Product design Management

Flexible workflow for how I manage product design development

Scoping

Determining Scope of Design Discovery

The Discovery Playbook is a tool to guide discussions about right-sizing the approach to design discovery work. The image below represents different levels of design discovery work that could be done for any given product design effort. It was born out of need to communicate with other disciplines who were new to incorporating design work into their planning. It helps answer questions like “How do we right size our approach to design? How do we align cross functionally on risks and desired outcomes for product MVPs?”

To better understand all the things that should be considered for scoping design work, see my case study on Dual Track Agile.

Once a “right sized” approach is agreed upon, product design managers should work with other disciplines to create a discovery plan to operationalize the effort.

Managing in Asana

To make this work viewable and shareable across the program review efforts, the timeline, once agreed upon, should be tracked in a program that lets others see it. Here Asana is used.

Design team tracking

In addition to being able to share the aligned upon work effort in program reviews, I was able to easily set up templates in Asana for other managers to utilize as part of planning for the Dual Track Agile Process, and create an all-up view of design resource availability:

Kick Off!

A cross-functional kickoff meeting is typically conducted, during which I would highlight the key objectives of the work, outline the Discovery Track Plan, and clarify roles and responsibilities of designers on the team.

UX Research

Product design managers and research

Depending on the needs of the project and the skillset of the team, I typically like to be involved in UX research for a project. This ensures that I’m on the same page as the designers when it comes to what insights are driving the design solution.

There are many kinds of research, but generally, product design managers should be involved in writing up the research plan, the research sessions when applicable, and the synthesis and outputs of the work

Dovetail or Research Software

UX Managers and designers ideally have access to UX research software for this collaboration.

Example of user interviews in Dovetail.

Principles

UX Principles & Archtypes: Outputs from UX research

As a result of gathering insights from the research phase, I often find that helping designers translate those insights into UX principles is a useful step. Depending on the maturity of the team, this may be a product design manager’s task, or may fall directly to a designer.

Requirements

PRDs

Depending on how your organization works, someone is generally creating an initial Product Requirements Document. This may be a Product Manager or other stakeholder.

Story Mapping for cross functional alignment on scope

In terms of how we translate this initial set of documents into a cross-functional scoping conversation, I expect product design managers to help facilitate Story Mapping sessions with well written tickets. This is the single most important task I have found for setting cross functional expectations and getting work into a backlog in a timely manner.

Tracking Work

UX Kanban & backlog

Depending on how your organization work, a product design manager needs to be keeping and eye on where the design work is tracked. We used a UX project in Jira with a Kanban board that different engineering teams could pull work in from, which was handy as UX work often doesn’t fit cleanly into Agile workflows. This was an effective solution.

Meetings Cadence

Sample UX ceremonies cadence

A product design managers needs to set up a series of reviews to manage and evangelize the work. Below is an example that accounts for Design Discovery ceremonies and where it intersects with engineering’s Agile ceremonies.

Review Work

Review in progress work

Product design managers should regularly review work with designers and ensure cross-disciplinary teams stay informed on progress. See notes below for discussion points in design work reviews.

Product design managers must schedule regular reviews of design work across phases of development and ask critical questions around the design solution topics, including:

UX Solution

• Can the designer explain how the feature product is meeting both a user and business need?

UX patterns

• Is this pattern in agreement with our design system or other accepted industry standard?

• Why is this the right pattern to meet the users need?

• Have you thought through the accessibility concerns?

User flows

• Does the UX pattern have edge cases we need to account for? Dead ends in task flows, no information states, etc.?

• Have they accounted for visual and (placeholder) written feedback for task completion/entry fields, etc.?

• Do you have documentation for user flows, including red (magenta?) lines and key interactions that show how users progress through a task?

• Have you included links to JIRA tickets and other necessary documentation in Confluence in your Figma files?

• Have they identified components within the design comps and/or story maps for engineering?

 Visual design

• Is the design following our design library standards? Including fonts, colors, & type ramp?

• Engineering doesn’t use a grid (yet) but are they designing on one? Are things aligned properly to it?

Design Library 

• Where they have made changes to a UX pattern or component that expand outside of the library, have they brought those changes to the team for review and created/updated documentation?

Testing

• Does the design need to be tested for usability? What does the designer think needs testing and what plans have they made or aligned on with UXM to do so?

• Has the designer considered what kind of feedback they might want to get from Internal Review Group or the like?

Presentation

• Can the designer present the work?

Decision Making & Ownership

• Is the designer getting the right information to drive decision making on their own, and do they know how to drive a conclusion when their research (internal or external) leads them to multiple and conflicting solutions in a timely manner?

Process Rigor

• Did the designer write tickets for the work and include user story with ACs?

• Did the designer put tickets into a UX backlog and track the work with them?

• Was the scope of the work (where applicable) generated with a Story Mapping exercise?

• Has the designer regularly checked in with engineering or PMs to answer questions about comp to get alignment and reduce production friction as the design evolves?

UX Documentation

UX Managers need to ensure that proper documentation is included in design work. Below are some examples.

Design System & Brand

Ensure that the visual design is aligned with the brand and UX patterns

Product design managers, in addition to ensuring that the user experience is meeting both business and end user needs, must ensure that the design is on brand and being worked back into the design system, if applicable.

Group Critique

Critiques

Depending on how your organization is set up, you may want to have your designer(s) review their work with the broader team in addition to a product design manager review. Group critiques are a good tool for this.

Present Out