Alignment

This is an example about alignment. A lot of what I do as a design leader is about getting alignment. I like this example because it highlights how important alignment is to the success of the team, the happiness of the team, and the greatness of the product. I believe in the three legged stool metaphor to approaching design work: balancing product, design & engineering perspectives, recognizing that great work comes when all perspectives come together and push and pull on each other.

The problem

I’ve noticed something in my time leading design teams where at some point, the team goes through a frustrated moment where they don’t feel they are having the impact they know they can have. As we were looking to transform the Learning product, the design team was frustrated with what they perceived as slow progress and differing expectations.

The examples of great learning apps and products available to you and me on our phones are motivating to me, and was very motivating to the design team. The team wanted to approach the project with a robust full engagement set of design and research activities, from discovery to creating concepts, through iterative usability work to design system enhancements. They had devised a good plan. But the design, product and engineering teams grew increasingly frustrated with each other. There was a lot of us vs them language being used.

The product leader and I got together to discuss. I asked “what are you worried about?” It was in her response where I learned just how misaligned, or maybe misunderstood, each of our teams were. The things I was worried about were different, yet it was easy to understand how both of what we were looking to do was important to the product (and both were necessary). Our dialogue is where we I realized how important it was going to be maintain conversation on goals and outcomes, approaches and values.

I’ve become a believer in asking “what you are worried about?” And I coach my teams to leverage that question as a way to open dialogue for learning about different perspectives and to gain alignment. What I learned was that when I asked my teams if they knew what their partners were worried about, they often didn’t have an answer. This got me thinking about how we could better understand the perspectives of the teams we work with.

The outcome

My teams went on to create a tool for widening our view when thinking through project approaches, capacity planning, creating team assignments, and hiring. We called it the Value Pulse, as a way to help ourselves align to valuable work, where we could have a great impact. And we conduct it quarterly on projects where we are heavily invested.

Here’s an example, where we mapped our projects to a set of values, and assessed our understanding of each one. I asked each design leader (usually this is a combination of manager and/or principal level designer/researcher) to do the assessment for their product area of focus.

We wanted to know if we were spending our time the right way, on the right work. And it helped with that a lot. But what this tool also showed us was where we had gaps in our understanding of key perspectives from the teams we partner with. I asked each leader to video record themselves sharing their rationale from their assessment. These recordings became I great way for us to practice talking to our plans and approaches, and helped us identify gaps in our thinking, and in our ability to explain our work.