Reflections: setbacks, support, strategy
They are aspects of "design maturity" in certain ways
Much has been written over the years about “design maturity” in countless places — so here’s my bit of reflection on this persistent topic! 🙃 More specifically, this has become an emergent thread across recent moments over the past few weeks while working with cross-functional teams, wrapping up performance reviews, and company OKR/strategy planning, as well.
💥 Setbacks are part of the process: This is simply true both at (a) an organizational level of a team developing its capabilities of working through a human-centered design process, and (b) at an individual level of a designer on their growth path of learning how to handle the challenges of applying such a process — especially as they might seek a promotion.
For a team learning to include Design in a balanced, cross-functional process, there will be some frictions and setbacks along the way. Misunderstandings, unstated assumptions, disappointments, and so forth just happen. For instance, maybe timelines were agreed upon months ago, but then personnel changes or priority shifts ensued. Suddenly there’s a panic about the work to be scoped… and suddenly we hear ”OMG, we need final designs now!” 😆 Umm, but what about the process we all previously agreed to? Stuff happens, right? That’s life! We have to adapt accordingly.
So let this be a moment of everyone stepping back, acknowledging a changed situation, supporting team morale, and finding the right balance while charting an adapted course.
This is one sign of demonstrating collective process maturity, for the team’s benefit.
For an individual getting bounced around while striving to adhere to a certain methodology or plan guided by core UX principles, that can be deeply frustrating.
pro tip: process purity or pedantry usually is not a good idea! Flexing the process is a normal thing.
Perhaps the workshop went sideways with some stakeholders strong-arming a wild idea, or new information emerged that basically trashed your preferred concepts. Your stellar design direction or workshop plan didn’t go your way — oh noes! 😬 Learning how to handle that moment, to turn it into a personal learning opportunity, that’s a key sign of personal maturity, for the team’s benefit…as well as one’s own, while becoming a better designer and leader, too. It’s something that can be helpful evidence on a promotion path, demonstrating selfless, ego-less detachment, with a healthy view of moving the team or the project forward. ✨
⚖️ Balancing design support: Establishing the right ratio of designer to PM or designer to Engineering is never easy, especially in the tech industry where multiple projects, workstreams, and timelines proliferate, along with velocity-oriented drivers/metrics. For example, if there’s literally one designer to support eight to ten engineers on a team — well, what’s the solution? 😬
It’s essential to candidly acknowledge the role and value of Design — it’s not to unblock Engineering to fill up their backlog of work to do.
I’ve literally stated that to Eng teams in meetings! 😅 The purpose of having Design as an established function on the team is to help create & deliver value to customers, to unblock them in performing their jobs with satisfaction — and maybe some joy! Indeed, that’s what all cross-functional teams should be aligned upon: QA, Eng, Product, Sales, Marketing, so forth.
Furthermore, not all projects or workstreams need 100% total Design support, from discovery through delivery, depending on priorities.
If there’s limited resourcing in terms of actual hands, clock time, domain skill, critical priorities, etc. then there needs to be collective support for a range of ways to support a team’s ability to create & deliver human-centered value, through a modulation of design activities.
In practice, perhaps it’s a few pen sketches to help get started, with no Figma file at all. Or asking the Eng/PM to take a first stab at problem framing, with Design as consulting, perhaps in a short workshop, with internal proxies like CSMs or Support offering credible inputs. Or maybe holding real-time pairing sessions with PM/Eng to explore possible interaction/interface solutions, via iterating in the code or Jira ticket. Maybe setting up office hours on a regular basis to solicit feedback on tactical, lightweight design issues. And so on…
This varied approach to balancing design support is a form of maturity, realizing that not everything can be 100% run through the full human-centered process, but there can still be moments of impact from the designer, to move things forward collectively and iteratively. ✨
♟️ Design’s superpowers for strategy: Shaping a strategy at the company level that guides product direction in terms of aspirational targets and roadmap tactics is not easy. 😆 Nor should it be done purely through the lens of numerical spreadsheet analysis and profit/loss statements! They do offer vitally important inputs, of course — but strategy is a deeply creative act. 🔥 It’s an inquiry into what’s possible, comprised of myriad puzzles or mysteries of what ought to be achieved in order to establish an advantage, secure competitive gains, and enable massive market impact.1
But that’s exactly how Design can help — by offering sequenced, structured activities to visualize, clarify, and distill what should be the focus for the strategy. And by gathering critical stakeholders together for a robust conversation that’s facilitated to move everyone from ambiguity to clarity. This includes holding open brainstorming sessions, clustering/affinity mapping, conducting 2x2 matrix analysis, perhaps against multiple vectors (effort/impact or pain/value, etc.). 🙌🏽
Something else that Design can help is guide the creation of a narrative that supports the strategy, breathing life into it — so it’s more than simply a set of bullet points! This includes storyboarding scenarios, sketching out the human/customer impact to make it feel like more of a “lived strategy”, not simply a dry document. It’s a story that galvanizes key Product & Engineering & Sales & Marketing leaders to want to pursue the strategy with passion and tenacity. Thus, the arduous task of defining a strategy, while always difficult, can be more of a shared agreement that motivates a team to want to dare boldly. ⚡️
Highly recommend reviewing Roger Martin’s strategy framework as expressed here: https://fs.blog/playing-to-win-how-strategy-really-works/
“Perhaps the workshop went sideways with some stakeholders strong-arming a wild idea…” chuckle 🤭