Collaboration — it’s process not tools
At Leading Design a couple of weeks back, Maria Giudice was talking about siloed working. She said it occurs when teams have different motivations and no one wants to give up power. This really got me thinking about the micro-silos we often find within teams.
The phrase ‘multi-disciplinary team’ is often used to describe a product team encompassing different skills, and it’s really important to have that — teams leverage different individual strengths to become stronger as a collective whole. But teamwork also depends on each team member relinquishing individual power and embracing shared responsibility.
This is something I think a lot about as a content designer. It’s super hard to find teams who understand that the user experience is the shared responsibility of all team members contributing to the final outcomes.
Designers often talk about ‘getting a seat at the table.’ When designers talk about this, they mean having presence at exec level as problem-solvers who can help solve and influence the larger business issues and not just be viewed as a digital service. When content designers talk about a ‘seat at the table’, they mean having a place in the design team as problem-solvers who can help solve and influence the bigger design challenges. At the moment, in most places we’re not at that table — we’re still seen as a service to design teams (often along with researchers).
Even when content designers work within product teams, they’re often across multiple teams — the ratio of content designer to product designer in digital teams can often be as high as 1:20.
What this means for the product team is that there can never be equal collaboration. The product designer can allocate 100% of their time to a sprint, a content designer working across multiple teams can only allocate a small percentage. So the responsibility of design naturally rests with the product designer, and therefore the power too. Content disciplines will never have equality in design teams when they physically can’t invest the same time to a project.
More haste less speed
Working with collaborative design tools is another thing which allows companies to tick the ‘collaboration’ box. But they also make it very easy for designers to quickly jump into Figma or Sketch to get their ideas down. This is vital in fast-paced product teams who need to deliver. But there are two problems with this approach:
- Inadvertently skipping out useful user experience methodology such as journey mapping or empathy mapping which can give a clearer context to the solution, ditto research
- Missing out on collaborative ideation – which should incorporate perspectives from all team disciplines
The strongest solutions are always those which have been created through multiple perspectives. This includes research which is another discipline often squeezed into a team for just a small amount of time.
Product teams with a ‘divide and conquer’ approach can become very output-driven by the desire to ship something quickly with minimal effort. But it also encourages exactly the wrong behaviour which is design-first, then let the content designer ‘polish up the words’.
In the most forward-thinking companies, content design is an equal part of the design process. Jonathon Colman at Intercom says ‘We hold product and content designers accountable for the same things so they work in the same ways.’ This is reflected both in their job levels and in their work culture.
That joint accountability is key for equality and therefore better teamwork. Michael Metts, co-author of Writing is designing agrees: ‘It’s the fundamental differences in the ways content writers and designers are included/treated that creates inequality.’
An imbalance of power influences everything, from when a content designer is brought into a project, to who gets to present work to the board.
Having access to a shared file doesn’t mean the solution has been created collaboratively (even if a design file is shared with the content designer in draft stage, the product owner’s often already seen and become attached to the solution and any content thinking will be automatically influenced by the solution presented). Collaboration tools facilitate people and process but shouldn’t ever be a replacement.
The only real way to make sure disciplines have equal input into a design solution is for them all to be involved at the same pace, all the way through a project, which isn’t easy. It relies on a culture that recognises the value of outcomes over output, recognises that all product team members are responsible for the end user experience, and fosters collaborative ways of working (not just tools).
This means providing co-working spaces too where teams can use wall-spaces to workshop ideas and map things out. All too often new open plan offices lack the space to collaborate and encourage less face-to-face work. There are numerous articles written about how open plan offices are killing collaboration — it’s all too easy to Slack someone or share a file instead of getting together to bounce ideas of one another. This kills creativity and stifles innovation. And if a team member’s looking unapproachable with their headphones on, crucial conversations between designers and content designers are less likely to happen. Teams who work remotely have to work even harder to ensure they’re genuinely collaborating.
In design we often talk about the importance of empathy to our work, but we don’t often think about how empathetic we are within our teams and to other disciplines. We need to ensure content designers, researchers and designers all have an equal voice in the creation of the experiences we build. Only when we achieve that equality will our teams really get the best outcomes.
Why you need a content team and how to build one is out now on Amazon.
