Dear (none)Designer,

Welcome back to the twenty-ninth Design at Scale™ Newsletter – focusing on innovation and how design drives change in a large organisation or an agency.

Last month, we looked at high-performing teams in agencies and service-driven organisations that thrive in high adaptability and performance, which allows them to build a multi-proposition for the different clients.

Today, we'll reflect on a completely different topic: high-performing teams in large organisations and how they can outperform their odds.

We often assume that the in-house product teams are somehow different from the agencies in their life cycle. Ultimately, they produce the same designs;

Inevitably, their focus is completely different.

When the agencies are trying to perfect the fast-paced delivery where multi-focus becomes a necessity, in-house design teams tend to differ and go quite deep into a problem definition research analysis, experience design mapping, and an extensive design process that often means that one product's design is 10 to 15 times before it reaches the hands of customers.

Equally high-performing teams in a large organisation depend on transparency as the flow of interaction is slightly different to the agency. To generate more designs in a short period of time for brother clientele, relieving solidly removing all obstacles from the designer so that design is strictly a solitary experience.

Resource A - move the button B - in screen C

In-house teams have the opposite challenges; the main disadvantage is the integration. Instead of looking at the task, where it came from, and who owns it, they often play a Sherlock Holmes role and put all the puzzles together by themselves. While in constant change, they adjust themselves and deliver to the environment. Almost exclusively, they look at "how might we broadcast" the change so that all relevant parties have clarity on what is coming and can we all make informed decisions.

To explain this plainly, design agencies have a challenge with the inbound workload, whereas the in-house team faces the outbound/broadcast challenges that need to be integrated across the organisation.

The codependency of a complex proposition is one of the key differentiators that defines the success or failure of a product.

That is why high-performing teams in large organisations are not the ones that are the fastest, but the ones that find the right balance between creating and broadcasting the change. The organisation eventually adjusts and reduces tension, allowing more space for creativity, which is usually a sign of a mature agile organisation.

Same as the previous agency example, mobilisation operation and acceleration come with an emphasis on understanding where and with whom the product or service will be integrated. Quite rightly, the emphasis is given to an integration, so from day one, the team has to understand who they gonna integrate with, and more importantly, how often they need to communicate the change. Some deliverables are communicated daily, some weekly, some monthly and so on. It is vital to set the delivery mechanism right from the beginning and inform in small increments so that all subordinate or external teams share the same knowledge from the main (or peripheral teams) team. The information is therefore equally distributed and allows other parties to make data-informed decisions while building other products and services that are integrated with the corporate position.

It is not a secret that the integration is sometimes 60 to 70% of all the work, just because the appropriate alignment is not defined in the proposition shaping stage, and therefore highly impacts delivery and extends the budget across all subordinate teams.

To reduce the time to a minimum and empower the team in the mobilisation phase, we create one location where we collect all the PiD's – project notification documents that are intertwined and therefore allow all parties to understand the ecosystem they are building.

Equally, the research, content and experience sections are shared with all parties on a weekly basis. Not to overwhelm but simply to broadcast. The RAG report over the email will be made at the beginning – though if you are really in the environment of a constant change, we utilised the JIRA where we have all PUBLIC updates that drive GLOBAL features.

Weekly increments dictate a quick adjustment, far more importantly, shared knowledge in the form of tokenised or standardised modules that can be reused across the entire proposition. This allows all parties to adopt constant change and therefore build a product or service at scale, reducing the integration timing by 30-50% and creating the so-called organisation's operational excellence.

Optimise phase allows everyone to work in daily increments, delivering the weekly sprints and doing monthly releases, and without higher effort, become a high-performing team that is well recognised by nature (well, the design), not the business. By having access to the knowledge, all teams in the organisation are now able to make informed decisions. Natural progression usually within the 3 to 5 months, the optimise phase will transition to accelerate and scale.

At this point, they are bringing more products or services under their wings, which might seem like an obvious move, but delivering at scale is not necessary with more but with less by creating high-quality work and therefore greater value.

The doctor who clears the cancer is remembered for a lifetime. The doctor who concentrates on resolving a shortcoming by prescribing medications is forgotten in a step out of his surgery.

For more information, please visit Designa at Scale™ – GRID Magazine, where you can find additional relevant articles that explore high-performing teams, self-organising teams of 001, teams of 010, and teams of 100 that deliver the value proposition within a product-led environment.