The loner in the corner: The struggle of designers in cross-functional teams
Accepting the human element in product development that drives business value.
Why do designers often feel marginalised within cross-functional product teams? This exploration delves into the root causes of this prevalent sentiment in the tech industry.
As a product designer, I’ve witnessed and experienced tension between design, product, and engineering teams. My design colleagues, both within my circle and in the wider field, echo this sentiment, observing a distinct divide between the design function and the rest of the product development team.
This topic came to the forefront in a recent meeting I attended, where a Scrum Master sought insights into how design could be more seamlessly integrated into agile practices. This prompted me to consider a fundamental issue: while the roles of engineers and the command of product managers are clearly defined and recognised, the place of design in this mix is often ambiguous and undervalued.
Unlike engineers, who implement technology and have strength in numbers, or product managers, who have decision-making power, designers often find themselves alone and in a more ambiguous position. This lack of power in numbers or defined authority leads to an often overlooked power dynamic.
In the modern digital era, with technology at every turn, user experience isn’t just a critical element in business competition; it’s also become a popular buzzword. Some use it without fully grasping its implications, while others follow the trend without question. The McKinsey Design Index (MDI) study sheds light on this phenomenon, showing that successful design in business is not just about user experience. It’s a comprehensive blend of usability, functionality, and strategic implementation. Companies that score highly on the MDI aren’t just ticking boxes; they see real-world rewards. As McKinsey’s “The Business Value of Design” points out, this is reflected in their revenue and shareholder returns. Here, the emphasis is on the real, measurable benefits of weaving thoughtful design into the fabric of business operations.
Design in software development is about crafting the journey for the user, creating the unwritten narrative, an impression, and the direction of the interface. A skilled designer can craft experiences that resonate deeply with users, evoking emotions and effortlessly guiding them towards desired outcomes without the need for additional interventions. This aspect of design serves as a form of unspoken and unwritten communication, crucial in shaping the user’s interaction and behaviour with technology.
In more general terms, design is the coherent representation of approaches to achieve specific outcomes. Saul Bass, a renowned graphic designer and filmmaker, aptly described it as ‘Design is thinking made visual’. Within software development, design is then also converting the team’s abstract ideas into concrete, visual forms that can be shared and refined with stakeholders and users. So, design in software goes beyond focusing on the end product’s user experience; it also plays a pivotal role in bringing the team’s vision to life.
Product ideas, before creation, are ephemeral and require focused and considerate extraction, bringing those fuzzy notions into the real world and putting them under the spotlight. Without being sketched out, it is all a theoretical concept riddled with unknowns. Only when you bring those ideas out of the mind and into the real world can they be measured for their likelihood of success.
A team member’s role, shaped by their individual skills and experiences, creates a distinct perspective and a set of priorities. For a product designer, the core objective is to thoroughly understand and meet the needs and desires of end users, ensuring their interaction with software is effective and intuitive. This user-centric approach is pivotal for designers, but if it were the focus of every team member, the essence of a cross-functional team would be lost. However, emphasising end users does lead to another crucial point. Despite the growing recognition in industry literature that product teams should regularly engage with users, customers, and stakeholders, this practice is surprisingly not widespread.
Within a team discussion, ideas, considerations, assumptions, and priorities all jostle and compete for space in the conversation. Within this chaos, it’s inevitable that choices are made (consciously or subconsciously) about what to discuss and for how long. When you are a lone voice with a non-critical perspective, it’s easy for that perspective to be diluted in the end result.
In this whirlpool of dialogue, decisions and ideas often lack the grounding of direct user validation. Such validation is crucial; it ensures that choices reflect real user needs and are not just theoretical or assumption-based. Engaging with users provides concrete feedback, bridging the gap between what the team thinks users want and what they actually need. This missing link of user validation is key to making informed, effective decisions in product design.
The challenge for designers in product teams is rooted in how businesses prioritise and define success. Typically, a team’s focus is shaped by the business’s needs. Developers play a crucial role here; without them, there’s no software. Product managers align team efforts with business goals and provide reassurance that these goals are being met. Similarly, the operational oversight provided by roles like delivery managers or Scrum Masters is vital to ensure work is completed efficiently and within budget.
However, when success is measured solely by timely completion within budget to specific functional requirements, the need for a designer who offers more than pretty UI becomes less apparent. Designers’ true value lies in ensuring human-centric outcomes, not in completing outputs. Their contribution is in increasing the likelihood of a positive and successful outcome for the end user. In an output-over-outcome environment, designers face an uphill battle, and their input is often seen as a slowdown to completion, an increase in scope, or a ‘nice-to-have.’
Before design can be truly implemented into a product development team, how the business and teams measure the success of work needs to be rooted in human outcomes.
‘The product teams exist to serve the company’s customers in ways that meet the needs of the business.’
- Marty Cagan, Inspired
This inherently means measuring success by the outcomes for the users who use the product. After all, regardless of who makes the purchase, it is ultimately humans who use the product, and if it fails to meet the needs of those users, then it becomes a wasted investment.
In the absence of being able to shape this change in measuring success, one thing a designer or team can do to promote inclusivity and guard from marginalisation is to look at how often a whiteboard is being used to follow the flow of the conversation. As well as this, who is doing that recording and how often? What is physical is referenced and its narrative is able to be followed, thus those who record, shape the conversation. I would argue everyone on the team should become proficient in this skill as the ultimate goal is to have the whole team at the Whiteboard, rubbing things out, and adding new things. By encouraging every team member to contribute to the whiteboard dialogue, we create a visual and dynamic record of our collective understanding and are better able to visualise what we are missing. Designers, by harnessing their visual thinking tools, can effectively ensure that their perspectives are not only recorded but also thoroughly understood, standing as an essential and integrated component of the team’s collective vision.
Find out more about this topic:
Sara Wachter-Boettcher – Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you
Fabian Kleeberger – Embedding design in Agile teams
Jeff Patton – Dual Track Development: Involving The Whole Team In Discovery And Delivery
Jeff Gothelf – Lean, Agile, & Design Thinking @ Mind the Product Singapore 2019
