Two cooks in the kitchen
How to collaborate better with other designers without burning down the kitchen
Collaboration is a key ingredient in creating great products. When people come together, contributing their unique skills, ideas and points of view, you simply get better results. But even if the work culture supports it, it is up to the people themselves to work together as a team.
As a product designer, I know how fickle our kind can be. And while collaborating with other designers can be a great creative experience and a wonderful learning opportunity, it can also be an exhaustively frustrating one, that creates tension and resentment. From what I’ve observed, behind the failures are usually miscommunication, ego or undefined expectations.
A designer friend of mine very accurately compared this to having two cooks in one kitchen, an analogy that works really well to explain how to avoid burning both personal and professional relationships down to the ground.
Set goals
Before pulling out their pots and pans, cooks gather all the information they need to create a great meal. They explore what dishes they can make, what ingredients are available and assess the amount of people they expect to accommodate. If they’re exceptionally good cooks, they will also consider any allergies the guests might have (wink wink accessibility 🎉). Knowing what and for whom they prepare the meal will help them devise an amazing menu that will leave an impression.
The same goes for Product design, to plan a great app or website (or their smaller parts like flows and features), you have to understand the goals, the scope of the task at hand, who the users are, what their needs are and what’s the experience you want them to have.
Align expectations & build an action plan
Agreeing on what the cooks are going to prepare is not enough, they also need to agree on what recipes they are going to follow and divide tasks among themselves. Not making these preparations puts them at risk of ending up with a pile of weird looking food that no one wants to eat and a whole lot of hangry customers that want their money back.
Similarly, if the designers don’t strategize on how they are going to achieve their goals together, they will create a product that is hard for the users to comprehend, with features that make no sense and flows that lead nowhere.
Talk. Talk. Talk.
If one cook is using the chef’s knife, while the other one is frantically looking for it all over the kitchen, precious time will go to waste. Making sure both partners are aware of what the other one is doing helps to keep track of the progress and to see the big picture forming. Using a whiteboard, lists or task board tools has become common practice in the product world. Just choose which one suits you best and use it.
Communicating and tracking each other’s progress can also help foresee potential problems. If one cook’s soup is nearly overflowing but he’s off seasoning the steaks, the other cook can step in and save the soup.
Don’t guess or assume what the other is doing or thinking. To paraphrase Ed Catmull, we give meaning according to how we interpret others’ behavior. And in a world where most of our communication is done by texting, we often misunderstand things.
So talk! I can’t stress this enough. If you don’t talk, bounce ideas off one another and raise red flags whenever needed, your collaboration will fail and good food will go to waste. Constant communication gives you the power to be flexible and adjust when things go off course, which they certainly will.
Sticking with one’s own task
I’ll finally give the cooks analogy a rest for a bit. I don’t know how often it happens in the culinary world, but in the design world, we are tempted sometimes to stray to another designer’s territory and “help”. We might disagree with the corner radius and just want to “try out and experiment” our own vision of the feature. Avoid it at all cost. Just think, honestly, how you would react if someone tinkered with your stuff, uninvited. Don’t move the other designer’s pixels for them. If you have feelings about their approach or design, and there are reasons behind those feelings, use your words and the great tool that is feedback instead. Yeah, I know, again with the communication.
Topping it off
Collaboration is an ongoing conversation between people. Treat each other with respect, be clear and keep an eye on your shared progress. As long as you follow these guidelines, you can achieve great collaboration without burning the kitchen down.
Part of being a good chef is being able to work well with others and make things work under different circumstances. — Chef Stephanie Izard.
