Building design services in the engineering world
Building a reliable design office means building a design community rather than a classic functional office within the company. This main goal of the Design Center of Excellence should be reflected in every aspect of organizational work, competency management, and productivity.
When you’re building a design community, there are two aspects you have to keep in harmony: focus on individual personalities and focus on building relationships. The second latter is even more important because strong professional relations make the business successful.
Being a Head of Design within one of the big IT companies, I would like to share our design team journey and all the transformations and challenges along the way. This article should be helpful for everyone, who considers establishing solid design services within their companies and/or scaling existing design offerings.
How Everything has Changed
Several years ago, our team was much smaller and consisted of about 10 people or so. All of them were assigned to a few commercial UX projects within the company and to helping our marketing department occasionally. As the design team, we were dreaming high and striving to establish a design-driven culture within the company. We believed in the great value of human-centered design and wanted to promote its benefits across all other communities inside. We came up with the decision to apply the design thinking methodology and defined the design aspects that could be useful for our company’s business success. We have interviewed everyone who was somehow related to sales activities and customer engagement: account managers, business developers, directors of sales, marketing, and many other related roles.
We’ve got a lot of insights about their pain points, their search for the perfect value proposition, their dedication to establishing an engaging dialogue with prospects and existing clients.
For example, we had a Discovery process based on traditional requirements elicitation techniques that were less client-oriented and didn’t encourage co-creation and vast exploration of the business context and product-market fit.
That was a good chance for designers to rethink the approach. One day we received a request to build a product for brokers in a global insurance company. Our user experience designer joined the discovery team. The goal was not only to understand their customer needs but also to demonstrate our product design expertise to the stakeholders. That was a possibility for us to help the client with product ownership of multiple products within the insurance enterprise company.
So, we gathered at a client’s office in the US and discussed the product solutions with the company’s managers and other decision-makers. At first, it sounded like they were confident that they knew what to build, and the only concerns they had were about the timelines and costs of the implementation. Then we asked if we could talk to the actual business users who had requested the solution and would be using it in the future. A series of user interviews made us realize that business users’ problems were far from what had been proposed by executives. Based on our conversations with the users, we mapped the journey of brokers’ daily tasks and workflows — this allowed us to define the opportunities for improvement.
So far, so good — our next step was to talk to the company’s clients who were interacting with the brokers daily — this time, the big picture changed once again. The executives were too detached and couldn’t see the whole process in detail. For example, they lacked focus on the tiny pieces in the communication approaches that could negatively impact the entire product and overall customer experience.
After a few days of research, we presented the as-is state of what’s going on and the customer experience gaps we needed to bridge. Then we began brainstorming and outlining the step-by-step plans on how to improve the workflows, communication, and how to digitize tons of paperwork. And, of course, many hours of design workshops (mapping persons, value proposition, storyboarding) helped immensely. The co-creation spirit between the stakeholders and us brought both teams to a constructive way of designing the product. Daily prototyping, user interviews, and corridor usability tests with brokers and other business users helped us find the consensus and prepare the validated product concept.
Executives of the company stopped being just “customers” — they became co-owners of the ideas; they became passionate about the solution and the change it would bring — as much as we did. Then there was a process of cost-benefit analysis of company investments for the implementation, and it turned out to be successful. So, we were coming back with a big contract for a significant and exciting piece of design work. Back at our headquarters in Ukraine, we were preparing for a contract sign off, and we were proud to name the main document as: “Statement of Work for Product Design Services.”
The Era of Product Design
Over the last two years, we became the ambassadors of bringing the design thinking approach to the early stages of cooperation with the customer. We were traveling all over the world and running design workshops to research user needs, address the right expectations, and of course, understand how we can bring value to the business. We designed and built products, conducted dozens of interviews and usability testing sessions for our clients on both coasts of the United States. We created product strategies and designed applications for our customers in Europe, Japan, and the Middle East (UAE, Jordan, Israel).
In Europe, we focused on major markets: the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany. Whenever applicable, we replace the traditional engagement process by free design workshops. During these mini design sprints, we’re using the co-creation approach to discover the client’s opportunities, break down product vision into features and roadmaps, and engage product owners to proceed with us as vendors. In Europe, such activities are more feasible for us, because of the short traveling distances. Sometimes you have a call with a prospective client, and you schedule a workshop for the next day — at his office in Berlin, Munich, Geneva, London, Vienna, or any other European city with a direct flying connection to our headquarters. As we started introducing this new way of engagement activities, it proved to be highly practical and cost-effective — the opportunity win rate has been increasing as a result.
What we have learnt:
- Existing customers or prospects can obtain great value even from one day of such activities. It shifts the focus to the clients’ needs: the first meeting shouldn’t be only about the presentation of the vendor’s services. It should be the first step in achieving the customer’s goals. We are now digging deeper into the customer’s ideas, focusing on the value for their target audience, their business objectives, and possible technology solutions.
