Design Chat: Anca Luca, Everon. The place & role of design in an organisation.

Meet Anca Luca, Design Lead at Everon - the products that aim to electrify the world by offering the software platform for your organisation to run a sustainable EV charging business. 

She is passionate about the social & economical impact of the technology and she is a strong believer that we can all contribute to a better world. She gets her kicks from discovering the real problems to be solved, from taking the road less traveled, and from getting things done. 

During the last years, she laid the foundations and principles for what Design means to Everon, from a people, process and data perspective. 

Where should product design sit in a company?

This is a hot topic in the design industry and opinions are divided. Most would say that it depends on different factors, such as the size of the company, their purpose on the market, etc. And there is truth in that for sure. However, I also think that where design sits within a company says a lot about the design maturity of that organisation.  

Let’s take a look at the 3 most popular scenarios:

1. The design team sits with the technology team. In this case, the design team is seen mostly as part of implementing the solution. The role of the design team in this case is to answer the question “How do we implement this solution?”.
2. The design team reports to the product team. In this scenario, the design team answers the question: “What solution meets the needs of our users?”. Together with the product owners, designers run research to better understand the underlying issues and to make sure that they are solving the root cause of the problem.
3. The design team is its own department and reports directly to the upper management. In this case, design is part of strategic discussions, innovation and defining organisational culture. With this structure, design helps answer questions like: “What opportunities do we see?” and “Where can we innovate and differentiate ourselves from the competition?”.  

In the beginning, when I first joined Everon (around 3 years ago), the design team sat within technology. It was a great partnership between design and technology, however the processes matured and we, as a team, moved on to work closely with the product owners. Hence, the organisational structure evolved with us and now we are part of the product team. We strongly believe that only working together we can bring both business & user value and we can build a product that is competitive on the market. 

Long story short, a healthy partnership between design, product management and engineering is required for a competitive product to be built. Product management tells design ‘what is the business value’’, design defines ‘what the problem statements are’ and ‘how to design to solve them’, and engineering informs product and design ‘how it is implemented’.

How to structure the design organisation?

The literature available identified 3 main models:

1. Centralised - the design team functions as an in-house agency where designers are being assigned to projects based on their available capacity and based on the skills each projects required
2. Embedded - there is no design team, each designer is fully embedded in a cross-functional team where they work together with product owners, developers, architects, data analysts, etc. to deliver the right solution
3. Hybrid - where designers are embedded in cross functional teams, but they also come together as a design team to share knowledge, request feedback and improve the design process, as a whole 

At Everon we chose to have a hybrid approach as this suits us best at this moment, in our organisation.

Within our Design Chapter, we come together as a design team and we focus on overarching design topics, such as: working on the design system, defining usability metrics, design processes, and best practices. 

By being embedded in cross functional teams (together with product owners, architects, front-end and back-end developers), we have the opportunity to build extensive knowledge about specific market segments, personas and specific parts of the product. 

Having a deep understanding of the end-to-end journey of our users it’s crucial in designing the right solution, hence each of us is responsible for one or more personas and their customer journeys.  

How to embed design methodologies in building the right solution? 

No matter what design methodologies you choose to use to define the problem and to design the right solution, it is important to embed them in the organisational processes. 

At Everon, we use a combination of Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile - Scrum. 

For Design thinking and Lean Startup we have a separate backlog that we call “Discovery backlog”. We consider that discovery should get as much attention as delivery and we want to provide as much transparency into our work as possible. This helps us in having better communication with our stakeholders and in planning our capacity more accurately. 

Once we have a good understanding of the problems to be solved, of the impacted users and of the priorities, we go into delivery (Agile - Scrum) where designers work with multiple development teams to deliver the best solution.

From your own personal experience, looking back, is there anything that you learned and you would like to share? 

Reflecting on the last couple of years, there are a couple of lessons that I always try to keep in the back of my mind as my guiding principles.

The first principle is always ask “Why”. Understanding the back story and the root cause is crucial in making the right decisions. 

The second one is: provide as much transparency into your process as possible. This will create a trust relationship with your stakeholders and will transform them into insiders instead of them being the outsiders. 

And the last, but not the least, create a team culture where making mistakes are allowed and where you can all learn from this. This is part of the creative process and, if done right, it leads to progress, trust and innovation.