Discuss Fulfillment section designers covering projects instead of groups
Problem
Due to reorganization in the Fulfillment team over the last ~ 18 months, allocating designers to projects according to group assignment is no longer working as it used to, leading to borrows and frequently reassigning designers to different PMs.For example,
- The Purchase team had an assigned designer, but a portion of the user experience related to purchasing is owned by Provision, including email notifications and some setup required to start using your purchased seats.
- The Billing and Subscription Management team has an assigned designer, but the Platform team was supporting significant portions of the subscription management experience from a platform perspective, and design support was crucial as this was a key workflow.
Proposal
Our focus in UX should be to ensure the top priority work in Fulfillment has design support for the end-to-end experience, rather than organizational structure. We should pilot having designers focus on projects instead of Groups.
- Designers support priority projects rather than groups, and focus efforts on the end-to-end user experience, regardless of the group doing the implementation. Assigned projects should be longer term themes, not an issue or two meant to complete in a few milestones.
- Examples of priority projects that need UX support are Single Sign-on, AI add-ons and add-ons in general, and Multiple Billing Accounts.
- These priorities should be reviewed by the Product Design Manager and the Director of Product for Fulfillment on a regular basis to ensure designers are not overwhelmed.
- Designers can work with multiple PMs during a project, as aspects are implemented by different PMs, but there should always be a project DRI PM who would be their primary contact.
- To manage workload, designers should generally be assigned to no more than one large and 1 small/medium project at a time, or 3-4 small/medium projects (or the equivalent in issue weights).
- Issue weights will be used to discuss trade-offs when needed.
- Designers can still pick up issues outside their assigned projects. These should be crucial UX issues such as SUS Impacting issues. The process by which PMs would have these issues prioritized is TBD.
- Designers should work with their project DRI PM to decide which meetings to attend, and aren't expected to attend team sync meetings for multiple teams at the same time.
- For communication purposes, Designers will need to participate in multiple group Slack channels. This is currently the case, so shouldn't require any change.
- Fulfillment designers will participate in product MRs via Reviewer Roulette. However, since they also do CustomersDot reviews, they are encouraged to set themselves busy when they reach their threshold of product reviews, so as not to be overwhelmed by both responsibilities.
We can formalize this and try it for about a quarter to see how things go. Emily has already been working this way for quite awhile, and both Fulfillment designers have strong relationships with multiple group PMs and Engineering Managers, so onboarding to this model should not be very different from how they work now.