While there are mindsets and practices that tend to support higher quality design, there is no one best design culture that all teams should strive to realize. Given the different values of different companies, and the variety of the services they deliver, it is up to each design team to articulate a culture that matters to them. While Peter was at Groupon, he established a culture in response to the marketplace Groupon was building, and the journeys that both merchants and shoppers were on. To deliver on these end-to-end service experiences, the design team’s culture emphasized service design and collaboration. This in turn influenced hiring (bringing people on who were comfortable with user research, and worked well in teams), and delivery (encouraging more robust exploration of problems, deeper user research and analysis, greater coordination across designers). Other design teams may place greater value in building a “maker” culture (emphasizing prototyping, building, coding, and direct ownership of the design that is delivered) or one of strong aesthetics and personality (inclined toward storytellers and craftspeople).

And not only is it important to articulate values, but also a team’s purpose (as was discussed in Chapter 3). Why does the design organization exist? How will it serve the rest of the organization? For example, when Bob Baxley led the design team at Pinterest, they were focused on predictably producing world-class work with quality and velocity. Kaaren Hanson, VP of Design at Medallia, an enterprise software company focused on managing customer experience, has stated the purpose is to craft exceptional experiences with empathy and thoughtful provocation. At Groupon, it was to ensure delight and coherence across the ecommerce marketplace.

While there is no One Best Design Culture, there is a set of values that are common among strong design teams:

Having clear values and purposes that individuals and teams align to means that everyone understands when a team takes a customer-first approach, supports collaboration, protects making time, and seeks measurement for their outcomes. With that understanding in place, design leadership can advocate for and prioritize initiatives and activities like spinning up a customer insights team and repository, bringing customers and potential customers into concepting exercises, journey mapping training, and the development of common metrics. These objectives can then be tied back to performance management. Armed with the values, decisions both large and small are more easily made.

Just like with the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an organization’s values, principles, and purpose ought to be written down. In Chapter 3, we suggested the start of a charter for a broadly impactful design team:

Once the purpose has been stated, add the team’s values and objectives. Try to make it concise enough to fit on a single page, something that can be posted in a common area. Make it part of the conversation when recruiting and hiring, and refer to it in meetings and work sessions.

The act of drafting a charter is a remarkable exercise for a team to go through. It will be contentious, and force people to deeply consider just why they’re doing what they’re doing. The result, a printed document, is the first step to making the abstract and potentially nebulous notion of “values” into something concrete. The next step is shaping the space that upholds these values to support the work.

We saw the importance of environments come to life at Adaptive Path. When the company began, we worked out of our homes, and then for a few years rented a couple of rooms as a space where we could meet and talk. Our work focused on web user experiences, largely executing on interaction design and information architecture challenges for marketing organizations. In 2005, the company moved to a new dedicated office, a place we committed to being in every day, with large open spaces to support our work. And with this move, the nature of our work changed. Previously, work sessions involved going into a conference room, collaborating, and then having to take the material down when the meeting was done. Now, dedicated project spaces allowed us to keep our work on walls at all times (Figure 8-2 and Figure 8-3). This externalization of a team’s work product made it easier to share, to get feedback from others, and to introduce to our clients. The bigness of the space supported the bigness of our ideas, and our work evolved from execution-focused web user experience to strategic and definition-oriented service design and future forecasting. The big spaces in turn supported the work becoming more physical and tactile, with large diagrams, walls of concept designs, and Post-it notes everywhere. By freeing ourselves from working only within screen-based digital tools, we found ourselves tackling new challenges.

Figure 8-2. Project team at Adaptive Path, with movable walls behind them (the white wall is whiteboard, and the blue wall is a tackable surface). Photo by Peter Merholz.

Figure 8-3. The same workspace as shown in Figure 8-2, from the opposite angle—plenty of wallspace supports permanent placement of guiding documents such as experience principles. Photo by Peter Merholz.

