I know, I know… I should have cut my hair a lot sooner! Hindsight is always 20/20!
Challenge
Create a positive culture for our team in an environment that was extremely corporate.
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“Nick was by far the best boss I have had in my career. His passion for our project was intoxicating, with as many people joining our team to create the product as to work with him. He was the type of manager who was not only concerned with helping members of the team grow their skillsets, but also with mentoring us in how to recognize and achieve our career goals. Nick was always interested in our ideas, whether for the team or the product, and encouraged us to not be afraid to disagree with him on anything. His belief that great UX was paramount inspired us to constantly push the boundaries of what we could do for the product. His persistent drive propelled us forward, and I know I’m a better designer because of him. It was a truly a pleasure working with Nick. Any company would be lucky to have him.”
Senior Designer, Infor Retail
“Nick deftly balances big vision with keen attention to detail, both in the products he leads to and the people he mentors. As a leader he is enormously caring, direct, and capable of connecting each team member’s work to progress toward a larger vision. Nick inspires confidence in his UX team and in his colleagues throughout our product organizations. He is adept at giving fine-grained feedback to designers one-on-one or in wider reviews; he is constantly on the look-out for opportunities to help his people grow and even outshine him.
I’m looking forward to the next time I’ll work with — or for — Nick again.”
UX Manager, Infor Retail
“Nick is a great business partner. I admire his dedication to user centered design, building and leading his team, and commitment to executing product deliverables. He has high integrity and brings excitement to teams. Nick’s designs will live on for years; he brought consumer grade interfaces to retail’s stale software market. I look forward to seeing what Nick does next and hope to work with him again in the future.”
VP of Product, Infor Retail
“Nick has a knack for finding talent and foreseeing team chemistry before they come together. He curated a dream team of UX designers at Infor Retail from scratch, to undertake a mission to revolutionize enterprise software. Although the team consisted of different personalities and viewpoints, what he saw and what tied everyone together was an unwavering ability to empathize and be human. He never hesitated to ask for people’s opinions and encouraged the team to question his decisions and stand up for their opinions. He was as much part of the team as he was with the leadership and that trust drew people to him. He understands people, and I have always observed this with awe.”
UX Manager, Infor Retail
Strive for the top 1.6%
1000+ Candidates reviewed
8% Interviewed in person
20% of those interviewed received an offer
100% of offers made were accepted
A great team starts with carefully matched diverse perspectives, experiences, weaknesses, strengths, and personalities. It was important to me that we built the team like an admissions team might design a modern preschool or boarding school class.
No enterprise software or retail experience required
Solicited CEO approval to hire a design team with consumer product experience, not enterprise or retail.
Seeded UX talent from our engineering contractors at The Nerdery
The Nerdery’s Minneapolis team were a godsend on the engineering side, but they also brought significant UX talent that would prove invaluable over the coming years.
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HIRING PROCESS OVERVIEW
Intake:
Recruiters & Referrals
Step 1
Portfolio & Resume Screening
Step 2
Phone Screening
Step 3
Remote Design Exercise
Step 4
In-Person Group Interview
Step 5
Final Interview
This was more time with me to answer any outstanding or logistical questions. This was often accompanied by after-hours social time with team members, which helped the team and candidates better establish rapport and get to know each other in a more relaxed setting.
Tactic 1
Simple and fun design exercise
Many interview design exercises waste valuable time on both sides of the process and reveal little about a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, let alone what it would be like to work with them.
I designed our process to be simple and fun, implementing a 90 min time-boxed product design exercise after each candidate passed an initial phone screening, even for non-designers.
The challenge was simple—design an app experience to solve one of three challenges. The final solution must be presented on a single piece of paper, although interviewees can share unlimited process notes and sketches.
The test was a huge success because it was designed to be lightweight, fun, and open-ended. Candidates couldn’t prepare or overwork.
It allowed our team to evaluate an individual’s capacities in a number of areas, from hard skills like design and systems thinking, to soft skills like presenting, working under pressure, communication, debate, ability to process new information quickly, and ability to receive criticism.
Tactic 2
Open and collaborative team interview process
Never skipped steps in hiring process, and implemented a team-wide veto policy for any candidate. Exposed team to decision-making.
I didn’t want to see a team of people who looked or acted like me. As a result, I worked hard to negate biases at every step of the process, removing names from CVs and portfolios, and working to remove unilateral decision making.
For manager hires, I wanted every person on the team to have a say — and when we decided not to hire someone, I was transparent with the team about why. We belabored our decisions about how and who we’d hire, because the process often dictates the outcome.
Tactic 3
Selling the vision of Infor Retail and the excitement of enterprise software
How do you hire the best consumer product design team possible to work on a product that doesn’t yet exist for a retail industry in flux at the largest enterprise software company they’ve never heard of?
It was easier than I expected for several important reasons:
The story made sense. Everyone knew that the retail industry was beset on all sides by new challenges and disruptions, but they didn’t know just HOW bad it was at most major retailers. I joined the team because I saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do something great, and that excitement was easy for our team to share with candidates.
