Leading the design team
Infinum is an independent design & development agency. Together with my fellow team leader Marina, my job was to enable a happy and productive design team.
The Design Team
At that time the Design team had 23 people including UX designers, UI designers, Illustrators and Motion designer professionals. Most of them worked in HQ and we had a few remote people.
One role – two main challenges
People management is not something they teach you at design college. So every day was a new challenge for me. I like to think about these challenges in two main directions — Team lead responsibilities and design director responsibilities.
Team Lead
As a team lead, I had to make sure that the team was evolving in the right direction. There is a set of activities, methods and tools to steer the team. In this category main responsibilities were:
Actively looking out potential candidates when the team needs to grow
Onboarding new people
Mentoring and education
Consulting cross-functional team
Finding and enabling the talent & potential in everyone
Defining the team strategy
External and internal presentations and workshops
Encouraging team activities and feedback sessions
Creating an aligned vision
Therapy talks with team members
Design Director
As a design director, you have to work together with the team to create innovative concepts and ensure that all projects have high quality within scope. In this category my main responsibilities were:
Design strategy and planning
Consulting cross-functional teams
Building trust and relationships with clients
Collaboration with Business Development and various teams
High-quality product design
Detecting & encouraging innovations
Team workshops to enable new approaches
Workshops with clients
Keeping track of industry best practices and technology
Diverse tasks and communication with people of different backgrounds gave me the opportunity to learn from them and to exchange my knowledge.
Thanks for surfing with me 🌊🏄♂️
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