A conversation with JJ Rogers, Head of Product Design at Watermark Design
“Delight is actually a combination of multiple emotions; it is joy coupled with surprise. So, I’ve really been thinking about how I can bring in more of that delight with very small tweaks to our everyday rituals at my company.”- JJ Rogers
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson speaks with JJ Rogers, Director of Product Design at Watermark and a facilitation expert. They discuss JJ’s facilitation journey, from his early career to his current role, emphasizing the importance of engaging activities and setting clear expectations. JJ shares his strategies for combating disengagement, particularly in virtual meetings, by creating novel experiences and incorporating user feedback. They also touch on the scaled agile framework and the significance of preparation in facilitation. The episode concludes with JJ’s focus on bringing joy into everyday meetings and his successful mentorship program at UXPA.
Show Highlights
[00:01:31] JJ’s Introduction to Facilitation
[00:08:01] JJ shares notable experiences and lessons learned from conducting workshops, including the importance of setting expectations.
[00:16:27] JJ reflects on his journey from following a formula to customizing activities and tailoring content to individuals.
[00:21:06] Discussing the challenges of getting upper management to adopt facilitation techniques and the impact of leading activities in broader team settings.
[00:27:26] The significance of marking team transitions and celebrating achievements to maintain team cohesion and culture.
[00:33:07] The importance of pre-planning and preparation in facilitation to ensure effective outcomes in collaborative activities.
[00:38:53] Exploring the concept of delight in user experience and the vision of incorporating delight into everyday rituals through small tweaks.
Links | Resources
JJ on Linkedin
JJ on X
JJ on Voltage Control
About the Guest
JJ is the Head of Product Design at Watermark and leads a team of 8 product designers focused on building engaging, delightful & accessible product experiences for higher ed. His background includes teaching User Experience Design at General Assembly and designing digital experiences for ICANN, Stanford University, and Dotdash Meredith. He received his BA in Design from the University of Northern Iowa.
About Voltage Control
Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.
Subscribe to Podcast
Engage Control The Room
Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control
Transcript
Douglas Ferguson:
Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about our twelve-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.
Today I’m with JJ Rogers. JJ is the Director of Product Design at Watermark, where he is all about elevating the user experience in higher ed. Recently, he led the charge on a mentorship program at UXPA in Austin, connecting early career designers with seasoned pros. And he’s also a founding member of our Facilitation Lab. Welcome to the show, JJ.
JJ Rogers:
Hello, Douglas. Thank you for having me. Very happy to be here.
Douglas Ferguson:
It’s great to have you. Per usual, let’s get our start hearing a little bit about how you got your start. How did you get introduced to facilitation, start getting curious about this work and diving into the art of facilitation?
JJ Rogers:
Good question. I think I became interested in facilitation through, well, naturally being in design, in product design. There is a level of facilitation I think that’s needed to present and share your work and get feedback on your work from various stakeholders. My first job out of college was at a software company, very kind of old school software company called Meta, pre-Facebook’s Meta. It was actually Meta, it had a longer name, Meta Communications, et cetera, but we all called it Meta. I worked with a bunch of Russian engineers in Iowa City, Iowa. Lots of black tea, dark chocolate, and scotch. Scotch was used for both celebration and if the engineers were really pissed off.
It was my first design job, I would say, I didn’t think I was doing much facilitation. I was simply just kind of a heads down in my cubicle, creating designs, creating interaction designs. I did a little more marketing design at that time and sort of transitioned into software, prototyping software, wireframing the interfaces, and I think I failed a lot. I think I wasn’t able to get a lot of my ideas across that I wanted to. I wasn’t maybe managing stakeholders properly. I was very reactive in how I was sharing my work, and I worked there for a couple years. I learned a lot, but I definitely knew I wanted to…
At that time, I think UX as a term was starting to emerge, or maybe it was becoming more popular. I was really looking for careers or job titles that were really not just thinking of design as an afterthought, but really were fully focused on building a better user experience for the customers. And I was looking for a job outside of Iowa, so I came across an agency called Four Kitchens in Austin, Texas. I was really excited because, I don’t know why, but I think maybe in college you hear about agencies or consultancies and you’re like, “That is where I want to work.” They get all the good business. There’s definitely a variety of projects to work on, so you don’t really have to be honed into a particular domain or project for long periods of time.
