Empowering teams across the planet

The challenge

Having worked in teams and with teams for over 20 years, I was asked by Pip Decks to distil my knowledge into a card deck. This came with several challenges:

• Every team works in different ways and is often context-specific.
• Teams have varying levels of maturity. A tactic that works for a new team may have been tried by many teams for a more established team.
• Individuals in teams are at different levels and don’t always feel confident to bring change.

Research

I spoke to many people… 100s of interviews with design leaders and 100s of exit interviews told me:

• Communication issues – up and down.
• Lack of strategy.
• Disciplines involved too late.
• Roles are not being defined.
• Lack of culture with a safe space and no sense of community.
• Work capacity.
• No accountability for doing/success of the work.

Go live

We chose to launch an alpha named “Design Team Tactics” to test the content. 100 people joined the test. Surprisingly, a lot of people were not in design teams. Engineers, film products and sales teams joined the program.

What we learned:

• People recognised the problems the cards aimed to help with.
• Even though the language was slightly design-focused people self-adjusted it to fit their role.
• The product would work for teams outside of design. So we changed the name to Team Tactics.

Outcomes

Pip decks outcomes:

• 10,000+ copies sold.
• Used by Apple, Google, Ikea and many leading experts around the world.
• Team Tactics is one of Pip Decks the publisher best selling decks of all time.