At the end of 2017 we finally hired our Director of Product Design (Yaaay!!). The search was a long one with many extremely talented people that we met along the way, many of whom we lost in the hiring process because we didn't know how to find the right person. And that's what this post is about — how our team found their new design leader.

The Background

There's never a "good time" to leave a company and anytime a core individual such as a team leader makes the tough decision to depart, you always feel it. That was the case for our product design team in 2017 which lost its team lead as he decided to pursue another career opportunity. A few months of hard work later we worked through our existing candidate pipeline and grew the team from four designers to seven! This was fantastic news which kept the (never-ending) work moving.

But scale quickly became an issue. The team inherited me as a leader, and with my responsibilities I wasn't in a position to effectively support seven smart, eager designers who wanted to get better at their craft. Furthermore I wasn't in a position to effectively educate and advocate for the role of product design in our organization where this is a new capability.

What we all needed was a strong leader who could fill these gaps.

Finding myself in this situation, I had a few options, one of which (a reflex action for most) was to quickly hire someone who I thought would be a good fit. This would be a top-down decision, installing a leader in the team. However, this option felt unnatural: Imagine coming into the office on Monday and hearing: "Meet John. He's your new boss". I'd feel uncomfortable and awkward if I was the designer on the team, hearing that on a Monday morning.

Every designer had a stake in the recruitment process since every designer would eventually develop a relationship with their new lead. The obvious choice was to get everyone involved. I should mention — it helps that we had a manageable team of seven designers; it might not have been possible to get everyone involved as much as we did, had the team been much larger.

Our Criteria

In our new lead, we were looking for the following four things (taken straight from the Job Description):

  1. Be a Design leader by developing and contributing to a vision for how each of our businesses should evolve, with specific focus to the end-to-end experience, beyond the digital properties.
  2. Be a strong collaborator by working with & educating others about the role of product design and the process by which we think about product development.
  3. Improve how we work: Have a strong and continually evolving knowledge of best practices and tools to help us move faster through the product development process.
  4. Be a mentor to our Product Design team. Cultivate an open and inclusive culture that reflects the team's values.

We felt a person that had these qualities would be the perfect fit. Armed with this, we met people who applied directly and through referrals — no surprise to anyone in the industry, referrals are great and have been a fantastic source of candidates for us at Loblaw Digital.

How We Did It

Round 1 — Get to Know You

Round 1 was a "get-to-know-you" phase where our recruiting team would reach out to the candidate and give them an overview of Loblaw and Loblaw Digital. At this point they would also schedule a 1hr interview for the candidate with myself for us to get to know each other. In this face-to-face meeting, I would go deeper into the four items above and discuss our approaches to product development and explore a potential fit.

Round 2 — Meet Our Sr. Designers

Round 2 was an opportunity for the senior members of our team to meet the candidate. This is a chance for those with better domain expertise to explore fit. It's also an opportunity for designers to get a sense of how the candidate might support them as a lead. I left the structure of this round open to the designer's discretion; they're the experts so I trust them to ask good questions. The interview debriefs were always interesting for me as it gave excellent insights into how our Sr. Designers were thinking and while the goal was to determine candidate fit, these interviews also served the purpose of developing our designers' recruiting muscles.

Round 3 — Meet the Team and Show Your Stuff

In Round 3, the entire team got involved. We used a round-table style meeting where each of the team members introduced themselves with a quick overview of what they do. Once past the introductions, the candidate presented a major example of their work covering the following:

  • How they built their product design team
  • How they mobilized their product design team to execute on the task
  • How they framed the problem internally
  • How they identified the product gap and mobilized the company to address the issue

This gave us a chance to see the magnitude of the candidate's work and if their past experiences can support the needs of our team.

Next step: we invited the candidate to participate in a design critique where we had a volunteer designer from our team present a pre-selected piece of design work. The item we chose definitely had some design issues and it was important to see how our candidate would address these items. To give credit where credit is due, this was a brilliant idea from our designers and allowed us to see how comfortable the candidate was in front of the whole team. I really like this challenge as it allows me to understand the following:

  • How deep does the candidate go with their feedback
  • Do they assume control of the critique or do they facilitate?
  • Do they ask open-ended/probing questions that gets our team thinking

Ultimately, is our team better off with the feedback they received through the mock-critique? Was the performance relatively better or worse than other candidates?

Making a Decision

This is the tough part: By enabling the team of smart people to be part of the process, many will feel that they have a big part in the final decision. The reality is that the individual who is accountable for the outcome must make the final decision. It must be clear to the team that they will be heard and respected but the ultimate decision lies with the person who is accountable — the leader. Being involved in the process doesn't necessarily mean having a final say!

The benefit of this process is that it reduces the risk of complete mis-alignment because the team has had an opportunity to assess the candidate's fit. We don't have to all agree, and often times, we will do a thumbs-up/thumbs-down vote (on-the-fence votes NOT allowed!) after everyone has had a sufficient opportunity to debate the candidate. I participate in this process as well, but it's very important to allow the team to have a conversation and avoid a top-down directive. Once we've voted we agree to move forward, even though we may not have complete alignment.

The result is that the team has been part of the discussion; I've shared my opinion and preferences and we're all aligned on how to proceed. And yes, we got lucky because we found a candidate we all liked. Had we been at a stalemate, we would have explored the following options: wait a day or two to discuss again (perhaps some time away from the decision brings new perspective); setup another meeting/activity to explore areas of uncertainty.

The Outcome

We invested a lot in this decision and some may argue that it's full of bias and not a guaranteed way to find a good leader. But when you consider how we went about it, we achieved the following:

  1. Everyone had input into the final decision which is very important in getting everyone aligned, and supporting the ultimate hiring decision
  2. We strengthened everyone's recruiting muscle which is a skill most individual contributors don't get an opportunity to develop
  3. We were excited and couldn't wait for our new lead to join instead of being anxious and worried about change.

I would strongly recommend this approach if you've got a small established team and you're in search for their new leader.