Planning the S’s
OVERVIEW
Strategy keeps the team focused on what matters most as priorities shift. Structure provides a shared roadmap that guides how work is organized and executed. Systems create the repeatable processes that enable collaboration, consistency, and scale.
Strategy
Stay aligned with shifting business priorities and market conditions. Strategy gives direction. It helps you decide what matters now, what matters later, and what does not matter at all.
SKILLS
Alignment, Managing change, Standardization Harmonize, Planning for growth, Prioritization
Structure
Build a clear structure and roadmap that shows where you are going and why. Structure creates shared understanding. It helps teams see the work ahead, sequence decisions, and move in the same direction.
Systems
Create systems that support collaboration, diverse disciplines, and organizational scale. Systems make work repeatable, predictable, and easier for people to succeed in.
Strategy
Strategic Frameworks
Organizational Structure
A strong structure empowers people to lead, collaborate, and deliver meaningful outcomes. Structure should clarify how the design team operates while ensuring it is fully integrated with the rest of the organization.
Align Design Goals With Business Objectives
Design must show measurable value. Ensure all design initiatives connect directly to business priorities—whether that means improving customer experience, reducing friction, increasing adoption, or enabling other teams to deliver key outcomes.
Inputs are the signals, requirements, and context that shape the work.
Empower Through Structure
Design leaders need room to make decisions, set direction, and influence outcomes. Build a structure that supports autonomy while also enabling tight partnerships with product, engineering, marketing, and other critical teams.
Collaboration Framework
Build clear processes that enable effective collaboration across departments. Strong collaboration ensures design is fully integrated into product development, marketing, engineering, and other key areas of the organization.
Define how teams work together, how decisions move across functions, and where shared accountability lives. When collaboration is structured and transparent, teams move faster, reduce rework, and create better outcomes for customers and the business.
RACI: Roles and Responsibility Map
A clear accountability model for collaboration across teams.
R = Responsible (does the work
A = Accountable (final decision owner)
C = Consulted (provides input)
I = Informed (kept updated)
Collaboration Model: Inputs, Outputs, Workflows, Cadences
A. Inputs
B. Workflows
A simple, repeatable workflow from early discovery to delivery.
Always start with strategy. Revisit your design team’s strategy regularly to make sure it stays aligned with changing business goals and market conditions. Strategy gives you direction and ensures your decisions support the organization’s priorities.
Diagrams are powerful tools for making complex information clear. They can define roles and reporting lines, show cross‑department collaboration, or illustrate work buckets tied to goals or organizational structure. Whether it’s a rough whiteboard sketch or a polished, detailed graphic, diagrams help people understand how work connects and how teams operate. Strong diagramming is a core skill in my toolkit because it simplifies complexity and builds shared understanding.
Define Clear Roles and Reporting Lines
Make the design team's place in the organization explicit. Clearly outline roles, responsibilities, and reporting lines so people understand who does what, how decisions are made, and how work flows across teams. Clarity reduces friction and speeds up execution.
C. Outputs
Clear, shared deliverables that support alignment and progress.
Structure
How to Create Structure on a Team
Over more than ten years in UX and five in leadership, I’ve seen structures that help teams thrive — and others that slow them down. Every team has different needs, but this is the general template I return to. It strikes a balance between structure and autonomy so creative people can do their best work.
Stand‑Ups
I’ve run stand‑ups both synchronously and asynchronously. My preferred model is a 2–3 times per week synchronous design stand‑up.
I do not recommend designers attending daily engineering stand‑ups; it’s rarely a good use of their time. Once a week is enough, unless a project requires active problem‑solving with engineering.
Design stand‑ups serve three purposes:
They help designers prioritize and stay focused.
They give me a quick way to spot misalignment and redirect early
They show the team who is blocked and where collaboration is needed.
Design Critiques
A weekly critique at a consistent time works well. I schedule it immediately after a stand‑up to create a natural transition into deeper work.
This gives designers regular space to review work early, gather feedback, and course‑correct before anything gets too far along.
Open Workshops
I schedule one open workshop per week, also immediately after a stand‑up.
This time serves multiple purposes:
Team brainstorming
Helping someone unblock a problem
Cross‑pollination of ideas
Running structured workshops when needed
The consistency builds trust — designers and researchers know they will always have a space to think together as a team.
Focus Time
I encourage designers and researchers to block dedicated focus time on their calendars and bundle their meetings.
This helps them:
Protect deep work
Strategize without interruption
Reach flow state
Produce higher‑quality outcomes
It also supports retention. When people feel they have space to do meaningful work instead of being pulled in every direction, they stay longer.
Scale the Work
A strong, component‑based design system is essential for scaling. It improves brand consistency, reduces development time, and allows teams to build and ship faster. As large sections of a product or website mature and shift into a management and maintenance phase, the focus moves toward identifying common patterns and documenting ecosystems of templates, page types, and reusable structures.
This approach empowers teams to design ahead with predefined solutions. It reduces manual work, increases predictability, and accelerates delivery across functions.
