Jan - Oct 2019
Sainsbury's Argos
Sainsbury's Argos, which includes Argos Financial Services, Tu Clothing, and Habitat, is a leading UK-based online retailer.
With 29 million store customers and nearly a billion online visitors every year (in terms of size, only eBay and Amazon are bigger), Sainsbury's Argos is striving to help make its customers' lives easier.
My Role
Head of UX and Product Design
Reporting to the Director Digital Product Development and then to the Director of Digital
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Re-engineered, led, and coached a team of multi-disciplined professionals, including Information Architects, Product Designers, Researchers, and UX Writers.
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Worked closely with brand, CRM, and relevant teams to help ensure a consistent tone of voice and appropriate design across all digital customer channels.
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Defined and executed the user experience vision, strategy, user-centred design direction and guidelines.
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Enriched a strong technology-based culture by injecting a more user-centred and problem-solving mindset and process.
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Identified and drove emerging digital initiatives associated with usability, accessibility and Design Thinking.
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Liaised with designers, developers, and product owners to implement new conceptual ideas.
How it all started...
After nine years, I decided to leave Ocado.
After leading the design of all major projects in Ocado, including ocado.com and the Ocado Smart Platform, it was time for me to be engaged with new people and challenges. I was hungry for new experiences to enrich my life, personally and professionally.
I joined Sainsbury's Argos as their new Head of UX and Product Design.
[Spoiler alert] Unfortunately, my experience did not last long; I will leave the business after only ten months and you will know why.
Needs
From the first day, I could clearly recognise the weak disposition and significant challenges the UX team members were facing. Not having anyone to lead the team for more than a year impacted negatively on the designers' growth, influence, and craft.
The designers felt disengaged and demotivated, and one by one were leaving the business. Team spirit and comradery were nonexistent, and as a consequence, personal conflicts started to arise.
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a disengaged and demotivated team made primarily of individuals working in silos
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a team of individuals well connected and appreciated within Sainsbury's Argos that worked with and for each other.
We need the UX and Product Design team to be more collaborative and engaged.
Challenges
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Some designers were sitting next to each other. Others were seated alone in product teams without being truly part of such a team.
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Design practitioners weren't collaborating effectively with each other, and product cohesiveness and alignment was lost.
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The individual's career progression was unclear if not bleak. No learning platform or framework was set.
My first and only priority was to bring back enthusiasm and teamwork.
The plan
- Engage with the team frequently in a group setting and individually.
- Clarify and constantly repeat team values and expectations.
- Show what the future might look like.
- Plan and facilitate playful, educational and team-building events.
The obstacles opportunities
Sometimes, challenges can become opportunities.
- Internal conflict. Solving a palpable conflict between two designers will indeed demonstrate that things could get better.
- Low expectations. Less you expect, much more you will gain.
- Some designers were already leaving. A chance to refresh the team with new hires.
Solutions
I measure success by how much designers contributed to the success of their peers.
I loved my first three/four months. The feeling I got when people privately told me how much better the team was doing was rewarding. The feeling I got when the designers shared their recent impactful's story with sincere excitement, is what makes me love my job. After four months, we started to see some real progress.
How might we be organised in a way to become more productive and collaborative?
Re-engineering a Team and new processes.
In my opening weeks, I spent most of my time being engaged with the business leaders and my team.
I listened to my team and several stakeholders, and I observed behaviours and dynamics. It became clear to me that a bit of disruption was needed; we needed to reset team habits and routines.
My most challenging and controversial move (for all agile aficionados) was to reunite all the designers into one office space. The intent was to send a clear message: we need to speak to each other more often, share our work regularly, be comfortable to ask for help and bond with each other. These are basic team principles to function effectively as a group and deliver good work. That was a disruptive decision; a temporary move. When the time was right, together with IT and Product leaders, we would investigate more efficient ways to organising ourselves.
Every new day that passed, we felt more united; and feedback within the team and from different stakeholders was extremely positive. The designers loved to be able to share ideas and receive feedback from their peers. In no time, thanks to everyone's effort, things started to move into a better direction.
Unfortunately, some designers were already preparing to leave. Sad as it was to see them going, that opened the opportunity for me to bring in a new hiring process to facilitate the finding of the kind of designers that we needed.
The design process
AA design process is a planned journey that relevant stakeholders should consider when developing an idea from its definition to its success. The Experience Team, and not only, shouted for and needed a design process urgently.
I wanted to deliver a process that was meaningful and relevant to the team. Because the primary users of such process are the designers and researchers, I decided to facilitate an ideation workshop so to empower the senior design team members to deliver and own the process. The outcome was an MVP step to step guide that needed to be tested in the real world; it was the beginning of a journey.
How might we develop a more collaborative environment, thus to deliver more cohesive and aligned products?
The Great UX Bake Off and Design Thinking
Being part of a culture and environment that fosters learning is the ambition of all the best employees and in such a setting, happiness and productivity boost over the roof. Critical to my strategy was to create opportunities for my team to spend Friday afternoons in personal and team development.
