Wolfram Thurm🇩🇪

About Wolfram Thurm

Head of Design Central Design Services | DesignOps | Design Strategy at Gojek

I am currently the Head of Design for Central Design Services and DesignOps at Gojek, enabling, embracing and supporting the design team by evolving and accelerating our Strategy, Practice, People and Culture.

As a design strategist I deeply care about building a design practice that is centered around people. The people that build experiences as well as people who interact with it. I strongly believe that what’s good for the customer is good for the business. In that order, even though one cannot be without the other.

We are currently serving a 120+ people design team. I have been an active mentor (mostly on UXCoffeehours) and enjoy sharing whatever little I have picked up along my path. My background is in music and industrial design. My key topics are Design Operations, Design Program Management, emotional well-being, culture, work-life balance, and being a parent in the fast pace environment of tech startups.

Expertise

Sessions with Wolfram Thurm

• Mentorship Session (30 min): General mentorship
• Career Frameworks for Designers (60 min): Dive into understanding and developing career ladders and growth frameworks. The answer to simple questions like whether or not people can meet their career goals at an oraganisation not only affect peoples productivity or engagement, they employee retention. Design leaders and organisations need to provide the right frameworks and opportunities. 1. Understand single track, dual track and multi track career ladders 2. Build the right skills and competencies 3. The role of LnD, up-skilling and mentorship Being able to learn and grow is by far the biggest driver in choosing a job today. Building the right growth frameworks and ensuring that team members see how they can meet career goals is one of the most foundational pieces in building a successful team. Actionable insights and real value need to come out of these sessions the curriculum is adjustable. This sessions correlate with topics covered in my other advance sessions and they can be extended to go deeper on request.
• Design Maturity (60 min): Deep dive into design maturity models and how you can level up the maturity of your team and organisation. A lot of the frustrations we designers experience on a daily basis are related to the (or lack of) design maturity of your organisation. 1. Understand maturity models 2. Define the right maturity model 3. Measure design maturity 4. Identify the right interventions and actions to level up maturity 5. Organisation design Even though maturity is a somewhat elusive concept to evaluate a teams ability to perform, lack of maturity is also is often times the root cause for friction and frustrations for designers. Understanding how to measure and influence maturity is powerful leverage to increase a teams effectiveness and well being. Actionable insights and real value are key to these sessions so we can always adjust the curriculum to fit your needs. This sessions correlate with topics covered in my other advance sessions and they can be extended to go deeper on request.
• Prioritisation and Planning (60 min): Deep dive into the planning and prioritisation for designers. Navigating ambiguous roadmaps, ever changing priorities and constant flow of incoming work can be hard. 1. Capacity breaking and understanding how much time we actually have 2. Principles and the power of principled decision making 3. Understand and apply the right prioritiation frameworks 4. Applying agile methodologies in design (Scrum and Kanban) 5. Visualizing timelines 6. Produce strong effort estimations 7. Communicate and negotiate with stakeholders Prioritisation is one of the key challenges for startups as well as established companies. I want designers to become powerful allies in this quest so they become indispensable assets for their organisation. Everyone should get actionable insights and real value out of these sessions so we can always adjust the curriculum to fit your needs. This sessions correlate with topics covered in my other advance sessions and they can be extended to go deeper on request.
• Translating a Vision into a Strategy (60 min): Deep dive into the world of design strategy. working with C-Level executives or founders means most often that we have to translate a boarder product vision into an actual strategy. This can be tricky, especially for smaller teams: 1. What is Strategy (a word that can mean so much and so little) 2. How to translate a vision into goals or objectives 3. How to translate a goal into initiatives and projects 4. How to translate initiatives and projects into milestones and tasks 5. How to define the right success definitions, measurability criteria and risk mitigation These sessions aim to understand where you or your team currently stands and will address your imminent challenges. I want to make sure you get actionable insights and real value out of these sessions so we can always adjust the curriculum to fit your needs. This sessions correlate with topics covered in my other advance sessions and they can be extended to go deeper on request.
• Design Quantification and Metrics (60 min): Deep dive into the world of quantifying or work as designers. We will look at setting the right quantification strategy for you and/or your team: 1. Understand the need to quantify experience. 2. Performance metrics 3. Satisfaction metrics 4. Operational metrics 5. Understand and apply the Goal, Signal, Metrics framework 6. Dive into other goal setting frameworks Being able to quantify impact is one of the most critical skills for design leaders so we can become effective partners to our business and product stakeholders. For many designers this is a daunting endeavor. Understanding and speaking the language of business however is a necessary skill if we want to level up the maturity of our design practice. I want to make sure you get actionable insights and real value out of these sessions so we can always adjust the curriculum to fit your needs. This sessions correlate with topics covered in my other advance sessions and they can be extended to go deeper on request.

What mentees say

“I came into this session with a very broad and vague problem statement about design management. In 30 minutes, Wolfram was able to get to the heart of the issue. He helped me find my main priorities for the next few weeks, helped me outline actionable steps, set my expectations and suggested timeframes for my goals.”

“Wolfram is an amazing mentor. After a few minutes, he instantly knew what my challenges are, and was able to provide actionable feedback. His passion for the subject shines through, and is very contagious. I would absolutely recommend Wolfram for mentoring your next career move!”

“The call with Wolfram was great. His wisdom and practical approach allowed for a safe conversation on emotional well-being and how it connects to your work. It was a refreshing talk!”