Managing Product Design Teams

Most of the team’s energy goes into producing artifacts for this flow. Storyboards, user journeys, and wireframes are all methods that once helped keep design human-centered, but are now implemented as key deliverables needed for businesses to measure progress. Some businesses, uncomfortable with the uncertainty traditionally associated with the design process, have forced design to operate entirely in these predictable stages. Others have implemented strategies to be more integrated, yet the conflation of tools with roles is ever present. Many companies manage to design and build great products in these siloes, but might not realize the costs involved.

One cost is that the work is slow. Product teams struggle under the weight of these processes and, at worst, end up filling their time completing checklists instead of doing impactful work. Because the work is done in isolation in page-based, manual design tools far away from the medium we’re designing for, the outputs tend to be derivative, perpetuating a pervasive monoculture in digital design. On top of that, these processes come with a strong bias towards objectivity, often reducing design to an act of averaging user opinions, which further promotes monoculture. And perhaps most damaging, the waterfall process enables a design process that is entirely detached from the technology we’re designing for. The usual response to these issues is more process and more managers, which lowers productivity even further. The real solution is to break out of these rigid practices altogether.