Assemble a Diverse Project Team

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Define the role of the design team.
Explain how to assemble the right project team to solve your challenge.
Explain why diverse teams can better solve your challenge.
Identify key moments in the strategy design process when teams need the most support.
Describe strategies to strengthen team dynamics to solve your challenge.

Strategy Design Is a Team Sport

Because of the complexity of the challenges we face today, no one person can solve a design challenge on their own. The strategy designer should be empowered to assemble a project team that has the right capabilities to solve the framed challenge, a shared purpose and trust of the organization to help set strategy with meaningful impact, and a deep focus on customers and their needs.

How to Assemble the Right Project Team

To kickstart the strategy design process, a cross-disciplinary team is essential. Only through a team with diverse disciplines, expertise, and life experiences can you successfully navigate the ambiguity throughout the strategy design process—from “What could we do?” to “What should we do?” and “What will we do?”—and solve the challenge.

Use these questions to begin the team-building process.

What hard skills will you need to solve this challenge?
What soft skills will help you solve this challenge?
What perspectives are important to have on the core team, and which ones are important for the extended team?
Is there a capability or perspective you need but don’t currently have access to?
Are there skills or capabilities you may need but just for specific moments within the strategy design process?
Do you have a good mix of thinkers, doers, dreamers, and tactical folks on the team you’re assembling?
What is your project’s timeline?
What is each individual’s availability?

Cloud Kicks Project Team

When assembling the project team, the Cloud Kicks strategy designer considered:

The challenge question, “How might we turn customers into fans amidst supply chain disruptions?”
The need for strategy design and UX design skills, because the challenge involves a complex system, and the solution will likely involve both a customer-facing experience, and a need for research and prototyping.
The need for expertise on the full shoe delivery value chain, especially from business process and manufacturing perspectives.
The time to fully discover and explore—at least an eight-week commitment in their case—with a team that’s dedicated full-time to the challenge.
Domain expertise in customer service, sustainability, and technology/product development/systems architecture.
The reality that they aren’t likely to get all these skills on the core team with a full-time commitment, especially with stretched bandwidth during the pandemic.

They recommended a small core team that included the strategy designer, a UX designer, and a business process/manufacturing team member. To ensure there was insight across the full value chain, expertise such as customer service, brand, sustainability, project management, and product development was scoped to participate at key moments when their expertise mattered the most in research, prototyping, and planning the product roadmap.

Why Diverse Teams Can Solve Your Challenge Better

In the strategy design process, teams need to be engaged, empathetic, and conscious of their own biases to understand customer needs and create solutions that drive market growth. Diverse teams can help you by using diversity to drive innovation.

When assembling your team, expand your criteria to include expertise and life experiences that also represent the customers you want to reach. Keep these elements in mind.

Stakeholder roles/disciplines/levels/departments
Soft and hard skills
Experiences
Expertise
Personalities
Culture
Backgrounds
Gender
Race
Age
Neurodiversity

Diversity isn't just a box you check, and you’re done. It’s about building a culture of inclusion and belonging that allows teams to constantly question bias and world views, and bring other people to the conversation. It requires leading in new ways. Use these pro tips to develop an inclusive and equitable team culture.

Build core team values that celebrate authenticity.
Map personal interests to tasks and development plans.
Build collaborative workspaces.
Empower micro-moments to learn about team member interests and motivations.

Cloud Kicks Prioritizes Diversity

Diversity is a core value of Cloud Kicks. Its customers, especially its West Coast influencers, are a racially and ethnically diverse community. Therefore, it is important to the strategy designer that the project is intentionally designed for both diversity and inclusion.

To ensure there was proper representation on the team, the strategy designer reflected on what perspectives they bring to the team, and then considered UX designers and business process/manufacturing team members that have different life experience than their own. Additionally, the strategy designer prioritized diversity of life experience for additional team members as part of the extended team and to provide input along the way.

Furthermore, to ensure the strategy design process was inclusive, the strategy designer considered representation in research and prototyping. That meant identifying, inviting, and welcoming diverse users to offer insights and co-create concepts.

Key Moments When Teams Need Most Support

As we mentioned, the challenge framing process is filled with ambiguity. So it’s no surprise that there will be moments throughout the strategy design process when your team will need more support.

Kickoff: The invitation to join a project and the kickoff meeting set the tone for the project and the team dynamic. Making sure to balance clarity on purpose and roles and responsibilities initiates trust and the learning journey the team will go on together.
Research moments: Findings can sometimes be different from the experience and expertise of the team members. Creating time to process either one-on-one or as a team can help expand understanding.
Synthesis moments: Taking key insights and turning them into opportunities for design—whether in challenge framing, after research, or throughout prototyping—there can be differences of opinion. These are key decision-making moments, so it’s important to stay connected to the original challenge framing and what you learned from users.
Review moments: When holding design reviews with key stakeholders, use feedback as the opportunity to learn and explore. If the review is not in alignment with user feedback, it’s a chance to understand more deeply the important factors from the stakeholder point of view.

Pro tip: Set the expectation for ambiguity and reinforce the concept that a strategy design process is for learning. Then, when support moments arrive, they can be depersonalized and leveraged as a chance to learn with and from users and each other.

Strategies to Strengthen Team Dynamics

A well-selected project team will more effectively address your design challenge by providing different perspectives. Follow these best practices for strengthening the team throughout the strategy design process.

Determine if you need to bring on new team members for certain project phases. For instance, if you decide to make sustainability content a key part of the solution strategy, add a writer to work with your sustainability expert.
Consider what skills and perspectives each person brings to the team, and then consider how to complement them with different perspectives.
Examine your team, and acknowledge if team members seem too alike. You should plan other ways for diverse voices to participate in co-creation and decision-making moments if you find you can’t achieve diversity within your core team.
Make sure your design team members feel safe to have hard discussions. Make it clear through words and actions that you’re fostering an environment of belonging.
Genuinely accept other perspectives from team members.
Embrace constructive conflict because it may surface obstacles and issues that could hinder your product’s success once it’s in the market.
Recognize the diversity in the group. Do not try to downplay it.
Recognize when you need someone to add infusions of knowledge/perspective but not be part of the team.
Ask for help if you need support in creating an environment of belonging, having difficult conversations, or addressing friction.

Assembling a diverse project team with the right capabilities to solve your framed challenge is one of the most important ways you can set your project up for success. But how do you measure that success? Find out in the next unit.