Summary
How do you create an agile, customer-centric team of designers, developers, product managers, and user experience specialists whose instinct is to make, not talk? How do you ensure that this team’s output remains focused on business goals, not the technology of the week? And most critically, how do you successfully integrate this team of do-ers into a larger, more traditionally structured organization? In this talk, Husani Oakley shares tips and best practices honed over 20 years of building teams that build best-in-class experiences for clients large and small.
Key Insights
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A cultural divide between creators and makers can cripple project clarity and success.
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Defining and writing down team values creates alignment that drives real accountability.
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Process changes alone do not fix culture; values must underpin those processes.
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Cross-discipline interpersonal relationships transform collaboration and empathy.
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Recruiting from traditional talent pools risks perpetuating unproductive cultural biases.
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Quantifying candidates’ alignment with core values helps predict cultural fit.
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Teams benefit when they embody values that reflect their purpose within the larger organization.
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Acknowledging both positive and negative user feedback humanizes development and improves products.
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Implementing cultural change is iterative and may require changing people or teams.
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People behind tools and products matter as much as the end users; ethical responsibility is imperative.
Notable Quotes
"We make things for human beings in all of our various shapes and sizes and colors."
"Question marks for people who build things aren’t that great, but they’re also what we look for."
"The studio model in agencies throws ideas over a wall to engineers who build without context or emotion."
"Unless you write down the idea, it doesn’t actually count."
"Holding people accountable to values has to be ruthless, otherwise what’s the point."
"Nobody hated us; they just didn’t know us — the makers weren’t known within the agency."
"Talent is everywhere; the problem is we often look in the same places for the same kind of people."
"Your gut is probably wrong; quantify how candidates align with your values during hiring."
"Process for process sake doesn’t help anyone; processes only work when they reflect core values."
"We’re builders, but we don’t always get to control what or why we build — still, we have responsibility."
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