- Another aspect is the power of co-creation. Even for a short period, the client can get a feel of your team dynamics, of your product approach — during a workshop; you provide a glimpse of how your company will continue supporting the customer vision throughout the development process.
- You’re sharing a piece of your professional knowledge for free, and your clients will appreciate it. It creates a culture of partnership and is the easiest way to engage with the customers.
Our exploration of demand for Product Design services at the European market allowed us to establish design presence in 3 European capitals:
- Berlin, Germany
- London, UK
- Tallinn, Estonia
The Power of Collaboration
Within the company, we’re focusing on the creation of a cross-functional team for the delivery of Product Design services. Our collaboration journey started with the technology office. It includes three significant areas of expertise: Software Architecture, Research and Development, and Cloud Services. Engineers were the first ones to adopt the design thinking approach and apply it to the software architectural exploration and decisions. One of the offices is using the workshop-based methodology to define quality attributes. We collaborated with the CTO deputies and jointly gave several talks at design conferences. Together, we demonstrated that software architecture is one of the main pillars of the product design methodology.
The next part of the Product Design puzzle was to establish collaboration with Business Analysis and Product Management, and these experts have excellent knowledge when it comes to defining the product scope and requirements elicitation.
Eventually, we have built the service of Product Design comprising three primary areas of expertise: Design, Software Architecture, and Product Management. We have created a playbook with the rules for service delivery. Each of the roles/expertise is responsible for one of the fundamental parts of the service.
- Designers are responsible for defining user needs and shaping the customer experience (which includes personas, customer journey mapping, value proposition mapping, ideas validation, usability testing, prototyping, and interaction design).
- Business analysts and Product managers are responsible for the problem statement, solution vision & scope, user story mapping, and product backlog.
- Software architects are responsible for the technology vision, stack, quality attributes, and involvement of technical experts. They are using C4 model for visualizing software architecture.
Other important aspects cover the implementation roadmap for the future product, the best team composition for the development, and the project budget. By combining all of these items, we end up with a comprehensive package that helps clients shape their solution.
Influence of COVID-19
Usually, we divide the service into a few steps:
- First stage: deep-dive into the business domain (“pre-onsite”). At this stage we are defining the product objectives and conducting initial research (Domain, Company, Industry, Competitors), We’re also preparing workshop materials, including the agenda.
- Second stage: actual workshops. This includes traveling onsite to conduct co-creation sessions with the stakeholders, observation of the users’ workflows (user safaris), user interviews, and usability testing.
- Third stage: documenting the insights, solutions, and roadmaps.
However, in times of the global lockdown, we had to re-imagine our approach and decide how to proceed with the service without onsite presence. We have re-packaged our offering for the remote format and tweaked the naming to Product Design Online. Our experts are certified in design facilitation and have a great toolkit of instruments and techniques, ranging from GV Design Sprint methodology to Service Blueprint frameworks. Online collaboration tools, like Miro and Whimsical, allow us easily interact with customers, without losing the engaging nature of the co-creation approach. Design tools like Figma and InVision provide us with possibilities for prototype discussions. Lookback and other platforms for usability testing help us conduct user research at its full scale.
The main goal of Product Design Online is to keep delivering maximum value to our customers. Moreover, we have leveraged the challenge of the current situation and made it our advantage. For example:
- It’s more time-efficient. This is especially important for customers with tight project deadlines. Now you can gather all stakeholders under one virtual “roof,” in the simplest way possible, and get the most from your globally distributed teams with zero time spent on traveling.
- Obviously, it reduces costs. Zero travel time means zero travel expenses for train and plane tickets, accommodation, and rental of meeting premises.
- It’s more inclusive. Now, you can enrich your product team’s knowledge with company-wide expertise across different domains and technology stacks in minutes by bringing them into any discussion or activity virtually.
Product Design Online became one of our most successful services, and our clients admit they didn’t feel any difference other than a positive one. We continue adhering to the benchmark of product design services we had set before 2020, and remote format is not a constraint.
Another aspect is education and knowledge sharing with designers across the world. Our office runs a series of events called Product Design Meetup. We successfully conducted such events in London (UK), Berlin (Germany), Chicago (US), and all over Ukraine, of course, in cooperation with designers from Pivotal Labs, Fjord, and BMW design group. Our next meetup had been planned for Paris, but because of COVID-19, we ran it virtually, which attracted five times more attendees than before.
Being a design-driven company doesn’t mean the excellent expertise of user experience professionals. Design-driven means rebuilding the overall company approach to customer engagement and product development; shifting everyone's mindset to a better understanding of design value and user satisfaction. Whether you’re a software architect, engineer, business analyst, or manager, you are already a designer in your particular area and you could benefit immensely by using design collaborative methodologies.
