Rosenverse
Creating the Blueprint: Growing and Building Design Teams

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Creating the Blueprint: Growing and Building Design Teams

Gold
Thursday, November 8, 2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Share the love for this talk
Creating the Blueprint: Growing and Building Design Teams
Speakers: Jennifer Kanyamibwa
Link:

Summary

Building a team is like building a tribe. Jennifer will focus on the complexities, celebrations and challenges of building a design team and what she has learned through the course of her career.

Key Insights

  • Resilience stems not only from professional challenges but deeply personal histories and experiences, as embodied by the speaker’s grandmother.

  • Building team culture can be as simple and powerful as cooking and sharing meals together weekly.

  • Process is not a burden but a key driver for innovation and scalability in complex, distributed projects.

  • Transparency builds respect among team members by helping them understand the complexities of each other's roles.

  • Cross-agency collaboration benefits from regular, candid updates connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated work.

  • Storytelling within teams strengthens internal bonds and helps external stakeholders understand the team’s identity and values.

  • Teams that share personal and political stories can better reflect those narratives in their client work, enhancing authenticity.

  • Constraints, such as lack of budget or resources, can be overcome through trust, creativity, and collective determination.

  • Shared interests and cultural references, like video games, help reinforce trust and camaraderie in teams.

  • Leadership involves fluidity—team members may lead, support, or follow at different times but must stay aligned towards common goals.

Notable Quotes

"Resiliency is not really a professional thing. It's actually a lot more personal."

"If you really want to build culture and see how people cross collaborate, try to make lunch with your entire team every single week."

"Process can make things scalable and help you take the smallest problems or the biggest problems and really bring folks together in ways that are not even imaginable."

"Transparency is building respect for what your teammates do."

"Without having these conversations and understanding each other, we wouldn't understand how this city really ran."

"Telling your team's story goes beyond the walls. It's also about understanding your place within the team."

"All the brands that came to us to understand women were really trying to understand us."

"We had no budget, we had no backing, and it was a huge success."

"Having each other's backs is like literal video game hero style slaying constraints."

"Sometimes you're the leader, sometimes you're at the end, sometimes you're trying to get other folks to come in — and that's okay."

Ask the Rosenbot
Anna Nguyen
Why Our Voice of the Customer is Better Than Yours
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Ovetta Sampson
Managing the Human Engagement Risks of AI
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Sam Proulx
Understanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Sarah Barrett
The "How" of Enterprise Information Architecture
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Billy Carlson
Pro-level UI Tips for Beginners
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Weidan Li
Qualitative synthesis with ChatGPT: Better or worse than human intelligence?
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Karen McGrane
AI for Information Architects: Are the robots coming for our jobs?
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Nathan Curtis
Design Systems for Us: How Many One-Source(s)-of-Truth Are Enough?
2019 • DesignOps Community
Johanna Kollmann
Insights-Driven Product Strategy: Get your Research to Count
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Craig Brookes
"Just Make it Look Good" and Other Ways We're Misunderstood
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Neil Barrie
Widening the Aperture: The Case for Taking a Broader Lens to the Dialogue between Products and Culture
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Bria Alexander
Theme Two Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Theme Three Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Jacqui Frey
Scale is Social Work
2020 • DesignOps Community
Alla Weinberg
How to Build and Scale Team Safety
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Ashley Sewall
Exit Interview #5: Designing My Life After Tech
2026 • Rosenfeld Community

More Videos

Darian Davis

"Creating a roadmap built enough space to make meaningful design changes for developers to implement."

Darian Davis

Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship

January 8, 2024

Indi Young

"Casting diverse characters who represent thinking styles breaks down demographic stereotypes."

Indi Young

Thinking styles: Mend hidden cracks in your market

January 8, 2025

Louis Rosenfeld

"I want you to have the best time possible and bring your fullest self to our conference today."

Louis Rosenfeld Bria Alexander

Day 1 Welcome

September 23, 2024

Melissa Schmidt

"This program has become the gateway drug for customer research for people who didn’t know its power or value before."

Melissa Schmidt Adam Menter

How UX Research Hit It Big in Las Vegas

June 4, 2019

Kristin Skinner

"Designers often resist processes meant to streamline their work because it feels restrictive."

Kristin Skinner Kamdyn Moore

8 Types of Measures in Design Operations

April 16, 2020

Dave Hora

"Visual diagnosis builds credibility and trust before you ever do user interviews or tests."

Dave Hora

Advice for Establishing Research

December 8, 2022

Sean Fitzell

"We wanted to surface agents day-to-day jobs, not necessarily how they were using Compass products."

Sean Fitzell Sarah Han Kayla Farrell

Craft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps

March 12, 2021

Jason Mesut

"I’m not happy with reducing visual design down to one segment because of my previous work with those types of people."

Jason Mesut

Shaping design, designers and teams

November 8, 2018

Dante Guintu

"Candidates sometimes got rejected within hours despite active recruiting efforts, and recruiters lacked visibility into the system issues."

Dante Guintu

How to Crush the Talent Crunch

September 8, 2022