Building collaborative teams using cross-functional work processes
“What’s your design process?” is one of the most common questions you’ll get as a designer. The answer varies depending on the dynamic of your team and the culture at your job. Throughout the years, I realized that a design process is not just about your own process as a designer. It’s more about how you collaborate with the cross functional team and how you integrate your process into others.
I joined Autodesk in June 2019. At the time the process on my team wasn’t ideal, and there wasn’t a place to track what people have done throughout a project. Instead of jumping right into designing the pixels, I decided to first strengthen the foundation layer by leading the team to create a cross functional process together.
I started with defining the problems and reasons why we needed such a process, followed by presenting my ideas to the team for input and buy-in.
Problems Means Opportunities
I set up 1:1s with product, design and engineering leads to learn how they’ve been working on projects, and here are my findings:
I saw an opportunity to decrease frustrations by creating a cross functional process that enables better collaboration, see below:
Define the Process
I created a draft to show my vision of a cross functional work process, starting with product requirements all the way to engineering implementation. I set up a meeting with the leads from product, design, and engineering to get buy-in and feedback. Here’s the final breakdown:
- Project Phases
What are the requirements for product, design, content, user research, and implementation? - Status
What happens in each phase of the project? - Driver
Who drives each project phase? - Partners
Who needs to be involved as a collaborator? - Artifacts
Where can I find the links to product spec, design spec, research plan, JIRA tickets, etc.? - Goals
What to accomplish during each project phase?
While I designed this process for my own team, I encourage other teams to use it as a reference and adjust it based on their needs. It’s also a flexible and agile process — there’s no specific order in how a project should get done.
Design Kanban Board
As we started trying out the new process, I wanted something better for tracking design projects. We use JIRA at work. During weekly planning meetings, engineers will go over the Engineering Kanban board and talk about who’s working on what projects.
I had been tracking the design process, but there was no room on the Engineering Kanban to include those design projects. To solve this problem, I worked with the engineer lead who’s responsible for JIRA, to discuss how we can create a design kanban that fulfills my needs. Here’s the vision I had:
Now Design is finally one of the issue types when creating a JIRA ticket, and seeing the heart icon next to Design makes me smile every time!
Here’s what we ended up having:
Here’s how Design JIRA plays a role in Product initiatives and Engineering JIRA:
Progress Tracking
To keep the momentum going, I created a progress tracking template where each project phase can be documented, with important information such as: when did the meeting happen, who was in the meetings, the meeting’s outcome, next steps and artifact links to prototypes, etc. I used red text to indicate extra effort and green text to indicate the current stage of the project.
For example, I was once given a project without well defined product requirements. The team was struggling and having back and forth meetings on design solutions. I documented all the extra meetings, the reasons the team had to keep up with the constant changes in requirements and why it took longer than expected to get to an agreed solution; later I was able to leverage the data and discuss what the team could do better, and from there, the team ensured we had well documented product spec for all new projects. See image below:
Progress tracking page is also useful for user research. You may have been fighting for user research resources but with all the pushback the team skipped over it and jumped directly to implementation. This document will be your best friend for you to point out the fact that there was no user testing done or not enough user testing thus the risks became reality and users were not happy with the new releases.
In summary, our brains can’t keep up remembering all the details from every single project on our plate. Progress tracking works like performance review but on a team level. It makes things easier when the successes and failures of each project are documented in one place. The team can reflect, improve and become more motivated in collaborating.
Iterations
We made a few improvements while trying out the XFN process. We found out that even with well documented product spec, it was still difficult to reach the same vision. Product, Design and Engineering have different understandings about what to accomplish in product spec reviews and prototype review meetings. The meetings became inefficient, the team ran into disagreement, and it was hard to track action items after each meeting. And I became the only one to update these time consuming progress tracking pages.
Here’s what we did to solve the problems for my weekly design review meeting with the teams:
1. Meeting agenda
• Provide clear agenda ahead of time.
• Store the same type of meetings in one meeting agenda page.
• Attach agenda link in meeting invites so everyone can look at the agenda prior to the meeting.
2. Meeting notes
• Get meeting notes template from the agenda page.
• Rotate note taker, write down feedbacks and next steps during the meeting.
• Assign action items to individuals during the meeting.
3. Progress Tracking: It became effortless for me to update the progress tracking page by referring to the meeting notes and just filling in the meeting date, attaching the meeting note link and the artifact links if any.
By using this cross functional process, my team better understands the importance of each phase, from product requirements to design, user research, content and implementation; the team also has visibility to what have been accomplished, what the next steps are in each project with trackable artifact links. By integrating everyone’s unique work process into others, the team is able to align goals early on and become more proactive in communicating their needs in order to achieve the mission together.
In 2020, I look forward to seeing more collaboration, improvements and excitement on my team. The XFN work process I shared worked well on my team in 2019, I believe it will keep renovating in the new year.
What’s your process at work? If you have questions or suggestions, let’s chat!
Reference: Cover image credit
