credit: Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
A few years ago a designer came to our 1:1 upset. “What’s wrong?” I asked him.
“You know the product pages I told you we’d be launching today? Well they’re not quite ready. They’ve been delayed and it will be a few more days until they’re ready.”
We were replatforming our entire website and working against a tight deadline This was in the middle of the project and the pressure was high. So I enquired what was causing the delay.
“Chris [the engineering manager] was running last minute QA and he noticed some things were off — odd line breaks and font changes, CSS stuff. All minor things. He reached out to me and we’ve been working through it together, but there’s a lot of little things to work through and it’s taking a little longer than expected.”
My designer was genuinely bummed about the delay. However, I was quite pleased about this. This behavior is exactly what I was hoping to see develop. And it took a while, but we got there.
What was important to me hearing this story is that the engineer had looked at the page and while it met the definition of done and had been ready to go, he noticed it was not quite right (design QA/sign-off was not a part of our definition of done). He took it upon himself to reach out to the designer and work through the problem together. He wanted to make sure that what went live met the highest of standards. Engineer and designer sharing a commitment to delivering the highest quality product to our users. Working together.
I’ve had several conversations recently with product and engineering orgs where a common complaint I hear is how the design team have different objectives from the product and engineering teams. It’s a type of comment I’ve heard often throughout my career. The general comment goes something like:
“Designers are focused on the user while product managers are focused on the business.”
It’s usually put delicately and to suggest that designers have noble purpose, but also this purpose can sometimes get in the way of the responsibilities of the team. This perspective is at odds with the above example of designer and engineer perfecting the product pages.
I reject the framing that designers don’t care about business goals. Designers’ goals and PMs’ (and engineers’) objectives are not so diametrically opposed. Every designer I’ve worked with wants the company to make money and succeed. There’s a whole talk I give on this subject — about how designers use the wrong language in voicing their goals and objectives at work. I should probably write a post about that one day. But I want to get back to the designer and engineer anecdote I started with.
That collaboration doesn’t happen by accident. There’s something this designer did, something I’ve seen a lot of really good designers do, that helped bring them to that point. They reached out and built a relationship.
This designer, in joining that squad, reached out to each member one on one and set up a coffee chat. He wanted to get to know each of the people he’d be working with better. He didn’t set it up to learn more about the work and team’s focus, or how it operates. He set it up to get to know the person.
I can think back on the designers I’ve worked with and the ones that stand out did this sort of thing. They were naturally empathetic and curious. Those traits certainly transfer nicely to product design. But the unintended — or intended — consequences of reaching out in such a personal and genuine way is that it builds closer working relationships with those around you. When one does that, they understand better how their team member thinks and feels and goes about their day. And each team member learns the same thing back. That’s how an engineer comes to consider important the things a designer they’ve befriended considers important.
That’s my advice to designers out there: send out coffee invites. Get to know the engineers and PMs on your squads. Learn about them as people — what their interests are, what’s going on in their lives. It will lead to deeper connections and from that, a better working relationship.