Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Fair and Effective Designer Evaluation
Gold
Wednesday, September 25, 2024 • DesignOps 2024
Share the love for this talk
Fair and Effective Designer Evaluation
Speakers: Ignacio Martinez
Link:

Summary

How do you evaluate designers fairly and effectively while providing a clear path toward career advancement? This is a question our organization has grappled with throughout our eight years as a company. Design can often be left up to gut reasoning by leadership and designers may not have a clear understanding of what their role means and how they may grow as designers. We’ve developed iterations of different tools and processes over the years to address these concerns and to evolve with our shifting needs as a growing company. All of which has led us to a robust tool that we’ve been using over the past two years which can serve as a model for how organizations can deploy qualitative career advancement. The session will cover our journey to this point and showcase the tools and processes we’ve deployed to make evaluation and career advancement systematic within a design organization along with surprising benefits and lessons we’ve learned along the way.

Key Insights

  • Grant Studio’s evaluation system uses a transparent, weighted career path covering craft, quality, client, and team categories to fairly assess designers.

  • Continuous anonymous feedback between team members after each project provides timely, goal-constrained input for growth.

  • Career managers mentor designers and advocate for their promotion and staffing based on synthesized feedback.

  • The career path tool is a customized Google Sheet to allow easy experimentation and full understanding of processes.

  • Craft and quality are weighted heavier for junior roles; client and team collaboration gain importance at leadership levels.

  • Non-linear and lateral career moves are harder to evaluate, with Grant Studio still refining assessments for such paths.

  • Leadership transitions require additional training beyond readiness indicated by the career path evaluations.

  • Client evaluations focus on studio-wide feedback rather than individual designers to respect client time and relationships.

  • The system fosters a sense of safety and clarity around career progression, aiding retention and alignment with company goals.

  • Challenges include varying quality of feedback and limited attention to role adjustments for accessibility or disabilities.

Notable Quotes

"Even before adding ambiguity, design roles like lead designer can mean very different things across places."

"Design is collaborative, making it hard to evaluate a single design output."

"We developed a career path that defines expectations to make evaluations fair and consistent across roles."

"Continuous feedback after each project happens anonymously and is goal-focused to improve relevance."

"The career path is a weighted system where roles emphasize different categories like craft or client."

"We chose a Google Sheet so we know what’s going on under the hood and can quickly make adjustments."

"The career path has helped us improve retention, staffing, and mentoring within the studio."

"People see either all their accomplishments or all their gaps—it’s not a race to fill the pages."

"Non-linear careers are tough to manage, and we’re still figuring out how to evaluate those paths."

"We haven’t considered adjustments for accessibility yet, but it’s an important future area."

Ask the Rosenbot
Christian Bason
Expand—Rethinking Design for Public Challenges (Videoconference)
2022 • Civic Design Community
Xenia Adjoubei
Empowering Communities Through the Researcher in Residence Program
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Jennifer Fraser
What would Emmy Noether Do? Math, Models and Mulling in UX Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Andy Warr
Under My (Research) Umbrella: The Benefits and Challenges of Building a Unified Insights Function
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
George Hinchliffe
Delivering Amazing Experiences
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Abby Covert
Panel: Collaboration Tools
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Tess Dixon
C'mon Get Happy
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Jaime Creixems
Best Practices when Creating and Maintaining a Design System
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Susan Weinschenk
Evaluating the Maturity of UX in Your Organization (Videoconference)
2020 • Enterprise Community
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Welcome / Housekeeping
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Laura Klein
Unique challenges of innovation in enterprises (Videoconference)
2020 • Enterprise Community
Jon Fukuda
Theme 3 Intro
2024 • DesignOps 2024
Gold
Making People the X-Factor in the Enterprise
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Alla Weinberg
Cross-Functional Relationship Design
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Dalia El-Shimy
So You've Got a Seat at the Table. Now What?
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold

More Videos

"Teaching product managers heuristics took 15 minutes, and now they use that shared language to articulate design."

Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone

June 15, 2018

Simon Wardley

"You can mine metadata from your platform to spot emerging patterns and commoditize new components."

Simon Wardley

Maps and Topographical Intelligence (Videoconference)

January 31, 2019

Sandra Camacho

"We can’t solve systemic problems with surface-level solutions or checklists."

Sandra Camacho

Creating More Bias-Proof Designs

January 22, 2025

Darian Davis

"Reviewing decision points creates a source of truth and makes it harder to forget or scrap earlier agreements."

Darian Davis

Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship

January 8, 2024

Fisayo Osilaja

"Stakeholder communication is crucial to professional strategy because without it, we run the risk of activity without impact."

Fisayo Osilaja

[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist

June 4, 2024

Uday Gajendar

"Empowering maker culture invites everyone to be part of a collective endeavor far beyond any individual."

Uday Gajendar

The Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX

May 13, 2015

Davis Neable

"Service blueprints would have helped business units understand backend impacts and responsibilities."

Davis Neable Guy Segal

How to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team

June 10, 2021

Eniola Oluwole

"You won’t know what success looks like until you put something out there and see how it works in practice."

Eniola Oluwole

Lessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site

October 24, 2019

Aurobinda Pradhan

"Product managers feel design is a black box; they want visibility, transparency, and accountability on timelines."

Aurobinda Pradhan Shashank Deshpande

Introduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts

September 9, 2022