THINGS I NEED TO IMPROVE IN 2024

TLDR – Transform my career in 2024: Three things I need to improve

This post is about things I need to improve during 2024. I want to work on delegating, planning, and ensuring the experience design team delivers a design that unlocks business value.

A few weeks ago, I posted about my design career and my first year as Global Head of Experience Design at Vorwerk International.

When I shared my post on LinkedIn, I received questions about what could have gone better. It made me realise there’s no rose without thorns and invited me to reflect on the bumps in the road of my first year in this new role.

Here are three things that didn’t work out for me during my first 365 days as Global Head of Experience at Vorwerk International.

Intro

In the previous post, I wrote about my journey to integrate private and professional life, developing a business-friendly vocabulary and what I consider toxic positivity in the corporate environment.

In part two, I analysed three topics that I consider critical for my management skills and for the team I have the privilege to lead to become more successful. Hence, delegation, planning, and design quality are the subjects I consider needing improvement when reflecting on my first year as Global Head of Experience Design at Vorwerk International.

Improve Delegation

I consider delegation the most dangerous trap a designer must avoid when they step into a management role. Designers live and breathe design. Creativity propels their commitment. It’s hard to realise that with the management role, part of their day-to-day fatigue must focus on admin ta, which are, by definition, everything but creative.

Design managers need to move from Figma to Excel and SAP tools.

They need time and focus to manage time and complexity, which consumes their capacity. There’s only one way to have the right time to manage admin tasks: delegate the design tasks!

Guess what? I kept being part of the product design flow and often the process bottleneck. I held my role in the hands-on part, ignoring the admin tasks piling up and the new projects entering the game. The consequence of my behaviour was that I couldn’t accurately follow up on detailed questions, which confused the team regarding critical decision-making.

The most critical task of the first quarter of 2024 is to draft a delegation plan based on centralising accountability and decentralising responsibilities across the design team. The expected outcome is to generate an optimal level of accountability for all the team members. The desired return on investment is a more mature team capable of delivering a design that unlocks business value.

In chaotic, dynamic and rapidly changing environments, leaders at all levels must be mepowered to make decisions

Jocko Willink and Leif babin

The book Extreme Ownership and its chapter about Decentralized Command are helping me improve how I delegate.

Improve Planning

In the first twelve months as the Global Head of Experience at Vorwerk International, I had to find a way to provide an apparent team capacity forecast to the different stakeholders. I struggled to provide accurate planning to my stakeholders because of the change of plan for one demanding project and the amount of work the design team outsources. I learned that when there’s a considerable amount of outsourced work, it’s critical to have multiple options to ensure the optimal capacity investment. 

During 2024, I started to distribute design projects based on an Eisenhower matrix to predict multiple scenarios in case of a change of plans. The goal is to establish a new form of dialogue with the stakeholders to make them aware of any impact an unplanned change can have. I expected that the outcome would be a better team configuration and an increased level of confidence in planning the team activities.

The book I rely on for mastering the Eisenhower matrix.

Improve Design Quality

I am used to measuring design quality against standards, such as the W3C for a web-based experience and tech capacity. These “KPIs” are critical to delivering a design that unlocks business value. The solution that fulfils these KPIs will be sustainable from business, tech and UX angles.

Last year, because I needed to delegate and plan more effectively, the design team could only sometimes focus on delivering painless solutions to implement and scale. 

The design team has decided to follow web standards and use existing components as much as possible for their project in 2024. The primary objective is to maximise content editor capabilities and the component library maturity. This will help refine their solutions and save time for new projects where the team has more freedom to experiment.

Image credits

Photo by Adam Bouse on Unsplash