How I started my new role as a Product Design Director fully remotely
I started my new job at OpenClassrooms in March 2020. More precisely on the 16th. If this date rings a bell, it’s probably because it was the day when Emmanuel Macron announced a full lockdown in France…
One week before, I was still working for Idean as the “Design System expert”, receiving copies of the new book I had helped to write: “Hackez le Design System”. Even though this position was great, I felt like I needed a new challenge and so made the decision to leave Idean and start a new role as a Product Design Director at OpenClassrooms. I just didn’t know at that time that I would have to do it in a very particular context…
New job, new team, new ways of working and exceptional context… I wanted a new challenge: well, that’s exactly what I got!
First weeks: Discover, observe & audit
So here I was, alone in my living room, trying to get familiar with a new job, new company and new colleagues, all of this through the window of my computer…
I must confess that my first week was quite repetitive:
Call - Call - Read Notion - Call - Call…
It was hard but it was a necessary step to get to know the team and to better understand the organization and the product I was going to work with.
—
UNDERSTAND THE PRODUCT
Thanks to the different online presentations planned during the onboarding period, I was able to get to know better the product I was going to work with.
I already knew that OpenClassrooms was an online School, created by Mathieu Nebra who started this project (first called Le site du zéro) when he was only 13 years old. His idea from the very beginning was to “Make education accessible”.
But the Product was more complicated (or should I say “richer”) than I expected:
- Many targets: Students or apprentices who want to find their first job, employees who want to upskill or reskill, job seekers, mentors who support students, or just people who want to learn for fun.
- Whole admission experience: OpenClassrooms is a school, so it needs to collect diplomas, CV’s and check student motivations.
- Learning experience: All courses and training modules are “homemade”, using a customized pedagogic model.
- BtoB experience: HR from big companies who wants to train their employees can access analytics and reports to monitor the training plans.
I felt like being next to a giant train, going at full speed and in which I had to jump without it stopping or slowing down.
—
UNDERSTAND THE PEOPLE
Before the lockdown, I only met my team members once. So I started with a one hour interview with each of them. At that time, 5 product designers & 2 Ux Writers.
Here are the 5 questions I asked them:
1. How do you define your role today?
2. What do you like about working for OpenClassrooms?
3. What needs to be improved?
4. Is there a specific design skill you would like to learn?
5. What do you expect from me as your new manager?
I was also able to meet virtually other people, some with whom I was going to work on a daily basis but also people from other teams, thanks to Random Coffees. It’s a Slack app that randomly organizes meetings with 2 people from the company. It really helped my integration!
—
UNDERSTAND THE PROCESS
When you join a company that works entirely remote, you read. I mean, a lot…
At OpenClassrooms, documenting processes is part of the company culture. Thus, during my recruitment process, I took the dedicated course entitled “How do we work at OpenClassrooms” which presents the different teams and methodologies.
And when I finally joined the company, I discovered all the other resources available:
- In Notion: everything related to process and ways of working.
- In Confluence: everything related to projects and features.
- In Product Board: the roadmap with the prioritized items to be delivered for the next quarter.
Reading all this documentation helped me understand the current process but also sometimes, to see that there is a difference between what is written (we want to work like that) and the reality (well, actually that’s how we really work today).
At the end of the first month: Go, go, go!
Having a better understanding of the organization, the product and the people, I was then able to establish an action plan, with a list of challenges that we will need to overcome as a team:
- Structure the team
- Improve our processes
- Upskill the team
- Shine internally and externally
—
1. STRUCTURE THE TEAM
Define the vision
It’s important for a team to have a North star. So with my manager, we defined a 5-year vision, meaning what we wanted to achieve through our daily practices. Here are the 3 key points of this vision:
1.Be recognized as a reference in the Product Design industry
- The quality of our product is recognized: easy to use, delightful and useful
- Our processes are efficient and shared within the team
- We communicate on how we build our products, internally and externally
2. Be able to scale our process
- We share the same practices and templates
- Our practices are effective and bring direct value to the product
- We maintain a great culture within the team
3. Keep people in the team for a long time
- Onboarding period is easy and smooth for newcomers
- Everyone has a Career Path and clear goals
- Everyone can learn new things every day and change careers if they want to
Define roles and activities
I wanted everyone to understand their role in the team, without putting people into “boxes”. So I structured the team around 4 main activities:
What is important to understand is that activities are not necessarily roles. For example, UX Writers can do User Research. And Product Designers can do UX Writing.
