Design Ops
The key to a successful design org in any business is being the bridge between marketing and product, sales and engineering, and most importantly, an advocate for the user. Marketing tends to be the wild west, product tends to be regimented and hardened. What I find can unite both sides is qualitative and quantitative data. Since I tend embed myself in startups often times it is up to myself and stakeholders to build a data-informed design operation.
Research and Discovery
Projects of all scopes and scale have an end goal or an objective. There are several levers that can be pulled to find data. My favorites are GA and Tableau. Apart from just creating the standard personas and interviewing the power user I also like to dig deeper. I like to analyze folks that abandon carts, bounce from pages, and cancel subscriptions. It’s important to understand your successes but knowing how and why you failed can further inform and empower a product’s design.
Product Management
Once personas are defined and user journeys and empathy maps have been executed I like to start by writing out simple structures and requirements out as a bulleted lists. Translating post-its to written specifications are more adoptable and approachable to external teams. Once a spec has been written it’s time to pick the requirements apart, identify scope and viability, and proceed to design.
Product Design
Once we are spec’d out I like to start simple with white boarding and Balsamiq. The hope is to save time with mockups but some teams prefer medium to high fidelity comps using Sketch, Adobe CC, or XD.
Presentation depends on scope and timeline. In the ideal scenario I’ll either build out an interactive model in Invision or if the product is web-based I’ll just build something really quick using html / css. I’ll circle back with my stakeholders to socialize my designs and gather feedback.
Development
I have been on the development side of product design several times in my career. As such I know the frustrations that can stem from fractured design specifications and holes in interactive models. After story grooming I like to pair with the engineer and product manager to make any last minute adjustments and refinements. In certain roles I have been on the front-end writing code in tools such as Visual Studio, QAing code in systems such as Litmus and pushing code using Git, Github, and terminal.
Validation and Optimization
After a product has been launched I like to obsess over it’s performance. I know that a few days or weeks can be statistically insignificant but it’s important to monitor and track kpis. I love leveraging tools such as Hotjar, Optimizely, or Mixpanel to evaluate and understand performance.