This case study is an overview of the steps I took to rebuild the design and research function at Carbonite after it was impacted by layoffs. I wasn’t looking to be a design leader at that time, but found myself overnight the most senior designer in the company. My goal was to put systems in place that both raised the quality of experience across our products as well as allow us to more teams with limited resources.
Challenge
- Substantial layoffs within a 1000-person enterprise
- Tasked with rebuilding the design function
Approach
- First priority was to focus on active listening and reforging trust
- Co-authored charter for new function: principles, goals, service model definitions, communications strategy, and impact case studies
- Initiated a design system and implemented supporting processes
- Proposed process to stabilize design prioritization and impact
Outcome
- Team health: Gradually returned to an engaged, productive, and growing design team
- Function health: Organic growth of audience for our sprint, quarterly, and annual Impact Reports
- Function health: Dedicated percentage of product roadmaps reserved for design recommendations
- Business Impact: Design impact included in investor relations and M+A
Elements of our team charter:
1. Establish design principles
I worked with the team to co-author a vision of what “good” meant to us. I shamelessly leaned into the company obsession with Star Wars. We revisited to these principles regularly to retro.
2. Establish a communications strategy
I established a regular format and cadence for showing our progress toward those principles with clear, plain language.
3. Define engagement models
We defined and communicated a few core models of engagement with the new design team. I used the metaphor of man-to-man vs zone coverage to help shift the expectations about how our team was capable of working.
4. Author a skills matrix
As an engineering-led company, Carbonite lacked a common language for our expectations of designers. This had resulted in disjointed hiring in the past, including a notable gap in visual design because the company just didn’t know what words to use to hire for that skillset. I worked with our HR team to build out a skills matrix for each discipline in the design function which we could then use to hire more efficiently and strategically.