Ramping up your design practice

I had the opportunity to present this talk twice this summer, both at LaProductConf in Paris and UXCamp Europe in Berlin. Here’s the summary.

Design as a profession has been fighting for recognition probably for the last decade. Designers are hungry to become active in strategic discussions within a company, but are we ready for it?

In my experience something that is missing, is Design owners. When you go and look for design job openings, you usually find designers, design leads, or heads of design jobs, but you never see design owner, contrary to what the Product organisation has.

Calling for design owners

“Be an owner” — Bertrand Jelensperger

Design and Product are fighting hand-in-hand to build better products, but so far we keep treating Product as the business-oriented side of the group, demanding from them clear data to back up their decisions and clear roadmaps and visions. But we never stop and demand the same from designers.

We keep treating designers as “that creative bunch that do the fun stuff”. But we’re not there to have fun, we’re there to work! And as designers that is the fight we need to fight: the fight to get treated seriously. And that fight should go through leading by example, through pushing ourselves and demanding from ourselves a more professional output.

Building that design ownership

Calling for machine-builders

“Build the machine” — Vinh Giang Vovan

In order to ramp-up our design practice, the first thing is to remove all unnecessary procedural churn to allow designers focus on the important work: designing.

As a manager, basically my role is to build repeatable processes within repeatable cycles supported by durable relationships to stabilise teamwork.

Repeatable processes mean having a clear input flow that we ask from the other teams in order to satisfy expectations. Sometimes as designers we receive poorly specified briefs which cause a poorly designed product or an incredible loss of time and energy redesigning the product. As designers it’s our responsibility to declare upfront what we need to work, how we need it, and what other teams can expect from us.

Repeatable cycles is only the organizational branch of it. If teams around us know when and how in advance they should contact us as designers, last-minute requests will vanish. Once again, our responsibility to demand that time and show the advantage of it.

Durable relationships concern office politics and how we achieve the buy-in of all stakeholders. Designers must have, as part of their skillset, a communication and evangelizing arm, ready to defend their designs through arguments.

Teamwork is all about knowing your place and your playbook. Where relationships are the external facade, teamwork is about the internal team politics and expectations. As a design team we must not only have a playbook, but to know it, acknowledge it and use it to our advantage to minimise churn.

Calling for storytellers

“If it is difficult to explain, it is difficult to understand” — Vincent Roussilhon

Part of our fight for recognition must go through evangelising. We need to get out there, tell our story and explain why design is important. In order to get the buy-in to build that machine (recruit, spend time organizing it, etc.) there must be a clear story of wins that will be caused by that machine.

But stories in the professional world should be non-fiction. We can’t invent those stories and need to back them up with data, and by data I mean simply knowledge: of our users, our market, our context, our situation and capabilities.

Calling for data scientists

Design without data is destined to be an exchange of opinions.

Many times I’ve found that designers base themselves on “buzzwords and common sense”. They backup their design on “what our competition is doing”. They get inspired and “if it works for Facebook, should work for us”. And, sometimes without knowing it, these designers are harming our profession.

As long as we keep doing design based on common sense, anybody will feel they can do it

The problem with common sense is that it doesn’t explain our decisions. It doesn’t show our science and, above all, it doesn’t show why we should be the designer and other people shouldn’t.

And don’t get me wrong, common sense is not the same as informed decisions or information from experience. Common sense is that thing that “we should all know”, is wild guesses, is uninformed deductions.

Lisa Wade for Time magazine wrote a great article about how the lack or difference of common sense between men and women are slowing women down. Common sense is what makes us say: “Toilet paper is running low, let’s buy some more”, but that proof of common sense usually comes from wome, Wade says. And if common sense can make such a difference at home, imagine the harm it can make when discussion professional issues.

So, designers, collect your data and debrief it. Debriefing is key to get the buy-in from stakeholders, debriefing is key to have accountable data that noboy can challenge. As long as our teams agree on the methodology and results we got, data can’t be challenged.

Calling for design professionals

Let’s stop playing to be designers and start being professional designers

There are similarities between Lebron James and myself.

Differences: He is a 2.03m high professional basketball player and I’m a 1.72m high professional designer.

Similarities: We have both been playing basketball for years.

The main difference is the professional aspect of that. As a professional, Lebron practices everyday to become better, he understands his strengths and weaknesses and above all he consciously practices to over come his weaknesses. I’ve never been so disciplined in my basketball practice.

But as a professional designer, it should be my responsibility to do those same three things at my level.

You can find the slides of my talk on slideshare