Then, to ensure other teams understand what’s behind, we detailed each activity further:
- What does that mean? Make sure that a common definition is shared across the whole company.
- What are the benefits? Explain why we need it and how it increases the quality or value of our product.
- What is the scope? Define the tasks we will be responsible for or not. Define also how we will help/train other teams to do some part of these activities on their own.
- What is our process? Detail how do we integrate the overall workflow, when and with whom we should work.
Define our values
As I have different profiles in my team and people who come from different backgrounds, it was important for me to find out what was the main values we shared and what brought us together. So I organized a workshop, starting from the overall values of the company (Care, Dare, Persists and Tell it as it is) in order to find our owns:
And as we couldn’t get together “physically” to celebrate Christmas, we thought of a special gift for the team: making sweatshirts with these values:
—
2. IMPROVE OUR PROCESS
Standardize our workflow
When you have several designers in a team, it’s important to share common practices, in order to be more efficient and to keep a constant level of quality.
A good process has to be fully integrated into the designers’ workflow.
We’ve then worked on harmonizing our process by creating a common template for all the projects. Concretely, it’s a page in Confluence, a kind of “Toolbox” with everything a designer needs when working on a feature:
We regularly improve this template, so every designer can take advantage of other designers’ methodologies and templates. They can remove a section if they don’t need it and mark the section as “done” when it’s completed.
If you want to know more about this process, check this article of Lucie Lemauff:
Prepare next Onboardings
6 months after my arrival, the Tech team had to recruit more than 20 new team members, still in remote of course! So to ease the integration, we’ve worked on an Onboarding template, telling newcomers everything they need to know when they join us.
This Onboarding checklist helps newcomers to understand which tool they need to install, which Notion Pages to read first, which video to watch and who they should meet. It’s organized by key moments (first day, first week, first month and first training):
—
3. UPSKILL THE TEAM
Competency grids
Within the tech team, we have a strong policy of Salary transparency. This means everyone in the team knows everyone’s salary. So during my first months, I worked hard to define the core competencies of Product Designers and UX Writers. The designers were then able to position themselves on the grid, according to their level of experience but also regarding other designers’ level. This is a very useful tool for career-monitoring on a daily basis and this will definitely be the subject of my next article ;)
Monthly training
Of course, as learning is part of OpenClassrooms’ DNA, I wanted this to be pervasive in my team as well. So I created a Google Sheet with this two information:
- I can teach
- I want to learn
Each Product Designer can offer training for other team members, whether they are juniors or seniors. Anyone can learn from anyone! It works great and we run this kind of training every month!
Product Design Academy
To gather all this material, we’ve created the “Product Design Academy”. It’s a Notion page where anyone can access videos of our past internal training:
—
4. SHINE INTERNALLY AND EXTERNALLY
Notion documentation
Having started in this fully remote context and being the first “Product Design Director”, I had to clean up the Product Design sections to make sure that everyone who reads these pages understands what the team does and how we do it:
MasterClass and presentation sessions
And since we never communicate enough, especially when we can’t see each other physically, I gave a Masterclass about “What is Product Design” to the whole company. I also regularly introduce the team to newcomers so they understand what we do and can ask me questions.
So what about today?
Today, I’m so proud of my multi-profile team which grows each month, in skills but also in numbers, as they are now 6 Product Designers, 1 User Researcher and 2 (soon 3) UX Writers:
Taking this position in a full remote context has certainly not been easy and it’s still a daily challenge. Even now that we have a nice office, I don’t see much of my colleagues because of the Covid situation.
We must therefore find ways to maintain a good team spirit and to talk to each other regularly. For this, we have our Chapter's rituals:
- Our weekly chapter meeting
- Our chapter’s retro
- Design critique
- Workshops…
And we also organize remote team activities which, despite this particular context, contribute to the general good mood:
Want to know more about how we daily manage and deliver Product Design at OpenClassrooms?
→ Listen to Design Journeys’ Podcast (in French):
https://designjourneys.fr/audrey-hacq-openclassrooms/
