Upon joining the Watson Virtual Agent team, I identified a need for closer collaboration between designers in order to prevent miscommunication and lack of continuity in design work.I organized, implemented, and led various efforts to maintain consistent collaboration within the design team, as well as resources to help our development and product/offering management teams more easily engage with the work designers were doing.
In order to create a more collaborative environment for the design team, I organized, implemented, and led Design Collaboration Sessions. These occurred 2-3 times a week and were used to give status on design work, provide time for critique, and to allow time for the design team to work together on efforts by white-boarding or live editing of designs.
We also extended the invite for these sessions to our development team and the offering manager who was assigned to work with the design team in order to keep all areas of the product team informed and up-to-date on with the design team was working on.
The implementation of these sessions resulted in more efficient collaboration and created a feedback loop that had not previously existed on the team. It has since been implemented in other design teams throughout the organization.
A couple months into joining the Watson Virtual Agent design team, we began the process of converting to an agile workflow, including tools to enable this workflow (i.e. Github) and the typical agile ceremonies. The design team took a leading role in helping to define what parts of the agile workflow we would use and how we would adapt it to fit our greater team.
Over time, as we accumulated more and more design files we realized that we were having issues with providing our development team with the most up-to-date files, causing discrepancies in the implementation of designs. In order to remedy this, I implemented a file structure across the team, maintained master files, and built and maintained a website where we kept links and descriptions for all of our current design files. Developers and offering managers could visit this website and easily download the most recent designs and presentations.
In order to keep the rest of the product team informed of the design decisions being made, we organized what we called Design Interlocks. These occurred at the start of each sprint, and showed the work completed during the previous sprint. We gathered feedback from the rest of the team, which allowed us to make changes to our sprint plan and priorities when necessary and to have the entire team commit to building the designs in a single call.
In an effort to create a more open and transparent culture within the design organization, I implemented a concept called the Feedback Jars. Originally only within our Austin site team, we expanded the concept to the entire org after seeing its success. This was done in the format of an anonymous survey sent out before every All-hands meeting with 3 categories: Happy things, Sad/frustrating things, and Questions or general comments. It helped members of the team raise issues that they may have been uncomfortable bringing up had there not been an anonymous way to do so. During each All-hands meeting, our design director would read aloud and answer the entries.
