How should a new design team be organized?
Illustrations by @bbriuses
Unfortunately as with every complex subject, it depends. To be able to structure a new team of design we need to understand the particular context of the organization it will be part of, from the responsibilities the team will have, the type of projects and other variables.
To helps us shed some light on these variables, we have some questions that will helps us:
1. Which are the responsibilities and their level that the team will have?
Model 1. Adapted from “Org Design for Design Orgs: building and Managing In-house Design Teams”
Identifying the involvement of the team in terms of the level of strategy, from the most strategic (i.e. the brand future) to the tactic everyday decisions (the color of a button or a visual component); as the channels and communication mediums that the team projects involve (Physical products, digital products, services, environments, brand, etc.) will help us understand the kind of designers, their specializations and their seniority and strategic level.
Model 2. Adapted from “Org Design for Design Orgs: building and Managing In-house Design Teams”
2. In which projects the team will be working?
Once we know the kind of abilities that our designers need, we should find out how big our team needs to be, both in terms of individual contributors and leaders / managers. For that we must ask us the following questions:
- How many projects does the company have?
- How many of those should the design team be involved?
- How is the timing of the project’s pipeline? How long do they last? How often do you have to start with new projects?
- How is the process to iterate the company products and services?
- How complex are the projects?
- How do you think you should tackle the projects in terms of the level of involvement of the designers?
- What type of attention would be given to the projects? (Centralized, decentralized or hybrid)
3. What are the specialities needed for the designers?
All designers have to consider the whole customer journey, not just the part corresponding to our products or services. Independently if they are designing a physical product, a digital one, an environment, or service.
Although all designers share this responsibility, the needs of the projects point to the different knowledge and skills needed from the designers, much of the time no single person can have the domain of everything that is needed. Those projects need much of the time is in part derived from which channels have the design team involvement. (i.e. physical offices, web page, web app, mobile app, etc.)
To design for the digital world, commonly we need:
- Visual designer: It gives the final touches to the interface and generates new and innovative visuals that extends or challenges the brand manual or design system.
- Product designer: Is in charge of building the product functionality using people centered design, from the value proposition, to the live to the public product and its iteration.
- Service designer: Ensures that our product and services have the customer journey in mind through all the touchpoints involved.
- Design researcher: In those projects where we don’t know enough about our client needs, this designer is in charge of generating the knowledge though quant/qual research and translating those needs into design decisions.
- UX writer: Responsable of the text, labels and content between the interfaces, so these can be understood by our clients and users.
- Creative tech: It’s the bridge between the development and design teams. It pushes both technology and design to reach new levels.
- Data designer: It’s the bridge between the data and design teams. Ensures the creation of a common language and the integration of both worlds in the product/service creation process.
Others design profiles to have in mind, depending on the channels to be designed are:
- Physical products: industrial designer.
- Environment: architect, wayfinding designer, flow designer.
- Marketing & communication: communication designer, graphic designer, information designer, animator, packaging designer, video designer, brand designer, etc.
4. What are the profiles for the support teams?
The whole team is not supposed to be only individual contributors focused on the surface and structure, skeleton elements of the products/services experience. We also need support teams, usually we can divide this in two groups:
Design leaders
They guide the designers and help them connect their work to the business strategy.
Inside the design leaders we can distinguish between them depending on their level of experience and involvement with the scope and strategy for the products/services. This will put them more or less closer with the individual contributor designer, going from the closest one we have:
- Design lead or design manager: Is a coach for the project teams (no designers) and the designers. It helps them to apply the experience & business strategy to their respective projects, at the same time is responsible to ensure the highest standard of quality for the design process & outputs.
- Design Director or design program manager: Supervises the design manager’s work within a group of projects (Program or value stream). It makes sure the business and experience strategy are translated into the individual projects, ensuring the quality of the design process and output. Also is involved in solving any conflict at the program manager or stakeholder level.
