You’re a designer. And you work well with the CEO.
5 ways that we can all play well with each other.
This post is in response to “You’re a designer. Not the CEO.” by Bradford Shellhammer
I am one of two designers at a little startup called Wanelo. We are a team of 35 people, including about 20 engineers. We also have a PR team, community managers, content editors, one CEO, one CTO and one VP of Product. You get the idea, there are quite a few groups of people who need to work together.
Contempt does not exist on our team. Collaboration does. And passion for the product. Every single person who works here has an opinion—not just about design, but about how it solves our users’ problems. And how we can all work together to make the most useful and engaging shopping app in the universe.
Of course we know that all humans have an appreciation for and understanding of design. The difference is that most humans find it very difficult, almost impossible, to translate that amazing thing in their minds into cold hard reality. Unless you’re Michaelangelo.
A designer has the tools to do this, but even we struggle sometimes. Design needs to be an ongoing conversation, so that together we can turn that hunk of marble into David.
The word politics is loaded. It assumes an adversarial stance. It’s the designer vs engineer, designer vs CEO. This is a flawed perspective. Designers are part of your campaign team (to use a political metaphor), they get your message out to the people.
Here are a few ways in which we can all get along and build awesome things together:
1. Communicate effectively
At Wanelo, we over-communicate.
We have a style guide and visual aesthetic, so the basic building blocks are in place, and the conversation is now about interaction and designing for the user’s journey through the app rather than the color or size of a button.
We have daily standups, lunches together and company-wide retrospectives every other week. These are all great opportunities for different parts of the company to get on the same page about goals, issues and ideas. Anyone can join standup when they have a request for help, or feedback about a specific feature that was built.
We also have hack days every other week, where designers get to work on their own ideas with engineers they might have not have worked with before.
2. Include designers in conversations not just about design
Designers don’t want to be thought of just as support staff or pixel pushers. We want to feel like we have an impact on the product.
At Wanelo we all work very closely together. Literally. I sit back-to-back with engineers, and am very interested in learning how things are built. And they are very enthusiastic about explaining things to me in a way that I can understand. We have demos by engineers on analytics, scaling, or how a specific feature was built.
The product roadmap is shared with the whole company and we are invited to give feedback. And this feedback is actually considered.
3. Don’t have 25-people-in-a-room-with-a-projector design reviews
Any designer who has been to art school understands the trauma that comes with your work being critiqued by a large group of people. School is a learning environment so this form of feedback might be appropriate (though I am strongly opposed to it), but it has no place in a company where we are all adults and can find ways to communicate in less pedantic ways.
We have a product channel in Slack where mockups are posted several times a day, and anyone is free to comment. We create clickable prototypes and walk over to each others’ desks with our phones in hand. This completely eliminates the need for a formal design review where everyone feels obligated to express an opinion.
4. Continuous feedback is oxygen for design
We have a continuous feedback loop at Wanelo. Feedback from team members while a feature is being designed, feedback through App store reviews, feedback from users at in-person user-testing sessions.
Feedback is given several times a day in bite-sized chunks. It doesn’t come down like an avalanche, burying the designer with vastly differing opinions from people who are out of touch with each other and with the product.
Being a designer is hard. We combine a subjective art with the practical realities of creating a product that people will actually use. We bare our souls several times a days with each design decision we make. Therefore it is important that the feedback we receive is constructive and backed by good reason. We are more likely to be open to it when we are not being defensive.
5. Give designers the information and support they need
Designers want to know why. They might not always ask for it, but give them all the data you can about the impact their designs are having on user behavior.
We get daily metrics reports on all our platforms via email, and specific bits of data are shared in Slack when something of note occurs. We A/B test everything because we know that sometimes we don’t have the answers. This makes design so much more about the process of continuous improvement than a silver bullet that has all the answers.
That’s what we all need to do to build amazing things together.
