5 Ways to Increase Designer & Developer Collaboration
Effective collaboration and communication between designers and developers is critical if your company plans to ship digital products that captivate users and keep them coming back for more.
While both roles typically embrace unique personality traits and technical skill sets, the ability to create synergy and fusion between these roles will inevitably make or break the success of your project. Lucky for you, I have some tips and tricks up my sleeve.
In this article, I will discuss 5 ways product designers can foster effective collaboration and communication with their dev teams during the product delivery lifecycle.
1. Invite developers to product-led sessions
An excellent way to encourage trust and transparency with your dev team is to include them in product-led brainstorming sessions. These could be lightning demos, card sorting exercises, or user journey mapping sessions.
Inclusion in these activities enables developers to feel involved, engaged, and heard. These sessions help developers better understand how designers think, brainstorm, and strategically approach user and business problems.
Instead of a Jira ticket hitting the sprint board with predefined requirements, developers feel in the loop and aware of upcoming initiatives on the roadmap well before execution time. Of equal importance, their participation in these activities ensures that diverse perspectives and opinions are captured and documented. Ultimately this promotes a team climate where all voices are heard and accounted for.
Pro Tip: Include at least one developer on all brainstorming calls. Mark them as optional and encourage them to attend if time allows.
2. Start with workflows
If there is one thing I have learned from working at SaaS companies, it’s that developers get weak in the knees for a comprehensive user flow chart. Their eyes light up, and they lean forward as if they are going to kiss the screen.
In my rookie year, I quickly learned that presenting UI designs to developers before discussing workflows is a surefire way to raise eyebrows and attract criticism. My key takeaway from that early career hiccup: always start with workflows.
The logical nature of these visual diagrams helps developers understand end-to-end user journeys without the distraction of UI elements and screen layouts. It helps them conceptualize the desired user flow and where system logic will need to be baked into the product.
During these presentations, ask the developers to call out any tech limitations or architecture dependencies. Ensuring your team is aligned on the desired workflow before moving to low-fidelity mockups will help your team scale faster and deliver well-thought-out design solutions.
Pro Tip: Use dedicated workflow tools such as FigJam and LucidChart. Make it a priority to invite developers to the files and encourage them to leave comments before presenting them to your team.
3. Host a weekly ‘Story Time’ meeting
Story Time is a weekly team meeting where designers present key user insights, data trends, updated mockups, or design activities that are in progress to the dev team. The ultimate goal of the meeting is to share work early and often and to keep the team up to speed on current design priorities.
The session serves as a team checkpoint and a feedback forum that promotes transparency and collaboration on a regular cadence. When we started running these sessions at Alcumus, they quickly became a fan favourite. Multiple members of the engineering team, both individual contributors and leaders, voiced that the meeting shone a bright light on the depth of research, experimentation, and design thinking that goes on behind the scenes.
To get the most out of the meeting, follow a structured format. This will ensure that your key objectives are covered and that the meeting is not derailed. For more information on how we structure these feedback sessions, see our Design Team Rituals at Alcumus article. Specifically, keep an eye out for the section entitled ‘Huddles.’
In addition to following a structured format, send out links to the work you will present a day before the meeting. This will allow teammates to preview the content and prepare any questions ahead of time.
Pro Tip: Make sure to schedule this ritual on a recurring weekly basis. Carving out this time each week will get teammates in the habit of coming with an open mind at a consistent time.
4. Host a weekly ‘Desk Check’ meeting
‘Desk Check’ is a weekly drop-in session where designers and developers review the implementation of the designs during a sprint. This time should consist of developers asking for feedback. This meeting is for developers to ask questions to designers. This could mean developers asking about style guide components and edge cases or getting some design eyes on the current implementation of a feature or UI element.
Hosting a weekly meeting like this helps designers chime in on developer work early in the implementation process. In the long run, this simple meeting will save your team a great deal of time and effort.
Pro Tip: Invite dev team members on your squad to this weekly session and mark them as optional. Before the meeting, send out a reminder to the team (email, Slack, Microsoft Teams etc.) and ask if anyone has anything to share during the session.
5. Use a design system at your company
The holy grail of designer and developer collaboration is to have a rock-solid design system that serves as the team’s north star. This means having reusable dev components, Figma libraries, and a detailed documentation hub where nothing is left to interpretation.
The sheer power of having a single source of truth when it comes to design components, patterns, and UI elements should not be overlooked. While this will not solve all your implementation woes, it will undoubtedly help streamline your collective understanding of where you should be heading regarding the look, feel, and interactions within your product.
While building your design system, make sure it is a collaborative process. Regularly review component naming conventions, micro UI interactions, and implementation details alongside the dev team and engineering department.
Pro Tip: Remind the dev team that a design system is fluid and constantly in flux, like code. Ensure that when updates are being proposed, they are reviewed and directly communicated to all team members.
The bottom line
Fostering an environment where designers and developers thrive together will inevitably affect the caliber of your company’s products. Now that you are armed with 5 new strategies, I challenge you to deploy them and improve upon them as you see fit.
We are currently growing our design team and have several exciting new opportunities. If you’re interested in making an impact on the lives of others and being a part of a rapidly growing global organization, we hope you’ll consider joining us!
Learn more about our openings on our Careers page.
