By Janus Boye
Mads Norlyk in action at a recent peer group meeting in Aarhus
How do you become an inspirational leader of a UX department? In particular, one that needs to gather existing habits, change some of them, and set a new direction. There are many good leadership books you can read and plenty of management theory, but in these strange and surreal times, we need to observe leaders in practice and learn from how they act and behave.
I recently spoke to Mads Norlyk, Head of UX at Jyske Bank in Silkeborg, Denmark about his role, recent lessons learned, and his experiences keeping the team creative and motivated.
Mads has been 3 years with the bank and was previously Digital Experience Manager at LEGO Education. Earlier he was on the agency side as User Experience Designer at Designit. Mads is our expert of the month.
What’s on the table right now as Head of UX?
In these times alternating between forced working from home, voluntary working from home and some days in the office, let’s start with what’s on Mads mind right now:
Better understanding and usage of data.
To Mads, data can be used to create a much better user experience. At the moment, he’s working with his team to work data into prototypes, so that they can create better outcomes.
As a source of inspiration, Mads points to Spotify. Not so much how they are agile, but specifically their published engineering case study on How Spotify Built Shortcuts in Just Six Months. This is a story of really understanding the user experience, using data to validate hypotheses, and refining recommendations.
Mads strongly believes this can be applied to the bank and many other organisations.
“As a loyal Spotify listener I appreciate the quality of their personalized content based on my data and I do find playlists like the Discover Weekly inspiring. The utilisation of my data to create a personalised experience has become my main reason for sticking with Spotify.”
To add some context, let’s zoom out:
When Mads started as Head of UX about 2 years ago, UX skills and resources used to be divided into different departments spread throughout the bank. Each with more or less different ways to talk about user experience and importantly also to practice it, like 10 slightly different ways to do user testing.
The goal at the beginning of his tenure in his role was mostly to create a common design system and less so to centralise. Today the UX designers still work in different teams, but they have established a common vocabulary and way to work as designers. Digital components as well as methods are aligned.
As he says:
It is not just a red dot, a beacon, or a thingie in the UI; We call it a badge.
According to Mads, being specific is crucial and helps the team to make cross-company collaboration go much easier.
How to keep a team of designers motivated?
As a newly minted leader, Mads looked back to his personal experience in different roles. From time to time he had found himself both in a great job and demotivated -- at the same time. How come he had a good job, was reasonably well paid and didn’t feel motivated? He didn’t want this to happen to his team.
Thinking about the traditional rewards system let Mads to discover the TED talk on the puzzle of motivation by Dan Pink.
Here’s what Mads took away from the TED talk:
“We know that "if-then rewards" don’t work. We don’t care for sticks or carrots; we want something meaningful. Higher pay is not going to change the attitude towards motivation. At least not for long. We need to establish the right conditions for self direction, which will then result in engagement.
All the designers want to do their best and add to the success of their team. My role as a leader of the design team is to step back and move my focus away from the all too comforting micro of discussing screens and flows to instead focus on the macro; e.g. how do we collaborate and where are we heading. “
Experiments show that solving tasks because of free will makes people complete tasks better and faster than paying them better. Even in poorer countries. So allow autonomy and instead help them make their own and the team's purpose clear.
Making motivation both personal and work on his extended team
As a former amaetur musician (more about that in the next chapter), Mads was also personally touched by the now infamous 2014 Sundance Film Festival winning American drama film Whiplash.
The film depicts the relationship between an ambitious jazz drummer and an abusive bandleader. In the film, you see how the bandleader takes the role of a good coach to extremes. When watching the film, Mads pondered about the different paths to coaching and managing designers. How to get the most out of your talent in a sustainable and human way? And what kind of inspirational leader does your personal way of leading match up with?
On the topic of motivation, Mads also draws on his agency side experiences as he is frequently working with designers who are not employed by the bank. How to keep them at their best?
To quote Mads:
“From my previous experience, I know that as a consultant you are highly dependant on a well-defined brief of the task at hand. But I never worked to sell hours; I was there because of my drive to learn how to design cool things.
When assigning consultants it is my experience that you need to owe them the same trust as you do to your employees. If you assign a consultant to a fixed scope, fixed date for delivery, and sometimes even a fixed solution (yep, I have in fact done that) you'll get just that. But that is not taking advantage of the person's capabilities. You hired a person because you needed their skill set but you are missing out on a great part of it if you don't allow them autonomy.”
What’s the path to becoming Head of UX?
As with many other experts and digital leaders alike, Mads has not taken the straight line in terms of his career.
In his twenties, he had what he himself refers to as several random jobs. Basically just some jobs earning him enough to pursue his dream of becoming a musician. Jobs included being a lifeguard, working in a music store and also working in sales at an industrial engineering firm.
Later he went to Aarhus University, where he studied to become a master in Cand.it in Digital Design focusing on “Sustainable interaction design”.
This led him to a job as a User Experience Designer at local agency Designit. Here he found himself surrounded by smart people and also learned how effective you have to be when the customers are paying you by the hour.
Looking back today and also looking at his extended team, he finds that this kind of background is not only valuable experience to him, but perhaps more the norm than the exception. Almost no one in his team is straight out of school.
Learn more about Mads
You can meet Mads in our design leadership community and also connect with Mads on LinkedIn.
For an ice breaker when you meet him, you can ask about his take on what he calls “teater scrum”. Hint: It relates to this article from back in April on moving on from agile.