Bias Towards Action: Building Teams that Build Work
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
-
•
Agency structures with separate creative and technical teams create cultural barriers that hinder project success.
-
•
Defining, writing down, and holding teams accountable to core values is essential for cultural change.
-
•
Successful cross-team collaboration requires knowing and valuing the people behind different roles, not just enforcing process rules.
-
•
Building software that structurally enforces department collaboration can mirror and support cultural shifts.
-
•
Cultural values should answer why a team exists and how it fits within the larger organization.
-
•
Recruiting from the usual talent pools risks attracting people who reinforce existing cognitive biases and fail to embody desired team values.
-
•
Quantifying cultural fit during interviews helps reduce bias and align hires to team values objectively.
-
•
Teams must remember that their work is ultimately for human users, fostering empathy to improve products.
-
•
Creating opportunities for team members to bond as people builds trust and better collaborative outcomes.
-
•
Tech creators have a responsibility for the social impact of the tools they build and must remember the humans affected.
Notable Quotes
"Ideas that get sold without knowing how they work or how they’re made reflect a cultural problem in the team."
"No one hated technologists, they just didn’t know who they were because there were no personal relationships cross teams."
"Process for process’s sake doesn’t help anybody; processes must reflect your core values."
"Talent is everywhere. You find talent when you look for it without skepticism and bias."
"Quantify cultural fit by scoring candidates on how they align with your values before hiring decisions."
"We made a system that wouldn’t work if any part of the code or any team disappeared or refused to cooperate."
"We are making things for human beings, and we too are people who must own that responsibility."
"It wasn’t just about process changes, it was about changing how people think about their work and each other."
"When I walked into the office, my team was ready to quit because they were taking rude user emails personally."
"Our hands make all the things, and our brains form the teams that run the hands making the things."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Swarm behaviors thrive on incomplete information and require no spectators, only participants."
Surya VankaUnleashing Swarm Creativity to Solve Enterprise Challenges
June 10, 2021
"Journalists experiencing the same trauma as samurai during the Meiji Restoration – once warriors, now unsure of their role."
Patrick Boehler Madison KarasThe service shift: transforming media organizations to create real value through design
November 19, 2025
"The complexity of automating marketing content for agents varies because some want hyper-personalized brand content while others prefer general automation."
Andreas Huebner Amy Takata Craig BrookesWhat Is It Like To Be Part of The UX Team at Compass?
March 11, 2021
"We need to position the design ops role as critical as an enabler of the design strategy."
Patrizia Bertini Alexandra Mengoni LeónPushing DesignOps’ Influence into New Global Markets
September 9, 2022
"We’re showing people how to collaborate like crazy and how to fail gracefully."
Phil GilbertA Consistent Culture of Design
May 14, 2015
"AI behaves like an alien intern because it’s not capable of making sense of some things easy for us."
Yulya Besplemennova[Demo] Stress-testing GenAI in user research synthesis
June 4, 2024
"Don’t do remote contextual inquiry just because you can; you lose so much context."
Sarah RinkRemote User Research: Dos and Don'ts from the Virtual Field
June 11, 2020
"In this context, sometimes slower is actually faster because it allows going deeper and unlocking more meaningful insights."
Mujtaba HameedThe new horizon of ethnography: using AI to unlock the full potential of in-person research
March 11, 2026
"People who understand the problem best are set up to do the best work."
Sheryl CababaLiving in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset
June 6, 2023
