How we turned our design vision into an effective strategy
…and why we’re going to do it all over again in 2024.
Introduction
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, having a vision means attaining the ability to think about or plan the future with great imagination and intelligence.
A vision can be created at any scale, be it to become the Prime Minister, to write a book or to picture your living room in a different shade of green. In each scenario you’ve signed a contract with your future self to acknowledge what you, today, will aim at. Bobby today, for example, wants the Bobby of next month to have finished writing a book; this is Bobby’s vision for the future.
Of course having a vision, no matter how grand, is useless if it remains a vision. Bobby of next month can only have finished writing his book if he continues writing today — completing the next page, and then the next chapter and so on. He must reject the distracting sliver of light emitting Strictly Come Dancing on Ice with the Stars whilst they Bakeoff in the Jungle After Marrying at First Sight during a Dinner Date, else he won’t reach his vision.
I’m going to discuss how we as a Product Design Guild set our Design Vision for the year, turning it then into a tangible Strategy; something that fixed our focus but allowed us to pivot and twist and turn to work with the complexities of the wider business and the fullness of our schedules.
I joined Student Beans around the end of October 2022. The Product Design Guild were well embedded within their squads and had a strong social culture. Though what was missing was a vision built by the team. Values had been created in the past in isolation, which means low buy-in, belief or willingness to live them, let alone refer back to them to guide design or research decisions.
Our Approach
The most important part of crafting a vision is doing it together as a team. Without everyone’s input to the vision there can be no effective long-term strategy. One may be able to force a strategy created in isolation to work in the short term, but without communal buy-in and ownership the strategy will not be able to breathe, morph, to grow or shrink alongside the shifting sands of business needs.
We arranged a 2-day strategy meet-up for January to reset, together. The key focus was to craft our Mission and Vision statements, as well as to identify what we needed to start, stop and continue doing. We ended the first day with two very strong statements.
Our Mission statement, explaining what we do today, and our Vision statement, where we want to be in the future:
Mission: We delight our users. We create big opportunities for our brands. We collaborate with everyone. Delight. Create. Collaborate.
Vision: We’re the most curious, trusted and revered team in the Product Design game.
To avoid communicating a vision with no bite to back it up, à la most world leaders, we needed to identify specific elements which could make a strategy. In other words, tangible things to make the vision real to us and understandable to others.
Using our Mission statement we determined how we delight, create and collaborate. We asked ourselves what the key ceremonies, methodologies, systems and so on are that make those things in the Mission possible. The things we identified included but were not limited to:
- The Design System
- Ideation Sessions
- Our Design Language
- UX Scorecards
- Design Tooling
Next, we focussed on the Vision statement by asking questions relating to the key verb and adjectives; Revered, Trusted and Curious.
- How might we become the most revered team in the Product Design game?
- What does reverence look like when we achieve it? Can you achieve reverence?
- How might we be the most trusted team, both internally and externally?
- What does trust look like and how is trust gained?
- How do we become and remain the most curious Product Design team?
- What does curiosity actually mean?
With those questions to focus on, we came up with some new initiatives to throw into the mix of things we identified earlier, such as:
- Having a strong external profile can help build trust, hire top talent and adds to strengthen the design community in general.
- A solid User Research Model will help improve our and the business’ curiosity.
- Building out our accessibility standards as an end in itself will help build trust, as well as keep us curious, honest and build reverence externally.
- Crafting an understandable design language will enable us to tell a story of our design decisions internally and externally, building trust for our stakeholders, adding to the design community externally to create reverence.
Objectives & Key Results
Even with all of this figured out, there is still one key step missing. We needed a high-level theme to create an annual objective. This is an important, high-level focus metric to report to senior management. What did all of these things we wanted to improve or maintain have in common? If you find the theme you find your annual objective, the tangible metric to pin your vision and all subsequent key results to, to measure your year effectively. Our themes were:
- Maturity
- User Centricity
And so the annual objectives we decided would get us closer to our Vision are:
- Raise Product Design Maturity
- Raise User centricity
We now have the building blocks of a strategy. Without these elements we are but a rudderless visionary, standing at the podium promising the world but offering no route forward.
Having our annual objectives now meant we must find a suitable key result. We opted for a maturity metric given to us by surveying the company with the NNg UX Maturity Scale survey.
Other surveys were conducted to attain the annual key results for our Raise User Centricity annual objective. With those two metrics we were then able to slot all of the initiatives, all of the reasons why and how we delight, create and collaborate, into our quarterly focuses. That looks something like this:
Conclusion
Having a vision-linked strategy means you have something with which to rally your team around, as well as something tangible to report back to the business on a monthly or quarterly basis. With the elements explained above we turned our vision into a strategy which has the space to grow or shrink, to maintain or stop, to be renewed when appropriate. The team is always focussed on the macro picture so the micro changes aren’t so daunting.
Each team member has the autonomy to join or not, any objective. They’re invited to think about their squad work and their own capacity before choosing. It’s also important to note that this system aids personal and professional growth, as the individual contributor can ask his or herself whether the design objective fits in with their own personal visions for their futures.
This year has seen greater collaboration, clarity and confidence in our Product Design Guild work. There has been less rework because of a stronger understanding of our users, thanks to our quarterly objectives focussing on raising user centricity which in turn makes us more curious; a lovely cycle going all the way back up to our vision. Our Design System revamp has fostered greater trust among the designers and other internal stakeholders, and we’re working on raising trust with the developers to an even greater degree with 101 educational classes and much more.
I look forward to getting together again with the team in January 2024 and sense-checking our vision. Are we on the right path? Does the vision or strategy need tweaking? Is there anything we’re not doing that we should be? With this collaborative medium- to long-term approach to improvement we can achieve anything —the crucial part is remembering our focus needs to be pinned to something we have all created together and we all believe in.
