Building a Design Process for Larger Teams

5 Tips for Building a Design Process for Larger Teams

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Our guest for this episode was Wonder’s Lead Strategist, Mariana Lopez. She has over ten years of experience in building products, working on user research, usability, and interaction in design in web and mobile applications. Mariana has a masters from Carnegie Mellon for Human-Computer Interaction and has also taught as a university professor on human-computer interaction and research. Here are five tips Mariana shared for building a design process for larger teams. 

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Building a Design Process for Larger Teams | WandrFul Design Podcast Ep.# 04

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1. Be flexible 

Plans are made to be broken. Your team might have a road map for the year, but be flexible when things change. Don’t let your plans be the only roads you take. Document your decisions and why you made them, and have a retro. Answer the questions of whether they were good calls or bad calls and avoid mistakes moving forward. 

2. Improvement over innovation

If you’re going to improve your product, put slight improvement over innovations. It might be less sexy to sell, but you might get more retention. Focus on making the products better. 

3. Work as a team – the whole time 

Give enough information to the whole group about who they’re developing for and designing for. Good communication and enough information will help build trust within the team. Everybody wants to work on something that has value, so take advantage of that!

4. Get everyone involved

Involve everyone in the team from the early planning stages. Sometimes, developers or designers might be briefed much later. However, sharing information before the design and development process starts is much more productive. Why is the team doing this? What is the ultimate goal? 

5. Think about the user

Never forget who the user is. Listen to the people using the software. Ask your clients how they feel and what changes they would make, and investigate why they want to make those changes. 

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Takeaway

Working in larger teams might sound harder, especially if they’re working remotely. However, great goals can be achieved by setting up processes, having precise information, and working as a team. Share the correct insights, prioritize communication, and never forget what your client and user are looking for. 

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Quotes

Sometimes it’s about continuous improvement versus chasing after new features just because it’s like, oh, the shiny object, oh, our competitors are doing it. 

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Everybody wants to work on something that has value. 

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People have to be reminded, but it’s really helped us, you know, being able to keep track of what changes are made and being able to review them remotely. That’s really helpful for collaboration. 

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Sometimes you can be so invested in getting those designs out or, you know, making that conversation or generating something new that you forget there’s an actual human being at the end of your products. And that’s who we should be constantly focused on.