Summary
Building a team is like building a tribe. Jennifer will focus on the complexities, celebrations and challenges of building a design team and what she has learned through the course of her career.
Key Insights
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Resilience is deeply personal and can be inspired by family stories, such as surviving the Rwandan genocide.
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Regular shared rituals, like making lunch together weekly, foster cross-cultural understanding and strong team culture.
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Process is not a burden but a powerful tool that enables innovation and scalability in complex projects.
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Transparency builds respect among team members by clarifying the interdependence of their work.
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Storytelling within teams helps individuals find their place and strengthens recruitment and culture.
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Collective creativity can overcome lack of budget and resources when teams support each other fully.
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Cross-functional collaboration across different agencies or disciplines reveals hidden connections and efficiencies.
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Political or societal challenges can be processed and integrated into team identity through shared reflection.
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Every team member can cycle through different roles, from leader to supporter, and that fluidity strengthens teams.
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A team’s blueprint is built from accumulated personal and professional experiences, not just formal strategies.
Notable Quotes
"I titled my speech a blueprint because it’s a series of lessons I’ve learned throughout my career."
"Resiliency for me is not really a professional thing. It’s a lot more personal."
"If you really want to build culture and see how people cross collaborate, try to make lunch with your entire team every single week."
"Process can make things scalable and bring folks together in ways that are not even imaginable."
"Transparency is building respect for what your teammates do."
"Telling your team’s story explains the culture of your team and how someone could fit into it."
"We started doing something interesting: every Monday, instead of having a stand-up, we would journal and share."
"We had no budget, no backing, but we started looking at competitors and created something ourselves."
"Sometimes you’re the leader, sometimes you’re at the end, sometimes you’re trying to get other folks to come in."
"The blueprint is really within all of us — all the things that have brought us to this moment should come to our teams."
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