Role: Hiring Manager, Design at Docusign
People :: Operations & Leadership
Design your career architecture like you design your products: for high impact and with attention to detail
Hiring, Developing and Promoting Designers
Timeframe: 4 years
Status: hiring/promotion process and career architecture in use
Scale
Hiring Manager: Manager and Senior Manager of a scaling team from 3-8 designers, Director of a 23-member Product Design team, Director of a 6-member Service Design team
Hired, promoted or transitioned all but five people across all the teams I led
Product Design: 70 designers broken into 6 larger teams; designers assigned to features or flows
Product Experience: ~125 design, research, content, IA & ops
Product, Design and Engineering: 2,700 employees
Docusign: Public company with 7,500 employees and 1.7M customers globally
Challenge:
Hiring was kind of a mess, promotions were mostly done by “gut” and no one moved around in the product experience practice.
In 2020, Docusign was scaling up, so I was given headcount to fill almost immediately. Thousands of people applied. Most were white. I was left to figure it out for myself, with loose guidelines around ratios and portfolios.
By the time I extended an offer, I was so exhausted, I wouldn’t have noticed if I’d hired a designer or one of my pets.
The truth is we made our own lives harder — & the process highly inequitable.
As time went on, I noticed similar issues with promoting people and our review process. And no one moved teams or functions. Ever.
The only goal was to grow, and there was only one way to grow: keep hiring rock stars, drop them into a team and leave them there until they got bored and left.
Originally I only wanted to make things better for myself because that was how Docusign operated, generally. But I needed to have an effect on the whole system to achieve that.
Hypothesis:
If I can improve processes around hiring, transitioning, promoting and retaining designers, we will have a greater impact as a practice.
AND
If I can improve the structure that underpins those processes — our career architecture — I will be able to make all of those processes more efficient, transparent, and equitable for everyone.
Highlights
Operations Mindset
Career Architecture
Leadership in people processes
Service design processes
Partnership with Talent Acquisition and HR
The Context
Docusign was a place people wanted to work.
The stock price was going bananas. We were scaling up fast, adding people through acquisitions and filling open roles. Growing by the hundreds.
From a distance it all looked fine. People were being hired, promoted, and there were quite a few long-tenured folks who had been there for 10+ years that made our retention average look pretty good.
People seemed happy when you talked to them. People said they stayed because of the people they got to work with. (That last one is a yellow flag, in case you were wondering.)
Our talent and HR processes were pretty standard. We had them, they were used, no one seemed interested in going around the process or the teams.
Our talent partner, Aimee Cook, was by far and away the best one I’d worked with. When I was hired I thought, well, when I have to hire people I know it will go smoothly. The process was clear and I flew through it to be hired as a Manager in Product Design.
Everything looks good from the outside until you dig a little deeper.
The Problem
“We only hire rock stars.”
That statement is the cause of, and the answer to, all of the problems we had at Docusign across the employee journey — the interview process, career growth, and reasons for leaving.
More or less in order of me encountering and seeking to solve them, here’s what I saw:
Hiring
‘Rock stars’ is a concept that enables basically every systemic -ism
We only hired senior designers (which was going to create major problems real soon)
We actually needed marathon runners interested in unglamorous problems
There was no practice-wide hiring strategy beyond “grow”
Hiring managers didn’t know about each other’s roles and didn’t share candidates
Roles were left open until filled, which was an average of 95 days but could be as long as 9 months
Promoting/Retention
Similar mindset of “I’ll know it when I see it” made statements like “she doesn’t feel like a senior yet” completely reasonable
No hiring strategy —> low shared skill sets, which could be an opportunity for internal mentoring, but was not recognized
Unclear expectations in promo nominations
Kept nominees in the dark
Widely interpretable career ladders
No hiring strategy —> incoherent team and practice evolution
The Stakes
“But I thought you were happy!”
I believe there are three things that keep people happy in a job: the people, the company’s mission or values, and the work itself.
If you take away one of those, people lean on the others and are generally okay.
