Why design department’s common goals are a must also in the era of cross-functional teams?

I took the lead of our SOK Design team one and half years ago. At the very same moment as I came, one of my new team members left for maternity leave, returning around a year later. Her observations on how big of a leap we had made on the common way of working and building design culture in the company during her absence, made me reflect on the key success factors for building a committed and impactful design team.

As in the article about?“Redesigning the design department” by McKinsey Design, “…the best corporate design departments are transforming from fortified castles into vibrant town squares…” The article shares the findings and reflections on the characteristics of a successful design department and how to integrate in-house design into the organisation.

Based on McKinsey’s research, following summarizes?the key success factors for a successful design department:

• Tight integration of design and designers into business through?cross-functional teams?and?shared goals and financial incentives?for all members working in the cross-functional team
• Nurturing design talent?through trainings and mentoring to better integrate designers into the company
• Providing tools and infrastructure that?support physical and digital collaboration?and delivering best possible design work and outcomes.

Personally, I’m very much in line with above findings, and I’m pleased to notice the very similar approach in our company and how we have structured the design competence to support the business, innovation, and customer-centricity.

On top of above,?I’d like to add though one additional success factor for a successful design department; common goals also for design team.

Combination of cross-functional team’s specific AND design competence team’s own goals

As article points out, a centralized design function as such might not serve optimally alone; it’s important to avoid becoming a separate own design island. True!?But?centralized design department?and?working tightly with business in cross-functional teams?and?having a 80/20 rule for goals, seems like a good way; 80% for the cross-functional team and 20% for the design competence group. And that’s what I can see as a great set up for bringing most value for business, building committed design talent and growing customer centricity and design maturity in the company overall.

Why am I of this opinion? I believe that the tight design community is very crucial for the designers themselves; it’s important to spar with other designers and grow together. There’s also seldom budget for“just building” design maturity in those parts of the company where special design budget is still missing, and thus a centralized design function is an excellent base to take the ownership of the actions needed towards more mature company. Just a dotted line might not be enough.

Elaborating a bit on the benefits…

?? Getting focused on right stuff

Working systematically and having a clear and prioritized set of design team goals supports us in getting the most important things done. We’re all busy in our cross-functional teams, and there’s no time in huge side gigs. Thus, it’s good that we have just a set of objectives we want to achieve together and those are split into reasonable number of key results with proper follow up metrics. Each designer “signs up” to contribute on max two different key results during the year. This is how we keep the workload manageable, and the key results proceed on the side. Once a key result is on appropriate level of completion, designer can jump to support others or continue focusing 100% on work in cross-functional team. Adaptation of the course is built in like in OKR model.

?? Increasing design team commitment

Like written in the McKinsey article, designers tend to be very purpose driven. To support and foster purpose driven work, I’ve noticed that very often it’s not enough to focus on supporting just one business area. This way designers can certainly work their way from purely operational design to a more strategic level (super important!). But as designers discover and define through customer needs and think very holistically, the outcomes are seldom restricted to one business area. Thus, it’s important to have also infrastructure allowing to work across businesses and specific cross-functional teams. It’s good to work on other design related challenges than what the immediate cross-functional team can offer and with other experts. This adds purpose into design work as well as variety and possibilities to learn.

?? Supporting in changing company culture

Shared design department goals are very much adding value also for businesses. Benefits come from getting the support of the whole design department even “only paying” for the exact designers allocated for the business. Good examples for such value in our case are internally organized design thinking training for non-designers as well as building multi brand design system. These we build for anybody to use in the organization eventually. Basically, while designers by-design approach customer needs and business challenges holistically, they simultaneously solve challenges for multiple businesses and thus support in changing the company culture from siloed way of working to more customer-centric.

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There are certainly also other benefits for having design department own goals aside the shared goals with cross-functional teams. But above is something I have been observing previous years when leading productive and committed design teams. Often the change is something that is only visible from a little bit of distance. Like my team member who cheered of the culture change we managed to make just in a year. I’m pretty sure that commonly shared design team goals helped a lot! Would be lovely to hear how other design departments are handling the topic of team goals. Please do reach out!

P.s. This article was originally published in SOK Design Medium blog and is a result of our objective to communicate more of what we do in our team and to build employer branding. Through our blog publication we will be sharing all the cool stuff we work on in our team. I’m very delighted and honoured to be the first one to publish here! Thank you, team! You can also follow us on Instragram: s_ryhma_design!

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S Group is a customer-owned Finnish network of companies in the retail and service sectors, with more than 1,900 outlets in Finland. S Group consists of cooperatives and SOK with its subsidiaries and offers services in the supermarket trade, the department store and speciality store trade, service station store and fuel sales, the travel and hospitality business and the hardware trade. S Group provides all of our co-op members with comprehensive banking services through S-Bank.

SOK Design is an in-house design team at SOK. We craft everyday experiences through practicing design thinking and doing. Simultaneously, we inspire and challenge our stakeholders in SOK and in Co-Ops to create world class services in customer needs driven way.