None of this is fact.

These are my current thoughts and opinions about teams, collaboration, and creative work, formed over the past 13 years spent on the difficult and rapidly evolving task of creating things that other people find valuable enough to pay for.

Creative work is unpredictable, and quality takes time. My job as a design leader is to foster an environment that increases the odds of lightning striking — meaning high-quality, innovative work output from the team at a relatively rapid and predictable rate.

This means inspiring the team to show up and imagine new possibilities every day, creating space and rituals for people to work alone and together, and celebrating the great things that come from the team — whether they ship or not.

This page introduces some frameworks that drive my approach to design and team leadership, and that help simplify the endless complexities of cross-functional product design and development.

Consider the product design and development workflow as a pyramid with 3 layers, each foundational to the one above:

A foundation of great people, working with intentional tools and systems, are most likely to create a successful product

People

People are the foundation of everything.

Nothing gets done without the right people in the right positions, aligned, motivated, empowered, and working together toward a shared vision.

But great teams aren’t great simply because they’re full of individual rock stars.

Great teams embody a 1 + 1 = 3 dynamic — meaning that the whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

They operate on a foundation of trust, and value diversity — meaning they understand that no individual can accomplish what a team of complementary skill sets can.

They're comfortable with respectful, open debate, and are willing to challenge each other’s assumptions.

They push one another to empathize with unfamiliar points of view, and then imagine new possibilities.

They leverage each other’s strengths and cover each other’s blind spots.

They share victories, and learn from failures, together.

If the People layer is not working well, then the rest of the pyramid will fail. Processes won’t work, no matter how intentionally designed, and a great product will never be delivered.

Some signals that there are problems in the People layer are:

• Unclear roles and responsibilities
  For example, people “stepping on each other’s toes” and doing work that someone else assumed was theirs to own
• Opaque, rather than transparent and candid, lines of communication
  For example, part of the team redefined a project deliverable without involving another part of the team, leading to wasted effort and frustration
• Unclear goals and desired outcomes
  For example, the team doesn’t understand why a deliverable matters to the business because they haven’t been involved in goal setting
• The wrong people in the wrong positions
  For example, a junior designer owning a large-scale strategic initiative without guidance and mentorship along the way, or a UX specialist tasked with executing a visual brand refresh
• An underlying culture of toxicity
  For example, long-standing team members feeling threatened by new hires, and not welcoming or involving them in team rituals

Process

Process is the middle layer.

It covers the systems and tools that a team uses to get work done — collaboration, communication, sequence of operations, approval gates, norms, and rituals that the team follows to keep work on track and running smoothly.

There’s no one size fits all process that every product team should follow.

One team may do best to follow a strict, highly regimented process — for example, a large cross-functional team working on self-driving car technology that is heavily regulated and puts lives at risk.

Another team may best operate with very fluid, almost non-existent process — say, a small team of founders working on a new mobile game proof of concept to shop around to investors.

The right process for a team can vary widely based on variables like company size and stage, level of product-market fit, number of teams and their size, product ecosystem, skillsets and skill gaps within a team, company or team goals, leadership style, and general company / team culture. It can and should evolve as the business does, adapting to fit the current state of the business and teams.

Even with a well-functioning People layer in place, if the Process layer isn't working, then the team will not deliver on the top Product layer of the pyramid.

Some signals that there are problems in the Process layer are:

• There’s no agreed-upon model or tool for asynchronous communication
  For example, some people prefer using Slack, while others prefer Microsoft Teams, which leads to fragmented knowledge across the team
  
• There’s no regular forum for design reviews, critique, and feedback
  For example, a designer putting the finishing touches on a 4-week deliverable receives late feedback from engineering, who only saw the project today, forcing a rework of the foundational information architecture and design direction
• Project documentation and decision-making data is unclear, leading to stakeholders questioning product direction
  For example, there’s no centralized place for user research outputs and insights that anyone can access, search, and leverage any time, so teams spend a lot of time defending project direction to stakeholders
• There’s no repeatable, effective approach to kicking off new initiatives
  For example, on a team’s previous project, they ran a design thinking workshop to uncover hidden assumptions in their team, quickly generate possible solutions, and validate with customers, while on the current project, someone individually wrote a doc that “covers everything we need to get started” and shared via email
• A team of strong individuals feels frustrated after missing yet another deadline
  For example, our newly formed growth team has run into a blocking issue where the pattern they need to ship their desired experiment is not approved in the company’s design system, causing delays in their progress

Product

The top layer of the pyramid is Product.

Delivering a winning product requires that the two layers below are both working well — we have the right People in the right positions, and they’re empowered by effective Process to do high-value work, efficiently.

Good people together with sound process create a higher chance of building and scaling a successful product. But the reverse is also true — good people without clear ways of working and collaborating, or a team of unskilled people following the most mature processes from the most successful business in the world, will struggle to achieve a successful outcome.

As soon as we have multiple designers contributing to a single product experience, it becomes important that each designer's deliverables fit into a cohesive whole that adds value at each stage of delivery, rather than fracturing and diluting the overall experience.

A concentric model for coordinating multiple teams working toward a single vision, delivering value to customers along the way

This is a concentric team model, with each team aimed toward the same long-term vision and outcome. Their deliverables complement each other’s at every delivery stage so that as delivery milestones are met, value to the user increases.

