Experiments in Remote Design Leadership — Month 1

Last month, I started at Babylon Health as the Interim Director of Research. It’s the first time I’ve performed an interim role so I thought it might be useful to share my approach and any learnings along the way.

Caretaker or Change Maker?

When I joined, the team had been without leadership for a few months. Jane asked me to come on board and steady the ship until someone permanent was in post. I wasn’t sure what to expect but this post by Tom Prior helped. I have been made to feel really welcome these past few weeks and I have been so impressed with everyone I have met. The researchers are super smart and the broader team are a wonderful bunch.

Babylon are headquartered in West London and I live near Cardiff so this is to be a (mostly) remote gig. The team are mostly office based so it’s a bit of an experiment for everyone. Researchers are embedded in squads and tribes so the Research Director leads the community of practice across the chapter. During some intro calls with the research team before I started, I discovered that the team are actually distributed across a few offices. This has actually been a helpful thing for me, because the team are already dialling into Zoom meetings from different locations. As the company grows and opens more offices overseas, distributed teams maybe the norm. The push for supporting this way of working led by Daniel within the broader Experience Design team has definitely helped me hit the ground running.

So, what have I been up to? Month 1 has been all about understanding the environment and getting to know people. It doesn’t sound a lot but it’s been all consuming. I haven’t had job induced insomnia in a while but I’ve definitely had bouts of it over the last few weeks! There are 15 researchers and we’re still growing, so a large portion of my week has been taken up with one to ones. I’ve also been getting to know the rest of the Design Leadership team and key partners in other parts of the business. I’ve spent at least a day or more in London each week so I can meet everyone in person and attend some of the other team meetings.

There is already a foundational layer of Research Ops but I’ve still found myself drawing upon the recent work I did with the Research Ops Community to provide a roadmap. We’ve kick started some team projects to help mature our practice. On the pure ‘Ops’ side, we’re working with Design Ops to smooth out our processes, audit our tooling and compliance and create guidelines and best practice for PWDR. On the capability and context side, we’re focusing on sharing the value of research, partnering with our design colleagues to tell a better story and triangulating insights with Mixed Methods.

Month 2 has started in earnest with a deep dive into the scope of the work to help with hiring and org design. I’m conscious of not changing too much before a permanent person is appointed but there are some things that need to happen to set that person up for success. Steadying the ship doesn’t mean holding still. We have to keep moving forward. By being transparent and involving the team in the discussions and decisions, I’m hopeful we can make good choices.