Design Team Building — Mike Townson

Design Team Building

Hiring top Product and Marketing design talent has been a major part of my career for over 7 years. Scaling those teams to take on multiple different problem spaces is my sweet spot. My approach to attracting talent and keeping them has been proven to work by my 95% retention rate. I use the leader-leader method best defined by L. David Marquet in his book “Turn The Ship Around”, and it has paid off in not only building, scaling, and upleveling great teams, but keeping them engaged, efficient, and happy.

Design Manager Skills

Managed teams of 4-25, individual contributors and managers
Recruiting, hiring process/vetting, onboarding, and retention
Measuring team efficiency and individual manager and IC performance
Strategy and goal setting, communicating expectations clearly
Kind, fun, and inclusive

Leading By Example

My secret to giving designers the confidence to solve hard problems and nvaigate abiguity is to take them along as I do it myself. I openly and transparently share my approaches, teqchniques and tricks learned over the years. I have them shadow me as I work along side them and then support them from behind, allowing them to find their own tricks and techniques. I often learn as much from my team as they do from me. Below you’ll see just a couple of my many techniques explained.

Communicating Through Design

Being a confident illustrator during ideation sessions is helpful in being able to explain ideas through storyboarding. Drawing quickly on a whiteboard and being able to get team ideas into story formate was hugely sucsessful for us.

I have extensive experience in facilitating Five Day Sprints as written by Jake Knapp. As well as Design "Studios" - a workshop style we have perfected at The Knot, and user story mapping sessions as written by Jeff Patton.

Using Storytelling

Humans are designed and have evolved to gravitate to stories. As a creative, story-telling is my strongest asset to communicating a plan, importance, a pain-point, or a user's behavior. I have the added benefit of spiking high in my abilities to do this verbally and visually.

"Owning the whiteboard" is how I lead by example and work with other designers to make them feel comfortable using thier most valuable asset, design competence, to help teams get aligned quicker.

Clearing Up Career Paths

Something the design team needed after getting married to our competition, WeddingWire, was a new definition of who they were in the organization and the path forward to where they wanted to be in their career. I worked alongside the executive team and HR to create a clear and measureable way to communicate levels in the design org.

This work consisted of looking at the team we had and who the high performers were and decide if we felt they were defining their position or not. We created a matrix with titles and expected outcomes along with examples of feedback that individual might receive if they were doing a great job and the impact their work was having on the products they touched.

Measure Metrics, Beating Goals