Designing at scale: Where creativity meets organized chaos

Here’s a question: How can a (growing) group of individually talented designers, each with their own unique strengths and style sensibilities, consistently strive to deliver exceptional on-brand design work for an expanding range of diverse products?

Short answer: It’s complicated.

Long answer: It’s complicated — but exciting — and one of the many challenges we’ve been navigating at Bending Spoons over the past couple of years. Read on for the best solutions we’ve come up with so far.

By Luca Burgio, Bending Spoons head of Design

An identical process for incredibly diverse projects

Our Product Design team is a horizontal force. We’re split into groups focused on diverse projects, spanning from AI events to video- and photo-editing platforms. And as a horizontal team, it’s super important for us to be using the same processes and practices in how we design. Here’s why:

• It makes our internal organization fast, reliable, and scalable
• It makes it easier for designers to switch to other teams
• It simplifies decision-making within smaller design teams

A lot of effort, plus some trial and error, went into developing our shared design process — and we’re still finding ways to improve it all the time (more on that below). But we’ve identified three core elements that are indispensable. Here they are:

• We use Figma for organizing pretty much everything, from brainstorming sessions to final product mockups
• We structure our design system in a way that optimizes our workflows
• We keep our communication clear, transparent, and well-documented, for all projects and products

With this pragmatic and streamlined process for how we work as designers, we’re able to be creative and inventive with what we create as designers—without spiraling into complete chaos and inconsistent design clutter.

Alignment initiatives for sharing feedback and sparking new ideas

We’ve been experimenting with several cross-team initiatives to strengthen our ability to design at scale. Below are some of the latest examples that seem to be working pretty well.

Design critiques: A catalyst for collaboration and growth

Beyond fostering a collaborative spirit within the teams, critique sessions have the power to ignite inspiration and fuel motivation. At Bending Spoons, we use these recurring sessions not only to showcase our work and exchange feedback, but to unveil new visions, discuss ideas, and express doubts. We started by trialing the format in our largest Product Design team, and these meetings have now become a weekly ritual for all teams.

A small yet vital point: Weekly feedback sessions are fruitful, but not the sole channel for receiving potentially critical input. Whenever we want or need immediate feedback, we don’t hesitate to reach out and ask for it. This helps keep us agile, and able to deliver our design work not just at scale, but also at pace. What’s more, everyone at Bending Spoons is not only empowered to offer proactive feedback, but is even expected to — even on design projects, and even when they’re not designers themselves. We receive valuable input from growth managers, customer support managers, engineers, and more.

And a word of caution: As much as a well-run design critique can inspire and motivate, a poorly managed one can leave the team disoriented and demotivated. So success lies not only in the process, but also in fostering a supportive and constructive environment conducive to open dialogue and growth.

Design system reviews: Creating a solid, yet flexible, structure

Different products call for different design systems. So one of our biggest efforts is giving a solid structure to our overarching design system, while still making it adaptable.

To address this, we hold recurring design system reviews, with the following goals: 1. Create and maintain the most efficient and solid design system for each product. And 2. Share practices and rules that can be applied to all ‌design systems.

While our product-specific design systems almost never share the same tokens or components, they do adhere to the same structure, rules, and practices. This ensures we can always test new practices in the future, and apply them to all our product-specific design systems easily and efficiently.

Patterns and components mapping: Finding inconsistencies

At Bending Spoons, we’re all about exploration and experimentation. But that comes with a risk, especially in design. The risk is that we end up introducing inconsistencies in the product.

So twice a year, we run a review to map all the patterns and components in our products and platforms, allowing us to spot any inconsistencies or other issues.

After that, designers go through all the issues found, then define an efficient and pragmatic solution that does the following:

• Creates the least debt possible, by reducing and reusing existing design components
• Fixes the issues without impacting or altering data — for example, a solution that requires the least amount of changes to the current UX
• Involves as few platforms as possible — for example, if we have an inconsistency between the Android and the iOS versions of an app, we’d prefer a solution that uniforms one to the other instead of looking for a mid-way solution that forces us to modify both the platforms

Having — and reviewing — design systems helps us reduce the number of inconsistencies incurred over time, but it’s still not 100% bulletproof. A lot depends on how many constraints there are on the design system and how many experimental iterations are run on it.

But being overly rigid with our system, and never exploring possible improvements, is just not an option for us at Bending Spoons. We embrace innovation, and accept the risks that come with it, seeking only to mitigate them as much as possible.

Design Pause: Challenging the status quo

Last but not least is an initiative we just started testing, and run when we feel it’s necessary.

Design Pause is a playground in Figma where designers can cast votes and propose changes to our design system, such as introducing new components or deprecating old ones, as well as suggesting fixes and general improvements.

The initiative is helpful for prioritizing tasks for our design system effort and in keeping all designers involved and aware of what’s coming and what’s changing in our design system.

Looking ahead: New opportunities, new avenues for growth, and new Spooner designers

Challenging, rewarding, and ever-changing — the work we do as product designers at Bending Spoons is never boring. And never finished! From small iterations to major improvements and the introduction of new products, our team has endless opportunities to fine-tune our individual skills, enhance our overall process, and increase the impact we have on the company. And, of course, increase the impact we have on the millions of people around the world using the products we’re designing.

I couldn’t be happier to be working with this amazing team of talented, passionate, and incredibly collaborative designers. I can’t wait to see what we come up with next, and what our new team members joining us in the future will bring to the table!

Ready to join Luca and the Product Design team in their creative journey at Bending Spoons? Head over to our jobs page to check out open positions.