Finding Alignment: All The Feels

Issue 24

Adventures in UX Design is a newsletter helping you navigate UX roadblocks

Finding common ground, reaching consensus and alignment, practicing ethical and humane design, active listening, relational leadership — these are all critical, interconnected themes and skills that are surfacing in the zeitgeist, as well as in design and UX conversations, like never before.

As teams adopt Lean and Agile practices, the development of time-consuming artifacts and deliverables has been replaced with sprints and prototypes that satisfy rapid development and deployment goals. This shift in focus makes perfect sense. Teams can’t afford to waste time creating static deliverables that will rapidly change during production and testing.

But teams also can’t afford the minefield that miscommunication and lack of alignment create, when we assume that everyone is on the same page and has reached the same, shared understanding. How can teams use design artifacts in their process to push solutions forward while also maintaining team and stakeholder alignment?

In this issue we explore the difference between a design artifact and a deliverable, the purpose of each and how they are used. We also look at the type of design artifacts teams use to foster alignment and communicate design decisions. This issue is crafted by humans and communicates ways that teams can find common ground and purpose, and thus has not been approved by trolls, bots, and shadowy foreign adversaries.

Is It An Artifact Or Deliverable?
It’s A Floor Cleaner And A Dessert Topping!

Before we had deliverables, we had the product. (Said in a deep, stentorian tone.) Then deliverables came along as a way to communicate goals and invite collaboration across departments within an organization. We understood that the product couldn’t be built in isolation with so many cross-functional dependencies influencing its success. We introduced deliverables to communicate challenges and describe solutions.

But as our production needs evolved, so did our approach to the creation of deliverables. The focus of many teams has shifted away from deliverables to what is needed to develop and ship a product. Updates and changes can be made and take place in the code.

The challenge with this approach is that we run the risk of moving too quickly and failing to communicate new products and changes to other teams and stakeholders, resulting in pushback.

Artifacts and deliverables are two sides of the same coin. Understanding the difference between them, and the shape they can take, empowers team to apply the right artifact to communicate at the right time to a specific audience, bringing teams and stakeholders together.

What’s the difference between an artifact and a deliverable?

Artifacts

• Show the progression of creative thought: the journey the team took to reach a solution
• Are powerful storytelling tools
• Work best when they are in a rough, unpolished form
• Provide the perfect fodder for debate and discussion around a problem and its myriad solutions
• Are often used as straw men to test ideas

Deliverables

• Tell the story of what we think the design should be
• Can be refined and iterated until they accurately represent the team’s thinking
• Are not meant to be debated as artifacts are
• Represent settled decisions
• Are more polished than artifacts

As Jared describes in his article, “Deliverables aren’t only used to communicate to the developers the specifications of what to build. They are seen by stakeholders and others in the organization, to understand the direction of the design. Sometimes it’s to show progress is happening. Other times it’s to give insight into specifics others need, like how to plan the product’s marketing messages. In an organization that has many parallel activities leading to the product’s release, deliverables communicate how the jello is being nailed to the wall.”

Teams can build, track, communicate and iterate upon ideas using design artifacts. They can explore customer experiences, services, and solutions with the right diagrams. These same artifacts can be used to build alignment, and can evolve into more polished deliverables that communicate strategy, effort, and outcomes to internal and external stakeholders.

READ: Design’s Fully-Baked Deliverables and Half-Baked Artifacts
READ: Pushback is Poison. Alignment is the Antidote by Jared Spool