Welcome back. What’s your design mantra? I’d love to know the short saying, old adage, or phrase that’s on repeat when you’re elbows deep in Figma and trying to keep your head on straight. This one really stuck with me →

—Tommy (@DesignerTom)

The Wireframe:

• There’s no universal blueprint for team-building
• Defining team strengths 💪
• What are the best ways of working?

How to Build a Design Team From the Ground Up

If you’ve ever been a design team of one working on a high-growth product with a killer team, you know this is true: There comes a point when cold brew after dinner can only get you so far. The long days tucker you out, the quality of your work starts to suffer, and you know it’s time to expand the team.

But finding the right talent to join a design crew can be brutally hard. Not only are you on the hunt for someone who can provide real, measurable results that mesh well with the budding vision and brand you’re building…but you’re also trying to figure out what roles need to be filled and when.

Knowing how to build your team—and the pitfalls to avoid when doing so—can be a huge advantage as you progress as a design leader. So today, I’m sharing some strong takeaways from Andrew Coyle’s goldmine of a guide to building a design team based on his time at Flexport in the early days, c/o my friend Vitaly Friedman in this post on LinkedIn.

These tips can help you get from this…

To this…

Learning 1: There’s no blueprint.

Designing your team is like designing your products—you have some baseline knowledge of what works, but there’s no formula for perfection. Especially if you’re building a team at a startup, all decisions require context: what you’re building, how your business model currently works, and where you’re headed.

So instead of trying to mimic the team buildout you’ve read about online or been part of in the past, try this →

• Figure out what design work needs to be done
• Prioritize the challenges that need solving first
• Start there—bring on a hire who can rise to that primary challenge, then rinse and repeat as you figure out how to go from surviving to thriving

For example, that might include hiring a UI engineer to bridge the gap between design and engineering—that’s what Andrew did at Flexport, and it helped to reduce friction by ensuring both sides understood each other.

This process will help you get from “I’m drowning in all this work” to “we’re starting to come up for air.” When the time is right, you can start to categorize the roles and responsibilities of your team (e.g. communication design, user research, etc.). That’ll give you a strong starting point for your hiring plan.

Learning 2: Know where to complement your growing team.

As you’re building a design team, know what strengths you’ve got covered and what strengths you’d like more of.

Some examples, according to Andrew?

• Visual interaction and design: composition, visual hierarchy, grid systems, typography, etc.
• Interaction: trade offs, collaboration, articulation of design flows, etc.
• User research: how and when to bring in user feedback to the design process

These skills can and should stack on top of some important fundamentals—strong taste, a general understanding of the business’ goals, and enthusiasm for the mission. When you bring on a diverse team with a wide range of perspectives that tick these boxes, you set yourself up for success.

Which brings us to…

Learning 3: Be methodical as you establish ways of working.

One of the toughest parts of working on a startup team can be determining when to be scrappy and when to act like the company you want to become—and this is painfully clear when determining mature ways of working.

Andrew’s POV? Create a framework for feedback, communication, and professional development. That might include…

• Weekly standups to get the team on the same page about priorities and challenges
• Design critique sessions that are rooted in context so that designers can ask (and get answers to) specific questions from the broader team
• Regular one-on-ones for designers to get feedback regularly (instead of only in a quarterly or yearly performance review) plus office hours for anyone on the team to surface and solve issues
• Weekly retrospective sessions at the end of the week for reviewing accomplishments, talking about what’s next, and bonding as a team

Bottom line: It’s tempting to chase designers with big-brand portfolios, but that’s not what gets you a strong, repeatable pattern of design wins. What does? Seeking out diverse and ambitious players who are eager to learn, making responsibilities and ownership clear, and establishing the workflows that let you step back and watch your team make a big impact.

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News, Tools, and Resources: Building a Design Team

These are some invaluable resources to help you understand design job levels and the design career framework, as suggested by Vitaly:

• ​Building Exceptional Design Teams at Spotify by Nicole Burrow
• ​How We Built the Design Team at Figma by Noah Levin
• ​The State of Design Teams: Structure, Alignment, and Impact by Kate Kaplan
• ​How I Build Effective Design Teams (at Facebook) by Amanda Linden
• ​Strategies to Build a Successful Design Team by Harrison Wheeler from LinkedIn
• ​How to Structure and Grow Successful Design Teams by Tracey Che King
• ​Navigating the UX Team Of One by Vitaly Friedman

Got a great tool, podcast episode, idea, or something else? Hit reply and tell me what’s up.

The UX Tools Job Board

• Cash App is looking for a Principal Product Designer, Bitcoin.
• A Staff Product Designer, Gusto Pro role is open at Gusto.
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Hiring for a design role, or know someone who is? Submit it here to hit the inboxes of 75k+ talented designers.

Thanks for reading! What are you currently doing to level up on your team? Hit reply and let me know. See you next week!

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