Building Loyal Health’s Design Team

Leading product design operations and building a healthy, collaborative culture.

About the project TL;DR

I joined Loyal Health in March of 2020 right when the global pandemic began. I moved back to the US from Quito, Ecuador in the hopes that I’d soon be able to work with my team in person. At the time, the organization was a fledging business with less than thirty people, two of them product designers. It was also a moment of complete uncertainty; at the time joining a company, let alone building a team remotely was pretty new.

My goal coming into the role was to establish and scale a strong and culturally healthy design team to support the next generation of our rapidly growing business. Four years have past and our team has grown to 14 people and the org has gone through different stages of the startup lifecycle. During this time I was able to hire design managers and promote team members. I was also able to establish both a design system function and user research function.

I am truly, proud and grateful to be a part of this team.

Timeline

April 2020 - Present

Creating interviewing, hiring, and onboarding practices

While at Loyal I have had the opportunity to recruit, write job descriptions, set up the interview processes, and hire folks directly. After we hit a certain size, our organization was able to bring on an in house recruitment team. My team and I work closely with them to find people that will thrive on our teams and bring their own unique perspective and experience. When looking for new folks it important to me that we hire people and not skills. By focusing more on the mindset and characteristics of candidate rather than solely their technical ability, I have found that we are able to truly determine how well they would do and how happy they would be on a team.

Creating a career growth framework

In June of 2020, Nieslen Norman published a study that found 89% of teams did not have a documented career ladder for designers. In previous jobs I saw first hand the difference that a career ladder made in the hiring and performance management processes. I also knew, at least anecdotally, a key thing designers look for in potential jobs opportunities for growth in their careers.

This was the first large initiative that I undertook as the Director of Product Design. It was important to me that our team had guide to make solid decisions when hiring, managing, and promoting the team as it grew. I also wanted a clear, detailed way for my team members to understand how to evaluate themselves and areas in which they could develop their skills. And it acted as a tool for my managers and myself to advocate for recognition for my team members with our executive leadership team.

This career lattice went through 4 major iterations as our organization scaled. And I am proud to say that it was used as a guide for other cross functional teams including Engineering and AI.

Defining and leading design rituals

Rituals are important to drive our product work and craft forward, as well nurture a bond between team members. One of my learnings as design leader is that the state of your team ebbs and flows. Things that work during one cycle of life in your org may not work in another. This is not to say you are throwing out important rituals every quarter; it’s just that you just can’t set it and forget it when it comes to the activities you do as a team.

When a “shift” happens for our team I hold reviews of our rituals and conduct retrospective like sessions to identify what rituals still provides value, what parts of them no longer works for us, and what we need to do to change. A ritual that we most recently iterated on was our design standup. We realized they were not achieving the goal we set out for them: to promote transparency across the team, know when our work overlapped, and set the week up positively with a moment of bonding. A member of the team, Val Vega, came up with a set of cards that not only allowed us to succinctly call out our work, but also encourage people to share more of their lives outside of the office. It also acts like a quick snapshot of what are peers are working on.

Our design rituals

  • Design Standup

  • Design Critiques

  • Weekly Design meeting ( sharing/ continuous learning)

  • Monthly bonding sessions

  • Weekly 1:1’s

  • Monthly skip levels

  • Senior and Peer Mentorship meetings

  • Feedback channel

  • Friday Kudos (brainchild of Hannah Koenig)

Creating our design principles

There is often skepticism around establishing design principles for your products. The often can seem obvious or too general for the organization and don’t truly guide people when making decision at the detailed level. When my team collaborated on these principles our goal to show the “why” behind how our collective mindset and our approach to our work. We wanted it to be practical, be based on actual examples, and help us make decision at both a macro and micro level.

Crafting our design principles became a multi-day workshop that was interspersed with days where people were able to take there ideas back and ruminate on them. I guided us through multiple exercises that got us close, but it wasn’t after Erin McGlothlin came up with almost a specific “formula” for guiding our thoughts did we end up with a final set. By then end we were proud of the belief system we had built together.

Read our design principles here.

  • In order to foster health equity, we try to meet people where they are and design for their context keeping in mind inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility.

  • At Loyal we strive to provide a helping hand whenever needed. As hospital organizations across the country began tackling Covid-19 testing we created and shared a solution for triaging patients for free. We sweat the small stuff and create thoughtful experiences to empower health systems with the information and tools they need to better engage with their patients.

  • We listen to patients and our partners in healthcare, so that we can build the right thing. By sharing our insights across our teams and with our customers we work to ensure that real data drives our decisions.

