Scaling Design

Pamela Mead at UXDX Community: Germany. Video: https://youtu.be/haf7SVzf0lA

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.

The models I use to orient myself

[00:00:05] I'm talking a bit about scaling design at SumUp. It is actually a journey that I am in as we speak. I've been at SumUp about six months, so I'm sharing with you really my experience in real time. When I joined SumUp in November, leading up to that I had quite a few interviews with different executives and different members of the SumUp design organization, and it very much became clear to me the very familiar questions that I would be needing to deal with when I came on board and started to look at where design needs to go for SumUp. These are some of the questions, and I was like, okay, this makes a lot of sense, very familiar from some of the other companies that I have joined in the past.

[00:00:58] And I have a series of models that I like to usually reference, to give myself some orientation to what are the things that I need to be doing or thinking about as I scale design in a particular organization. This is a model from Design Centre and the Dutch Design Center[?]. There are very similar models out now. Most recently InVision published one last year that is really quite good. But it really tries to establish where in the journey of understanding and adopting design an organization is. And I would say SumUp, like most of the companies that I've joined, is somewhere between level 2 and level 3. I might say SumUp is already moving a bit more onto stage 3 of the process, and I have to admit that I have yet to really help lead an organization to level 4, although that certainly is my ambition joining SumUp. But it's a good way in which to start to understand where and how do we need to position design and how do we need to evolve it.

[00:02:06] Another model that is always quite familiar is how do we actually organize design. Historically, to establish a design organization, you move from taking a scattered group of designers into a more centralized, or potentially centralized and embedded organization, and then moving more towards distributed and empowered teams. What is actually happening today is very much that we have to move from potentially scattered individual designers to actually distributed teams, which is quite a challenge, because we don't really have the option to create a more formalized central design organization where you can really build the culture. So these are some of the challenges that we're also addressing at SumUp.

[00:02:54] And the third model, that Rory was also already talking about, is what I call the magic triad. How do product teams really come together and work together? In the world of what I call tribalization and setting up squads, this model is actually at the heart of these ways of empowering teams and self-organizing teams. The challenge that I see in a lot of the organizations is that while design, product and engineering are meant to really work together and partner together, there's usually some kind of relationship that's more dominant than the other. Sometimes it's product and design, sometimes it's design and engineering, and the customer is not always at the heart of the organization.

What makes SumUp particular

[00:03:46] So when I was coming in to SumUp with the questions that I've already identified and these models, I really started to look at what do we really need to do. And scaling design in a company is really very much about taking the company on the journey with you. So all of these models and all these processes really have to be looked at and evaluated in light of what is the particularity of the organization that you're joining, and SumUp has that, of course.

[00:04:16] So one of the things that's really quite interesting is that in a lot of ways SumUp is simpler from a product perspective than some of the others that I have worked in in the past. We have in essence a product, we have a card reader. We are adding some additional products, more digital products, to our core offering, but still you're very much in the payments space, taking payments for our merchants. We have an interface, if you will, in addition to the actual device: we have a mobile app and we also have an online dashboard. Again, not a super complicated set of components or products that we need to be working with.

[00:05:06] But we do have some interesting complexities, because as the company has shifted towards embracing what I want to call the Spotify model for squads and tribes, we have autonomous teams that are really working on very different parts of the experience. So imagine, we now have multiple digital products, they're all being exposed through the one particular interface that I was just talking about. What is that actual journey experience, and how do we really make that happen cohesively?

[00:05:43] We have marketing organizations that are country based teams, because SumUp actually has a presence in 36 different countries around the world. So here now we have different teams working on creating experiences and creating entry points into marketing our products, all of them working with a certain amount of autonomy, creating advertisement, in-home, out-of-home, as well as individual touch points. How is that all coordinated? And then lastly, of course, we also have the support experience with customer care, and how are we actually shaping that experience? The way I like to think about it is we have one merchant, yet we have all of these different touch points that for that particular merchant define what SumUp is really all about and what it stands for and how to think about it as a company.

