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.
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.