Here’s Why Your External Design Team Isn’t Meeting Their Goals

Missed deadlines are the plague of product development teams and, let’s be honest, most other teams and people. This problem is older than product management and older than the word "deadline" itself.

What’s Wrong with Deadlines?

We have always despised the term "deadline." Not only because deadlines bring constant pressure into our lives. It’s the unnecessary drama they inject into the workflow. After all, no one will die if an article isn’t published by the end of the month. And design work doesn’t carry life-or-death importance either.

We never know how many iterations we’ll need to achieve the best result. When deadlines loom, there’s a high chance that testing gets skipped and the final version ends up being not the best, but the one closest to the deadline.

This doesn’t mean designers don’t know how long their work will take. For small tasks like "create screens for the registration flow," time estimation is essential. But if we’re realistic and accept that the first version of our design won’t be the best, we need to give ourselves more time and explain to clients that deadlines can hurt design quality.

That’s why we work on a prepayment model: we don’t risk stating an exact deadline only to compromise quality due to lack of time for iterations. We work with clients who understand that good design is a lengthy process, so our pricing model resembles a subscription: you can always cancel if you feel it’s not delivering value. And we’re happy to see that people keep subscribing as long as needed to achieve the best version of the design.

What’s Wrong with Traditional Solutions?

Have you ever waited hours to see a doctor for some strange ailment, only to be given ibuprofen? Ibuprofen relieves symptoms but doesn’t treat the root cause.

In our case, the symptom is missed deadlines. What’s typical of ibuprofen and acetaminophen for product managers? Hiring new team members, changing the project team’s organizational structure, extending deadlines, reducing scope, and so on.

What is the real cause? I don’t want to be that TV doctor who diagnoses from a distance, but let me share one common reason: the approach to interacting with external teams. How can we optimize it to cure deadline failures?

Changing the Management Approach

Sometimes you go to the doctor expecting strong pills that will cure you, but instead you’re told to exercise for 30 minutes daily and eat right. It’s good, comprehensive treatment, but it can also be disappointing.

Changing the management approach is a similar kind of treatment. It requires ongoing effort, but it yields more results in the long run. Whatever your project team structure, there is a product owner who must assume a certain level of leadership.

We suggest focusing on useful habits like proper communication. This means sharing information with the team, considering everyone’s opinion when making decisions, evaluating the development team’s initiatives, and giving and receiving good feedback. All of this will foster a culture of dialogue that makes your team more functional.

Explain the Importance of Deadlines

The development team is like a kindergarten, and everyone knows that being late is bad. But being an adult also means you’ve likely missed a few deadlines in your life and know that nobody dies from it. So people might do it again.

To solve this problem, the team lead needs to provide enough information so the team understands what depends on their work.

Designers might not rush to finish screens if they know developers won’t start implementation for another month. Conversely, when you explain that a testing round is scheduled for next month, the need to meet the deadline becomes obvious.

When an external development team doesn’t know about your internal processes, they might not realize that their work is part of a larger project. You need to make it clear that the project delivery date depends not only on them: people tend to be more responsible when multiple parties are involved.

Share the Product Strategy and Goals

Often our clients come to us for a redesign with tight timeframes. We know that a proper redesign takes much longer. Moreover, we know that redesign is a means, not an end, so we focus on the real goal. Improve usability? Or ease the onboarding process? Based on that, we can look for solutions that get us closer to the goal without having to redo the entire product.

Maintain an Open Dialogue

This is another way to make the deadline less "deadly." Sometimes people face a choice: either admit they need more time to complete a task, or do it at all costs, sacrificing quality and working conditions.

In products with high trust between management and team members, people feel less pressure and aren’t afraid to say they can’t meet a deadline, and ideally, they participate in planning to make timeframes more realistic from the start.

Simply put, it’s harder to miss deadlines when you set them yourself.

Understand Your Team’s Needs

First and foremost, it’s helpful to view an external team as part of your own team. Working with an agency that handles the entire project in one go is different from having an external team you can interact with regularly.

At the start of collaboration, external designers will need to ask about many things. Naturally, you may not want to share all your documents with an outside design team, but the more you can provide, the less they’ll ask later. Be sure to include this in the standard onboarding process for an external team.

Next Steps?

Solving the deadline problem is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to prepare and be ready to change communication habits, project team workflows, or anything else.