Leading by Design in Enterprise SaaS
Six lessons we learned to drive meaningful change as a team
Although working at a well-funded unicorn start-up comes with rapid career growth and access to amazing resources, it also comes with a litany of unique challenges that have required continuous iteration in how we approach product design. Here’s a window into our world to share some of the approaches that have helped grow the value of design at ServiceTitan.
1. You cannot turn a battleship by running in circles
There’s a magical aspect to the first 3–6 months in most new design jobs. The challenges are fresh, the excitement high and your perspective as a designer is completely free from any existing internal company challenges. It’s a wonderful time to capture some initial energy and really bring fresh concepts to the table as the newly-hired Designer.
Then reality sets in — project stakeholders emerge from their offices, timelines and developer capacity come into play, limitations from technical debt are revealed and suddenly that revolutionary new approach becomes marred with so much process baggage that you question how anything has ever been built.
Yep, it’s just another job…you suddenly go from being a Designer to simply being a design resource. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
By learning how our design work fits within a larger product context, we’ve learned to prioritize alignment up front. We now know that deciding where we spend our design time shares the same level of importance as to what we design.
2. The myth of a “design-first” culture
Last night at Disney, Jared Spool said “Design is the rendering of intent.” I love that — kind of want to paint it on the wall — let’s break it down, as Jared would say.
If we’re saying that as Designers want to work in an “intent-first” culture, then we might actually be right where we need to be without having to stir a giant rebellion. All start-ups are intent-focused. That intent is represented by varying goals from adoption & revenue generation to market penetration & other service-oriented goals.
I’ve yet to find an actual company whose sole intent was to exist for the sake of creating good Design. That’s like saying we as humans exist to breath. It’s a functional requirement, not an end goal.
The important key is that leadership understands the impact of good Design. That alone creates the necessary space for designing with intent.
In a rocketship environment, our job is to design with purpose and intent so that we use what’s on the screen to help with problems off the screen. Many times the pixels are the easy part.
3. Doing it right vs. Doing it fast
This trade-off is at the core of every product team. We’ve learned that although it’s not always one other, more often not the key to avoiding failure is to identify the definitions of success from the start of a project.
Many smaller tasks are simply required dependencies that enable a larger objective; they may only need to follow basic usability standards in order to be effective. The art is in the recognition of these moments: the time saved* here can be applied to opportunities that deserve iteration and will have a significant impact.
In short, sometimes in a production environment doing it right is doing it fast. It might not result as a standalone portfolio piece, but it may be an integral element that allows your fellow team members to move a larger initiative forward.
*One caveat is that having an amazing DesignOps team and Design System significantly helps reduce the time it takes to execute a meaningful solution at a higher level of quality — even under the duress of tight time constraints.
4. Assessing impact on the bottom line
There have been some amazing articles citing the ROI of UX that highlight both the qualitative and quantitative factors necessary to connect design efforts to financial impact. We’re still working on creating those connections with our product ops and business intelligence teams.
In the interim, we’ve learned that measuring the consequences from the absence of design is actually much easier: analyzing customer support logs, referencing CSAT dashboards in Tableau, and/or monitoring user commentary on social channels.
Last year, we realized there was some low-hanging fruit and spotted an opportunity to create a more design-conscious workplace. We decided to start with new hires and now introduce tools like root cause analysis and elements of design thinking during new employee orientation.
We’re seeing a promising evolution company-wide via a greater allowance in project plans for research-backed problem validation. Executive level decision makers have recognized product design’s impact on business support functions like support and account management costs.
Even though it’s taken a couple of years, leading by example as a Design team has begun to have tangible effects on the quality of service we’re providing as an entire company — far beyond the realm of just product development.
5. Make pretty things that move
Sometimes you have to get people’s attention; visual design and lightweight animation chops (#principle) can help with just that. There’s no arguing that many people like to look at nice things.
The next step, however, is much more difficult — issues of scope and spheres of ownership can often result in sequential meetings, process slowdowns, feature direction negotiations and an overall loss of momentum.
Thankfully, we’ve learned to spur alignment discussions before investing heavily in the design process. Concept work can be some of the most powerful output a design team can do in terms of generating a signal from both internal and external stakeholders.
One of the takeaways is that not all work has to ship to provide value — conceptual designs often enable directional feedback that can save weeks of superfluous design effort focused on the wrong problem.
6. Skill demands change from #60 to #600
Our roles have changed drastically at each stage of growth, requiring every team member to evolve in areas of systems design, user research and more recently — service design.
Most of the businesses we serve run their processes differently than their counterparts — that’s been one of the challenges that make this work so interesting. One of the problems that we’re counting on new hires to help us solve is the puzzle of solving pixel-based problems for our users that have dependencies on the management layers that govern their workflows.
We’re learning to focus on what Jared [Spool] refers to as different resolutions: from the screen to application and organization to ecosystem. Each realm of magnification requires a different subset of skills from the UX quiver.
Overall, improving the efficacy of a digital service often requires changing more than just what’s on the screen. We’ve learned that addressing change management at an org level has become a key input in terms of understanding how to improve the overall user experience at a feature level.
TL;DR — 6 lessons learned designing for Enterprise SaaS
- You cannot turn a battleship by running in circles
- A design-first culture is often an intent-first culture.
- Doing it right sometimes means doing it fast.
- Addressing consequences due to a lack of Design helps the bottom line.
- Use visually-strong concept work to get attention & generate alignment.
- Change management is integral to the user experience for SaaS design
Thank you for reading — would love to speak with you if any of these challenges seem like something you’d want to help us solve. We’re currently hiring for Product Designers, Design Technologists and User Researchers at ServiceTitan.
