With experience leading both pure design teams or mixed discipline teams (design/dev/pm/content) I’ve established a couple of best practices that help me cultivate talent and keep a happy healthy studio producing best in class work.

Never go alone
At every opportunity, I connect people together. Jr.’s are partnered with Sr.’s to build skills in both directions. Dev is connected to design to build empathy and knowledge. Humans working together to get better at their collective craft.

Own it
Ultimately, I’m responsible for the success or failure of my team and their work. However, people want to have a sense of ownership over the work they do; as such, I offer those opportunities. Each person on my team is a ‘lead’. They lead their features, and lead their work. This allows for faster progression of skills and partnerships between Jr. and Sr. talent.

Present it
Talking about the work and decisions behind the work is a critical skill to develop. I encourage the owners to pitch their own work to develop the muscles of talking about the reason they solved the problems the way they chose to.

Transparency in the work
Show the work regardless of stage in the process. Get it off of the screen and out into the studio so the entire team knows what’s being worked on and has the ability to contribute to the conversation about the work. Have no fear of the messiness found within the process.

Never fear failure
Failure isn’t a bad word on my team. We all fail together and then talk through what we can learn from it. Embracing failure enables people to work fearlessly while trying to find the best solution to the problem. We celebrate failure as a family and share the learning that comes with it.

Have fun
We spend the majority of our lives in the studio together and having fun is a critical part of that. Music on, food together, fun research trips and opportunities to share outside studio passions with each other is how we stay tight. Keeping it light ensures healthy and productive creatives.