014: Design is a toolkit.
What it's really like designing in big tech.
February was a very impactful month for developing my design leadership. With a PM and design lead on vacation for the month, I had to step up to become a more active voice in our team’s product strategy and design direction. It forced me out of my comfort zone and it’s overall been super rewarding.
What is it really like designing in big tech?
I want to talk about what it’s like to design in a big tech company. I was originally taught product design through a fixed design process: First empathizing with the user, defining their goals and problems, ideating solutions to those problems, and then prototyping & testing the final solution.
This is a great process that all designers should understand. See my previous article describing the Double Diamond process in depth. However, I ran into issues with this when I started working at Meta in 2021.
I found that applying that same exact process to every project I was assigned at Meta wasn’t an effective use of my time. In many cases, I was given a feature to design that the team had already decided to build. If the team is already dead set on building and testing a feature — then doing research, defining the problem/user goals, and ideating other solutions is redundant and a waste of time.
That was my struggle. Sometimes I spent over a week going through user research and understanding the problem when that wasn’t even the question my team wanted me to answer. I would confuse myself because I unknowingly expanded the scope of my work and started to come up with solutions the team didn’t care about.
So then, I started ditching the research altogether, purely focusing on the visual and interaction design for the features I was asked to build. But this just resulted in a long list of design options that I struggled to narrow down. I couldn’t narrow things down because I didn’t know enough about our user, app, and the problem I was solving. I went back to the drawing board repeatedly as more questions came up —extending the design timeline more and more.
How to approach design projects.
So what is the solution? How should a designer approach their projects at work when the design process can’t be applied the same way every time?
The solution is to see design as a toolkit rather than a prescriptive process. Design is an emergent process that requires different tools depending on the task and situation.
What do I mean by prescriptive and emergent processes? Here’s a quote to help illustrate:
“When you have high degree of control and predictability, like a math problem, you can be “prescriptive”. This means that beforehand, you can apply a known process with steps that have been proven to work in order to solve the problem. The prescriptive approach is centered around executing and optimizing the steps that have already been established to be effective. It involves following a predefined sequence of steps, making it ideal when consistent and predictable results are desired on a repetitive basis.
For less predictable problems that you have less control over, like a soccer game, boxing match or most real-world scenarios, its best to apply an “emergent” strategy. Emergent strategy is more about finding ways to address the unpredictable challenges and situations that you encounter along the way. It involves many characteristics of “muddling through” that Charles Lindblom coined back in 1959. Emergent approach is more about learning, adapting and experimenting incrementally to find a solution.”
What makes design more suited to an emergent process? Here’s a list of some factors that can make design unpredictable:
Engineering constraints. Your team might only be able to afford to build a very cheap solution to the problem. On the flip side, they might be able to build something super expensive. Depending on this you will have to curate your design process to come up with buildable solutions.
Stakeholder personalities. You might be working with people with strong opinions on your project, and you’ll need to find a way to deal with them and make everybody happy (enough). You might collaborate with people who are very growth-driven and willing to test even the hackiest of experiences. How do you make sure their voices are heard without sacrificing the design quality of your solutions? On another note, some team leads like to see all the thinking it took to arrive at your solution. Others just care about the final designs and good rationale. So depending on that, you might have to factor in time to create a suitable presentation.
Approval processes. Depending on your company and team, there will be different processes that you have to go through to get your work approved to develop. Maybe you have a weekly design review, or maybe your manager likes to review your work through a chat thread. Maybe you have to collaborate with another design team to make sure your designs are compliant with accessibility standards and the design system. Your process will have to change depending on these things.
Shared knowledge of the problem/solution. As I mentioned earlier in this article, your team might already have a very strong understanding of the problem you are solving. They might also have a good understanding of past solutions tried and why they did/didn’t work. If you can get this information quickly, then you can really shorten your design process for that project. In other cases, they have no understanding at all. Then it would be useful for you to run a design sprint and conduct user research to get a deeper understanding.
Conflicting features. Let’s say you’re designing a feature for a social media app to let people comment on posts. But there’s another team working on a feature to let people directly message the creator of the posts. Now you have to answer more questions: How do you ensure users don’t accidentally comment when they meant to directly message the poster? What action should take priority between the two? How do you ensure your feature is still intuitive?
Timelines. Sometimes, you simply don’t have enough time to go through the whole design process. Your team might have an urgent need come up and require a design proposal in 1 day.
Given all this variability, you couldn’t possibly apply the double diamond or the 5 step design thinking process to every project. Or at least, you couldn’t get good results every time by doing it.
“There’s no telling if the next step in the double diamond approach tackles the challenges you face, which can frequently lead to a feeling that the design tasks you’re engaged in are circling back to the original questions. Or feeling like you keep doing design activities but the process isn’t stringing together to answer the questions that address the unpredictable challenges in front of you. You end up with tons of journey maps and personas but not with the information you need to actually make good decisions about your design. Even after all the design activities you feel like you’re taking a big leap of faith with your design because you didn’t address all the unknowns.”
So if you are stressing over having a perfect design process, put your mind at ease. There is no perfect design process. It all depends on the project. To be an effective designer, you need to have a solid toolkit and know what tools to apply to accomplish your specific goals.
“The key design skill is less about beautiful all-encompassing Figma documentation with all the kinds of journey maps and personas, or mastering a ‘process’. It’s about being so keenly situationally aware of what unknowns are in front of you so you can pick out what tools or design activities target them precisely.”
The quotes in this newsletter came from Eduardo Hernandez’s article “Death to the Double Diamond”. Give it a read if you’d like to dive deeper into this topic.
My month in review.
🏀 Picked up basketball again after 6 years. It’s been great for clearing my mind and getting cardio in the morning.
⚡️ Hit 1000 mentorship minutes on ADPList and made it to the top 1% of design mentors for the past 3 months.
🏠 Started hosting my friends a lot more.
🚀 Stepping up my design leadership at Meta.
Very insightful! As a design student, it's reassuring to hear that the design process can be more free-flowing than it seems from the outside. Thank you Jalil
This was great! I see that designers have to be flexible and willing to adapt to a lot of different scenarios.