Julie Agerbeek

As a designer, my role is to lead and guide the team to a hopefully good conclusion of the project. In previous projects, I had unfortunately struggled with inactive designers, leading me to have to often take charge of all designer tasks as well as some tasks from other roles. This lead to issue that when I was finally paired with another dedicated and capable designer as well as fast and reliable group members from other roles, I struggled with letting go of certain tasks and trusting the team to be able to figure tasks out themselves. It had become a (bad) habit to expect to have to do a lot myself and being scared of team mates messing up tasks that I'd have to redo later (due to the bad experiences).

Funnily enough, the amazing team I was paired up with this last project made this change much easier than I'd expected. From quite early on, they showed me that when I assigned a task, they would be able to quickly do it or if they struggled, they would come to me or the other designer. As art and code started rolling out, I noticed that if I made it clear that I was there for any feedback or questions, the team members would approach me and we would work closely together to make sure the end result ended up being what was desired. Communicating what was expected and showing a willingness to help where needed, appeared quickly as the main way that I, as a designer and unoffical team lead, could and should interact with the team in order to get the right results.

I use a color method to check in with my team members. Green means everything is going well, yellow means they are struggling a bit and red means they are really struggling. This method has helped me a lot in knowing when to check in with my team members and when to let them work on their own. I trust them to tell me when they can't figure it out.

If I tried to do all tasks on my own I would be overwhelmed the bigger the projects became. It is after all a team effort. Learning how to communicate, trust the team to do tasks I had normally done, and giving tasks out of hand, are fundamental to building a solid