One merchant, many autonomous teams

[00:06:41] This is the diagram that I want to share with you, because one of my designers created it for us to understand: this is our software digital interface experience, and what are all the different teams that are developing into this one touch point towards the merchant. I shared this diagram with Daniel, the CEO, and also the executive leadership team, with a narrative that right now this is really my worst nightmare. It's the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night, trying to figure out how to really create a seamless and cohesive experience with that many different autonomous teams working together.

[00:07:20] And it was a pretty insightful moment when Daniel looked at this and then exclaimed, very enthusiastically, that this is actually absolutely wonderful, because this is really at the heart of the philosophy that SumUp is embracing, which is to empower teams to be autonomous, to be able to move fast, to be working on creating these products and services and enabling them for merchants. So whereas on my side I'm really looking for how do I create a cohesive experience from the merchant's perspective, from a company perspective it's really a celebration that we have actually empowered teams to be autonomous and to be able to develop independently into this one experience.

[00:08:12] So this is the journey, the particular challenges that I am working with, that my team is working with, as we look to really scale design within SumUp. The way I like to frame it is scaling design really for autonomous teams, and what are some of the ways in which we're working to accomplish that. And I want to be talking with you in three different categories. One is around design as an organization: how do I structure design when it is already established that tribes is the format that the company has embraced and design really needs to follow? And then how do we take that into the practices and the community, so that the teams that are going to be embedded also can deliver to the kinds of excellence that we as a company really strive to achieve? And then lastly I want to talk a bit about UX strategy and product vision: how might we really enhance the impact for individual teams, so teams can make a decision and yet at the end of the day we have a really powerful integrated experience?

Scaling the design organization: skills and expertise

[00:09:31] So first, about the design organization. As we move towards autonomous teams, one of the things that is becoming really quite important for us is that we need to be scaling the design organization with a really, really strong focus on skills and on culture. Since I joined in November we have actually grown quite a bit already. We've grown from 35 product designers and brand designers and researchers to actually 60 team members. We are quite distributed, so I'll talk about that a little bit later. But as we are growing we have looked at what is the skill set that we have as designers, what is our expertise, and what is really needed for us to be able to evolve and grow as an organization.

[00:10:30] And I like to think about this in a couple of ways, because I really believe in the importance of deep expertise. We talked a lot today about product designers as being the T-shaped designers, the very holistic designers. However, I believe very few designers really can be excellent at UX, excellent at UI, excellent at research, excellent at UX copy and everything else. So the way we're looking at this is how can we provide integrated design support at the team level and also start to build the different kinds of expertise. So we are definitely looking to have at least one, if not two, designers committed to all the different squads that we have. But then we are also talking about what are some new specialists that we need to be bringing into the organization that can start to work collaboratively with these different team designers, if you will.

[00:11:37] So we are talking about enhancing, for example, excellent UX designers with shared UI or visual designers. We're looking to hire somebody to really lead the effort at UX copy, which is a really new concept for SumUp. I know that one person will not be able to actually fulfill the needs and the demands, but I know that if I bring one person on board as a shared resource, then we can really build the value for what this person will be contributing and how it will impact the experience, and from that the demand for this kind of resource will naturally allow us to then build out that skill set in the company as a whole. Researchers is a little bit different here: we really are looking to build a much more extensive community, which I'll talk about in a minute. But we might also have motion designers, or front-end developers, or maybe even illustrators that we want to be bringing into the organization.

[00:12:36] The importance of this model is that it allows us to scale responsibly, if you will. I look at different parts of the organization and say, where are the needs, where do we actually have shared resources within a tribe, whereas what about tribes that potentially can work with more global resources?

Tribes, embedded marketing teams and global practices

[00:13:04] To talk a little bit about tribes, since I can't ask for a raise of hands: a tribe is basically a grouping of squads or teams that are really focused around particular parts of the user journey. Some of the ones that we have at SumUp are an acquisition tribe, which is a bit more focused on the early parts of the journey; a hardware tribe, which is focused on our devices; merchant growth, which is focused on our various products that we're now offering; banking is a new area. So these are some of the product organizations that have already been firmly established, and in these areas we have now embedded the design organization, but we'll be looking to start to what I call tribalize sometime later this year.

