Influencing Stakeholder Collaboration at Arcadia

Background

Overview

I empowered my squad to make decisions in a structured and design centric way across various small and large scale projects. I did this by tailoring our product design team’s process to fit the needs and behaviors of my squad of PMs, EMs, data analysts, copywriters, and engineers. I introduced the design process in an iterative and collaborative way producing training videos, developing ideation sessions, and asking for feedback in our biweekly retros.

Problem

After joining this team, it became clear that the squad had no formal process for integrating design into upcoming projects. I was consistently bombarded with last minute design requests. I was given little to no business context or time to conduct stakeholder interviews to better understand the problems I was asked to solve. And most importantly there was an underlying impression that design “is a blocker” when projects come down the pipeline. With the lack of process in place, I did feel like a blocker, and sought to solve this problem.

Goals

• Provide clarity to how my squad can work together

• Provide a consistent, structured framework to problem solving that is reusable and flexible

• Provide tools to better communicate design capabilities and skills that can be utilized during a project

• Ultimately create a consistent experience for our users

Collaborators

• Designers, Adriana Phillips - Guzman & Caroline Portugal

• Volume Squad

• Product design team

Process

Stakeholder Interviews

First, I interviewed members of my team to understand their workflows and how they view design. This helped me gain knowledge into the gaps within our teams process and my stakeholders’ gaps in understanding what design is and how we are integral into building a great user experience. These interviews were sometimes informal, sometimes during our retros, or smack in the middle of a project when I noticed a gap.

Opportunities & Artifacts

From these interviews I uncovered some opportunities for our team and built artifacts to aid the team in building rituals.

⚡ Opportunity:

From my own experience with the team, it was difficult to carve out time for design within a project timeline.

🚀 Design Artifact:

I advocated for the team to update our product requirements document (PRD) to include design tasks section, tag design when projects needed design support, and carve our space to properly scope work for all affected team members

⚡ Opportunity:

I noticed a constant lack of source of truth when meetings occurred.

🚀 Design Artifact:

I decided to propose a dedicated slack channel per large project with a bookmarked PRD listed above within the channel, the design file, and a dedicated meeting notes within the PRD to keep all stakeholders informed and updated.

⚡ Opportunity:

My squad was unaware of the design process and how it could be utilized in small feature updates as well as scale to larger, more challenging projects.

🚀 Design Artifact:

I tailored a design framework developed by the product design team to fit the needs of my squad which included:

• One design process for smaller updates which integrated design seamlessly from beginning to end without being a blocker.

• One design process for large projects which carved appropriate time and dedication to discovery and ideation.

• Clearly distinction of stakeholders collaboration needed at various stages.

• Call outs when collaboration with marketing and copywriting were needed

⚡ Opportunity:

Finally, my squad had no formal process for quality assurance after building a feature. This created massive amounts of design debt, inconsistency in experience, and lack of source of truth. I also noticed the lack of response when QA was done directly in comments within the Figma file.

🚀 Design Artifact:

I developed a QA process that allowed design and engineering to collaborate after design handoff, address high priority design updates, and address design debt in later sprints. I did this by utilizing Jira as this was a system the team was used to collaborating with.

Takeaways

✅ What worked:

• Design tasks made allocating design effort easier

• A dedicated slack channel made communication more effective

• The QA process made it easier to hand off designs and ship quality experiences

💡 Areas of Improvement:

• Note taking for meetings is difficult to oversee and maintain

  • POC for meeting notes defined before hand?

• Managing project channels and new PRDs became cumbersome

  • POC for project management?

• Small projects vs large projects were still difficult to understand.

  • More ideation on how to scope a project and when to pushback for better understanding of needs