Team Scaling & Onboarding

Team Showcases

Examples of showcases and presentations I've spoken on to improve our team's visibility across the organization. This strengthens our reputation and relationship-building among new and emerging stakeholders and business partners, supporting understanding of our team's impact and encouraging outreach to leverage our team's services.

Roadmaps

While sharing examples of actual roadmap priorities would be too revealing, please enjoy this teaser Q4 hype video I made to introduce our team's roadmap for that quarter. (Yes, it was played during roadmaps and received many emoticon reactions)

Onboarding & Hiring

Our team looks for highly self-motivated individuals who are clearly technically experienced, but even more importantly are unique culture fits that expand our perspectives and ways of working. Below is an example onboarding meeting I typically lead for new hires, going through the foundational onboarding topics and setting the tone for supporting our designers' autonomy according to team principles and processes.

Design Workshops

I support and encourage every designer to craft their own way of working that works best for them, from feedback and personal experience that agency and autonomy are the greatest indicators of work satisfaction alongside relationship with managers and compensation.

When there are strategic initiatives or guidelines that we need to tactically align with, I oftentimes create a workshop so that we can introduce new approaches together live and open a collaborative process around it.

Employee Growth & Culture

Employee growth and culture has historically been historically low, due to limited pre-existing resources and processes in place for teams. By conducting a retro with the team on the 2022-2023 raise and promotion cycle to use as a baseline, I pinpointed problems that were resulting in a 2.5 rating by our team on employee growth.

It was a personal goal to improve this experience across our team for the next review cycle.

The action plan I executed for the 2023-2024 review cycle

• Begin an employee growth handbook
• Develop needed growth resource templates internally (Individual Development Plans, Promotion Discussion Templates)
• Develop spreadsheet detailing every designer level and expectations across technical and design thinking skillsets
• Clearly document team goals and cultural priorities
• Work with regional HR offices to share our team's processes and request needed collaboration
• Continue to promote a culture of transparency, feedback and open discussion around how to improve employee growth on our team

2023-2024 review cycle retrospective feedback

• Broke down satisfaction into key contributing areas
• "Clarity around promotion and raise expectations"increased from 2.5 to 5.7
• "Satisfaction with role and pay" increased from 2.5 to 6.4
• "Consistency between global and local office communication" identified as weakest link, only increasing from 2.5 to 3.2. We are taking this information to lead productive conversations and learnings for how to better coordinate across regional offices for our distributed team in the future

Beyond promotions and raises, I am a big believer in building a culture of recognition where team leaders and peers really see each other and the contribution that we all make to the team, appreciating each others' unique strengths and journeys.

I am also a spokesperson for a culture of learning, where we support technical excellence but a low tolerance for asshole behavior.This is reflected in our hiring processes, and we prioritize growth and learning mindsets that are curious about what more there is to learn instead of being the smartest person in the room.

I'm very proud of the growth each individual continues to make, and am so grateful for all the learnings that we continue to make together as a team.

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