The phases of establishing design
Establishing design in an organisation is a phased journey involving team building, skill and craft development, and strategic influence. For design to truly have impact, focus must extend across delivery teams and the wider organisational strategy and culture. This requires years of effort, to ensure design has high standards, has the space and focus to deliver, and the influence needed to solve problems for users at an organisational level.
Throughout this journey, as a design leader, you need to prioritise where you focus your energy and effort. At different phases, you’ll need to operate in a slightly different mode.
Phase 1, Team: Creating the foundations
The initial phase revolves around building the practices and roles in a design team. Start with a small group of design leaders who share a common vision for design within the organisation. Form communities around the design practices your organisation needs most (for example, content design or interaction design), based on their products and services. These communities of practice will begin to create an anchor for designers who share similar skillsets. More formally, you’ll need to identify and move individual designers into roles within these practices, and establish leadership for each. These designers will likely be doing design work in multi-disciplinary product teams, but this will depend on the organisation. You might need to hire more designers at this point, or you might wait until the next phase when you have a clearer idea of any skill gaps.
Your role as a design leader: Building the foundations for design to happen.
Phase 2, Skills: Developing the skills to deliver
Once practice leadership, communities and individual roles are in place, the emphasis shifts to skill development. It’s likely you’ll need a mix of generalist designers (who have a wide breadth of skills spanning different practices) and specialists (who have depth expertise in one particular practice).
Start by identifying the skills that design needs to be effective in your organisation. Practice leaders should work with designers in their teams to assess the capability levels across those skills, and where designers want to develop. Create opportunities for growth by moving designers into teams where others have their desired skills, or in teams focused on the work that will help them to build on their strengths. Within each community of practice, find opportunities for designers to learn about new approaches together, based on any skill gaps across the practice. You might consider external hiring to fill the gaps.
For larger teams, invest in design operations. They’ll help to operationalise the admin of running a design team and support designers with the tools and workflows needed to do their best work.
Your role as a design leader: Developing the design team’s collective skillset.
Phase 3, Craft: Learning by doing
Now you’re into the heart of design, ensuring work is done to the highest standard to meet your users’ needs. The design team should feel pretty stable at this point, doing solid work and working well in their product teams. But let’s not settle there, for design to be really effective it has to look at the wider ecosystem of services across the organisation.
Encourage exploration beyond the boundaries of products, and try new approaches to challenge the status quo. Leaders should find opportunities for designers to do work outside the product teams, collaborating with other functions and stepping into the strategy and design of the wider services.
Design crits should be a regular rhythm across teams, encouraging designers to seek help to improve their work. Work in the open as much as possible, making your work visible across the organisation. Open up your communities to people outside design in your organisation, and step outside to share learnings with other organisations to bring inspiration back in.
Your role as a design leader: Demonstrating leadership through action, setting an example for the team by actively engaging in the design process.
Phase 4, Strategy: Making space for impact
The final phase aligns design efforts with the organisational or business strategy. Leaders must seek opportunities to connect design initiatives with broader goals, influencing the wider areas of the organisation. Research and service design should be positioned to identify opportunities across the entire business, making the connections between user needs and commercial viability explicit. Design needs to step into organisational strategy, so that understanding customer problems becomes the first step in defining business goals.
Your role as a design leader: Finding opportunities to have an impact on the overall business.
It's important to note that, while these phases will often be linear, you will find yourself moving backwards and forwards between them as you learn and the wider organisational context changes.
Growing design influence across the phases
How the size of design’s influence scales across the phases of establishing design.
The phases align with establishing design at different levels:
Establishing design practice: Laying the foundations for a stable design team.
Establishing design in product teams: Developing the skills for high-quality design in product teams.
Establishing design across services: Refining the craft and extending influence to whole services.
Establishing design across the organisation: Aligning design with the overarching business strategy.
The journey to establish design in an organisation is not a straight path, but a cyclical process that involves continuous adaptation. By navigating through these phases, leaders and teams can expand the influence of design across the business, creating a culture where meeting user needs is a driving force for innovation and success.
I’ll be following up this blog post with a series of practical posts sharing examples of materials to support design leaders and my own experiences of the challenges in each phase.