Beck Harris Design

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Rebuilding a design function

Rebuilding a design function

This case study is an overview of the steps I took to rebuild the design and research function at Carbonite after it was impacted by layoffs. I wasn’t looking to be a design leader at that time, but found myself overnight the most senior designer in the company. My goal was to put systems in place that both raised the quality of experience across our products as well as allow us to more teams with limited resources.

Challenge

  • Substantial layoffs within a 1000-person enterprise
  • Tasked with rebuilding the design function

Approach

  • First priority was to focus on active listening and reforging trust
  • Co-authored charter for new function: principles, goals, service model definitions, communications strategy, and impact case studies
  • Initiated a design system and implemented supporting processes
  • Proposed process to stabilize design prioritization and impact

Outcome

  • Team health: Gradually returned to an engaged, productive, and growing design team
  • Function health: Organic growth of audience for our sprint, quarterly, and annual Impact Reports
  • Function health: Dedicated percentage of product roadmaps reserved for design recommendations
  • Business Impact: Design impact included in investor relations and M+A

Elements of our team charter:

1. Establish design principles

I worked with the team to co-author a vision of what “good” meant to us. I shamelessly leaned into the company obsession with Star Wars. We revisited to these principles regularly to retro.

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2. Establish a communications strategy

I established a regular format and cadence for showing our progress toward those principles with clear, plain language.

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3. Define engagement models

We defined and communicated a few core models of engagement with the new design team. I used the metaphor of man-to-man vs zone coverage to help shift the expectations about how our team was capable of working.

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Example of a full engagement

Our highest priority work was staffed with design, research, and content resources. We supported product and engineering teams all the way through the product release cycle.

Discovery and planning

  • If needed the design team builds out a custom project plan
  • Inventory and track key user tasks included in the project
  • Estimate design, research, and stakeholder milestones
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Low fidelity

  • Defining and socializing foundational mental models for user management, multi-tenancy, white labelling, and other platform-level architecture.
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Mid fidelity

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High fidelity

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Example of a design review

We also offered design support for teams that already had internal design resources. These were informal critiques or office hours where product teams could bring challenges or new ideas.

With ongoing coaching these relationships evolved into a few “deputized” collaborators who made design decisions independently.

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Example of a checkup

We offered a standardized heuristic evaluation of three key tasks for a given product. Each checkup resulted in actionable recommendations for the product team.

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4. Author a skills matrix

As an engineering-led company, Carbonite lacked a common language for our expectations of designers. This had resulted in disjointed hiring in the past, including a notable gap in visual design because the company just didn’t know what words to use to hire for that skillset. I worked with our HR team to build out a skills matrix for each discipline in the design function which we could then use to hire more efficiently and strategically.