Designing for farmers: how we’ve built the design team at Granular

Our vision, manifesto (operating principles), objectives and design principles

But first, context

Before diving in, I’m going to share a bit of context: I joined Granular in January 2017 as the Head of Design. At that time we were a Series B funded startup with offices in San Francisco, CA and Champaign, IL. We had 2 products and our design team was tiny — 1 brand designer and 2 product designers (including myself).

Things changed when, in August of 2017, Granular was acquired by Dupont Pioneer to lead their digital business. Their two existing software teams, Encirca and MapShots, became a part of the Granular family via the merger. So, Granular went from a <100 person startup to a team of 400+ people across 4 locations, and became a part of a broader, 20,000+ person company. And, overnight, the Granular design team grew from 3 people in San Francisco to 13 people in SF and Iowa.

To be honest, it was both exciting and terrifying.

Similar, but different

Soon after the merger, I started meeting regularly with the design team lead in Iowa, Eric Wagner. We’d share our work, what was going on with our teams, the challenges we were facing and our wins. Eric and I discovered that our teams had some very important things in common: we had kind, passionate, talented team members who cared deeply about our mission and earnestly wanted to help farmers and their trusted advisors. That was huge.

But our teams were also very different. We had different job titles, disciplines, roles, team structures and relationships with cross-functional teams. Namely:

1. Product designers were well integrated on some subteams (playing the role of a lead with product and eng counterparts), but on other subteams they were not. In some cases, Product Designers were seen more as UI designers/engineers who executed on PM PowerPoint art rather than strategic thought partners
2. User research in SF was informal and handled by product designers and product managers, but in Iowa we had two highly skilled, academically-trained researchers who brought a level of rigor and polish to research activities
3. The two UX engineers on the team in Iowa were building components and implementing a lot of the front end that the design team spec’d out. We didn’t have that role in SF, so the engineering team worked closely with design to make that happen
4. Brand design was primarily outsourced to an agency on the Iowa side whereas we had an internal brand design lead on the SF team

The path to unifying our two teams looked difficult…so we pretty much avoided it for the first 7 months post-merger. But then in March of 2018, I was promoted to VP of Design and we began the journey to unify our teams across state lines, processes and team cultures.

Getting Started

Like any new relationship, we started off slow…

• We held monthly Design Team All Hands where we got to know each other, our products and our disciplines.
• I went to Iowa frequently, and before my first visit, I sent out a survey to the Iowa team members and then met with them 1on1 to get to know them all personally.
• We started a team wide Slack channel and started doing joint critiques.
• We standardized job titles and built a shared career ladder.
• We reset expectations for product designers within the team and with key stakeholders.
• We developed a shared research responsibilities matrix that repositioned our research team as experts providing support to PMs and Product Designers.
• Eric formed a Design Systems team (read more about them here).

It took a while, but slowly our team started to feel less like 2 separate teams and more like a unified one.

The Vision

Unifying the team was feasible because we had a shared goal that excited the entire team: to build the best UX and brand in AgTech. So that became our team vision statement.

The Manifesto (Operating Principles)

The vision helped set where we were going, but I wanted a rallying cry for our team that could help unify us across locations and disciplines, while also standardizing how we approached our work. A subset of the team had already been brainstorming product design principles, so at first I was thinking we could just use those—otherwise it may be duplicative. But some of the principles felt less like guidelines for our work/decision-making and more about our philosophy and approach.

We had more discussions and brainstorms and in May 2018, we formalized the Granular Design Team Operating Principles.

1. We are relentless about design and delivering value to our customers

We advocate for our customers, ask why? why? why? and push our teams to make tough tradeoffs to ensure we’re delivering the best experiences.

2. We use data and customer insights to inform and evaluate our design decisions

We are not our customers. We never stop learning from them and keep their needs at the core of everything we do.

3. We strive for simplicity and only layer on complexity if it’s absolutely necessary

Simplicity of process, communication, design, feature set, language and technical approach. It’s easier to add than take away.

