Taking Ownership as a New Grad Designer at Google

I recently had a conversation with my teammate about how to effectively present work to engineers. For my project, I originally had plans of scaffolding a few key screens in high fidelity based on the dire need on the engineering side to start implementing. If I could provide part of the design right away, they could get started on building. Before our conversation, this sounded reasonable. We have pretty tight deadlines. Engineers have the backend ready. I provide the engineers some of the design to start building on. We finish quickly.

When I told my teammate this, she asked these two key questions any designer should think about before presenting high fidelity mockups to engineering:

• Is this part (the design) the engineering team is asking of you for really central to the UI you are building?
• Would you get locked into a design?

From my perspective, high fidelity deliverables can bring up the assumption that designers have already thought through how the design works from a systematic and/or user perspective. From the engineer perspective, they start building on it, expecting the designer to continue delivering to that standard.

Ever since I started working at Google, I have been having a small predicament with load balancing. This means trying to…