You Need a Plan: Design Structure and Iteration
All design projects that involve more than one person need structure to help all the participants play well together. Structure is the beat providing a foundation for your creative melody. Children, songs and project squads like structure.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. If you want to go anywhere interesting, make plan with deliverables and deadlines, and stick to it.
Iteration is the heartbeat of design. Iteration is like a simple melody - it provides a framework for your design exploration. By using a simple, lightweight routine you can increase your confidence (and speed) by consistently examining and testing your assumptions. When you measure the impact of your designs with simple tools that keep you honest, you can plan and launch new projects with far less waste confusion, saving tons of time and money. So if you want to thrive rather than just survive, you need a lean, iterative design process that your entire team loves and defends.
Here are some key principles you'll need to keep in mind while developing a successful design process:
Know your limitations
The key to any plan is to consider the reality of your project. And that means your limitations in three areas:
- Time
- Cost
- Scope
The golden rule of design project management is to know and understand these three things: how much time, money and scope (features) the team has. The best part of this "iron triangle" is that your answer to almost any project question lies within the structure of this If there isn't enough time, money for your vision, then your scope has to change. If you can't change the scope of your plans, then you have to have more money or more time. If you only have a specific amount of money, then you have to change your scope or you have to change your timeline. For every change in one area, the others must adjust to reflect the reality of the resources available. There are no exceptions to this in reality. This is physics. For realzies. That's why it's called the "iron triangle".
Keep it flexible and focused
Confronted with the limitations of the damn inflexible nature of reality, many creative perpetrators assume that the only way to build is to take a "waterfall" approach to design crime and plan their heist all at once, down to the last detail. (Then burn the plans while god laughs, amiright?) A waterfall approach plans every single detail from start to finish, with a timeline that describes the essential handoffs between partners and when they will happen. The fastest timeline is called the "critical path". However when you are taking advantage of a lightweight design loop focused on learning and building confidence, you can explore creatively and still keep your timeline, quality and scope in check.
The lightest design loop I’ve found is Learn | Build | Measure. It’s similar to a lean product loop, with some adjustments to prioritize building confidence for any type of effort rather than just technology products. I talk about this method more in this post about {?}, but for now just consider how much it would impact you and/or your team if you had the ability to quickly agree on where you are in your process as a team and then just as quickly make decisions in response to new information. (Spoilers: this will save you so much time and heartache. So. Much. Time.)
Build culture to build speed
When your entire team learns the value of a lean design loop and can play their parts in time to the music, it truly is an incredible creative experience. Spend time with your teammates focused on anything but work. Share and build loose connections, lightweight similarities. Play games, talk about common interests, be brave and share your music - understand each other as people. Being human with each other opens up creativity - the only wild card to crashing your timeline and truly transforming the iron triangle.
That's the biggest design process secret: you can actually change the game when you are creative as a team. Understanding your limitations helps you understand where you could have the most impact. I’ve frequently found that by collaborating together with my team we are able to discover solutions that completely transform our timeline and the joy we can build into our experiences.
What I’m saying is -
Repeatable process, shared focus and clear planning as a team can change the design game for you.
Know your limitations.
Be flexible and focused, always keeping your eye on your limitations and goals.
Weave lightweight process into your team culture - almost any process will be an improvement over no process.
