How to Grow Your Design Practice

I often get asked by first-time practice leaders how to build and scale a design practice. Where do you start? And how do you know you’re doing the right thing? It often feels like an opaque and daunting journey into uncharted territory.

And the question behind that really is: Can you give me a clear plan, a failsafe map, of how I get from here to a thriving design practice?

Instead, I have broken down the journey into three steps, and want to share an overview of the most important questions you need to address along the way.

• How do you attract your first hires?

• How do you develop a thriving team?

• How do you grow to a practice beyond the first team?

Let me share my most recent context with you. At Pivotal Labs I was hired as the first designer outside North America, I helped establish the London office and build a design practice there from scratch, then helped four more practices get off the ground in Europe. From there I took on the role of leading the practice globally, across 20 teams. Now in our consulting work at Northshore Studio, we help our clients establish and advance their practices.

How do you attract your first hires?

Design practices can take many shapes and sizes—there is no right or wrong answer. But you need to figure out what works best in your situation. For example, is it a centralised or distributed team? Is it new or established? Is it in one place or crossing geographies, time zones, or cultures? Is it remote or in-person? 

It’s also important to know how your organisation is structured. The image below illustrates a few examples.

Image source: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

At Pivotal Labs, we worked in cross-disciplinary product teams, alongside our clients to teach them user-centred, lean, and agile product practices. That means our design practitioners rarely got to work alongside each other.

Making your first hire

Imagine this: You are a designer at a growing company and you need to increase design capacity. This is an exciting opportunity, but also quite a shift from being a practitioner.

Your first question is: I need to hire someone. But who? 

To help you identify who to hire, get a good understanding of what skills and experience you need. Map what skills you have available, what capabilities are necessary to do the job well, and what gaps there might be that you need to bridge.

When you start building a design practice, chances are the organisation doesn’t already utilise design to its fullest potential. What work do you believe would create the most value? Are there any capabilities you need to build?

Your goal is to articulate the necessary skills to set someone up for success in the current role, and what work you need to be able to do as a practice going forward.

Consider what support you can give the new hire at the moment. Are you able to help them learn necessary skills on the job? Are you able to support them if they are not confident about all aspects of their job? Be very realistic! I see a lot of teams overconfident in this situation, and then early-stage practitioners end up under-supported in their work.

“When starting a practice, my advice is to start with experienced generalists.”

When starting a practice, my advice is to start with experienced generalists. You need people who can work independently across a wide range of challenges. With each new hire, you have an opportunity to build up practice capabilities. Your goal is to have expertise of all necessary skills in house. No one is good at everything. You are looking to round out complementary skill sets.

How do you attract the people you are looking for?

If you are starting from scratch, it’s unlikely that your company already has a reputation in the market for being a great destination for designers. Perhaps you don’t even have much work to demonstrate the awesomeness that lies ahead. So how do you create a destination?

You have an opportunity to be intentional about the practice and design culture you are developing. This also helps you to paint a picture of what mission people would be joining. 

Daniel Pink explains workplace motivation is driven by three factors: 

• Autonomy: Our need to direct our own lives and work

• Mastery: Our need to get better and better at something that matters

• Purpose: Our need to join a mission that matters to us

To help you identify what you need beyond the technical skills—and help potential hires identify that this opportunity is a great fit—start with describing the purpose of the practice and the role. 

Define the North Star for your practice, so you can share it with others. You are describing the purpose and setting the tone for the practice culture. What makes this place different? How do you expect to show up together? 

Articulate goals, values, and principles for the practice. Ground this in the company’s mission and values, and extend and translate that where necessary to guide a design practice. What’s your vision for the design discipline at your company? What’s your goal for the work?

To be able to hire for culture add and values fit, you need to have articulated your values first. 

This will evolve with the team, but you need to create a starting point. We all know that culture is the interplay between people. As a rule of thumb, values and principles evolve slowly while practices can evolve quite quickly to keep up with our ever-changing technology context. 

With your vision in place, you have an opportunity to share what you do in the community and to create a great reputation. There are so many ways to be active in the local community, and now we’re even able to tap into the global community online. You can host events, sponsor, volunteer, and speak. This is also a great way to connect to people who might be looking for a new job and to understand their needs better. 

Finding the right people is critical, as every new person changes the dynamic of the team. One wrong hire can be a costly mistake that’s difficult to fix, leads to other voluntary departures, and becomes an all-round frustrating experience for everyone involved. It’s worth investing time in honing your approach.

Do your job description and interview process help you find the right people?

Here are several questions to guide you when thinking about your hiring process:

• Are your expectations realistic and is it a fair value exchange of what you expect and what work you can offer?

• Is your offer competitive? There might be a gap between the job that needs to be done vs. the budget given to you—how does that constrain you?

• Is your interview process fine-tuned so you and the candidate can quickly and confidently make a hiring decision?

• Does it introduce any unintended biases?

• How is your process helping you identify culture add and values fit?

• If you have hiring partners, how have you calibrated what you are looking for? And how do you involve the team? Do they have a shared understanding of what you’re looking for?

• And from the candidate’s perspective: What’s the overall interviewee experience like from first contact to starting their new job?

How do you develop a thriving team?

Once you’ve hired someone else to join you, it’s critical to consider team dynamics and decide how you will work together. I like this quote from Rebecca Buck, CEO of Forge Studio:

"Asymmetrical knowledge is the first challenge to overcome when bringing together a new team. As leaders, we need to provide a structure for the team to define a starting point and shared process for working through the problem. People bring their own experiences, biases and hypotheses to every challenge.

So, the sooner we can build shared understanding of a problem and the solution finding process, the faster we can engage the power of multi-disciplinary teams."

