Re-thinking design and strategy collaboration

Kateryna Topol
Jul 24, 2017 · 3 min read

Gone are the days when designers and strategists set in silos on different sides of the office. In the Design Thinking world these teams come together and approach projects in a much more integrated manner, but each organization approaches these collaborative and multidisciplinary teams differently.

Over the last year I’ve learned a lot about, and helped shape, how we approach design process and delivery team collaboration at Architech. During these 12+ months we’ve taken on more lean startup projects, refreshed the team composition, tried and tested various methodologies, techniques and exercises. At some point, things got a little messy. We begun to battle the value of certain techniques over others and various confusion points begun to service around who does what.

And let’s be honest, in an agile, forever iterative, environment where different minds come together and no project is the same, these issues are pretty common.

It was time to get re-aligned. The ultimate goal was (and still is) to create a joined, streamlined (iterative) toolkit that can ensure clarity across both teams and serve as a library that will kickstart every project.

We approached the exersize itself as a project. The first step was to get all stakeholders in the room, look at what we are doing now and what might be wrong with that process or could be improved upon. The team took note of everything we’ve done for every project in the past 6–10 months: every exersize, meeting, discussion, design, sketch, brainstorm, you name it. That set of post-its got organized into a flow: what strategy does, what design does, what we do together and at what life-stage of the project.

For the next meeting, we took everyone out of the office for a full day of activities, some games, and a BBQ. The team set around the table and tore this process apart in order to put together the ideal future state (taking into consideration that not all exercises apply to all projects). Some aspects had to be taken out into seperate discussions because not all specific methodology tools are ideal for us and need to be fine-tuned to the Architech way (i.e. Strategyzer tools).

The overall process is currently being tackled by the design and strategy team members as the big picture. The learnings so far have been invaluable and giving each team member a voice in how we work as a team has been very empowering.

I cannot wait to see this toolkit come together!

Kateryna Topol

Written by

Freelance product designer and art director. Founder of quipmag.com, music junkie, food fanatic, and travel blogger at pathstotravel.com.

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