Creating a product design process

Skills

Design leadership Facilitation

Background

MessageMedia is a well established company that had recently created a new product team with an associated UX team. It was my role to manage this UX team and lead the growth of design. Shortly after starting in this role I determined that a product / UI design process was required.

Challenge

There were a number of challenges that I faced:

  • There was no clear process for how products and features were developed from ideas to concepts to release.
  • There was little documentation of design or other decisions
  • No process to track the design and build of UI elements.

Actions

I worked with the product and development teams to create a process for both tracking product design progress and managing the build of UI components.

I created a matrix to understand roles around leading each step of the process.

 

Trello board – obscured
Product process – obscured.

Results

  • The process is used to track design progress and to understand which team has ownership or decision making power for a given stage
  • We iterated this across different systems (including paper, Jira, OneNote, aha) before using Trello.

During this process I deliberately made the process diagrams “rough” – starting with whiteboard diagrams and basic “boxes and arrows” diagrams. This was effective in getting feedback and ideas for improvement from stakeholders.