As Design Lead of the IT department at ByteDance, I lead all 20+ IT projects, including design from the ground up and iterations, and manage 6 junior and senior designers.
IT Department Service:
• Manage all software & hardware assets to reduce losses
• Protect enterprise information security
• Maintain conference rooms operation to improve work efficiency
• Build and optimize the network architecture of the enterprise
Under the IT department, we have 100+ engineers, 30+ PMs, and 8 designers to focus on developing the middle and back-end products of ByteDance, across the web, smartphone, and iPad platforms. Our users are ByteDancers and external partner organizations.
The most significant difference between IT products and other products is domain knowledge. Our users are expert users, including computer administrators, network operation and maintenance personnel, company asset managers, etc. Therefore, the bar of their work is very high. Designers need to understand how users work to satisfy their needs.
Compared to other teams at ByteDance, the IT department was more undersized and more scrappy. In the beginning, I was the only UX designer in the IT team, and this startup-like culture was something I greatly valued. There is no design system, design guideline, or design process in IT, and I need to build them from the ground up.
I started to build the IT 1st design system, design process, design standard, and build design recruitment process and guideline. It not only made UX process better, but also created a strong foundation that scaled well as my team got bigger.
As the 1st designer in IT, I need to hire more designers to expand the team for better supporting IT grooming projects. The first step is to establish IT recruitment norms and the recruitment process.
How did I establish the IT recruitment process?
1. Collaborated with ByteDance recruiters to know the company hire process
2. Analyzed the design process and criteria in big tech companies
3. Proposed a product designer recruiting principle and criteria
4. Prepared interview question bank including technical and behavior questions
5. Finished the design recruiting process documentation
6. Interviewed 100+ designers and successfully hired 6 designers in 1 year
Following the recruitment process, I interviewed hundreds of designers and successfully recruited 6 designers, including 4 junior designers and 2 senior designers. By building an efficient interview process, I quickly completed the rapid expansion of the IT design team and efficiently supported 20+ IT design projects in 1 year.
It’s my first time being a design lead, and I am very frustrated and nervous because I have had no experience before. Following are some tips I found out about management.
How did I manage the IT design team?
1. Built designer mentor mechanism and onboarding process, helped designers formulate reasonable OKR, control the progress and promote the achievement.
2. Established designer career development path and aligned it in the design team
3. For the top-level designers, gave the most significant cake and best performance reviews. For the middle-level designers, helped them improve quickly and moved to the top level. For the lowest-level designers, honestly pointed out the existing problems and gave time. If they slowed down the team’s progress, they had to be eliminated.
4. 1-1 Monthly to understand every designer’s demands to sort out their career paths, formulate development goals, and help them achieve their goals.
5. Initiated design review 3 times/week to align the design principles, improve the individual contributor designer skills and make every designer on the same page
6. Initiated internal sharing to make the IT design team share work experience and learn from each other
7. Made 2022 annual headcount plan and adjusted the design team organization structure.
When I first came to IT, the entire department did not have a design culture. When I collaborated with stakeholders, the product team, and the engineering team, I felt a negative impact on work because of the lack of design culture. Therefore, I think it's the best time to build the design culture in the IT department.
How did I build the design culture in the IT department?
1. Initiated the internal design sharing forum to make the IT design team share work experience and learn from each other
2. Allocated different design sharing to a suitable designer to maximize design resources
3. Reviewed and revised the PPT before every sharing to ensure the quality
4. Invited the PM team, Eng team, and design team in the company to participate the design sharing and spread the awareness of the design sharing
5. Hosted every internal/external sharing, including opening, time control, follow-up questions, to ensure the participator's experience
6. Distributed the questionnaire after the sharing to collect participator's feedback for experience improvements
7. Initiated the sharing topic, including the usage tips of design tools, user research methodology sharing, graphic design sharing, how to quickly integrate into the team, how to set up a workshop for better design, etc.
8. Recorded, organized, and documented the sharing as onboarding materials, which help new designers quickly get started with IT design work
9. Kick-off 5 sessions for internal sharing, which covers 100+ participators and successfully improve the individual contributor designer skills
10. Invited external experts to give us sharing which covered 200+ participators, including the VP, IT design team, product teams, and engineer teams
11. Expanded the influence of the design team, made more stakeholders understand design work, and laid a strong foundation for future collaboration
Before I came to IT, there were 4 product teams but no design team, so it is necessary to build a design process for how the design team will cooperate with the product and developing team in the future. I was responsible for building the IT 1st design process and standard from scratch to lay the foundation for efficient cooperation with other teams in the future.
How did I develop the IT design process?
