Rapid Fire WIP Design Share

Rapid Fire WIP Design Share

For every tech company I’ve been a part of, siloed information has been a problem. Conway’s Law states that “organizations will design systems that copy their communication structure”; in tech, we self-impose a sacrifice on a cohesive product and UX by operating in small, distributed squad models. Features tend to be designed and developed with minimal visibility and input outside of the immediate team, leadership, or platform-focused teams.

Going virtual-first has only amplified these silos.

For a user, however, there is ONE product. As UX teams it is our responsibility to deliver a cohesive user experience, and to do so our teams must be aware of each other’s work and empowered to collaborate. Product designers across teams must connect dots to support the broader user journey, learn the rest of the product, and build upon one another’s approaches. There are UX org-model approaches that start to combat siloed knowledge and design (see centralized partnership in Org Design for Design Orgs by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner), but how can we effectively share UX work-in-progress more broadly at scale? And how do we help the team separate signals from noise?

I’ve tried tackling this problem in a few different ways but, as tends to be the case, simplicity prevailed. Instead of developing a large new program or adding more meetings, we experimented using the last 20 minutes of our UX All-Hands for a “Rapid Fire WIP Share”. On a rotating business-unit monthly cadence, designers and other UX functions prep and present their current work-in-progress in a ~2-3 min single slide presentation: a screenshot or gif, a few bullet points, and related links.

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The lightweight prep overhead and quick visual format is enough to kickstart the right follow-up discussions amongst the team:

  • “I’m working on this new filtering component, seems like you could leverage it too..”
  • “Have you thought about how that feature could impact the work we’re doing over here…”
  • “Hey, looks like you might need some UX Content input soon…”

The first time I tried this practice out, I was pretty astounded at how positive the reception was - sometimes we can forget how EXCITING design work can be. Yes we were sharing information, but there were so many other benefits: it sparked joy and anticipation for our product releases, it gave a platform for folks to speak to their work, and it was inherently engaging due to its visual format. What started as a UX team slide deck started to get shared more widely across product & engineering. I’ve now introduced this practice at multiple orgs with repeated success - it’s certainly not the only or full solution to UX information silos, but I believe it’s a great start to build upon!

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