For global products, internationalization must always be a core consideration. Teams need a clear understanding of i18n, localization, translation workflows, and how global traffic affects A/B testing, personalization, and customization. These factors directly influence performance, experimentation outcomes, and the overall customer experience.
Roadmap Structures
Create contextual roadmaps that give teams a shared understanding of where they are going and why. A well‑structured roadmap aligns priorities, clarifies expectations, and shows the sequence of work required to reach your goals. It helps teams stay focused, communicate progress, and make informed decisions as priorities shift.
A strong roadmap should show:
What needs to be done
Why it matters
When work is expected to happen
How initiatives connect to business objectives
Where teams depend on each other
When teams have a shared view of the path ahead, they move with confidence and avoid unnecessary rework.
Optimize Systems
Continuously refine your design systems and operational processes to improve efficiency and adaptability. Strong systems reduce friction, increase consistency, and give teams more time to focus on meaningful work.
1. Design System & Component Library
Purpose: Consistency, speed, quality, accessibility.
You need:
A component library (Figma components + coded equivalents)
Usage guidelines
Accessibility requirements baked into components
Pattern documentation
Versioning rules
A formal governance model (proposal → review → approval → implementation → release)
This is the system that makes the rest of the team faster.
4. Collaboration & Communication Systems
Purpose: Coordination across product, engineering, marketing, and leadership.
Includes systems for:
Cross‑functional planning (quarterly/annual)
Weekly design standups
Weekly design critiques
Open working sessions / co‑design
Documentation and communication norms
Project updates and status reporting
Good collaboration is never improvised — it’s architected.
7. Performance & Career Systems
Purpose: Clarity, growth, retention.
You need:
Clear role definitions
Career ladders / competency models
Design‑specific performance criteria
Coaching and mentorship programs
Clear expectations for seniority levels
Systems for feedback and goal‑setting
Without this, the best people leave.
10. Internationalization (i18n) System
Purpose: Ensure global readiness.
Includes:
Localization workflow
Translation management
Layout rules for global languages
A/B testing segmentation rules for international traffic
Guidelines for market‑specific customization
A medium‑sized team that serves global users can’t skip this.
Systems
Workflow Systems
Build clear, efficient workflows supported by the right project management and communication tools. Define how work moves through the team, how decisions are made, and how information is shared. When systems are predictable and well‑maintained, teams execute faster and with fewer errors.
12 part ecosystem
2. Workflow & Delivery Systems
Purpose: Predictable, transparent work execution.
You need systems that define:
How work requests come in
How work is prioritized
How designers hand off work to engineering
How design, product, and engineering sync
Where documentation lives
What “definition of done” means for design
Common tools:
Figma, Jira, Asana, Trello, Miro, Confluence, or Notion.
The exact tools matter less than the consistency of use.
5. Knowledge Management System
Purpose: A single source of truth.
Must include:
A unified repository for design artifacts
Version control for assets
A shared decision log
Team guidelines and playbooks
Templates for repeatable work
Recorded research, diagrams, and process documentation
This reduces “lost knowledge” and onboarding time.
8. Intake & Prioritization System
Purpose: Control chaos.
You need a consistent way to:
Handle inbound work
Assess business value
Align requests with roadmap
Prioritize based on impact and capacity
Reject or defer low‑value work
Make tradeoffs transparent
This system protects the team from overload.
11. Governance & Decision‑Making Systems
Purpose: Keep decisions transparent and scalable.
Includes:
Decision logs
Approvals workflows
Ownership maps (RACI or similar)
A clear process for updating systems, patterns, and workflows
Good governance prevents design systems, processes, and workflows from drifting into chaos.
Medium‑Sized Internal Design Team
A medium‑sized design team (typically 10–40 people with mixed roles: product designers, UX researchers, content designers, design ops, design system contributors) needs systems that support clarity, efficiency, predictability, and scale.
3. Research Operations (ReOps) System
Purpose: Scalable user insights.
You need:
A participant panel or recruiting process
Templates for research plans, scripts, reports
A repository for insights
Tools for moderated and unmoderated testing
A process for tagging and reusing insights
A medium‑sized team can’t afford ad‑hoc research. A ReOps system saves years of wasted effort.
6. Team Operating System
Purpose: How the team works together, not just what tools it uses.
Includes:
Meeting cadences
How work is reviewed
How feedback is given
What autonomy looks like
How escalation works
How decisions are made
How priorities are set
How the team protects focus time
This system ensures the team moves as one unit, not 20 individuals.
9. Quality & Review Systems
Purpose: Ensure output quality and alignment.
Must include:
Design critiques
Accessibility reviews
Copy/content reviews
Engineering feasibility checks
Design QA before release
Post‑launch evaluations
Stable quality systems reduce rework and build trust with partners.
12. Design Operations (DesignOps) System
Purpose: The connective tissue of the entire team.
A medium‑sized team needs:
A design ops function (formal or part‑time)
Process owners
Tool administrators
A roadmap for operational improvement
Metrics to measure system health
DesignOps maintains everything above.