If you take away two, people burn out or leave.
The company has a solid mission but we weren’t really fulfilling it. We didn’t make things simple for anyone but a signer. A LOT of customers found workarounds to avoid using our products.
The work itself was rarely intellectually challenging or exciting. The technology was behind the curve (bespoke html pages!?) and our ability to have an impact was limited.
I remember talking to a designer who said, “I can only change the text on these three buttons.”
No one is sticking around for three buttons.
So, people leaned on “the people are great” as the biggest motivation to stay. And if you don’t get that right, holy cow. Huge yellow flag, maybe even a red one.
As someone who worked hard to be a good manager and leader, the deck was pretty stacked against me.
The Ask
At first no one asked me to do anything. I just started improving this stuff for myself.
First, I joined our Talent Guild, a small group of volunteers responsible for supporting the ladders, hiring and promotion.
I ended up being the only member actively working on anything in large part because I was the only manager — but it got me a periodic invite to senior leadership meetings.
I went to our Talent partner to build diversity at the top of the funnel — broadening where we posted our roles.
I refined the hiring process for myself — creating a standard schedule for candidate assessment, a better process for final interviews that included a written guide, and a clear process for cross-functional partners who would be interviewing my candidates.
I successfully made the case for ‘less rock star, more cross country star’ based on what was actually in the career ladder, which freed me up to hire people who would be a better fit.
My time-to-hire went down to 65 days.
I implemented an ongoing process to prepare my people for reviews and promotion that used the career ladder.
After failing a couple of times, I created a process for promotions that had 100% success — again, using the career ladder.
I advocated for and got the okay to really go to town on the ladders and linked processes by our VP.
“We trust you. Go ahead,” he said on a call in front of all the design leaders.
The Oh no
Change is easy when things are good.
So I got the green light to put in place the new career architecture. I started an internal mentoring program. I taught managers how to use my tools and developed templates for them. I got started on a hiring system that used the career ladder and skills/skill levels to build the job description and interview guide.
I was on fire!
It turns out the stock price was also on fire.
After a bunch of leadership change and layoffs, we weren’t hiring, we stopped backfilling departures, and promotions were all but paused.
Now promotions had to equally consider business need, not just the person’s abilities.
In other words, there had to be a business need for a designer paid at a higher level if I wanted to promote them. (It’s a sneaky way of giving leaders an out on any promotion, honestly.)
Most of our designers were seniors who wanted to be leads, and the leap between those levels was really big.
But the work just wasn’t there. Teams didn’t want lead designers who worked across products. They wanted designers who cranked out mockups for three buttons.
The screeching halt forced me to reassess how to make my work successful no matter what the business conditions were. It was the only way we’d retain good people.
The Aha
I decided to focus on developing the business need for promotions in my teams instead of asking for the business to agree with me.
I was still a manager, after all. This career architecture stuff was side-of-desk, and our ops team wanted nothing to do with it.
Building up a business need would take time, and I’d have to find a way to make it repeatable. But ultimately I knew doing this would lead to retaining good people for longer. I’d be able to promote them in a tough environment.
Designers need the opportunity to stretch, practice, and then do higher level work consistently to be promoted. I was there to create that opportunity for them.
That is the job of a people manager.
At some point companies will realize this and rehire them. Until then, design operations can create systems that support retention instead of simply accepting high levels of churn.
I reorganized the team I was leading at the time so that I would have to promote people to fill the need, while giving them bigger challenges to work on and a reason to collaborate with each other instead of working in silos.
This was definitely repeatable. There were silos and people working on the same things everywhere.
And lo and behold, it worked. Then we reorganized… again.
The Results
BIPOC hires went up 50% after I started casting our recruiting net wider.
Average time-to-hire went from 93 to 65 days after my changes were implemented.
My fastest time-to-hire was 27 days.
I promoted almost everyone who reported to me.
Retention in my teams, especially of the most experienced designers we had in the practice, was the highest in the practice.
As far as I know they’re still using my career ladders.