Beyond Designing Products: Connecting Dots by Cross-Functional Collaboration
Design Skills — It’s a super power. With it, we can visualize anything to enhance the communication and intentions. Here at Sumo Logic, Rohan Singh, Rocio Lopez, Jason Eaglin, Himanshu Kapoor are the designers with amazing UX skills, UX Researchers Bret S, Aona Yang who enlighten us with the research and testing, Rebecca Sorensen and myself are the Product Designers with visual skills, and we have a visual designer in Marketing, Jen, who creates beautiful collaterals for customers to experience Sumo outside of the product.
While our Design team is developing product and talking about the next OREO flavor we should try, we also invest our time in cross-functional collaboration. We can be making SWAG for an event one day, and another day we can be creating diagrams for the Sales Engineering team. We are so popular!
One day, I was assigned to create a Customer Journey Map. I assumed everyone in the company had seen the spreadsheet version of it, and thought that was enough. But later, we came to realize that visualizing the Journey was extremely beneficial for not only myself as a new hire, but also for other teams to understand how our team empathized with the customers who experience Sumo. Currently, the Customer Journey is used cross-functionally to plan, prioritize and communicate with user focus. Who thought a cute poster would help out this much?
Since then, I participated in many cross-functional projects and I wanted to share some takeaways with you today.
The Benefits
Special Bonding Experience
I think this is a privilege that creators have with other people. It may not be simple and easy, but you get to engage in a very meaningful interaction with them because you have to immerse yourself in their world. For example, even though we are one company, each team has a subtle difference in their team culture and structure. Some may be more execution-focused, that they need a perfectly finished deliverable by a hard deadline. Others may be exploration-focused which allows us to iterate on versions of design throughout the quarter.
Minding the Gap
When you immerse yourself in their world, you get to pick up on what they understand about that same product you are working on. Then you will start to discover opportunities to fill the gap and execute designs that are more valuable to both you and the collaborator. If you can dig in further, you may start to see how the team dynamics may create the gaps. This maybe the most enlightening part, because you and the collaborator will realize the amount of opportunity that may enhance the internal communication between teams.
At the End of the Day, you Always Get to Delight Them
You get to demonstrate the benefits of having a designer around. But most of all, you get to see everyone’s face light up when they see the finished work.
The Challenges
Managing Requests
You’ll hear people say “OMG that Service Topology Diagram is on fire!” When other people hear this, everybody will come to you for your super powers! It’s a good problem to have. But you don’t want to accept or reject projects without regarding the resource and time. There may be some questions you want to ask before, like: Do they have a specific deliverable they need, or is the idea open-ended? Do they have a vendor or tool we must use? Where is the budget coming from and how will this be paid? — and last but not least, do they have a deadline?
Don’t be a Design Robot
Creative integrity bites back if you ignore it! It’s easier if you just execute things as requested but as a Product Designer, use your best judgement to represent the company. How are the deliverables going to be used? Do you need to create a guideline to avoid the misusage? Are there any stakeholders or teammates who may have important feedback that may change or stop the direction of the project? Because if Joe from the Sales Team asks you to design a company whoopie cushion to thank customers, you have to stop it with all your heart and pixels.
Wear Your Perfectionist Hat
For physical deliverables, it would be best to account for a sample check. If you have a tight deadline, always set the expectation with the collaborator and maybe have a backup plan, setting the expectation really saves a lot of heartbreaks, and the back up plan could ease the pain. Another important part of the collaboration is to over-communicate. They might think “What a bug-a-boo!” but in the end, you’ll be happy about avoiding an expensive mistake.
As a product designer, collaborating with different teams allows you to broaden your view about the work that happens beyond your team, and there are countless benefits to acquire their perspectives.
In our case, the Sales Engineering Team showed us how they explain data collection to their prospective customers by using a data diagram that is being designed by us. For the second phase, we will have our company specific diagram kit so that any SEs in Sumo Logic can create a more personalized diagram for their specific customer.
We learned that the Customer Success team in collaboration with the Marketing team are some of the most talented and hard working teams for coding their own portal, filming, editing and publishing tutorial videos by themselves. In order for them to move fast with their projects, we serialized the design with our color swatches for their certification programs, cheat sheets and training topics. The design principle is currently being used in their collaterals to have distinguishable visuals following color usage rules.
The design delivery discussion with the People team always gets a little complex when we discuss the logistics to include our teams in remote places. But we keep our stamina to strive for inclusiveness. When you see that they even think about baby onesies to match their expecting parents shirts, and water bowls for the fur babies, you know they really care about the people.
Our visual communication and culture initiative could not happen without our IT and Facilities team. We learned so much about what to be aware of when we are exploring and ideating the deliverables. They helped us with a visual communication initiative by preparing and installing a large monitor so we can better communicate and raise awareness of our Hackathon to other teams in the company.
If you are ever in a situation where you will be designing for another team, take it and run with it. Not only do you get to delight them with great ideas and designs, but it will be a meaningful exercise that will allow you to gain more empathy toward other teams. They may have a slightly different agenda than yours, but it’s up to you and your creativity to connect those dots for the better.
