Dear (none)Designer,
Welcome back to the fifteenth Design at Scale™ Newsletter – focusing on innovation and how design drives change in a large organisation or an agency.
"The power of one" framework most certainly requires a special chapter, if not the entire series. In today's newsletter, we'll unwrap the framework and show you how to best implement these four pillars in your design practice.
The power of one consists of four pillars: one language, one location, one team, and one product. We always explain it as a table with four legs, and in the middle of that table is a tennis ball. If, for whatever reason, one of the legs is shorter, it creates an unequal surface, and the ball, due to natural forces, tends to gravitate to the corner—the corner where we are short of something.
Put it simply, it refers to an ecosystem that supports each other to create a one prosperous organisation (the tennis ball in the middle). The value can be seen as a tennis ball growing into a bigger ball, where the legs need to be stronger and so on. You've got the picture.
The majority of the team fails not because of the skill set. They fail because they lack a strong and visible foundation. They do not have a defined way of communicating, storing, and managing design decisions that drive the velocity and increase the quality of decisions. Poor decision-making costs businesses 60% of the time refactoring old changes. Almost always recreating the artefacts that already exist, let alone the one that has zero impact on the delivery.
Not building a consistent and cohesive trail record puts the team at risk of guessing and sense-checking while searching for the latest agreements. It seems pretty obvious that unifying the business, design and development language in one space drives better decision-making and enables the team to focus on experimentation rather than hunting for the next Teams message.
It wouldn't have happened if the team had not decided on one location. Meaning, the place where we document our tasks, dependencies, deliveries, designs, code and release notes. The place where we can connect and communicate the value across the proposition through real facts instead of assumptions and opinionated guesses. The business that cultivates a single location as the knowledge and source of truth simplifies the noise into signals. Why do you need to maintain 16TB of SharePoint, where you cannot even find the latest receipt? You have a very unique space that tells you every day about the project, where we are, what is missing, and whether we are hitting the target.
Are we on the way to launch it?
This brings us to one space. The space that is protected from outside noise and distraction. With a solid focus on the proposition (PiD) and a clear definition of all the problems at hand (HLRs), which serves a single purpose: resolving all the challenges with the product (Jira).
Leading us to one product. The primary focus is on delivering the product within a specific timeframe. The timeframe that can be measured, assigned, allocated, evaluated and fully communicated to other parties for further integration, so whether you're building a minor feature like onboarding or the entire app like Netflix (an example), it's always good to have one product in mind and narrow all the efforts to that very specific outcome.
These four pillars create "the power of one".
Representing the understanding, transparency, trust, and willingness to adapt to the purpose of creating the product. Inevitably, by setting these four pillars, the majority, if not all, teams I have the opportunity to coach have proven that these simple understandings help them enjoy the work while collaborating, testing, creating, and strengthening a driven design proposition at scale.
Feel free to reach out for more details about the power of one or read one of our articles, which are part of the Grid Magazine, as well as Design a Scale Academy.
