Design at Scale 2021- Design at Scale is People! (Peter Merholz)

 

—> Thank you for having me and for giving me time and attention. I’ll dive right into this talk, talking about design at scale

 

—> If you do  a google search you will find design at scale ties into design systems

  • You will find articles about processes to align design activity across an organization

 

—> Why is this? There are two considerations,
  • Consistent quality as you grow. Design quality should remain the same, despite growth in your organization
  • Design systems are there to maintain and velocity as you coordinate design across the org

 

—> However, design operates in broader context, as everything is, or is becoming, a service

 

–> Examples of this phenomenon include
  • Criterion Channel
  • Airbnb
  • Lyft
  • Oreilly’s Learning Platform
–> All of these don’t rely on you owning the product to access its benefits

 

 

—> Here’s an example of experience map diagram from a travel experience I worked on at Adaptive Path

 

—> It shows the multi-touch point reality people are in
  • A mobile app/website is one point in broader service relationship

 

—> With a service, customers have to primarily consider their experience
  • See the example of the travel experience, and all the stress, joy, frustration that happens with that experience
    • Once we’re done, all we have is memories of the service
—> More opportunities exist for things to break down for a service as it grows, particularly at the seams of the service experience

 

—> So it’s not just quality, and velocity, but also maintaining coherence as you grow
  • Coherence is needed to prevent yourself from falling into siloed elements
—> We can only go so far with current processes , but design as a practice and craft reintroduced human into a corporate, business, and technological context that has forgotten people

 

—> Per Steve Jobs: “Design is the fundamental”

 

—> If design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation, how do you scale a soul?

 

—> I started off by thinking about design systems and processes as the raising floor for quality and speed, but having no soul
  • Without soul, these systems risk becoming dehumanizing
—> Design Systems, as they stand now, take their place in a long history of dehumanizing approaches, through increasing efficiency and enforcing consistency

 

—> To maintain its soul, “Design at Scale”, needs to place culture and people before systems

 

—> Starting with culture, there are two ways to build it
  • Within the design team
  • Across the company

 

—> What worked when there were six or seven people around a conference table/Slack channel, doesn’t work as you scale up
  • Culture must be made explicit

 

—> The key way to do this is developing a shared sense of purpose for the team
  • i.e. Purpose statements for design team charters
  • It’s important for members of design team to know the reason for why the team should exist, and the higher order  of design within the organization
  • Without a purpose a team is just a collection of individuals

 

—> You also need to establish values for the design team

 

—> In my prior work at Snagajob I worked to uphold values of humility, evidence and context

 

—> Next think of norms, and how you behave and live the professed values of the organization
  • In behavior we have to balance ourselves and make judgment calls
  • Norms at Snagajob included: Candor, respect, asking for help to get out of the weeds
    • So long as you hold norms things are good

 

—> At Snagajob, we created a kit for designers that developed an identity for the team
  • By making artifacts that represent design culture, we helped the team members feel connected to something larger than themselves
  • This is especially important in pandemic world where we are not engaging with each other

 

—> So what about scaling culture company wide?
  • The most important thing is singular design leadership, where you need to a recognized individual head of design who sees all design happening at the company. Need someone to carry torch for the design practice
  • That head of design should be no more than two levels from the CEO, to show that design is important for the company
  • Executive commitment and investment, like IBM, which involves building out design as a practice within the company
    • For any movement in org, you need executive commitment and investment
  • You also need “Design Thinking” classes workshops to spread the practices of design to the group overall
    • Make design a set of activities that anyone can embrace

 

—> Now let’s talk bout “People” and focus on roles that enable scale

 

—> Take a look at the diagram of a big design team, where the design team is at scale
  • Asked to name the most important role in design org, one would likely say director or leadership roles
—> I’d say that the most important roles are team leads who are leading the various design teams
  • Team leads are managing down, and are coaches for managing the team. They provide:
    • A vision of success
    • Context to get most of the team
    • Recognize people as individuals who will bring their full selves to the challenges faced
    • Uphold standards of quality for the org. They are where quality happens
    • They make sure what’s worked on matches up with company standards
—> They also manage across via diplomat archetypes
  • They recognize we are in this together, and that we all have our own pressures and challenges
    • They need to avoid feeling victimized by product and engineering groups. Need to understand how to work with these factors
  • Still, we need to stand strong for the ideals of the design organization, and need to understand purpose and values to stand strong for what matters

 

—> The last component of the team lead is to manage up, and champion the team, and to push for the team in the face of upper management neglect and distractions to focus on work ahead

 

—> Due to these pivots, team leads are stewards for the design culture, and are the most important role to make sure we are living the culture we want

 

—> So how do we get a coherent experience across a product site?

 

—> We organize teams along the user experience, and build teams to deliver on key part of journey for customer experience
  • i.e. Purchase Design teams for an e-commerce teams
  • Each of these teams could be focused on their own work, so it is put to team leads to make it all work
  • They are the soul of design of scale
—> I was inspired by Cornelius’s talk on Wednesday, and we need to recognize how to operationalize team to do service/product design work

 

—> If we take the scale and design organization
  • Team leads are still focused on product/feature experience, but I’m now seeing this experience in Super-Senior ICs like Design Architect or Principal Designers
  • ICs who are focused on creative/strategic effort of a specific team, since executives lack bandwidth for strategic and creative work
    • Now we have folks who span product all the way through ecosystem, such as ICs who are responsible for connecting pieces of output on service and system level

 

—> The humanist foundation provides the soul, a vision that aligns distributed effort across the organization (though that is the subject for a different talk)

 

—> It helps ensure systems and processes serve people and not themselves

 

 

Q&A

 

  1. “Since the head of product and the head of engineering report to the CEO, why not the head of design?

 

—> I’m seeing that role more and more

 

—> Typically design hasn’t had enough design executives to be in that executive, as field is young, and creating that relationship takes time

 

—> In 3-5 years the head of design role will be more common

 

2. “How about discovery/purchase/post-purchase cross-functional teams?

 

—> Yes is the short answer, though it is not my responsibility to tell product and engineering how to organize their teams

 

—> Design needs to figure out the design  organization, regardless of how other departments of the organization are built