How product design and engineering can work better together

To make sure my product design team is in a “good place”, I continuously focus on three key questions:

1. How are things going?
2. Are people stressed or productive?
3. Are people getting what they need?

The current answers are:

1. Pretty good!
2. Kinda stressed, but still productive
3. Most of the time

While my team is producing quality designs in a timely manner, there’s always room for improvement in how we work. Here are some of the things that we are doing to improve our working relationship, and IMO these are tactics that any product organization can use to improve how design product and engineering can work better together.

Conversations, not silos

I’ve worked in quite a few organizations in my career, and I have the utmost respect for product managers. They are ultimately responsible for the success of the feature they are responsible for, and it’s a big responsibility. Often PMs write up requirements documentations they then share with design and engineering, which results in the designer (and sometimes, the Engineering Lead) feeling more of an “order taker” than active collaborator.

A better approach (and an approach I see producing the most successful projects) is to have a collaborative conversation FIRST between design, product and engineering, discussing the customer problem that needs to be solved, and then documenting the approach.

This allows for the design and engineering teams to identify the appropriate amount of  design work, what approach is best, and what engineering effort is required. The results: Cross-team capacity planning done openly, and not in isolation.

Clear customer value statements and OKR alignment

As designers, we “explain the why” around our approach and design activities. Likewise, without a clear customer problem and value statement from product management we can still execute crisp design work, but we won’t be as effective. That “explains the why” to us so we can produce more “dialed in” designs.

And having additional context regarding the objectives and key results we want to achieve with a particular project also helps the design lead. It allows everyone to know what success looks like, which also allows design management to properly evaluate the designer’s impact… Which results in more effective review cycles, allowing for raises and promotions to be based on each designer’s impact.

Better visibility into timelines and sprints

Sometimes, my design team members only has a vague inkling as to WHEN designs are due, because of a lack of (consistent) visibility into sprint schedules. Optimally (and obviously), a designer should know when their work is needed by engineering as well as the level of fidelity is required. This reduces stress and allows us to time-boxing design efforts.

The simplest approach would be working to get designs complete at least one sprint ahead, if not two. Having visibility into this and having consistent sprint timelines across projects allows for better capacity planning and focus.

A clear RACI and quarterly kickoffs

Each quarter, every feature team should set kickoffs to discuss the core focus of the quarter and present a clear RACI regarding what is expected of everyone. This should also be integrated into a sprint planning session where everyone knows when the work is planned.

Obviously, plans change, but the entire team should know enough at the beginning of the quarter to know what the “north star” is for all concerned.

Regular design huddles and walkthroughs

As part of a major product design project last year, we established regular internal design huddles to discuss design questions and make decisions. Upon the beta launch of the feature, we used these huddles to quickly refine the product design in partnership with Product and Engineering. This has proven to be so successful we continued these weekly huddles, working with the Engineering team on tweaks and other customer experience/UI issues.

I recommend that every functional area in product teams establish a forma two-week “huddle” with product and engineering, to walk through design work and get feedback around design work (both around viability and identifying additional use cases that need design support).

The expected outcomes should be (again) improved communication, visibility and partnership across product, design and engineering.

Embrace dual-track agile

In dual-track agile, we have teams working on both discovery and delivery work. This allows for better planning for the next quarter while also delivering design work needed for the current quarter. While this may impact delivery hours available from the design team, it will help design support the product strategy and ensure that future features are appropriately “tuned” to customer needs and use cases.

This also allows for more “experimentation” and concept exploration on “big rocks”, the equivalent of agile spikes.

More on this here:

https://www.productboard.com/glossary/dual-track-agile/

Conclusion

I often say that “perfect is the enemy of good.” If we strive for perfection we will never get there or ship anything. By time-boxing work and having clearer and shared vision, process and partnership ANY product development teams WILL get better, and we will get better together.