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September 7 - October 28, 2018
literal. Great design work takes space — places to collaborate, whiteboards for sketching and ideation, walls to show work. And those spaces should be permanent, places where the team works and sees their work all around them. Not only does this encourage continual engagement from the team itself, such spaces enable people outside the team to quickly connect with the work. It literally demonstrates openness and transparency.
And instead of having occasional big share-outs (that require preparation that takes time away from productivity), these spaces support frequent lightweight check-ins. This keeps the work on track, because if it begins to veer off-course, it is quickly corrected.
Ironically, though, designers often resist practices and policies meant to streamline their work, concerned with how it may inhibit creativity.
Use these 12 qualities as guidelines for assessing a design organization. Have all the team members score the organization against each quality, and use the results to identify areas that need work. By making it an inclusive, whole-team activity, you ensure that responsibility for improvement is shared by everyone, further strengthening the team’s bond.
As the team grows, if something isn’t done about this structure, everyone will report to one boss, and there will be one undifferentiated mass of designers trying to work together. That is not sustainable.
While each product or feature, considered on its own, might be better than what had come before, when pulled together with adjoining products, all those decisions that made sense in isolation end up causing cracks in the overall customer experience. Customers get confused as they have to re-orient with new navigation models, new interface
This trade-off of greater speed and autonomy might make sense in companies where the different offerings aren’t really part of an experiential whole (think Facebook and its many different services, like Events, Photos, Messenger, Games, etc.), but in companies trying to deliver a most holistic experience (such as service industries like retail, banking, health care, and travel), this approach can make the overall experience worse than when things were centralized.
Just like flocks of geese are safer (thanks to their many eyes) and expend less energy (thanks to the reduced drag) than geese flying individually,[15] a gestalt occurs where a strong design team can accomplish much more than the same number of designers working on their own.
Though many in-house teams are often dismissive of how agencies operate, there’s much to be learned from companies whose sole purpose was to deliver the best design work.
In short, the best team leads are a combination of coach, diplomat, and salesman. And they are folks who, through experience, find they can span the conceptual scale from 1,000 feet all the way down to 1 foot. They oversee the end-to-end experience, ensuring that user needs are understood, business objectives are clear, design solutions are appropriate, and the final quality is high.
No wonder it’s so hard to find such people!
It’s important to recognize that team lead is not necessarily a people management role. In many companies, reporting structures and team structures are the same, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
Don’t just mirror the product organization or business units
A design organization that is not wedded to the structure of the broader company can help maintain a stable customer experience when the inevitable reorganizations occur.
Product and service features are just manifestations of a user’s relationship with a company. Instead, designers should be obsessed with their entire user experience. So, organize teams by types of users. Many companies have clearly distinguished audiences — marketplaces have buyers and sellers; banks have personal/consumer, small business, and institutional customers;
When a design team focuses on a type of user, it can go very deep in understanding them, and that empathy leads to stronger designs that fit the users’ contexts and abilities.
Banks and other financial institutions typically organize their teams around products or lines of business (basic banking, credit and debit cards, loans, mortgages, etc.) that behave as if in silos, and rarely coordinate. However, the same customer is engaging across these products, and can find the lack of coherence frustrating. Putting together a “retail consumer” design team that works across these products should lead to a better customer experience but will be difficult to maintain in the face of a company that incentivizes business units through their specific products’ success. This
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Using the Buyer Design Team from our simple marketplace, establish subteams such as Discovery, Purchase, and Post-Purchase
many design organizations realize benefits when rotating designers after a sufficient “tour of duty.” Team leads must remain committed, but other team members might change teams after 9–12 months. Designers appreciate this, as it keeps their thinking fresh, exposes them to different styles of leadership, and broadens their skills and acumen. The business benefits because these designers, by bringing their experiences from different parts of the organization together, help weave a coherent customer experience.
With the Centralized Partnership, business teams, which otherwise have control over much of their own destiny, do not have their own designers. This can make them anxious. Quelling their concerns requires conversations about planning, staffing, and the means of collaboration. Such conversations can prove burdensome for design directors and team leads, who need to be able to focus on creative leadership and professional development.
To address this, the design organization needs an operations team, what we call Design Management (or Design Program Management). It is not a big team — you can get by with one Design Program Manager for every 10–15 designers. The charter of this team is to make things go and to ensure that the rest of the design organization as effective as possible.
remains. Many people advocate design reporting directly into the C-suite, placing it as a peer to product management, marketing, and so on. Given the expanded mandate for design we’ve been preaching, such placement makes sense in theory, but in practice can feel premature. The nascency of design in the enterprise means that it still doesn’t have the critical mass or presence that engineering has, and also there simply hasn’t been the time to develop enough credible senior executive design leaders. Perhaps this paragraph will be revised for this book’s second edition, but there’s a pragmatic
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Based on our conversations with industry leaders, that seems to work fine — teams that report through product are quite successful, even when those design teams are also responsible for design outside of product, such as marketing.
more important than reporting lines is that the design team: Is a single operating entity Has a mandate to infuse their work through the entire customer experience Has leadership empowered to shape the team and its activities to deliver on that mandate
It’s worth noting our antipathy toward job titles. Job titles exist to make company operations easier. Instead of accepting the messiness of individual people, companies operate at a level of abstraction and treat everyone with the same title the same.
Such bureaucratic practices support a 20th-century need to operate at scale, but remove the humanity necessary in a 21st-century services-based economy. In reality, just because two people have the same title doesn’t mean they are interchangeable. Nor does any title describe the totality of what any person does.
chapter). In defining the roles that make up a design organization, our bias is toward generalization over specialization. Titles that are too specific become straitjackets, confining people to a limited set of duties, encouraging a bureaucratic mindset that employees are cogs in a machine. While generalist titles might feel uncertain, they provide wiggle room that allows for career growth, and encourage dealing with those who have these titles as people, not labels.