  • We work to earn trust and confidence in our patients and our customers by providing clear and transparent communication in our interfaces and by making product choices that reflect our stance that privacy is non negotiable.

  • At Loyal we look forward and seek out areas in the healthcare industry that lack definition. We do this by listening to experts and patients, examining emergent technology, and the shifts in our domain. Our goal is to proactively work towards closing the gaps we find and creating a more seamless, supportive healthcare experience.

  • Our teams hone in on the goals and tasks of our users in every aspect of our work, whether we are making strategic decisions, troubleshooting with customers, or designing features. We respect people's time and effort and work to ensure that users are able to focus on their task and not our tool.

  • We believe that it is important to be comfortable with defining ambiguity and managing the unknown. We pride ourselves on being able to navigate our wide array of users, their needs, and contexts across an ever evolving, complex healthcare journey.

Design System Designer
Tory Martin

Establishing a Design System function

Our design system began as a grassroots effort between designers (Alex Roberts and Bhakti Shah) and front end engineers. It quickly gained excitement and momentum amongst folks at the mid and individual contributor level. Designers and frontend developers were working on components in addition to their daily tasks. It was obvious with how our platform was growing and the amount of people building our products everyday we needed buy in and funding at the executive level to create a dedicated team.

I presented to our CPO, based on our current data, the value that company wide design system would have on our overall experience and on the product organizations efficiency, as well as the time and money that could be saved. With this I was able to get a budget and hire a full time dedicated designer, Tory Martin.

Tory has taken our design system leaps and bounds. He has been instrumental in advocating for our design system. Because of him we now how foundational components for a large swathe of our products, a process for development to be shared between all product teams, transparency and communication about milestones. He also works with developers to support Storybook,the frontend workshop for building components.

Tory also diligently works to foster communication and collboration across design, development and the PM group. He consistently gathers feedback and input. Most recently, Tory interviewed and conducted a survey of the entire front end developer team and engineering managers to improve our processes.

Lastly, in order to show the value and impact of our design system to stakeholders, Tory share updates and information on our Design System slack channel and presents to functions across our organization.

Establishing UX Research function

Data is key to truly understanding the problems we wish to solve and for whom we are solving them. It was critical to me that Loyal Health’s design team have a research driven mentality and be built on top of a strong UX Research function. When I began at Loyal, I set the expectation of conducting user research for our current and new projects for our designers and for the collaboration with PMs, developers, and our CS teams. And I shared with them methods and tools for doing so. In order to get buy-in from our larger organization I gave talks, including during our company wide meeting, about what user research was, its benefits, and how folks across the organization would be involved in the process. I presented to our CPO the value that UX research function and strategy would have on our on our business. I was able to get a budget and hire a full time dedicated User Researcher, AJ Ayeni.

AJ was pivotal in establishing and operationalizing our organization’s user research function. He created a robust, flexible, and repeatable UX research process. He developed templates and frameworks for conducting research, analysis, and synthesis. He helped democratize the research practice and encouraged participation from cross functional peers. AJ enabled roles across the organization understand the importance of UX research. With his guidance our process was streamlined, saving us time and improving our efficiency. He not only handled UX research ops, but also acted as a coach to all of the designers. Our team had varying levels of research experience and he was hand on in helping grow people’s skills and experience.

In order to socialize the impact UX research was having on our product teams and overall organization AJ and I had a multi-pronged approach. AJ ran a slack channel for user research and gave frequent updates. After each initiative designers presented their research the product team, insights were presented at company wide showcases, and reports were shared with leadership.

As our organization and the number of products we began to make grew I saw that there were parts of our process that would benefit from having a research platform. We struggled with areas like recruiting and scheduling. Operations took away from the critical time AJ and our designers could have been spending on the research itself. I analyzed our current processes and calculated the time and cost we would save by having a user research platform. With this data I was able to advocate our need to the VP of Product. After getting buy-in and support from her, I was able convince our CPO, President, and CEO of our need and procure funding. After much competitive research I decided that we should use dscout. Dscout allowed AJ and our designers to focus on gaining insights and less on operations. We were able to double the number of research initiative on each team, reduce recruiting, scheduling, and analysis times. With our new streamlined process we were also able to create a firmer research roadmap and support more continuous research.

Ultimately our research function has been critical to making product decisions, decide on the direction for new investments and ultimately showing our products’ value to our customers.

User Researcher
AJ Ayeni

Measuring impact

466%

85%

Growth of team

Retention Rate

4.7/5

Satisfaction Score

Let’s Talk

I enjoy grabbing coffee in person and virtually. Message me at apettus3 [at] gmail [dot] com or on LinkedIn.

Work

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