– Greetings! We decided to hire you an assistant for the current project, we found a suitable candidate. By the way, it comes out on Monday.
– Ummm, okay.

Reaction

— Why wasn’t my opinion asked!? Why should I do it? Maybe I don’t want to waste my time!?

– I’m not ready! I am not sure that I will fail.

“Oh my god, another unpaid duty!”

Yes, it happens, sometimes a business knows better how to conduct business, scale a product and how to grow a team, so I suggest that you drop considerations on this topic and move on – the most interesting is ahead!

Don’t panic!

Imagine that you are in front of you, just at the beginning of your career – try to make the process of interaction and learning as comfortable as possible, because you already know what is important in the profession and what is not so important, what can be missed and where you can cut corners, and where the opposite – more effort is needed. Now is the best time to use this knowledge.

At the same time, it should be taken into account that all people have different experiences – for someone, everything went smoothly at the beginning and he got into a good company after training, while someone wandered through small studios or galleries, where there was no onboarding process in principle, and they belonged to newcomers without proper respect

Your protégé is a designer just like you – your task is to help him gain experience and periodically tune his direction of development if he wanders in the wrong direction.

Onboarding is easy

It’s cool when there is a document in Knowledge (not necessarily Knowledge, anything will do) with the most basic questions, for example, how to get access, where files are located, how to create an account in Slack, as well as what to do if you get sick and how to do it correctly go on vacation and so on. If not, it might be worth thinking about, it will come in handy in the future.

It is very cool when you have a checklist for a beginner, with items that need to be completed for the first week, month, or the entire trial period – easy and convenient to control.

List your expectations and principles

After you have closed some basic things, it is important to talk about your expectations for cooperation, voice the criteria by which you will evaluate the work of a specialist, what part of the product the newcomer should close and what he will be responsible for, as well as the expected deadlines.
Commit the person to your personal work principles and the company’s work principles. If you have any special work rituals, please share them.

Getting to know the team

We move on and get to know the team – one call with everyone or a series of face-to-face meetings, it doesn’t matter.
You can also discuss what the new designer prefers at a general meeting – okroshka on kvass or kefir, Marvel or DC.
If you go to the office, order a pizza and let the team chat all together, or take someone to lunch – whatever you prefer.

Figma is not all!

It is not enough to fill a person with access to Figma and say – let’s understand! Tell us how everything is arranged in your work with layouts, tell us about specific processes, maybe you name files in a special way, or there are peculiarities in the task statuses, or you transfer files to development in a special way.

It is useful to show the previous iterations of your product, it is important for understanding the vector of development and working on the next tasks.

Tell us about the culture of adding new components to the library, working with fonts and icons.

After that, you can take the person to a couple of work meetings, so that he can see for himself how the processes are arranged, and also start immersing himself in the product.

Check on simple tasks

To begin with, you can give a few simple tasks and see how a person copes – based on the results, you will see where you should tighten up. I would pay attention to the following criteria:

• Terms. The development team expects to receive ready mockups by a certain time. It is important to convey to June the value of deadlines so as not to let the team down.

• Necessary and sufficient level of processing logic. You will see whether the person understood the task, found the optimal solution or thought over several options, or can explain in detail why he chose exactly what he chose.

• How neatly assembled layouts. It is interesting to see how a person assembled the screens, whether he used components, whether he paid attention to the styles of fonts and colors, and how he got along with the design system as a whole, discussed new components with developers, whether all the corner cases worked.

• The level of communication with the team. Did I ask additional questions to the development team, managers, and it’s fine if I thought about how the task looks from the business point of view.

• Ability to independently solve problems and work in conditions of uncertainty. In general, independence, in my opinion, is the most important metric that you should try with all your might to grow in your newbie.

The more mistakes he makes and corrects in small tasks, the easier it will be for him to work on large projects.

Correction of mistakes

Three points that can help a beginner designer grow and take more responsibility

1) Let’s test the solution

Besides getting your valuable feedback and comments from the team, it will be good if the solution is at least tested in some way. At a minimum, you can assemble a prototype and arrange corridor testing or test it yourself.

