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Now is a good time to multiply your Design team’s capacity
Takeaways on how to build a fully optimized & functional Design team. How to become a multiplier instead of an empire builder.
This article’s timing is partly due to the major layoff happening worldwide. IT Companies have been building empires. Empires are, by their structure, as fragile as they are big.
So while the world realizes that non-profitable businesses are not so great, it might be a good time to re-think how teams, and more particularly Design teams are built and managed. Liz Wizeman wrote a book back in 2010, explaining how leaders can become multipliers, instead of empire builders or ‘diminishers’.
This culture of multipliers is deeply integrated into my company’s leadership principles. Being a team lead for that same company for over 8 years taught me how to direct my efforts into building a compact, fully optimized team of Designers. You’ll discover that this has both advantages for the team’s performance, but also for each individual inside the team as it promotes a sense of accomplishment and self-responsibility.
I know for a fact that other companies, working on similar products have huge Design teams. In proportions, we are about 1/4 to 1/8 of their sizes. Still, we manage to ship everything on time, and our product quality is by all standards, satisfying following our customers’ feedback and business/usability metrics.
And because you might wonder, we don’t overwork. 😏
An entire book could be written on this topic. But for this article, I would like to give an introduction to each lever I could identify to multiply your Design team’s capacity.
Let’s start with some basic requirements:
Before building anything, it is important to know what we can multiply. You should answer this question first: Can I measure my Design team outcomes?
Know what you should multiply: having measurable Design outcomes
As a lead, your responsibilities are tied to the performances of a product (or a team in the case of a function team). To multiply something, you need to know the current value first. By doing this kind of audit, you might realize that some of…
