Lucy Denton, Head of Design at Dovetail, discusses design thinking, lessons from Atlassian, sacred rituals of Dovetail's design team, balancing product simplicity with new features, and the double diamond framework. They explore Dovetail's mission to improve quality through customer insights. They also discuss scaling the design team and aligning teams and business goals. Additionally, they highlight the challenges of scaling a team and product and the importance of prioritization and improving the user experience.
Design is about solving problems and finding solutions that customers will love.
Dovetail follows a design-led approach, collaborating closely between design and engineering for iterative product development.
When growing a design team, hiring individuals with the right skills and prioritizing design hiring are crucial for success.
Deep dives
The Purpose of Design in a Company
The purpose of design in a company is to solve customer problems, create innovative solutions that users will love to use, and differentiate the company in the market. Design is anchored on customer-centricity and the goal is to create products that customers will love.
Design-Led Approach at Dovetail
At Dovetail, they adopt a design-led approach to product development. This means starting with a deep understanding of users and continually iterating on product discovery and development to meet user needs. Design and engineering collaborate closely, fosters iterative product development, and ensures continuous learning about users.
Example of Research Project at Dovetail
An example of a research project at Dovetail was focused on expanding the product's video transcription feature. Rather than incremental improvements, they conducted a generative research project interviewing customers and non-customers. From the insights gathered, they identified opportunities in the research industry, strategically focused on building solutions that aligned with the existing product and addressed key user problems. The project resulted in the creation of a new use case, a research repository, which became a significant differentiating feature.
Hiring a Strong Design Team
When growing a design team, it is important to consider the specific skills required for the team's success. Hiring the right individuals who can contribute new skills while also aligning with the team's existing strengths is crucial. Conducting a thoughtful interview process that assesses the necessary skills is recommended. It is also important to prioritize design hiring to avoid putting pressure on the team and ensure the capacity to execute product work and scale the design function.
The Role of Design in Problem Solving and Influence
Design plays a vital role in problem-solving by orienting towards the problem, generating a range of solutions, converging to a viable idea, and iterating on that idea. Additionally, influencing stakeholders is an essential aspect of design. Designers need to align stakeholders on the problem, communicate the design process, and ensure buy-in to build the proposed solution. Effective storytelling and facilitation skills help designers influence and engage both leadership and the development team, creating a shared understanding and motivation towards the desired solution.
“Ship less, but better”, with Lucy Denton, Head of Design at Dovetail
âś…Lessons from working at Atlassian
✅Detention & Sparring: “sacred rituals” of Dovetail’s design team
âś…Balancing product simplicity with new features
✅Design thinking & the “double diamond” framework
Dovetail is on a mission to help the world improve the quality of everything. Dovetail’s customer insights hub allows teams to quickly analyse research data and share insights collaboratively, helping thousands of teams build better products by helping them understand their customers.
Episode Highlights from Lucy:
“Everything is a design problem! It’s just a way to solve problems.”
“We have a few rituals that are sacred to the design team. One we call Design Detention, and the other is Design Sparring… They’re two pretty standard rituals that a lot of design teams have, usually they’re called collaboration & critique.”
“We have a ratio of about 1 designer to 6 engineers, and that feels like a good ratio for us. At Atlassian I think it was 1 designer to 8 engineers… so it just depends on the company culture and how fast the engineers move.”
“Once you have a product and you have users, you get so many feature requests, and it’s really easy to just build everything that everyone asks you to build. But you have to be quite thoughtful about what problem that is solving, how does that fit into your existing feature set?”
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