If you are working on a mobile application – let him look at it from the mobile phone screen, sometimes there are many unplanned discoveries here.

2) Show the solution to the team

Show the completed flow to your development team and manager, they will probably voice some comments. If you have other designers, it would be very helpful to get comments on the layouts from them as well. At this stage, the feedback received will help the novice to improve the current solution.

3) Let’s make mistakes

It is not necessary to immediately wrap up decisions that will not work – let the person digest this decision for himself a little and understand where its disadvantages are. Moreover, it should be done as delicately and reasoned as possible in order to encourage a person to think about some more decision options, and not to close. Carefully highlight the disadvantages of the current solution and give detailed comments, show examples of successful solutions to a similar problem.

The secret formula

In fact, it does not exist, but there are three important points:

Diving

With each solved task, the immersion in the product will increase, making your life easier. It is good when a person himself is interested in starting to understand the intricacies of the product, this should be encouraged and be ready to answer questions, sometimes uncomfortable ones.
At the first stages, it is important to encourage a person and help him understand the limitations of the product, talk about the context of making certain decisions and development directions.

Delegation

Each new independent step will untie the newcomer from you, and he will rapidly gain experience points. This is cool and each time you will be able to devote less and less time to work with a newbie. An important point – at the same time, you should start delegating more difficult tasks to your mentee, and also demonstrate a willingness to delegate responsibility for these tasks.

In the first steps, you can help discuss together the terms of the task and the technical limitations. Make sure the person understands the essence of the task and give them the freedom to find a solution. Discuss the interim results in a few days, and if June has gone wrong, adjust the solution search vector.

Humility

Here it is a question of the limits of your ego (perfectionism, if you will) and responsibility for the product.
Even if your mentee has designed a sub-optimal solution that is generally at a sufficient level to become part of the product, accept it as such. Of course, you will always be able to prove from the height of your experience and knowledge why you can do better, but if you are sure that the current solution also solves the task – accept it and send it to development!
Getting a result will be a powerful motivator for June. Even if the layouts are not perfect, you will have something to discuss and suggest how to do better next time.

It will be great if after some time you can get feedback from your users or analytics data on how the implemented solution works. Let your jun gain useful experience and improve his decision in the next iteration.

Don’t forget to support

Give ecological feedback

Honesty is the basis of any quality feedback. Be sure to highlight the moments that went well. Blurry wording can appear disingenuous.
Highlighting weak points, focus not on the problem, but on the goal. Argue why it does not solve the task at hand, or solves it, but not in an optimal way (for example, too expensive to develop).
By the way, I believe that praise should also be given for simply well-done work, it is not necessary to highlight only significant moments.

Drive progress

Okay! You have been working for a while and your protégé has some points that you would like to raise – feel free to schedule a meeting and discuss it.
Make recommendations and discuss the timing of the next meeting based on the results of the work.
If everything went well and June is already in the staff and successfully solves product tasks, feedback sessions are of course appropriate! Usually a small call once every few weeks or once a month is enough: find out how the person is feeling, if there are any questions or problems, how progress is moving with tasks and personal goals, if there are any comments on your work as a manager (yes, and that) too you have to ask).

Untie Jun’s hands

Make a checklist item with suggestions for improving the product and current processes regardless of budgets and timelines. Let your imagination run free.

Don’t underestimate a beginner just because of his lack of experience. Working for a long time on the same product, we often grow with it and do not want to make any changes. An outsider can bring interesting ideas, simply because he has a fresh perspective and is not committed to current solutions, and the lack of a framework can make them truly daring and revolutionary.

How to break up correctly

Unfortunately, sometimes it just doesn’t work.
The person didn’t fit due to weak skills, insufficient product immersion, or a cultural mismatch with the team spirit. Well, the company did not meet the expectations of the newcomer with an unhealthy atmosphere, lack of design culture, built processes and common sense in general.

Of course, there is a reason for this, and this reason needs to be communicated honestly to your newbie — neatly and exclusively to the point. Try to give the most detailed feedback, point out strengths and weaknesses, be sure to give recommendations on what needs to be worked on.

I hope it was useful, thanks for your attention!