As a Practice Lead
I make sure our Designers have all the tools and support they need to perform at their best level and grow in proficiency.
As a Technical Director
I support our multidisciplinary teams to make the best use of Design when delivering across the Product Life Cycle.
As a Designer
I facilitate workshops to provide Product Vision, Strategy and Prototypes for our Clients as well as for our R&D projects. I concentrate on Sensemaking, Presumptions, Learning & Rapid Prototyping.
As the Regional Director
I’m responsible for the LATAM Design & UX Practice. I oversee +35 Design Professionals across Argentina & Mexico. The team works in multiple end-to-end Projects, servicing various Clients across the Financial, Utilities, Mass Retail and Health & Life Sciences industries.
I’ve spun up the team from scratch, and in 3 years we have become the fastest organic growing Design team within the organization. Even as we switched to full-remote throughout the pandemic, we are still actively growing, running into 2022, at an almost constant 97% utilization.
Building a team from the ground up meant my role has evolved as the team scaled. Yet, 3 fundamental goals have been clear all along the process. For this team to perform we must be great at Talent Growth while also putting a great focus on Talent Attraction and Talent Retention.
Raising a Community
My core goal is Talent Growth, which has a big compounding effect on retention. Together with the Managers we mentor and coach the team’s Designers on their career growth. Our homegrown Career Path is aligned to our annual review cycle.
As a growth metric for last year we had +15% Promotions and +26% Level ups.
The Career Path has both Individual Contributor and a Management Tracks, and is focused on building core Design skills. Since 80% of Design is convincing stakeholders, communication abilities are paramount. These, require building a sense of purpose, intent, agency and autonomy, all which become essential as seniority increases.
Apart from the universally established Design Craftsmanship, the generative and change pursuing nature of our discipline requires creativity fueled by curiosity, experimentation and a healthy dose of nonconformity.
The team is organized in smaller decentralized and autonomous local collectives, who pursue the same goals as the larger group. Led by a Senior Designer and acting as mentor/mentee networks, they’re enabled to explore and run small scale initiatives to go after these objectives.
This has resulted in several initiatives such as partnering with new joiners during onboarding, daily meetups to foster wellness, and monthly gatherings to encourage other skills such as envisioning, presentation, and front of the room confidence.
Building a Practice
To enhance this growth and increase proficiency across the Product Design Skills Matrix, we’ve set up internal Design Sub-Practices. They span User Experience Strategy, Participatory Design & Facilitation, Design Research and Interaction & User Interface Design.
These round tables are run by the Talent, for the Talent, and are led by the seasoned specialists within our team. These professionals can delineate a particular competence and help the rest approach craftsmanship from theory to experience, from technical knowledge to practical and procedural skills.
Hiring the appropriate Talent
I recognize none of this could happen if we weren’t able to attract and hire any Designers. This makes Talent Attraction our precursory goal. We work with our Marketing team in the first place, to build awareness and presence within the regional Design communities and events.
Almost 30% of our team stands in as technical interviewers and we’ve iteratively refined the interview process, in order to make it work with the volatile markets we’re present in. I’ve also personally created a Market Guide for our Recruiting Team to have an exhaustive understanding of the different Experience Design Talent they can find. And we work closely together to find the best talent in each of our studios by crafting candidate pipelines that match our delivery needs.
Taking the Team for a Global Spin
As part of the Global Design network, I work with our Management to foster cohesion and best practices into our offerings and build thought leadership across our worldwide teams. This includes running Design client relationships, acting as a Technical Director for Design, running co-creation, ideation and discovery workshops with our clients, and working with Solutions to pitch projects and pursue opportunities.