Working as a Team

Are you working ON a team or working AS a team?

Unfortunately, at many companies designers are working on a team, rather than as a team. You can determine which category your team falls into by answering the following questions:

• Does your team have a regular forum to update each other on what you are working on?
• Does your team share in-progress and completed work on a weekly basis?
• Do you often help each other out with challenging design problems?
• Do you collaborate across squads on more widely-used design patterns?

A “No” answer to any of these questions indicates an opportunity to improve the collaboration and effectiveness of your team.

Now, you might ask, “What’s the problem with having a group of designers where each one is working on an adjacent feature or product?”

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, but when designers only work on their own, they can feel isolated, often have no where to get help when they are stumped, don’t have opportunities to get coaching or mentoring, and can be at the mercy of stakeholder’s priorities with no escalation mechanism.

All of these challenges can be addressed by building a collaborative team. And why is that better? Well, a collaborative team increases the connection among the designers, reducing the sense of isolation, which is increasingly a challenge in our new remote and hybrid environment. A framework to collaborate on difficult design problems provides a mechanism for designers to identify solutions more quickly, which increases the team’s efficiency and effectiveness. Also, collaborating on solving design problems usually results in stronger, richer solutions. Finally, a collaborative team, where everyone is in the loop on work in progress, provides more opportunities to flex the team across squads. This is especially critical when a squad has a short-term need for additional design bandwidth.

So how does one create a collaborative team? Well some of the answers are baked into the questions I asked at the beginning of this article:

Regular stand ups for the design team

These can follow the typical stand up format:

• What did I work on yesterday
• What will I be working on today
• Any blockers I might have

In addition to keeping everyone connected and in the loop, these meetings are a great way to identify collaboration opportunities. If Anand reports that he is working on a design that is also applicable to Kati’s product, consider having them work on it together.

Design Shares

Ideally on a weekly basis, establish a forum for any designer to share completed or work in progress. Designers like to be in the loop about what is happening elsewhere, and often get good ideas they can apply to their own work. One of the most useful benefits of a weekly design share is that it provides a forum for designers to get help from a larger group of designers. This is especially helpful if they are wrestling with a challenging problem, but even if they are not, it’s a great way to get feedback to make sure they are on the right track.

Collaborate across squads

Whenever possible, identify design problems that designers on different squads can solve together. Not only will this produce stronger solutions, but it will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the team if the result is a reusable solution.

Team Mission

Does your team have a mission statement? A team mission statement articulates the purpose the team serves for the organization, as well as what value it delivers. Ideally a shared mission should inform the designs for every project, and it’s a good way to start baking a brand identity into the user experience. The mission statement serves as a touchstone designers can use on every project. Here is an example of the design team mission statement we created at a previous company:

• Simplify. Easy to build. Easy to use.
• Connect. Seamless collaboration for us and our users.
• Accelerate. Work more effectively together. Think ahead of our users.

Team Charter

Once you have a mission statement, use it to drive the creation of a team charter. Team charters are best created as a group activity: not only does this produce a stronger product, but shared ownership of the charter greases the wheels of socialization and adoption. To create your team’s charter, assemble in person or virtually and answer the following questions:

• What value to do we deliver to the larger organization?
• How do we relate to each others as humans?
• What are the guidelines for how we work together?
• What is the conflict-resolution process?

There are quite a few templates available to support this effort (Mural, Miro, Figma, etc.), choose one or create your own.

In this increasingly challenging economic environment, many designers are concerned about how to become “recession-proof”. The best way to do that is for your company to see the design team as a critical strategic resource, rather than the people who make wireframes. Working as a team, creating a charter, and increasing efficiency and effectiveness is a great way to promote your team’s strategic value.

Do your designers work as a team? What practices, frameworks or processes did you put in place to get there?