Building a Service Focused Design Team

Matthew Ström at UXDX USA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg_hwGQ8XKg

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

How should designers lead?

[00:00:00] Good afternoon, good morning or good evening, whatever time it is where you are. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. I wanted to start off by asking a question: how should designers lead? This is a question that matters if you're a designer and you want to be a leader. It matters if you're a design leader figuring out how you want to grow your career. But it also matters to those of you who are not designers, because if you work with designers, these folks are thinking about this question all the time, and they're going to look to you to help them lead as designers.

[00:00:44] So I wanted to start here, and I also wanted to highlight a tension in this question. This question is answered by a lot of different folks in a lot of different ways. There are two main themes to the answers I hear. The first one is that design is important to business. Classic. This is from the Harvard Business Review, Tim Brown's design thinking essay, talking about how thinking like a designer can help businesses develop process and strategy. But the other point of view, which I'm hearing a lot more lately, even from design leaders, is this quote on the right here from Alex Schleifer, who's the previous head of design at Airbnb: that design shouldn't necessarily be the leaders of the company. If you're a designer, or you work with designers, you hear these two viewpoints all the time and wonder, what can we do about this? And I promise this is the last time that the words design thinking appear in this presentation. I just had to get it out of the way.

The decentralized design org and its limits

[00:01:55] In my personal career, I've heard the range of different ideas on how design should lead. These are a few companies that I've worked for in the past six or seven years. These are companies I've led design teams at. Throughout my journey as a design leader, I have worked at small companies, I've worked at big companies, I've worked at tech companies and traditional service companies. But all the companies did share one thing in common, and if you're working with designers, or you are a designer, you will recognize this. This is how design teams are structured, and how designers typically lead at organizations. Most companies today have designers working in this decentralized way, where a designer will be organized in a functional group underneath a leader who reports out of that group, and then eventually on up to the C-suite and senior leadership.

[00:03:00] If you're not a designer, I want to put you in the shoes of someone who is, and imagine what it's like having your colleagues be in different parts of the organization. Even in small companies, even in a 10, 20, 30-person company, sometimes you don't get to actually share that feeling of being on the same team as some of the other designers at your company. It can be really frustrating. And for me as a design leader, I realized that my career prospects were a little bit limited by this, because I could only ever get to the top of my functional ability. I could never really get past that functional leader up into the senior leadership of the company. So in most of my past experiences, I've been frustrated as a design leader by the way that design traditionally leads at companies.

Saying no, and the centralized partnership model

[00:03:54] I was thinking about this a couple of years ago, and I got a call from a company called SimpleHealth. Like Rory said earlier, SimpleHealth is a reproductive healthcare company. We are focused on providing things like birth control to people through telemedicine. SimpleHealth called me up and said, hey Matt, we really want you to come in and interview for a role as our product design leader. We're going to have product design, and they're going to report to product, and we're going to have marketing design, we'll hire a different leader for that, and they're going to report to marketing. And I said no. I said, I'm not interested in that, thanks.

[00:04:33] That's something I would recommend everyone try, saying no to recruiters, because in my case it worked. They didn't just say, okay, bye. They said, actually, how do you think we should build our design team? At that point SimpleHealth didn't actually have an in-house design team. So I was like, oh, that's a really good question. Nobody's ever asked me that before. So I had to come up with a good answer.

[00:05:00] So I read a book. I read this book called Org Design for Design Orgs. Fantastic book. Some of you have probably already read it. If you haven't, there are great pictures of fish on the cover. This book recommends a model called the centralized partnership model. The way it works is that a design leader reports directly to the C-suite, or, heaven forbid, is in the C-suite. Oh my god. And they work with a centralized team of designers, whether they're marketing designers or brand designers or product designers, and everybody works together. But all of the designers work in embedded teams.

[00:05:47] What that means is that if you're a product designer, you're on the design team, but you spend most of your time with the product team. You go to the stand-ups, you go to retros. You really build strong relationships with the engineers and product managers you work with. I can't literally see people nodding their heads, but I imagine the product managers and the engineers who are listening are like, yeah, that's what I want. Marketing designers go and spend their time with the marketing team. So the designers get a really close coupling with the work that they're doing day to day, but they are a part of the design team and they all work together. That really resonated with me as the kind of design org I've always wanted to work for, and for SimpleHealth it's what I suggested that we build.

Making the case: design closer to the CEO

[00:06:42] The way I did this when I went back to SimpleHealth was with this slide. I show this to you just in case you're a designer, or advocating for design at your company. Please feel free to use this. I'll link to it afterwards. This is from the InVision design report that was done a few years ago. What they did is they surveyed a lot of designers in organizations, and they asked, how does design work at your company? What they found is that most companies they surveyed have design reporting to the head of product. However, at companies where design reports to the CEO or the C-suite, outcomes are better across the board. This chart on the right shows that the impact that designers can have on the business is much greater when designers are closer to the CEO.

[00:07:36] So I showed this to the CEO at SimpleHealth and they said, great, you're hired. I mean, there's a little more to it than that, but this is a compelling argument. So this was great. I got to get started and start building an organization. The first thing I had to do was figure out how not to repeat the mistakes that other organizations make when building their design teams. The first part of that was trying to really understand: if design is better when it reports directly to the CEO, then why do design orgs look like this?

[00:08:16] After staring at this for a while, and interviewing a lot of people, talking to my friends and former colleagues, what I realized is the reason why this makes so much sense for organizations, especially if you just look at org charts all day. In this way of organizing your design team, you literally have designers supporting each part of the business, in this very visceral way, where designers are at the bottom of the org chart, literally lifting everybody else up. You're drawing lines directly from those designers into product and marketing and brand and customer service and operations. That's because everybody in the company wants to feel supported by design. Design has this very unique property of being able to work with everybody in the organization. If you're listening to this and you're not a designer, I would bet that you work with a designer, or you have wanted to work with a designer before.

