Building a successful UX team: A curriculum for systematically skilling up your people

Building a team of curious UX designers and researchers that “get it” and have the skill (and the drive) to deliver impactful, human-centered design solutions is an enormous challenge.

An increasingly competitive market within a relatively young field make it hard to find and retain talent that with the ability to hit the ground running. This is especially true in organizations that might not have the brand cache of the big names who are able to scoop up top talent in droves.

We need to take responsibility for building our own team learning culture — an environment where good designers and researchers can become great.

As design leaders, what should we do? in the face of these challenges, how do we go about building a human-centered, innovative design capability within our organization?

Putting up a job description, crossing our fingers, and hoping to find an illusive set of high-performing unicorns is not going to cut it. We need to take responsibility for building our own team learning culture — an environment where good designers and researchers can become great.

So where do we begin? To get started, let’s look at the multi-faceted skillset that great designers and researchers need to command.

Craft. Context. Communication.

To create impactful work, designers & researchers need to develop a skillset that goes beyond Craft — they also need to understand the value of Context and Communication in navigating the ambiguous nature of creative problem solving in a team environment.

Mastery of these three distinct lenses allows designers and researchers to be able to fully understand and connect with the work they are doing — the ever illusive “Why?” and “How?”.

This perspective facilitates broader, critical thinking which in turn results in the development of more thoughtful, informed, and impactful…