From hiring, training/coaching, supporting each steps of our Design process to spreading Design awareness and good practices, I manage a strong design team that answers our business problems. Designing early concepts, based on business assumptions is what I excel at. This is where I can be helpful to the team and where I make a difference. These concepts are useful to communicate internally or with our partners on upcoming leads and have shown their importance.
I lead solid product teams driven by clear mission & set vision. I use Design technics to communicate complex concepts and to 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 un numbers and so most of my decisions and objectives are based and monitored through our own set of data.
Connecting the dots with our company vision or with our engineering conventions and setting our own design goals and protocols is what I do.
Understanding what is at stake and translating these insights into tangible objectives is my mission.
This goes through clear principles for the team to follow, a strategy to shape our vision and a set of methods permanently evolving to reach greater results.
The few last year proved me that OKRs are working great with Design. I take the necessary time to connect Design objectives with our product road-map, identifying dependencies and leverages for us to explore. OKR have been proven a great source of motivation as well as ensuring meaningful work. KPIs can and should also apply to Design. It usually covers from our team efficiency, the way design is spreading within the company and of course the quality and reception of our products. I am currently implementing Google’s H.E.A.R.T framework to better track our overall product design usability.
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 became 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.
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 my line of work. It gives me a better understanding and it is a natural way to earn the trust and respect of my peers.
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 verbal communication (mockups, drawings are most of the time sharper communication mediums to communicate your design).
This is a recent add-on to my list of principles. It is important for my own survival and for the mental stability of my teammates 😁. It is about.. the right balance between initiating projects and delegating responsibilities.
I love to start new projects. I did it a lot on my own but eventually felt limited by what I could achieve by myself. That is mostly why I decided to step up and take on a leader position early in my career.
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.
I am the typical assertive advocate, 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. But I suck at remembering something when I can’t quite identify any patterns.
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 totally 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 softwares 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 afterwards.