Building a Team Experience aka. TX — Management for Engineers Series
💬 If you are a functional manager in some forms, you should know that your team is your customer right? You should care & design their experience. This is what I call the Team Experience or TX.
TX Loop of win-win-win
TX ↗️ => Team Performance ↗️ =>Product/System Quality ⏫ => Customer Trust ⬆️ => Organisational Revenue ⤴️ => You 🔼
Thinking in Design
💈Empathize — Managers assume how their people are doing. Wrong! Set aside your assumptions and gain real insight into your customers and their needs. Do your research within the team & with the team. Here are some questions that can help you figure out key problems:
- How is your newcomer’s Onboarding? 🤩
- How long does it take to Set up to Start working? 🛠
- How easy is to Find a Point of Contact or an essential information? 🤓
- Why people don’t want to work with each other? 🤔
💈Define — Problems can differ, for a senior and a junior problems are different. Create personas to describe differences in your team. A nice introduction to personas is here.
Write down together, the problem statements that would improve the team’s experience.
💈Ideate — Go outside the box 📦. As you are to close to the problem, which means inside of the problems, you don’t see them. Otherwise, you would have addressed it. Try to find solutions that are fast to prototype. Things should already be clear within a day. Check the Bonus section if you need some inspiration.
💈Prototype — Be fast 💨, in few hours, to have prototyped THE solutions that you as a team have selected previously.
💈Test — Does it work? Measure what you think is the improvement metric. You can for example assess the time to onboard new comers, the satisfaction level of setting up the work environment etc… If you are confident with the results then it works. Yes! Great 👍 No? Iterate and start back from the empathize phase if you think you solved the wrong problem😊. Otherwise, go back to the ideation phase.
There are many methods and mental models to help you in design thinking. You can read more about them here.
For engineers, it seems like nothing new here. However, as humans, we often struggle to apply our best practices to other areas of responsibilities and create analogies.
Emotions in a wheel
Besides the 5-step approach to design a great TX. You should also care about the emotional change within your team. Feelings can be changed so can you do it too.
Here is a quick guide to emotional change within the team:
A- Your team starts with an established emotion. Identify it together using the wheel.
B- Use the wheel to set a target emotion for the team.
C- I don’t write this step… you are clever enough to figure this out 😉
This is an extremely interesting exercise. We applied it to our product design. The process of identifying the target 🎯 emotion and working on the whys and hows is indescribably rewarding. 🤩
Now, go and build a better experience for your team!
⭕️ Bonus — 30 Circles
A little bonus for your design thinking.
+How can I generate ideas quickly within your team?
— A cool 😎 exercise is the 30 circles activity.
Here how it goes:
- Give to each a paper with 30 circles on a paper ⭕️
- Start your 3 minutes ⏰
- Draw any idea inside of these circles 🎨
- Compare concepts, identify similarities and out-of-the-boxes
- Vote 🗳 up favorites
- Pick most +👆 ones of the team 🏆
You can print your circles from here.
Other readings from the same series that may interest you:
DevOps to Win | Make, Buy or Ally | End of Management?
I write, teach and coach engineers to become leaders of tomorrow. Find out more about my Management for Engineers Course on https://emregency.com
