Empowering Design Teams Through Crit Ops
As a rapidly growing discipline, Design Program Managers are quickly becoming integral to product design teams’ operational success. DPMs are resourceful generalists who specialize in helping their teams solve product problems, often related to process efficiency, communication strategies and culture building.
This past half I partnered with 2 managers in my organization to solve key problems in our weekly “crit“ that touched all 3 of those areas: improving a process, enforcing stronger communication and building a stronger culture of feedback.
What is Crit?
Crit is a dedicated time for content strategists, product designers and UX researchers to get together, share work, and give each other feedback. The 3 main goals of crit are to:
- Help team members solve problems
- Support team members’ growth as practitioners
- Build a stronger, more connected team
Crit is integral to product teams’ ability to move fast, drive design quality and ultimately ship great customer experiences that deliver business and user value.
What Was the problem?
Process inconsistency and misunderstood expectations across all teams of the organization had often led crit to become inefficient and frustrating for its attendees. What was supposed to be a place for problem solving, promoting growth and team building, crit lacked consistent norms, clear guidance about presentation set up and scope as well as trained facilitators to guide the meeting.
How Did We Solve?
Given the ability of DPMs to help design teams improve their operational success, these problems were ripe for the taking.
To start, I created a task force with myself and 2 team managers to establish a project brief compromised of the issues we were facing, goals we hoped to achieve and a plan to make it happen. To better understand the issues and opportunities in front of us we interviewed team members and participated in other teams’ crits to establish a baseline and ideas for what makes a successful crit.
Once the baseline was established, we were able to see the gaps in our team crits and work towards addressing them. As the team DPM, my primary responsibility was to drive the effort, including how to approach the gaps, manage the scope of work, establish the timeline and, ultimately, ensure we could measure success. Over the course of the half we set to work on documenting process, guidelines and standards that ultimately resulted in a crit toolkit focused on 3 key areas:
Facilitator Guidelines
Crafted to establish consistency of facilitation practices as well as documentation of the best practices a strong facilitator follows, from setting an agenda to keeping the meeting discussion on track.
Crit Process & Standards for Readiness
A set of norms to guide a successful crit, including standards for understanding when work is ready to be shared and how to do so as well as expectations for attendees, including how to deliver strong feedback to presenters.
Expectations for Sharing
Direction on setting up work to be shared at crit, including illustrating the problem to solve, outlining what success looks like and how to ask for specific feedback.
With the toolkit complete, the final step was to drive organization understanding and adoption. To ensure operational excellence, I owned the communication process, which involved creating a roll out plan that included the following:
- Presentation to the team manager group for feedback
- Detailed posts about the task force efforts and results to our organization
- Socializing the improvements in weekly team meetings
- Piloting the toolkit in crits
- Ongoing efforts to stay aligned with the task force to monitor crit health and continue to develop it as a practice
As we’ve closed on the half, I’m happy to share that the toolkit has been met with acceptance and success in the organization. We’re finding ourselves more prepared, more efficient and our crits are happier. As a DPM, I’m proud of the value I brought to the program- driving process change with key partners to ensure the team can get the most out of our operations.
