There are many factors that go into building a high-performance team but I want to highlight three areas that have the greatest impact, based on twelve years of experience building and leading cross-functional teams.
1. Leadership
Teams that have great leadership excel.
Teams that have poor leadership struggle.
For example, you can have the most talented and experienced employees on your team. But constant micromanagement kills creativity, team morale and productivity.
A good leader knows how to empower and motivate his or her team to get work done without constant oversight. Don’t get me wrong, all team members need frequent training, direction, feedback and accountability but micromanagement is not the way.
Clearly, a good leader supports his team but more importantly, he gets out of his team’s way so that the team can do what they were hired and trained to do.
I think this quote from Steve Jobs sums up this concept:
It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
-Steve Jobs
2. Process
Great user experiences almost never happen by accident. They are the product of creativity, innovation, dedication and hard work supported by a clearly defined UCD (user-centered design) process.
A UCD process typically includes but it is not limited to user research, ideation, iterative design, prototyping and testing.
There are many different UCD processes such as the British Design Council’s Double Diamond, IDEO’s Human Centered Design process or Stanford’s (d.school) Design Thinking Process.
Frankly there is no perfect one-size-fits-all process and the actual methods (affinity mapping, card sorting, task analysis, usability testing, etc.) used in your process can vary considerably. But I’ve found that having a clear process and sticking to it yields better results than not having a process in place.
A clear process ensures that critical steps are not skipped over when designing products and services for your users.
3. Collaboration
High-performance teams collaborate both internally and externally within their organizations.
Let me explain this further with an example.
In many organizations, there are sales and customer support teams and these teams interact with users/customers on a daily basis.
Most UX teams do not interact with users/customers on a daily basis. Not because they don't want to but its just not a part of their daily job responsibilities.
Therefore, if we are being totally honest here, the sales and customer support teams interact more closely with the organization’s users/customers and they have critical information to share with the UX team. Wouldn’t you agree?
This doesn’t mean that the UX team has not researched their users/customers on their own.
However, high-performance UX teams understand the benefits of frequently collaborating with other departments such as sales and customer support so that they can fully understand the needs of users/customers.
Other Factors?
So what has been your experience working in a UX team? What are some other factors that influenced the success of your team?