Over the last four years as Executive Creative Director, I led BBVA’s design team through the organisation’s digital transformation. Now at my own studio Far Co and reflecting back, it was an incredibly exciting and innovative time to be a designer at the bank. A time to create, test, fail, iterate and ultimately transform a global bank into a design-led organisation. Here is a summary of the most important challenges, decisions, milestones and deliverables.
Step Three: Design as a shaper of the future
The team is big and structured. The processes, tools and design system are developed and standardised. It is strongly urged to use and reuse them. The most important objective during the third phase is inspiration. Inspire the organisation that continual design evolution is important and inspire the designers to create the future.
Design maintains relevance in the organisation
The trap that can happen with a design transformation is that the design capability becomes a check box. We’ve invested, we’ve redesigned, done. Design-led organisations update their design system around every two to three years. It takes around one to two years to implement a new design system. This means to truly function as a design-led company, thinking about the next evolution of the design system happens almost as soon as the current one has launched.
One way to ensure expectations are aligned is to keep design visible within the company. Using public platforms with effective story-telling on design topics is a great way to stay relevant. One example that we tried to model at BBVA is Microsoft’s Story Labs:
The design team stays motivated and engaged
We grew to over 250 designers across seven countries that created new challenges to stay connected and engaged. We implemented many different tactics to maintain constant communication — project shares, active online social channels, weekly emails profiling different designers, in-person global forums — all with the intention to make sure designers felt like they were part of the larger team.
It was important to reassure the team that we were making progress and celebrate achievements. A yearly award show brought together all countries in one place where the best work of the year was highlighted and awarded.
We also created and shared a year-end highlights reel that showcased all launched projects for the year. As it was sometimes hard to see real progress in day-to-day activity, the year-end project reel reminded everyone of the distance we had travelled over the last 12 months. Personally, it reassured me that we were making a big difference.
Our approach to training was that the motivation to grow was directly paired with the opportunities to learn. BBVA Campus, both a physical campus and online platform, allowed all designers to re skill in different areas of design or learn new capabilities outside of design through training courses.
Design shapes the future
The purpose in gaining efficiencies through a developed and standardised design system and platform was to allow the design team time and space to think about new ideas and innovate. Traditionally new product ideas came from the strategy or business teams, but the design team began to be more proactive in the idea generation. We conceptualised ideas in the design studio, developed internal pilots to validate the idea, and finally worked with business teams to launch to the public.
Step Three Conclusion
Through the design transformation of BBVA, we created a culture that values design, developed and standardised the processes and tools to prove that value, and then inspired and empowered the designers to be the creators of the company’s future. It was a process that required constant reflection and adjustment, and even though every company is unique, I firmly believe that the principles of design that influence great change are transversal to any size company — big, medium-size, or start-up.
In summary, the main milestones in step three:
- Design maintains relevance in the organisation
- The design team stays motivated and engaged
- Design shapes the future
If you would like more information, you can reach me at brian.farrell@farcostudio.com
