Design (Ops)

Ced's process of tracking projects, employeee growth and progress across two disciplines

Design Resources

2H Design Ops Strategy

Design Projects

Review Meeting

Cross-Functional Org

Head of Design HQ

How We Got Here on Marketplace

Weekly Design Update

Untitled page

Product Design TEAM SETUP

Design TEAM SETUP

Explore

My Desk

Design Org

Building out the design org for Alto

Last edited 437 days ago by Ced Funches

Design Ethos

First and foremost, solve future problems.

Understand our customer.

Take a problem from start to finish, with strong craft throughout.

Bring a superpower to the team.

Leave your ego behind and collaborate.

Everyone's future is important, including yours.

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Personnel Requests

Hiring: Sr. Product Designer + Brand Designer

Design Director (hands-on) : Q2 2024

Hiring: 2 Sr. Product Designer + Brand Designer

2 Freelance Sr. Product Designers (focus on platform + web): March 2023

1 Freelance Brand Designer (Focused on brand enhancements for product+marketing): July 2023

1 Freelance Motion Designer

Project Manager Q2 2024. I believe the design team will be at scale by December 2023.

Assess the needs of Alto in 2024 and bring on at least FT Senior Product Designer

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Tools

There are a couple tools I think we need as a team to be more in-sync.

Tool Name

What is it?

Value Proposition

Link

Costs/mo.

Zeplin

An organized workspace that is friendly to non-designers, making it easy for everyone to collaborate and ship beautiful products together.

There is no real design handoff process. Zeplin gives a source of truth to the design and removes any need for translation. Integrates Jira.

$200.00

Coda

Collaborative Docs that scale outside of the rigid Jira/Confluence space

Alto is very task oriented with little room for creative discussion. Coda allows clarity of thought away from tasks. Integrates Jira.

$150.00

Prince XML

HTML to PDF converter that allows you to set custom styles. 1x cost.

It’s quick and simple to convert HTML to PDF with Prince. HTML is seamlessly transformed into documents you can print, download and archive.

$495.00

Balsamiq Cloud

Low-fi wire framing tool used to get alignment of design and engineering

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Balsamiq Wireframes

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is the industry standard low-fidelity wireframing software. Annual costs.

$500.00

Beautiful.ai

Finally approved BOOOOM!

Webflow

There are no rows in this table

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— Not sure design needs anything more than this.

Projects Management

Monday.com: Looking to get more proficient at running projects on Monday board. Concern is the amount of time it takes to PM. More documenting than actual work a real fear.

Creating an intake form process to track and organize projects on Monday

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Process Reminders

Sharing prototypes

Gain consensus within the comments and feedback. Our colleagues opinions are very important. Push for informed clarity from project managers and stakeholders over subjective “I like this” or “I prefer it to be...”

Ask for solid examples

Show what our competitors are doing and ask “why wouldn’t we do this?”

The Design Sign-off Meeting

This is a 25 minute meeting to gut check the design and the choices made to this point. There shouldn’t be any design work being done ad-hoc without this meeting to sync.

Prototypes are mandatory

Design decisions or feedback happen at the prototype level not on the Figma file.

This will help our team move away from group think.

Lo-Fi sketches are used in early rounds to ensure sync and promote team discovery

User Research

In addition to JTBDs, we will need to attach real customer archetypes to our product development process. Investor, Issuer, Firm, Analysts?

No Date? No reason to rush.

If you don’t have a firm date to work back from, backlog your PRD and look to firm up dates. Respect for our colleagues time outweighs our to-do lists.

5 steps for Design to work

Make the requirements less dumb - question the question.

Challenge and questioning the requirements, no matter who gave them to you.

Delete parts or process.

Start from the core and add when required. Resist the urge to add things ‘just in case’.

Simplify and optimize.

Now you’re answering the right question and have stripped it to the core you can begin to optimize what you have.

Accelerate cycle time.

Again, knowing you’re moving in the right direction, it’s time to iterate faster.

Automate.

Finally, consider how to automate processes moving forward.