Design team strategy: the complete guide

In the world of digital product design, having a clear, comprehensive strategy is crucial for any design team aiming to make a lasting impact. Starting last year, together with my team I’ve explored the process of developing such a strategy hands-on and documented it through a five-part article series published by The UX Collective. This article is supposed to serve as an overview of and guide to the approach we took, offering a rough bird’s-eye view of the entire series.

From defining a team’s mission to crafting an inspiring vision, we’ll walk through each critical component of a design team strategy, including the “Strategy House” as a helpful visualization. You’ll discover how to:

1. Create a roof that embodies your team’s mission.
2. Build robust pillars representing your most important objectives.
3. Construct your strategy’s foundation with carefully defined team values.
4. Establish design principles that operationalize your values.
5. Cap it all with a vision that guides your team towards a successful future.

Whether you’re leading a design team or simply interested in strategic thinking, this comprehensive guide in five parts will provide you with practical insights and actionable steps to elevate your team’s performance and align your efforts towards shared goals.

Part I — The strategy house: how to define a design team’s mission

This article focuses on an introduction to the “Strategy House Model” — a visual representation of a team’s strategy, with the mission as its roof, the most important topics as its pillars, and the values as its foundation. It goes into detail on how our digital product design team at BestSecret developed their team mission by brainstorming “stories of value”; extracting actors, actions, and outcomes; and finally compiling the overall mission statement from those.

☞ Speicher, Maximilian. “The strategy house: how to define a design team’s mission.” UX Collective. February 3, 2023.

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

In this article of our Design Team Strategy series, we explore 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. By following these steps, you create the pillars of your team’s Strategy House, which will guide your decision-making process and ensure that you’re staying true to your overall strategy.

☞ Speicher, Maximilian. “Pillars, objectives, and OGSMs: how to define a design team’s most important topics.” UX Collective. March 2, 2023.

Part III — Team values: the foundation of any strategy

In this article, we explore the importance of team values in creating a cohesive and effective strategy for a design team. Team values are the guiding principles that shape a team’s culture and determine how its members interact with each other and stakeholders. Defining them is a collaborative process that in our case involved revisiting our stories of value, brainstorming our proposed team values, agreeing on a final set through an affinity diagram, and, finally, creating posters for each to make them salient and memorable. While design principles are important to a design team’s work, they are not the same as team values. Team values serve as a framework for making decisions, setting priorities, and guiding behavior.

☞ Speicher, Maximilian. “Team values: the foundation of any strategy.” UX Collective. April 19, 2023.

Part IV — Designing together: the importance of shared principles for design teams

Design principles operationalize a team’s values into concrete guidelines that inform the design process. The specific steps we took for developing our own set of principles were: ① Brainstorming already established principles, inspiration from other teams, and what prevented us from becoming more successful; ② Revisiting our nine team values; ③ Conducting a closed card sorting to map the brainstormed principles to the values; and ④ Clustering similar principles within each value category while distinguishing between “design principles” and “team principles.” The end result was a set of principles that provide common understanding and guidance for executing our team’s design work in line with our values and standards.

☞ Speicher, Maximilian. “Designing together: the importance of shared principles for design teams.” UX Collective. August 9, 2023.

Part V — Crafting a Vision that Inspires

A team vision is the North Star that guides a design team’s collective efforts towards a shared purpose and ultimate goal. In this article, we explore the importance of a team vision, how it differs from other components of a strategy, and provide a step-by-step guide on how to craft a team vision that resonates with everyone: ① Crafting “stories from the future”; ② Extracting the essence of those stories; ③ Formulating individual vision statements; and ④ Crafting a collective vision that brings it all together. We share our own experience and the exercises we used to develop a vision that aligns our team’s efforts and inspires us to work towards a common goal.

☞ Speicher, Maximilian. “Crafting a vision that inspires.” UX Collective. August 9, 2024.

Copyright © 2024 by Maximilian Speicher ● Originally published by The UX Collective

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