A data-driven approach to design strategy
Leading a fairly mature design team with a dual-track agile approach was a great experience, but my director and I faced a challenge: a wealth of ideas for improving our practices without a clear direction. We needed a strategic way to prioritize our efforts and make sure we were focusing on the right initiatives. My goal was to create a data-driven roadmap that would help the team make more purposeful priority decisions and become more proactive.
To address this, I introduced a design maturity evaluation. This method served as a powerful discovery practice, a way to quickly gather insights on our strengths and weaknesses. It gave us an objective view of where we were and what opportunities would have the greatest impact on improving our overall design function.
For the first round speed, rather than precision was a priority, as we didn’t know if this method indeed provided good pointers or not. I set up the evaluation sheet, did some light interviews with design team members, performed the analysis, and created a summary view with clear recommendations for opportunities.
Based on our findings, we launched several key projects that directly addressed our strategic goals. We worked on user journeys and personas to improve decision coherence through design critique. We focused on creating experience visions to explore possible product futures and improve onboarding. And we prioritized growing and promoting people. The tangible outcomes: improved team retention, a more proactive design team that was driving initiatives rather than reacting to requests, and better decision-making across the product org.
Taking the time to pause and reflect is crucial for making effective, proactive decisions. A data-driven approach to understanding your own team’s strengths and gaps is the key to building a high-performing design team.