Building user centred design teams
Seven years, eight teams, three lessons
Between 2017 and 2019 I helped two private healthcare providers, a law firm and a bank build user centered design teams before jumping ship to build an in-house department for my dream e-commerce client.
It’s impossible to distill 7 years of stakeholder engagement, coffee chats, budgets, 1:1s and sprint plannings into one case study. But what I can do is share some of the (sometimes hard) lessons I learned along the way.
Shareholders have needs too
It’s important to recognise that revenue will always play an important part in the private sector design process. While our designers focus on audience, customer or end user needs, we as leads must recognise that shareholders (or CFOs) have feelings too.
Fiscal responsibility isn’t quite as sexy as building a design system but keeping a handle on ROI might mean the difference between team growth or project death.
Moving in-house gave me valuable insight into the long term impact of my strategy. It took me a while to understand that a 0.1% increase in conversion can be a good thing but now, I include CVR and AOV (Average Order Value) as KPIs of a well balanced e-commerce roadmap. For the customer service design team, we focus on support ticket volume and support team feedback. For a private sector design lead, it’s important to understand and design with your own revenue metrics in mind.
Delivery is key
Large organisations are rife with issues that need fixing. An inquisitive designer might lose 12 months on discovery, mapping and synthesis. In my experience that’s a sure fire way of losing stakeholder backing.
During my time helping a bank digitally transform, we lost trust by wrapping ourselves up in endless discovery cycles and constant course corrections. It would take almost 8 months to deliver our first product by which time client frustration was palpable.
I set myself the goal at Canyon of shipping something useful within 6 weeks. With multiple squads (and an exceptional product management team), I’ve maintained that cadence, simultaneously running flagship programmes, launching new services and product updates for 10 months of the year. (As a German company we take summer and winter breaks seriously).
In my experience, focussed discovery cycles, smaller iterative releases leading to faster delivery have been the key to continued investment in my department.
Get the people right and the rest will follow
Hiring, developing (and sometimes even sacking) people is a whole other case study. But it would be disingenuous to pretend that great design and delivery is possible without an exceptional team.
Hiring multidisciplinary designers is a big job, and one that requires a solid understanding of UX, UI, service and content design. In the past, I know I missed great designers due to overzealous HR shortlisting exercises. Training my HR business partners to spot green (and red flags) on CVs has dramatically improved the quality of my candidates.
And ultimately, good people make my job great.