4. We use teamwork and collaboration to solve tough problems

We leverage the talent and skills of our fellow designers and cross-functional teammates to think creatively, critique each other’s work and identify opportunities for shared/consistent customer experiences.

5. We embrace optimism and accept that failure is part of success

We roll with the punches and create clarity where there’s uncertainty. We learn from our mistakes and don’t let them bring us down — instead we learn from them and iterate our way to greatness.

We honestly don’t talk about our operating principles enough, and the brand design team (now two people, and we’re hiring a third) has been too swamped to help make the propaganda — sorry, internal marketing materials — to help reinforce them. But these shared set of operating principles helps set the tone for what we’re all trying to do here.

The Objectives

So with a vision and manifesto, we knew where we were trying to go and the behavior that would guide us there. The “how we’ll get there” is covered by our three objectives:

Every quarter we set key results (we use OKRs at Granular) that help us chip away at the objectives and get us closer to our team vision.

Our first team objective is to create consistent, easy-to-use products that customers love. But, our products were built on different tech stacks by different teams and tackle different problems for our users. So we have a small — okay, large — problem with consistency.

We’ve been chipping away at that problem with our shared system of design components via our Design System, but we’ve also been tackling it at a more fundamental and philosophical level via our shared design principles.

Design Principles

I wanted to codify design principles for Granular back in 2017. But the team was small and we were able to “hive mind” enough that it didn’t make sense to take the time to formalize them, and the team was unsure how they’d help us. But when the team expanded in the merger, we had to take action since we were missing the “guideposts that articulate the fundamental goals that all decisions can be measured against and thereby keep the pieces of a [product] moving toward an integrated whole” (source: a classic Luke W piece).

So we started brainstorming and workshopping different principles. We found many examples of principles from other design organizations that served as a source of inspiration. We also looked at how they were structured. Some teams had single words, others had long paragraphs. Some teams had only 3, others had 7 or more. Some seemed generically universal and others seemed more product or industry-specific.

We determined what we liked and what we didn’t like, and after a few rounds of editing and iterations, we made them official in September 2018.

Here are Granular’s design principles:

1. We ensure that value is much greater than effort
   The payoff must be > work it takes to get to that payoff. This applies to our customers’ experiences with our products and the work that our team does.
2. We make common things easy and uncommon things possible
   We optimize experiences for the majority use case. Extra clicks or taps to do something is okay if only <20% of users will use/benefit from it.
3. We guide and warn our customers — but don’t constrain them
   Users may not know what they ought to do, so we should guide them in the right direction. But we should get out of their way if they want to do something “wrong” or unusual. We should make it easy to fix a mistake.
4. We give customers just what they need to make a decision
   Imagine the customer is Goldilocks: we want them to feel “just right.” We try not to give them too much (or they get overwhelmed), but give them enough to feel informed and like they can trust us.
5. We aim for consistency, but favor appropriateness
   We should try to reuse existing Granular design patterns (or borrow from farmer-favorite products like Twitter) but ONLY if it’s appropriate for the context or use case. We shouldn’t be afraid to innovate or deviate, but we should have a good reason to do so.

We developed these shared principles to help standardize excellence through consistent product design decisions and execution. Our other disciplines (user research, brand design and design systems) are still figuring out if these principles resonate with their work. But for now the 6 product designers we have that work on our 4 different product lines are unified by them. And it’s so exciting when one of our PM or engineering counterparts cite a principle!

Our team today

We have a team of 15 product designers, brand designers, user researchers, design system practitioners (UX and engineering) and managers. We are spread across SF, Illinois and Iowa, but feel like one team. And while our interactions have made that unification possible, we are strengthened by all the fundamentals described above. Your team probably needs this glue, in some form or another. So make it happen!

That was a lot! Thanks for reading.

If you’re interested in transforming agriculture and making farming more efficient and profitable, come join the team at Granular.

We’re hiring a Brand Designer and a Senior Product Designer. And we have many other open roles across our four locations.