#1 The product leader

Being the talent business unit leaders' right hand to get the investment for the creation and maintenance of this ecosystem. Acting as the liaison between different functions to determine priorities and get value delivered.

#2 The strategist

Directed the strategy, structure, and success metrics for the initiatives, bringing my team to collaborate with stakeholders to review progress, prioritize, and refine solutions. Researching on innovation to support the future 10 years of the company.

#3 The designer

I am a designer at heart, and even when I had too many bureaucratic tasks, such as dealing with a budget, I would try to have some hands-on design activity on my plate, like a user interview, design review, or some ux writing.

#4 The manager

Co-managed these distributed product teams with Tong, my colleague from China, focused on delivery. We owned stakeholder relationships, vendor management, team structure and staffing of designers, product managers, and engineers, as well as performance assessments.

#5 The thought leader

By embedding agile rituals, design and product best practices, we got to delivery quality, better forecasting, and better work. I wrote internal and external articles and was always open to participating in activities that would lead to a better understanding of the work we were doing.

#6 The facilitator

Company-wide workshops and masterclasses on high-performing teams, growth, feedback culture, design best practices, product management, user research, prioritization, and delegation. These sessions were always a high point of my day: facilitation energizes me.

#7 The mentor

Mentored leaders and many designers from Brazil, North America, India, China, Spain, and Singapore. From associate developers to principal designers, my goal is always to support the person's growth and help them deliver impactful work.

#8 The team member

At the end of the day, we are all colleagues. I believe in leadership by collaboration, and therefore, unless in a serious situation, which has been the exception in my experience, I would not push a hierarchical approach and work as a peer.

Challenge #1: Innovation x debt

Talent had a lean and underinvested structure for many years. And when you have so much debt, it gets hard to balance innovation and the debt of fixing known problems. We organized the teams in a structure where there was always innovation at the core of the work but considering space for customer support (we did not have a dedicated team) and paying tech debt. 

Challenge #2: Design system

Thoughtworks was in the process of brand redesign at the time, so the development of a design system was blocked. The reality was that all products were delivered with different levels of design maturity in terms of interaction and visual design. We mindfully created components across products to make sure of minimum rework later.

Challenge #3: Customer support

With help from tech operations, we implemented a customer support structure with a rotation of team members on call to make sure there was no delay for critical errors and bugs. Urgent requests were dealt with immediately, and a review of all other requests happened every week to make sure users were being heard.

Learning #1: Iteration, iteration, and more iteration

I led this work by aligning business and product, bringing the users to the center of the work, and identifying the most important criteria for prioritization. With that, making sure there was clarity on how to reach our team for new features or to fix problems became an easier task. This process was iterated numerous times, receiving strong positive feedback and being adopted by other business units.

Learning #2: Roadmap and visibility of the future

The roadmap is commonly not a designer responsibility, but as this was a leadership position and I had the 'pre-consent' to change this process, I led this work. I created it using a tool that allowed interactive visualization of the past, present, and (possible) future. This roadmap was maintained by the product managers and me. It was also integrated with the feature request system and all other insights from user research, making it easy to a) visualize all the debt, b) demonstrate progress, and c) have a complete view for prioritization.

Learning #3: Launch and internal marketing

Each launch taught us a bit more about what worked and what did not. We were able to hire a comms specialist to partner with us to drive multi-channel marketing campaigns. Depending on the product or feature, we took different launch approaches: a) all users, b) demographic, c) user maturity, and d) role or position, among other approaches.

Learning #4: Experimentation and curiosity

The teams that were building this suite of products worked as a sandbox for experimentation. We were growing the engineering teams while we delivered internal tooling and increased business value. By being open to experimenting with new ways to build products at Thoughtworks, we tested, tried, and implemented processes and methods that were later broadly adopted by other business units.