Design Leadership

ZoomInfo has played a key role in shaping who I am today. It provided an incredible environment for exploration, experimentation, and risk-taking, all while offering valuable opportunities to learn and refine both my craft and leadership abilities. During my time there, I developed and continually refined my own processes and developed a variety of systems for team management, coaching and performance guides

The Problem

Managing a team introduces many challenges. As a manager you need to make sure the team is high performing, reaching the business goals and also confident they are positioned for success. Your team players need to believe in what they are doing and strive for continuous improvement and growth, but how they can do it in a volatile environment, through a major organizational shift and when the goals are not always defined?.

As I was watching my team progress, through team meetings, feedback sessions, work reviews and occasional "pulse check", I encountered a number of pain points:

• When the company is making radical organizational changes, employees tend to show business as usual, even if they are overwhelmed with the changes, feeling upset or their performance is being affected by it.

• Designers don’t always know what they should do to succeed or get better - It happens more often when business goals are changing frequently, organizational changes impact accountability and the employees don't have a chance to see how their work impacted the business.

• Design goals are not easy to measure or quantify - While the business is producing a long array of analytical data about usage, retention, feature adoption, churn and more, It's not easy to determine what exactly made an impact and translate it to ROI. While designers output can be very intuitive, user friendly (based on research) and check stakeholders objectives, there are many reasons and circumstances that can hinder success, such as technological limitations, platform stability, business focus (limited resources), weak methodology practice etc'

Main Goals

I took a stab at trying to figure out what can help my team succeed, define their process, understand what they accountable for and what are their growth path. All while also understand the limitations, learn how to adapt quickly, become a better designer and work on their weaknesses.

This led me to work on a "Performance Book" - Goals:

• Define a growing path for designers and define how success looks like

• Alignment with business goals and finding the best metrics to evaluate design work  

• Create a list of Do's and Don'ts when defining design goals

• Get to a defined process that’s aligned with everyone on the team and our partners

Team Feedback

Generally most of the team reacted well to these values and especially the defined process which made things easier for everybody. After a number of sessions and iterations we came up with something that made sense for most of the team and our engineering and product partners were very positive about the new process. It helped us increase efficiency by at least 20%, made expectations clearer and the team members were more confident in their growing path.