Dear (none)Designer,

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

In the series of hyper-performing teams published at Design at Scale™ .CO, we have debated the impact that an individual team or department can make on the proposition or on the organisation itself.

Today, we will look at how we can increase the impact of your team within the organisation. Before we dive into the example, let's set some foundations, starting with these generic assumptions: you are in a business of a hundred plus people, 50 of them are designers.

Guess what this is defined as: a led design organisation. In fact, being in the organisation means that your teams often move from one client to another or from one product to another for the same client, to keep up with the rate-card or briefs that come in. This way, you would be forced to adjust to at least 2 to 3 projects a week or month.

Understanding that all projects have stages of proposition shaping, design, refinement, development, and integration. We often see designers needing to switch their mindset four or five times a day to sustain the knowledge related to the project. Often, poorly documented project identification documents are not even in place in some companies; the majority of the knowledge is redistributed across individual brains, desks, desktops, or posted notes on the wall. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to read the Post-it notes in a different room, let alone in a different country.

To increase the productivity of such a team, we first need to agree on a "one" single location that reflects the truth and all agreements between the definition and delivery. Regardless of who makes these decisions and how often, and whether they are made on a board basis, they are all recorded in one place. This simple fact increases productivity by 12%. All teams – business, design and development will not look at different sources of truth and make decisions based on inaccurate data. Secondly, by inviting the development team into the design stage, we allow our engineering colleagues to make performance architectural decisions. Equally, we can prepare the files so that they can consume them faster. This simple act will increase productivity by 9 to 16%.

The last part, at least, is the length of the sprint for the delivery of an increment. It has been well documented that short sprints allow him to focus on smaller tasks while being able to flex and prepare the inevitable foundation for the work that's coming the following week. The shorter sprint also means that every Monday, the product owner can pivot the direction of the project and choose a different feature for delivery.

This way, the team has a clear focus and a transparent understanding of the environment, but more importantly, a single-minded delivery approach.
Combining all three above, the team that has been part of our program delivered work with a 37-42% increase in productivity without actually utilising artificial intelligence automation.

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.