How a content designer collaborates with a product designer
There’s no one way to do this, but maybe this will help.
The benefits of content and product design collaboration are no secret. Many words have been shared on Medium and Substack about why collaboration is important but few speak to the mechanics. Maybe it’s because there’s no right way to do it. It’s hard to talk about something without being prescriptive because people generally want to be told how to do something. Nevertheless, having examples of how to collaborate might help shed light on the ways content and product designers’ roles overlap. Here’s how I collaborate with one of my product design colleagues, Sam (not her real name), with whom I have a very great relationship.
Again, there’s no right way to do this. There are factors at play that encourage collaborative flourishing or collaborative tolerance.
Who am I?
I’m a content designer at a company that provides SaaS in the events and hospitality industry. I’m embedded in a team of product designers and provide consulting to other UX teams that lack a designated content designer. As you can imagine, that’s a lot of personalities. It’s a lot of different team subcultures, different team practices, and so on.
You can’t brute force great collaboration but you can encourage some contented form of it.
Is it Luck?
Maybe. But personalities matter. A lot. It sounds too simple but really, you click or you clash. It’s a fact of work life (and elsewhere). Sam and I just so happen to click. Very well. So much so that we often joke about being separated at birth.
Everything is easier when you gel with someone. Sam and I enjoy each other’s company despite living on opposite coasts as fully remote employees. We meet regularly for 1:1s and design sessions. Some are scheduled, others are ad-hoc. We confide in each other. We lean on each other as a resource. And it has served us both really, really well. I’ve been told our level of content-product collaboration is an outlier.
Of course, it’s not just luck. You can’t will great collaboration into existence. It does take some effort and time to build that relationship, even if you’re like long-lost siblings.
Establish the Relationship
This is obvious but people don’t want to talk about the effort needed to establish and maintain relationships. Especially work ones. If you get along well enough and the work gets done, well, that’s that. It’s also easy to not think about the effort when it works well because it just works. But the truth is that cultivating and maintaining really good collaborative relationships isn’t easy. And it takes effort. If we want to be fancy, we can call it The Art of Collaboration.
“How to Work With Me”
I have to credit Sam for how much she’s put in towards our friendship and collaboration. She makes it a point to get to know everyone she directly works with and I was no exception. Within weeks of joining Sam’s team, we had regular 1:1s. We covered the usual topics-how we like to work, what was life before UX, how we best communicate, and so on. But these weren’t your standard “get to know you” chats. Sam and I were doing a conversational version of the How to Work With Me document.[1 2 3]
We talked about:
- How we worked: Did we prefer utter solitude and asynchronous time? Did we crave total collaboration and always synchronous? Or did we like a balance?
- When we got into “the zone”: Did it happen morning, midday, afternoon, or never?
- Where did we like to work: Directly in the Figma files? Static documents? A combination?
- What knowledge and experience do we have: What did we both share, and what could we teach each other?
And this isn’t a one-time topic either. We regularly come back to these questions because people are dynamic. Priorities and projects change. Through constant reassessment of our partnership, we can continue to reach out to each other during scheduled meetings and ad-hoc design jams. We might not work directly on the same projects as before, but this open communication allows us to continue being the dynamic collaboration duo that we are.
Complement Each Other
Sam and I don’t emphasize our roles as product and content designers. We are UX designers with shared and specialized skills. We are solving the same design problem. A lot of our technical skills overlap, which makes working in Figma easier, but the exciting part of our collaboration happens in our discussions while we design. It’s where our strengths play into each other and we learn from each other. I bring journalism/socio-psychology/marketing to the mix, and Sam comes with business acumen and real-world hospitality experience.
I observe product designers go straight for the jugular of solving the problem. To balance out the sprint to designing, I slow things down a little. I get us thinking about the information we’re piecing together. I can see what we’re attempting to solve but what is the actual objective with the thing we’re creating?
Tapping into OOUX, we do quick and dirty outlines of our primary objects, user roles, and actions. We then talk about the relationships between everything, sometimes mapping it out with arrows on more complex workflows. This helps us have a clearer picture of what the things are, and how a user interacts with that thing.
We also prioritize information and identify what’s absolutely necessary and what’s auxiliary. We talk about why a label works or doesn’t work. We discuss the implications of specific terminology and check for audience fit. We borderline get philosophical. We have disagreements and argue with each other about design decisions-visual and content. It all leads to a near-harmonious working relationship that’s resulted in many great designs.
Trust
Design is a vocation of the personally fraught alongside shared reward. We get to work independently with minimal guidance or work in a creative fishbowl. We are precious about our work, both design and writing. When this territoriality is left unchecked, we can fall into animosity and distrust. This makes working with others awkward, uncomfortable, and precarious.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this-even with peers you don’t quite get on with. Once you break free from the limits of taking critique too personally, you can easily move into building trust. Critique, when done correctly, is an ego boost but also shows the skills and knowledge you have to your peers.
Working with Sam is a continuous cycle of trust and open communication. When we have reservations or doubts about something we bring it up. We talk through critique while encouraging each other’s efforts. Sam writes the first draft of nearly everything she designs, and I walk her through why things work as they are and how they can be improved. I teach her how to think about words, language, and information in a way that can be scaled to all of the designs she works on. Sam reciprocates by teaching me how to use Figma to design elements for a larger product. By teaching me how to use Figma, Sam is comfortable with me editing her files. By teaching her the basics of writing, I trust her to do a great first draft.
This is our design session. This is how we collaborate.
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Originally published at https://wordsbydesign.substack.com.
Resources
1 Maymin, S. (2020, July 21). The “How to Work with Me” Document
2 Manual of Me. How do I create a ‘How to Work With Me’ document?: Part 1: Agree on its Purpose
3 Marko Saric. (2018, October 17). Why you should write a “how to work with me” user manual
