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OnePlus became a sub-brand of OPPO in 2022, As a result, our design team has integrated into OPPO’s design team. The design department undergone a huge reshuffle.
I went through almost two months of quarantine time, left Taiwan for Shenzhen. In May 2023, I started the new role, managing system design team, primarily focus on foundation experience for ColorOS ( OnePlus' OxygenOS and OPPO's ColorOS merged to form a unified OS ).
The story continues... towards a new chapter
Most importantly, we need to repeatedly broadcast our team values, reflect and reframe problems as often as possible, show how much I care about them and want them to grow professionally and personally. It is through managing and leading them, I became more aware of myself and how I work with others, how I can support the team in the future.
First-time remote working, one of the biggest challenges for me is to establish an online presence. Most of the time, being remote doesn’t affect my daily work, but whenever I want to have team building events or 1 on 1, it creates a little barrier.
Online presence
When I was in New York, there is a 12 hours difference between Shenzhen and Taipei teams. During the day, I have meetings and some design concept works with the NY team, at night from 9 pm, I started to have meetings with Shenzhen and Taipei team until 1-2am. It was tiring and worthy.
Timezone
Cultural Norms
Because of limited resources, our designers often have loading issues, but we rely on each one to accomplish quality works. So as a leader, I need to maintain their motivation. One way is recognition, we send out newsletters every Friday to cross-functional teams, listing out all the small and big actions designers took during the week in order to ship work.
My style usually is giving away control to individuals, I believe everyone is driven and able to create good work with supervision. But this is not the case with Chinese team. A lot of them are quiet, like to follow orders, however, if we control too much, they think we devalue their abilities. There is a fine line between control and autonomy. We have a board of proactive tasks for designers to pick up. In the beginning, designers are reluctant to choose, because that means extra responsibility, but with a little nudge and encouragement, they started to take it.
As a new design lead in this uncertain time, I definitely encountered lots of challenges. I highlighted a few:
Design leadership reflection
Taipei team outings
Buddy + Learning Resources
This is designers’ favorites. We know designers needs to feed inspirations and imagination. So every second Friday, we organize team half day outings, taking class, going for hike, trying new cafe, seeing exhibition, singing karaoke, watching movies, any activities that lift our mood and give us creative fuel, we called it daydream.
Daydream
We are 30+ designers (including India and New York, Shenzhen and Taipei have 20+). It’s not a very small team, we need time to sync. Diary Sharing is our weekly design gathering. We use this for discussing design topics, catching up with team members, share project updates and acknowledge achievement. We sometimes invite speakers to share stories.We didn’t call it design critiques because I learned our designers don’t like to be criticized publicly, by making the meeting more informal, emphasize the sharing part, enable psychological safety.
Diary Sharing
Team Culture Building
People
-Define roles and team composition
-Hire new talent (including graduates and interns)
-Mentor and coach team
We believe in collective intelligence and autonomy. We encourage designers to thrive for principled imagination and relentless curiosity and keep pushing boundaries. Our team located in different time zones, alignment and communication very important.
Product
-Develop OxygenOS vision and direction
-Leading end-to-end design work, give constant feedback & guidance
-Creating design principles-Manage research throughout the product development
The mobile operating system is extremely complex, for every update, we need to follow the latest Android release. In the meantime, we also need to meet the deadlines for various phone releases. Because users expect the system first to be stable and usable, so most of the time, it’s micro innovation.
Tools & Process
-Plan budget for tools and materials
-Advocate design system-Introduce new tools
-Manage external collaborators
OnePlus is a very lean organization, every member takes on multiple projects on hand. We need to streamline tools and processes to be more efficient. Sometimes we rely on outside partners for design inputs.
Impact & influence
-Up skilling and maintaining motivation
-Establish a healthy and welcoming design culture
By cultivating a flexible and inclusive environment, we give everyone a fair shot to share their thoughts, perspectives, feedbacks and life moments. We created series of activities and sessions to share, inspire and educate not only designers but also cross-functional teams and occasional guests.
Trust is maintained when values and beliefs are actively managed.
― Simon Sinek
As leaders, our job is enabling team to move efficiently by creating sense of community, transparency and remove roadblocks, so that designers can focus on what's matter to them- which is design.
We mainly use OKR to measure team annual performance, we also send out pulse check surveys quarterly to team members to get insights of employee experience, as well as attending fortnightly management meeting to report project progress.
How to Measure Success
As the team lead, I think to reinforce our vision and figure out how to enable the team to do the best work. Me and Xi (who is the co-lead) started to design our own way of working that is similar to design ops. Below are the areas we spend our most energy on.
Areas of Responsibilities
Establish team operation
After naming, we started to think about how to represent our new identity. Two of our visual designers started to explore the concept in their downtime. We were very happy with the final look.
Brand the team
We want to give it a new name to reflect on our value and strength. After some internal discussion, we come up with the name Gaudi. Yes, that architect Gaudi. Why did we choose the name Gaudí? Gaudi is famous for his natural, vibrant, unique architecture, it is full of imagination, also highly functional too. From the construction of the entire building to the choice of a piece of glass color, every element is careful considerations and precise calculation. It is the perfect combination of art and science. We think his works capture the essence of our team- marrying technology and art, sense and sensibility.
So we have a new name - OnePlus Gaudi, the creative force behind OxygenOS.
The Rebirth of a Team
OnePlus had undergone an organizational change in 2019, the software design team needed to adapt to the new way of working. We made the decision to rebrand OnePlus design team, and together we began a collaborative adventure to create a people-first design team.
The team used to call OUX studio (OnePlus UX) in the early days of OnePlus. It was straightforward, but we think it lacks imagination and spirit. Deep-rooted in Never Settle culture, designers are serious about doing great work and they live for relentless curiosity and principled imagination.
The Transformation
Design a design team
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