🧭 Navigating a mess

🧭 Navigating a mess

Context

Fast growing teams. No clear processes. Ever changing priorities and roadmaps. Designers being deeply integrated in the cross-functional teams struggle to find time to support each other with the meaningful feedback and align on the overall design direction. Quite common, right?

There are some key elements to focus on in order to empower designers to drive design process and decisions, as well as to help company integrate design thinking and customer consideration across organisation:

  • Leadership

  • Processes

  • Principles

  • Design thinking

  • Knowledge share

  • Growth and scaling up

The order of these key points is not random and is important — we can think of it as of building a pyramid:

Or maybe even of building a layered cake 🤩

You can't put a cherry on the top if there is no top yet. Or, if you still decide to put that cherry now, not waiting for other layers, it won't be a cherry on the top anymore — it will be something else. And maybe it's not as bad, but you definitely need to understand what that is now and how it affects the initial recipe.

And to be honest, I like that cake analogy better as we can also think of the cream in between the cake layers as the overall company culture and relationship in the teams — something that glues everything together or can completely ruin the final cake if is not in balance or even worse — toxic.

But let's discuss those key points in details.

Leadership

To initiate any kind of action you need to have someone responsible for the action as well as the expected outcome — an owner, a leader.

Want to know a secret? In case you think there is no leader in certain topic, and feels like no one cares so you have to take care of it — congratulations, the leader is you! Maybe unwillingly, not officially, probably without any recognition or support, but it's you. You're welcome.

Why finding a leader is a first thing you need to do? Because for all the following steps you will need to have a clear driver, the go-to person, enabler, protector, and advocate, whether it's the same person or not. And yes, it doesn't have to be one person — you can split responsibilities of this role between person managing designers and designers themselves. Though it would make it harder to align in vision and expectations, as now it's not a single source of truth, but several people whose decisions may depend on each other a bit too much, and proper alignment would require extra time and efforts.

And of course the leader should be the person you trust to. Sometimes they will have to (and should be able to) make a decision or give an answer quickly, without a need to consult with you. So make sure the leader is a cultural fit* and shares company values, goals, and the overall strategy.

*I've seen examples of when the leader (also a hiring manager) wasn't a cultural fit, but was able to freely hire more people in their team. As you can guess, this team wasn't performing as expected and was constantly bringing issues of the different scale and importance to the rest of the department. It's easier to prevent than to deal with.

Principles and guidelines

You have the leader and clear processes the design team is following. The leader keeps an eye on if there is a need to optimise or adjust anything, and helps to make sure design processes are considered and respected by other domains, and no one pushes designers to skip or ignore important steps. But in order to empower designers to make better informed decisions, they need to understand the key principles the leader and the company follow. This way they'll be able to react quickly, take on more responsibilities, and grow.

Principles can be grouped by the scale, connection to the business or design, design process stage, etc.

For example, earlier stages of the design process are normally more focused on the idea and the opportunity, not the solution itself. So you can base one of the principles on the main company value (e.g. enabling customers to achieve something)". And in case a designer is exploring ideas, this will be one the filters they can apply — does the idea contribute to or improve the way customers achieve something?

Another example can be more design driven. Let's say your product is all about content, so one of the principles can be something like "Readability first". This will allow designers to make decisions on the layout, font size, font style and so on, and to better advocate for their designs in later discussions with the rest of the team.

You can see what your designers and organisation struggle with the most and build or adjust principles based on that.

Design thinking and customer consideration

By defining core processes and principles, design leader takes off a lot of stress from the designers themselves — they know their path is clear and is designed considering their needs, is respected by others, and matches the overall company needs. And it's a great opportunity to load designers with something else. Yay!

So the most natural next step is to actually let designers dig deeper into the reasons behind product and design decisions, to build better understanding of the customers and business needs, as well as the technical possibilities and limitations.

This will allow designers to better contribute during the discovery phase, thereby helping to shape the product. Also, this will allow designers to bring stronger arguments to any following conversations with any other teams.

This will lead to designers gradually gaining more trust and attention. Design as a function will be more considered by others and this will be a perfect time for the next step ↓

Knowledge share

When designers are finally aligned in their vision and understanding of the design function within the company and this specific product, it's a great time to spread the word of how others can benefit and get the most out of collaborating with designers.

Yes, all departments can and should be interested in reaching out to the design team. As a result of all the in-depth user interviews and testing, as well as benchmarking, related data analysis, observations, and so on, design team happens to have lots of the different insights on the different parts of the product. And anyone should be able to access that data.

You can organise both passive and active knowledge sharing, meaning organising a documentation / data base of the insights, or set up some knowledge sharing sessions.

Documentation can live in Confluence, Slack channels, or fancy tools like Airtable or similar. Just find the optimal way considering the scale of your company and how much you can invest into maintaining this.

Speaking about the knowledge sharing sessions, make sure right insights reach right audience. You can group insights by department or project and send invites to the sessions accordingly. Or this can also be a newsletter.

Just start with something, and you can always improve later.

Growth and scaling up

To properly plan how to invest and scale design resources, you really need to make sure the previous steps are complete. And the key word is properly. To properly plan. Of course you can hire more designers at any stage of building the team, but you need to onboard them. And good onboarding usually covers:

  • what are the processes;

  • what are the expectations and opportunities;

  • what are the goals of the projects and the product in general;

  • what is the toolset and how to use it in the most optimal way;

  • how and where to get feedback;

  • how to pass the probation and make sure the company is a good place to stay at.

... and of course other ones depending on the seniority of the designer.

And please don't think that if you hire a Senior person you can leave them dealing with all of that on their own. They of course can make themselves busy, but can you be sure they will follow your company values? Will they be developing? Which direction?

Get prepared for taking a new person in your team and help your company to be a better place for designers to join, learn, and contribute to the product growth.

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