Scaling Design at SumUp

Pamela Mead at UXDX Europe. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KgfmNvMPj8&t=328s

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.

A journey of scaling design at SumUp

[00:00:00] Hi, everybody. Super happy to be speaking to you at the UXDX conference; many thanks to the organisers for inviting me to come speak to you. Happy to share with you my journey at SumUp and how we're looking to scale design. It's been quite a journey, especially in the last couple of months. The experience with COVID has really taught us a lot about the organisation and how we need to be adapting, and it has affected and impacted, of course, how we're thinking about our scaling.

[00:00:28] We're going to talk about three pillars that we are racing to put in place to make this journey work. One is around organisation, one is around practice and culture, and the other one is UX strategy. So I'll walk you through all of those. I joined SumUp in November last year, so it's been 10 months. As I already mentioned, it has been a journey, both because of the nature of the company, and then of course because we had to make some significant adjustments with the lockdowns and the COVID crisis.

[00:01:06] It has actually revealed quite a bit about the company and the commitment that's at our heart to helping our small merchants be successful. Helping them be successful at this point in time was a very heartfelt and very genuine part of our motivation to significantly shift the company from a card reader company to a multi-product company.

Taking an inventory: design maturity and organisation models

[00:01:29] When I join companies, I always spend some time getting to know the organisation, and I like to use this model from the Danish Design Centre to take a little bit of an inventory of how the company actually understands design, how it works with design, and how much it embraces it. There are a couple of other models that are also quite good. One is the McKinsey design value index that was published, I think, in 2018. And then last year the InVision maturity report was also published, and it's quite good and worth a read. This one is a simple four steps, so I like to stay with it because it makes it understandable how design can progress in an organisation. SumUp, like most companies, is somewhere between two and three: thinking about design as more styling, versus understanding that design is actually a process, and that the way of designing and the way of working can be an organisational change driver.

[00:02:27] The other model that I always like to look at is where the organisation is, how it is evolving, what its philosophy is. In general, when companies are early in design adoption, I like to start with more centralised but embedded teams, in order to really be able to build the culture and build the practices. What is happening, as we are now all living in some form of tribalisation, is we frequently have to go straight from scattered individuals and teams to having distributed teams that are living inside of tribes, or whatever the particular language is in your organisation. And we need to move towards finding a way to have what I call empowered transversal teams, to really support the individuals in the various tribes in organisations.

The magic triad

[00:03:20] It is for that reason that I come back to what should be a super familiar model to us, and almost common sense at this point. But it's always surprising to me how organisations are not really acting, embodying or working with it. It's what I call the magic triad, where design, product and engineering really collaborate together in solving the problem that we're trying to solve for our customers, in this case for our merchants.

[00:03:50] But I find in a lot of organisations, sometimes because of reporting, design and product work well together, although frequently design is more of a supporting function to product, and then engineering's left out. I have been in some organisations where design is more closely tied to engineering, and then it's a bit more on the implementation or functional side. But in most organisations, this magic triad doesn't really work the way I think we're all envisioning it, in this super collaborative, super equal mindset. I'll bring this up again later when I talk about how I'm setting up the organisation within SumUp, but I think it's a pretty important framework to remember: real innovation comes at that intersection.

One merchant, one product, 16 teams

[00:04:35] With these three models, I then also always look at what is unique about an organisation, because ultimately any model can work, but it can only work if it can fit within the philosophy and the structure of the company that you're trying to introduce it to. And SumUp has distinctly unique attributes and characteristics that require particular approaches.

[00:05:02] The way I like to talk about product in the merchant experience is to say we have one merchant and one product. For quite a long time, this was really true. We had a card reader, and then we had an interface, for example with this product, the Air. You needed to have the app so you could enter the amounts, and then you could actually do the transactions. A straightforward interface, some additional management functions, but quite straightforward.

[00:05:30] In the last four or five months, we've become a multi-product company. We now have invoicing, we have selling online, we have mobile payments, we have gift cards. We have all these new products, functions and tools that can allow our merchants to be much more successful. But where do we put them? How do we integrate them? We've started the conversation of saying that our app reflects our organisation, because we have one more button where everything that we've launched now lives.

