Management
Team scaling
During my time as UX Manager (2018-2020) and then as UX Director (2021-present), I had the chance to build an amazing Design function. At the start, it was only me, embarking on a journey to scale and grow the team.
I also had the joy to deal with department wide reorganisations, and my team (UK based at the time) inherited new designers and researchers based in our Barcelona and Wroclaw offices. This came with its own set of challenges (split location, new processes, cultural differences…) but I’ve tried my best to make our overseas friends feel part of the team. We peaked at 35 people in 2023.
Then the company had to scale back due to various factors, and so I gained first hand experience in handling redundancies. This is always difficult period, my focus has been to motivate and energeise the remaining team members, helping them seeing opportunities behind the change.
Today, we are over 25 brilliant individuals, from graduate to senior, across Design, Design System and Research, taking care of a multi-channel Ecommerce platform for grocery retailers around the world.
Building a career model for growth
As the UX Community grew in Ocado Technology, the need to offer practitioners a clear career path became crucial for talent retention, employee engaement and personal growth. Working with UX managers, we came up with a resilient career model for all our teams. And since its rollout, this career model helped us successfully promote team members, have fruitful performance conversations and better set expectations for new hires.
A clear path
Although we had total freedom to create the career model we needed, we also wanted to keep it aligned with the other disciplines in Ocado Technology as well as industry standards. We looked at the Engineering and Product career models in the company, and best practices across UX in different companies.
Behavioural & Craft competencies
Looking at what we do everyday (researching, wire-framing, designing, testing…) we started to group these activities into behavioural and craft competencies that we thought were key to a UX practitioner in Ocado Technology (below pic). These competencies are detailed for each level of our career modal, with clear expectations and measures for success.
Aaaand Action!
This video, shot in 2021, gives a nice overview of my UX Manager role at Ocado Technology. It focuses on what it is to be a leader, taking both craft and people to the next level. The main goal of this video was to help us with our recruitment efforts across the company, as most people don’t really understand what is Ocado about.