Gaining a firm GRASP on crafting design principles
There was a time at Fellow.app where we used to painfully power through extended design critiques riddled with intense and puzzling debates. A simple button that performed a single task would take us down a rabbit hole discussing dynamic label states based on various rules. It seemed so complicated and convoluted, yet we still managed to burn the majority of our time on such topics. Design critiques had become a source of anxiety for everyone. This spark initiated the development of Fellow’s first set of design principles.
Des Traynor, Co-founder and Chief strategy officer at Intercom, encourages his teams to share and refer to their core principles frequently to avoid repeating their past mistakes.
“Clear guiding principles are the best way to scale a team while keeping them aligned. Without a set of principles, organizations begin to fracture.”
So many companies like Intercom, Figma and Spotify have provided visibility into their principles. The results are great, but how did they get there? We struggled to find any real source of truth to help us kick start the process. After weeks of hardcore procrastination, it was time to take a firm grasp of the problem. Fast forward several months, and we’re ready to share those principles and the path it took for us to get here. A process we’ve named the G.R.A.S.P method.
- Set a Goal
- Internal & external Research
- Synthesizing your research down through Association
- Summarize the results
- And finally, Polish your principles
Set a goal
There are likely many questions and perspectives on what a set of product design principles should be. Design principles belong to your team, your organization. Every organization’s mission is different, as well as its team values. As a result of those two variables, it’s hard to think of a set of global design principles that would be a one size fits all.
“Design principles should help build confidence, contribute to positive team culture and increase team performance at scale.”
The first step in all of this is to remove the ambiguity by having a group jam. I recommend starting with a group of 3 to 7 key teammates to participate in a series of note-taking exercises. The goal here is to help everyone understand why defining these principles is necessary and their value.
Understand your goal
Provide everyone with a set of sticky notes and a fresh sharpie. Start by asking the group a series of individual questions. Give participants enough time to write down one or more answers. Ask the team to share their responses one-by-one while posting them nearby for everyone to see. This structure will help you avoid a single influential voice controlling the overall direction. Try not to hyper-focus on any one particular situation or problem as your goal should be to expose as many individual responses as possible.
Note: Continuously sort and document the team’s results. You will want to reference this progress along the way.
Define your goal
Now that the team has built an understanding of the potential benefit to these principles, you can proceed in defining a goal. At this point, you want your team to think about the expected outcome. Ask everyone to draft a goal statement individually. A goal should be simple, describing who it’s for, what the result will be, why it’s important and how it will help. Remind your team to review all the previous notes for reference. Ask team members to present their drafts one-by-one and post them on the wall.
Invite everyone to review each goal statement silently. Using small voting dots, encourage your team to mark parts or entire statements that may resonate with them. With everyone’s input in mind, craft a final goal statement. Your goal will serve as the team’s compass while progressing through defining principles. For our design team, we were looking for “A set of product design principles that would provide guard rails for our team’s decisions and discussions easing day-to-day friction and accelerating time to solutions.”
Note: Words matter, but it can be challenging for everyone to agree 100%. Focus on aligning your team around the context behind the goal.
External & internal research
With a goal in mind, your team can begin collecting insights from both internal and external sources. This research will help uncover friction and feedback areas to help inform and strengthen the value of your team’s principles.
External
As your team begins gathering data, start by looking at sources external to the team. Take advantage of any active collection of insights from your cross-functional peers. Typically customer success, sales, UX research and marketing are actively gathering customer feedback. Dig into the details further by scheduling 30-minute sessions with those colleagues. Furthermore, engage with customers directly to hear their feedback directly.
Empathy mapping is a great tool to help structure your team’s line of questioning during this process. Capturing what people see, hear, and feel about your product and how that translates into what they say will be critical in grounding your team’s design principles.