Design is a service

[00:09:23] That, to me, really started to unlock some ideas. How do we make a design organization that can provide the same level of support to everybody, without needing to break apart all the designers and literally ship them out to these teams? This was the moment that I built my current mantra about design teams, and that is: there is no business without design, and there is no design without business. Forget design leading, forget design being subordinate, forget first or last. Design and business are so closely tied together that there could not be one without the other.

[00:10:07] To me, what this says is that design is a service. Design exists to serve the people that we work with, to help them do great things, whether it's support customers, or market a product or service, or create great outcomes and a more equitable world. Design is a service, and as designers we get to provide that to people.

[00:10:36] Now, when I started to understand this, and I'm still learning a lot about it, I hadn't done a lot of deep thinking about what a good design service looks like. So I googled it. I found this book by Lou Downe, who worked really hard in the UK to help the UK government build better services, and Lou Downe came up with 15 principles for a good service. I'm not going to go through all of these, but the book is about a more traditional idea of a service, like a DMV, or a product that serves people. But all of these things can be applied to a design team.

[00:11:22] One in particular I wanted to call out is the idea that design as a service can encourage the right behaviors, both from the people who use it, so the partners that we have in the organization, and the staff, so the designers themselves. I'll give you a very specific example of this. When I was trying to figure out how we were going to be a service to our marketing organization, I realized that all of the marketing asks that we get come in through a brief. It's a piece of paper that we essentially get handed that says, here's what we want from you. On that piece of paper, I had people fill out a user profile, a kind of persona section, which had everyone working on a marketing project just take a second and think about the people that they were designing for. By designing that process, instead of having everybody go through and take a course on how to be more empathetic, we're just encouraging people to do the right thing, which is to think about our users, whether they're our patients or our customer support people, when doing our marketing.

Quantifying the impact of design

[00:12:33] The thing that I have really enjoyed almost above all else in building a service-focused design organization is that it's solved one of the hardest problems for a design leader, which is how do you quantify the impact of design? If you have ever been in a conversation with a designer or a design leader, or senior leadership talking about design, this question comes up all the time: okay, what is the ROI of design? What is the impact of design? A service-focused design organization has helped me really do a lot of that. There are a lot of ways that you can quantify a design service. If any of y'all work in customer service, you'll recognize these. And if you do work in customer service, next time you talk to a designer, tell them how you measure your work, and I guarantee they're going to start having all sorts of great ideas about how they can measure their work. Because this started to really feel just right as soon as I applied it to our design team.

[00:13:39] The one thing, though, that has really made my partnerships with folks across the organization work is this idea that above all else, what I am interested in as a design leader is not my own team's OKRs or KPIs, or thinking about how big my team gets. It's really just how successful my partners are. So instead of taking the pie of all of the great things the company does and trying to figure out what slice of it design is responsible for, I get to take everybody's success and say, here's a part of the company that design was instrumental in, and here's another part that design was instrumental in. And honestly, there's nothing at any company, but especially at SimpleHealth, that does not include design, or doesn't need design, or cannot benefit from design.

[00:14:34] So by measuring design as a service, and then providing that same service, and developing our skills as designers for designing good services, it creates this great feedback loop of constantly being able to look back and say what's working and what's not, and then implementing those changes and seeing how it measurably improves the performance of the design team and the success of the company as a whole.

Two surprises: small teams and stakeholders as advocates

[00:15:03] Finally, I wanted to share two things that I was surprised by when I started implementing this, and things that I'm still exploring today. First, design teams can be powerful even when they're small. This is a little counterintuitive to leaders or managers. Oftentimes what you think of as your gas pedal, the thing that's going to get you to that next level, is hiring more people. But with a service, sometimes it doesn't really matter how many people you have working on that service. You're abstracting all of that away and just talking about the throughput and the outcomes of your team. So instead of hiring another person, you can just improve your process to be more efficient, and your finance friends will absolutely love this.

[00:15:56] And lastly, one of the most surprising things about design as a service: I thought by putting my stakeholders at the center of the universe, I was somehow putting myself as less, trying to be in the background or in the supporting role, and that my stakeholders would see that and get really self-important and think they're way better than design. But what I found is that in putting my stakeholders and my partners at the center of the universe, they end up being my biggest advocates. So when they want to grow their teams, when they want to do really exciting and cool things, the first thing they say is, okay, design, we're going to need you to have more people on your team, we're going to need you to have a bigger budget. And that's really great. That means that my team and the teams we work with are super aligned.

Growing the team at SimpleHealth

[00:16:54] So at the end of all this, here's what this looked like. When I started at SimpleHealth in 2020, I was the only full-time designer. I had a few contractors that I worked with, but more than anything I was a one-man band. At the beginning of 2021, I had hired another full-time designer, and I had grown the number of contractors that I worked with. Actually, I love to take contractors and slowly bring them in-house. That's one of my favorite things to do. And then, when we started to really prove out this service-oriented model, my boss and the CEO were like, okay Matt, all the people you wanted to hire later in the year, just go ahead and hire them right now, because we want you to grow as fast as possible. So I'm on track right now, at the end of 2020[?], or the beginning of 2022, to have this six-person team, and we'll just keep going from there.

[00:17:52] I'm very excited about that. And importantly, at the end of it all, I can quantify it. I can show my business stakeholders that our service has continued to provide the same level of outcomes for our partners. We haven't slowed down. We haven't dropped off as we've become busier and a larger team. This is the thing that has really helped me get the kind of buy-in and interest and support from the partners that I've needed to grow. And that is the service-driven design organization. Thank you all so much for listening to me today. I'm going to be sharing some of the links to this content later, and feel free to follow along.