Shafeen AlamA design team, not teams of designers
Design at Asurion was embedded, a designer inside each journey team, which is a reasonable structure that had produced an unreasonable outcome. Everyone was close to their product and isolated from each other. This is how I diagnosed that with the team, what we named it, and the case I took upstairs.
A burned-out team working in silos cannot influence strategy, and the product shows it.
60-second read
Designers sat inside separate journey teams and behaved like teams of one. Silos, redundancy, no shared process, no seat in strategy, and by the team's own account a loss of trust and burnout.
Run design as a product. Give the function its own goals, put them in the system the company already used to measure people, and staff them with tiger teams drawn across journey teams.
Diagnosed it with the team rather than for them, named the problem in one line, and took a thirty minute case to the executives whose buy-in it needed.
A strategy the team wrote with me, eight named initiatives, and design goals inside Workday and performance reviews rather than in a deck.
Jump to
01 · The sentence
Today we function and behave not as a design team, but as teams of designers.
That line is the whole case. It took a while to find, and once it existed I did not need much else, because every designer who heard it recognized their own week in it.
The other sentence I kept, from the same whiteboard: design is our house, we need to fix it.
02 · Diagnosing it with the team
I did not write the diagnosis and present it. We built it together on a glass wall, one problem per sticky, then clustered until the categories named themselves. Doing it that way meant nobody later had to be convinced the diagnosis was fair, because it was theirs.
Seven clusters came out of it. Only one is about craft.
Responsibility
No seat at the table. Lack of trust in design. Pixel pusher versus user experience. No awareness of how long design actually takes.
Collaboration
No support from above. Difficult to strategize with product. Things are too prescriptive. Too many meetings.
Accountability
Who has the final say. Who has the D. Too many opinions, not enough facts.
Process
No unified process for how we work together. Missing kick-off, test, review, deliver. No design sprints. Nothing documented.
No time
Straight to production. No time for iteration. Too much pressure to ship deliverables before they were ready. Work-life balance.
Tools
Too many tools, too many places to post an update, no agreement on where files live.
Style guide
No consistent UI components. No reusable symbols. No file consistency.
03 · Framing the case
Then I had to turn a wall of complaints into something two executives would act on in half an hour. I planned it as a purpose, objective, strategy and time, wrote it on a whiteboard, and kept rewriting the framing until the problem and the ask fit on one board.
04 · What the team asked for
The second wall was actions, same method. It matters that the requests were specific and mostly unglamorous, because a team asking for a style guide and a defined process is not a team asking for more freedom. It is a team asking to be run properly.
Design leadership
A VP of Design, and design standing on its own rather than sitting under product. Someone to fight the battles.
A real process
Defined design phases, estimates, a 40% explore and 60% support split, design reviews with executives, and time carved out for research and prototyping.
A style guide
Patterns, principles, human interface guidelines with do's and don'ts, and a shared library rather than a folder.
Resources
A user research expert, a content writer, more design headcount, and constant access to data.
05 · Design as a product
The pitch, in March 2017. The move it makes is small and load-bearing: stop asking for design to be respected, and start treating the design function itself as a product with goals, owners, a roadmap, and a way of being measured.
06 · Tiger teams across journey teams
The structural fix. If designers are embedded in journey teams and that is not going to change, then the connective tissue has to be built deliberately: small tiger teams drawn across those journey teams, each owning one initiative, each staffed by two or three designers.
Eight initiatives. Note how many are about the team rather than the product, because that was the point.
Design systems
Patterns, intake process, design language, UI engineering
User research
Personas, process, tools, training
UX strategy
Business skills, leadership, UX meetings, coordination
Prototyping
Animations and microinteractions
Brand marketing
Brand identity, moodboard, marketing assets
Inclusive design
Accessibility, diversity of personas and perspectives
Culture of learning
Conferences, books, team events, peer reviews
Recruitment and retention
Outreach, recruiting, team building
07 · Making it survive the meeting
Most design strategy dies as a well-received deck. The only part of this I would call genuinely clever is the last slide, which is also the least exciting one.
Put the goals into Workday, the system the company already used to evaluate people. Be measured on them at performance review. Track progress openly and mark the wins.
That single move converts design strategy from extra work into the work, because it is now the thing your manager reads back to you in March. It also makes the commitment mutual. If the company agrees to the goals, the company has agreed to the time they take.
08 · Meanwhile, the actual work
All of this happened alongside shipping. I mention it because design strategy written by someone who has stopped doing the work is worth very little, and because the room below is part of why the team believed the diagnosis in the first place.
09 · What I would defend
I do not have adoption or delivery figures from this period, so none are claimed here. What I would put in front of a hiring manager is the method.
A team told me what was wrong, in their own words, on a wall. I turned it into one sentence, a definition, eight owned initiatives, and a line item in the system that decides people's raises. That sequence is the transferable part, and it is close to the sequence I used at BlackBerry the following year on a much larger function.
Captions on this page are read from the artifacts themselves. Where a phrase appears in bold it is transcribed from the whiteboard or slide beside it.
10 · Takeaways
Embedding designers solves proximity and creates isolation. Both are true.