One of the activities that I enjoy running is The Great UX Bake Off. The purpose of such a workshop (sometimes by bringing home-baked pastries) is to have individuals or groups working in solving a stated problem not related to the business. That is an excellent opportunity to put into practice design thinking, collaboration, innovation, presentation and pitching—all in a great friendly and fun atmosphere.
Alternatively, we would spend a Friday afternoon in social events, such as visiting art museums and pubs.
A few disagreed with spending that time in not doing "work", but as I like to repeat, poor teamwork = poor outcomes (evident in the long term). I didn't compromise; that was the most crucial time of the week.
Design Thinking
I ran Design Thinking workshops across the organisation to divulge the meaning and value of design. I engaged with other leaders from different areas of the business such as Brand, Marketing, and Technology so to build a stronger relationship of trust and collaboration.
I also started building a bridge between our team and the Sainsbury's Experience team to open opportunities for learning and working together.
How might we learn and develop our skills to progress our careers in the right direction?
Career's paths and the "Thank you" letter.
Our Friday's afternoons design workshops are giving us the chance to improve our hard and soft skills. However, more is needed to boost career and craftsmanship growth.
I regularly invite team members to step into my shoes in leadership for a specific task or time. Why?
Like it or not, I firmly believe from first-hand experience that we learn faster when faced with change and discomfort. One of the biggest dilemmas of designers is which career path to follow: leaders of people or leaders in craftsmanship? PS: If you're striving for both as I am doing, you should bear in mind that is exceptionally demanding, and it's easy to lose a sense of reality.
Experiencing being a leader, even for just a day, will give you a nudge in the right direction. That happened to someone in particular at Sainsbury's Argos.
Career's path and team org.
To facilitate scale and career's choices, I structure the team to grow organically, and according to the designer skillset and mindset; valid designers are not managers. A designer's spirit is creative and a bit rebel. Hence, let's focus less on management and bring more emphasis on coaching and craftsmanship.
The "Thank you" letter from the future.
How do you set goals to improve yourself?
Start by envisioning whom you want to be in the future and write a thank you letter to yourself for the achievement.
In this letter, write down each step you performed, including all the possible obstacles. Name whoever will assist you in your journey.
Come back to the present. You have now a list of actions you need to perform and the names of whom will be there for you. Validate the letter with your line-manager; ask her/him to support and monitor your progress. And in 12 months, you will be compared against what you were a year earlier.
Results
The team was more united than ever, and optimism started floating in the air.
It was time to start facing the fact that we needed to scale and deliver more significant design outcomes. We should never forget that our mission is to provide significant and valuable outcomes for our customers and business.
With the intent to optimise design delivery and consistency:
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I started defining a strategy to improve and scale our Design System (Bolt).
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We initiated a new design process to facilitate collaboration and business/user validation.
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I started exploring new design opportunities to optimise the overall Sainsbury's Argos experience.
Unfortunately, you will soon find out why these concepts will never see the light of the day.
Finale
Everything was going according to plan. Then, one rainy day in May, an announcement was made.
The whole digital team of Sainsbury's Argos was going to merge with Sainsbury's Grocery to become the one digital Sainsbury's team. And it needed to happen fast (rumours might say that it was a response to the failed merger between Sainsbury's and Asda).
I had to pause my initiatives to participate in the new Organisational Design workshops. While interacting with the Product and Tech Sainsbury's management, I realised that significant changes were ahead of us; changes that I struggled to be excited about.
One after the other, my line managers resigned. It became clear to me that, regardless of my efforts, I couldn't shape the new Experience team as desired. The design team will be organised like any other team in Sainsbury's.
My leadership values, mindset, and vision were not compatible with what Sainsbury's needed at that time. To avoid any further and future disruption, I decided to follow the leaders that hired me and resign before the new Experience team structure was made public. It was a choice made by gut feeling, intuition, and heart.
I wished I had more time to observe and enjoy the growth of my team and being able to deliver a better craft and experience to our millions of customers.
When Gianni started at Argos he immediately identified opportunities in our ways of working; proposed and gained support for necessary changes; and then guided the team through the transition in a way that gave every team member a way to feel good about the process.
PS: All the outcomes mentioned were only delivered successfully because of the trust, support, skills and care of professionals of all disciplines.
During the time Gianni and I worked together at Argos, I was impressed with his professionalism, ability to spot key issues, and ability to "roll up his sleeves" and teach by doing. Gianni's readiness to learn new UX skills and his readiness to learn new aspects of the UX profession were especially impressive since he brought with him an already impressive set of skills and approaches.
When Gianni started at Argos he immediately identified opportunities in our ways of working; proposed and gained support for necessary changes; and then guided the team through the transition in a way that gave every team member a way to feel good about the process.
Gianni frequently wrote his own UX prototypes to ensure the changes proposed were workable for the organisation before presenting them to the team. He also held brown bags and open design meetings including Product Management and members of other organisational UX teams, including merchandising and brand.​
I truly enjoyed working with Gianni, was impressed with his professional approach to the broad range of problems and opportunities he encountered, consider him to be one of my "great" hires and would definitely work with him again if the opportunity ever presented itself.
Melissa Dunn Director Digital Product Development @ Sansbury's Argos (2019)