How to Create an Ideal Design Team: A Strategy for Product Owners
We think that for most product owners, hiring a new employee is a fairly stressful and complex task, so building an entire design team (an effective team!) may seem like an impossible mission.
Solving the question "how to assemble a team of designers?" is not a one-day task. You need not only to find candidates and evaluate their skills but also to create an entire company culture and a favorable environment that will attract the best people for your project and business as a whole.
First, before talking about the approach that will help you create a "killer" design team, let's understand what it consists of.
Roles in a Project Team
We can define a design team as a designer or a group of designers with different responsibilities, whose main task is to complete a design project (develop a website/web or mobile application) using specific design tools and methods.
In principle, any design project requires a person capable of handling UI design (creating aesthetically pleasing screens), UX design (creating intuitive and logical user flows, wireframes, prototypes), and UX research (conducting user testing to validate ideas, creating buyer personas, tracking customer feedback, etc.). And these don't necessarily have to be three different people.
Here is a list of specialists who handle the above responsibilities and could become part of your team:
- UX Designer. Their role is to ensure a consistent and intuitive user experience across all products.
- Product Designer. Product designers' responsibilities are largely similar to UX design, but in addition to user experience, product designers also pay close attention to the company's business goals.
- Visual (UI) Designer. They develop visual concepts based on the creative brief and turn them into layouts (select and arrange images, colors, typography, etc.) for design projects.
- UX Researcher. This specialist identifies user needs, sets goals, creates a plan to achieve them, conducts research (user interviews, usability testing, A/B testing), and analyzes the results.
- Copywriter/UX Copywriter. The copywriter's task here is to use their writing skills to help the user easily achieve their goal, find a solution to a problem, and quickly navigate the application.
- UX Lead. The UX lead mentors other designers, communicates with the entire team, presents their thoughts and ideas to company executives, and ensures the project moves in the right direction.
Despite the many job titles in the design industry, it's very common for one person to combine several responsibilities in a design team, and that's when you start questioning how many employees you need to hire.
How Big Should My Team Be?
How to choose the structure of a project group?
The structure of a UX design team varies depending on the company and the type of project. There are large corporations with dozens of designers, each belonging to their own product development team. There are also design agencies where 10 people handle their responsibilities perfectly. Many startups have just one designer, but that designer is an expert in their field.
In most cases, the number of designers only affects the project duration. The quality of the final result depends on the designer's qualifications, not their quantity.
Therefore, if you have a large volume of work or need to complete a project in a tight timeframe, it's better to hire more employees.
Do I necessarily need a project manager?
The need for a project manager mainly depends on the project's scale. Of course, if 10 designers are working on a project, you need someone to lead them. If you have only one specialist, they can easily handle all tasks without additional manager assistance.
Different companies choose different approaches. For example, at Wix, a designer has 2 managers. The first is a guild manager who cares about the designer's personal development (helps them grow professionally and understand which direction to go). The second is a project manager who monitors how the designer works on a specific project and assigns tasks.
Strategy for Building a Design Team
Creating a professional design team is a complex process that requires attracting good specialists, properly distributing their responsibilities, choosing the right tools and methods, and establishing a consistent product design process.
Here are some tips to help you move in the right direction when building a design team:
Define Your Needs and What You Expect from Each Team Member
To properly form a development team, you need to understand what tasks and outcomes you expect from them.
Think about the product or service you are developing and the skills required to successfully create it. Make a list of needs and prioritize them. As a result, it will become clear what help is needed for specific tasks.
The result might look like this:
Must-Have
- creating user flows, wireframes, and prototypes
- creating UI kits
- conducting user interviews
- conducting user testing
Nice to Have
- creating a content strategy
As you can see, we are not specifying job titles. Try to focus on the skills and personal qualities your team needs to successfully accomplish the tasks.
Once you assign all responsibilities to employees, they will need a clear step-by-step plan on how (and with what tools) to develop the product/service.
Design an Effective Product Design Process
An established and well-organized design process helps designers move faster toward the final design. It eliminates misunderstandings and miscommunication both within the team and when communicating with you (the product owner). This happens because, with a defined design process, designers know what to do, when to do it, and what you expect to see as a result.
In our organization, the product design process looks roughly like this:
Foster Professional Growth
Plan professional growth paths for each team member, otherwise, they may feel they've reached their growth limit in the company and decide to move on.
The best way to learn something new is to observe the best in the field, work side by side with them, and receive feedback. A mentor helps an employee create a clear development plan and identify tasks to practice and improve skills. The mentor can be a mid-level designer, art director, or another employee with more practical experience in a given area.
A good manager's task is to think about beneficial growth for both the business and the individual.
Leave Room for Diversity and Autonomy
Diverse designers are a strength of any organization. Every designer you hire is first and foremost a person with their own strengths, weaknesses, and desires. They are creators and must have the ability to create cool things (and cool projects).
Therefore, everyone has their preferences. Some employees prefer "creative" tasks, while others like to delve into the technical aspects of the product. To avoid burnout, you need to give designers autonomy, allow them to make their own decisions, or work on different projects. At the same time, you should make it clear that they can always ask for help from other team members.
Seek Feedback Often
Over time, your company and your team will grow and evolve. As you grow, you'll need to make changes to the methods you use and even to the established work culture. To track these changes and adjust in time, communicate with your employees and ask for their opinions.
Strategy for Those Who Don't Like to Wait
Everything we've discussed above works great, but such a strategy is suitable for those who are willing to patiently and steadily follow a long-term plan. But what if you are short on time or it's not cost-effective to hire an in-house team and train them?
In that situation, consider an alternative like hiring a design agency that has strictly vetted employees, no overhead costs, and no problems with turnover.
What Is the Best Design Team?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how to form a design team and who should be on it. For example, Genius initially had no designer at all. At Pocket, the designer was the second most important employee, and designers played a significant role in product development from the start. Some hire very experienced designers with ten years of experience working at world-renowned companies. Others prefer to hire designers with diverse work experience. The design team at Airbnb includes a former librarian, mechanic, therapist, and dancer.
Managing designers is not difficult—the key is to find great people and give them the freedom to create. Good professionals love their work and genuinely enjoy completing tasks, making the world a better place.
So, create good working conditions for your team members, provide them with support, listen to their opinions, and together you will create beautiful, effective, and valuable products.