I interviewed the product and engineering teams about what was and was not working well with the design team and the current process. I went through the feedback and brainstormed solutions with the team to make efficiencies.
After socializing potential solutions, the teams were on board to give some a try. We saw major improvements, and had some quick wins.
Overall, the changes were a huge success and we continued to make refinements and improve our process quarterly. We followed a phased approach (see the "Crawl, walk, and then run" section below).
My role
Created, implemented, and refined a design workflow process, resulting in proper reviews, transparency into capacity, and visibility into project status.
Persuaded senior leadership to change workflow process by communicating vision and collaborating with stakeholders.
Delegate the design team to run their own refinement meetings, allowing them to build relationships with product owners and free up my time to focus on leadership.
Results
Improved opportunities for collaboration between product owners and designers.
Improved the ability for designers to come up with more creative and impactful design solutions by breaking up projects into focused areas (discovery, user research, wireframes, design, UX games, etc.).
These process updates lead to the Analytics and Engineering teams to follow our2-week sprint process.
High-level process
Connected process vision
Design team workflow
Process refinement tips
1. Define your team responsibilities
Have a clear understanding of why we’re here, doing what we’re doing, as a team is essential. This identifies what we should and should not be focus our energy on, and what we have to balance.
Here was an example of our Tripadvisor Flights, Rental Cars and Cruises design team responsibilities.
2. Crawl, walk, and then run
It's impractical to make large-scale changes overnight and doing so shortens your success rate. Avoid becoming overwhelmed or burnt out by breaking up change into manageable phases that grow with your capabilities.
Here was our phased approach for how we worked with the team at-large within sprint cycles.
Crawl - We learn how meetings work together and how to make them more efficient. We iterate on ways to work better together.
Walk - Align ourselves with engineering sprints, and regularly analyze and incorporate user testing results into our design concepts. Our meetings become much more efficient and reduced in length. Our backlog is consistently refined. We are able to streamline all aspects of our workflow and increase the amount of work we take on without feeling the burden of added work.
Run - Become so efficient that we feel ready to work directly with engineering within sprints. Engineers are able to get designs into production for reviews. They can refine designs “in browser” instead of within comps. We become very quick by working together.