The Danish Design Ladder
Here's a post highlighting the difference between hiring a few designers to fill in for specific roles & building a strong design culture...
It is widely accepted a fact that the autonomy the teams are handed with often translates to success, enabling them to scale those revenue peaks, when the opposite of that could be micro-management, where the managers get themselves involved deeply into the nitty-gritty of every team member’s workflow dictating what’s to be done & how.
And this isn’t a thing of the past. I’ve recently had to deal with a call from a mentee who asked me the very same question, but in his defense, he had joined an org. as a PM about a few weeks back, still fresh into the role. But if you think about it, managers are perhaps more worried about a lot more things than what constitutes a team member’s individual efforts / performance, which is only but natural. So, they tend to prod deeply, handhold, follow-up vigorously so as to help one be more focused, more accountable & 99% of the time that happens only when they think one isn’t working to their potential.
That happens to be their coping mechanism. When you may hate it, you can’t just change all that by the flick of a switch if you find yourself being micromanaged.
Having said that, there are instances where the grant of autonomy didn’t quite convert to any kind of runaway success. When this could happen across the board to any team out there, let’s just stick to design for the scope of this article.
There are cases where the design teams’ efforts just gets the product to standout & does that not only over offering an impeccable UI, but also in the way they choose to solve problems for the users - UX.
For ex: Uber.
Do you think Uber or any other ride-hailing Apps would be just as effective today if they were to operate without the MAP-based interface?
The map is what makes the whole App usable in the first-place. And when one looks at an App like that one would understand the depth & impact the Design teams could have over any product. When that’s top-of-the-line, there are orgs. who still struggle with putting out even a basic version of an App / build a feature that’s likeable by even a handful of their users. A few good questions to ask at this stage would be:
Why do users term design as bad in spite of it being aesthetically pleasing?
Is “looking good” & “working well” one and the same for users?
Why do the designs lack the punch? What could it be attributed to? How can this be avoided? What ought to be done to reverse it all?
The problem here may not be quantitative (the number of designers in the team) & neither qualitative (the ability of each of those designers).
The problem could be in the way the org. perceives design itself.
Danish design ladder
The Danish design Ladder is a great way to understand the importance & penetration of the design process & intern how it all contributes to the strategy, functioning of product teams, most importantly how it helps add value to both the org. & the users.
Think of it as an evolution that happens stepwise & the org. taking to / adapting to each of the stages, which means that they get more clearer & stronger at the core with the power / control passing top-down from the EXECs to the ICs.
Lets’ explore each of these stages in the ladder, understand the motivation behind the orgs. to adopt & enlist roadblocks they may face whilst delving deeper into steps to overcome them.
STAGE 1: NOTHING
It is a given how every org. would start off from ZERO. And that could be attributed to various factors given how the org. that’s just getting off the ground may not pay too much of a heed to Design as a function, unless there are a team of designers who are acting as cofounders in which case their thinking chiefly from that standpoint may well be acceptable.
In most cases they may be totally unaware although they may have Design embedded as a function with some other team members shouldering that responsibility as well, which used to be a pretty common sight 2 decades back.
Important question here:
Q: When should you look to hire designers?
A: When hiring designers to build a core design team may not be the first thing on the cards for an org. as they begin, earmarking it & working towards that as an offshoot of the strategy / strategic initiatives they are working on could augur really well. If it is not now, it ought to be at some point later.
STAGE 2: DESIGN for AESTHETICS
OK. So, a design team has been hired now. And it is possible that the designers so hired hail from really diverse backgrounds & are pretty well qualified holding degrees from great schools / universities. But throwing the ball into their court handing them unparalleled ownership over the design artefacts by spoon-feeding screens via Hi-Fi Mocks just to witness a disaster has been quite a thing that haunts many leaders even to date.
It is so common to see how many designers early in their careers tend to associate with the term aesthetics which does largely translate to colors, shapes, sizes, scale (height, width, breadth, length) & the balance of patterns that constitute the screens / the UI.
It is well-known how situations like these have pushed teams into a retrograde leaving leadership with a pile of TECH-DEBT to tackle. And what’s sadder than that is how it could be too late by the time one gets their hands on all of this given how one ought to pin on lagging indicators to gauge the situation. So, it is important to build a design team that understands the importance / depth of design over a product and thinks beyond just what meets the eye.
Important questions at this stage:
[The Hiring Strategy]
Q: Do I hire more designers or do I need a Design Leader?
A: You may have a few designers who form the core of a team but unless they are guided well by an experienced senior member who could provide the essential oversight, it may not fit in well with your purpose of building a complete design team that has the capability & confidence to shoulder the responsibility of innovation.
[During Actual Hiring]
Q: As a designer what does “Design” really mean to you?
