Team has been growing fast after the series B investment. It needed a person to handle comm & facilitation, career growth, and other managerial works. I answered the call and transitioned into a ppl manager at the beginning of 2019. It was NOT easy at first. After years of learning and practicing, I'm very proud to say I've built a 1st tier design team in LA today.
The team has been staffed to 20 designers by the end of 2020.
• Managers/Leads: Sean Dillingham, Joseph Calvo, Patty Johnson, Carly Chiao, Pat Capulong, Samantha Lopez
• Designers: Anita Wei, David Moon, Dayana Alvarez, Jared Brainerd, Jose Torres, Julie Logue, Justin White, Katherine Wang, Kevin Lam, Lawrence Yong, Malia Eugenio, Pavel Villarreal, Yeoj Kwon
My contribution to people management is embedded in the full talent cycle of Acquisition → Retention → Developing → Evaluating → Departure. To share a few case studies below.
Historically, the team was very strong in visual design, while comparatively weaker in UX. Meanwhile, PMs came to us with solutions already instead of problems. It was very obvious both the design and the product team needed more design education. I set up one of the goals that year as to level up UX under the product org (We reported through the product). Design Thinking workshop was one of the internal learning initiatives.
After rounds of chatting with designers and feature team partners, I identified a theme of 'unclear responsibility in UX works'. For example, some feature team PMs were drawing wireframes themselves. The reason was either our designers didn't know it was their job due to our 'Visual Heavy' culture or some designers were lacking UX skills. By putting everyone's skills on the skill radar, we needed to improve our team-wide UX skills.
With the budget blessing from leadership, I was fortunate enough to work with William Evans on the design thinking workshop as a co-presenter.
Honey went through a major reorg from the function team to the feature team to start the agile process. Honey Design was running as an internal agency prior to it where everyone sit together. This was not working anymore under the new product/eng structure. We needed a new way to structure our design org.
Thanks to the book of Org Design for Design Org, we applied the Decentralized Partnership method with a minor twist. On top of that, we also had Design System team and Visual Art team embedded in the product design org to support other design verticals. Below is the process of how I came up with the org structure.
At first, I looked at how our product and eng org were structured. The product org was somehow structured by product portfolio while the eng org was structured by code repositories
Secondly, in order to design an org that can deliver cohesive E2E exp, while staying resilient to others' reorgs, I structured our team based on user journey points, which are 'Engage', 'Discover', 'Consider', 'Purchase', and 'Post Purchase'.
Everything seemed perfect for the design org. Well, there was one problem that new design vertical designers need to be equipped with all platforms knowledge, from the extension to the web to iOS to Android, which only a few senior designers were capable of. My last stroke was placing new roles called 'Platform Expert' on each platform while reporting into Design System. Their job was to ensure platform-wide excellence by making platform-specific patterns and E2E IA.
With all line managers staffed, I was delegating hiring. A guideline needed to be created to direct us on how to staff a stellar design org.
With the theme in mind, I overhauled the entire hiring process as below.
Other hiring artifacts.
After the acquisition, Honey Design need to migrate into PayPal Design's career progression system.
The Honey Design career ladder then.
I mapped Honey Design's core skill area to PYPL Design's, and stretched Honey's career span to PYPL's wider one.
Then, I created new career ladders for both Product Designers and Visual Artists under my org. I also added routes for people managers.
