How To: Design Team Strategy

Tales of Design & User Experience (ToDUX) #8

Mar 20, 2023

Dear readers and friends,

I hope this newsletter finds you well. I’m excited to share two new articles I’ve published since the last edition and hope you’ll find them interesting and useful.

Design Team Strategy

I’ve started writing a series on how to develop a comprehensive strategy for a digital design team, based on the actual strategy we developed at BestSecret Group, and including a lot of hands-on advice. The first two parts have already appeared in The UX Collective and, as of now, it seems the series will comprise a total of five parts, with the aim of publishing one per month.

The first article focuses on an introduction to the “Strategy House Model”—a visual representation of a team’s strategy, with the mission as the roof, the pillars as the most important topics, and the values as the foundation—and goes into detail on how we developed our team mission.

☞ The strategy house: how to define a design team’s mission

A schematic depiction of the “Strategy House Model.” The team values are the foundation. Above those, we have four pillars representing overarching teams. Within each pillar, there are the theme-specific objectives (which can be formulated as OGSMs). The pillars hold the roof of the house, which contains the team’s mission.

The second article explores how to define the most critical topics of a design team’s strategy by brainstorming current and future objectives, clustering them into overarching themes, prioritizing them, and formulating corresponding OGSMs—thus forming the Strategy House’s pillars.

☞ Pillars, objectives, and OGSMs: how to define a design team’s most important topics

Of course, I’ll announce the next parts of the series here, as they appear. So, stay tuned!

Latest Gems

And just in case you’ve already found and read the above articles (I admit this edition of my newsletter is a little delayed), here are some more 💎’s I stumbled upon lately:

☞ Why every designer should be a systems thinker by Helge Tennø in The UX Collective on Medium

☞ 8 free UX Research courses by Kritika Oberoi on LinkedIn

☞ How do you run better meetings? by Vitaly Friedman on LinkedIn

Enjoy reading and until next time. As always, I welcome your feedback and comments on my articles and this newsletter. Simply reply to this email to share your thoughts. 😊

Cheers,
Max

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