[00:13:55] Also embedded are our marketing teams, our brand designers. They're working with the various in-country teams to really focus on the marketing pages and the marketing campaigns, again so we can really develop a lot of expertise as the teams get to know their particular markets and what works and what doesn't work. The marketing teams, interestingly enough, we're looking for the time being to please keep as embedded teams. So whereas the product tribes are going to be moved towards tribalization, the marketing teams we're going to keep a little bit more embedded.

[00:14:28] And then in addition to that, we have a global organization that focuses on some of the topics that I think are particularly important for us to keep looking at horizontally, which is of course brand design, developing a design system, service design, which is much more looking at the user experience end to end, and then we are starting the journey of building user research as a core practice within SumUp. User research is something that I have quite a bit of ambition for. We want to be building it as a discipline that is less project-based and much more around continuous knowledge building. We're quite early in this journey, we just have several people now starting to come on board in user research, so it is an area that I hope to be able to share more about when we've progressed a little bit further on building that capacity inside of the organization.

Key ideas as we scale the organization

[00:15:30] So a couple of the key ideas that we're really looking at as we're scaling the design organization itself. We have to adapt the organizational philosophy to really map to the organization and the philosophy of the company. So in the chart that I just shared with you, basically I'm really working on both tribalizing, embedding, and looking at horizontal structure that will evolve over time, although from my perspective it's very important that we keep having a level of global effort going, because of the particular nature of the services that we're providing.

[00:16:19] Very important is the quality of talent and cultural fit. There's a lot of pressure as we look to scale the organization at a pretty rapid pace to compromise on talent and find people who are talented but maybe don't fit all the qualities that we're looking for, and we're finding that's actually risky, because with embedded teams you have to trust that the people who are working inside of the various tribes really can solve complex problems and deliver the quality that you're looking to achieve. Cultural fit is also important. We'll talk about that in the next section, because so much collaboration is an important part of how we need to be working to be able to overcome the fact that we are actually quite separated in terms of the tribes and teams.

[00:17:24] The model that I shared with you, how we're looking at expertise versus embedded product designers, is very much about scaling at the pace that the organization can handle. We're not duplicating, we're not bringing in multiple people into every single team, but really sharing resources so we can build in and then expand the capacity as the organization sees the value, and instances of value, and actually even demands it as we're bringing more people on board. What is also important is really nurturing the internal talent, so that everybody in the design organization can be part of this journey.

Practices and community across distributed teams

[00:18:03] Practices and community is the second area that is really quite important. As an organization we have to basically decentralize, we have to be embedded, we have to be really supporting the individual tribes. So this shift, if you will, of what historically had been more a centralized organization, where you can really build the community and the association and the practices, that has now distributed, and so you need a strong community to keep that alignment, to keep that synergy going.

[00:18:49] We are not only quite distributed in terms of product organizations, we're also quite distributed in location, which is quite challenging, if you will. I make a point, when I join an organization, to meet every single designer and go to all the different offices. I've not quite gone to all of the offices before we are now working at home, but I've been to the Copenhagen office, the Berlin office, Sofia and São Paulo.

[00:19:26] For me it's quite important, meeting the teams locally, as I understand the local culture, I understand what the product design environment is like, I get to meet people and talk to the product managers and talk to engineers and really start to get a sense of the pulse of the organization, of what is needed, how ready are they to work with design, what are their perceptions, what are their assumptions, what are their needs, and what are their desires in terms of how design really works holistically with them. So it's something that I view as quite critical and quite important, and it cannot really be replaced by remote sessions.

Design sprints as a vehicle for collaboration

[00:20:14] The other thing is, as we're looking to build a culture that is really quite passionate about our merchants, and that really works collaboratively around design practices, we do embrace the design sprint as a vehicle to bring teams together, not only designers but also the various product organizations. This is a design sprint that we ran in January this year that brought together several of the squads in one of the tribes, actually really for the first time collaborating on a topic that was really quite important for the organization.

[00:20:52] It also brought together the teams from different tribes, because again, from a user experience perspective, really the journey experience for merchants is much more holistic, and we as designers have to really build that level of alignment and collaboration across the organization. And that is one of what I call the secret powers, if you will, that design has: that it can bring people together and really collaborate. And the design sprints are very good vehicles for us to do that. They're not the answer for everything, but they're really quite effective to bring people together in a short period of time.

