Designing the design process at Cover Genius

TL;DR

I developed a new design process at Cover Genius by conducting internal research and providing a process toolkit for the team to use.

Overview

When I joined Cover Genius I was given the opportunity to optimise and formalise the product design and content process. The objective was to develop a new process which can be scaled across all product teams.

Goals of the new process:

Deliver value into the products faster by reducing steps in the product development process
Mitigate the risk of misaligned expectations by involving stakeholders at every step
Remove silos and work as one team using the same software tools

Methodology

Listen - team interviews

The first step was to conduct a listening tour with team members involved. I conducted 10 one to one interviews with designers, product managers, content managers and engineers. This research aimed to understand some of the key pain points and opportunity areas for those involved in the product design process.

Research objective:

- Understand the key friction points in the current product design process - Understand what the key steps in the process are and who is involved in each step Identify opportunity areas for improvement

Audit - create a journey map of the current process

Using the insights from the team interviews, I created a current state process map. The goal of this was to understand the current workflow that team members go through within the design process.

The pain points and opportunities for improvement were then attached to each stage of the journey. From here it was clear where the key points of friction were in the journey that needed to be addressed first.

Journey map of the current design process

There were three areas for improvement that were prioritised to be tacked as a first step:

Feedback loops
Project kick-offs
Content and design collaboration

It was also important at this stage to understand what was working well and the positive areas of the process which could be built upon.

Workshop - improving feedback loops

In order to improve the feedback process I facilitated a cross functional workshop with design and product. As a group we reviewed all the identified pain points within the feedback process and voted on the areas which were driving the biggest friction.

As a group we then took these opportunity areas and ideated on possible solutions. We gathered a wide range of solutions then did another round of voting to define which solutions we thought would be most impactful.

These ideas were then carried over into the improved design process development. In particular:

Involve product, design and content at the beginning of the ideation process
Define a different content approval process
Develop a more formalised feedback ceremonies that are documented and managed by a specific person

Workshop - improving kick-offs

Based on the previous research it was clear that the kick-off process was sometimes fragmented with the project team briefed in at different times in the workflow. A key opportunity for the new process was to streamline the kick-off and start creating value more quickly. The purpose of the workshop was to define how we would create documentation around kicking off a piece of work and what a kick off ceremony looks like.

Ideating on how to structure project kick-offs

As a group we ideated on the information that a kick-off document would need to include. A draft doc was then created and shared for feedback before being turned into a template. We also did an activity where we defined the roles and responsibilities within that process.

Workshop - roles and responsibilities

Another important workshop that took place was defining the different roles and responsibilities within the design process. I used a method from the Atlassian playboook and got the team got together and declared what they believed each other’s responsibilities in the process were.

Here we were able to identify overlaps and misaligned expectations.

Outcome of the roles and responsibilities workshop

Developing the content process

The content review and delivery workflow was another point of friction in the end to end process. By auditing the current experience it was clear there were operational inefficiencies and redundant repetition in the use of software.

By identifying a new software toolkit (Ditto) we were able to present a new process and pitch for the new tool to be integrated into our process.

Crafting a new end to end product design and content process

The underlying principle of crafting a new process is that it is built on a strong foundation of both tools and mindsets. Before diving into the process steps it was important to identify the mindsets we wanted the team to adopt when approaching product design and going through the steps in the process. These three mindsets led the thinking for the specific steps in the journey:

The process steps themselves were iterated on and adjusted based on peer feedback and the integration of other processes such as the content review process

The process steps, tools and frameworks were then presented back to the wider team for buy-in on the approach.

Outcome

I documented the new process steps in the format of slides which could be easily shared and referenced at any point within the design process. Each step included information on who’s involved, what happens and specific tools + resources.

I also created a process toolkit in Confluence. This is where teams can find resources and templates to help with each stage of the process along with an overview of the design process steps.

What’s next?

Onboard teams to the process through shared resources and presentations
Ensuring all team members have access to the toolkit
Testing and iterating on the process with live projects

Illustration source: popsy.co