Restoring morale to burned-out team members

This is the story how I improved team morale and increased Voice of Associate job satisfaction scores in only 6 months.

The team I inherited was burned out.

When I took over the leadership of the OrderUp team, morale was at rock bottom.

2 years of 'feature parity' and 'lift and shift' work had taken it's toll on the team.
Previous manager had been stretched incredibly thin, having little time for team members.
- Career development & mentoring was non-existent.
- Design quality was low and critiques were not constructive.
- Voice of Associate survey scores for this team were the lowest they had been in years.
Work assignments were not level appropriate.
There were communication breakdowns between UX & Product Management.

Designing an intentional and flexible team resourcing model.

We had junior designers working on vision / strategy work & staffs doing low level mockup work. Everyone was stretched thin. We needed to set the team up for success.

I started by identifying goals we wanted to achieve & pain points we needed to solve.

There were 2 key ideas:

Get Staffs out of the backlog as much as possible so they could help support the team and spend more time on future-facing visioning work.
Move to a Dual Track resourcing model where Staffs support a subdomain, and designers in the subdomain together supported a group of balanced teams. This would allow us flexibility to load balance work as needed and ensure the right designer was on the right task.

Scope expanded to all of Store Systems (60+ design org)

After many revisions I presented this framework and thinking to my director (skip level manager). He liked it so much, he wanted to explore taking the same approach with his entire org or 60 designers, researchers, managers, and senior managers.

I partnered with a couple Senior Principal Designers on how that might work across the full org.

Flexible framework not rigid enforcement

I had designed the original solution to focus on the needs & career goals of my space and team. If this was going to be rolled out to a larger group, I wanted to ensure we designed a flexible framework. I took a step back and separated out the roles and responsibilities from individuals or role levels.

Mutually beneficial, flexible resourcing examples

I put together multiple examples of how the roles and responsibilities could shift based on the needs of the space and the career development goals of Staffs & Managers.

Processes to improve transparency & design quality

With the team structured better, I then set out to put processes in place to help the team be able to achieve the most meaningful outcomes.

I developed a structure for tracking UX work in Jira to provide greater transparency to partners and keep ourselves accountable.

I partnered with Product leadership to establish a template for UX epic descriptions to help set UXers up for success.

I developed a Design & Research Effort framework to help us all get on the same page about level of effort, and help enable better UX capacity planning.

I developed career development tools to help have more structured and actionable growth conversations.

I formalized and established guidelines for Design Critique vs. Design Reviews to make those meetings more effective and purposeful.

Team morale saw an immediate lift.

Within 6 months, we saw an immediate increase in the Voice of Associate ratings on the team.