Portfolio of Christina Fowler

Recruitment

I believe it's just as important to sell the company during an interview as it is for the candidate to sell themselves to us. I always present an organisational chart to the candidate so they can see how many people are in the team, who is at the top and where they would fit. I also present tools that they will be expected to use and a high level process to show how we think as a team.

I prefer to do any design tasks using a whiteboarding tool, like Miro, during the interview time. This ensures that anyone with caring responsibilities is not put at a disadvantage and it helps me to see how quickly they understand a brief, how deeply they think about things and also I can see them design things in real-time. I've found this is a much more equal and effective way to understand someone's ability. I can be confident they haven't spent their whole weekend working on a two hour task and exactly how they might use productivity tools like AI too.

Onboarding

For new starters to my team I keep a deck with an overview of the company and all the different activities it covers, a timetable of team ceremonies and key links to help them get started with booking holidays and adding Figma libraries. I also include examples of the products that we are supporting as a team so they get a good idea of who is working on what. Finally, I detail some of the challenges we have as a team that they may be able to help out with. I keep this deck updated every six months to ensure it's ready for the next round of new starters.

Line management

I use a Miro board as a template to keep track of each team member's personal objectives. I encourage my team to create five year plans and work their way back to what areas of focus they want to work on in the next year and finally, what small activities they can tick off across the year towards their final goal.

I also use Miro to understand how confident each person feels about the key skills of their job. This also helps to inform short term goals and activities they can do across the year. Every year I send out a 360 feedback form for each person to their product team, key stakeholders and other designers. This helps them ensure that their view of themselves matches the wider team's view of them. If it doesn't match I focus on ensuring they are communicating their work or find ways to give them the opportunity to make use of all of their skills.