Creating the Blueprint: Growing and Building Design Teams
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
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Resilience stems not only from professional challenges but deeply personal histories and experiences, as embodied by the speaker’s grandmother.
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Building team culture can be as simple and powerful as cooking and sharing meals together weekly.
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Process is not a burden but a key driver for innovation and scalability in complex, distributed projects.
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Transparency builds respect among team members by helping them understand the complexities of each other's roles.
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Cross-agency collaboration benefits from regular, candid updates connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated work.
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Storytelling within teams strengthens internal bonds and helps external stakeholders understand the team’s identity and values.
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Teams that share personal and political stories can better reflect those narratives in their client work, enhancing authenticity.
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Constraints, such as lack of budget or resources, can be overcome through trust, creativity, and collective determination.
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Shared interests and cultural references, like video games, help reinforce trust and camaraderie in teams.
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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."
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