Meeting the Expectations of Early Adopters (NDA)

Role

In my role as a Product Designer and Design Product Manager, I effectively communicated critical UX issues and presented optimal solutions to key stakeholders. By collaborating with the Engineering Project Manager, Business Strategist and the Stakeholders, I prioritised the design tasks based on the business requirements and the technical restrictions.

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Team Structure

Our team was composed of the Design Team, responsible for UX problem-solving, the Development Team which included the Engineering Project Manager and Engineering Team, and also the Business Team that provided product specifications.

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Approach

We followed a structured and interative design process that included planning, analysis and research, design and review, handoff. Each version was followed by retrospective sessions in order to improve our internal processes and suggest improvements for the next one.

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Tools & Communication

The design team was involved to the handoff to the engineers, that use Gitlab. For better task tracking, we, as a design team used Notion that also helped in setting Milestones for each version. All the designs and specific notes were stored in Figma. There was also async communication with Stakeholders regarding each design task to a different board, using Trello.

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Deliverables

In my role, I've delivered complex tasks that needed deep understanding and communication between team members. At times, creating design alternatives was needed to validate our assumptions for our users. For design effficiency and consistency of the platform, we developed a Design System from scratch and kept preserving it to help our platform be scalable.

Each version had a specific number of tasks, followed by Acceptance Criteria and User stories. During our iterative process, we ensured that we design not only for the happy path, but also for the corner cases worth-solving at the moment, while keeping all the other in a design backlog.

Building a Scalable Design System with Atomic Design Principles

As the Design System Manager of this project, I led the adoption of atomic design principles to make our designs easily scalable as the project kept growing. We broke down our design elements into reusable parts, like atoms, molecules and organisms, creating a framework for growth. This allowed us to expand our components smoothly as the project evolved, keeping everything consistent and efficient, yet also flexible and not too rigid.

By encouraging collaboration between the design and engineering team, we were able to manage and improve our design system over time, adapting to fit each new product version. Through atomic design, we organised our files and grouped elementss to improve findability, contributing to the project’s success.

Challenges and Learnings

1. Finding balance in the design system between versioning documentation and flexibility, while keeping a consistent shared language across teams.
2. Emphasising effective communication between the design and engineering team to articulate complex user problems accurately.
3. Replanning to address unforeseen edge cases within time and budget limitations, involving additional analysis and design iterations.
4. Bridging stakeholder communication gaps and aligning project scope with budget constraints.