I was really excited about that, and that is probably where I was really introduced to facilitation as I know it today. The leader of the company of Four Kitchens, Todd Nienkirk was very adamant about having all of our project kickoffs on site. While we were mostly a remote company where we did the work out of Austin, Texas, and we had clients all over the US, we would always have an on-site kickoff. I remember attending a couple of those, just kind of as in a very passive role and being very excited about the activities that we did, how we got to know the different clients and understand their pain points. He was a really big Gamestorming lover. Gamestorming was our Bible. I remember him walking around the office and if he couldn’t find the Gamestorming book, he was freaking out, “Where’s that book?” And then he ordered multiple copies because people kept stealing it.
That kind of kicked off, piqued my interest, and then after a while at the company, I started to lead activities. They needed more people to go in and do these project kickoffs with clients. I think the first activity that I did was a pre-mortem for a university out of California, Monterey Bay, which is a beautiful area of California. I remember I went up to the whiteboard and I started drawing this graveyard and trying to make it look really cool and started leading this group of strangers through an activity of, imagine if this project failed, why did it fail, what killed it? Here lies the name of the project. It was really fun. It was very interactive and it was definitely, I think, a turning point to how I saw how I could really influence a group of stakeholders to get to whatever outcome I was trying to achieve.
So that was really fun. From there, I sort of slowly grew my arsenal of mostly design thinking activities, personas, empathy maps, journey maps, and that sort of became my wheelhouse, my job as I grew as a designer at this agency. I worked there for four years. Really, really great partnerships. For me, I think it was a wonderful learning experience because of exactly what I said of why I wanted to go to an agency or consultancy, is you just got to work across such a variety of different clients and projects and we’re able to try new things and experiment quite often. Contrast today in-house where we’re really trying to set up processes that can be repeatable over and over and over. A little different there. That’s how I got my interest.
Douglas Ferguson:
Wow, really cool. I love the story of the boss looking around for Gamestorming constantly and copies disappearing and more appearing. And certainly the pre-mortem’s a fantastic activity. What a fun way to start. Are there any other workshops in those days that come to mind that are notable for whatever reason?
JJ Rogers:
Yeah. Notable? Let’s see. Gosh, there was one time we had a client come in who they had to come in on a weekend because they couldn’t come during the week or whatever. Everyone had to come in on the weekend and do this workshop. It was a little bit of a curmudgeon. I remember from the opener we did two truths and a lie, not having it. Not having at all. It was very clear from the beginning, like, “I did not fly here from wherever to do this, to spend time getting to know you on this personal level and having fun. Let’s get down to business.” That was kind of a scary moment, but an excellent learning experience around setting expectations and what we’re going to do and why we’re going to do this activity and how important it’s to build trust at the beginning of a project so that as we’re working together and problems are going to arise, that we have a little bit of that kind of psychological safety already established and know each other as humans.
Douglas Ferguson:
That’s so critical, setting expectations ahead of time. How do you think that moment shaped your thoughts on setting expectations?
JJ Rogers:
Well, good question. I think for me, it’s made me more mindful about explaining what we’re going to do, not just what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it, but why we’re going to do it. Just making sure I’m inserting that why. Maybe not even ahead of time in an agenda or anything, but during that intro explanation to any sort of activity of just giving a little snippet on the why. Maybe not giving everything away, because sometimes you do want to reflect on the learning afterwards, and then you don’t always know what the outcome’s going to be.
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, that’s so critical. Often we’ve talked about, if you can’t ask the group why we just did that after doing anything with a group and it not erupted into a really pithy conversation, then we should be asking ourselves as facilitators, why did we just do that?
