Tool to Help Your Team Target Personal Development Goals

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Pretty much every Product Design Leader has had the conversation where someone on your team confides that they want to grow and get better, but they just aren’t sure where to direct their efforts or where to target their personal development goals. Most Product Design teams have designer profiles that list out roles and responsibilities for each level of designer, but I find that often designers (especially more junior designers) have a difficult time translating those somewhat pithy lists of responsibilities into actionable skills or knowledge that they can easily connect with a course, book, or learning opportunity.

Long ago I started my search to try to create some sort of scalable tool that would help my team with this issue, to take a self-inventory of where they are at today (and compare it with my assessment of their current mastery of skills), and I came across a spider graph that a UX team had put together of what they believed to be the core skills of a good Product Designer.

Now, if I was a more responsible blogger I would’ve written down that source so I could properly attribute my inspiration here, but alas it was so long ago that I forget where I found it, and have been unsuccessful tracking it down. I did adapt it somewhat to my team and purposes, but just wanted to give full disclosure that this is not a completely original idea (if you happen to know the source, please do email me so I can give credit).

Anyways, I liked the idea of a spider graph because it has a gamification feel to it, and is reminiscent of the sporting world where athlete’s skills and attributes are often plotted as a spider graph. I spent some time adapting the characteristics to make it specific to what skills and knowledge we want our designers to have, and then I put it all into a Google Sheet (not the fanciest, I know, but I wanted to stay lean).

Designers open it to a first tab, entitled “Self-Assessment,” that reads as follows:

To complete this self-assessment, fill in column C with a score of 0-4, indicating
your current competency in each category. After filling out column C,
go to the "Graph" tab to see your results.

BEHAVIORS (Rate yourself 0-4 on each)

Active Listening

Passion & Energy

Strong Backbone

Attention to Detail

UNIVERSAL SKILLS (Rate yourself 0-4 on each)

People Skills

Big Picture Biz Thinking

Written Communication

Visual Storytelling

Influence/Persuasion

Project Management

CRAFT (Rate yourself 0-4 on each)

Product Strategy

Visual Design

Interaction Design

User Research

Utilizing Data

Content Strategy

KNOWLEDGE (Rate yourself 0-4 on each)

HCI/UCD Theory

Inclusive Design

Next Gen Tech

Design Tools

After a designer completes this Self-Assessment tab, they can navigate to the next tab, which will show the Spider Graph that has been generated from their responses:

Spider Graph Example


The light bulbs really seems to go on when someone sees this visualization of their self-assessed strengths and weaknesses.

Note: this is the time for you to chime in and voice whether you think they were too self-critical, or too generous, in their self-assessment of any of these attributes.

Now ask them which 3 attributes they think would be most impactful in the next 6 months if they were to increase the rating by just 1, and you’ll likely find they now have no trouble at all deciding where to target their personal development goals.

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