It is for these reasons that so many design firms operate in such an open, studio environment. And space management has become one of the more quotidian challenges as design organizations are built in-house. It is still common for offices to be divvied up into cubicles, with fluorescent-lit conference rooms with one whiteboard as the only places where people can come together to collaborate; design teams are often spread out across floors, buildings, and campuses. These environments are death to creativity and innovation.

Firms that embrace design seriously invest in creating physical environments that support healthy cultures. At MX 2015, Katie Dill, director of Experience Design for Airbnb, shared her team’s mantra of “Know the moments that matter. Keep it simple. Make it visual. Ensure it’s visible.” They partnered with Gensler to create an award-winning studio space that supports collaboration with no shortage of wall space to showcase work and remind the team and visitors that they’re in the business of creating a sense of belonging in the world. Their physical space is directly connected to their purpose (Figure 8-4).

Figure 8-4. The Airbnb design team at work. Blackboards for posting work, floor-to-ceiling whiteboards, a table stocked with creative supplies, and even some art on the wall. One the left, you see the edge of a large HD display. These elements invite collaboration. Image courtesy of Airbnb.

Pinterest has enormous flat screen TVs throughout their space showcasing the latest explorations from the design team. And when Catherine Courage joined DocuSign as their SVP of Customer Experience, she met with Facilities in her first week to ensure that dedicated space for design was prioritized.^[25] This can take the shape of dedicated collaboration spaces like project rooms, video-enabled conference rooms, and workshop/training spaces, as well as space in high-traffic areas to show work in progress, upcoming releases, and design explorations.

When Kaaren Hanson joined Medallia as VP of Design, she created physical space and invited partners to rotate teams through. She organized the visits into two-week sessions with daily themes not only for the work but for meals and activities. She treated the sessions as immersive learning opportunities and even created customized menus for each of the partner team members, taking into account any dietary preferences. She leveraged her team’s culture to prioritize building relationships with key partners, celebrating the diversity of skills and perspectives, and quickly had a long list of other teams asking to partake in upcoming sessions.

A common practice in design firms that has not widely taken root as design moves in-house is the creation of a library. These libraries feature two types of books:

Even in this Internet-connected age, not all the best information can be found online (we say, writing a book), and an assortment of smartly curated books can serve as a means of connecting and uplifting a team (Figure 8-5).

Figure 8-5. Adaptive Path’s library. Books constantly flow in and out, and there’s even a card catalog to keep it all in order! Photo by Kristin Skinner.

Shelves are not the only spaces to be curated. The walls of the design area should also serve as a display for exemplars of art and design that can serve as inspirations to the team.

Shelves and walls aren’t just for material made outside the company. Every project should be printed, archived, and cataloged for reference, and key artifacts that demonstrate the team’s quality standards should be showcased on walls or countertops. Such displays reinforce the commitment to quality, communicating to the team, partners, and visitors the standards that deserve to be upheld.

When the product development team is small, it’s easy for designers, engineers, and product managers to all sit together. As the team scales within the building and across geographies, it becomes necessary to explicitly decide where team members sit—do they sit with other designers, even if they’re not working on the same problems, or do they sit with their respective teams, co-locating with engineers, product management, or marketing?

Ideally, the answer can be “both.” A healthy approach is for designers to spend chunks of time in both contexts, where execution time is spent with the cross-functional team, and reflection and review time happens among other designers. This requires both a design studio space and available desk space within cross-functional teams. If space is at a premium and a choice must be made, then it’s a matter of “it depends.” If the design team is relatively new, or in a period of low morale, they makes sense to keep the designers together to bolster their culture and sense of belonging. As the design team matures, it become less reliant on constant contact, at which point it makes sense to shift designer focus to their respective teams. This also has the effect of spreading the design mindset to other parts of the organization.

While it’s great to have the whole team sitting together, it’s not always feasible or appropriate. It’s important to manage an organization’s virtual environments as purposefully as their physical ones, and to imbue them with the team’s values.

