Designing With a Team

Design work doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it’s part of a product lifecycle that requires collaboration with other teams. Design as part of a large scale, enterprise team requires consistent and scalable design approaches to ensure coherence across projects, which teams can achieve through strong communication skills, collaboration tools, and thorough documentation such as design systems.

Three possible design team structures are centralized, where designers are part of the same core design team; decentralized, where designers are embedded on different cross-functional teams; and hybrid (or matrix), a combination of both structures.

Learning how to give, receive, and ask for effective feedback appropriate to the current design stage is essential to working collaboratively.

When giving feedback, we should first work to understand the stage of the project and the level of feedback desired, explain our reasoning, and tie the feedback to organizational design principles, project goals, or broader design best practices, rather than personal opinion.

When soliciting feedback, we should be clear about what kind of feedback we’re looking for.

One key collaborative dynamic within the product development lifecycle is the dynamic between designers, who tend to focus on user experience and the finer details of product aesthetics and functionality, and product managers, who tend to focus on market needs, product vision, and business goals.

The product plan or brief is a key deliverable that ensures that everyone is running the same race from the same starting point, toward the same finish line or goal.

For successful collaboration, it’s important for the product team to define product strategy early and communicate it clearly to the rest of the team.

Designers tend to focus on designing an ideal user experience, while engineers need to understand and execute on this vision within technical constraints, often on a strict timeline. Effective collaboration between both is crucial for successful product development and can be achieved through clear communication and documentation.

The process is likely to work most smoothly if it’s not considered a single moment of handing over a design file, but as a consistent collaboration before, during, and after handoff.

A design handoff file is an annotated design file that provides comprehensive, well-organized specifications and context, such as user flows, interaction states, responsive behavior descriptions, and accessibility guidelines. This deliverable helps developers accurately implement design intentions.