Organisation chart showing the Lead UX role and UX designers across five product teams

Leading the UX team at NHM

Breakpoint DesktopTeam leadHiringCoaching

Challenge

  • I was hired as Lead UX Designer, then managing just 2 UX designers.
  • They had been losing people recently, with 3 leavers and 2 failed hires.
  • I was challenged to come in and rebuild the team, shake up the culture, bring more commercial awareness and be a strategic driving force for designing better end-to-end experiences.

Context & constraints

  • Whilst I had project-level leadership experience, line management, coaching and team strategy were completely new to me.
  • My line manager (Head of Product) left just a couple of weeks into me starting, with no replacement for 6 months.
  • The complex digital rebrand project had just started, so I had very little time to learn how to lead a team before having to jump right in.

My role

For just over 3 years, I led a team of 5 UX designers/researchers and 1 UI designer, split across 5 multidisciplinary product teams, each working towards a different museum value lever, across the main museum website and micro-sites.

Org chart showing the Lead UX position within the Natural History Museum product team structure

Ran and tweaked the hiring process

With 4 vacant mid-level UX/UI designer posts, I had the freedom to shape the team as I felt the situation required.

  • Completely rewrote previously used job descriptions, interview tasks, screening and scoring criteria.
  • Enlisted my existing team members, product managers and developers to help with interviews.
  • Prioritised the person beneath the portfolio, their deeper why and how their skillset could complement others to create a well-rounded product and UX team.

1. Job description

  • Focussed on challenges and impact
  • Honest about organisational constraints
  • Sold the team culture and meaning

2. Screening

  • Blind-scored with Senior UX
  • Set criteria agreed together
  • ~200 applications for 4 roles

3. Interview 1

  • Video call with 12 candidates
  • Motivations and experience
  • Portfolio walkthrough

4. Working together task

  • 6 candidates given a scenario
  • NHM setting up a museum in Madrid
  • Plan a kick-off workshop with PM & dev

5. Interview 2

  • Run the workshop live
  • Clear scoring criteria for PM & dev
  • Final call with me before decision

Coaching and running useful 1:1s

My role as a manager and leader was to help my team work through problems by prompting with targeted questions and offering different perspectives and lenses they might not have thought about, but most importantly to really listen.

I have a set of questions I go back to (inspired by The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo):

1. Identify where I can help

  • What's top of mind for you right now?
  • What priorities are you thinking about this week?
  • What's the best use of our time today?

2. Dig deeper to understand more

  • What does your ideal outcome look like?
  • What's hard for you in getting to that outcome?
  • What do you really care about?
  • What do you think is the best course of action?
  • What's the worst case scenario you're worried about?

3. Shift to how I can be of service

  • How can I help you?
  • What can I do to make you more successful?
  • What was the most useful part of the conversation today?

Establishing our new team culture

With lower salaries on offer and no social budget, I had to get creative to attract top talent and build a culture they would enjoy to do their best work.

1. Collaboratively arrived at our team's why and value system

Our UX team's why

Nested circles showing the NHM, Digital team and UX missions, titled Our why

Our values

  • Seamless end-to-end experiences
  • Advocates for users
  • Champion inclusive design
  • Always asking "why?"
  • Mindful of the wider context
  • Driving for better

2. Established a new set of team ceremonies

Weekly

  • Monday team kick-off: priorities check-in and UX craft discussion
  • Wednesday feedback/jam: request and give constructive feedback, or work together on a blocker

Monthly

  • Personal retro: reflect on key pieces of work, document and appreciate progress
  • Team trip: explore another London museum or attraction, learn about their UX and bond

Quarterly

  • Team ops retro: what we Liked, Lacked and Would Change about our ways of working
  • Offsite: work on a UX team ops challenge, plus a team social

Team ops and workflows

  • Built the design system for more consistent and efficient UX work.
  • Established workflows in Dovetail using AI to speed up research analysis.
  • Before leaving, started working on integrating CoPilot into our user research repository for faster AI-powered research retrieval.

Impact

  • A team that had gone from quiet and reserved, to collaborative with psychological safety and sharing widely.
  • Created a senior role to promote 1 team member, not common or easy at a cash-strapped organisation like the museum.
  • No leavers during my tenure!
Team trip to Barbie The Exhibition
The UX team posing inside a giant Barbie box at Barbie The Exhibition

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Piqued your interest?

Get in touch

Whether you're looking for a new product design/UX team lead or you'd just like some advice on how to improve your conversion, drop me a line!