What we’re about to say feels self-evident, but warrants saying as we have been in multiple environments that tried to operate this way: email is not a collaborative work tool. Too often companies still resort to email as the way to handle communications, make and track decisions, and share ideas (as attachments). It’s messy, as oftentimes not all the appropriate participants are included (and have to be awkwardly added into email threads after they’ve begun), and the record of decision making is hard to parse as separate threads emerge. Even worse, many large enterprises automatically delete email every 30 to 45 days or so, wreaking havoc on one’s ability to refresh on important topics.

For a design team to work in a virtual environment, it’s important to do so with tools suited for collaboration: chat tools like Slack or HipChat; project communication and coordination tools like Basecamp, Asana, and Trello; shared file servers like Box and Dropbox; cloud-based collaborative productivity tools like Google Apps and Mural.ly, and design feedback tools like Wake.

Simply having tools is not sufficient. Standards and practices must be articulated and enforced to ensure that they are used in a way conducive to teamwork. As anyone who has spent too long finding the right funny animated GIF for a chat conversation can tell you, these collaborative tools can become a distraction and attention drain when not handled appropriately. Shared file servers only work if people can find what they’re looking for. Communication services only work if people don’t neglect them and resort to email.

Based on our experience working on and leading design teams across locations and time zones, we’ve come up with a set of considerations to maximize team time, protect maker time, and allow for spontaneous collaboration:

A special class of activities takes place when a new member joins the team. Thoughtful onboarding is the difference between a new member feeling welcome, knowing where stuff is, and hitting the ground running, or someone feeling confused, uncertain, and unable to work. Provide the new designer with a team roster, instructions on the shared file structure, pointers to standards and guidelines, a glossary of acronyms and other jargon, and a buddy to go to for questions as they arise. Make sure they have a computer with everything they need already installed (which might mean working with IT to get a “designer special” setup, as designers have needs for software, displays, and accessories that differ from other departments). Schedule a team lunch to celebrate the new member.

At Groupon, the design organization called itself the Design Union, a recognition of the company’s Chicago roots, and a celebration of the honest labor and craft of the team’s design work. Every new team member received a welcome kit, which included a branded notebook (Figure 8-6) and a rubber stamp featuring the Design Union’s shield (Figure 8-7). These small, fun non-essentials made clear the importance of craft within the team.

Figure 8-6. Branded notebook for Groupon’s Design Union

Figure 8-7. The Design Union’s rubber stamp

Just seeing the word “meeting” elicits groans. The problem, though, isn’t meetings. It’s poorly run meetings with no clear agenda, no one keeping matters on topic and on time, and loud voices dominating the conversation. When effective, meetings serve a crucial role for a design team and its culture, primarily around communicating effectively, but also solidifying the team’s identity through shared work.

A weekly meeting for the design organization should have these three elements:

Regardless of how large the team gets, keep these meetings to no more than one hour per week.

All of this effort to create the right environment and explicit mindset is for naught if your team isn’t able to deliver. In Chapter 3, we described the difficulty of striking the balance between establishing a quality bar with valuing delivery over perfection. However that balance is struck, what’s crucial is that the team is able to produce. Companies inadvertently throw a lot of obstacles (unnecessary meetings, unreasonable deadlines, unclear requirements) in the way of design work, and the most important mark of the team’s culture is how it navigates these obstacles and successfully delivers.

Meetings are perhaps the force most disruptive to a design team’s ability to produce. This is less of an issue in small organizations; as companies get bigger, meetings seemingly grow exponentially. Designers find their calendars carved up with colored squares, leaving very little time to do their design work. Successful design work requires the ability to focus for long stretches, ideally in a space with other design team members. One way to address this is to protect designers’ time in a predictable way—no meetings before noon, or no meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This can be tough to stick to, because at some of those meetings, important things are discussed that would benefit from designer involvement. To make sure design’s perspective is represented, a team lead or other design leader should be tapped to attend such meetings, keep their team’s time free, and make sure that they remain up to date.

