Leading the team in the time of the merger
2023-2024.
Responsibilities
Design leadership & management
At the end of 2022, Seven Bridges, Pierian, and UgenTec combined to become Velsera. At the time, I worked as an Associate Director of product design at Seven Bridges, where I was employed for four years. I led a team of three designers and oversaw design work for the Seven Bridges platform (the main Seven Bridges product).
After the merger, I advanced to the position of Director of Product Design, and two more people joined my team.
My responsibilities expanded to include overseeing design work for three additional products. I discuss below how I dealt with the challenges we faced due to the restructuring of the company, increased workload, and my team becoming international (the two new team members were based in India and Belgium).
Redefining roles
Every legacy company had its design roles. After the merger, we ended up having multiple design roles in the team — UX designer, Product designer, and UI designer. Based on how we wanted to design products in Velsera, we decided to merge all design roles into one — Product designer with deep, specific knowledge of certain design disciplines and some knowledge of other design disciplines.
We also introduced the Lead designer role. We assigned designers to a specific product based on their prior experience and interests. Lead designers should work primarily on tasks for their assigned product.
All designers accepted the Product designer role. They better understood their responsibilities and how to collaborate with other designers and the rest of the company.
Design team meetings
The merger meant an increased workload as we supported the entire Velsera organisation and four products.
An important issue was that product managers issued tasks directly to designers they used to work with in the legacy company. We also needed a clear visibility of the tasks designers worked on. To solve this, we started having weekly Design planning meetings during which we analysed and distributed requests from product managers.
Soon, designers expressed that they really appreciated having weekly planning sessions. These sessions gave them a good overview of the work they needed to do and gave them space to work consistently on one set of problems for one week without being interrupted by new requests from the product managers.
To foster collaboration between designers, we scheduled regular Design feedback sessions, where team members would present their work and discuss their challenges with others. All team members could contribute their expertise to all of the products. Besides that, we could make consistent design decisions - one of the main tasks was to work towards a more unified look between all products, which initially had independent designs.
Our decisions about the team structure and organisation at the team level were good. The work ran smoothly: we met deadlines, and the product management accepted the prototypes we created without major complaints.
Product design workflow
Before the merger, every company had its own process of designing and developing features, and we had to make sure the design team followed one unified process similar to individual processes from the past.
By analysing all three processes from all three companies, we realised that the process we followed in the former Seven Bridges was the most streamlined and gave us good results. We decided to use this process as a starting point and create the Velsera design process outlined in the diagram below:
- This process is part of the Quarterly planning process and should ideally happen always a quarter ahead.
- Product design is Accountable.
- Product management and architecture are Consulted.
I will briefly explain each of these phases:
Design inputs
- Perform UX research to understand problems better and gather more information about users’ current experiences and pain points.
Design and prototyping
- Generate ideas that will potentially resolve user problems and needs
- Translating best ideas into several prototypes
Design verification
- Confirming that the design solution/prototype meets design inputs
- This step may identify usability problems and UX issues in the design solution.
- Could be organised in various formats:
- Usability testing session where participants try to do a specific task in the prototype and give feedback on usability and design
- Workshop, during which a designer shares a prototype and asks participants to give feedback on specific interactions demonstrated in the prototype
- Form/survey with questions related to the design for collecting feedback asynchronously
Design validation
- Design validation confirms whether the design solution meets the functional requirements outlined in a feature or an epic. This means the product manager has accepted the design solution, and the architecture is aligned.
- After this phase, the design is completed.
- The design review process might start right after the completion of the design solution.
Design review process
At the request of the CPO, we defined a Design review process to align stakeholders on the solutions that are designed but not yet developed.
The design review process should start with a formal meeting during which Product managers and designers present selected solutions that are part of strategic initiatives. Product managers will present business value and user requirements, and Product designers will present the design solution and prototype. The Product director should own this process and make sure all relevant stakeholders are invited to the meeting. Product managers and designers should collect all feedback in a notebook in Aha! and link to relevant epics/features.
Design tools
Every legacy company used Figma for prototyping, and after becoming Velsera, the company was paying for three separate Figma licenses. As we had to work for all Velsera products, we had to add every designer to every Figma license, which increased the cost and complexity of organising design work. We took the initiative and reached out to Figma to transition all three licenses into a single Figma organisation that allows us to work more efficiently.
Unified design system
One of our primary goals was to create unified Velsera design system to achieve consistency across all Velsera products, as every legacy company had independent design system. We approached this in two phases:
- a short-term phase to apply Velsera branding
- a second long-term phase to create a unified design system.
During the first phase, designers focused on applying Velsera branding by creating a colour palette, typography, navigation background colour, and primary button background colour.
After completing the first phase, we started working on the new Versatile design system. First, we analysed the design systems of every company and took the most developed one as a starting point. We analysed all the components used in every product and decided on the final design we wanted to implement across all products.
Approaching this in two phases turned out right. We implemented branding in a short timeframe and focused on finalising the design system without time pressure.