Bootstrapping a Team

Situation

Joining a new team is always a challenge, but joining and leading a new team in the middle of COVID? Luckily, I enjoy a challenge, and as the new Design Lead for the International team at Kaluza, my goal was to set up strong processes to ensure success.

Kaluza is a part of Ovo Energy, a market-leading energy company in the UK. As part of their strategy, they launched new businesses in France and Spain during 2020. The energy markets in France and Spain are not as liberalized as the UK, providing an opportunity for new businesses to step in and offer something that the incumbents didn’t.

Ovo’s value proposition focuses on green energy; relying on renewable sources for 100% of their supply. This stood in contrast to the incumbent providers who only provided renewable sources for part of their energy supply.

I joined the team after they’d established an initial product and had built up a small user base.

Task

The International team was still in a very early stage within Kaluza and hadn’t had a dedicated design resource until I joined. Previously, they’d worked with designers on a more tactical basis, with very clearly scoped deliverables. I aimed to make design an integral part of the product development process, supporting a diverse set of stakeholders both on specific projects and through self-directed discovery work.

In addition, I undertook foundational work to source and setup user-research tools for day-to-day work, helping us benchmark our current flows and speak to users. Most of the team didn’t have experience with experimentation and user-testing as part of the development process. This meant that I not only found tools that fit the budget and needs of our team but also educated key stakeholders on the value of this approach.

Action

The first step was learning as much as possible from a range of people in the team: marketing, product, commercial. By accumulating artefacts from the team and understanding the goals and existing work, I gained a better understanding of their current ways of working and priorities. This extended outside of the International Team and into the design and research team, where I identified the tools we already used and assessed their suitability.

Once it was clear where the gaps in our knowledge existed, I developed a plan to address them. The team had already gathered a lot of secondary research about the market but lacked insights from our users, both regarding our product and the needs of users. I created a business case for budget to address both those needs, focusing on short-term solutions that could be scaled up or down depending on success. The primary user-testing tools were going to be replaced for the UK team, which offered an opportunity to incorporate our needs into their replacement.

Since the International Design team sat across two markets and several product squads, I created a Jira board along with briefing templates to track incoming work. This established a clear process for incoming requests, avoiding side channels and helping designers pick up projects reliably with clearer expectations on delivery.

By this time, I had been joined by another product designer whom I managed, and I made sure to get their feedback early and update the processes we’d created accordingly.

I also mapped out our existing research onto a Confluence space, ensuring that everything I had learned was documented in a single source to help new additions to the team get up to speed faster.

Result

The user interviews we conducted benefited not only the product design function but also the marketing teams. Creating the document store on Confluence encouraged the whole team to contribute, with engineers and customer service staff adding comments.

Regularly presenting back work and being open about our process encouraged questions. Our research methods, in particular, attracted questions about our methodologies, which fostered discussions that advanced both design and other parts of the business.

Finally, by referring back to our Jira board, we could demonstrate the value that design brought, showing how much we delivered over the last three months.