Product Design Handbook
We are very excited to release the Product Design Handbook in English!
Hi Product Design Handbook! Today we are excited to share our first English version of the Product Design Handbook where we share all the learnings from the last two years.s
https://productdesignhandbook.mendesaltaren.com/
This version includes two years of learnings with top-notch professionals, amazing customers and talented students.
So what is the Product Design Handbook today for us? the PDH helps us to improve onboarding new designers in the studio, standardize internal processes, achieve consistency when we create, modify and keep documents, and also integrate our teams better with other teams.
10 things that you will find relevant on this release:
- It is finally published in English for international folks
- We provide deep information on how we’re organized and work in the studio
- We explain our processes to design new products
- We discuss in detail how we work during the branding process
- We dedicate a full section to design systems (Concept, Principles, Styles, Type of elements and how we generate components, Names, Documentation examples, etc.)
- We explain in detail how we use the most popular tools in the studio (Abstract, Sketch, Figma, Zeplin, Marvel, Notion, Asana)
- We open the opportunity to get feedback and continue improving the design handbook together with you
- We provide real examples to illustrate the documentation
- We give you access to the plugin to generate automatically a style guide for design systems
- We love sharing and adding value to the worldwide design community
This is a thrilling adventure. We are growing fast and we are already 11 people in the studio (we were only two people 2 years ago), and this is forcing us to create new processes, standardize the existing ones and thinking how we can continue scaling but offering the same quality that we provide since day one. That’s why we provide an open and collaborative tool as it is the Product Design Handbook.
Improvements on how we organize our team:
We have a strong product culture in the team and we respect processes such as dailys, plannings and retrospectives.
We always force ourselves to continue improving and it can only take place putting in practice critical thinking. That’s why we use communication tools and tactics such as retrospectives and postmortem.
We also use tools such as slack and a daily bot to keep our teams informed on every project and task progress on a daily basis. Parallely we use Asana y Notion for project management internally and with customers.
Finally, Abstract also help us to improve the workflow thanks to the way it manages commits. Now we all use the same process and that’s how we have been able to:
- Take notes in a meeting
- Create new tasks
- Create a different branch with the same name of the task
- Design, save and commit
- Create a track of all the changes
- Communicate automatically the progress on the project
- Unify and centralize the work from multiple team members in one single folder
We keep record of the “how” and “what” to avoid mistakes and be aligned, that’s why the Product Design Handbook is so important to us. This gives us space and time to add value, avoiding mistakes and communication problems.
Branding and visual design
We love teaching, you learn a lot things while teaching and you also have the opportunity to meet with great emerging talent. Most of our team members teach in different schools and we have seen great interest in the way we conceive the visual design and branding. In this section, you can get access to our customers’ brief template, we explain ¨how¨ and ¨why¨ is important to make a moodboard, talk about how important is the communication and many other things.
Design Systems
Yes, of course it is one of the sections of our Product Design Handbook. Design systems for us is to define a common language. It is the first thing we share with other teams when we start a new project. In this section you will find different topics, such as what we understand for system definition or how we give names to elements (components or styles) to help us design.
We have already helped many teams from large corporations to small start-ups to solve communication problems, make their design and development process more agile and avoid discussions related to communication issues so the teams can dedicate their time to what it is truly important to them.
Today and tomorrow
We believe that every company that is willing to work efficiently needs to define processes, systemize tasks and generate a culture that involves all the previous ones. This Product Design Handbook belongs to a series of tools that we are working on to improve our team performance everyday and help improving our customers´products.
Companies such as ZARA, INDITEX, C14/SEAT, Coverwallet, JoinedApp, UEFA and many others have used or are using today our Product Design Handbook to work more efficiently.
We enjoy giving you and everyone in the community access to our knowledge. We are willing to listen and receive your feedback to continue improving our Product Design Handbook. It is located on GitHub under a license Creative Commons, so don’t hesitate to participate and send us any questions and suggestions.
Here you can find the link:
https://github.com/mendesaltaren/product-design-handbook-en
We are very thankful for your support. Thanks to you and many other people from the industry we can reach other professionals, continue improving our documentation, getting more ideas and becoming better professionals.