JJ Rogers:
Yeah. There were definitely lessons like that. I think at the consultancy it was just a lot of practice and repetition, draw your homepage, co-designing, those sort of activities, which really led me into… So after Four Kitchens, I went into teaching. I taught at General Assembly and was teaching the user experience design immersive, which is a ten-week bootcamp, really re-skilling adult learners going from a former career in anything or sometimes coming fresh out of a degree, like a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, not being able to find a job, so taking a bootcamp to transition into tech. We’re teaching adults, and I think that having that background and facilitation helped me be more successful. One, I had to teach these activities. I had to teach design thinking, but there’s definitely parallels between teaching a classroom, which may seem like more traditional kind of format.
With General Assembly, we really tried to be very… Well, it was very immersive, within the name. It was smaller classes. Maybe our classes ranged from 12 to 18, maybe sometimes we had 20. They’ve probably grown. But with teaching adults, you had to learn how to add some checks for understanding, if you’re teaching a concept in there. So making sure that you are including the class for some sort of feedback that you can incorporate into maybe rephrasing something or realizing you have to re-explain something or teach it again. I think the one thing it really taught me was the art of repeating myself or just repetition. Repetition with instruction, changing how you do it, and not taking that personally. When you have a classroom full of people, a certain percentage just aren’t going to get it the first time you explain it, so making sure you’re building on that until everyone has a better understanding.
Douglas Ferguson:
And when we think about cross-functional teams too, that need to collaborate and work together, not everyone’s always in the same meetings. So repetitions is a critical leadership skill that people don’t talk about enough.
JJ Rogers:
Or I run across people who get frustrated because they’re like, “Well, I thought we shared this out. I thought we explained this.” It takes a while, especially I think with Zoom these days. There’s a large percentage of folks are distracted constantly, so it’s really even less than that. In the classroom at least we could really control for that variable because we were all in one room and it was great. We could do a lot of in-person sticky notes on the wall. Gosh, I don’t really use sticky notes anymore.
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. What are you using instead of sticky notes nowadays?
JJ Rogers:
We’re using Mural, so I guess the virtual version of sticky notes we’re definitely using. I’m using sticky notes for maybe what their original intention was, just to write little notes to myself and stick them on my desk.
It was really great. I loved it. That was a great time in my career. It was also located within WeWork, downtown Austin, and the environment, the bustling energy of WeWork at that time, I don’t know why I look at it now and think of that as like, oh, those were the good old days. There were so many startups and you would meet people. Every day you’re meeting new people just bumping into them having coffee. I was able to get a number of freelance jobs out of it. A lot of people were really interested in UX design, and it was a really good environment for learning and collaborating.
Douglas Ferguson:
Well. How did this transition from being in a consultancy to then now teaching, how did transition impact your perspective on facilitation?
JJ Rogers:
Well, I think even at my consultancy, I don’t know if I use the word, I don’t know if we use the word facilitation even that often. It was kind of more around leading this activity, doing this kickoff. We thought about it more project based, even though that is what we were doing. When I transitioned into teaching, I think the biggest difference is that I knew I was leading and I was being very intentional about whatever I was trying to teach or whatever activity we were trying to complete. Even if we weren’t teaching something, but we were doing an activity to craft the classroom values, and we needed to get input with everybody and maybe break up into small groups and then come together, I think I was just much more intentional about designing activities for the classroom. Whereas with the consultancy, in my mind back then, and maybe it was my maturity with facilitation, I was kind of just, oh, I’m just going to follow this playbook that’s already kind of pre-written, right?
Douglas Ferguson:
Mm.
JJ Rogers:
We have these design thinking activities. We’ve done this sort of ceremony before. We’re going to start with an opener, this icebreaker, so I’m just going to do it. I wasn’t as maybe creative about tailoring the content to the individuals. There definitely were people that I worked with that were doing that, but I think I was early in my stage where I really just kind of wanted to follow a formula.
