Steve Lindgren
Using future design to gain traction and bring teams together
8min read
Jan 24, 2023
Relationships are at the heart of any successful product
Relationships are at the heart of any successful product. As a designer, if you have a wonderful relationship with your product manager, your development lead and your stakeholders - with all of your goals aligned, you are set up for success.
But how often is this the case?
Almost two years ago, I started as a lead designer at $10B company that helps users store and share files. I was contracted to create a 3 year omnichannel strategy for the delivery of web support services and I thought I’d be doing so with access to ample resources. The company has over 150 designers with design leadership all the way up to the board of directors. This was the last place I expected to find a department with low UX maturity.
Every group, every project, every department is different
The first month of any new design project is a time for discovery about the project, about the team and their past experiences with other designers. This can be good, bad or ugly - and this is also your primary opportunity to make an impression on the team and set a standard for how the future will go.
Through reviewing documents and meeting with team members, I learned that despite being in a design-led company, my new teammates didn’t have experience with or confidence in design thinking process.
My first tack was to gather a group of managers for a workshop that allowed us the space to detail the current state of our system, identify pain points and any outstanding opportunities that the team already knew about or had in production. I led them through workshops and ideation sessions in order to create a simple design system. The goal was to impress upon them how design could work to speed up their delivery process and not hinder it.
They had the information I needed to successfully complete the project, but we had no shared language or working experience - in fact, my initial tack intimidated them and slowed down our progress in the very beginning. I decided to pivot my stakeholder and team management style and kept an eye on what worked (the ideas that they easily got behind versus the ones that needed more in-depth conversation or process and adjusted as I went).
How do I provide value (as an external resource) to a department that doesn’t seem to want the help, no matter that leadership has identified that they absolutely need the help. How do I get everyone on the same page and moving forward?
What about a turn around?
Here’s what I knew about the situation: the team hadn’t shipped new code in almost 18 months. They were on the lower end of the corporate priority list because they were not a revenue source. In fact, I’m sure that a large number of the leadership at this company had no idea how bad the online experience this particular department was providing.
Because the department was support-service based, they didn’t have a lot of connection with the other departments. When there was dependencies or a need for two departments to work in conjunction with one another, we were given the ‘product cold-shoulder’ (aka, no support, no prioritization).
Here are the design-led steps that I took to help get my team the traction they needed and the support from across different departments.
Taking the first step (again)
I started by making sure that we were able to produce designs & documentation faster than before. Design would never be the thing that people pointed to when a feature or project failed to ship.
I created a simplified component system that the developers could build once and use multiple times - which gave us a quick, scalable system where we deliver work and value much faster.
Showing leadership that we were making gains (any gains) was the first and most important step.
Cross-department buy-in
Other departments had worked with my team in the past and now they were dragging their feet on offering support this time around. In order to get everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction, I started developing high-fidelity prototypes using Figma and Framer. These prototypes provided a clear direction for all the work that we were doing and made the design, flow and interactions easy to grasp.
I’d send prototypes directly to leadership. They could interact with the designs directly from their cell phones. They could see the changes we wanted to make and after interacting with the prototypes, they would push their teams to help us make our vision a reality.
They also helped identify outside team dependencies and their impact on our product roadmap, so when we needed support, Leadership stepped in to make sure that everyone, on every team, new that this new work was going to be a priority.
Another successful initiative was improving our research strategies and documentation. We shifted from a much more waterfall approach (we did research, we added it to the backlog, we built it two years later, now nobody wants it) and pulling them into a more agile framework. We set up analytics, we analyzed the problems and needs of our user base and began to implement changes in a more agile-fashion.
Results
We shipped our re-design just a few weeks ago. I learned a lot in the process, about how to work with a group that had little to no UX maturity, how to get them quickly up to speed and how to rally them around a common vision.
I also learned a lot about how embedded our own views of design are - when I was trying to break down some of these principles for my team - I realized that the shared language (of knowing what design thinking is, of understanding agile) would make our break our team communication. I was unprepared for a lot of this, but kept augmenting my own process until we found a good match for what they needed and what we could deliver.
For other designers who may be entering a contract or a position in a low-UX maturity department or company… the “evangelist” role is alive and well. You’ll not only be the evangelist for UX across your new team, you’ll likely be the coach, the QB and the cheerleader. Once the team sees the inherent benefits of your approach (or the approach you finally settle on!), you’ll see the timetables speed up and things get moving.
After almost a year, we have made strides to ship our new product and lay the foundation for our next big goal: transitioning this department into an income generating department. We have set the plan in motion, we have the designs and the leadership buy-in, and I’m excited to see where they go with this project.
