This is part 2 of my post on building a successful product design team. You can find part 1 here. Part 1 covers the first 2 pillars:
- Strengthening design team culture
- Driving design integration
This post will cover the next 2 pillars:
- Elevating design execution
- Establishing a design thinking mindset
3. Elevate design execution
Raise the bar for overall quality of what reaches users. Establish and meet a higher standard of excellence.
In companies with less mature design teams, focus is on expediency and less so on quality. Or more accurately, quality design is not defined. Get the work done quickly, hope it looks good, share visceral reactions but little in the way of constructive critique. As a result there is no way to truly execute consistently good design.
To elevate design execution, you must first define what “good” is. This is a step that is often missed in establishing an effective design team. Everyone has their own sense of what good design looks like (including non-designers). But this isn’t openly discussed and documented. When building a new team, this is something we spend some focus on: What is good?
This usually starts with an honest evaluation of the current state of things. Often one of the first things my team will do is complete a heuristic evaluation of the site or app (or both). It’s important to look at things holistically, screen to screen, review from beginning to end the complete user flow. Capture every inconsistency, every friction point, every potential area where the pushed live components don’t live up to the level of experience we want for our users.
The reality is that teams rarely look at the whole journey. They work on pieces of it with tight deadlines. Taking the holistic view is a chance for everyone to get a true understanding of what the experience is like. It also strips away the “we had to just launch it and move on…” excuse that often results in less than ideal experiences going live. Users don’t care what your constraints are.
And with heuristic evaluations completed, you will likely have a list of things to fix. And this is important because it signals to the rest of the product org a seriousness about craft. And it will also point to business impact (“fix this issue on checkout to improve conversion by X%”).
Design principles are an important part of defining good design. They help inform how one might design something, as there are often many different ways to solve a problem. Perhaps more important than having an agreed upon principles, is the act of creating them. This is an exercise that should involve all of the design team. The debates, discussions that will take place will challenge everyone and help crystallize for everyone what is important and should be the essence of the product’s experience.
At Drizly we established a set of design principles. These informed how we would design solutions. For those who don’t know, Drizly was an alcohol purchase and delivery app that paired customers with local liquor stores. Orders had a minimum order amount. Design principle #5: “It should be enjoyable” helped inform the best way to address this. Initially we treated orders that were under the minimum as an error state. You order size is has not reached the minimum. We would redesign it to treat it in a positive light. We redesigned it as a progress bar, urging the user on and celebrating when the minimum was achieved. Both approaches are valid. But one is more inline with our design principles.
Over time, a shared definition of “good design” develops amongst the design team. It is important for this to happen organically. I certainly coach up the team and share what I see is good and what is lacking. But it’s important for the notion of “good design” is internalized.
This leads me to an important point: in the early stages of a design team, it’s more important to focus on process — how we make good design decisions — rather than any single design decision. If we build the foundation of a good design process, owned and championed by each designer, then we will more consistently make good design decisions.
To effectively elevate design execution, it’s critical that an agreed upon understanding of good design is developed by the whole team. If all design decisions have to run through the head of design — me for instance — then that leader becomes a choke point. You overly rely on the individual to make decisions and shut down growth and development for the design team. And it’s not scalable. And so in building design teams, I endeavor to coach the team on how to make good design decisions. This leads to more stable and consistent design execution.
4. Establish a design-thinking mindset
Design thinking is a framework for identifying opportunities, exploring solutions, and testing them.
The benefit of a well-formed, effective design team is in how it transforms the whole organization, empowering everyone to think more critically and creatively in identifying problems, figuring out what to tackle, and the solutions they work towards.
This is design thinking, and while it has “design” in the name, it’s not just for designers. It offers a repeatable method for identifying opportunities, develop new solutions, and to validate those ideas, all relatively quickly. When this methodology is adopted by a whole squad, it superpowers their alignment and cooperation, and helps them work more effectively, autonomously.
Design thinking was popularized by the design agency, IDEO:
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. — Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO
Its approach has been adapted into the Design Sprint, outlined in the book Sprint by Jake Knapp of Google Ventures. This is the way a lot of organizations first interact with the methodology.
I’ve taught design thinking at several organizations now, and it is often quite transformative. I’ve led design sprints at multiple organizations. At Liberty Mutual we were committed as a company to instilling this approach within our product org and developed a program that immersed whole squads in a month-long effort, called Digital Garages that taught the participants the methods and principles, and had them working on a core product problem, interviewing users, and building & testing prototypes.
A number of things happen. First, team cohesion grows. Designers, engineers, PMs are working together and building bonds. And since no one is stuck exclusively in their domain expertise (designers in Figma, engineers coding, PMs in JIRA… sorry), everyone is working together and equally contributing.
This also gives the larger team a greater appreciation of the skills and approach designers bring to the work. They start to realize that design isn’t “make it look pretty” but rather, a user-centered approach to solving business problems. After I’ve taught teams about design thinking, I see the efforts of designers to be more valued.
One last key benefit of design thinking is that it sets the team up for success going forward. I’ve facilitated a number of design sprints over the years. And while we make meaningful progress on whatever challenge we focused on for the sprint, the team learns this framework and leverages those skills and exercises in their work going forward. Where a team might get stuck on “what to tackle next?” before they were introduced to design thinking, the team will set up an effective brainstorming session* to focus on a real user need.
* unstructured brainstorming sessions are mostly useless and essentially action that isn’t actually productive. A design thinking ideation session is very different.
Teams have the tools to better define the problems and challenges before them, to break them down into key parts, and tackle them effectively, all without wasting time debating about what to do or how to do it.
In conclusion
I’ve found that investing in these four areas will turn a collection of well intentioned designers into an effective team that can transform a product org and help power innovation throughout the company. It’s simple enough, to outline, but takes a lot of hard work from everyone involved to achieve. And it does take time. But once you make headway on these pillars, the transformation begins to accelerate.
What do you think? Have you seen other foundational pillars for building a team that I didn’t address? Or do you have questions about the how to structure this? I’d love to hear from you.