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I think that is a pattern that we see with a lot of folks when they start out, the formulas, the patterns, the structures are really valuable. Then over time, as people get more comfortable, they tend to customize more. They tend to lean into the emergence or adapt to whatever’s happening in the space a little more fluidly. I’m curious, it seems like you’re kind of echoing that journey, that arc that I’ve seen before. Is that resonating to you?
JJ Rogers:
Yeah, that definitely is. I think I’m at a place now at Watermark where that is what I’m seeing is… Well, and I would contrast being in-house too, to being a consultancy where you have a lot of variety of clients. And there’s other variables that you have to account for because they’re new stakeholders that you’ve never met before, new clients, their projects might be very different. The content shifts a lot, whereas being in-house, it can get more mundane. I want to intentionally try new things and change this, even if I can just tweak it slightly. You kind of need that variability to hold people’s attention. Otherwise, we’re just going through the motions and we’re doing this same sailboat retrospective again.
Douglas Ferguson:
What’s your go-to approach to mixing it up so you’re not just going to the same metaphors or same activities over and over again?
JJ Rogers:
I guess my approach would be just to make it different. Like I said, I think the biggest hurdle is kind of playing with novelty and variety, so no one gets bored with the same thing. When we have rituals, I think it’s important to have rituals to create some structure, but I don’t know. I mean, definitely playing around with whatever’s topical. Whatever’s going on, either, I don’t know, with the company at the time, or maybe there’s some sort of seasonal thing, making it celebratory towards something like Global Accessibility Awareness Day is something we’re going to celebrate this week, so how can I incorporate that into the all hands this week or bring in some sort of game that also is a learning activity for the team to learn a little bit about accessibility? This actually came from General Assembly where we’d play a version of Jeopardy Bingo, a game, a learning game. Bringing that over to my team to learn a little bit about accessibility was one way that I brought that over. That was fun.
I would say, yeah, some ways to break it up. Okay, so now I’m thinking. One way is spreading the responsibility around. Even though I am in charge of this team, I don’t have to be the person to lead every single activity. In fact, I don’t want that to be the case. I want to make sure that I’m upskilling my team in their facilitation skills as well. While I may lead an opener, icebreaker type activity initially, now my team does that and we take turns and everyone gets to practice that opener. Same with critique sessions. That’s led by the person that needs critique, or we have a learning forum. This week we have a representative from our design system who’s going to run that forum. Finding ways where, one, it’s not all on my shoulders, but also that does provide more variety for the team. Then they have an opportunity to learn and hear from someone else and watch someone else practice.
Douglas Ferguson:
That practice is so key. You even mentioned earlier that the consultancy gave you lots of opportunities to practice, and I love that as a leader, you’re passing the marker, or at least the spotlight on others so that they can have a moment to either pick the warmup, run the up, or even just schedule in a spot that’s variable from time to time. I think that shows a facilitative style to leadership, not necessarily having to be the one to facilitate, but encouraging others to adopt the skills. Then that has a way of proliferating through the organization more largely.
JJ Rogers:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Speaking of through the organization more largely too, that’s something that with my role, sure, I can practice these facilitation techniques with my team, but how do I then get my boss to want to maybe make a meeting better? And so some ways that I practice that would be if I have an opportunity, for example, we have an all hands, which includes everybody on our product team, product management, scrum, masters, multiple roles, and I might volunteer and say, “Okay, I’m going to lead the opener of this,” or, “this activity, I’d really like to do breakout rooms.” I’ll go ahead and lead that portion of it because my manager isn’t as comfortable with those sort of skills. Anything that I can do to, one, practice those skills on a broader team that maybe I’m not directly leading, but also I think I have seen then a natural appetite start to arise for more collaborative sessions that aren’t just the status quo of what it’s always been.
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, it’s interesting how infectious this stuff can be when folks attend sessions that are more inclusive, that are more fun, frankly, but also get better outcomes where we’re not left with more questions than we started with. Everyone appreciates it, and so it has a virality to it.