- Heads of design / Design senior director: They have under their charge whole project portfolios. They translate the business strategy into an experience vision and strategy and communicate it to the designers though the design program managers and the design managers.
Team enablers
They provide tools, methods and policies focused on increasing the efficacy and efficiency of a design team at scale (more than 12 designers). We have the following profiles:
- DesignOps project manager: It supports a particular design team to help them achieve the project goals, it’s a peer of the designers.
- DesignOps program manager: It supports a group or portfolio of design teams to help them achieve their project goals, it’s a peer of the design manager.
- DesignOps head: It’s responsible for the designOps project manager and the designOps program manager. Defines the Ops strategy and it’s a peer of the heads of design.
- Functional designOps head (Research, Education, etc.): It has in his charge a functional support area for the whole design team (for example the design system, education, people, design process, etc.). It’s a peer of the design heads and design Ops head.
Once we have defined the type of designers, we need to figure out how many of each. For that we also need to understand the quantity, demand and complexity of the projects they are going to take.
5. How to classify the projects?
Having some criteria to classify the projects according to their needs will help us to have a simplified model to help us to assign the right designers to the whole portfolio of projects.
Common typologies:
- Projects according to the size of the work demand
- The project complexity will determine the “size” of the project (Small, medium, large and extra large).
We will need to take into account how long it takes a team of designers to complete all of the outputs required. For example a small project that only needs some changes in text or a minor adjustment to a limited number of interfaces could be completed in two weeks, but a large one with whole new flows for multiple channels (web, app, etc.) could take three months.
Projects according to the activities of design involved
We could classify the projects depending on the activities to be done in the project from a research and product design perspective, a project with more uncertainty will require more work. Optimizing an existing purchase funnel will involve summative usability testing and A/B testing; designing the purchase funnel for a new type of product could imply concept testing, exploratory research, wireframes for the new components, formative usability testing and visual design for the new components taking more work, time and people than the previous example.
There could be more variables to group and classify projects, by no means these two groups are the only classification possible, but every design leadership team should choose one and use it consistently.
How to define the “size” of the projects?
Creating this “t-shirt size” typology involves a lot of information, from identifying the common activities and deliverables to estimating the time involved for the design team, and every specialty defined in the team, both for individual contributors and enablers.
We can dump all this information in a table to help us visualize and define how many designers and which specialties are needed for each project. We called this table the “Design T-shirt for projects”.
Table 1. We can observe 4 main elements of the table: project size, estimated duration, designer profiles and percentage of dedication needed for each project size.
With the “T-shirt” we’ll analyse 100% of the portfolio of projects of our organization where design should be involved. This will allow us to have an idea of the size of the team and its composition between designer profiles needed to cover the demand of design.
Table 2.
IN this example we can see that if a design team wanted to support all three projects we would need 9 individual contributor designers, and possibly 1 design manager and 1 design Ops Program manager for a team of 11.
Table 3.
Although we may want to cover all the projects in our organization, the most common thing for a design team is not having enough designers and to focus on the most important projects. Every design organization needs to define their ambition alongside the data, product and technology teams inline with their company circumstances.
6. How to organize the team?
Let’s assume that you already have the responsibilities, number of projects, their complexity, and the size & profiles of the design team. And you have calculated the full size of the design team, now we need to organize it.
So, how should we organize the team? How should we define the working teams and their enablers? To guide us, we can use the team complexity model by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner in their book Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams1.
This model is a reference on how to structure the design team, depending on how many designers we have. More designers implies more complexity.
As the work increases or decreases, so in many organizations the design team grows or shrinks going through several levels, each complexity level requires a slightly different structure of the combinations between designers, design leaders and other enablers.
7. What’s next?
The only constant thing in life is change, and the circumstances that shape our model for the design team are always changing. We need to stay vigilant to detect if things are changing and showing us pains that could indicate a need to restructure the team.
Share your thoughts.
References:
- “Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams” by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner — Book & Blog
- “Design T-shirt model” naming by Marianna Wickman & Derek White
