2024 RETROSPECTIVE

Retrospective sessions are often gruelling—an honest, sometimes uncomfortable look back at what worked, what didn’t, and why.

For me, they’re a bit more challenging because I tend to break many of the conventional rules surrounding agility and scope. In fact, I’ve turned this process into something far more personal: a chance for self-reflection.

At the start of 2024, I set out with a clear focus on three areas: mastering design quality, improving delegation, and honing my strategic planning skills. As the year unfolds, I’ve realized how much these areas are intertwined with delivering a design that truly unlocks business value. In the next few paragraphs, I’ll take you through my journey, the lessons I’ve learned, and the challenges that have shaped my understanding of what it takes to create impactful, value-driven design.

INTRO

I value retrospective sessions because they are crucial for self-growth. Retrospective sessions are great for teams and individuals to evaluate progress, identify improvement areas, and decide on the next steps. When I have this session with a group, I make it simple in terms of structure to leave people time to reflect and articulate thoughts. When I run the retrospective sessions to understand how I approached a specific topic, I make it more complex. Hence, this is the way I write down my thoughts.

RETROSPECTIVE mastering design quality

My 2024 retrospective highlighted how often I was efficient in one of the two and completely bad in the other. Managing this double-deck practice is vital to protecting the team from missed expectations and enabling the team’s talents to flourish and grow.

My retrospective for 2024 highlighted that quality can sometimes be deprioritised to help the company advance its strategy. In this context, “sustainability” is a crucial term for fostering design practices within established organisations and large companies.
From a design perspective, this assumption can be frustrating because it often results in design outputs that fall short of excellence. However, there is a silver lining: moving away from the perfect for a specific task or project allows design teams to concentrate on projects and tasks where high standards are required and expected.

Design must adhere to strict rules and guidelines to deliver high quality. These guidelines provide a secure foundation for design excellence. If an organisation wants to deliver design according to the books, it must be ready to invest in it to benefit from its potential value. In my career, I have learned that organisations need support to become mature in design.

RETROSPECTIVE mastering delegation

About a year ago, I kicked off a delegation plan for the Experience Design team at Vorwerk International. The idea was to empower the team to take charge of different parts of our design work.

Now, looking back at 2024, I need to work on holding back instead of jumping in every time I spot an issue or something that seems complicated. I’m getting better at accepting that things don’t have to be perfect and that finding a compromise can help us move forward.

One big takeaway from this past year is that my progress in my design career depends on the trust I build with my teammates. I’ve realised that delegating is like a muscle you need to train. So, I started small by letting my teammates take the lead on our team rituals. Watching them run the daily stand-ups gave me insights into what I was doing well and where I could improve. Plus, I discovered skills in my teammates that I hadn’t noticed before. The best part? They devised team rituals that were way more effective than I initially thought.
I’ve figured out that trust is ultra-important when delegating tasks. It shows up when my teammates need to meet my expectations. Those moments are when we build and strengthen our trust in each other.

RETROSPECTIVE mastering strategic planning

As a crucial part of the Experience Design Team, our role in managing work packages is paramount. This task is critical to raising management’s attention and supporting key stakeholders in identifying sustainable tasks and projects for the team.

This situation reminds me of what I often do with my kids. They are good at asking for stuff but usually less good at remembering what they asked for just a day or a week prior, and they underestimate the parent’s capacity to handle the existing backlog. In addition, one of the most crucial tasks a manager must handle is a well-balanced workload distribution for the team. Drafting an effective and efficient plan is critical to the team’s chemistry and ensures that each talent feels engaged and committed to delivering a design that unlocks business value. Strategic planning is a combo of stakeholder management and project management skills that must be part of the designer toolkit.

My 2024 retrospective highlighted how often I was efficient in one of the two and completely bad in the other. Managing this double-deck practice is vital to protecting the team from missed expectations and enabling the team’s talents to flourish and grow.

CONCLUSIONS

Looking back at the 2024 retrospective, I’m satisfied with how I’ve handled design quality gaps and delegation. That said, it’s evident that I need to improve my strategic planning skills. At this stage of my career, time and focus are so precious that it’s imperative to develop skills to improve my ability to spot risks and opportunities.

I need to effectively figure out both quick wins and long-term plans. It’s a fact that I’ve got to work on managing my time better and zeroing in on things that will add the most value for both the team and me.

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