JJ Rogers:
Yeah, definitely. I think there’s something too I think I mentioned earlier about Zoom, like people on Zoom being distracted. I read a quote, I don’t know, I think it’s by Adam Grant, and maybe you’ve read it too, about Zoom fatigue, and it’s not really fatigue, it’s actually boredom. Or it’s not burnout, it’s bore out. When meetings are virtual, it’s not that we’re overwhelmed, we’re understimulated, which leads us to actually do something else, look at my phone, or I’m in a multitask on Slack, and it’s because of this boredom with what’s going on right now. That only emphasizes the point of really trying to create these novel, fun engagements to combat that. You’re constantly trying to combat that.
Douglas Ferguson:
The other key is that we have to ensure people are connected to it because it’s easy to come in and try and dazzle people with something a bit different and novel, but if they struggle connecting to it, and it comes back to your point around the expectations too, the why, but also why is it important to them? How do they connect to it in a meaningful way? If they’re not, that’s another source of disengagement.
JJ Rogers:
Yeah, that is true. The novelty doesn’t last.
Douglas Ferguson:
What are some things that you found useful in your work, whether it’s connecting to the values or something that the team finds really motivating? In fact, you mentioned already educating folks on not only bringing a theme in, but educating them on the importance of it or educating them on how it works. Has that been really effective or are there other things that you lean in on to get people really engaged and connected to the concepts?
JJ Rogers:
I think for user experience design, one of the themes that I think is kind of the most effective that I’ve seen time and time again is when they can be connected to an individual or they can be connected to somebody that they’ve talked to that is actually using their product. I think whenever we get direct feedback from a client that is very specific around a certain feature or an area of a product that we had a designer or product team member work on, that positive feedback is just so rewarding. It’s so rewarding because we can tell them they did a great job all day every day, but when you actually hear it from an end user, it’s very rewarding. That isn’t something that we’re always able to solicit even. We can try and solicit it, but we’re doing research to kind of learn, not necessarily just tell us what we did.
I would say just keeping that customer’s story, keeping the user’s journey top of mind, I think is a natural motivator. This leads me to another thing too, related to just celebrating. Making sure that we are taking time to celebrate these moments when they happened, otherwise we’re just moving on to the next thing. We’re not taking the time to stop and think. Related to celebrating, you know the stages of teams, like forming, norming, storming?
Douglas Ferguson:
Mm-hm.
JJ Rogers:
I don’t even know them all. Anyway, the last one is adjourning, and I’ve never focused on the last stages of team, like adjourning? That’s a thing? Well, I had a team transition. We were moving a teammate from one to another, and I don’t know, I just had this idea of like, “Well, why can’t that be a ritual? The adjourning. I mean, this person isn’t leaving the company. They’re literally just going to be doing different work.” But we created a ritual, a ceremony, an adjournment ceremony, and we really celebrated this person’s accomplishments and really the team’s accomplishments with this person because they’re all contributing towards the same goal, marking that moment of time of this team is really no longer going to be the same. With every person that leaves, the culture changes a little bit. With every new person you add, the culture changes a little bit. We just wanted to mark that in time.
It’s a really fun team. They have their team mascot and their team song, and they’re really into donuts, so we ordered everyone donuts and we had a donut toast. I found it really rewarding. I got really good feedback from the team too, just really, really grateful that we were able to take the time to celebrate and mark this moment. Also, I think Priya Parker says this too, “Those moments of transition are very important for anyone who’s going through them, so you need to make sure you’re taking time to mark those.”
Douglas Ferguson:
The transitions can be just as important as the destination and your starting point.
JJ Rogers:
Yeah.
Douglas Ferguson:
I wanted to just echo back something you were talking about with the end user being that focal point and those stories that come from the user. Sometimes those stories can be positive and we can celebrate the things that we accomplished and the good work we did for the end user. Also, it seems that as a group that’s focused on improving user experience and adding new user experiences that help them address their needs, these user stories around needs and what they’re going to and bubbling up that voice of customer and putting them at the center of our engagements, by nature is going to be a strong source of commitment and connection because that’s the entire bedrock of what drew people into the profession to begin with.
