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Designers, use your intuition
When collaboration becomes consensus-driven design
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Product teams manage the risk of launching a new experience through a list of activities: design reviews, signoffs, user research, engineering feasibility, and more. As companies find themselves entrenched in building “empowered teams” who “make decisions collaboratively”, it can be tempting to design based on consensus as it is often the most personally comfortable choice for everyone.
Why “personally comfortable”? Generally, nobody wins any battle in the collaboration process (whether for their agenda or a bigger goal). Still, it is enough for everyone to agree that it is good enough to launch. The green light for a design handover goes beyond just the design manager and the product team but also includes other collaborators roped in along the way who may not always deal with the product.
Design handovers often look similar from company to company: the designer gives the audience a presentation of the user flows and specifications, then gives a window of time to address burning questions.
Before the handover, the process looks similar (no matter what you call it): the designer and product manager get together to discuss requirements, the designer produces some output of research and design, and they find ways to make it better/less…