I’d like to coach your design team

Coach a design team?

Product teams get coached all the time. Millions of dollars are applied every year to the “Agile Coaching” industry and while there are mixed results the concept of coaching your developers, product manager, etc. on how to best utilize agile methods and process to have the greatest positive impact is not dismissed out of hand.

The issue that designers face is they have internalized the expectations that others have had of them. They have accepted the message that our value is in what we deliver, not how we deliver it. While what we deliver is incredibly important, its value to our teams and customers is also greatly impacted by how we deliver it.

For many design organizations this has meant to a systemitized change in how they do design to map against how code is produced and managed. This isn’t intrinsically bad or wrong, but it can’t be done in a way where designing is lost as an outcome of focusing on designs output.

As a design coach, my first goal is to help your design team work best with your other stakeholders to meet business and customers value needs and hopefully exceed them. In essence, I will help guide your organization to not just be better designers, but to be better stakeholders on a complete product team.

What does a coach do?

I love the word coach because it is truly the appropriate metaphor. Yes, it might seem a bit too “sportsball” for some, but a design coach is like a team coach and life coach for your design team. The methods of coaching are the same: evaluate, plan, execute, measure/observe, adjust, repeat.

Evaluate

I’ll come into your organization and help you understand:

1. What are the pain points your design team is feeling or coming up against?
2. What are your stakeholders feeling in terms of their relationship with your design team?
3. How does your entire organization understand the value of design? How does that understanding line up with those of your design team?
4. What are the objectives design is measured on? How do you know you are hitting those objectives? Are those objectives aligned with the organization?
5. What are your current team skills make up and how do those skills map against your needs, your growth plans, etc.?
6. Do you understand your team’s developmental needs? How do you plan on meeting them?
7. What are your toolkits that you use regularly? Which of your stakeholders is aware of these tools and how do you engage them and finally to what end?

There are definitely more and similar questions that need answering and more that we won’t know to ask until we ask these questions.

How we get to the answers to these questions happens through a combination of interviews, workshops, and synthesis sessions. The end of an evaluation period for you and your team would culminate with a vision for where you want your team to be at the end of the next period(s).

Plan

Just like planning any project, we need to understand that any plan is going to hit potholes, blockers, and challenges. This means any feasible plan has to maintain general course, but adapt to a fluid terrain in doing so.

I like to use storymapping as the means to develop a plan of releases. For every given release there are deliverable goals, but more importantly a set of learning objectives that help us achieve the next stepping stone on our path.

Execution

Just like an athlete, only the player can execute the plays. The coach though is there to help do micro-adjustments during the execution period to make sure the participants on the team are getting the most out of their activities. These close-in, high-touch coaching sessions allow the team members to learn from each other. The coach’s role here is to externalize for everyone what is working and what isn’t and to advise adjustments for everyone at the same time.

The coach will facilitate retrospectives on tight periodic periods for both designers and non-design stakeholders alike.

Observe/Measure

At the end of the agreed time box, a larger restrospective and will be done. This retrospective will go into a broader analysis sessions. Whatever goals or indicators of success were determiend before will be looked at by all relevant parties. The coach will even have the broader teams look at the measures themselves. Did they really lead to the types of impact(s) that people were expecting?

Adjust

What’s the point of observing and measuring if you aren’t going to change if you learn that you need to. Of course, one of the things that needs to be measured is how well you and your teams are able to adjust based on new information at all, eh?

This really means going back to the planning stage based on the evaluations of the analysis you’ve done previously.

Who needs a design coach?

Dare I say everyone? The question is really when do you need outside help and when do you need to figure out to bring this service into your organization and if so how?

Startups

Your organization has 5 designers who reports to an engineering, marketing, or product manager. There is no clear design manager in the organization but you know you’ll need one soon, or think you are ready to promote up one of your individual contriutors to a player-coach role, but need them to be coached into the position.

Established design team regardless of organization type

Your design team is established. There may be 10 or so reporting to a design leader. However, the team is struggling to have the range of value impact that they feel they should be having overall. There is a combination of value alignment to what even design should provide or does provide, as well as how that team should integrate with stakeholders based on the current working models of the service or product organization. The coach here is going to work two-fold in helping to redesign the operational model of the design team and cross-functional players. Teach cross-functional teammates to themselves become designers, or design literate. Finally, provide the career path development lacking in such a team.

Large organization with design at scale

You have multiple teams and multiple managers reporting through a design leadership chain of some type. Your leadereship team is busy putting out fires, working on strategic vision, and organizational bureacracy, so no one can give the attention your organization needs to the DesignOps and similar needs in your organization that impacts your team’s ability to provide the most value to your customers. Your customers are getting served, but your competition is either pulling far ahead or about to pounce. Startups are inching up as well. By bringing in an outside design coach you and your team can get the outside perspectives for how a design organization needs to be changing. The coach can evaluate all of yoru practices and operational models to find inefficiences. After doing that, they can help guide this type of larger organizational transformation to make sure that the plan and the execution both lead to desired outcomes for your team and your customers. One of the end goals of an engagement at this scale is to hire a full time Design Ops Director to take your organization to the next level. The coach would help desig and write the job description, and source for that role.

So get a coach today!

I’m available to help your organization get to the next level, to help your design team provide their potential value at the highest level of effectiveness. There are many forms such a relationship can take. Let’s chat!