Conversely, a parallel team model has teams operating and delivering separately from each other. It tends to index on team autonomy and speed, but the trade-offs are quality, consistency, and long-term value for customers. This “speed” optimization is short-sighted, as teams effectively silo from each other, and risk delivering inconsistencies that devalue the overall product experience. This introduces new types of cost and thrash in the form of design and technical debt, bugs, and customer complaints. Now the team is stuck delivering short-term, incremental fixes that slow progress more than if they had simply strategized together from the start. Most importantly, this chips away at customer trust and sentiment, risking potential churn.

But getting this right doesn’t have to be difficult. It takes:

• Strategic vision
  Where are we going in the big picture, what are the outcomes for our users and customers, and why is it important for our business? Once we understand that, we can rally teams toward it, and define the key delivery stages that will get us there.
  
• Alignment of teams and deliverables
  Delivery milestones are defined by impact to the customer and product experience, and then divvied up across teams based on their focus (product area, technical expertise, etc). What might our deliveries look like, so that we’re improving the product experience as we release, never detracting? What projects might reach dev completion but will not add value to customers until a subsequent piece can be included with it?
• Visibility and collaboration between teams and functions
  This is an inherently collaborative, not siloed, approach, both within and across teams and functions. Shifts in one team's planning and deliverables may affect another team, and that’s ok. We’re not measuring success solely on quantity of delivery, but rather on quality and value to the user. It’s important that visibility and communication channels are established, so that any changes to planning can be managed proactively.
• Mindset: ‘Speed + Quality = Scale’
  Delivering software that doesn’t work well, or that breaks conventional patterns simply because it’s dev-complete is a shortsighted approach to building a successful product over the long term. It often costs more to unravel and fix issues later than it does to invest in getting them right from the start. The art comes in understanding what “getting it right” actually means — the goal is to not over-invest in details that may not materially impact value to the customer, while also not delivering a half-baked solution that doesn’t accomplish its intent.

Designers are uniquely equipped to craft useful products for people by leveraging their superpowers of curiosity, empathy, visualization, rapid prototyping, and ongoing learning and iteration.

We dig in to understand a problem space, explore possible solutions and make them tangible for others to experience and evaluate, and ultimately discover the best solution to execute and deliver, based on value to the customer.

Understand user needs, explore and evaluate potential solutions, then decide on the highest ROI solution to execute BEFORE fully investing in development and delivery

This drives value for businesses because it’s a cheap and fast way to understand the nuances of what works and what doesn’t before investing in high-cost product development and delivery, and without risking delivering a solution that misses the mark.

The product and UX design loop covers three main phases: Understand > Explore > Execute.

Phase 1: Understand

This is all about building empathy for customers and the people who use our products. We dig in to understand their day-to-day behaviors, challenges, and overall problem space. The goal is to uncover actionable insights and opportunities that may be worth exploring in more detail.

‍How It’s Done

• Qualitative insights from customer interviews, observation, and surveys
  
• Quantitative product / usage analytics
• Competitive / analogous product analysis
• Design thinking sessions
• Collaborative design sprints and workshops

This is all about building empathy for customers and the people who use our products. We dig in to understand their day-to-day behaviors, challenges, and overall problem space. The goal is to uncover actionable insights and opportunities that may be worth exploring in more detail.

Why It Matters
‍The better we understand the specific needs of our users and customers, the more focused our design and development will be. This saves time, resources, and headaches as we move through the product development process, and also helps us tell a more effective customer story in our marketing and sales conversations.

Phase 2: Explore

This is all about exploring potential solutions to the problem space from phase 1.

Through ideation, testing, and feedback loops with users, we evaluate ideas and narrow down toward the best solution based on utility and usability for users, feasibility for our teams to execute, and viability for our business to deliver and maintain.

‍How It’s Done

• Brainstorming and co-create sessions
  
• Visual storytelling like storyboarding, user flows and journeys, information architecture diagrams, etc
  
• Rapid prototyping to make ideas tangible for others to experience
• User testing and directional validation to evaluate overall value, as well as usefulness and usability

Why It Matters
‍The goal is to build confidence in a direction — or kill it — before moving into development and delivery phases, which are more time-consuming, resource-intensive, and higher risk to customers.

Work done in this phase tends to be thrown away, and that’s perfectly ok. It’s the time to be creative, explore ideas that the team wants to learn about, and uncover answers to specific questions to inform further investment.

Phase 3: Execute

This is all about scoping, documenting, and articulating the full experience to be developed and delivered.

How It’s Done

• High fidelity “production-ready” prototypes that demonstrate functionality, logic, and user experienceInteraction, interface, and systems design
  
• Updates to design system as needed — components, styles, interaction patterns, page archetypes, navigation models, language and naming, etc
  
• UX copywriting and associated content (illustration, photography, etc)
• Design specs that act as the source of truth for development and ongoing documentation
• Development and delivery planning — sequencing, deliverables, dependencies, roles, etc

Why It Matters
‍By this phase, we’re confident that our delivery will bring value to customers, so it’s all about setting our development and delivery teams up for success.

We nail down the details, evaluate tradeoffs, and document everything for efficient, low-risk development.