How to Find Opportunities in a Growing Design Team | Thoughts

When joining a small company, what happen if you find design roles are unclear and unorganized? It can be a mixed bag of challenges and opportunities. It can be overwhelming and even stressing you out. In my recent experience, I found myself frustrated with me proving design values to business people, establishing boundaries among teams outside the design team, and dealing with micro-management. However, these obstacles can be viewed as opportunities to turn chaos into a strong, well-organized and supportive design team.

In the past months, I experienced a growing design team, during the expansion of company, brought three main challenges emerged:

Inconsistent visuals and user flows: Without a unified approach and documentation, the user experience became fragmented and hard to deliver to new PM and other designers.
Confusion over branding guidelines and individual responsibilities: The lack of clarity around branding and role definitions led to inefficiencies between the marketing team and designers.
A lack of evaluation and progress tracking: The absence of a formal system for evaluating performance made it difficult to measure success and career growth.

With the team's efforts, consistent communication, and open-minded discussion, I focused on the following key areas to establish from a flat hierarchy to a better organizational workflow.

Define Brand Identity and Establish Design System

The first step was to define a clear and consistent brand identity. This involved creating branding guidelines to define visual languages among design, marketing and product management. Keep in mind, regarding instability of the growing business, the branding identity has to be scalable and flexible to cope with any future changes.

Second, establishing design systems is important to communicate among designers and ensure design consistency. We documented typography, color palates, components and existing user flows. The system is built as more mock-ups created. Depending on the status of product development, we examined accessibility for products under the design-phase but kept the local design system for product in the development. The flexibility needs all-design minds to understand how to deliver and revamp designs reflecting on the situations, helping designers speak the same styles and deliver seamless user experience across the organization.

Deliver Design Value to Business Stakeholders

It was crucial to communicate the importance, impact of design and design roles to business stakeholders and non-tech leadership roles effectively. When considering what is generating revenue, demonstrating how design impacts on consumers and how research affects innovation is challenging for the design team. I focused on presenting design updates regularly to align design goals with business values. By daily to weekly self-progress tracking and regular design updates, we were able to keep track of growth and progress and secure our strategic design workflow into business outcomes.

At the same time, interpreting the meaning behind a buzz word from a non-technical stakeholder is also challenging. The communication requires the power of psychology to understand what's the real meaning associating with the term. Oftentimes, the real reason is the objective. But the buzz word becomes repetitive and blurs out the problem a stakeholder is coping with. Even though the learning of communication is an ongoing path, the mindset to be flexible and adaptable helped me go through the challenges.

Set Boundaries with Other Teams to Prevent Micro-Management

To avoid confusion and micro-management, it was important to clearly define the roles and responsibilities of the design team versus other departments, such as marketing and development. We collaborated closely with the product manager to establish boundaries by outlining each team's scope of work and ensuring that designers had the autonomy to make decisions within their domain. The efforts required every individual to be transparent about their workload, collaborative thoughts to set up a clear workflow internally. Next efforts came with regular communication and collaboration channels to set up, stick to the plan, to keep everyone informed while respecting each team's expertise and workflow.

Standardize Design Team Workflow for Accurate Time Estimation

One of the major steps in improving our efficiency was to standardize the design team's workflow. We went all the back to think about what work we've done and how long it takes, as far as we could. We estimated time and started to detailed each task, each phase to structure our process. The goal aimed to assign projects to project owners, allowing us to assign tasks accurately, estimate the required time precisely and reduce the inefficiency of content switch which breaks the thinking process. This standardization would not only streamlined our work but also improved our ability to meet deadlines and manage expectations across teams.

Propose and Establish Performance Evaluation to Define Designer Levels

Recognizing the need for a formal performance evaluation process, I introduced a framework that allowed designers to track progress and define clear career paths for product design. This framework included setting specific goals for design team's responsibility, mission statement and design opportunities, for peer reviews and self-evaluation. It's not only for team member personal growth, but also for identifying the challenges and opportunities for the whole design team's work. By establishing criteria for different levels of design expertise, we could understand our own design strength and weakness to leverage research and design skills to improve product design effectively.

The journey in the expanding tech team is challenging but interesting. I've been learning and absorbing diverse perspectives from peers, leadership roles and managers. The five key strategies highlight the product design journey of ensuring design consistency with design systems creation, delivering design value with non-technical stakeholders, improving workflow efficiency with cross-functional collaboration, task time accuracy and work accountability with team workflow standardization, and initiating design productivity performance framework. The work required every member onboard to maintain and build a creative, collaborative and efficient work environment.

References:

7 Problems Growing Design Teams Face
From Chaos to Cohesion: My Experience Restructuring a Product Design Team
Getting decision rights right: How effective organizational decision-making can help boost performance