Building Ada's Design Org
The Product Design team at Ada was small when I joined in the autumn of 2018. The team included David, the co-founder (who designed the initial product) and Nima, who joined a few weeks before me. I came in as a Senior Product Designer and grew into a Product Design Manager in my time at Ada.
During my first few months, I focused on handling design projects while learning about Machine Learning. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of fresh new problems to solve. By the end of 2018, my role was about to change. Ada was signing robust clients like Mailchimp and AirAsia and as a result, promising an action-packed roadmap for 2019. It became apparent that we would have to hire more designers to keep up with the demand.
Building the team
I quickly went from assisting David with interviews to completely handling all hiring activities from start to finish; while still being an individual design contributor. It was a huge growth period for me. I honed my time management skills and practised my ability to choose suitable candidates and evaluate the skillsets of candidates I reviewed.
Over 6 months, I hired and onboarded 5 new designers. Here's a little Instagram story by Peopleofada where I'm talking to a large group about how Design works at Ada during a StartUp Open House!
Defining how we design
Soon after my first hire, I became aware of the little documentation we had on how teams build the product and the role of Design at Ada. Thinking ahead, I knew that as we continue to add more members, we would need clearly articulated processes and standards to maintain Ada's design quality.
I started to discover what documentation was needed by gathering some key product people and asking them what current practices we follow and expect as a product org. Soon I realized the gaps in what we knew or where we agreed. The following were the main areas we needed to define clearly:
How do we design at Ada?
How do we use our design system?
How do we design for our users well?
How do we work with other team members?
How do we work with designers on other teams?
This activity helped me define several things: principles, attitudes, practices, meetings, process, role expectations and tools to enable designers to be successful at Ada. The guiding documentation lived on Notion, our regularly accessed internal wiki. Here's a quick snapshot of the Design section I built and maintained for the team.
Creating role expectations
As the team grew to 6 designers, one of my new challenges as Product Design Manager was articulating and setting clear role expectations to help navigate conversations around growth and career planning.
To define a role matrix, I researched role definitions at other organizations and shortlisted definitions that fit with the culture and design ideals at Ada. I also drew from my personal growth journey over ten years to define the required competencies for each level of designer. It was then just a matter of organizing the role expectations into a user-friendly matrix. The matrix described the development of skills across several expertise levels and included the following:
Research and Data
Collaboration
Communication
Mentorship
Leadership
Culture
Visual Design
UX Design
Design System
Product Thinking
Product Process
Toolkit
Mentoring designers
As a manager, I was responsible for overseeing the success of Design projects and the professional growth of designers. Through weekly standups, design reviews, and one-on-ones, I had the opportunity to coach and mentor a team with varying levels of experience.
I see this as the biggest growth I experienced professionally and personally. My knowledge, experience and leadership were put to a test regularly. Through weekly one-on-one with each of my 6 designers, I practised listening skills, empathy for and understanding of my team's unique strengths and challenges. I also learned to observe the intangible things such as designer motivation, judgement, agreeability, openness and drive, and adjusted my approach for their benefit. Through weekly design reviews, I provided feedback and challenged the team to push solutions towards greater simplicity, delight and usability.
Bringing Designers at Ada Together
Ada’s quick expansion had separated the company physically into two locations. Our Marketing Design team was in a different office from the Product Design team. We did not share any space together or any overlapping process which helped us unify our design language and processes.
One of the initiatives I spearheaded was advocating for these two teams to work more closely together and have a platform to unify and bridge any gaps. I pitched this initiative to the Head of Marketing and Head of Product.
With their buy-in, I set up biweekly Fresh Eyes meetings where designers shared ongoing design work for critique. The second change we made was to propose projects spanning across Marketing and Product that can be collaborated on. We called this the Design Guild. The guild primarily focused on:
Gestalt across Web & Product
Ease of Use & Functionality
Consistency of design system
Cultivating Team Culture
It is important that a team is not merely made of rockstar designers who work well independently. It was my goal to create an environment that fosters a sense of camaraderie between them. Studies have shown that strong camaraderie leads teams to overcome challenges faster and with more trust.
I encouraged the activities that made the team feel united outside their daily work. It was a joy to celebrate the special events together or coordinate an ice cream run across two offices on a Friday. Other activities included weekly Lunch and Learn where designers watched and discussed Design Talks together. All an essential part of building a sense of belonging within the team.
