Hiring designers
I used to help hiring product managers and designers at Oracle, this was the first time I was the hiring manager and it was a new experience I approached methodically.
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I knew we need the best designers with the right motivations because our budget is not going to surpass what the corporations offer. I worked with recruitment specialist to attract the talent via transparency and honesty while communicating a clear challenge. We received a praise from the design community in Czechia for the best job description.
Design Exercise
I wrote a list of qualities we look for in the new hires. It helped me to create a design exercise that tested those. The initial call between the recruiter and the talent took 20 minutes thanks to prepared questionnaire. Next was the design exercise whose outcome was a 3 minutes video presentation. We work asynchronously and hiring could not be different. If the presentation was good enough, we set an hour to ask questions for both sides. Last round was a social one.
Fair opportunity for everyone
Writing the ad the way everybody feels like they are welcome is a matter of course. Comparing candidates in the unbiased manner is another story. I created an excel spreadsheet with the list of qualities we are looking for and other "designer must haves" experiences to be able to see the human beings all equal and focus on the most important qualities.
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Team leading
I have been part of many teams before and I naturally tend to become the leader of a group. Leading people in sports and hobbies is a nice predisposition but organising people at work requires more than just a talent.
I provided the team a clear structure and every team member responsibilities and goals to work towards. I kept designing together with my team, we worked as an organism in which I was responsible for the organism to have a direction.
We organised
- Design critiques with external designers
- Weekly syncs where we divided and switched roles
- Asynchronous design demos for the product team
- Retrospectives
Design System
The design of the MVP was like running a sprint. Focus was on fast delivery, not sustainability. To organise a team of designers, sustainability is necessary. When most of the MVP design was ready, we started a reflection.
We broke all the screens apart.
From the bottom up, we build the design system and adjusted the existing style sheet.
We ran a workshop with the development team to align what are the components called. It was an investment into the smoothness of future communication between us.
Breaking the UI into atoms
Hiring a design lead?