2019 — Current
As our design system garnered adoption across the company, we realized we needed a way to create alignment across design. To remedy that we implemented a hybrid governance model, consisting of a primary and secondary delegate from each program.
Every year we would kick off with an affinity mapping session. Each program would check in with their product designers to talk through what needs they envisioned coming up for the year. We talked through each request to understand the needs and would reprioritize every quarter. This allowed for flexibility as business needs shifted throughout the year.
To start off working together we established boundaries and definitions. We created artifacts to articulate our roles and show how the team would operate. It included examples showing why it benefits the organization and pathways for working. In addition, we created a simple mission statement together that we would use to root our decision making in.
Our team adopted a structured framework for approaching each governance topic. This allowed us to keep momentum throughout our sessions and created seamless expectations for everyone on an ongoing basis.
Over the span of two years of facilitating governance of the designs system, our team was able to drive alignment and cohesion on some of the most integral elements within it. These would drive alignment on the fundamentals of how users interacted with products across 84.51°.
As we established rules of engagement in how to partner with our product design peers, I crafted a simple framework to help enable adoption and collaboration. This framework ultimately helped drive alignment and efficiency across all designers by standardizing the approach for questions, feedback, requests, and collaboration.
As the year would wrap up I would share out with the team what we accomplished. Because we identified most of our hopes and dreams early on in the year, we could easily color encode what we had made progress on and what we had not. We could use the artifact to celebrate our successes but also to inform our future roadmap if there was anything important and still relevant.
Programs engaged
Annual Completion rate
Topics identified
Delegates
