Building a Growth Culture through Design OKR’s
Everyone hates performance goal settings. Often people lack clarity on how to set goals for their growth, the ways to approach and the least how to effectively measure it. Even the best performing talent can be discouraged and demoralized by complex goal-setting frameworks which at times merely ticks a checkbox rather progressing an individual to deeper maturity levels. In my few years of working as a people manager, I have realized both the first time people leader, as well as seasoned managers, faces difficulty in effectively mastering this key skill and building the right capabilities in their team.
During the formative years of my design career, I worked with an organization which solely focused on measuring performance as the primary means to grow individuals. The downside of the performance-obsessed approach is, it creates a divide between high and low performers, similar to education system driving fear rather than the potential. On the other side of the spectrum, the designers are also challenged by the unclear articulation of career goals that are suitable at their levels in the organization. Some of them end up setting up low-hanging fruits or the ones which are really hard to achieve.
The need for growth-obsessed culture is undebatable. It’s hard and tricky to set growth goals in a creative field like us. Experience Design is part science and part art hence not everything can be seen purely from the lens of a mathematical equation. Firstly, measuring expertise and proficiency in creative is incredibly hard. Secondly, design competency can be perceived differently by different leaders.
This article explores different approaches UX managers can consider to steer their teams to higher UX maturity, upskilling them and activate a growth-focused culture. Also, I intend to leverage OKR’s tool (Read: The Beginner’s Guide) to create a win-win situation for both individuals as well as an organization.
Let’s have a look at the process that has helped me to plan individual growth through goal-setting…
Foremost, Understand the Maturity level of Designers
Every UX team has a different hierarchical structure but in a large scale product/service company designers can be put together in some common brackets. In my experience, here is a typical career path for designers…
Entry-Level Designers — Fresh out of college, new to the industry styled projects and processes.
Associate Designers — A slightly experienced designers in the range of 2–5 Years; They are primarily responsible for lightweight lifting, delivering specific user journey or operational aspects generally under the guidance of their superiors.
Senior Designers — They are seasoned designers who have witnessed different weathers typically within the experience of 5–10 years. They can perform heavyweight lifting, and can play step up role at times. Primarily individual contributors, they are part of the big product or large scale UX transformation for clients, understand depth and breadth of experience design and ready to plunge into people leadership.
UX Managers — They steer a team of designers while strongly advocating for user needs, meeting business objectives, making tough design decisions and ensuring projects are delivered with high quality. Design Ops and grooming designers on the job are their key responsibilities.
Senior Managers — They manage a team of Managers and responsible for setting higher standards of craft leadership. They push the limit of creativity, imagination, and strategy.
Directors and Above — This layer manages large design teams and client portfolios. Responsible for providing thought leadership and strategic direction both internally and externally and more importantly foster creativity and intellectually stimulating culture.
For the benefit of readers, at the time of writing, I belong to the UX manager level. Setting up a growth plan is a tricky affair as it involves a strong understanding of goal-setting theory (i.e. Clarity, Challenge, Commitment, Feedback, Task-Complexity ) and also multiple consideration like skills and maturity assessment.
Second, Conduct Skills Assessment
For an effective goal-setting, as a people manager you need need to build a strong understanding of these inflection points and skills that need be developed at that level. The skills assessment should be done through two-way open-ended engagement combining individual self-assessment and manager evaluation so that aspirations and organizational needs balance out. The alignment should happen in these areas -
- Skill Activation — What are the must-have skills at that level? Does the individual possess all the necessary skills required to do his job?
- Role Effectiveness — What skill will make the person effective in his current role? The obvious question could be — Is the person ready to pick up user research all alone ? or Is the person ready to mentor junior designers?
- The Next Level — How the designers are prepared for success in the next role? The assessment should look at taking skill proficiency to higher levels and acquiring new skills from the next level.
Third, The Maturity Assessment
Yuri Vetrov in his famous article Applied UX Strategy, Part 1 : Maturity Models talks about 3 levels of company UX maturity. In my opinion, the same maturity can be extended to individual designers as well that gradually steer them to be a strategic influencer.
- Operational — The designer is just an implementer, working on assigned design deliverables. Delivers consistent and reliable quality of work.
- Tactical — The designer is an integral part of design decisions and deeply integrates design research, design theory, best practices in UX deliverables. Demonstrates expertise in their craft by consistently producing work with a high level of polish and detail.
- Strategic — The designer is a visionary or product owner who influences strategic decisions on how to evolve a product. Provides craft leadership, driving innovation within their discipline by promoting experimentation and development of new processes, methodologies, and approach. Educates internal and client stakeholders around the discipline, ensuring teams have space and opportunities to produce high-quality work.
Fourth, Define The Focus Area
Lastly, any goal should be linked to organizational and your department focus area. if your design department is building expertise in Artificial Intelligence in Experience Design practice and your team is focusing on conventional system intelligence than this misalignment is beyond any reasoning. Aligning goals to business objectives encourage participation as an individual can aim at focused activities in-line with needs and see the impact. Along with business objectives, there can be other focus areas that your design team can look in general to uplift capability. These could be and not limited to
- Craft — Knowledge of tools, methods, and processes.
- Consulting — Ability to advise stakeholders on the process right for the business context
- Leadership — Exhibits craft proficiency and a champion on behavioral and people skills
- Culture — Evangelize design-driven culture
- DesignOps — Drive all aspects of operations, pushes tighter integration with technology teams
Finally, the Role of OKR’s
Now, you exactly know what your team should focus on, what objectives are critical and you can better rationalize growth plan based on an individual UX maturity and focus areas but how exactly you make it outcome focussed. You can have too many goals. Point is which one you should be focussing on. OKR’s come to rescue here. Recently OKR’s discussion was parachuted by the leadership team and it was followed by a unanimous nod. the For newbies, OKR’s is a highly popular goal-setting system to create alignment and engagement around measurable goals.
The anatomy of OKR is a simple statement —
I WANT TO …………………. (Objective) as measured by
- Key Results 1
- Key Results 2
- Key Results 3
There are 2 parts to OKR’s
Objectives — A short and inspirational description of your goal.
Key Results are clearly measurable tactics that track your progress towards the Objective. 2–5 Key results for every objective are advisable.
What makes OKR’s a reasonable choice is OKR’s are not synonymous with employee evaluations. OKR’s are about the company’s goals and how each employee contributes to those goals. It’s a unified scorecard where every player contributes.
To gain the maximum out of OKR’s, these 4 parameters should be kept in mind
- Alignment with Organizational Objectives — It’s a top-done framework with both vertical and horizontal alignment. Your goals are all the way up to your team, department, and organization. It’s a classic game where everyone has to perform to win a game.
- Communication Clarity — Needless to say, a simple and comprehensible objective with simple success criteria is a job half done.
- Combine Moonshots and Roofshots — Set goals which push the limit of an individual taking them beyond the comfort zone but practical enough to achieve. Felipe Castro has very beautifully described the how ambitious your goal could be by drawing an analogy between moonshots and roofshots.
- Focus and Priority — Focus on what is important and sequencing the important activities helps in achieving outcomes.
As this framework is relatively new to us, we are in the process of developing this framework further to develop talent and notch up our creativity, imagination and strategy skills.
