Design team in a product triad
When setting up a design team to be successful, you must look beyond the team itself and at the environment the team will operate in.
Successful design leaders remember that design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Even the strongest design teams will struggle to make an impact if they aren’t aligned to the larger business culture or account for how other teams operate.
Below is a example of how I am leading my design team by addressing the culture and environment around my team and seizing the opportunity to reset expectations for the role of design.
The Problem
Designers were often “catching” work requests from product managers or business stakeholders, rather than helping to identify user problems that could be solved by design.
Experience designers and content designers were relegated to designing interfaces and screens that were already mapped out by requesters, rather than helping to identify the problems that needed to be solved and exploring multiple ways to solve the problem.
Researchers were limited to focusing on late-stage usability testing, and then only to validate decisions requesters had already made.
This way of working set the expectation that the design team was primarily an execution team, rather than a strategic partner who could help product managers and stakeholders identify ways to create value for the business and users. It was also made it harder to retain highly-productive team members who were looking to play a larger role.
The Opportunity
Large changes in leadership, team structure and company philosophy beyond my design team created an opportunity to redefine expectations for our team. These changes included:
A change in senior leadership of the product team we partnered with.
An increased technology investment into our business channel, growing the engineering team by 50%.
The beginning of a company-wide shift towards a product operating model.
These changes, all happening in the span of a few months, reset the environment the design team operated in and created an opportunity to reframe how other teams worked with design.
Establishing a shared perspective amongst leaders
To accomplish this, I first invested in increasing visibility into the design team for new leaders coming to the channel. I met with them regularly one-on-one, invited them to observe users and interview stakeholders together, and invited them to design critiques with my team.
These interactions accomplished a few things:
Other leaders began to see how when a design team was limited to executing a prescribed solution, it was limiting the opportunity to discover the best solution through user research, critique and iteration.
It built trust that we had a common view into our users and their problems.
Ultimately, this reframed the role of the design team in our new product management leader’s eyes and helped him see the value in organizing his team to be a stronger partner for design.
Moving towards a shared team org
Establishing this shared culture and values with other leaders was critical. They became advocates for the kind of environment that would support user-centered product design.
A significant input to that environment is the shape and structure of our collective teams.
Prior, our product management, design and engineering teams were organized in different ways. This created silos that forced design and engineering teams to operate like a service organization intaking requests, and it inhibited collaboration and product discovery.
We addressed these silos by committing to organizing our teams along the same lines to encourage collaboration and shared accountability of delivering outcomes.
We reviewed our user research, digital product experiences and business processes to align on the shared view of the user journey, including stages and jobs-to-be-done.
We established workstreams and desired outcomes for each stage in the user journey.
We identified product, design, and engineering leaders responsible for delivering the outcomes asked of each workstream.
We built cross-functional teams of product managers, designers and engineers, with each reporting to their functional lead in the workstream.
Due to staffing constraints, we positioned content designers and design researchers outside the cross-disciplined teams. This allowed them to report to their own functional leadership while still being embedded into the workstream, operate a higher altitude to tie threads across the mission, and balance their own IC work with creating templates to help other roles to manage simpler content and research requests themselves.
Our hypothesis is that setting up our teams in this fashion will change the way these teams work together for the better.
Team members will understand who to partner with, what their roles and responsibilities are, and can develop closer partnerships and working arrangements.
Cross-discipline product teams will share accountability for outcomes of their work, and they’ll have the autonomy to establish ceremonies like research share-outs, design critiques and stakeholder demos as needed.
Design team members and engineering leads will be able to join product managers in product discovery work because they are not balancing work from multiple requesters.
We are still early in this journey, and we will continue to tweak the shape and structure of our teams as we learn what works and what doesn’t.