1. Prepared and initiate design onboarding materials
2. Codify the Design Team Operation Model between product(PM, Eng, PMO)
3. Define the design system roadmap to unify all products
4. Define and document UX research methodologies, including quantitative and qualitative research
5. Build the design process, including design methodologies and workflows
6. Define design principles to raise the project bar
7. Clarify the design implement tools within the design team
8. Draft the product launch review guidelines and create a design quality checklist
9. Establish and optimize the design review process to improve the design quality
10. Present the design process with designers, PMs, and Engs to reach an agreement
11. Create a design team onboarding video to coach and onboard new designers
Before I came to IT, the development team used the ByteDance Lark and Alibaba Ant Design system. Both are good, but neither is specifically designed for IT products. To ensure consistency, unify the visual style, and improve the design efficiency, I led to building the IT 1st design system, including typography, color, icon, illustration, style, and desktop components.
How did I establish the IT design process?
1. Worked cross-functionally to design components for all IT Products, including color, typography, icon, illustration, style, and desktop components
2. Defined the look & feel for all IT products that raised the bar for visual design quality
3. Defined the typography set for better readability and legibility
4. Created icons to match IT 2B products better and served user’s visibility needs
5. Built new illustrations by applying a new color palette to connect the product more closely to the IT brand
6. Worked cross-functionally to design desktop components for all IT products, including Buttons, Navigation Bar, Select, Table, Card, Upload, Tabs, Dialog, etc
7. Reuse components from the old design system to increase productivity and quality by allowing for designers & engineers to focus on larger user experience issues
8. Redesign new components including Transfer, Date Picker, Cascader, etc when the original components cannot meet the product needs
9. Write department-wide design system documentation and guideline
10. Spread awareness of the design system in the company across IT 4 product teams and engineer team
Regarding the specifications in the design process, I have summarized design guidelines, including color, typography, icon, illustration, interaction, UX writing, and localization to answer questions for designers, share internal knowledge, and make the design well-founded.
How did I create the IT design guideline?
1. Created a guideline roadmap including design principle, design outline, and design standards to ensure the high quality of the design guideline
2. Developed the delivery date, owner designer, and review date to ensure the smooth process of the roadmap
3. Allocated different guidelines according to the strengths of each designer to maximize team resources and execute better documentation quality
4. Listed usage scenarios including good examples and bad examples in every guideline
5. Customized the design guideline for IT 2B products
6. Revised the guideline after the review meeting until there is no problem
7. Updated the guideline bi-monthly to make sure it is up-to-date
Despite having 20+ products to support, the IT department had no designer when I joined. In less than one year, I grew the UX teams by 7x. Here are some of the strategies I used:
Gradient design team
For the top-level designers, gave the most significant cake and best performance reviews. For the middle-level designers, helped them improve quickly and moved to the top level. For the lowest-level designers, honestly pointed out the existing problems and gave time. If they slowed down the team’s progress, they had to be eliminated.
Team management is to maximize the goodwill of human nature.
I have seen too many negative team examples, like team members taking others' credit, robbing others' benefits, shattering the responsibilities when encountering problems, and finally leading to inefficient teams and ineffective competition. A good team leader should know how to make team members collaborate and compete simultaneously. Team members should be a whole and give credit to each other, which is the basis for effective competition, practical collaboration, and an efficient work environment.
Let the designer learn from challenges
When the designer met challenges, I never directly pointed out the best solutions. Sounds strange, right? If there are better ways, why not tell them out directly? Because design can't be taught by others. If every time I verbally tell them how to design, they will never be able to grow by themselves. Even if both the user and the PM accept it, I will let things go naturally. After several iterations and user research, the designer will naturally find the problems and propose better solutions by themselves, which is the best time for him to grow.
Team management is an art, not a technique
I spend a lot of time understanding each designer's personality, career path, and life goals in my daily work. To help them achieve their objectives, I need to manage them using different strategies. I think a leader is more like a referee in a game, and he never goes off to participate in the game but sets the bar to inspire the running team to move forward. For the lousy performance designer, I often use peer pressure to stimulate the team. For example, I would pair a bad performance designer with a good performance designer by giving appropriate stimulation, which approved significant improvement on the bad performance designer.
Avoid invalid competition and reduce internal friction
In the design team, designers will form a very delicate competitive relationship, which is very familiar. A good leader should know how to allocate the design tasks smartly to avoid invalid competition and promote effective competition.
For minor features, I would assign it to a suitable designer according to the strengths of each designer to maximize team resources and execute better design quality. For significant features which need to accomplish by many designers, I would divide the features, clarify everyone's tasks, and identify the owners at the beginning. Therefore, designers will take responsibility for their tasks and reduce internal friction. At the same time, they are all responsible for the whole project. They have to back up for each other and collaborate effectively to guarantee the final delivery.
