Build a Design Engine in your Organization
Frameworks to push your organization forward
The Big Q: How can we design + implement a framework to push everyone forward at our organization?
Anyone asking this realizes it’s a very loaded question. It means we’re feeling pain: business pain, product pain, process pain, and overall doing-great-work pain. And it’s not pain that’s easy to fix.
Premise: great product and design requires the need for frameworks, inclusiveness, and cross departmental / cultural focus.
Technical challenges:
- How can we design better?
- How do we bring design to our organization?
- How do we get Apple/Google design standards and processes?
- How do we build a user centric product? What’s great UX/UI?
- How can we design and build our product to sell more?
Solution:
“implement a holistic design framework at your organization.” Or… Build a Design Engine
Challenge #1: Building a Design Engine can be a costly commitment of resources
For organizations that haven’t built themselves around a systematic design framework, doing so now requires balancing any risk to the pace of great products getting out the door or to business development and sales. Numbers and Dollars.
Our goal is to implement organizational and process change while using and building on existing organizational momentum, and to do that we have to balance people, time, and opportunity cost.
Rule #490: Don’t slow down shipping + billing to implement design thinking frameworks for innovation or anything that sounds like that.
The key is that we’re not bringing in outside Design Thinking frameworks. No, what we’re doing is recognizing the existing systems and frameworks within our organization and building on that collective intelligence to create a model of work that takes a holistic approach to design for operations, product, marketing, and sales.
This gives us an opportunity for process growth, organizational growth, and to form a better understanding of the existing goals, challenges, opportunities, and risks our organization faces before making decisions that can disrupt momentum.
- Recognizing our work ecosystem and building onto existing processes and frameworks helps make that system better.
- It creates more free time for everyone on the team to focus on their own tasks
- It gives people context for the impact of their work
- Beyond that, it instills a holistic responsibility– all team members carry the insights as well as the responsibilities that come with knowing the stakes of our actions.
Over the next article, we’ll outline Challenge #2: why implementing a design engine will tear through all layers in your organization and how the scar-tissue will make you stronger.
I try to help leaders build design practices in their organizations through a mixed-mode of services consulting and business framework co-creation.
Send me an email if you’d like to talk about what you’ve read: mail@mustefa.com
