Growing teams with experience stories
As a design leader, I’ve found that one of the most critical but challenging tasks is helping team members grow and rise to ever-increasing challenges, to go beyond the comfortable, and become a T-shaped specialist.
I noticed a pattern where team members were staying comfortable as shallow generalists, which limited their growth and the team’s overall impact. My goal was to create a system that would help everyone find their deep expertise.
To address this, I designed a level system (an approach I called the ‘UX RPG’ to signify the end goal of a great team) to help people set goals and grow themselves. This system was not a checklist, but a diagnostic tool for finding their growth directions and skills gaps.
I introduced ‘experience stories,’ which were like personal portfolio pieces focused on distilling lessons learned into reusable knowledge. These stories were a form of continuous discovery, turning individual experiences into shared knowledge. They helped us understand our strengths and weaknesses, which in turn helped to create a clearer vision for our team’s future. The system also became a key part of everyone’s growth plan, a way to direct my coaching efforts, and a core topic of discussion in our 1on1s.
Making this system work required a lot of reflection and trust. But after two years, the results were clear: the best story writers were also our highest performers. The system’s transparency meant I got very few questions about promotions, as people were focused on their own growth rather than comparing themselves to others. This experience reinforced my belief that a transparent system for growth is the key to building a great design team, one that is confident, empowered, and focused on making the right kind of impact.