If we’re here talking about a new feature or talking about analysis or doing some critique and that voice is left, that’s a real opportunity to bring in a unifying force, something that everyone values. Even for folks that aren’t in user experience, there’s probably an analog for their team. What’s the values that they share that drew them to the role, drew them to this work in the first place, and how can we bring that into our meetings to center ourselves?
JJ Rogers:
Yes, to create that kind of connection with the content. Yeah, and really use that in your why, I guess. Well, I’m really interested. I know Teresa Torres is coming to speak, and her book has been out for a few years now, but she does have a number of different activities to help bring the customer voice or keep it alive, keep it memorable to the team. Anyway, I’m excited that you guys have her on Facilitation Lab.
Douglas Ferguson:
Absolutely. A big fan of her work. If you have questions that you’re wanting me to ask her during the fireside chat, please pass them along.
JJ Rogers:
Okay, sure. Yeah.
Douglas Ferguson:
I wanted to talk about SAFe as a software startup or as a software company. You practice agile through the scaled agile framework, and one of the rituals with SAFe is PI planning. I know that comes up a lot with folks that are practicing SAFe as a moment where Mural, Miro, these digital tools show up as really important because it’s very facilitated. It’s a cross-functional dialogue where we’re exploring these things together. I’m curious how that shows up in your work, how you facilitate it. Are there any tips for folks that are starting this for the first time or even veterans of PI planning that might help them facilitate it better?
JJ Rogers:
Yes, we definitely use sticky notes to come up with the work, track dependencies. The ceremony is a really big deal. With Watermark specifically, we have a number of different products, and one of our goals is making sure that these products are working well together, like they’re integrated, they’re using a consistent design language. The dependencies that come up can be quite a few. It’s really great for tracking when you have a lot of interdependent teams. I think another great aspect about it is assigning the business value, so you’re really looking at… You’re writing these higher level objectives for what you plan to accomplish over this next quarter. I think that is really fantastic because that kind of forces higher level leaders to think about the objectives from a value perspective, like what is the end user expecting to get out of this? What is in it for the client?
So it’s not just we’re going to build this feature, it’s really how are we trying to change their work life or improve their lives somehow? But yeah, your question around process and facilitating SAFe, from the design side of it, we do a lot of the preparation work to get ready for this big ceremony. So making sure our engineering teams have groomed a number of the features that we’re going to build ahead of time. We’re definitely working earlier to ensure that the teams can have a successful, safe planning ceremony.
Douglas Ferguson:
That makes sense. I think it’s an important aspect of facilitation is that pre-planning and preparation, making sure that we’re well-crafted in our approach so that when we do get together, things are as effective as possible.
JJ Rogers:
It’s been really valuable in terms of having a kind of quarterly deadline to shoot towards. I think SAFe, they throw out some number. They want, I think, it’s like 75% of the work that’s going to go into that PI to be quote unquote solid, like somewhat figured out. I don’t know where they got this number from. It does give us something to shoot for because we want to make sure that we have done our job on the design team to have we prototyped a number of items, have we tested these? Certainly the stuff that’s going to go in earlier in the iterations, I should say, because they don’t use the word sprint, are going to be mostly baked, mostly crafted and ready to go. The things later on, those are the things that are going to be a little squishy still that we have time to work through. It really helps us sort of evaluate our design backlog and making sure we’re working just enough ahead, not too far ahead, and also not too close to the actual development timeline.
Douglas Ferguson:
I’ve always found design orgs… That’s a big question typically, is how far ahead should we be operating? It sounds like that process is helping you dial in that cadence.
JJ Rogers:
Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely been fantastic and really, I think, forces the company to get organized because we’re going to have this ceremony.
Douglas Ferguson:
Before we wrap up, I’m really curious to hear a little bit more about the mentor program and how that came about and the good work you’ve been doing there.
