Promoting a Culture of Design

Last time I wrote here, I introduced two big things and explained how in 2017, as a Product Design Team, we were tackling the second big thing. I also alluded to the fact that as a company we had made great strides in the first big thing. Let’s recap.

The two big things I noticed when I joined Vend was that:

1. We didn’t all fully understand Design and so we weren’t giving it enough attention and respect.
2. Our Product Designers didn’t have a clear professional development roadmap.

Last time I talked about our competency matrix, this time I’m going to talk about the strategies we deployed to help increase the Design literacy for every person in the organisation, as well move the organisation from being delivery focused, to create room for discovery.

Increasing the Design Literacy of Every Vender

At Webstock 2017, where Jared Spool talked about the UX Tipping point, he also suggested that an organisation’s Design literacy is only as strong as the weakest literacy of all decision makers. This was something we have been working on at Vend since early 2016. The goal has been to bring everyone into the fold. Make the design process something that was understood and where the value was clear.

The biggest hurdle was in conveying the understanding that design wasn’t the last step, just before development, where we spruced up a solution and made it look good. This was never an overt or malicious belief, but it came out in the words people used to praise our work: the word “beautiful”, and its synonyms, were most frequently used.

We needed to get across the idea that the value in our work was in rendering the _intent_ of our product experience. We all walk around with great intentions for what our product should be like to use; a successful design is one which shrinks the gap between that intent, and reality.

We started with creating design values, before moving on to evangelizing and inviting the rest of the organisation to look into our process.

Articulating our Design Values

The designers at Vend held an off-site and we left with 4 values. Four simple, yet extremely useful, phrases that would help us render our intent.

1. Be clear. The most important thing, always, is that retailers know what to do.
2. Be true. Consistency is one of the best (and easiest) ways to help increase the usability of your app.
3. Be friendly. Act like a person, cause you are one.
4. Be bold. Design for the next 100k retailers.

These four values have shaped the way that we review our work as a design team, and through the repetition of these values (and their accompanying sayings) these values have seeped into the culture of the rest of the organisation.

Design for the next 100k retailers has been co-opted by our larger Product team as one of their values: Build for the next 100k retailers. “But think of Jo (a persona)” — a phrase encompassing the values of Clarity and Humanity is often heard around the office. And consistency is no longer optional — it’s expected and we work hard to make it the easy choice. These become reasons that we choose to commit to work which would otherwise be seen as superfluous, nice-to-haves, or pushed to the next iteration.

Inviting the organisation, in.

We started something called a “Design Show and Tell”. These used to be weekly and then bi-weekly as we were catching up, trying to cover a torrential amount of design debt that needed to explained and shared. Now we host them whenever we have something new to share.

These are 1 hour sessions on a Friday morning. We invite members from our front-line teams (Support and Customer Success) as well as other members of the Product group (Product Managers and Product Marketing) and we walk them through a piece of work we have recently made significant progress in. We show works-in-progress, completed projects, and sometimes even ideas of the future. We also offer a live-stream on Youtube Live, so the entire organisation can watch, if they’d like, and this is also recorded and hosted for watching back later if they couldn’t make the live stream.

During Show and Tell we show the process we went through, the challenges we ran into, what we learnt from testing and feedback. We show the paths which we tried, and failed. We explain why. We show the paths which we tried, and succeeded. We explain why. Often the work we show is incomplete, and we have a great opportunity to get feedback from a wider group (this has saved our bacon a couple of times already!)

The reasons why our product is being built a certain way is shared with the wider organisation. Change is no longer a surprise to our front-line staff — they know what change is coming, and why we’re making changes. Our developers know the value of the work they are doing, and they can rest assured that it will be valuable, because we’ve already tested it.

Most importantly, though, the design process is demystified. We are no longer magicians whose work is triangulated to being something close to making things look nicer. We’re much closer to scientists. We learn about human behaviour and the ways humans interact with computers; we hypothesize about how that would play out in our product, and we test that hypothesis. Nothing has changed; this is what design has always been — but now that people see that process, they understand.

Rethinking our Organisational Structure

Near the end of 2016 our Solutions team took a look at our structure. I had gone to San Francisco to meet with Design Managers in organisations there and one of our Product Managers had also just returned from a conference. We were bringing a similar message: the way we organised our teams were very different from the way everyone else was doing it (did we have good reason for that?) and that we were possibly missing valuable influences from engineers and designers in our decision making.

It turns out we used to have a good reason to have a designer, and a group of engineers reporting to a Product Manager, but things had long since changed. Our Product Managers were being kept busy with Project Management, not Product Management and were very busy looking after engineers. Our engineers needed leadership opportunities, and they also needed to be led by engineers. Our designers felt like they were always begging for improvements, and didn’t have a stake in any decisions. We needed to reset our structure to solve a number of problems we had run into over time.

We chose a model where a designer, engineer and product manager would coalesce around a problem, and solve it. They were the Discovery team. The engineer would then take that “solution” to their engineering team, who would work with the Discovery team to get the solution dev-ready. Engineering would focus on engineering. And the Discovery team would focus on testing solutions to problems at the lowest cost possible.

The Discovery teams’ jobs are to answer questions of risk around the problem, and each risk is owned by a member of the Discovery team:

1. Desirability (Product Manager)
2. Business Risks (Product Manager)
3. Usability (Designer)
4. Feasibility (Engineer)

This solidified the role of a designer in the decision making process. It also encapsulated the design process (testing early) in our product development process (as a valuable and required part of Discovery). We now answer the “Usability” risk, before we spend money on developing anything — this has also saved our bacon at least a couple of times on just one project alone!

Thanks to the effort we put into showing what we as designers do, and demonstrating how our contribution is valuable, we were able to move the needle when the organisation was looking at adjusting our structure. In the end, we found a place in organisation that better reflected the value Design could bring.

At Vend we believe that our product will reflect the organisation of our teams and so these organisational changes are clear evidence that we’ve made headway with the first big thing: they have established design’s role in the process.