HOW TO MANAGE AND RETAIN TOP DESIGN TALENT?
Wayfair | Vision, Discovery & User Research, Affinity Mapping, Roadmap
Designers practise our craft in UI and UX. Leaders and managers rely on an additional set of core skills. I believe that design management should also be a craft.
I evangelized the concept of management as a craft across the 170+ members of the Global Experience Design (GXD) Community at Wayfair. I pioneered and led sessions to establish a common set of expectations for all GXD managers.
For my work, I was selected to speak at the UXPA Boston 2022 Conference and the Design Museum Everyday 2022 Conference.
Read more about the results in my Medium article on the Wayfair blog.
THE PROBLEM
Research from the Harvard Business Review (from 2016, 2018, and 2022) repeatedly show that employees leave a company because of a poor relationship with their managers. Forbes in 2019 showed that it costs an extra 33% of an employee’s salary to find and train someone new.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, our design team’s attrition was high.
HYPOTHESIS
My hypothesis is: If design managers feel supported, they can better support their team. This will then level everyone up and decrease attrition.
VISION
Before I started tackling this problem, I secured support from leadership with this vision:
DISCOVERY
I first analyzed the company-wide employee survey between managers and individual contributors (ICs). There was statistically significant difference between managers’ and ICs’ employer net promoter score (eNPS). eNPS asks, “How likely would you recommend your workplace?”. I was not able to find out why from the survey. So I conducted my own.
I created a survey in the form of a Miro board. I wanted to know whether manager needs changed depending on how experienced they were at managing. Managers left feedback as anonymous post-its and upvoted the ones that they resonated with.
For each question, I then used affinity mapping to group feedback and pain points under similar themes.
I then further grouped the themes from each question to larger themes. This helped me pinpoint the most important, low-hanging fruit I need to tackle first. It also helped me build a roadmap to address pain points.
Results
I created templates for 1:1 meetings and development conversations. I also created templates to help managers address common development opportunities from their direct reports, like problem definition and project scoping. I then created an internal Confluence hub for design managers for these templates and invited other managers to contribute.
I created, presented and led onboarding sessions to establish a common baseline of expectations for all new design managers. Session NPS is 100. Participants wrote that “all the templates” and “dialogue at end to share tips with other folks in group” were most helpful.
My work has enabled other team members to highlight gaps and address the manager experience, like initiatives to clarify titles and clearer performance criteria.
Recognition
I was invited to speak about my work at two conferences in 2022:
UXPA Boston. This was an in-person conference in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., with 640+ attendees.
Design Museum Everywhere’s Design Week. This was a virtual conference in the U.S.A with 200+ attendees.
A participant wrote:
Super valuable topic for UX folks in all stages of their career. Joyce is a great speaker! Would love to hear more talks by her. Joyce was very thoughtful with her responses in the Q&A session.
