A Glow-Up for Yelp Design

Rebuilding a fractured Consumer Design team and turning it into a team of world-class leaders and practitioners

* Glow-Up: A major and impressive transformation in appearance, talent, power etc. Wiktionary

When you think about Yelp, "great design and user experience" may not be the first thing that comes to mind. It certainly wasn't when I took over the Consumer side of the design team in 2017. Back then, the team was divided and their performance was lacking. Their impact on the business was minimal and they had no capacity to advocate for the user. And as you would expect, this was reflected in the product. Yelp was not the best example of a human-centered user-centric product.

Fast forward to 2022: the Consumer Design team has grown and created the best work of their careers. We've completely transformed the user experience and perhaps most importantly, took that “seat at the table” to actively influence the direction of Yelp as a company.

If you haven't used Yelp in a while, check it out. You'll be surprised.

At a glance

Head of Consumer Design (Director level)
Reporting to VP of Design
Responsible for the entire suite of Yelp’s consumer products - app, website, etc
Responsible for maintaining and growing our contributors (reviewers)
Team size varied between 10-20 product designers, divided between three managers

Screenshots below are work produced by my various teams during my period of leadership

Over the course of four years, we rethought the home page, search page and business page, modernised our visual design and launched a ton of features that made it easier, faster and more delightful to use Yelp to connect with great local businesses.

I joined design leadership at Yelp in 2017 after a short detour into Product Management at Google. The team was in crisis and I had stepped up to lead the 15 people working on the Consumer Design team, reporting to the CPO.

Consumer Design was responsible for everything you touch as a regular consumer of Yelp — for example, the core experience (home, search, business pages, etc), growth (SEO, onboarding, etc), and contributions (reviews and community).

The Problems

Stepping into the role, I knew the team was in a bad state. We'd just had several design leaders quit, and morale and retention were low. There was lots of finger-pointing — Design blamed Product for alignment issues and “not understanding the role of design.” Product felt that the design team's quality and velocity were low and “if they just did what we said faster everything would be better"…😳

My first goal was to determine the root causes of the issues. I embarked on a listening tour of the team and their cross-functional colleagues, and identified some top issues within my design team:

The team had very few skilled role models. The team consisted only of mid-level designers and lower. There was raw talent, but it was unhoned. And there were cultural problems. The team was very insular and had an “us vs them” attitude with Product.
Our team structure was inhibiting our ability to have impact. The team was structured in a pooled model where designers jumped on projects as needed. Designers struggled to build cross-functional relationships and expertise, which in turn prevented them from having roadmap influence.
Our senior designers were stuck in meetings constantly. They were spending the majority of their week in interviews, onboarding new team members, or doing project management. They barely had enough time for the work, and certainly not for mentoring or thinking about the future of the team.

You could see these problems in the product. Yelp's design and user experience had clearly fallen behind its competitors

Yelp in 2017, just as I started. Obviously, it looks terrible, but what may not be evident from just these screenshots is that our product experience had gotten borderline unusable - as result of designers not having an influence on years of launches

There were also issues outside of design that impacted my team:

We had outgrown our product decision-making process. Leadership would see projects for the first time in design review, which of course, was far too late as designers were wasting weeks and weeks on projects that were not aligned
Yelp had no clear long-term vision. Our leadership team had experienced a lot of growth and had not had practice establishing and communicating a vision. Not only did this mean designers were not inspired, it meant we would chase short-term wins only, and have many alignment issues on anything bigger.
Our decision-making had a lack of user focus. We had only just hired a research leader and had not figured out how to include user insights in our product prioritisation.

These problems were not one person's fault. We had gone through a lot of growth, and our processes and team had not kept pace. I had a big job ahead of me.

Getting my house in order

Before I could tackle some of the bigger issues at Yelp, I needed to get my team in a good place. For that to happen, I needed to build trust. I knew they were sceptical of someone coming from product to lead, despite my past experience as a Design Manager.

