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generalassemb.ly | @bryanberger

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Who am I?

I’m Bryan Berger,Product Design Lead at General Assembly.

I lead a team of 5 Product Designers. We build platforms and solutions for online and in-person learning experiences.

Previously:

I’ve worked in UI/UX, Product Design and Web Development with companies such as:

IAC, Philips, Fox Sports, Ford, NASCAR and Ogilvy & Mather.

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We offer both online and in-person education programs

that prepare students for a career in design, data,

marketing, and technology. We also work with employers

to help source, assess, and transform their talent.

ATLANTA HONG KONG LA NYC LONDON

By the end of this year, we’ll have 25 campuses around the world and over 25,000 graduates.

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Design is at the core

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So, what is this talk about?

How we paused all work for 2 weeks across all teams.

Why we needed to do it, what we did, and what we learned as a design team.

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The Setting

▸ I’ve been at GA for about a year

▸ I’ve hired 3 new designers so far

▸We recently hired an amazing new Chief Product Officer

▸Our Product Team has been through some restructuring

▸We are in a growth stage and becoming more global

▸We have some foundational design improvements to consider

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Why, stop everything and focus?

1. We started to hit the limits of our current solutions

2. Optimize team efficiency & design impact

3. Fix broken processes and sunset old cluttered systems

4. Shed light on things that have been overlooked

5. New courses, classes, formats

To deconstruct our current way of doing things & support a mode of growth

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Your Typical Startup Lifecycle

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First things first, knock down the Silos

1. Silos are destructive2. They resist change3. They promote one-off solutions4. Scalability isn’t top of mind5. They burn people out

It was obvious. In order to sustain our growth the silos had to go

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ENTER:

A DISTRACTION FREEDESIGN SPRINT

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How did we approach it?

GET ALIGNED

1

GET BUY IN

4

SETEXPECTATIONS

2

PRE-PLAN

3

MAKE IT REAL

5

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Step 1: Get Aligned

The Product Design focus was to position

ourselves to be more effective.

We had an off site and performed a SWOT

analysis of our team to identify what we were

going to tackle.

There were 2 clear problems we needed to

address.

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Step 1 (cont): Get Aligned on the Objectives

Design standards▸ The state of our frontend became unmanageable and chaotic

▸ Patterns that champion reusability, consistency, and efficiency across products and teams

▸ A single styleguide helps our production cycle

▸ Speak the same language across design and engineering

Service design▸ Our service graph had become so complex, no one really knew how it all worked

▸ Blueprint and visualize all digital and physical interactions

▸ Our customer line of visibility was often skewed

▸ Our back-stage, sometimes disjointed processes were affecting customers

▸ To unlock the true power of our user-data

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Secretly though...

Design standards & Service Design?

YESSS!

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Step 2: Set expectations

1. Outline the schedule

2. Be realistic

3. Stop all other work...

4. Address ambiguity up front

5. Review the plan of attack

Rally the team!

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Let our powers combine!

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Step 3: Pre plan

1. Define the Epics up front

2. Define roles & responsibilities

3. Split the team & share decision making

4. Define success criteria & our DoD

5. Budget for any materials or offsite time

6. Build in critique time

7. Stub out a place for documentationa. Final artifacts on Confluence

b. Working docs on Drive

▸Standard Design Sprint stuff

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Step 4: Get buy in

1. Get Executive buy-in on the ROI impact of

each objective

2. Roll up to Product wide “Themes”

3. Create a dashboard for transparency (JIRA)

4. Include Stakeholders (let them know that

they will be heard)

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Step 5: Make it real

1. Work towards a concrete outcomea. Documentation

b. Prototypes

c. Opportunities

d. Research

e. Diagrams

f. Concepts

g. etc...

Be actionable after the 2 week sprint is over

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OUR APPROACH

Who Where

Evolve & Refine

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THE OUTCOME

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KEY LEARNINGS

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Learnings

▸ It's extremely inefficient to achieve growth & future goals without the

foundational pieces in place

▸Teams can now visualize the complexity and work to simplify it

▸We stubbed out a huge chunk of our Pattern Library

▸We identified key areas for additional research within our ecosystem

▸We have actionable roadmaps to tackle each initiative in order to,

keep the momentum going.

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Learnings (cont) - The Distraction Free Design Sprint

▸Empower your team

▸Huge moral boosting capability

▸Draft a design team charter

▸Pair new hires with veterans

▸Cross-product design collaboration is very powerful

▸Make research insights accessible to everyone

▸Frame Stakeholder discussions on the present

(it’s easier to work with wish lists if we understand the facts first)

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In Conclusion

Embrace the power of a distraction free design sprint!

THANKS!

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▸@bryanberger

▸ bb@ga.co

▸ generalassemb.ly