Dear (none)Designer,
Welcome back to the twelfth Design at Scale™ Newsletter – focusing on innovation and how design drives change in a large organisation or an agency.
This month, we will look at how design at scale helps democratise education. For centuries, the majority of academia has proceeded through the cycle, finding a subject to teach, finding the person who knows the most about it, persuading him to write about it, forming syllabi for the course, and finding the budget for someone to run the course. With the greater digitalisation of our day-to-day life, Pearson has realised that the demand for high-quality syllabi and their supply is significantly different.
In order to redefine education, you need to be obsessed with learning. Our team was 20+ professionals who had fallen in love with the education, project, and redefinition of what is called the stage and gate. Our team was based between Boston, London, and Pune, enabling us to deliver the first 24-hour team while working synchronously side by side with an engineering team. I have already worked in Dual-track in the past, yet this time was my first under the agency. This experience was utterly different and should be replicated once more for the great benefit of design integration.
Organising ourselves in a unit was a brilliant idea. Offering the design/brand team the flexibility to explore possibilities, allowing the experience and BA teams to collaborate on what is achievable within the given timeframe. This also allowed the engineering team to respond with such precision as was needed for this proposition.
Or delivery cycles were organised in 3 different ways. Brand work has a Wed-to-Wed cycle, whereas experience has a Mon-to-Mon cycle with an engineering team following the same in two-week sprints, Thu-to-Thu. This way, we avoided hundreds of meetings and only saw each other at stand-ups assigned to us. After 5 weeks of initial toothing, we have settled on two medium or one large feature a week to be fully defined, designed and documented for the development.
The ultimate beauty prized by the client was that the refactoring had dropped in week 9 to only 10% this way, what had been said and agreed was delivered.
Let's look at what the normal week cycle looks like:
Monday – Stand up for designers was about reviewing the previous week's build, where the engineering team was reviewing/ and sizing what we have just designed and documented. This way, both teams delivered one message to the business – we know what we are doing. If we have some catalyst events, such as sickness or holidays, we can accommodate them in advance.
Once we had a green light, we proceeded to weekly sprint planning. The BA and CX described the feature or journey in question, along with the attempts made for the successful delivery.
Tuesday and Wednesday were mainly heads down, producing the outcome for Thursday's Dev day, which we call Show and Tell. This programme handshake was brilliant in the way that no one judged the code or design; it was about making it happen. A fantastic moderation of CPO and associated PMs helps the team navigate through the technical challenges.
Thursday was the dev day – everything around the development, data, assets, signs and so on, so that our development team has absolute clarity. Leaving Thursday with an absolute clarity was a massive relief for all the team involved. This was the evaluation point where all parts click into one machine.
– Project tick
– Experience tick
– Brand tick
– Assets tick
– Accessibility tick
– Front-end tick
– Back-end tick
– Integration tick
Friday was always focused on prioritisation and planning next week + a 3-week window, so that we all know what needs to happen and everyone is aware.
This was successfully repeated for 72 weeks when we finally launched the new Pearson platform. The main learnings were – transparency beats any planning, a meeting without an outcome is wasted time for everyone, and code is the new law and soon will be the design too (written in 2010)
That's all for this edition!
I hope these insights were valuable and sparked new ideas for scaling your design propositions. Remember, the journey from concept to widespread impact is a shared one, and your experiences are invaluable. Keep experimenting, keep learning, and stay tuned for our next newsletter, featuring more strategies and success stories from our incredible community.
Happy scaling!
J+