JJ Rogers:
Sure. I was Director of Mentorship and Career Development at UXPA, so that’s the User Experience Professionals Association, the Austin chapter, for a few years there. One of my goals was to create, and this is related, having come off of teaching general assembly, there’s a number of junior designers looking for roles and not that many roles, so we wanted to set up kind of another pathway or avenue for them to just learn about the industry and hopefully make more contacts, help them get jobs. It wasn’t designed only for junior designers. We definitely mentored anybody no matter where they were on their career journey, and tried to find somebody a little more senior so that they could get some advice, but by and large, it was heavily skewed towards that junior population. We created a mentor matching service, just put out the word on LinkedIn targeting specific, I would say, design influencers in the community.
I think we had 60, close to 70 mentors sign up that first round.
Douglas Ferguson:
Oh, wow.
JJ Rogers:
It was pretty high because we really hadn’t had anything like that formalized in Austin before. This is even before ADP List, which is a national mentorship program. This was before that was developed. So there was definitely an appetite for it. Then we had a ton of mentees sign up too. Some of our mentors mentored multiple designers. We just did kind of a manual matching spreadsheet. Everything was very manual, but we tried to target specific, if they had similar career goals, if they… Because it was actually in person, we even matched them depending on where they lived in Austin, if they lived north of the river, south of the river, east, whatever their kind of preferences were to meet. Anyway, there was a lot of thought that went into it that created a lot of work for our team actually doing the matching.
And then we just connected them via email. We didn’t have a whole lot of check-ins initially. It was just kind of, here’s maybe some advice on how you can be a good mentor, just to see how it went, see how it experimented. The pandemic happened during it, so we really had to transition a little bit. I mean, not a lot because everyone was just easily transitioned to Zoom it seemed like. But going forward, we were able to grow the program. We tried not to grow it too much beyond Austin because we were still the Austin chapter, but we could include some more rural communities outside of Austin since everyone was meeting remotely. It was really rewarding. I think it was something that the community definitely… We identified a need. We hit on something and tried to fill that gap.
Douglas Ferguson:
Wow. Super cool. Is the program still going?
JJ Rogers:
The program is still going. I’m no longer the director, but yeah, UXPA is doing mentorship, so if anyone is interested, we’ll just look up UXPA Austin and we’ll see when they run it. It is something that they do run, there’s a start date and an end date. It’s not ongoing, forever. We do a kickoff. I think we say you’re going to meet with your mentor at a minimum once a month during the program. Then at the end of the program we do something where we all come together and talk a little bit about what we learned and try and improve the program. It was really great.
Douglas Ferguson:
Amazing. We are running out of time here, so I wanted to end by giving you an to reflect a bit on where you think things are going. How do you plan to lean into facilitation in the next year or two or five, whatever vision you have as far as how facilitation might adapt in your role in your work?
JJ Rogers:
Well, I recently read a definition for… So in design we often use the phrase, we’re trying to delight the user. We want to add delight, want it to be a delightful experience. Well, what does that mean? Delight is actually a combination of multiple emotions. It is joy coupled with surprise. It’s not just standard joy, it’s something kind of surprises. You weren’t expecting something, and that really delights the person. I’ve really been thinking about how I can bring in, I think this goes back to what we were talking about, variety and novelty, but how we can bring in more of that delight with very, very small tweaks to our everyday rituals at my company.
In doing so, I think it’s more attainable for, we were talking about bringing in other members of the team to facilitate. It’s an easier ask to just kind of tweak something slightly than to completely redo and redesign a regular ritual or meeting that you have. Really encouraging the team to just tweak something small, and in myself too, that’ll add delight so that no two sessions are the same. No two days are the same. Why should the sessions be exactly the same? Mark those fleeting moments of time with something a little unique.
Douglas Ferguson:
I love this, and I think what a perfect way to end the show. Maybe everyone can take up this challenge, to dial up the delight. I would have to say it’s been delightful chatting with you today, JJ, and look forward to talking to you again sometime soon.
JJ Rogers:
Thank you, Douglas. It’s been a pleasure. Yes, anytime.
Douglas Ferguson:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration. Voltagecontrol.com.