[00:06:03] That can all be worked out, but what's particularly challenging about this is that, and this was actually in January, I had 11 teams working into one product interface. We're now actually 16 teams working into one product, one interface. So the particular challenge is: with these autonomous teams, how do we get this product to evolve in a way that creates a cohesive merchant experience, that really focuses on building value for the merchant, not launching products and features in our own autonomous ways? This is what keeps me awake at night, and this is really what I'm looking to address and evolve as we go on this journey of scaling design.

[00:06:47] So how to do this? I have three pillars, or areas, that I really focus on as part of this journey. One is what the design organisation is. Then what the practices and the community are that really provide the glue. And where do we really want to go: what's our UX strategy and what's the product vision that can really inspire people to work towards this shared vision?

Pillar one: a design organisation that mirrors the company

[00:07:16] First, the design organisation. I mentioned already that I have a particular philosophy of how I would love to start, but most of the time we're already further along. At SumUp, like probably a lot of the organisations that you're working for, we have to embrace the fact that the design organisation needs to map to the organisational philosophy of the company. I have worked in other companies where the design organisation didn't quite match the rest of the organisation. And yes, it made us special, but not always special in a way that was good for us. Design frequently, in those circumstances, was blamed for any hindrance, any delays, anything. Somehow design was always the bottleneck in terms of the team not delivering. So I'm very aware that even though I might want a different structure, it's super important for design to be equal from an organisational perspective.

[00:08:17] Since I started, we've grown from 35 designers to 68. We have brand designers, product designers and user researchers. And we are quite distributed: we have offices in Copenhagen, in Sofia, in Berlin, another office in Cologne, and a not insignificant office in São Paulo. So when I think about it: okay, we have this organisation, how do we create cohesiveness, both in structure but also in our practices, so we can all be empowered to create one experience for our one merchant?

[00:08:58] The way we've matched the organisation is we are tribalising our product teams. We have, I think, seven tribes now, and there are more coming on a regular basis. Then we have marketing teams that are currently embedded; we are very country focused, but here we are also talking about tribalisation. The company very much believes in autonomous teams, really self-organising and really solving merchant problems in their particular domain and value stream.

Empowered transversal teams

[00:09:28] On the other side, I'm looking to build this empowered transversal organisation. It's part of the platform tribe, where we're really building teams that can provide needed expertise and look across the journey and across our products. One is around brand design, one is around user research, a design system, and then service design. There are senior design experts who can work on projects that cover different tribes and teams, and we're also beginning to set up DesignOps, and then bringing in much-needed expertise that may not exist in the organisation. I'll talk about that in a few minutes.

[00:10:14] To come back to how we empower this triad, this magic peer relationship, to happen: I'm working with all the tribe leads, who can come from a variety of different disciplines, to create a matching structure for design within the organisation. Design will have a design lead reporting to the tribe lead as a peer to the engineering leads and product leads, and then designers actually reporting into them. So we set up mini organisations in these tribes, so that there is design support for the designers, there's mentorship, there is this cohesiveness. And there is a representative at the most senior level in the tribe, and a setup where the disciplines in the teams are treated equally. This is really quite important, because in a lot of organisations design is reporting to product, and this keeps a slightly lopsided relationship going. Here I'm really looking at reinforcing the equilibrium by setting up this parallel structure.

Team designers and experts

[00:11:18] Then we still have the designers embedded in actual teams and squads. This is super important, because this is on the ground, where you really get this level of collaboration going. I talk about team designers, with their own superhero skills, if you will, who can work on a day-to-day basis with a squad or with a team on features, be in the practices and the rituals, and really be part of making things happen.

[00:11:46] I've watched, over the last five years, the rise of product designers, which I don't fully believe in. Usually one designer is hired who needs to be great at UX, great at UI, great at user research, great at pixel iconography, and maybe even also copywriting. And while I may know a handful of people who are really great at all of them, most designers that I know really have a core strength where they really excel, and then they have complementary skills. So I really want to think of it as an opportunity for us to really honour their strengths and leverage that, and then have them focus on bringing in additional expertise as needed to help support where they may not be as strong. Team designers tend to be stronger on the UX and problem-solving side, but that's not a rule, of course.

