Product Design at Gracenote
In my seven years as a Design manager at Gracenote, I have led the design team to evolve in several positive ways. We had gotten better at collaboration—doing workshops and Design Sprints alongside our product stakeholders allowing us to brainstorm in a structured, more productive way. We had developed great relationships with our engineers ensuring that our designs were never merely “handed off,” but that we continued to iterate against working software. We had established a human-centered design process—one rooted in design thinking. We’d built trust with our stakeholders resulting in our being invited into more and more conversations.
However, in early 2022, I was keen to prove the value of design to senior leaders at the organization. By adopting some of the practices of the Product Designer, I hoped to start talking about the things they care most about: measurable outcomes and impact to the bottom line. This meant understanding the potential business opportunities in solving a problem as well as setting and tracking metrics for our design solutions.
I have long been a fan of Solving Product Design Exercises by Artiom Dashinski. It provides a lightweight and easily repeatable formula to solve any design problem put in front of you. Typically the framework is used to work through the “whiteboard challenge”—a common element of any product design interview. But I found the framework relevant to our daily work as designers. And beyond the impact that it might have on proving the value of the design team to senior leadership, I had hoped it would also have some secondary effects. Would our product stakeholders begin to mirror some of these new behaviors and naturally begin to seek answers to the questions we had begun to pose?
The assignment
So as we were setting our annual goals in the beginning of 2022, I asked the design team to read Artiom’s book and select a feature from each of their product’s roadmap to apply the framework.
The framework ask the designer to answer the following questions:
Why is this feature important? (i.e., business opportunities and impact)
Who is this feature for? (user needs)
When and where will it be used? (i.e., understanding the context of use)
What solution ideas exist and which ones are the most promising?
How will I measure success? (i.e., success metrics and KPI’s)
I asked them to use the framework outlined in the book to come up with their design solution. Importantly, I asked them to identify a metric they thought they could influence with their design solution. After their design had been built, they would be able to measure their solution and gauge success. I asked them to create a 30-minute presentation outlining their design solution and the measurable impact. We also set aside time throughout the year to work through three sample exercises as a team. And in October 2022, we gathered as a team to share our presentations with each other.
Outcome
This was a great exercise for my team! After turning the framework into a habit, we have established a lightweight product design process that we can leverage when designing any feature, big or small. It has also become a lot easier for us to present our work to different audiences because we can quickly communicate the rationale behind solution in real world context and user needs. Finally, by choosing a metric to track, we are able to prove our value to senior leadership, providing success metrics they care about.