Processes and Training

Managing design teams at scale to ensure quality and efficiency

Design Operations - Design Thinking - Optimizing Work Flows

Overview

I developed a number of initiatives to help people do their best work including streamlining onboarding, and developing design guidelines and training material.

Outcomes

  • Grew the contract team from 20 people to over 70 people in under 1 year.

  • Reduced onboarding time of new hires from over 1 month to around 1 week.

  • Created asynchronous training material to reduce the amount of time and effort needed to coach contractors, freeing up time to focus on more impactful work.

Goals

  1. Streamline onboarding to get new hires up to speed quickly and efficiently

  2. Transition from 1:1 training to asynchronous training

My Role

I worked as Program Manager and managed the day-to-day operations of our staff. I worked closely with the founders to rapidly grow our operations to meet the needs of the business including facilitating collaborative sessions to identify priorities for upcoming quarters, managing a 70+ person contract team and defining processes and workflows.

Identifying Priorities

I worked closely with the founders to surface and address areas of opportunity to improve the elearning service.

Collaborative Working Sessions

As the head of the e-learning program, it was important to me that our team was aligned on priorities and areas of work. I hosted collaborative working sessions with different verticals, surfacing what I saw as biggest areas to focus on while gaining perspective from other areas of the business.

Impact

The outcome of these workshops often defined the major areas of work for the upcoming quarter and ensured the team was aware and aligned on the most impactful ways to exert our effort.

Streamline Onboarding

As a team that was rapidly scaling, it was imperative we streamlined onboarding to free up time to work on other impactful initiatives.

Asynchronous Training + Onboarding

I collaborated with our hiring team to outline the onboarding user journey, produced comprehensive onboarding materials, and crafted recorded video content detailing common processes and essential information.

Previously, new hires underwent individual onboarding sessions overseen solely by me, and lacked adequate documentation for seamless integration into their roles.

Impact

Onboarding time was reduced by weeks and the amount of time I spent on onboarding individual contractors was reduced by 75%, freeing me up to work on other impactful work.

“Who do I thank for this seamless onboarding? I got up and running quicker than I thought”

- Nelcy, Design Contractor

Increase Design Review Quality

I developed a new design review system to give junior designers higher quality feedback, more quickly.

Design Standards + Recorded Walkthroughs

The design review team recognized the need for a more thorough method to evaluate wireframes and high-fidelity screens. To address this, I introduced and implemented an enhancement to our design review process including standardizing design criteria and recorded walkthroughs, aligning team-wide design standards, and communication of feedback for junior designers.

Before this update, design reviews relied solely on individual insights and written feedback, often resulting in misunderstandings.

Impact

The improved quality of junior designer projects led to reductions in necessary rework, resulting in savings of both time and money for the company. There was also decreased miscommunication and improved comprehension of design review feedback making it easier to make informed improvements to the UX.