[00:12:41] But if that's true, then at what point does a tribe, for example, or even the global level, need a really super expert UI designer that can work with and complement the team designers? Or a copywriter, because not every designer is good at copywriting. Or a user researcher who can really support maybe multiple teams or multiple tribes. This model really honours that if you want to have design excellence, we really need people who have deep expertise in a particular area to complement maybe more generalist designers, or UX designers who can apply very good systems design but who could benefit from a peer to really solve the design problem and take it to the next level, by having a UI or visual designer or UI copy expert working with them.

Scaling at a pace the company can handle

[00:13:33] This is important on a couple of levels. I apply the same model inside of tribes as well as to the organisation as a whole. It gives me a chance to scale design at a pace that the company can actually handle. We're now looking to hire our first UX writer in all of SumUp, and I'm hiring him or her into the global organisation. With that, I'll begin to set up almost a demand from my other teams and other tribes to also want to have a UX writer, because they see the value that this skill and this person can produce. And there'll be a natural push for tribes to say, "Yes, we need to have one. We're going to prioritise them as a head count." So rather than me needing to convince people, I can bring somebody in and show what value they can produce. And then very quickly the demand will grow in the other teams, and we can expand and disseminate, as needed, initially as shared resources and then maybe embedded in different teams.

[00:14:35] Coming back to organisation, what are three principles that can really help with the thinking around organisation? One, it's very important that the design organisation really adapts and works within the philosophy of the company. Two, if you aspire to have really great products, I really believe it's important not to compromise on quality of talent and cultural fit. And three, the idea of having experts supporting generalists is a way in which you can really do both, and really grow at the pace that the organisation can handle. That's where this model of experts supporting generalists is one that I found to be really quite effective in creating demand and creating a natural organisational pace.

Pillar two: practices and community

[00:15:22] The second pillar is really around practices and community. As we shift the organisation towards these embedded tribes and embedded teams, we need a way to have cohesiveness across them. Remember the 16 teams that are all working into one interface? Those are all individual teams and individual tribes, and I need to find a way in which, at least at the design level, but really also at the product and engineering level, we know what we want to be doing and we have shared practices to get there.

[00:15:54] Design sprints have become a very loved practice. I believe design sprints aren't the answer to everything. I actually believe in workshops: really sitting down and working together on solving problems. So we are embracing the workshop as a format for us in general. Of course, when we can all be in the room together, it really creates that bond and that sensitivity that we are looking for. One of the designers, I can't see him right now, is from our Sofia office. We had quite a few of our Brazil product, engineering and design members in this particular sprint, and he really embraced understanding our merchants from Brazil. Now, in conversations, he'll be talking about how we need to be thinking about it from a completely different perspective, and he didn't have that kind of awareness until we brought everybody together.

[00:16:51] So this, I really believe, is important. Of course, now that we're all working from home, we have to take it virtual. Yes, we're all getting to know Miro boards, and they do quite a bit of magic, but it is not the same thing as working in a room together and whiteboarding. We need to embrace the technology, and not forget the practice and the importance of collaborating and working together, which is super important to create that shared knowledge, especially when we're in an organisation that is so distributed, and we're developing in Berlin and in Sofia for our merchants as far away as Brazil.

Design critiques

[00:17:30] One of the practices that I really focus on, that I find quite interesting, is the design crit, as part of the way in which we can come together, review and give input on each other's work. We're finding at SumUp that frequently two or three teams are working on very similar problems or views in a portal. So we'd like to bring them together and start to have a conversation: do we really need to do different list views, or can we have the same one, and how do we agree to that?

[00:18:01] Coming from consulting, design critiques are a well-known practice. I found in organisations that they're much less common and frequently quite uncomfortable. So from my perspective, this is going to become an important part of our practice. But we need to figure out how to bring designers to the place where they can value it, they can work with it, they can separate themselves from their work and really engage in dialogue, so we can strive towards much better solutions and a much better quality of output.

