04 Nov 2022

How Farfetch maintain health and happiness within their design team

As part of our research into customer centricity, we spoke with organisations that are leading the way. Justin Stach, Former Senior Director for Research and Design at Farfetch and now VP of Design at Wayflyer, gave us the lowdown on the importance of employee satisfaction, and how they maintain it.

Farfetch is a leading global platform for the luxury fashion industry. It connects customers with items from over 1,400 of the world’s best brands, boutiques and department stores. Stach says that looking after the design team’s health and happiness is a key factor in their success. ‘People need to be happy in their job, to be loving what they’re doing and feeling like they are adding value.’ Having good leadership and management all the way through and having the right tools to do their jobs are essential factors in maintaining a fulfilled team, and are something Farfetch have prioritised.

A shared sense of purpose

Crucial to the team’s happiness and success is sharing a sense of direction. Stach explains, ‘Good design and good design teams don’t happen by accident. It has to be a case of the whole team buying into what we’re trying to do to get a shared sense of purpose – why we’re here and what we believe as a team. And that mechanism of really focusing on team health and happiness was critical to that, I think.’

Regular check-ins

At Farfetch, they run bi-annual team check-ins to ensure that their team have what they need and are happy in their roles. ‘We use a framework which draws on Buckingham and Coffman’s work set out in the book, ‘First, Break All the Rules’ which looks at the common traits in high-performing teams and boils it down to 12 questions that we ask every team member to understand where they’re at and where they need to improve.’ For example, ‘Are you feeling motivated?’ and ‘Do you have the right tools to do your job?’. Stach says, ‘As a team we invest 20% of our time on things like ‘How do we improve our practices? How do we optimise our processes? How do we get stronger as a team?’ We track this over time to check we’re going in the right direction and use that as a framework to assess what we need to do as a team and where the areas we need to focus on are’.

The feedback from the survey has been invaluable for improving the team’s happiness. For example, previous results indicated that the team felt that their work wasn’t influencing Farfetch’s strategy strongly enough, so they came up with a different approach that positioned design and research as a way to quickly show (rather than tell) the business how a given strategic direction would manifest as customer experience and help them make more informed decisions. Additionally, at the last team check-in, the survey results showed that people were uncertain about how to develop and grow within their roles. ‘So then we did a follow-up with the team to unpack that. And it was pretty clear that our skills matrix was just not up to scratch, so we swarmed around the problem and leaders like Daniel Souza helped all our product designers across Farfetch to co-create a skills matrix that would help them in development discussions with their managers. That’s a really big deal within the team – it’s something that the team and I pay a huge amount of attention to. But also as a business, there’s a lot of care given to the employee.’

Five keys to customer centricity

Prioritising employee experience is one of the five keys to customer centricity outlined in our recent white paper. Providing employees with the right tools, technologies, and support makes it easy for them to deliver great user experiences, resulting in better outcomes for the customer.

Based on data from over 100 of Europe’s top businesses, our white paper ‘The State of Customer Centricity’ explains what the most customer-centred companies do differently and how they outperform everyone else. You can download the white paper here.

Learn more about How Farfetch maintain health and happiness within their design team

Anna Boscoe

Reach out to Anna Boscoe

User Experience Content Specialist

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