A: Look for answers that depict an understanding of overall product design like the onus on understanding the user’s problems, how they manage to identify them, the comfort when dealing with ambiguity and those nuances, the time spent over understanding the problem itself & operating in the problem space sans venturing into the solution space.
STAGE 3: DESIGN as a PROCESS
The whole discord (and of course the blame game) could be averted if there was a design leader and they had something like a process in place, earmarked specifically for design teams to adhere to & help them understand the importance of, build & inculcate an outcomes-centric mindset, thinking about problems as pertaining to the users.
Owing to that mindset Designers would then be armed with more than the information they need helping them start off from the right place and that is to do with the users & the nuances of their pain points. Nothing too alarming, just a change in approach that goes from swallowing every requirement hook line and sinker to being able to ask the right questions & then documenting the whole thing so as to be able to factor every spec / detail into the design process. And this is where Design Thinking – [EMPATHIZE, DEFINE, IDEATE, PROTOTYPE, TEST] could take center-stage.
A process could also help streamline everything about the workflow of design teams and help with smooth XFN collaboration.
Important questions at this stage:
Q: When a process seems like it is perfectly in place why don't the metrics take off, are we missing something? Are we doing this right?
A: A process helps teams collaborate well but thinking / approaching it from a strategic standpoint would elevate the team’s thinking helping them concentrate on the problem from a couple of notches higher, understanding the “why” behind all the work that needs to follow.
STAGE 4: DESIGN as a STRATEGY
Focusing on the right opportunities is a precursor to hitting any level of success minor or major. When it is a common belief that thinking from a strategic standpoint is something that’s typical of leadership only, there’s enough reason to believe how that could be a totally misconceived notion given how successful design teams are operating today.
Thinking of design from the perspective of:
→ a process so as to align with XFN teams and help improve delivery cadences &
→ thinking from a standpoint of how design could be effectively employed as a strategy to help differentiate the product in the market
has a significant difference.
Given how most product teams are proactive, the adherence to design as a strategy could make it a uphill & a pretty steep climb, but totally worth it when one looks at the metrics going northbound keeping up with & exceeding the expected adoption rates.
Important questions at this stage:
Q: Looking at Design from the strategic standpoint is fine but why can’t we cater to masses looking to induce a visible change over the entire ecosystem? And what's it going take for us to pull that off?
A: Strategy obviously has another phrase governing it & that happens to be the SCOPE. If the scope is widened, it would enable the org. to affect a massive change across the ecosystem & design could be at the epicenter of it all, helping induce & drive that whole change forward.
STAGE 5: DESIGN for CHANGE
At this stage one already possesses the understanding & has used design to build successful strategies to put those product(s) in the market. But then the penchant for innovation never dies / never ought to die forcing one to think about how design could be employed to affect massive changes in the ecosystem, the usual term for which is SYSTEMS THINKING which enables one to solve complex problems.
Designing from a systems standpoint usually involves thinking from a higher pedestal. There’s a misconception of associating it with service design / user experience design (UED) when one refers to design being employed an enabler of change. But it goes beyond that as it deals with more complex systems like say the current day logistics problems or making healthcare more sustainable by effectively stitching a protocol between all the touchpoints & using (human-computer-interface) HCI enabling worldwide inclusion.
Important question at this stage:
Q: Is it enough for a leader to understand & employ design as an enabler for change affecting huge groups in society?
A: Changes could be affected by multiple ways, when one of them talks of affecting changes in society the leadership ought to be more concerned with how they could turn that into a culture internally helping teams imbibe & thrive on it henceforth. After all, building sustainable teams is one of the precursors of team building for any leader.
STAGE 6: DESIGN as CULTURE
Thinking ahead on the same lines, when one has been successful in affecting changes throughout an ecosystem it becomes crucial to see that all internal teams begin to use that as a starting point. The mindsets of people one believes & as documented many a times is hard to change. But, that’s an essential step one ought to conquer as EXECs / Leaders in using up all the learnings thus far over each of the previous 5 steps to draft the guardrails of what could become a culture within an org.
Consider the case of Steve Jobs. His name is held so high up today whenever one is on the subject of innovation. And, one could vouch for how those learnings over a few successes & all failures over the years has gone on to shape what defines how Apple as an org. thinks, innovates, designs & builds products today. The ground rules well documented as a handbook / playbook do get passed on to every joining member & also get cascaded top-down enabling everyone in the team to adhere to it as regular clockwork over their respective workflows, grow it as a practice, getting it to be upheld as the culture of the org.
Are there any important questions to pop at this stage? Of course & here’s one.
Q: Yes, we do have a culture in place when it comes to Design. Does everyone in the org. identify with it unambiguously? What do we focus on to better ourselves from here / improve the processes that define the very roots of our culture?
A: And the answer to that could be rooted in the perception of the phrase “continuous improvement” & how that understanding gets cascaded top-down across the internal teams as well as the value chain.