Building a super-charged product design team
Designers are expected to do a lot of different functions day to day. Product Designers are expected to be generalists–knowing all kinds of forms of design application–and that works well within a small team when you’re shipping features fast and have a lot of ground to cover, but can start to fall short when you’re designing at scale with a higher focus on quality.
As you scale a design team does it make sense to have the same expectations as the problems get deeper? Do you want to take what you have and scale it up linearly, or do you want to make your team exponentially better?
When scaling your team: It’s time to bring in the specialists.
If you think about what a Product Designer does it can roughly be broken into four major camps:
- Research
- Content
- Visual design
- User-centric problem solving
Every exceptional Product Designer can do all these things. They know to talk to customers and collect data; they can wireframe and solve UX problems; they can build style guides and implement usable UI; and they can write copy (No lorem ipsum please!). And while those skillsets allow a designer to ship great work and have huge impact on a business — being so general means you don’t have the depth that a specialist might have. And not every designer has the same skillsets or can go deep in all aspects of design. Each branch is like a power-pack that can be added on to their core functions. Bringing in specialists can help supercharge those fringe areas and allow them to reach their highest potential.
The goal with specialists isn’t to take away the exterior functions like Research or Content, but to increase their ability to deliver within those areas with the help of a dedicated advocate. This allows a lot of osmosis and knowledge transfer between generalists and specialists – making each side better.
When scaling a design team it comes time to start thinking more deeply about different functions of design.
Here are the roles and functions that I like to bring into a team as it grows. This is the order I would generally look to bring specialists into an org to benefit your Product Design team, but I think it depends on finding the right people through opportunistic hiring, and also the priority of business outcomes. Hiring different specialists can be very situational to your company. A business that’s oriented around analytics likely needs a lot of data visualization designers, where as other companies might need more Illustrators or Researchers depending on their desired outcomes.
UX Researchers
To do research and dig deep into your users frustrations, needs, and behaviours.
UXR can have a HUGE impact early on in a company. At Shogun UX Researchers were our 9th and 10th hire on the design team, and honestly we may have been late on that. I would suggest bringing UXR into the company within the first 12–18 months to help bring in the user’s voice early in the design process, if not sooner.
Customers drive your business and having a direct connection to them is one of the most important driving factors in success. I do think you can supplement research by tapping the support team. People in support roles also make great researchers (among other UX roles) if you can grow them into it.
It’s important that the feature designer still be involved in research. The UXR department can’t be a silo office where requests go in and results come out. A good UXR team will collaborate with each Product Designer to help them get better results out of the research they want to do. Building frameworks and process to enable the entire team to conduct or be involved in all manners of research.
Expect Researchers to help you with surveys, customer interviews, and identifying the team’s customer assumptions and gaps in customer knowledge.
Content Designers
To have big impact through content strategy.
UX Writer/Content Strategist/Content Designer. Whatever you end up calling them they are one of the most mystifying roles on the design team. Words? Do they really matter?
I like to say a Content Strategist is a designer; they just use language instead of visuals. Content and Design have a storied history over decades. In advertising every art director was paired with a writer to bring the marriage of art and copy into beautiful and functional ads. This has been mostly lost as the internet-age designers came into their own and lorem ipsum plagued too many a design. But content is having a huge revival and can play a very impactful role in modern software design. As flows get more and more complex being able to guide users through your app by utilizing the correct language, as well as having great help center articles and optimized copy can drive revenue and conversion as much as visual or UX design changes, and content designers often have a UX and product-mindset that allows them to own user journeys throughout your apps. It’s more than inserting the right words; it’s considering user’s and their journeys through your entire product offering.
Expect the Content team to work on user-journeys, copy/brand voice and tone, and elevate the language of your software to bring customer clarity and conversion.
Systems Designers
To enable everyone to ship consistent design quickly, and be aligned with brand.
Systems have been a hotly debated department in recent years across tech. At a certain size you need a team that is a champion for UI changes. This team needs to be cross-functional and have at least one front-end developer or UX Engineer. The team should act in a service capacity for the rest of the design and engineering team.
Controlling the visual and UI design for your product(s) should eventually fall onto a team that can provide usable patterns and frameworks for everyone to design within. Systems also enables less traditional design roles (like Content, PM etc.) to make direct changes without the direct involvement of a Product Designer or even an Engineer.
Systems teams can exist of UI Designers as well as UX Engineers that build components allowing other front-end engineers to move faster and follow guidelines more efficiently. It’s a collaborative role that exists between design and engineering allowing both to move fast, but I think it should belong within the mandate of the design team.
Expect the Systems team to provide a framework for other designers (and other departments) to consistently ship features without breaking the core philosophies of your design patterns, and focus on things like accessibility.
UX Architects
To make sense of complicated user-flows, IA, and focus on user-journeys.
UX problem solving is at the heart of what all Product Designers do. It’s their main achievement and their strongest talent. This is definitely the last specialization that needs to come in to a cross-functional design team, and in a lot of cases won’t be needed at all or until the company is at a very late stage. At some point it can help to have one person thinking deeply about how your product all connects together… but UX problem solving is the core of what a product designer should be spending their time on. Product Designers themselves bring this specialty to the table and don’t need the support they could use in the other areas listed here.
Often this specialization can be wrapped into the role of a Principal Designer on your team, as they’re focusing on truly deep problems, and Information Architecture and UX frameworks can fall into their mandate very easily.
Expect UX Architects or a Principal Designer to own Information Architecture for your product(s) and specialize on deep thinking around user-flows and user-journeys that connect multiple features, business units, or products.
There are also other specialties that can make sense to bring in situationally like an Illustrator if you rely heavily on that form of communication, or someone with micro-interaction skills, animation, sound design, and other niche skills as it aligns with your product and business goals. These are simply the four disciplines that can help super-charge your existing product designers and elevate your product.
Specialists can be a bit more of a task to hire as you need a really good balance of someone who is able to execute their craft while also becoming an advocate for their discipline by creating a process for advising the team and building sustainable frameworks.
At Shogun we have some or are recruiting for most of these positions, and starting to think about how the team scales and connects to each other as we grow further. No matter what the implementation of generalists and specialists is a healthy dose of diverse opinions is sure to supercharge productivity and efficiency to design orgs of any size.
