One key to launching well-designed products? Hint: don’t put design in an ivory tower.
When Fast Company interviewed former apple designer Mark Kawano about his insights into why apple design is so great, the article went viral in the design community. His primary message was this — design can’t just belong to designers… for great product design, everyone throughout the product lifecycle has to want, understand, and contribute to great design. What Kawano was saying was so core to UX strategists and designers around the globe, why did it sound so novel, so different than the companies many designers work at, or products we produce? My experience is that it’s fairly uncommon to find UX really integrated with business and dev, especially at larger companies. If you have it, that’s something special (and I would love to meet you!).
‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality of centralized teams
Designers like working in design teams, and developers like working in dev teams. PMs work in business teams, and marketers have their teams too. Having centralized functional teams can make for high morale, increased talent acquisition and retention, and can also help distribute specialized skills across workstreams. This is what’s great about a discipline-centric UX team, and as a UX leader, I’ve long been a fan of these benefits..
The drawbacks, however, can be seen at a meta level — ‘the designers’ have different priorities than ‘the developers’ or ‘eng,’ and ‘the PMs.’ Where this centralized team approach tends to break down is in the overall end-to-end lifecycle of concept-to-launch of a product or feature.
When design and research put themselves into a fully centralized team, they can find themselves left out of the business strategy at concept and planning phases, and then struggle to insert customer experience needs into the development & launch. Design teams that go even further and physically remove themselves from the rest of their product or engineering teams also risk being seen as putting themselves in an ivory tower. The team’s focus may be perceived to be more about ‘design for design’s sake’ than the business’s larger strategic goals. Sometimes that’s even true. How effective can a design team be if it's overly self-involved and preaches only to the choir?
Disconnection of UX in distributed teams
With an integrated cross-functional team it’s easier to agree on overall priorities, though maybe differing approaches to reaching those goals, which is healthy, even if sometimes contentious. Greater integration across functions can lead to a better product, and it’s a key component of popular strategies like Lean and Agile.
Unfortunately having UX distributed across product teams is limiting in other ways, like siloing product development, re-creating the wheel, and loosing sight of the larger vision for multiple teams. Even worse, UX often can be relegated to a back seat without senior, strategic UX leaders at the helm.
Combining the best of both worlds
A mix of the centralized and cross-functional team structure can happen, with some intention and planning. This is the best solution I’ve seen to keep designers motivated and learning, as well as adding value to the entire product life-cycle. UX professionals should have the benefits of being part of a larger design and UX team, where they can learn from and teach other designers. But they also benefit from being part of product and development team, where they can “own” specific products or areas. When they can divide their time between their functional team partners and their UX team partners, they can glean the benefits of both models.
We all take part in user-centered design
Another benefit I’ve seen when this is done well, is that the functional team partners get more involved in the user-centered designing process. When the whole team participates in user research and UX strategy, the product and engineering partners begin to realize the value of the the UX discipline even more, and by getting up close to users they often become champions for better UX process. And, they begin incorporating that user-centered design thinking into their business and dev deliverables.
For great design in the end product, design thinking and user centered principles have to be in every part of product strategy and development, and the designers and researchers are in a great position to lead and teach throughout an organization. Finding a way to integrate the best of centralized and distributed team structures can play an important part in an organization’s quest to deliver better experiences to their customers.
Other articles to read related to this:
https://blog.bufferapp.com/small-teams-why-startups-often-win-against-google-and-facebook-the-science-behind-why-smaller-teams-get-more-done
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/07/lean-ux-getting-out-of-the-deliverables-business/