My approach here was to be a “servant leader”. I picked up all the tasks people didn't want to do. I took meeting notes, I dug into our design project management process, and I picked up more interviews and onboarding. Based on these experiences, I started to roll out simple processes:

Structured interview process and training
Designer onboarding framework
Formalised regular 360 feedback
JIRA-based design project management process
Individual career development programs

The program I setup that I found the most rewarding was our career coaching program which borrowed heavily from two of my favourite books - Designing Your Life and Radical Candor.

I never thought of myself as a "process person" but I found the results of focusing on process rewarding when I saw the team's performance starting to improve.

It wasn't all easy. I had to manage out or transfer a few bad fits, and we had layoffs at the start of COVID. But mostly, the team was seeing that I was on their side. They were enjoying their jobs more and I was having great conversations about their careers and they felt like I truly cared for them. Because I did!

With trust established, I could move on to tackling the stickier problems.

Yelp in 2022, as I left the Consumer design team. A complete transformation that required the entire team to level up, take a seat at the table, find their voice and influence product decisions.

Upleveling the team

With the team in a better place, I needed to start to uplevel their skills. I was now responsible for Services and Design Systems, and I had two major problems: I needed to scale my management structure, and I needed to address our poor design quality. Here's what I did:

Took a chance on three future leaders & hired our first Lead. With a lot of coaching and development, I grew three Senior Designers to Leads and eventually, formal managers. I also needed someone to be a role model for the IC's, and set the standard for our design quality. I made a business case to bring in an incredibly talented Lead designer named Cortney who became my “right-hand woman”. She helped me show that there was a growth path for our designers who weren't interested in going into management, and her visual chops complemented my UX and design leadership focus
Implemented Design Principles and a Design Playbook. We needed some shared language to align on what “good” design was and what made our team and approach unique which led to the creation of our Design Principles. We followed this up with an easy-to-use playbook to encourage designers to implement solid discovery practices.

Our Design Playbook and Principles allowed us to dramatically scale both the quality of our design and our velocity.

Finally, I built a Design System team. This was a huge unlock for us to improve design quality and velocity and allowed us to hire a wider range of designers because they were supported by a strong system.

Seizing a “seat at the table”

Our design team was in a significantly better place, people were happy and motivated. Quality was improving and my managers were established. But we still had perhaps our biggest challenge to tackle: the problems with our product org. While the team was effective and had a business impact in their respective areas, they were still mostly in “execution” mode. They were struggling to prioritise user focussed initiatives and as a result, the user experience was still not where it needed to be. Two early changes I made to the team helped.

Re-structured the design team to align with Product. I aligned our Leads and Managers with respective Product counterparts, as opposed to a pooled model. This was controversial at the time. PMs felt they would have fewer resources, and designers were worried we'd lose our design team culture. But almost immediately designer & PM friction eased as they were on the same team, literally and metaphorically. This made it easy for them to start having an influence on their respective roadmaps.
Partnered with Product on better success measurements. The way our teams measured success wasn’t great. A single metric often didn't exist, and when it did, it was a bad proxy metric that encouraged teams to “game the metric”. Rarely did it reflect user value. Together with my Product & Eng partners, we chose better metrics and aligned the C-suite behind them. For example, we moved away from MAUs and decided on 7-day new user retention for our consumer experience teams.

These two activities helped a lot, but we still had one major problem: teams and leadership were constantly misaligned. Often, the first time leadership was seeing these projects was in design review. Designers would get extremely triggered when walking into a review after spending weeks on something only to hear “Why are we working on this?” from our CPO. (These words still make me shiver).

What is notable about what I did next is that these activities are often considered to be “outside the scope” of a design leader — often being the role of the Product or Exec team. So I trod very lightly here, knowing that there could be sensitivities about a designer coming in to do this. Because of the trust I had built with my PM counterpart, thankfully, I was able to make headway.

