Problem:
In July of 2019, a year and a half after TransLoc was acquired by Ford Smart Mobility, Ford also acquired TransLoc's biggest competitors – DoubleMap and Ride Systems. Legacy TransLoc was the only one of the three that had previously employed anyone in a "design" capacity. The resulting merger that kicked off saw attrition occur in departments across all of the legacy companies, including the design department at TransLoc. When I came on in May of 2020, there were 3 people left on the design team, 2 of which had already tendered their resignations and would be leaving within the next two weeks. This left the remaining Design Manager and myself with a number of problems: How do we raise the profile of the design team during a merger with companies who previously never had an opportunity to see the value of design, do so with limited staff, and while the three companies are trying to find a unified direction and vision? And how do you do all of this while 100% of the company is working remotely?
Role:
I was brought in as a Senior Product Designer, largely due to my experience with evangelizing the role of design and developing strategies for injecting user-centered design practice into product planning and execution.
Constraints:
When I first arrived to the company, the design team was operating as an entity that existed separate from the product organization under which it sat. Rather than being embedded on individual project teams, they had made a decision to withdraw themselves and intentionally inject themselves into whatever effort they felt needed them the most. With the departure of half of the design team occurring as I onboarded, that decision began to have impacts on the perceived value the involvement of design was having on project work. Furthermore, most people outside of the product organization had little notion that a design team even existed, especially those in any of the newly acquired companies. Lastly, the shared vision and direction for the recently merged companies was to create a consolidated product that combined the best of their product offerings. This didn't leave much room for planning or discovery on the problem (making the right thing) side of the equation and left "design" relegated to making the thing usable and look good, at least in the eyes of the majority of the organization.
Design Process:
One of the first things I did was conduct interviews with people across the company, with an extra focus on the people coming from the legacy companies that did not have experience with designers. I asked them to define the word "design", learned about their problems, what opportunities they saw for the company, and what they thought design should be doing. I brought my manager along for some of the conversations. Other times, I would bring a product manager to the interview. This allowed me to synthesize a hypothesis for a direction and purpose for the design team; one that would help solve internal problems while working towards a shared vision of success for the entire company. From there, I started working on a playbook for the design team that outlined how members of a design team could find success by providing structure, direction, support, coaching and guidance. A living document that evolves quarterly, and is intended just as much for existing members of the team as it is for people outside of the team and for those onboarding to the team. This allowed the design team to provide visibility into our intent and process, help others outside of the team visualize who we are, what we do, and how we do it, and establish a vocabulary that the entire company could utilize when speaking about design.
At the same time, I wanted to be able to measure the impact the design team was having on project work. With 2 designers trying to spread themselves across 7 ongoing projects, it seemed that the impacts we were making were only surface deep at best. We weren't doing ourselves, the practice of design, or the company any good by trying to be in all places at once. I performed an analysis of where project teams were trying to involve us in their process, how much time we were spending, and what the impact was to the outcomes of the teams. Additionally, we looked to implement a lightweight way to quantify the qualitative experience of having design involvement on a project team.
Finally, we attempted to raise the profile of the design team within the organization. We held an informal AMA on the company's general Slack channel – answering questions about design process, what design brings to the table, and how to engage with the design team. I joined the Culture Creators committee and shared the design playbook as a starting point for creating a culture of collaboration and open communication in the organization as a whole. I worked with product management to reach out to other operational groups within the company in an effort to learn more about our customers, open communication channels for cross-departmental collaboration, and share current work and direction with the rest of the organization.
Results:
The playbook has become a springboard for communication with other teams. We are now more able to demonstrate the legitimacy of design and design operations. Whatever gaps we have had in it are getting filled simply by sharing it with others. More importantly, we have realized a vision and purpose that allows us to contribute to the success of our company and our customers while raising the profile of the design team.
Our team of 2 designers has made the conscious decision to embed ourselves back on to project teams. While doing so, we have been turning down pleas for help from other projects, leading to more advocates speaking on behalf of our team for increased headcount for the design org. With a renewed focus, we have been able to more clearly articulate and demonstrate the intentional work of creating conversations that will lead to the eventual artifacts of "design" that people once associated as being the only output of design. The DIET score is still in its infancy, and as of yet doesn't have enough meaningful numbers behind it to point towards. But, simply asking the questions to those involved on the scrum teams is providing interesting conversations about how to improve our confidence in getting higher scores on the assessment in the future.
Thanks to ongoing conversations with people outside of product, and our continual efforts to remind people about what we do and why we exist, we have seen an uptick in interest in involving design representatives in various strategic efforts across the company. Solutions Engineers want to help us build and evangelize personas and problem statements. The Product team is starting to use the same personas and problem statements to inform their roadmaps. The Partnerships team is working with us to organize our collective understanding of the competitive landscape. Whereas once design was relegated to producing the artifacts of design, we are now becoming a strategic partner in planning and decision making.
Synthesis of ongoing conversations with stakeholders
Map of data and reporting gap analysis
The Design Playbook
Design involvement analysis