User-centered design was newly en vogue, and our thorough practice of research trips, user testing, and close collaboration with major retailers was a unique opportunity.
ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE WAS UNKNOWN TO UXasdfasdfasdfasdf
The pay was good—I always tried to pay people as well as I could for their experience levels, and I collaborated closely with HR and finance to keep my salaries competitive with big-name startups.
We had sweet digs — the UX team worked out of Infor Global Headquarters in NYC, and that meant seven beautifully designed floors on Sixth Avenue including a theater and rooftop garden.
I built a team of talented people who were all weird in one way or another — we had successful musicians, artists, and even a world-champion ballroom dancer on the team. Above all, I was looking for a team that was striving to be better and have fun doing it — self-awareness and a sense of humor were top priorities.
Tactic 4
Onboarding as an “all hands” iterative challenge
I believe intensely in collaboration and iteration, so when it came to the arduous task of on boarding materials for new team members, our rapidly-changing agile product suite and team seemed impossible to easily document.
So I opted for an obvious but somewhat unique approach—I “crowd-sourced” on-boarding documentation to new hires, asking that each new hire fill in gaps and changes as they go, allowing onboarding resources to evolve organically.
When new hires learned or documented something they thought would be valuable for future team members, they’d add it to our documentation.
What started as a five page Google doc grew well beyond 30 pages.
Eventually a new team member, Nicole Roberts, decided it was time for the next step — she turned our sprawling mess of documentation into a clean and organized Squarespace website.
The Retail UX microsite was soon full of videos, keynotes, team member bios and contact info, org charts, product maps, Sketch and GitHub repositories, roadmaps, and even product and process documentation—still editable by everyone on the team, still iterated upon by each new hire as a part of their own on boarding.
Our microsite was so successful it was soon used by the larger product team (500+ people) from sales to engineering, and became a model for the rest of Infor’s UX teams at Hook & Loop.
“I’ve had the privilege to work with Nick since the dawn of Infor Retail, and he’s helped me grow enormously as a product designer along the way. Nick has a knack for pinpointing an individual’s strength and helping them embrace it to drive their work toward a larger vision, and he does that by being incredibly caring and direct with everyone on his team. He inspires confidence in his colleagues by fostering a collaborative and creative culture with internal programs, educational discussions, and team building. As far as process is concerned, Nick exercises perpetual research and iterative design, and manages to keep a keen eye on every aspect of a complicated product. All of that means he’s able to drive a team towards a single, lucid end goal.”
Senior Designer, Infor Retail
“Nick is the single best manager I’ve worked under in my career. The first time I wrote that, I had qualifiers like “almost definitely” and “so far,” but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I couldn’t think of anyone else I’ve worked with who could match his talent and dedication. Nick’s secret sauce is his knack for balancing creative vision and operational pragmatism. We worked with a lot of vested parties who were not accustomed to placing a high value on design; Nick still managed to push our team to embrace risks and design the best possible product, not just the one that would be most palatable. He was able to translate business needs into design strategies effortlessly — at least from the perspective of those outside of his head. He was a staunch advocate for the value of creativity, hiring me (a content strategist) earlier than most teams would consider bringing on someone to focus on writing, voice, and tone. Beyond that, he recognized that just as design is more than making something look good, writing is more than making something sound nice. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention his kindness and compassion in addition to his professional prowess — his attention to detail and empathy for people goes beyond your typical ‘care about your users’ that’s prevalent in UX design. Nick really, truly cared about people, both the ones on his team and those who would eventually use the product. It was, without a doubt, a privilege and an inspiration to work with Nick.”
Content Strategist, Infor Retail
“Nick taught me the value and power of user centered design embedded in software development from the beginning to the end of the journey. I’d previously thought of UX as something you do as you are wire framing an application, and a set of standards you apply for consistency. Nick and his team elevated my understanding by adding value to the strategy itself. They developed empathy for the end user and their objectives by abstracting what they were trying to accomplish, from how they did it... No defender of the status quo, but always looking for ways to make tasks simple, intuitive and beautiful at the same time. I also had the pleasure of partnering with Nick to execute some amazing concept videos that served as our “north star”, creating a goal for our developers to aspire to and true inspiration for our customers.
The other testament to Nick’s leadership is the talented team he left behind. They are a great team to work with, and as you can see from their recommendations, a loyal team who appreciated the opportunity to learn from him.”
VP of Innovation, Infor Retail
“I feel incredibly fortunate to have worked with Nick.
I can’t thank him enough for creating an environment that truly valued good design, a strong work ethic, and a healthy culture within the team. I enjoyed coming into work everyday because I knew that I’d be both challenged and supported under his guidance. In fact, when I first joined Infor, I shared with him my goals of becoming a better UX Designer, and he put me on projects that only helped me improve my skillset. Thanks to his support, I am a lot more confident in my skills now than I was a year ago!
Nick built a genuine connection with each and every one of his team members. This is a quality that I greatly appreciated because it simply showed how dedicated and driven he was as a friend and manager.”
Designer, Infor Retail