Internal
In contrast to your external insights, these discussions should yield more intimate and personal details to inspire the team further. There are undoubtedly lessons and experiences the team can reflect on. Leverage this opportunity to dive deeper into some of the themes that may have come up during the goal-setting exercise. Consider inviting cross-functional team members into the process. Their participation will increase alignment, fostering relationships and allies to help design succeed within the organization.
Encourage everyone to prepare thoughts related to their own experience with the product, both positives and negatives. Furthermore, ask them to also reflect on their previous project experiences, mistakes made, and lessons learned. From there, set some time aside for the group to meet and one by one ask each team member to share their thoughts.
While your teammates share their stories, the rest of the team should be frantically jotting down as many insightful comments as possible. Post the notes nearby, encouraging continuous sorting along the way.
Synthesis through association
You’re now ready to synthesis your research by defining areas of opportunity where the team expects improvement. Start this session by prominently displaying some of the insights surfaced while setting your initial goal. On individual notes, ask your team, “In as few words as possible, write down the main areas or activities where you would leverage these product design principles?”. One by one, invite team members to post their notes nearby grouping similar thoughts along the way. Hopefully, at this stage, you have a distinct set of 3 to 5 categories via visual stacking. If that isn’t the case, invite your team to participate in a quick dot voting exercise to narrow things down.
Our team landed on Visuals, Operations, Infrastructure, Communications and Experience. Now you can begin to associate internal and external research insights with each of these defined categories. Start by adding problems your team would want to stop or avoid moving forward to each group. Boiling details down to as few words as possible will help you when leading to the next step.
Inversely, add items your team would want to continue or start doing more of in the future. Use this opportunity to match every problem with a solution that may have come up during your analysis. In cases where you may not have found a counter from research alone, ask your team to discuss new solutions. Our team played a little game of antonyms.
Summarize the results
Up to this point, your team has worked toward building a foundation of knowledge and alignment. Wherever you land when drafting your final principles, the value gained at this stage should serve the team well as a compass. Designate someone as a writer. Your writer will take the content gathered by the team and draft an initial set of principles.
For each category, write a short defining statement to help guide why your team should consider this viewpoint in the future and what problem it’s solving. Accompanying each statement should be a short title to summarize the definition at a glance.
Finally, for each category provide short examples of how these principles may have guided your team in the past or how you see them helping in the future. These concrete samples will be beneficial not only for the current team but also for those who may join in the future.
Note: Take a moment to look back at your team’s goals and challenges. Can you connect these principles back to some of those core challenges?
Polish
Once the writer has a draft, schedule a time for everyone to review the results together. Start by resurfacing the team’s initial goal statement. Then, for each principle, start by reacquainting everyone of the research to a specific category, followed by the proposed draft. Take a moment for everyone to digest what they’ve heard, urging them to take note of anything they’ve interpreted or feedback they may want to provide. One-by-one, ask your team to present their thoughts to the writer.
This review will arm your writer with the necessary feedback to finalize the team’s principles. Every team is unique, so you may end up rinsing and repeating this part of the process. No matter how many times you decided to refine messaging, don’t let its purpose get lost. Each principle’s core definition is what should guide your team.
Conclusion
With the first set of product design principles in hand, you’re ready to memorialize them. As a shared document or fancy printed posters, the most important thing is that they are visible, accessible, and regularly evangelized by the team during all your rituals.
Establish a regular routine of reviewing and refining your principles every 3 to 6 months. Consider your principles, a living and breathing tool that will undoubtedly grow and evolve. These principles will decrease in value over time without the necessary attention.
Ask yourselves whether they still resonate with where the team is today. Are your principles being used by everyone? Are they serving their original purpose? What has to change, if anything?
As a result, developing and caring for our design principles has increased the team’s confidence and communication beyond expectations. We’ve also drastically improved the alignment, velocity, consistency, and overall quality of work.
No more excuses, here’s your starting point. Catch me here or on twitter @jgrenier05. I’d love to hear how things work out.
Good luck!