Defining design excellence

[00:18:39] One of the things that we're looking at to get there is to talk about what we even mean by design excellence. It is my goal that we create amazing products, so we need to have a shared language, not only in design but also with product and with engineering, about what we actually mean by that. We're right now in the middle of going through this process. This was our first step, just saying what excellence is, and of course it's not purely aesthetic. There's a lot about fit, usability and accessibility, but we really need to take it a step further, because with too many principles and too many characteristics, it gets really confusing what to work with.

[00:19:20] So we're currently looking at how we take our brand values, or promises, or who we want to be, and then use design excellence as part of our process tool, something we can use for developing language for design critiques. And then how can we actually measure the output more on the design side, rather than on NPS or the overall performance side? It's still very much a work in progress, but we believe that this can be one of the vehicles where we as a design community, and then eventually also the product and engineering organisation, can have a language for providing feedback that's constructive, not opinion-based, and that we can over time actually tie to different metrics.

[00:20:10] So here again are three principles for how to emphasise community as a vehicle to build this cohesiveness. One is really about the community values: agreeing on the principles and the artefacts. We haven't quite figured out the artefacts yet, but that's part of what we want to do this quarter. I don't want to talk about processes, but what are the fundamentals that we need to cover as we work on different projects across the globe?

[00:20:38] I definitely believe we need to co-create, so we can have a shared language and a shared vision of what problems we're solving for our customers. And as a company, SumUp is very much in the conversation about how important it is for us to work together and be face to face. There's a big trend everywhere to work remotely, and that will stay, but we're real big believers that face-to-face conversations are the ones that allow us to innovate, that allow us to actually connect, that allow us to discover solutions to problems that we can't really get to serendipitously when we need to schedule calls.

Pillar three: UX strategy and product vision

[00:21:24] And then the last is UX strategy and product vision. Towards what end are we actually working? Where do we want to get to? What does great look like? What is this end-to-end journey experience, what is the narrative? This is, from my perspective, essential for having not only designers but also product managers and engineers really feel empowered, because they understand where we're looking to go.

[00:21:53] Coming back to our one merchant, one product narrative: this is really the world that I want us to think about for that one merchant. We have multiple products that are being experienced through this one interface. So what is the user experience journey, what does that really look like? How are we coordinating the marketing touchpoints for all these different countries, what brand are we really building? And then we invest in our customer care agents. We really believe they are an important part of delivering the SumUp quality of experience, so how do we empower them to really deliver an experience that's cohesive?

[00:22:36] So we're on a journey to look at what the brand characteristics are. We've been reviewing them to see if we can simplify them and really have a strong message that we can craft into the UX strategy. We have experience principles that we're working on. And as the third, we want to be looking at what our service principles actually are.

Continuous knowledge building

[00:22:57] One important part, and I'm super excited about this, with Erica Gibson joining SumUp as the global head of user research, is we're now starting the journey of really understanding our merchants. We want to build it around something we call continuous knowledge building, which is philosophically a very different approach to user research than even what I've been able to do in other companies, where it's more generally project-based or question-based.

[00:23:24] We have three pillars that we want to establish for this continuous knowledge building. The first pillar is data. We have data everywhere, of course, and we talk about big data, which is all the data that we generate through the use of the product, through our customer care agents, through demographics, through the business. But then we also have thick data, which comes much more through the qualitative research that the user research community is going to be bringing to the conversation. It's a really important part that we leverage all the data that we have inside the company to understand our merchants and try to create hypotheses.

[00:24:05] The second pillar for us is meaning, because of course the data in and of itself doesn't fully tell us what is going on. Both Erica and I are firm believers in the rigour that we need to put into understanding the data, creating insights, and creating meaning out of them. The meaning, however, is also only one thing. How do we then take what we've learned, take our understanding, and really create impact? What are the practices around that? I see the move from meaning to impact as where a lot of companies stop short, because it either gets lost in translation or there is no translation happening.

[00:24:47] Our vision is, with these three pillars, to create this virtuous circle of continuous knowledge building, where every person, every SumUpper in the company, starts to have knowledge of our merchants. Somebody in Sofia can really understand merchants in São Paulo or in the north-eastern part of Brazil, as well as in the UK. And somebody in Brazil also understands what our merchants' needs are in the UK. My metaphor is a bit like clay: it's continuous, additive knowledge building. It's not one report, one moment in time.

