How designers create alignment

Alignment is a design superpower that keeps teams focused and projects on track.

Ed Orozco

Published in

UX Collective

7 min readOct 7, 2024

3 large dots aligned horizontally traversed by a dashed line.

We’ve all been there: Projects that drag on forever and never ship.

PMs blame designers, designers blame devs, and devs blame lawyers.

The truth is, projects ship late because the team is not aligned. Alignment is the most important indicator of whether projects get done on time.

Aligned teams ship great products

Alignment is a collection of agreements on what everyone should do, how, and when. Aligned teams run like clockwork. Everyone chips in their part and the work keeps moving along smoothly.

Misaligned teams are a different story. There’s no clarity around who should do what or what the next steps should be. People waste time on assumptions and the work gets delayed.

Alignment is a design superpower

Design has the power to create alignment at multiple levels. To understand how, let’s look at the three key moments in which alignment happens:

When deciding what to work on — strategic alignment
At the beginning of a project — operational alignment
Throughout the project — tactical alignment

Alignment before the project starts

A design strategy helps you decide what to work on. It creates an exciting north star to aim towards. Usually design collaborates with product and management to create that vision.

Julie Zhuo wrote a great piece on strategic alignment a while back.

Imagine your team is wildly successful in 3 years. What does that look like? Write down your answer. Now, turn to your neighbor and ask him or her the same question. When you compare your answers, how similar or different are they?
They shouldn’t be different. You both work on the same team. — How to be strategic, Julie Zhuo (2018)

Julie’s quote is proposing a simple test to check for strategic alignment. You know your team is strategically aligned if they know what the mid to long-term goal is and can articulate it.

The way you create strategic alignment depends on the size of your organization and the culture. Designers at companies like Github and Ramp create artifacts that showcase what the product might look like in 2–3 years. They present that to the whole company and constantly remind every one of it during company-wide meetings. Those artifacts could be design prototypes, illustrations, or videos.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a super production. A strategic alignment artifact can also be an image or a sentence. The simpler it is, the easier it is to remember.

Alignment at the start of a project

With a clear design strategy, designers and PMs can decide which problem to solve next. If you have a system for continuous, quality learning, this tends to be a lot easier.

To align everyone around the problem you intent to solve, the PM will usually create some kind of one-pager or brief. While this is the responsibility of the PM, the best designers I know own the process and meaningfully contribute to it.

Getting this step right is crucial. It doesn’t have to be complicated, yet so many teams half-ass it or ignore it completely. Here’s an example:

# Problem description
Customers have multiple accounts for different purposes. It's difficult and time-consuming having to log out of one account and log into another. Especially when most of them have 5 or more accounts. There's no way to see aggregate data across accounts.# Why should we fix it
We charge our customers based on each account's usage. If we don't make it easy for them to use all their accounts, we earn less per customer.# What do we know from customers
Most customers have between 3-5 accounts. About a quarter of them have more than 7. Johnny from Company A said
> I need to check the performance of all my accounts every morning. Having 8 accounts means this process takes up to 1 hour each day.Arjun from Company B said
> It'd be great if I could aggregate the data of all my accounts in one place. # What have we tried before
We tried merging all the data into a single account but users want
to keep the data separate.

The above example communicates:

What the problem is
Why is it worth solving
What you shouldn’t spend time on

Now that everyone knows which problem to focus on and what it looks like, it’s time to start working on it.

Alignment throughout the project

Tactical alignment is the result of everyone in the team knowing what the pending tasks in a project are, which ones should be done next, by whom, and how.

Making sure the team stays aligned for the entire project is no easy feat. In fact there’s an entire industry around project management tools worth $7.5 billions and growing.

There’s no shortage of tools: Asana, Jira, Monday.com, Wrike, Linear and a whole bunch of others.

But of course, tools are useless without the right habits in place. As projects progress, some tasks become irrelevant or outdated. Many don’t have an owner and they are not prioritized based on importance.

I’m a big believer in the power of simplicity. Modern humans live their lives feeling overwhelmed and most project management tools throw too much information at us all at once. They are useful, but also create cognitive overload.

So I want to share something that’s been incredibly helpful for my projects. They’re called product development journals.

Product development journals

I’ve found keeping a simple journal is tremendously helpful to maintain alignment throughout projects. This product development journal serves as the team’s collective memory.

How many times have you made a decision about a feature with a colleague only to forget what it was a week later?

Product development journals are a simple way to capture important decisions and agreements on what to do next without increasing the cognitive load.

Keeping a product development journal

In a document that everyone has access too, create a text-based timeline of each conversation. Each entry should include:

The date of the discussion
What the decision was
What the next steps are

Whenever you have a conversation regarding the project, write a new entry. Someone needs to be in charge of writing the entry and if they are not present, someone else should be appointed the task. I personally like to take responsibility for writing the entry myself.

Here’s an example of what an entry might look like:

4 October 2024 · @anna, @jonas, and @rick agreed to use the card component as the basis of the widgets instead of introducing a new component into the design system.
Next steps:
· @anna will design the way the card component shows stats
· @jonas will create a new API endpoint to serve the stats
· @rick will wait for the designs and the API before starting the front-end code

I have been writing these journals in Notion for years and only recently started keeping them in Linear. You can create documents in the header of a Linear project. For us that’s the perfect location since that’s where our team manages its tasks. If you don’t use Linear, try figuring out where your journal will be most visible for the team.

A text saying “docs and links” with a plus icon pressed with two dropdown options that say “create document” and “add link” — You can create documents in the header of Linear projects. You can also link to a Notion page if you rather keep your journal there.

If someone forgets why the team decided X, they can go back in the journal and read about it. It’s also great when a new person joins the project. They can quickly get up to speed by reading the journal.

“The project journal is a valuable part of any work journal because it captures project-specific reflections and notes. Within each work journal, I have multiple project journals: dedicated pages for every defined project at the company.“— Using a work journal to create design case studies, Tanner Christensen (2022)

How not to keep a product development journal

Do not keep a journal in an app nobody uses or a place that’s hard to find. The journal should be shareable with a link and everyone should be able to access it quickly.

Also, make sure everyone in the team can edit it. You don’t want people to start collecting information outside the journal as that won’t benefit the rest of the team.

Takeaways

Alignment is making sure everyone knows who’s responsible for what and what the next steps are. It helps teams finish projects on time. Design can play a decisive role in creating alignment before, at the start and throughout projects. As a designer or PM, you can use product development journals to keep your team aligned during projects.