Design Producer = Secret Sauce
We have added Design Producer as a new role to our design ops team and I am quickly realizing that it just might become our secret sauce. Here is what they do, and why you need one!
Our design team is about 70 people spread across design, research, content and ops. We support 6 products, and partner with over 1000 engineers. As the organization’s design maturity increases, two things are changing:
- We are getting involved in projects much earlier.
- We are seeing a greater need for designers to collaborate more across teams.
As a result, engineers and product managers are sometimes not sure who is responsible for what, or when and how to get us involved.
Designers also have challenges — answers become harder to find, process is often not consistent between teams, and managing stakeholders is not always in their comfort zone.
Design Producer to the rescue
The design producer (also known as UX producer, design project manager, UX project manager…) works at the project level and is really the glue that holds everything together.
Let’s take a look at how they help both with cross-functional partners, and also with the design team itself.
The Benefits are many
- Allows designers, writers, and researchers to focus on what they do best
- Acts as buffer between UX and cross-functional partners
- Helps trial and enforce process improvements on the ground
- Can report out on issues/progress
- Owns bird’s eye view of overall project health, status and dependencies, while maintaining understanding of what’s happening in the trenches
- Advocates for the needs of UX within project lifecycle
- Manages and mitigates risk
- Everyone is happier and more productive!
I have literally had multiple people across design, product management and engineering thanking me for adding the role because they see it adding so much value to the team.
Are you interested in adding secret sauce to your team?
Connect with me on LinkedIn and I would be glad to share advice on introducing the role.
