No Surprises

As organizations grow, it's incredibly easy for teams to accidentally become islands, silo'ing themselves and their work until it's time to ship. The new release email goes out to the company, only to be met with a dozen or so responses that look something like:

This impacts what I'm working on. :(

I've been working on this exact feature. :(

The feature I'm working on directly impacts what you released. :(

This sort of occurrence is pretty rare at Etsy, but when it does happen, those are all responses I've heard. The problem is really that we don't like being surprised. It sucks to have your view of the world suddenly and painfully adjusted because a part of product development wasn't visible to you. It also sucks to be on the other end: to release your hot new feature only to find out you have to fix or adjust it because you got so sucked into your work that you forgot to surface for air (it happens to all of us).

A couple of ways we successfully prevent surprises during product development at Etsy:

All design goes into Basecamp

My favorite email every morning (yes, I have a favorite email) is the digest I receive from the Etsy Basecamp project. All of the design work and discussion from yesterday all rolled up in one place and easily scannable. I open the projects that I want to know more about or respond to and briefly read over the others. It's a full worldview without having to trudge through every single post and project every day. Our designers post frequently, but even if they fall off the wagon one week, we ask them to post their work before the weekly design critique. Quick reminders are magic.

Weekly product updates

Every PM at Etsy sends out an email each week just talking about what their team is working on, where it's at and what's up next. It's a lot of email all-told, but again, Google Group Digests to the rescue. Scan for things that matter to your project (or sound like they might matter) and click. Boom. It's like having the ability to see into the future.

Obviously we'll have to come up with new processes and strategies as we grow (what works for seventeen designers may break when we have forty), but the goal remains the same: no surprises. The products we design benefit so much from cross-organizational input and transparency, and our solutions will only be more holistic as a result.