XD-PM Process Improvement
Summary
The results of a company-wide survey showed that employees felt there was low collaboration between cross-functional work partners. The Experience Design (XD) team strongly agreed with this sentiment and took it upon themselves to improve the working relationship with the Product Management (PM) team. I led this effort, with the formation of a team of four product designers, to create a process and tools that integrated the XD Tasks into the same tool used by the PM and Development (Dev) teams to track and share their work. The outcome has been greater visibility for PM into overall XD workload, as well as specific sizing of Tasks and the capacity of the product designers. XD and PM now have a much closer relationship thanks to this process improvement initiative.
Problem Space
Decisions about what features are worked on are made without XD input. XD take on the requested features without question.
XD does not have a means to scope and size features accurately. Hence, XD cannot know how much time a feature will take and how much capacity they have to complete assigned features.
If unplanned features are assigned to XD after planning has completed, it is difficult to re-assess the work, since the capacity is unknown. Accepting unplanned features can lead to incomplete work and UX Debt.
The Goal
Identify a process to improve the working relationship between XD and PM.
My Role
As the driver of the team of four product designers, my role was to facilitate the sessions and helped the team think about the best approach to follow to solve for the problems.
I guided the team to follow a user-centered design process to understand the current XD and PM working relationship and pain points, brainstorm ideas to resolve those pains, and finally develop and implement the proposed process and tools.
Triple Diamond Process
Discover
Interview Experience Designers (XD)
Interview Product Managers (PM)
Pain Point Summary
Design
Brainstorm
Concept Design
Concept Validation
Develop
Review & Refine Designs
Develop and Adoption
1. Discover
Interview XD and PM
Like any design problem, we needed to understand the root issues by reaching out to the people involved. We identified which XD and PM employees we should interview, and created a research plan outlining what questions we wanted to ask them. We agreed to have participants walk us through their typical process when interacting with the other team, noting any pain points along the journey.
Data Collected
We collected all the data for each of the participants into a single spreadsheet for easy trending.
Pain Point Summary
We then performed a card sorting exercise where we wrote on individual sticky notes all of the pain points from the data collected, and grouped them into categories. We prioritized the categories of pain points and focused our efforts on solving for the highest priority pains, i.e. scope, size and capacity of Tasks. We also knew that the lower priority pains would either be resolved as a result of fixing the higher pains, or using existing solutions, that we all agreed could be taken, i.e. integrate XD Tasks into the same TFS application as PM and Dev, which track features and tasks.
2. Design
Brainstorm
From the High Priority Pain Points, we created Design Goals
Determine scope of each Task by identifying all its activities
Accurately measure the size of each activity of a feature, and hence the total size of a Task
Measure a product designer's capacity
Played a Brainstorming game called Crazy 8’s
We focused our brainstorming exercise (Crazy 8’s) on how to determine scope, size and capacity. Crazy 8’s is a really fun exercise to get everyone to put their 8 ideas from their head onto a single sheet of paper. Everyone shared their ideas and together agreed on which idea, or combination of ideas, to move forward with.
Concept Design
Tools
While there were some cool ideas that visually charted the sizing of activities and tasks, we decided the tool needed to be kept light-weight and easy to build. A simple table table listing all possible activities for each task and a column for noting the size, in hours, was the most effective. Another table summarizing the approximate size of each task was also created for quick reference when PM assign XD new features. We also created cards for each task, in the form of a cheat sheet.
Process
We knew that if we could incorporate the XD Tasks into TFS (the application that houses the PM and Dev features and tasks), then we would be able to speak their same language and follow their same process, and thereby collaborate better with them.
We set up a meeting with the Scrum Master to walk us through TFS and their process. We understood how to create XD Tasks in TFS, and I even learnt how to create a dashboard showing all tasks and total size for each of our product designers.
Approximate Task Sizing Chart
Task Sizing Cards
TFS Task Details
TFS Dashboard
Concept Validation
Tools
The Sizing Chart and Cards were reviewed with managers and other members of the XD team. Everyone loved the idea. It was just a matter of identifying all the necessary tasks, and the activities for each task.
Process
We validated the XD Tasks in TFS with the PM team by showing them an example of a task in TFS. As expected, they were excited to see us aligning with their tools and process.
3. Develop
Review and Refine Design
Tools
We continued iterating on the Sizing Chart and Cards until everyone was satisfied with the final result.
We then calculated the size of each of our current tasks.
Process
Knowing the size of each task, we added them all into TFS for each designer. We quickly noticed just how much each product designer was expected to deliver.
Working with our managers, we agreed on a maximum capacity per product designer of 200 hours per 10 week period. This was calculated based on 4 hours per day* x 5 days per week x 10 weeks.
* 4 hours per day was recommended to allow the remaining 4 hours for meetings, and other non-product specific work.
Develop and Adopt
Results
New sizing methodology and tools, like Task Sizing Chart & Cards, to help designers determine level of effort.
All XD work will be tracked as TFS Tasks, which will capture the size of each task, used to help measure and track product designer’s capacity.
Designers have a set capacity of 200 hours for a 10 week period.
We can confidently accept (or decline) new work with clear understanding of scope and capacity.
Since its inception at the beginning of 2020, it has streamlined the XD-PM working relationship by causing less friction and frustration when assigning and accepting new work, since XD is now considered & included during new business cases and projects.
One year later, we have extended the functionality of TFS to capture other XD Tasks that are internal to XD and not related to product/feature work. This helps each product designer more accurately know their full capacity (8 hours per day, not just 4) across all tasks they are working on.