“Prototype” vs “Prototype” — Breaking Down and Rebuilding Our Understanding of What We Do

Proposed presentation for the DesignOps Summit conference

This is the proposal I submitted to the DesignOps Summit for 2019. I’m early in my journey to learn and apply DesignOps within our multidisciplinary design team. I am starting small and sharing out what I learn about DesignOps with the broader company wide user experience community as I go.

Presentation Description

Re-orgs are inevitable, where the first pain point people encounter is terminology clash. It may feel trite to discuss labels when there are bigger issues to tackle, except that words matter. Words represent processes, methodologies, philosophies, and our values.

In this talk I’ll share our story, of two multidisciplinary design teams merging into one. Our pain points, and the exercises we used to break down barriers and create a new team skills framework for talking with each other about what we really do. Learn how to lead your team from affinity diagram to building a bespoke skills wheel self-assessment.

FYI

This talk builds upon a talk from the 2018 DesignOps Summit by Jason Mesut: Shaping Design, Designers and Teams. I applied some concepts from his methodology into our exercises and approach. As such it is a case study of how good things happen when you apply learnings from the DesignOps Summit to a team.

Case Study Outcomes

Because of the direct translation from the team affinity diagram to the team skills wheel diagram, we had team buy-in to engage people with the self-reflection skills assessment. Without this hands-on process, the conversation could have easily devolved into a critique and distrust about the framework.

Using the same skills framework across disciplines helped us see and internalize how in the big picture we’re more similar than we are different. It also helped people express their individuality of skills and growth area desires, utilizing the framework as a way to discuss career growth with their managers.

What’s in a Title?

The title could very well be “design” vs “design”—another terminology clash we had early on. “Prototype” vs “prototype” is based on a specific discussion I had with my manager where we had widely different views about what can be considered a prototype.

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Design Strategy, User Experience Design, Interaction Design, DesignOps

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