Design collaboration at Alan in 2021
Going from 4 to 12 Product Designers and a pandemic
Because many startups are facing the same challenges we are, and I personally benefited so much from the experience of others, I published almost 2 years ago an article about Design Collaboration at Alan.
Alan is growing fast, so are our ways of working, it was more than time for me to share an update!
What is the company organisation like today?
Alan is organised following a classic pattern:
- Horizontally in Communities,
- Vertically in Units, Areas and Crews.
Communities
Communities are groups of people of similar backgrounds. Communities are responsible for recruiting, setting up necessary tooling, methods and processes for people to thrive and grow.
At Alan, Design is actually the Design and Research community.
It covers Product Design, Brand Design and Research (UXR).
We are about 12 Product Designers, 2 Brand Designers, and 3 Researchers. We are still recruiting across the board as we speak, we’ll hopefully be more than 20 by the end of the year.
The product organisation
Units
Units are the highest organisational level.
To name a few:
- Better Life, focused on building the health services that will change people’s life,
- International, focused on setting up Alan in new countries,
- Insurance France, focused on the insurance part of the product in France.
Units handle more than product, they are also responsible for finances, operations, part of recruiting etc…
Areas
Areas are parts of Units. They are responsible for a specific part of the product. For instance, in the Insurance France Unit, you can find a Company Experience area and a Member Experience Area.
Areas are stable in time, and are responsible for the long term product vision of their scope. Areas decide of which crews will open and close, on which scopes and missions.
Crews
Crews are placed under an Area. Crews are multidisciplinary teams working on a mission over cycles of 6 to 7 weeks. They are focused on delivering on their missions over the current cycle.
How does Product Design fit into this?
Remember Areas ? Pods are a group of 2 to 4 Product Designers supporting the design needs for an Area. Pods are working both on long term vision with the Area and short term actions with the Crews of the Area.
Today, we have 4 of them:
- Better Life Pod, working with the Better Life unit
- Member Pod, working on the Member Experience Area within the Insurance Unit
- Company Pod, working on the Company Experience Area within the Insurance Unit
- International Pod working with the International Unit
The number of Pods will evolve with the product.
For instance, International Pod probably won’t stay a single pod for long, as the product grows and leaves the MVP stage in those countries.
Each Pod has a Pod Lead. The role of the Pod Lead is to lead the strategic discussion on the Pod’s scope, build and maintain a mid/long term vision, organise resources available efficiently and manage the Pod’s designers growth path.
So what has changed?
At the company level, the most noticeable shift is the introduction of Areas, as an answer to the maturity of the product and the necessity to plan and think over longer periods of time.
At the community level, the shift in our organisation in the last two years is moving away from a flat 1 designer / 1 crew model to the Pod model.
We really liked the very flat organisation with crews and a single “design referent” responsible for all the design for the crew. It was in line with the missionary type of people we hire at Alan, reinforcing the sense of ownership and focus. It was also very modular.
However, we noticed several shortcomings to our previous organisation:
- The number of crews would vary from one cycle to the next, and the needs of each crew in terms of design was not always equivalent. As a result, designers often ended up owning several crews at once.
- We had processes in place that designers could use to collaborate. They worked well up until the team reached 4 or 5 designers. Beyond that size, they still worked effectively mostly on isolated well defined topics but required an effort to make enough of the context available to others. Designers thus relied mostly on their own skills and availability, facing workload spikes and the feeling of lacking collaboration with peers.
- Because Designers were alone within their teams, we needed designers with a high level of seniority and a large scope covering strategy, UX, UI, Research. That was a major constraint in growing a team.
- We risked becoming unattractive to senior Product Designer. Part of the growth path of a lot of designers rely on their capacity to transfer their knowledge to younger peers, and the possibility to focus on aspects of the product where they feel their experience is making a major difference. This sort of progression was difficult to achieve in our organisation.
- With parts of the product becoming mature, it was getting very important to start thinking mid and long term, and not only on the horizon of the ongoing cycle.
- When a designer would change crew, all the knowledge would be gone with them. It was hard to plan and take time off.
Pods are a way to recreate the proximity of smaller teams, smooth workload among several people, share knowledge, create an environment offering safe room to grow for both junior and senior designers.
It’s also a way to solve a recruiting problem by making recruiting people of different seniority and background possible. Lastly, it allows us to reinforce our capacity to distribute ownership on mid/long-term vision for the product.
Building a sense of belonging while going international and enduring 2 years of COVID
Over the last two years, we went from a remote-friendly but mostly office based, France-only setup to a remote first setup in three countries.
Thanks to our written and asynchronous communication culture, we had solid basis to move full remote. Yet, onboarding a lot of new people with zero live contact has been tough, especially with Covid when even occasional events where not an option. Now that things are slowly getting back to normal, here is how we work in this new remote context.
Offices
Alaners work from co-working spaces in their city if they want to. We now have co-working spaces in a lot of cities in France, Belgium and Spain.
Our Paris office remains our main space. It is the daily workplace for about 30% of Alaners in France, so it’s naturally going to be where team spirit is cultivated.
Moving from “a place to work” to “a place to meet and collaborate” has a lot of architectural implications. For instance, we’ll probably forget about large silent openspaces and create more isolated spaces where 5 to 15 people can work very collaboratively over a short period of time.
We are also maximising well-isolated single call rooms for the numerous remote meetings Alaners attend to.
Onsites
Onsites are planned days where we encourage the community members to be in Paris. People do their usual work, we can use some time to work on collaborative topics that benefit from being in the same space, we organise an event and share meals.
We plan to have those roughly every two months.
Offsites
Offsites are trips of two to three days mostly focused on sharing time together in cool collaborative settings. Our first edition was cruising on an old sailboat in the sea of the Netherlands.
We may take some of that time to ideate over community issues, but it’s mostly focused on non-Alan related activities.
What’s the future like?
We are still growing and new roles are emerging. We are recruiting our first UX Writers, and growing the Research team. Future evolutions will involve adapting our collaboration to mix the various skills effectively.
With the team growing, consistency and evolution of holistic aspects of the product’s experience is also becoming a challenge.
I hope this gives you some insight into how design at Alan has evolved from a team of 4 to a team of 12 in just two years (mostly during the pandemic). It’s a learning experience for all of us and we adapt and mold our ways of working as we go.
In the meantime, if you are a Product Designer or a User Researcher, don’t hesitate to visit our hiring page! We’re always looking.
