Growing and Nurturing a Design Practice
When I joined the Greenplum Database team in 2017, one designer had left already, and the other designer was our Director. The work environment was described to me as “the wild west” without an established design practice. Product decisions were still engineering driven, but the product had scaled enough that user feedback loops needed to be put in place. There was room to create a more fertile ground for meaningful collaboration amongst the product team and with users.
Many of the teams had not yet worked with a designer, but we needed the design practice to grow. There were four factors early on in the process which contributed to our success in growing and nurturing the design practice: hiring, onboarding, first projects, and community.
Since 2017, we’ve been able to grow the team to four empowered designers, incorporate regular feedback loops with customers on four teams, generate personas that are used by almost all product teams to understand our users, contribute to the strategy to the overall product, and collaborate as designers together in meaningful projects that benefit us as well as Engineering and Product disciplines.
Hiring the right people
Success of any project depends on hiring the right people — people who are willing to collaborate, be self critical and want to make it a better place than how they found it. Finding such an individual is hard! For many designers, it’s important to cultivate the ability to work and thrive in ambiguity, as the solution is usually not obvious. For the Greenplum hiring team, we had an additional challenge of finding people who are also comfortable navigating an extremely complex and technical domain (think database CLI and APIs). These are people who are ok with not understanding everything and confident enough to make design decisions in the face of so many unknowns or ask for help.
To ensure we found the right person, we needed to start with altering our initial screening process with the recruiter and the hiring manager. Next, we needed to make sure the right people were involved in the onsite screening team. We spent a lot of time with our recruiters to make sure everyone in the hiring process had a clear picture of the ideal candidate. We looked for and weighed traits like humility, curiosity, and storytelling more than hard skills or domain expertise (this was made possible because our culture is very focused on teaching). The onsite interview panel included not just other designers but also Product Managers and engineers. This enabled us to get diverse opinions. In addition, it gave us the opportunity to observe the candidate asking questions to domain experts and navigate an area that they are not familiar with.
While our hiring process is long, it led to hiring designers who are collaborative and priming Product Managers and Engineers to have a sense of what to expect with designers because they were part of the hiring process.
Normalizing not knowing
Even after being on Greenplum Database for a few years, there’s still plenty of terminologies that are foreign to me. For anyone without experience working on databases, ramping up to the domain is like learning a foreign language. It’s incredibly important for the team to normalize that feeling of being clueless. By making sure that a new designer understands it’s perfectly ok to not fully comprehend the words people use, Engineers and Product Managers create a safe space for the designer to ask them questions. As a design manager, I continuously remind designers that it is expected they’ll need to ask the same question multiple times. It takes time and repetition to get it!
It’s up to the team to invest in the designer. This means helping ramp up the designer to the domain and being willing to collaborate with the designer on activities and workshops.
Finding the right project fit
The first project on a team that has never had a designer before can be challenging. The team doesn’t really understand what a designer does, and designers won’t know the context fully. In addition, every team has different needs and strengths. It usually takes some time to make those apparent. Plus, it’s unclear how much time the design process takes and the conclusion is not always well defined. Designers will want to contribute some value quickly and teams will want to leverage a designers expertise.
Generally speaking, for a domain with a lot of complexity, a designer should be about 3–5 weeks ahead of engineering. This gives the designer enough time to (1) conduct user research, if necessary, as well as (2) work with the Product Manager and Engineering Anchor on understanding the context. In other words, the ideal time to roll a designer onto the team is when there’s design/dev pairing needed on existing stories and when there’s a need to validate the next track of work. The team can always work with a Design Lead or Manager to identify the best first projects.
It is always worthwhile for the designer to conduct usability testing on one or more previous work to solicit feedback on how user needs have been met in past iterations are meeting user needs. This is more helpful if the team is in the middle of executing work that has already been defined and scoped.
Creating a sense of community
When a designer is embedded into a product team, it is common to lose a sense of shared design community that comes from working in a more agency-type model. While being on an embedded team means less interaction with other designers for crit and collaboration, this structure provides an opportunity to foster relationships through a closer product team.
Making sure that individuals feel they are contributing is an important step in creating that sense of community. Sharing team norms, having 1:1s, and conducting workshops where people get to know each other on an interpersonal level are great ways in cultivating community. The team then becomes an extension of the design practice.
Final words
Overall, the early days of a designer joining the team sets the tone for future work. By hiring for the needs of the team, onboarding with intention, defining the right projects, and creating a sense of community, designers (or any new discipline, really) have the best chance of flourishing and adding value quickly.
Thanks to Venkatesh Raghavan, Kathryn O’Donnell, Peter Stahl, Joy Chen, and Shanfan Huang for all the edits and feedback!
