Ilaria Mauric
Head of design
I’m partner and Head of Design of Tangible.
As Head of Design, I lead projects following our design process, that has user research at its core and technology as an enabler. I help our teams, external teams and the strategy and development departments of our clients design together products or services in a sustainable and measurable way, setting expectations, checking outcomes and seizing emerging opportunities.
As partner, I do my part in defining our vision, strengthening our company culture and posizioning our brand. And those are the kind of activities that fuel my motivation daily.
Past conferences:
– World IA Day 2017 Trento-Verona, Trento
– Agile Business Day 2016, Venezia
– Web Marketing Festival 2016, Rimini
– Better Software 2014, Firenze
– Better Software 2013, Firenze
– Agile Day 2012, Roma
– Agile UX Camp 2012, Firenze
– WhyMCA 2010, Milano
TALK #ABD18
(exposed in italian)
Shaping roles. Shaping culture.
Description
From 2013 to 2018 our team has grown from 5 people to 18.
This growth has obviously brought many changes inside our company, and we managed them in iterations, tweaking things, making experiments, measuring outcomes and improving over time.
Having a strong team culture and aligning individual values and intent to the company vision was our mantra from the start, and we put a lot of effort into that, with courses, team activities and workshops, coaching, etc.
We also rebranded the company as a way to have a stronger, shared collective identity.
Then we worked on our recruiting and onboarding process, to make it more effective and structured in order for us to hire new people and embed them into our team more easily.
What took us by surprise was crafting and enabling career paths: the need for a clear career ladder, with specific roles and skills started emerging after hitting a certain number of people and after they had been in our team for a good period of time.
The issue, in its first manifestation, emerged in a team retrospective in late 2016 (we were 10) , when many people asked for a more structured process and a refresher course on Agile principles, but the underlying, personal question seemed to be “How am I contributing to Tangible? What is expected from my role?”.
We spent the whole 2017 working together with Marco Calzolari in a coaching and consulting process, starting from people and their talents and ambitions to the definition of roles and skills.
In the meanwhile, in late 2017, we were 15 and the question “How do I grow in terms of skills and paycheck in Tangible?” had started to be clear and frequent. We took the roles and skills that emerged from the team and added the point of view of the business.
We worked for one month and came out with a matrix of the roles that the market recognizes, the roles that Tangible needs, the skills and responsibilities for each role, bonus activities, career paths, one-of-a-kind roles and emerging roles. This matrix has enabled a new kind of conversations and every person in the team has found its place and its desired path for growth.
We started talking about how to invest people’s personal budget for training and conferences and we started working to enable people’s careers.
What are the next steps? First we need to align our wages and incentives to the roles and career progression that are in the matrix, for better transparency and consistency. At the same time we need to grow gracefully and sustainably, avoiding unnecessary hierarchy and competition. Eventually, we need to keep steering the company towards its vision and keep our eyes open about the opportunities that are arising from this new roles-skills model.
