. And seems to have finally achieved a maturity where clients, even if they don’t know to ask for “service design,” are coming to us for service design challenges.

[end of email]

Looking back over the past four years, I feel pretty good about what I foresaw. We’re seeing companies acquire design/UX firms to do that squishy middle stuff that wasn’t as viable to do as a consultant. We’re seeing management consultants actively moving into the experience strategy space. We’re seeing small agile design firms successfully delivering product, augmenting in-house teams. The one thing we haven’t really seen is the Rise of Service Design like we saw the Rise of UX. By 2005, UX was pretty firmly established as a thing companies were investing in (and it was around that time that Adaptive Path grew in earnest). Here in 2015, Service Design still feels niche. I’m thinking that’s because companies still don’t know how to buy service design, because it requires drawing from multiple departmental budgets, whereas UX usually drew from a single group.

Lessons Learned at Adaptive Path: Recruiting and hiring designers

Four years ago, as I was leaving Adaptive Path, I sent a series of emails about what I’d learned in my 10+ years there. These were recently brought back to my attention, and I think there’s some hard-earned wisdom still worth sharing. Here’s the first.

So, we’re in a super-active hiring phase right now. This is an exciting time. Recruiting and hiring are among my favorite activities. I love talking to people, understanding where they’re at, how they approach problems, what they’re looking for, and trying to figure out if they’re right for us. Hiring can be a huge time commitment, and you need to be prepared for that. But, honestly, there’s little else we do that is as important to our business as hiring, and it’s worth all the time and effort to make sure we’re doing it as best we can.

My cardinal rule of hiring would be, Don’t hire the best; hire the most appropriate. It’s not enough to be a great designer — you need to be someone who will be great in the context of Adaptive Path. 

The slippery thing about that is that context always changes. Sometimes it’s a matter of what we need at a particular moment — do we need more strategist/thinkers? More maker/prototypers? More people interesting in speaking, writing, sharing with the world? 

I’m a big fan of complementarity. You don’t want a team that all looks the same. You want different skills, capabilities, backgrounds, and perspectives. You want diversity of experience, whether professional experience or life experience. Breadth is crucial, particularly in the kind of Big Picture work we do that requires synthetic thinking. 

At Adaptive Path, I’ve never been interested in hiring people who are passionate about design. I actually think that leads to a navel-gazing-ness that focuses too much on form. I have always looked for people who are passionate about the impact that design can have in the world. Design is a tool — it’s not an end to itself. I think crucial to Adaptive Path’s success, and our distinctive take on challenges, is born of this appreciation. What’s great about it is that you sometimes end up solving problems with non-design tools. My personal favorite deliverable in my past two years here was the SKT Trend Map [a 6-foot tall poster that was mostly words, articulating how the media landscape would evolve over time]. It was the right way to solve the problem, and not in anyway anything you’d think of as “design.” 

The other thing that you get when you engage with people passionate about impact is that they also tend to want to engage more broadly. They want to speak, write, and interact with a community, because their bigger-picture passion spurs them to do so. 

Don’t let people’s quirks turn you off. Given that we’re a consulting company, we tend to get nervous about how someone will present in front of a client. And so we get wary of people who come across a bit differently. I love quirkiness. It has served me, and Adaptive Path well. Embrace some freakiness. 

In terms of recruiting, I would suggest that you not be shy. In this latest wave, I’ve trawled through my email folders looking for people we’ve talked to in the past, seen where some of them are now, and reached out and said, “Hey, I don’t know what you’re up to, but we have these amazing opportunities… And if it’s not right for you, maybe you know someone?” And it has lead to us starting some conversations with great candidates. 

And: LinkedIn. It works, even if you don’t have a paid account.

In the four years since I’ve left Adaptive Path, this still is how I operate. The only thing I can think to add is, “If a candidate doesn’t feel right, go with that instinct and don’t hire them.” While my gut has mislead me on the positive side a few times, where I’m excited about a candidate who then ends up not working out, my gut has never mislead me on the negative side — anyone I’ve hired against my get (because there was some other logical rationale), has never worked out.

If you have questions about recruiting and hiring, I’d love to read them in the comments.