Managing Performance — Mallory Hartzler Design

Managing growth and performance

Supporting a growing team requires focused attention to ensure clarity, alignment, and accountability in hiring, onboarding, staffing, goal-setting, and cross-team resource allocation and collaboration. As a design lead, I temporarily expanded beyond my assigned job duties to put intention and care into our team’s hiring and onboarding efforts and to align and incorporate our work into team and organizational goals, which paid off in helping to shape more engaged, effective, and satisfied team members and reduced job turnover and stress.

Primary role: UX and Accessibility Lead

Time frame: February 2021 – November 2023

Brought structure to hiring & onboarding

With a nimble, at-capacity design studio team, it was crucial to bring clarity to the process and required criteria for hiring of contract-to-hire designers and ensure new designers received effective and expedited onboarding with required context, skills, and understanding of team dynamics and standard operating procedures. I took on the leadership of designing interview criteria and questions alongside an ideation activity for candidates to complete that allowed us to assess their fit for the role and the team. In tandem, I co-created a 3-month onboarding template with the design studio manager that I then used to create a more detailed plan within my direct reporting team of 4 designers. These efforts, while outside the scope of my role as design lead, allowed the studio to reduce time to value for new hires and provide necessary support across the broader studio team of 40 designers.

Martin, Design Director, KeyBank

“I rely on her clear-eyed analysis and forthright perspective in making hiring decisions.”

Managed allocation of design resources

As consumer digital grew, building more partnerships within the business to create digital products, the demand for new features and redesign of existing features increased, leading to a misalignment and poor allocation of designers to match the needs of the business. With visibility to designers’ work projects and priorities, I created more connection and cohesion between business leadership, consumer digital, and the design studio to ensure designers weren’t spread too thin across multiple, disparate projects. I built a Living Board UX Roadmap for my direct team of 4 designers and 2 UX writers—including estimated effort and expected impact, design phases and delivery timing, ownership and responsibility, and priority linked directly to team OKRs—that supported realignment conversations with product owners to ensure requested work was prioritized effectively. Ultimately, Consumer Digital modeled their product roadmap off of the UX Roadmap I created for my team. In addition, I developed and facilitated 20+ workshops across 3 years using human-centered design thinking approaches to connect teams and enhance cross-functional collaboration and support design resource allocation.

Martin, Design Director, KeyBank

“In a period where her squads experienced higher attrition, Mallory managed to keep projects moving forward on-time and on-schedule.”

Supported team goal-setting & accountability

Following a departmental reorganization and resource allocation process, it was necessary for consumer digital to define and commit to a new set of effectual, measurable, and inspirational objectives and key results. I collaborated with the head of consumer digital to plan and facilitate 2 workshops focused on creating more clarity and alignment of product development efforts across feature-focused squads, as well as more seamless integration of human-centered design thinking, accessibility, and specific designers’ existing work and individual objectives and growth goals. As a result, for the first time in the history of the organization, design efforts and measurement were directly tied to broader business objectives, and the studio had measurable key results linked to accessibility and the design system.

Stephen, Enterprise Design Officer, KeyBank

“Another big step forward in how our partners are engaging us.”

Recapturing the magic of on-demand home servicing