The goal is to set everyone up for success and create a shared agreement and understanding of how we work together, what our goals are, and what’s expected of us.

I prefer to align on principles and outcomes than to prescribe tools and artefacts. To align on outcomes, it’s also important to articulate what business we’re in and what value we create for the organisation and for users.

How do you provide that context in a repeatable way?

It’s not just information sharing—you need to create a great degree of connection, trust, and confidence, paired with empathy and humility to help each team member work autonomously and collaboratively. 

A great way to create this shared understanding is to develop a team charter together. Mural provides some great templates, including this one.

As a group, explore how you want to work together: 

• Decide how you will work

• Check in regularly to see how it’s going

• Develop norms together

• Create shared goals, vision, and principles 

• Define what success looks like

• Reflect on what practices help us and how we can support each other

It’s important to agree on where you are flexible and what’s necessary. Remove uncertainty and maintain flexibility wherever possible to keep improving. Forming teams takes time, and you can’t expect them to perform well immediately.

“Remove uncertainty and maintain flexibility wherever possible to keep improving.”

Bruce Tuckman described the phases a group goes through on their way to working together, illustrated in the image below.

Initially people tend to be polite and positive during the Forming phase, while some people might be anxious because they haven’t fully understood what work the team will be doing together. Then they start challenging each other during the Storming phase, questioning different approaches or goals. They gradually move to the Norming phase, where they resolve their differences, to finally the Performing stage, where they have settled into a groove together, and it feels easy to achieve goals together and become more productive. Understanding these different contexts can help you support the team better on their way to alignment.

What helps us create happy, high-performing teams?

To give you an overview, here’s the analysis Shane Snow, author of Dream Teams, has put together.

Image source: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6664534738922950658/

Teams don’t function when they lack trust or alignment. Teams work well when they have trust, alignment, healthy boundaries, social awareness, empathy, and information transparency.

What sets apart high-performing teams is the additional support of purpose, psychological safety, diversity, productive conflict, and humility. 

There are plenty of opportunities to foster and support growth across the practice. I want to mention four here.

First, you need to foster a culture of continuous learning. That means you need room for experimentation, learning, feedback, and reflection. If that’s not already part of your company DNA, shifting that culture and creating the psychological safety necessary won’t happen overnight. A good way to start is to create rituals for designers to collaborate, share feedback, and exchange information. 

Once you have brought someone onto your team, you need to help them chart and support the next phase of their career growth. How do you help them understand what is expected to progress? Is the company’s competency framework translated to design? Is that framework universally understood and career paths seen as a valuable growth path? How do you set goals and how do you review progress together? Are the expectations of your practice comparable to others? 

The third growth opportunity is to extend the capabilities of your practice. This is a continuous process to mature your capabilities, the value you create, and how well the practice is integrated and leveraged across the organisation. 

And fourth, you need to extend the influence of your practice across the organisation, too. In the beginning other teams often don’t yet know how to best collaborate with you. How do you reach out to your peers and leaders? How can you express the value you deliver in terms that other practices understand? How do you facilitate greater empathy for users throughout the organisation?

And how do you foster greater cross-disciplinary collaboration? What opportunities can you create to explore new collaborations to solve problems and create value? As a designer, you usually have zero ability to ship. You need to collaborate to deliver the thing into the hands of your users. 

This might feel like juggling a lot. I’ve intentionally only focussed on key topics when you develop a practice. There’s more to leadership and management, and often at this early stage you’re still a practitioner, too.

That means you’re trying to figure all this out, at the same time you’re learning what your new practice members need, and you probably still need to get some design work done, too. 

It might be helpful to use a framework to visualise the different parts of practice leadership. I created the one illustrated below with Jason Mesut to reflect on leadership capabilities.

As you are beginning to develop your practice, make this reflection a habit. You’re not going to do everything proficiently. Gather feedback and repeat regularly!

How do you grow to a practice beyond the first team?

This is often a real step-change. A team that works in close proximity easily stays connected and has a lot of opportunity to create that community themselves. Distributed teams need more help. 

Consider this example: Have you ever found it hard to find something in Google Drive? It can be difficult to locate your own stuff, or stuff from people you directly work with. How do you help people find and discover stuff they haven’t been involved with? They can waste valuable time rediscovering the same problem solutions over and over again. 

To help speed things up and remove uncertainty, you can introduce additional structure. But you need to weigh that up against losing some autonomy and room for exploration.

This is easy in the beginning and in a single group. As you grow, you need to be more proactive to keep things shared and visible.

You want to make room for everyone to improve on current practices, but they need to be aware of what our current shared understanding is and start there. Start with what’s already known and build on it if it doesn’t suit your needs so you don’t reinvent the wheel and waste time. And share out your learning and improvements so others can advance with you. 

To keep up engagement at scale, you need to create a community of practice to bridge boundaries. That will look different depending on what boundaries you need to cross. Is it products, departments, geographies, time zones, or cultures?

How do you keep communication flowing?

What structures do you need to put in place to keep things shareable and avoid duplication of effort?

How do you create opportunities for the team to come together to share their learnings and keep socially connected? This needs a lot of motivation and motivating while we’re busy doing the work! And that’s your job. 

Touch base with everyone regularly. Create time and space to gather feedback and continue to foster alignment and connection. 

“What works well now will inevitably stop working.”

One thing I’ve learned that has always held true: What works well now will inevitably stop working. You need to continually check that your approaches are fit for purpose.

Treat your practice like your product:

• Identify needs

• Design experiments

• Gather feedback 

• Iterate, together 

I hope this is a little bit of inspiration to help you chart your own map. If you have any questions or would like to discuss how Northshore can support your design practice in any of these areas, please get in touch.