Connecting…

Unlocking a team’s Design potential necessitates establishing connections. This entails aligning Design initiatives with Business objectives. It also involves fostering connections among individuals who will engage with our Design in various capacities, championing our endeavors globally. Additionally, it’s crucial to interface our designs with the product using a system founded on conventions and components to ensure uniformity and efficiency.

Leader

I build lean teams in which every member plays an important role. My leadership philosophy oscillates from transformational to democratic depending on the nature of each team and their related goals. From the hiring and coaching of all members, I focus on securing and improving the mission’s resources, my role as a leader is to make sure our team fully utilizes its potential to meet our goals.

I communicate a clear mission & vision and use Design technics to translate complex concepts and advocate our mission to everyone inside and outside the team. I drive performance through agile processes and radically candid feedback. Being at buzzvil for years taught me to only believe in numbers and so most of our decisions and objectives are based on and monitored through our own set of data (YODA).

Advocate

Being an advocate requires understanding the business strategies perfectly. What’s next is appropriating these insights in the context of a team and extracting a vision for everyone to follow. This is important to create an alignment between the business and the product roadmaps. Of course, this can also lead to greater performance/motivation and retention inside the team.

Discoverer

I am a problem solver. And that brings me to initiate discoveries. I connect design discovery practices with product discovery ones. Buzzvil gave me a few opportunities to start a new mission team from scratch. The last mission aimed to define what will be our next products. This was another exciting opportunity for me to grow my capacity to define new customer problems through desk research and customer interview and test to validate the best solution(s) to answer them.

Achiever

Converting a customer-centric solution into an actual product is no easy task. These past few years allowed me to fail many times and ultimately, succeed a few times too. I learned that the product delivery process requires extreme collaboration and an extensive understanding of the Business, the UX, and the development required to build the product. I also learned that if you don’t measure achievement, you don’t achieve anything. So part of the development roadmap is secured to add all the trackers we need to measure success.

My work Principles

Principles are essential to driving yourself, a team, or a product with shared and expected values. I apply principles to every team, project, or product I get the chance to work on. I believe it to be part of the fundamentals. Here are the ones I’ve set to define how I work:

Think slow, Do fast

Giving myself the time to think, giving my system 2 (slow thinking) a chance to connect the dots has been part of my routine for as long as I have been designing. My theory is that everything can be done fast as long as I know exactly what I need to do.
From this habit, I’ve become an automation specialist. It is all about identifying patterns, identifying everything that can be re-used to save up time and energy. Naturally, I try to advocate the same thinking process to my Design team, so we can all focus on things that matter.

Listen actively, communicate effectively

Information is key. As you will eventually see below, I am not the extroverted type of person and I enjoy listening to others. Effective listening has many advantages in this line of work. It gives a better understanding and it is a natural way to earn the trust and respect of others.
As a designer, I also need to be good at communicating my ideas and as a manager, I need to give my teammates clear indications & feedback. Despite my personality, I am usually enjoying giving a lecture or leading a meeting as long as it has a purpose (I am really bad at chit-chatting). Being a designer gives me plenty of ways to express what I need to say aside from verbal communication (mockups, drawings are most of the time sharper communication mediums to communicate your design).

Balance initiatives & delegation

Accountability inside a team is crucial to ensure motivation and get the 100% of your team capacity. The leader role is really about making every member an active collaborator who will have an impact on the product. I always loved to initiate new projects. But I eventually felt limited by what I could achieve by myself early in my career. That is mostly why I decided to step up and take on a leadership position just after a few years of experience.
Followed a long journey in which I’ve progressively learned to delegate, starting by hiring better designers, better specialists than I am and moving my focus toward different objectives and higher levels of concepts.

Personality

I show a lot of confidence in what I do and genuinely hate aggressiveness of any form. My introverted side disappears as soon as I can advocate what I think is right.

It usually takes a lot to stress me out and I am the one who will usually succeed in doing so.

What drives me outside of bed every morning is the feeling of achievement. As soon as a project, a workplace can’t provide that feeling anymore, I usually move on.

I enjoy learning new things, in various ways. I consider myself a slow learner as I like to understand why things work the way they do. It takes me time to learn something new as I go in-depth. But it takes no time for me to learn something adjacent or related, such as a new design software as I can easily recognize patterns. Every design software work pretty much the same way and I usually recommend designers to start with a pretty complex one, such as 3D modeling. Everything will look accessible afterward.