[00:21:27] What I really loved in particular about this design sprint also was we had quite a few of the representatives from Brazil, our Brazil office. Brazil is an important part of our merchant base, and I really loved that one of our key designers in Sofia now always speaks about the merchants and their needs in Brazil. So building that level of sensitivity and shared concern across the different offices is a significant win, and exactly the kind of collaboration that we can be enabling.

[00:22:09] This is the screen of a work session more recently, in March. We are taking design sprints virtual, so I wanted to share that with you: that even though we are in a little bit more challenging environments, the need for collaboration, the need for us to come together and have joint work sessions, continues. And I'm quite optimistic that when we come out of the challenges we're facing in this current crisis, somebody will solve the problem of really having powerful collaborative design tools.

Design critiques and defining design excellence

[00:22:43] The other part of our journey as a design community is design critiques. Having spent a lot of my career in consulting, I'm quite used to having a practice where we come up with concepts and we critique them and review them and we make decisions, and then we iterate and start to formalize towards one recommendation for our clients. That is not a practice that I see very much embraced within organizations, so it is something that I always look to establish, so that we can really give each other honest feedback and become a lot sharper about what we're designing and the quality that we are looking to achieve.

[00:23:34] It's quite interesting, SumUp actually has inherently an open feedback culture, so it is natural for us to be really giving feedback about each other's work. What is quite interesting at the same time is that the designers are very polite in sharing their assessments or sharing their feedback. And so the next iteration that we need to really be doing is describing our feedback so that we are not talking about opinions and feelings, but really are talking about the discipline of design, and why certain recommendations might work better than others. So it's a really interesting and very important, quite powerful journey.

[00:24:29] One of the things that I realized as I was meeting with my design leads is that we needed to come together to even define as a team what we thought great design really means for us. So it is something we haven't quite done yet as a group, but we keep talking about this, and one of the lead designers at SumUp started this by putting this list together, that I think is really great for us to articulate even what would we mean by design excellence, and that it is not purely a look and feel or an aesthetic conversation, but really also one about fit, about appropriateness, about usability, about impact.

[00:25:20] So we are still early in this particular part of the journey, so I'm looking forward to reporting back. But it really became clear to me that as an organization, for us to be able to scale, we need to have a shared understanding and a shared perspective and articulation of what design excellence really means, and then be in a commitment together to achieve that. That will then of course also have a positive impact on design critiques, because now we're really challenging each other to really achieve that level of design and quality.

Why the design leadership community matters

[00:26:01] So community is really, really important when we are starting to have teams that are distributed into these various tribes, into these various structures, and also into very, very different locations. When I talk to different candidates about coming on board potentially as design leaders, I always share with them that the design leadership has to be the strongest community. It has to be a really strong bond, because only when we really are in the same commitment towards our single merchant, if you will, can we really ensure that the individual teams have the empowerment to make decisions and we really in the end still end up with a great merchant experience.

[00:26:51] So community for me is very much about connecting with designers face to face, really understanding who they are, where they are, what their strengths are, where they're going from a career perspective, sharing the narrative of what we're looking to achieve as a community, and answering questions for the designers but also for the larger organization. That's really quite important. Agreeing on the values and the principles: what is design, what is great design, what does design excellence really look like, what are some of the artifacts we want to be producing, what are some of the ways in which we want to be working. Those are all really quite important, and we have to agree to them so that we can really hold ourselves accountable. And then reinforcing the feedback culture, the ability to really learn and grow and share and adapt, is super important. I'm really appreciating that SumUp has feedback as one of its core values, and we can really build on that through applying it to our design principles.

UX strategy, product vision and the power of storytelling

[00:28:01] UX strategy and product vision. At the end of the day we have one end-to-end journey, and this has to be cohesive. I'm finding it quite important to have a narrative and a story of what that means, not only for design but also for the rest of the organization. So, as I shared with you earlier, we have all the different touch points and different teams behind each of them, so the really important part for us is how do we create what I call an experience DNA that starts to really tie this together, that people can really embrace and work with.

