A Human Centered Approach to Scaling Design Teams
A lightning talk by Andrea Ong
When teams grow, pain seems inevitable. Critiques feel like a council throw-down on Game of Thrones; tenured team members start feeling either smug or displaced; new joiners feel like they interrupted a movie in progress; everyone feels like they’ve lost the plot and aren’t sure what else will change; etc.
How do we build a team while building its culture? How do we scale while strengthening that culture? When should we hire early-career designers versus seasoned veterans? “No pain, no gain” might work for body building, but for building a team, pain signals imminent entropy.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Andrea Ong
Director of Product Design, Loblaw Digital
Andrea's design practice is focused on triangulating the sweet spot where business goals, customer needs, and technology meet. Her practice areas include business analysis, design research, design strategy, experience design, content strategy, IA, digital UI design, software product design. She brings to every design challenge her diverse background: from academia to classical advertising, digital UI design to system and experience design.
Andrea’s current interests are in developing methodologies to support the work of designing for and within complex systems and at scale, as well as supporting and nurturing the next generation of designers into future design leaders.
