The People Layer 1.0

Deeper than the concerns of companies, code, and tools — are people.

The People Layer is the root of every organization’s performance. It’s the richly complex layer of interaction between individuals and teams that persists beyond changes in projects and in leadership. It’s broader than the problems being solved, and perseveres longer than the purpose of the business; relationships can outlast companies, and sometimes collaborative trust is only built over time.

Looking at the diagram above, the world of design organizations is likely more accustomed to frequent changes in the middle layers: there are iterations of devices and device sizes, operating systems, interaction styles, aesthetics and visual trends, code and technology stacks, and the tools and apps we use to do our jobs. Shepherding a team through the adoption of a new tool can be a task; evolving an entire organization to assimilate multiple layers of change can be a formidable challenge.

But once you solve for the layer of people—where everyone you work with is naturally included—everything else becomes achievable.

For the past 22 years, I’ve curated, managed, and scaled design teams. It was the purpose of my first design business, matching independent problem solvers with problems to be solved. At times we were two or three people in a team; other projects necessitated 25 of us—from business and content strategies to myriad forms and expressions of design and execution, digital and physical. The model afforded flexibility and variety with minimized overhead (especially when compared to our throughput); in the world of design, it was lean before lean was a thing. We partnered with clients and their teams at startups and Fortune 500 corporations, cities and national non-profits, artists and community organizations—sometimes simultaneously.

Now I’m in-house as the first Design Producer in Twitter’s product design team—an operational role that was new to the organization when I joined in August 2016. Initially, I helped to launch, brand, and socialize our product design system; now I facilitate weekly product design critiques (which the product management team has used to model their own); I’m re-establishing a design education program; inclusively co-authoring an update to our design process; and increasing visibility for our work through visits from General Assembly UX classes, recruitment events, and promotion on industry blogs, including our own right here on Medium. Through these and other workstreams, I help dozens of designers and content strategists in multiple locations to collaborate and communicate more effectively.

Working at Twitter can be a lot like using Twitter — it’s about what’s happening right now, now, now, and now. On the inside, the design culture is exceptionally experiment-driven, highly entrepreneurial, and almost constantly evolving. For our users (and on the outside), there are likely 1,000 versions of the product in operation, right now—based on variables such as the device and OS, our feature experiments and A/B tests, user behaviors, algorithms that serve content, and more. We ship—and celebrate what we’ve shipped—every week. Given this emphasis on versioning and now-ness, thinking about the configuration of teams at the people layer is a practice of stability in an otherwise mutable environment.

My hypothesis is that there are quantifiable formulas to the shapes of teams—augmented by relationships already in place—and applicable to the nature of the problem being tackled, type of decision being made, and stage of work. The study of these dynamics is called relationship aesthetics*. I’m always curious about how the work of design teams—in-house or independent, small-scale or enterprise, product- or brand-focused — is influenced by who’s in the room, when we collaborate with them, how, where, and why. My goal is to pursue and connect conversations about this practice that have already started, and to collect and share more data, experiences, and insights.

This post is a first version of synthesizing signals I’ve been seeing, societally and professionally. It includes feedback from conversations that followed a presentation about it at Hopscotch Design Festival, and will hopefully draw input prior to my talking about it at Clarity. So, like any developing first version of a thing, the signal will strengthen through conversations and feedback — I welcome it.

Signals in design and tech

In 2015, Beth Dean first noticed: “We don’t stop being human when we go online.” She argues for a modicum of emotional intelligence when building software, because we desire to relate to software as we relate to other living, breathing things—other people. More recently, Laurie Voss Tweeted:

While this is also true outside of tech companies, it resonates deeply within them; Bo Ren similarly Tweeted just a few days ago that “The future lies in humanists building a human layer on top of technology.” Laurie’s and Bo’s astute observations are explored in depth in a new book from Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech. In an interview, she calls on those in tech to check unconscious biases, and to work more inclusively at all stages of a product’s lifecycle.

The signals in design and tech seem to be increasing, along with a greater awareness of others considering the gravity of the situation. Last week, Rosenfeld Media convened the first ever Design Ops Summit in New York. About 150 of us—CEOs, VPs of Design, VPs of UX, design producers, researchers, strategists, and other development and design ops professionals—shared our perspectives and approaches from within our organizations. Nearly every presentation had something to do with people.

Left: Kristin Skinner, co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs. Right: Jeff Sussna.

And why shouldn’t a summit about the design of organizations in tech address the subject of people? Why wouldn’t any convening that highlights successful user experiences be a terrific experience itself? More broadly: how did we get here? Perhaps it’s because many seasoned practitioners saw and felt what wasn’t working in their own organizations. Perhaps, too, there were network effects (in the worst way possible) of moving too swiftly and breaking too many things. With the backlash from hustle culture and understanding that busy is a choice, I trust there are still ways to innovate that aren’t so disruptive to individuals.

Luckily, the Summit couldn’t have come at a better time. It was an inclusive, diverse, international, co-creating prompt to pay attention to the people layer, share and learn together, and figure out our collective impact. And thrillingly, the biggest signal of all is that addressing this issue has reached critical mass in the design and tech universe.

Signals in current society

The positive output from current societal conditions is that it’s motivated a lot of our country to rally, protest, march, and get up off their couches to express themselves, even if they’re unaccustomed to doing so. A groundswell of solidarity combined with an increase in visibility of resistance movements—Occupy, Black Lives Matter, pussy hats, and nasty women, to name just a few—are signals that fundamental human rights have been tested to their limit. Globally and domestically, even the search term and hashtag resist had peak results from the past five years during Inauguration Weekend 2017.

