Increasing project velocity by introducing multidisciplinary micro-teams

Global Manufacturing and Engineering Company, Platform Creation, Munich 2020

the problem

Creating a unified B2B platform

A global manufacturing and engineering company wanted to build the digital future of the manufacturing business by creating a unified B2B platform that integrated ecommerce, support, marketing and brand content. With over 150 people comprising the team, this project was like driving a bus at warp speed.

my role

Leading the design of pivotal pages

Leading a team of 3 experience designers, I was in charge of three key areas within the new platform: product detail page, product recommendation, and the product comparison tool. I was in charge of delivering holistic templates complete with technical annotations including all error cases.

creating Microteams

Cutting delivery time for validated concepts from 1 month to 1 week

It became evident early-on that the challenges we faced as a design team were lengthy: undefined requirements, a multidisciplinary team of 150 spanning 53 countries, and we needed to deliver a clean UI without losing any information and functions for our various user groups and needs. We have all been there: meeting after meeting with various tracks trying to understand what is to be done and having no time to actually do whatever you are supposed to be doing. I quickly pulled the breaks and requested a classic agile team reorg with one small tweak: the design would be the core of the conversation. To elaborate- we had bi-weekly team meetings where all tracks were focused on the user-centered design output. This small tweek allowed our agile team to work cohesively together to clarify the requirements for the end goal of a user-centered product. In the end, every single piece of information that we placed into the design templates had been vigorously scrutinized and validated by all teams involved: visual design, business analysts, backend/frontend dev teams, and UX . We increased the speed at which we were able to deliver templates and annotations to development teams, but we were able to deliver more confident designs at 4x the speed.