Article
Design and build principles
Bringing design and engineering together around a shared set of principles for how we build products.
When I joined CarFinance 247, I was going through my plans for how we would build a design team from scratch with Product and Technology Director Jon Wilson, talking about what kind of people we needed, what skill sets were needed, levels of experience etc.
We got onto ways of working and ensuring the quality of what goes out the door. Jon told me he'd been having a similar conversation with our Head of Engineering, Andy Kuszyk, from an engineering perspective.
I'm sure a number of you have heard of, if not come up with, design principles before. Over the years I've worked in a few medium to large companies. I am not talking IBM and I'm not talking about that oh too perfect Airbnb with their oh too perfect way of doing everything.
Design principles are great when you have a large enough number of designers that you need to start sharing a preferred, consistent way of designing products.
Our issue at CarFinance 247 was slightly different. We had one contract designer while I built the team, but developers were obviously still developing, working independently, getting code out there - site updates, product features etc.
This got me thinking. We work in cross-functional teams anyway, with designers working side by side with developers. Rather than keeping things separate, in the spirit of collaboration let's create Design AND Build Principles. At the end of the day designers, developers and product managers have the same aim: producing the best possible products for the people that will use them.
How we did it
I persuaded Andy, Head of Engineering, to help me run two quite large sessions with representatives from the whole product and tech team. Tech leads, developers, brand managers, designers, product managers etc.
In the first session we explained where we wanted to get to and the problems we wanted to overcome, also looking at examples of other companies' principles. We then, individually on Post-its, wrote words or suggestions for principles and stuck them on the wall and grouped them into themes.
The rest of the senior team and I crafted some initial principles wording from the themes and in the second session we all discussed and edited these to a point. We then defined the final wording.
We know a few of these are well-established phrases in the industry, but having them in the format below allows us to reference them in our everyday work.
- We fail fast & learn quick
- We keep it simple and iterate
- We own & deliver experiences to be proud of
We wanted to keep the principles digestible and not have lots to remember.
These design and build principles helped shape the way we produce great products at CarFinance 247
It's been amazing to see developers, product managers and data scientists quote these principles in conversation and presentations and ultimately use them to help shape the way we work.
These principles helped us as we scaled the business. I'd recommend anyone spend a few sessions coming up with your own and see if they help you and your wider teams.