Partly as a reaction to this new class of more broadly capable designer, in Silicon Valley the emerging consensus job title for software designers is Product Designer,
research. In leading technical organizations, it is common that once they reach a certain scale, often around the time they have five or six designers, they bring on a dedicated User Experience (UX) Researcher
“UX Design” is not appropriate because it’s too vague, and user experience should be everyone’s responsibility. UX Researcher is appropriate, though, because this role seeks to understand the totality of the user’s experience, and the insights drawn from such research will inform work across marketing, sales, product, and customer care, as well as design.
The key responsibilities are generative and evaluative research. Generative research, typically field research such as in-home observations or diary studies, leads to insights for framing problems in new ways that stimulate the development of innovative solutions. Evaluative research tests the efficacy of designed solutions, through observing use and seeing where people have problems.
Researchers who work on their own, delivering reports filled with findings in hopes that others take heed, will find their impact blunted. Instead, the UX research team should remain small, highly leveraged, and supportive of everyone else’s ability to engage with users directly.
This person’s primary objective is to make the design organization as effective as possible by enabling designers to focus on the work.
To succeed, a Design Program Manager cannot simply be a generic operations manager — they must have an appreciation for design practice and process,
Since the 1950s, advertising firms have understood the importance of having art directors and copywriters work hand in hand, whereas even today, typical product and service design practice separates writing and design. The design team dictates form and structure, and the content contributors are expected to fill boxes with words. This is a broken approach. For most digital services, it’s the content, not the design, that is of primary interest to the user.
We suggest using the more general Content Strategist label instead of specific roles of Copywriter and UI Writer. As it is with product designers, some content strategists will lean more toward the systems-level structural challenges, and others will be more comfortable writing the final copy. Instead of siloing these roles, keeping it general encourages the Content Strategist to expand their purview, and tells the rest of the organization that this is a serious role to embrace, and not just a matter of filling space with copy.
at some point, usually around 15–20 team members, it makes sense to have someone who focuses on this practice. At this scale, efficiency is realized as creative technologists can go deeper and work faster than product designers who also happen to code as a part of their job. Additionally, without dedicated creative technologists, a design problem with a tricky technological bent requires a production engineer to take time away from delivery and support this exploration. A creative technologist on the team allows others to focus on what they do best, and serves as a deep connection between
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Frontend developers ultimately serve the purpose of the engineering team, focused on performance matters of stability, speed, and working-as-it-should at scale. Creative technologists align with the mission of the design organization, using engineering as a tool to uncover opportunities for a clear, coherent, and satisfying user experience.
Head of Design has emerged as a title for this role, which works regardless of whether
level, the Head of Design is the “CEO” of the design organization, ultimately accountable for the team’s results. Their impact is the outcome of how they handle three types of leadership: Creative Managerial Operational
As the team grows, the Head of Design will not be able to perform detailed duties across these three areas. This is the time to bring on Design Managers and Directors (for people management), Creative Directors (for creative vision), and Directors of Design Program Management (to run operations).
Design Managers must also be skilled practitioners. To earn credibility and their team’s trust, they show that they can bring it when it comes to design delivery. This delivery can exist at whichever level (Strategy, Structure, or Surface) they are most comfortable.
A Creative Director works as a peer of design directors, and is responsible for articulating a creative vision and setting creative standards for the design team. Brand identity standards, style guides, experience principles, and other aspects that touch on the entirety of the end-to-end experience fall under this purview. In sufficiently large organizations, there may be multiple Creative Directors responsible for different parts of the service experience. For a marketplace, there may be a Creative Director each for the seller experience and buyer experience.
If the Head of Design is the captain of the ship, the Director of Design Program Management is the executive officer (as on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Commander Riker was to Captain Picard), making things go, striving for smoothness in how the team works, and removing the logistical and procedural obstacles that get in the way.
If the organization is serious about design as a competency, starting with two should not be too much to ask. Two designers allows for leadership experience and output velocity, structural competence, and surface savvy.
A single team of more than seven members proves unwieldy and hard to manage. Now is the time for organizational mitosis, splitting the team into two. This crucial step is where design goes from being a straightforward team to being a more complex organization
team. Team Lead is not a job you specifically hire — it’s a role that an existing team member assumes. As shown here, they are not a manager — all team members still report to the Head of Design. The Head of Design also still serves as a Team Lead, because at this size it’s important that they keep their hands directly in the work.
Moving into this stage tests the Head of Design. In order to achieve scale, the role becomes more operational and managerial. Some design leaders struggle with the mechanics of running a team, and some resist getting further from creative delivery. Such struggles, while understandable and worth addressing, aren’t fair to put on the rest of the team, and aren’t worth jeopardizing the organization’s overall health. Many companies realize at this stage it is necessary to bring in a new Head of Design, one who is comfortable at this broader organizational level.
Their tools, such as journey maps and service blueprints, provide a systemic framework to undergird the entire design organization’s efforts. They also connect with frontline roles such as sales and support to ensure that design is cognizant of the full context of service delivery.
beyond this point is mostly a matter of degree — it simply gets bigger and bigger. With specific design teams as the fundamental organizational unit, scaling is a matter of adding more teams, and augmenting them with other roles as needed. For every new design team, add a UX Researcher. For every three teams, add a Service Designer, Design Program Manager, and a Design Director.
