Design Team Strategy #4

Designing together: the importance of shared principles for design teams

TL;DR: Design principles operationalize a team’s values into concrete guidelines that inform the design process. The specific steps we took for developing our own set of principles were: ① Brainstorming already established principles, inspiration from other teams, and what prevented us from becoming more successful; ② Revisiting our nine team values; ③ Conducting a closed card sorting to map the brainstormed principles to the values; and ④ Clustering similar principles within each value category while distinguishing between “design principles” and “team principles.” The end result was a set of principles that provide common understanding and guidance for executing our team’s design work in line with our values and standards.

This is the fourth in a series of articles dealing with the development of a comprehensive strategy for a design team:

1. The strategy house: how to define a design team’s mission
2. Pillars, objectives, and OGSMs: how to define a design team’s most important topics
3. Team values: the foundation of any strategy
4. ☞ Designing together: the importance of shared principles for design teams
5. Crafting a vision that inspires

Created with Microsoft Designer. Prompt: “An abstract visualization of the concept of ‘design principles,’ comic book drawing.”

After establishing the team’s mission, most important objectives, and values in the first three articles of this series, we now shift our focus to design principles. Design principles — centered around the underlying values of a team — provide guidelines for the actual design work. They are the first step towards operationalizing the team’s values and serve as the foundation for executing the design-related objectives of the strategy, e.g., developing a design vision for the digital product the team is working on. In this article, we have a closer look at shared principles for design teams and why they’re so important, and explain how we developed ours based on our team’s values.

The Difference between Design Principles and Team Values

As discussed in the previous article of this series, “Team values: the foundation of any strategy,” it is crucial to differentiate between…