Establishing and Growing the Design Team

Situation

I was brought on to establish and grow a Design team for the unicorn startup, Pacaso. When I joined, there was…

  • No established process for hiring or onboarding product designers

  • No understanding of how a Design Org should be structured and grown

  • No Design System

  • No need for standardized tools or Design Ops processes

Task

To grow and mature the team, I needed to plan for and execute a number of tasks.

  • Educate Pacaso leadership about Design Org structures

  • Establish hiring and interviewing best practices

  • Hire and onboard strong product designers

  • Work with the team to create a mission, vision, and principles

  • Create and mature a Design Culture of collaboration and trust

Actions

Pacaso was growing fast, and I moved quickly with it. To make progress with the aforementioned tasks, I took the following actions.

  • Created and presented a deck to the leadership, showing how I expect to grow the Design Org and the strategic initiatives I plan to make progress on as the team grows

  • Explained the need for and the value of in-house user research partners

  • Established hiring best practices, based heavily on Lou Adler’s Performance Based Hiring and Jared Spool’s adaptation of his methods to the User Experience hiring process

  • Collaborated closely with recruiters; educating them on how to screen for talent, write a job description for UX designers, and establish the flow of candidate engagement

  • Hired three senior, diverse product designers, whose strengths complemented each other and aligned with our business needs

  • Created onboarding documents, so all new members of my team could hit the ground running

  • Ensured that the team had the right tools to brainstorm (Miro), design and collaborate (Figma), as well as validate design decisions (UserTesting.com)

  • Involved the team in the creation of our team mission, vision, and principles

  • Established a culture of trust, collaboration, and ownership

  • Coached and removed blockers during 1:1s and other recurring team meetings

  • Created weekly learning opportunities for the team

  • Collaborated with the People team to establish career ladder for the Design organization

Results

At the end of my year and a half tenure at the company, I achieved the following results…

  • Established deep respect for Design and Research at leadership level

  • Empowered research-driven strategy by hiring a Director of Research to help Pacaso understand user needs and validate product ideas. The research-driven strategies contributed to a 10X increase in revenue year over year.

  • Built a mission-driven, engaged, collaborative, and highly effective Design team that shipped over 20 high-impact customer-facing features across Web and Mobile platforms, driving measurable value for Pacaso’s customers and bottom line.

  • Set up the right tools and frameworks to get the job done, including establishing a Design System that increased execution speed by 400% and ensured consistency across products

  • Utilized a Democratic and Coaching leadership styles to lead my team, and established a psychologically safe place for them to experiment and grow