We’re in the midst of a cultural and societal reset, and there is much work to do now to teach tolerance, cultural literacy, and critical thinking.

So, let’s begin together, shall we?

How to identify problems at the People Layer

Here’s an initial slate of questions to ask yourself, and others, to identify opportunities to work at the people layer in your org. It is not an exhaustive list, nor is it stack-ranked, but it’s a start (and I hope it grows).

1. Does your company have separate Product, Brand, Marketing, and Engineering teams? If so, what is the relationship between them? How frequently do they collaborate—not just at the leadership level, but on projects that touch the whole company?
2. Is each team aligned on a common purpose? Is there an organizational chart or method of mapping how teams work together? Do teams share their roadmaps and strategies not only vertically (within the team), but horizontally (across teams)?
3. Does your company share how different teams make decisions?
4. Are you clear on what constitutes success for your role? In your team?
5. Before you begin a new project, is the team that’s going to kick it off multi-disciplinary? If it is, are all lines of business represented? Do you know how the people on the project were elected to work on it, and why?
6. When the project kicks off, are the appropriate people in the room? Is there a working agreement, delineating roles and responsibilities, and has the kickoff agenda been socialized with enough time for input?
7. For each meeting, are the appropriate people in the room? If not, has someone elected to follow up with them? Should the meeting still take place if all participants—not just key decision-makers—are not available?
8. If you’re jumping into a project mid-stream, or welcoming in a new team member to a project, is there a project brief you can read up on, and has someone been able to answer your questions about it?
9. During a meeting, are the loud voices in the room overtaking any quieter ones? Could a facilitator help ensure that all perspectives are heard? Or, is there a protocol for inclusivity?
10. What’s the culture of giving and receiving feedback? Is it published? Similarly, is there a growth mindset to the team or company? Is it visible and socialized?
11. When someone refers to a term like “on-brand,” is there a shared understanding or common vocabulary that you can reference?

How to begin solving problems at the People Layer

Each of these suggestions can be a nicety, but collectively they can influence individual and optimize team performance, and ultimately, company culture.

1. Establish the conditions under which you and your co-workers perform best, and publish it on an internal site. For example, are you a morning person? Or do you prefer strategy meetings at 4pm on Friday? If you need heads-down, uninterrupted time, does it take blocking off chunks of your calendar to get there, or could you indicate it physically (such as working with your headphones on)?
2. Identify and share your channel preferences. The myriad options of email, Slack, open DMs, HipChat, GChat, phone call, text, Hangouts, Skype, a tap on the shoulder… the list goes on, and it will continue to grow. Knowing someone’s channel preferences means the message you send will be a message that’s welcomed.
3. If you’re planning a workshop or extended focus time, have you accounted for breaks, food and snacks, good lighting, and a generally comfortable work environment? While the variables will differ across teams, it’s critical to set the stage for optimal performance.
4. Think back to your first days at your company: the excitement, the eagerness, the orientation to culture and core values, the introductions, perhaps the swag. What happened immediately afterwards? Was it clear what you were supposed to work on first, and how to prioritize the likely long list of things to tackle after that? If you had an onboarding buddy, how long did that last (and who paired you)? Were you pointed to a series of documents to read and make sense of in aggregate? How quickly did you feel like you were a part of the team? There’s a tremendous opportunity for a concierge-level flow for employee onboarding, and a great set of suggestions from the Design Ops summit by Russ Unger.
5. Deeper than an onboarding buddy, is there a mentoring program in your org, and what’s the cadence of matchmaking? Being a mentor means your acquired experience is highly valuable; being mentored helps develop confidence and leadership skills, and brings new thinking to a team. The right pairing can be a catalyst for personal bonds beyond the workplace.
6. Beyond alignment on design tools and your design system, are there design principles that govern your team’s decisions? When were they last updated, and how were they authored? Knowing how a set of principles shapes your work can remove decision by influence, ego, or committee.
7. Cultural and team activities can go a long way to build camaraderie and open up non-work channels of socialization. From elaborate schemes for off-sites and day trips, to simpler small team or one-on-one grabbing of a beverage of choice can help build relationships.
8. In the context of a learning mindset, you can never be wrong. The idea of failure is really opportunity in disguise; an instance of error is a point of data. This always growing, always learning approach can be exhibited in small ways, by asking questions that are openers, such as “how might we” and “what if” and “help me understand.” It can be exhibited in bigger ways, by how your team, and larger organization give, receive, and integrate feedback. And it can be exhibited by all levels—if you’re humble enough to learn at, and from, all levels.

We’ve arrived, at the beginning

There’s a lot of work to do at the people layer. Assessing, diagnosing, leading, and implementing these questions and answers is a full-time role, one that’s innately dependent on team work. So once again, dear reader, I welcome input from your experiences working at this, and your feedback.

If there are takeaways to inspire you to get started, it’s that the fundamentals don’t change. Among these are:

• Working at the people layer affords you the opportunity to hone your people skills, become a more empathic person, and better collaborator
• People skills will ground you amidst change, and serve you long-term
• Design is for people and product design is for people
• Once you take care of people, then you can take care of product

*A term coined by Randy Hunt. Special thanks to Mike Joosse, Billie Mandel, and Jim Beebe-Woodard for their feedback on the draft. The company, product, and service names used in this article are for identification purposes only, and are property of their respective owners, and I thank them for their use. All rights reserved, all palindromes reversed. Tested on peers, not boyfriends.