Navigating your first 30 days on a new design team
A helpful template to be proactive in understanding your new product, team, and organization.
This article provides a brief overview of how designers can plan the first 30 days on a new design team or organization. It’s adapted from Tori Podmajersky’s book, Strategic Writing for UX. Although the book focuses on technical UX writing, the last two chapters are a goldmine for all designers. The book wraps up how designers can be proactive in joining new teams, as well as how to prioritize their work.
Podmajersky closes with a helpful 30–60–90-day approach to joining an organization. I’ve noticed designers I talk to really have no idea where to begin when joining a new team and their only frame of reference for understanding the product, team, and organization stems from their initial interview questions. This article aims to serve as a tool to begin intentionally learning and growing, right from day one.
Podmajersky’s approach is more UX content writing focused, so I’ve adapted it to help designers gain a more general overview of their new professional contexts. Here is a template I’ve crafted to organize the steps ahead for your first 30 days. Link to template.
Plan 1–1s
A designer needs to unpack the What and the Who of the user experience and the team who will be designing this experience within the first 30 days. What’s really important here is to understand what’s important to each member of the team. Engineers have different opinions about the user experience than marketers. The same contrasts can be found between the founder’s assumptions and the sales reps, so it’s good practice to talk to everyone involved and synthesize these understandings. While you’re connecting with all these stakeholders, the entire team’s confidence is building that all the time, money, and energy put into UX design is going to pay off in the long run.
Begin by identifying a handful of teammates who have different points of view from each other and know organization inside and out. These individuals know the problems to be tackled. Start off with setting up 1–1 meetings where you can ask questions like: Who’s really on the team? Which individuals on the team affect the experience that we’re designing for? You may find that the decision-makers could be product owners, engineers, program managers, attorneys, business analysts, and so forth.
Synthesizing these insights comes next. Podmajersky suggests sketching a diagram of the key players of the organization associated with the designing of the user experience. Then share this diagram with your colleagues to check for your own understanding and adjust the diagram if needed. This will help you understand the organizational layout and decision making flows within the experience you are designing for.
Check-Ins
Once your 1–1s are completed, you will want to do 30 minute check-ins with those stakeholders that you just learned about in order to gather information about the organization, the product, business goals and your customers. In doing so, you’re introducing the idea of what it’s like for people to work with you. In setting up these meetings you get the opportunity to introduce your colleagues to what it is going to be like working with you and what it means to work with a UX designer.
In preparing for these meetings, you will want to provide them with a preview of the agenda. Make it something like a rough draft, nothing super-refined or set in stone, but something flexible. Using the headings provided below will allow for structure and the ability to fill in information on the spot. I have provided this document within my outreach emails to engineers and marketers to give them a sense of what our conversation will be about and give them time to digest the questions so they can be more articulate in our meetings.
The Template
The first section of the document is labeled “What You Think You Know”. You may think you know everything, but aim to write out your understanding in the briefest, scannable bullet points. I try not to do more than 5 bullet points. These understandings can be about the product, team, or organization. Basically anything you learned about the product in relation to the experience you’re designing for from the organization’s website or initial interviews.
The second section is labeled “What You Don’t Know” and you’re going to want to leave the section empty because you’re showing people who you are going to check-in with that you want to learn something, you’re owning what you don’t know, and that this information is communicated to you is really valuable to you. This section is a space to take notes in the meeting and organize and give context to the answers you’ll be receiving.
The remaining sections are as follows:
- Definition of the experience
- Customer motivations
- Organizational priorities
- Team/stakeholders
- List of existing content
- Reviews
- Terminology
Within the template provided, I added some questions for each section to help expand on these areas during your meetings to serve as talking points.
Note-Taking
When meeting with your colleagues it’s important to practice active listening and be able to take as many detailed notes as possible. Physically writing down other people’s words shows that their words have value and priority and that they play a key role in helping you understand the user experience. If you come across some overlap from something they’ve mentioned before, it’s okay to ask them to double-check and see if the content is correct or if there’s anything they should add or take away.
Synthesizing
Now let’s say you are prepping for your next stakeholder meeting. You’re going to want to clean up this document and make it look neat and organized. You may want to use the same document and type the next person’s responses in another color or use a whole new document all-together. Lastly, synthesize all this information into one existing document.
What you learn is that onboarding onto a new team can be stressful, but you’ll realize that nobody actually knows everything. No one has a complete and detailed overview on what your end-users are experiencing.
Artifact
As you develop a stronger understanding of the user experience, you can now create internal artifacts like a life cycle of the experience you’re designing for or a user journey map of all the goals, emotions, and frustration of your end users. Your life cycle can be shared with colleagues to either elicit opinions of where the user experience is broken or act as a reference piece to point out phases of the life cycle you will be focusing your work on. Podmajersky does a beautiful job weaving the concept of a virtuous life cycle throughout Strategic Writing for UX. I highly recommend picking up a copy to see the virtuous life cycle come to life as a final product of the information you’ve gained in your first 30 days with an organization.
Wrapping it Up
At the end of your first 30 days, you’ll have made connections with all of the stakeholders and decision-makers involved in the user experience. Your template should now hold valuable insights including :
- A prioritized list of tasks to produce or improve UX design
- A resource of the motivations and goals of the people who use the experience
- An internal analysis of the organization’s priorities and constraints
- A quick guide to communication channels, terminology , and review processes
I hope you found these thoughts and practices useful for your current job or new position on the horizon. Let me know how it goes!
David is a Product Designer at City of Wind Design, a design studio that specializes in serving startups through UX design & software development with a bias toward accessibility & sustainability. To learn more about David Pinedo visit: https://www.davidpinedo.com or follow @davidpinedo24 on Twitter.
