“Everything that Product Design touches turns into gold.”
As the head of a design team or department, the above quote is exactly the kind of feedback you want, right? But how do you reach the point where design is viewed like this in your organisation?
For Olga Mishyna, Head of Product at Adyen, this feedback came after several waves of recruitment and teambuilding – growing Adyen’s Product Design team from eight people to more than thirty in under three years. Talking to Product Unleashed, Olga was happy to talk through the key challenges and different approaches taken – and during the COVID-19 pandemic, no less, which added a few complications…
Why grow the product design team?
For Adyen – a global business payments and banking concern – there were clear indicators that expanding the design team was the right way to go. The simplest motivation was that the team needed more people to achieve its business goals. What’s more, as a development company built by developers, Adyen lacked UX design skills.
The key challenges as Olga saw them were:
- The team was – in Olga’s words – largely a “white boys’ club” – lacking diversity of background, experience, and perspective.
- The team was missing some key design skills.
- The team wanted to grow its reputation for product design.
On top of everything, much of the team’s expansion took place during the pandemic, which not only complicated the hiring process but also onboarding and team building.
4 waves of recruitment
One way to address the above issues – or at least, spread out their impact – was to expand the team into four stages. However, at each stage, the same basic hiring process was used for candidates:
- In response to the vacancy, send a portfolio/application,
- Answer initial HR questions,
- Informal phone interview with two designers,
- Two-part technical interview: present a project, conduct a mock design review,
- Three short interviews with Product Design team members and a Board member.
According to Olga, the single thread running through the process was that, “every interview is an interview for potential,” and that interviewers/assessors were, “always looking for a reason to say yes.”
Factoring in diversity…
An important first step, given the first challenge, was ensuring that the hiring process would do more than just perpetuate the current team demographic. First, Olga assembled diverse hiring panels so that candidates would see themselves represented by recruiters. Furthermore, to minimise any unconscious biases (either of the interviewers or the process itself) the same questions were asked of all candidates. To encourage a wider range of candidates to apply in the first place, the company reached out to a variety of communities using social media and Slack. Then, there was the question of how the posts were described. As part of the process, an ML algorithm was used to check job descriptions to ensure more inclusive and inviting language.
…and inclusion
An inclusive hiring process was not enough. Once recruited, new hires would be joining an established (and less diverse) team – a situation that carries barriers to inclusion. In an effort to ensure that diversity enriched the team dynamic, the team attended a workshop on cultural awareness to better understand the reality of working as a broader team. For Olga, everyone gained a greater appreciation of other motivations and perspectives and it, “definitely made us more empathetic towards each other… more understanding.”
Onboarding without face-to-face contact
Whether there’s a pandemic or not, new team members need to be welcomed and supported in their new roles and organisation. When everyone is working from home and able to communicate only electronically and at a distance, this is especially challenging. While modern business tools such as video meetings, and tactics such as buddying up newbies with experienced colleagues made this possible, the key issue for Olga was creating personal connections and closeness within the new team. This meant a succession of non-work events and activities, including quizzes, a focus on more social interactions, and even a series of shared recipes for culturally-specific dishes. This culminated, post-pandemic, in the expanded team (now including people from all continents, except Antarctica!) having its first full get-together for coffee in the park. In Olga’s own words, “Everything just clicked… the vibe was there… we felt like we knew each other even though we’d never seen each in real life.”
The transformation of a team
With this level of focus on expanding not just the team’s numbers but also its diversity and the resources and experiences that could be brought to the table, it’s not surprising that Adyen’s Product Design team was very different afterwards. This ‘focused expansion’ impacted the team’s structure, roles, performance management, and the processes it uses.
Change #1 – team structure
Previously, the team consisted mainly of product designers but now there was a shift to become more of a design operations team, a change of emphasis with a shared focus on research (focused on product discovery and understanding needs, and assessment of prototypes and MVPs), design (transform product goals into a functional user experience), and UX writing (working – alongside design – on the user story and experience via product content).
Change #2 – team roles
Before the expansion, the team had not classified roles as senior, midweight, or junior. However, in an attempt to attract the best recruits, all new roles were advertised as ‘senior’. This turned out to be potentially divisive for the existing team members and so they had to define the seniority levels. This prompted a close look at what attributes were most valued and led to a bespoke set of definitions:
- Starting – support-level, still working on their craft and skills.
- Core – established performer, strong communication skills, proactive relationship-builder.
- Experienced – high-level performer, formed wide-ranging relationships, able to lead large projects.
A big factor for Olga in assessing seniority is influence, hence the emphasis on relationships which signify connections and opportunities for wider impact and better product design.
Change #3 – processes
As the team got bigger, it was necessary to review and revamp some of its core processes. For example, product design reviews used to be carried out with the whole team, for maximum input. However, an all-in-one-room review rapidly becomes a logistical nightmare when you have a team of 30+ instead of eight.
After experimenting with a variety of factors – review group size, moderation, timings – the team categorised the different review meetings (one for each product group, and one focused on the design system) and began inviting product managers and developers to offer their input and feedback at meetings, broadening the points of view on offer.
Still, the common thread is that all design reviews are based on trying, “to understand before being understood.” The goal is always to gather clear and actionable views and feedback.
Improvement is continuous
Adyen realised that in design, diversity of background, experience, thought and ideas is essential. Hence the focused drive to not only increase the size of the team but also the scope of what it could offer. Done well, this kind of expansion changes the team completely (for the better!) As we can see, improving the team means also improving the way the team works, how it views itself, and which methods and tools it uses. The goal is a diverse and high-functioning design team that is more likely to come up with genuinely new and useful insights to create a better product. Did it work? The expansion of Adyen’s Design Operations Team may be a work in progress – the recruitment drive continues – but to return to that first quote, the feedback from company colleagues was:
“Everything that Product Design touches turns into gold.”