Scaling a Design Team
As we've scaled up to twenty-four designers, I've gotten a few questions about the processes we've developed to keep the design team connected and to continuously produce high-quality work. And while this is just a snapshot of where we're at right now, hopefully some of the higher-level ideas will stay with us as we continue to grow.
First of all, everything we do is in service of a single goal: transparency. We've discovered over time that most of our difficulties arise when a project becomes murky or goes dark. Design is a holistic practice and we can only truly design for the entire product when we can see across it with ease. In addition to making our own work easier, transparency also gives designers a chance to cross-collaborate on projects that they're interested in or that impact the thing they're working on. We frequently have designers on different teams identify overlapping work and get together all on their own without any prompting from myself or the other design managers. Transparency is magical in that way and can make or break a project or a growing team.
Practically speaking, we have a few ways to create that transparency. The most powerful tool in our arsenal at the moment is Basecamp. Designers start projects there and add the entire design team, as well as the engineers and PMs they're working with. From that point on, we encourage all thinking, iterations, mockups, links to live prototypes, etc. to be documented in Basecamp. What winds up happening is that, every morning, Basecamp sends every designer a digest email containing all of the design work and discussion from the day before. The first half hour or so of morning is spent perusing that email, sipping some coffee and responding to projects and ideas that pique my interest. The asynchronous nature of that feedback loop has been great for us and will help us keep up with each other as we scale.
During the week, we also have two critiques for designers to attend. One of those critiques involves random groupings of designers across the company who get together and go over what they're working on that week. While the feedback part of that meeting is certainly valuable, the true value lies in getting folks together who may normally not be working closely together. Hearing a peer talk about their somewhat orthogonal product area means a better understanding for the ecosystem as a whole, as well as an appreciation and familiarity with fellow designers (at least, that's the goal). We remix the teams once every three months or so to keep things fresh and allow people to get a regularly new view of the product.
The other critique is more focused and entails getting just the designers from one of our product areas into a room together. For example, every Thursday, the three designers from the Seller Experience team get together with me and their PM to look at in-flight work. Unlike the other critique, everyone in the room for this one is intimately familiar with the content, allowing us to skip the intro and explanatory bits and get straight into the complexities and nitty-gritty details.
Finally, we get the entire design team together every Friday morning for Family Hour, where we have a guest speaker talk about... well, whatever they want to talk about. :) Sometimes it's about design, sometimes art, or sometimes it's about startup life. Whatever the case, it's a chance for all of us to get together, see each other's faces and enjoy hearing from someone awesome. it's our own little Creative Mornings. Every week.
In all honesty, none of these processes will last forever. Even as I write this, I know that we're constantly evaluating and rethinking this stuff, since adding even just a few more people will break previously-successful practices. We're getting better at seeing these breakages looming, but we're still wrong a lot in our solutions. We've changed the format of the more general critique something like five times in the last year and a half. And we'll change it again. And again. And again. Because the important thing isn't the process or methodologies. It's maintaining transparency and enabling holistic thinking across our design team. That's what's going to carry our product forward.