As a team scales, it can prove helpful to establish a predictable cadence of design work. When Bob Baxley was leading product design at Pinterest, he developed a schedule of “closed-loop” theme weeks.^[26] Mondays are called “Playground” with a focus on generating ideas. Tuesdays are “Collaborate,” where ideas generated or iterated on Mondays are shared and discussed with partners from product management and engineering. Wednesday’s focus is “Breathe,” providing room and space for teams and individuals to go deeper on ideas and topics. Thursdays are reserved for “Workshops” to evaluate with teams, and Fridays are “Product Reviews” with an executive audience. Establishing such a clear, repeatable rhythm for the work allows other teams to adapt their meeting times accordingly.

Along with a dependable work cadence, another factor that helps teams as they scale are design guidelines. Based on core brand attributes and desired experience principles, these guidelines help teams not have to invent their designs from scratch, but instead provide a framework that supports the speedier development of new material while retaining quality. Some companies, like IBM, make these available publicly for other teams to leverage as a baseline or for inspiration. At GE, they couldn’t hire enough designers to cover all the work that needed to get done, so they built a UI framework for everyone to use. Their goal in building and extending a design system was to help teams that couldn’t get UX designers be successful. They took a risk by spending time to do something no one was asking them to do, but in the end they gave design the chance to have a greater impact.

A key mechanism for design to maintain its quality standards are review sessions, often called critiques. During a critique, designers present their work to one another, and receive feedback for how to make the work better. Because folks are putting their work out there for others to criticize, it can be a stressful experience. A strong design culture is one where people eagerly seek out this commentary; a symptom of a troubled culture is one where such review practices leave people deflated, or even in tears.

Being mindful of a few principles can make critique a positive experience for the team, and serve its purpose of maintaining a high quality bar:

There is a lot more that can be said about productive critique than we can get to here. Discussing Design (O’Reilly, 2015), by Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry, is an excellent book for digging deep into this topic.

A key sign of a healthy design culture is how often designers engage directly with customers. Whether shadowing sales calls, listening in on customer support, or going out in the field and observing use, by exposing themselves to the everyday contexts their users are facing, designers adopt not only empathy, but humility, reinforcing their role in serving others.

One of the most effective ways to spread culture within a design organization is to find ways to mix up the people working in it, so that team members get exposed to colleagues beyond those on their immediate team. The challenge is doing this in a way that is not too disruptive, as team constancy is necessary when digging in and delivering good work.

A simple approach for this that we developed at Adaptive Path is the Open Design Session. In an Open Design Session, one design team shares out a particularly sticky problem they’re tackling to the rest of the design organization, who roll up their sleeves and pitch ideas for how to tackle it. For the host design team, the benefit is they get fresh thinking on a problem they’ve stared at for too long, and often receive insights that allow them to move forward. For the other designers, they get to step away from their normal work for a little bit, and apply themselves to a new problem. They also get to see what their colleagues are doing elsewhere in the organization, and broaden their overall understanding of the service they’re working to deliver. And everyone benefits from working side by side and seeing how others think through design challenges.

Open Design Sessions typically last for about an hour—it’s rarely feasible to ask more of others’ time. To get the most out of that hour, the host team must come prepared, with a clear framing of the problem in question, the design objectives, and any research or other input material. The setup should take about 10 minutes, and then the designers work, typically sketching ideas, for 30–40 minutes. The remaining time is for sharing out the designs.

In order for Open Design Sessions to be a habit, it helps to keep them regularly scheduled. At Adaptive Path, we had two each week, with different orientations. The first was on Tuesday mornings, and was meant to be “generative”—coming up with new ideas and solutions for the problem being posed. The second was Thursday afternoons, and these were meant to be more evaluative—productive critique of the work a team did. These afternoon ones also included beer, which helped keep the sessions lighter and friendlier.

Activities important to embodying a design culture don’t occur only within the organization. For any design team that has a core value around the engagement, development, and promotion of ideas, a key way to demonstrate that value is with the design community at large. Start with small efforts, like lunch-and-learns, inviting people from outside the company to speak to the team. Connect with the local community through associations such as the IxDA, AIGA, UXPA, and the like, and offer to host evening events. Encourage team members to share their ideas, methods, and case studies at conferences or through writing. Supporting these efforts means allowing team members the time to engage. If it truly is a cultural value, it shouldn’t be that difficult to make work.