[00:25:26] Our belief is that in a year, a year and a half, when we have a knowledge base that we can leverage, when we've been talking about our merchants and building this narrative, the velocity at which we can create impact will increase, because we're all going to be working off shared knowledge, and we'll be able to reference that in solving our problems and building products. Super ambitious. We are at the beginning of the journey, but I'm very excited that this will give us a very different foundation from which to create stories and really solve our merchants' needs.

The power of a provocative story

[00:26:01] When I started at SumUp, a month in, I was asked by one of the tribes to talk about design and what we want to accomplish, and I put together this provocation to tell the story, to start to open up everybody's mind to what the experience of SumUp could be for our merchants. It was very provocative, it was a lot of hand-waving on my part, but the story behind it really engaged everybody. I've done the same presentation in a couple of different offices, and everybody would come up to me afterwards and say, "Okay, now I really understand where we're trying to go. I really understand what our goal is, what our vision is."

[00:26:42] The particular tribe that I created this for did their Q1 planning as a follow-on to this, and immediately changed their strategy and started to focus on how we would actually get there: what's the delta to be able to achieve the vision? So what's really exciting for me is the reinforcement of how important the story is, but also that we're actually on this journey, where this seems too provocative, but it's really not provocative. This is really where we're going.

Brand, UX principles and the design system

[00:27:11] One of the foundations for UX strategy is for us to look at our brand. I really believe that the digital experiences that we create are the strongest manifestation of a brand, because they're dynamic, they can be emotional. And we bring that together with our merchant knowledge. So we've been working on taking our brand characteristics, who we want to be as a company and what we want to stand for, and deriving UX principles from that, and we're going to be rolling that out this quarter. Initial feedback, even from product and engineering, has been super supportive and engaged, so we think we'll be able to provide principles that teams can use to really drive decision-making for the implementation of the experience.

[00:28:00] We, of course, have a design system. We're in the process of significantly upgrading it from a first version that was very web-based to a design system that really works on mobile too, and that can take us into the future. Next year, we're going to make accessibility one of our themes, and we really want to take accessibility topics and bring them into the design system. We've already started to do that with our look at typography and colours, so we have enough contrast. We're getting away from light grey on light grey, and very small type in light grey, and really creating a design system that works for our merchants, who are going to be using our product in bright sunlight, in dynamic environments, on phones of quite different quality, and starting to be truthful to our care for our small merchants and serving their needs.

[00:29:00] So, UX strategy and product vision: we really believe in them, and we are working on them. I'm happy to share when we have created them, as a follow-up, if there's interest. But as three principles on how to get there: I really believe in empowering teams with knowledge about our customers, and this is really our mission from a user research perspective. I believe in the power of story, inspiring and bringing people together, and I believe autonomous teams will gravitate toward saying, "Yes, we want to make that happen, and we'll go that extra mile to make it happen." Which is why number three is also important: we need to bring everybody on the journey. I want engineers to be as passionate about what we want to create as the designers are, and to be really engaged in the problem solving and in the solution.

Summary

[00:29:52] So, in summary, we use these three as a foundation for how we're scaling design at SumUp, and by design I mean brand design, product design and user research. It's very much looking at the organisation, really making it harmonious, really making it adapt. But then, as a counterpoint to the autonomy that we are setting up: what are the practices, how do I bring a really super committed community together, so that we jointly stay focused on our one merchant and our one product experience?

[00:30:27] And then, how do we inspire the whole organisation with this? This is really where the product vision comes into play, but also the tools that enable these autonomous teams to stay connected and create this cohesiveness. So that the product you'll be able to download, hopefully in a year, will be significantly more powerful and not reflect our organisation, but really serve our merchants' needs.

[00:30:52] So it's an exciting journey. We're in the middle of it, but I hope what I've been able to share with you is also useful for you and your organisations. I think these are fundamental tools and ways to think, but of course they all work a little bit differently in each organisation, and you need to figure out what makes your organisation unique and how you adapt them to take it on this journey. So thank you very much, and I look forward to talking to some of you during the conference. Thanks.