More time for higher-impact work and better collaboration.
As we were approaching the go-to-market strategy deadline for a B2B SaSS product used by financial services for trade reporting, stakeholders wanted the product and the dev teams to be able to iterate and ship faster. Their current way of planning and launching new features and updates was something like this:
Being a B2B startup, our main clients were big financial institutions which required a lot of hand-holding on setting them up, onboarding, and helping them use the product. So we weren’t worried too much about the UX at this point.
My role was to find a quick way to restructure the design process of the current UI for the internal product team which consisted of 15+ developers, a PM, and me (the designer).
So, the question was:
How do we restructure the current design process to fit the current agile development methodology in a team of 15+ developers and allow better collaboration between biz and product?
What happened:
After a few rounds of interviewing stakeholders from the dev and business team, we concluded the following:
We have a lot of design debt, the dev team is moving faster than the design. One designer and 15 developers. What a surprise!
Always a pain in the but for biz stakeholders to find certain screens in Figma and visualize/reproduce new updates.
Hard to know if something was already developed or if it’s in sync with the latest dev implementation.
UI Design is seen as an afterthought. Designing first seemed to slow them down, rather than speed things up.
+ more
So, we need to align everyone to a clear design process. P.S. – I’m not using real screenshots from the platform because of NDAs.
Structure the team in Figma:
Structure the files
Easily drag and drop files based on what stage are you in
Conclusion:
It restructured the design process to fit the current agile development methodology.
Easier to find and manage work and facilitates easier collaboration between stakeholders and the dev team.
Each design work is associated with its respective JIRA ticket so it’s much easier to track the progress.
Files organized in phases (WIP > Review > Ready for Dev > Shipped)
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