Design Lead and Team Manager for Globant’s Nissan account

Company: Globant
Client: Nissan

From June 2019 to June 2022, I worked on Globant’s Nissan Account. Projects completed are covered by NDA, still here is an overview of my role within the account.

☞ Snapshot from online training on remote working developed for Globant.

Service Design Lead

I promoted a user-led approach and ensured that new experiences (for example the launch of a new vehicle) were developed in a way that met customer needs and complemented the wider ecosystem of Nissan customer experiences for both newly acquired and existing customers. I collaborated with product, tech, strategy, and multidisciplinary design teams to ensure experiences were built with the end-to-end customer journey in mind. 

I actively worked to connect teams, departments, locations, and experiences, preventing silo mentality from causing broken-up and inefficient customer journeys. The projects I worked on ranged from an average of 12 weeks to longer programmes of 6 to 12 months. I regularly contributed to a large number of workstreams where I wasn’t part of the core team, providing design and facilitation support. Typical activities included:

• Designing and delivering face-to-face and remote workshops (Miro).
• Delivering remote working and facilitation training. 
• Creating template approaches, tools and workspaces (Miro) to facilitate the adoption of positive remote and collaborative ways of working. 
• Creating service design templates tools and methods to upskill colleagues and enable teams to use Service Design more independently in their workstreams.
• Mapping journeys, experiences, and creating service blueprints (for as-is and to-be experiences).
• Defining experience principles, and experience frameworks.
• Creating high-level journeys and visualisations to convey experience visions in a way suitable for executives, supported by detailed documentation to guide hands-on project teams.  
• Defining and conducting user research (including the definition of research briefs, participant screeners and discussion guides, online surveys, face-to-face and remote interviews, remote usability testing, and task-based testing).

☞ Nissan UK accessories catalogue developed by our Design Team.

Tech Manager (Design team lead)

In 2021 I naturally moved to a Design Manager position, leading Globant’s multidisciplinary Service Design, UX and Visual Design team and their projects for the Nissan Account. I was mentored by Dean Parker, client partner and strategic leader within the account. 

As Design Manager or Tech Manager, my responsibilities included:

• Selecting, setting up, and refining design and management tools to match the team’s nature and needs,  in line with the Account, and Globant’s ways of working.
• Defining and developing the team’s principles, values, and ways of working.
• Maintaining the team’s knowledge repository.
• Recruiting and onboarding new team members from within or outside the company.
• Embedding colleagues and ‘squads’ with the wider company, account, and client ecosystem.
• Maintaining and evolving the structure of our multidisciplinary team, while keeping everyone connected, inspired and on track.
• Monitoring the team’s health to identify and manage typical issues.
• Empowering the team to grow and become self-sufficient, and identify future leads.
• Understanding when team members need to leave and managing the surrounding processes.
• Defining an exit plan, and communicating it to the team and client, while supporting the transition to the new Manager.

Over half of my time was focused on providing hands-on Design and Project leadership within Service Design and Product – UX/UI design.

• Setting up new projects collaborating on briefs, timeline, outcomes and team definition;
• Kicking off projects supporting the team to tackle complex challenges;
• Joining key decision meetings, demo, grooming, and dependency mapping sessions to provide direction and troubleshoot issues; 
• Supporting hands-on, reviewing and creating designs, flows and prototypes on Figma;  
• Collaborating with design, tech and product teams to move projects forward overcoming technical, design, budget or business blockers; 
• Ensuring individual projects always ‘spoke’ with each other so that patterns, components, experiences, journeys and research findings are reused and optimised across the whole Nissan services ecosystem; 

While working as a Design Manager, I also worked as Service Designer on some occasions.

• Focusing on Organisation Design (including mapping processes, teams and departments, and leading collaborative workshops to define team structures and better ways of working);  
• Designing and delivering collaborative business definition and planning workshops (including large remote sessions of 50+ participants from all over the world using Miro);
• Running product definition workshops; 
• Streamlining our work and promoting the adoption of Service Design across the organisation;

☞ MyNissan owners App redesigned by our Design Team.