Established a new product review process. I needed to get leadership to “bless” these projects earlier in the pipeline. So, I set up a new product review meeting and spec template. I leveraged the “authority” I had as design director to prevent designers from starting on work without a signed-off spec, which pushed IC PMs into the meeting to use the template. While this didn't magically solve all those alignment issues, it did make PMs accountable. The process saved us a ton of time and meant the designers were significantly less frustrated. I ran this process for a year before the Product team took this meeting and template over from me and started to optimise their decision-making process.
Established company vision. I ran annual visioning sessions within my cross-functional team. This was successful at motivating and aligning not just design, but also PM, Eng and other stakeholders. Much of our roadmap for the following year started with concepts born in these workshops:

Events and and updates was a theme that my team came up with that would eventually becoome the basis of our new app homepage.

We worked closely with our partners to develop new ideas for co-branded advertising products - this informed our new home page takeover product.

Neighbourhood guides were a consistent theme. These explorations inspired a rework of our Collections feature.

The outcome

By mid-2022, the team and the product had been totally transformed. Our team retention dramatically improved (only two designers quit during those three years, compared to one per month before I started). My team had some of the strongest manager effectiveness scores in the entire product and design org. I coached three people from mid-level designers to senior managers, and we announced Cortney (the first Lead I hired) as our first Principal. We were shipping features faster, and our new core metrics were moving up - our new users were coming back more often, and people were contributing more. Our product ideas were approved faster and more aligned because we were "talking the same language" and aligned to a shared vision.

Some specific project highlights included:

Helping people and businesses during COVID

We were one of the first companies to help people and local businesses connect during COVID by surfacing health and safety information. This helped encourage people to get back to supporting their local businesses.

Smarter information architecture

So many of our pages were a mess due to no-one ever intentionally thinking about our IA. We rethought the content on each page from the ground up to make it easier for people to make decisions — and to make it faster to design and build screens.

Beyond the 5 stars — rethinking the review

People want to contribute in very different ways now compared to when Yelp started 20 years ago. We experimented with multiple new methods of leaving feedback including video and reactions.

New ways to choose what to eat

We identified the underserved use case of “I'm hungry and I don't know what I want” and launched new serendipitous image-first swipeable discovery experiences.

In addition to our teams performing on their business metrics, the product UX finally got better. We were chipping away at parts of the products that had not been touched in a long time, and shipping features that were not always quantifiable, but were the right thing to do for the user experience and were aligned with our vision.

Perhaps the most obvious impact of my new “up-leveled” team was the full product redesign we rolled out over two years.

By setting examples and expectations my designers took a “seat at the table” and were teaching their PMs to be user-focused. My designers were happier. They were doing the best work of their career knowing their manager and company truly valued them. And at the end of the day, we all enjoyed work a little more.

What I learnt

Back in 2017, a few months into this role I was stressing over my new 15 reports who all hated me, and was worried nothing would ever change. There were so many problems. How could I possibly fix them all? My CPO took me out to lunch and gave me one piece of advice: Focus on building a great relationship with your people first, then the rest will come. I'd been focused on the wrong problem. After I started truly investing in my relationships with my team, everything got better. And this was only possible because I truly cared about them, and found ways to show it.

I also learnt that as a senior leader in a large company, your job is to manage the process. In the spirit of not wanting to micromanage, Yelp had avoided any formal process to make product and design decisions. This of course backfired. You don’t end up with “no process”, you just end up with a terrible process. I learnt that generally, the best approach for processes in a growing org is “MVP” — Minimum Viable Process. That means implementing the minimum “quick and dirty” process that works and constantly monitoring, adapting and tweaking it.

Balancing user focus and revenue at a large public company is hard — but is your responsibility. I wish I could say this was “solved”, but the journey continues. The pressure of quarterly reporting pushes companies and PM organisations to become more data-driven, instead of data-informed. It is my job as the design leader to be the voice of the user, to bring their voices into the room along with data and research. And this job is never "done".