Moving from a small team to a big team — the biggest takeaways for a Product Designer
Towards the end of last year, I moved from a small company of 15 people to Fanduel Group which currently employs over 1000 people.
I wanted to reflect on my experiences as a new Product Designer in such a big company, looking at how I adjusted to a much larger team structure and adapted to the changes that came with it.
Attitude to UX & Design
In my experience working in small companies, people like the idea of User Experience Design. They like the concept of tapping into their user base to find out how to make a better product that can reach a wider audience and increase acquisition. The idea is good, the concept is appealing and in theory, this sounds like a great opportunity to grow a small company.
However in practice, it doesn’t always work like this; investing in user research costs time, effort, and money, users don’t always say what you want to hear and often you find that the product you’ve already produced, or the product you want to produce, just isn’t hitting the mark in terms of user needs or value, meaning that you might need to entirely rethink your strategy.
These things can be discouraging and expensive for a small company and often, they’ll take the “parts” of UX and Design that validate their opinions the most and disregard those that require a higher amount of effort to rectify.
I found the biggest challenge as a UX designer in a small company is increasing buy-in and trying to educate and convince key stakeholders in the importance of a truly user-centred approach, essentially “trying to make UX happen” when there’s a lot of push-back. For an experienced designer, this can be an opportunity to build a UX and Design team from the ground up, but realistically it can take a long time to change opinions and cultivate a workplace environment where UX and Design are even considered a core part of the business.
FanDuel Group has dedicated teams for the Product Design, UX Research, and UX Writing aspects of user experience. Part of the appeal of working at FanDuel was that UX already has a seat at the table, they already have buy-in and stakeholders have actively seen the value in pursuing a product with a user focus, meaning that more time and effort can be put into creating good user experiences and less time and effort into trying to convince colleagues to see the value. There are still times where getting buy-in is important and you might need to reiterate the importance in the work you’ve done, but there’s a lot more respect for the discipline and a lot more open questions like “What do you think of this? If there were no business goals, how would you design this for users? I want to know your opinion.” These kinds of questions from senior stakeholders allow for a much more open discussion around the best way of doing things and are key in creating a product that users want to interact with.
Trust in your peers expertise
This observation ties into the Paradox of Specificity. This important aspect of UX Design roughly states that creating products for a more specific audience results in solutions that end up being useful for a broader set of needs — basically, products that do one thing extremely well are more successful than those that do many things to a mediocre standard.
My belief is that having people with higher levels of expertise within a narrower skillset field result in a higher quality of produced work, and a more efficient way of working. In a larger company, like FanDuel Group, it is possible to have a wider range of specified roles and means that you can trust your peers to do a great job at what they do, with no notion of micromanagement — everyone trusts everyone else to do their work in a way that works best for them.
This is definitely more difficult to achieve in small companies where employees often need to become a “jack of all trades”, with a wide range of skills but lacking the top tier levels of expertise in any one particular field. It’s not a bad thing, and realistically it’s how small companies need to operate in order to get the most out of their limited pool of employees, but it’s quite an adjustment to move from this mindset into a more independent way of working, where you’re left to formulate your own decisions and work at your own pace to meet milestones. Without being “checked up on” or being distracted by miscellaneous tasks spanning a wide range of day-to-day roles, you’re treated like professionals and as such, are expected to (and have a desire to) live up to this expectation.
Meetings and presenting
This was the biggest adjustment for me, when starting at FanDuel Group. Being a globally distributed team means there can be a lot of meetings and a big part of a Product Designer’s role is presenting work. Sharing work early and often, rationalizing your design choices and being able to back those choices up with reasoning, research and analytics is a key part of presenting at FanDuel Group which was an area I needed to adapt to and become confident in.
It’s not that I didn’t present work within my previous roles, or that I didn’t show my work in progress and rationale my choices, it was just a lot less frequent, the work was often more “polished” and targeted towards either engineering, or a high value stakeholder/client audience. Getting used to showing “proofs of concept”, mock-ups and initial ideas for critique in very unpolished presentations without practice and preparation time, was definitely something to get used to and has helped me to let go of the desire to only show “completed” designs, to which feedback will almost certainly come too late. It’s also great for developing your confidence, improving communication and public speaking skills and in general becoming more proficient in expressing well informed design outcomes.
Time spent on projects
Probably the biggest contrast I noticed when joining FanDuel Group, when compared with the fast-paced, small agency environment, was the length of time spent on a specific piece of work. From initial discovery sessions to it being shipped and appearing in one of our products.
However, this is actually something I have really come to value as you’re afforded the time to “deep dive” into a solution, fully exploring the scope of it, test out a wide range of options, finding out what could and couldn’t work, discarding ideas that fail in practice, researching and exploring edge cases.
Having an established design system allows less time needing to be spent at a component level and more time on critical UX thinking to solve large scale problems for millions of users. Projects are given the time to add value for our users and as such reduce the fallout from releasing potentially flawed features that users neither want or need.
Personal development and growth
Career progression is a tangible thing within FanDuel Group, the UX & Design team have an established career path that is at the heart of many conversations with line managers and senior team members. While it can feel there are more steps to take when you work within a bigger team structure — I am surrounded by a large group of people that come from different backgrounds and professional experiences with varied skill sets that I can learn from. People seem really open to sharing the knowledge that they have.
There’s also a strong emphasis within FanDuel Group towards learning and development, through our bi-weekly day of 10% time, team lunch-and-learns, department knowledge share sessions, conference attendance, or undertaking online courses. That’s not to say that there wasn’t an element of learning and development in my previous roles, but when workloads are in a constant state of extreme flux and you’re a sole UX Designer, the opportunity for self-development has to be very self-driven with development occurring outside of work hours and progression opportunities sought out rather than encouraged.
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed adapting to a different working environment and picking up the skills required to communicate and present designs to a much larger team, work on projects on a much larger scale and become comfortable with UX problem solving for a vast user base. FanDuel provided a great onboarding experience for me in order to become familiar with the design processes in place and establish a strong foundation for personal and professional growth within the company.