[00:28:48] I started this narrative, this journey, pretty soon after I started at SumUp. It was shared with these three screens with a story behind them, more as a provocation. This is a couple of sketches that the designers were doing in a reasonably short period of time, based on a few ideas around money and a perception of money. And when I just shared this story at one of the team meetings and then also later on in different offices, it really resonated with people that there was a story, that there was a place where we were going to go, there's something we wanted to accomplish.

[00:29:28] And what was really powerful for me is that at the end of the two-day work session that the team had conducted, people were really using these three simple screens and the associated narrative to set their priorities from an engineering perspective. So the power of storytelling is really quite critical in bringing together everybody in the organization around where this journey is and where we could be going.

[00:30:00] We are in the process of articulating our actual UX strategy, and we are starting from the brand perspective. We are looking at what are the elements, what has worked from a brand perspective, how do we simplify it, how do we iterate on it, so that it is something that we can encapsulate in our design system. We already have a design system, we're calling it Circuit UI, but it needs to be enhanced through some additional principles, and then extended and expanded to address and be available for the different use cases that we're going to be looking at. With that is also, of course, developing different file systems around the design system that teams can be using.

[00:30:55] So to finish this section, really impacting and empowering teams to make decisions that are coherent and cohesive: for me storytelling is one of the key ways in which we can inspire the organization, inspire different teams. Really communicating with passion and commitment really brings people along on the journey. One of the things that I really believe a hundred percent is important is that great design isn't just about what we do. It really is about what the engineers are embracing, what the engineers are contributing. They are one of the biggest allies, because we can design amazing things, but if they're not implemented to the same level of care, the great designs will not really be realized. So having these stories really allows everybody to be able to see what their contribution can be in making an amazing journey happen for our merchants.

[00:31:54] And then maybe the last piece here is really how do we make it easy to engage. We have to remove barriers for everybody to be willing to come and use the tools that we are making available. Again, it's about bringing the organization together so we can create a cohesive experience even though we're quite distributed.

[00:32:18] To summarize: design as an organization is really important. We need to adapt it to the philosophy of the company and make that work. Being different is not always a good thing, so really making it work within the parameters of the organization is quite important. Community is essential, especially as we live with distributed teams, bringing them together around shared values, around a shared understanding of what great looks like. Being open and communicating is super important. And then the UX strategy and the vision is really what gives the company the glue, the glue for knowing how the pieces can come together, and inspires the organization to really do great work.

What it takes as a design leader

[00:33:06] Now, a lot of the work that we're doing at SumUp I've done at other companies. I've worked at startups and I've worked at big telcos, and what's really quite interesting is that the models are the same, the stories are very, very similar. The journey, however, is very much dependent on the nature of the organization, so what is possible really depends on the company itself.

[00:33:36] I view scaling design and design leadership as definitely going up a mountain, and sometimes it's going up a cliff. It is quite challenging and it takes quite a bit of endurance. So understanding where the limitations are of the organization to really embrace design at the strategic level, for example, is as important, to give yourself the space to know how far you can push at any moment in time, and iterate a little bit more slowly towards the goal of making design powerful and impactful in the company.

[00:34:12] I think the most important difference that I see at SumUp, and I've seen also at other companies, is really what authentic support do you have from leadership for design. What is really the true understanding of the need and the power that design can contribute to an organization? Because that really lays the foundation of how you can scale, how much flexibility you have, and how you need to adapt it. I'm very happy to say that our CEO Daniel and also the leadership team are very much in support of design, which doesn't mean that there aren't surprises on a regular basis. It doesn't mean that it's a very simple task. As a matter of fact, I hope that I was able to articulate to you some of the interesting challenges that we face with the nature of the organization that we're in. However, the support is present, the possibilities are present, and it is really a matter of continuing and executing.

[00:35:18] To close: what does it actually take as a leader, as design leadership, for scaling? It definitely is about a clear mission, a mission that is on one hand the one that's given by the organization, but also the mission that as a design leader you articulate for your organization and for the company as a whole. I really believe the power of design is in what I call radical collaboration. That is what allows distributed teams to really in the end create an amazing experience that's cohesive and makes sense. That is also what is frequently valued, because you're viewed as an enabler in really making things happen. And unbridled passion: being really committed and passionate about the changes that you're not only taking the design organization on, but taking the company on, is really quite important, because it does take endurance to scale, and it takes endurance to really do this journey.