At The Options Clearing Corporation, employees work across multiple offices or remotely. That makes in-person collaboration rare.
Despite this, developers and designers at OCC communicate frequently about the projects and programs on which they collaborate. Instead of off-the-cuff office chats or meetings crowded in a conference room, team members leverage technology to facilitate conversations.
“While most don’t want more meetings on their calendar, we find that blocking a dedicated time helps foster collaboration,” said Sonya Caffrey, director of software engineering: UI/UX.
All of OCC’s online communication channels also allow for commenting and feedback so designers and developers can leave annotations or thoughts on designs and standards.
Though designers and developers operate on separate teams, they are unified in one goal: bringing a unique product with a strong user experience to life. Collaboration and communication is essential to do that.
To collaborate and communicate effectively — especially when giving criticism or praise — OCC relies on a design system, which establishes standards for the UX and development processes. Standards upon which to align and collaborate provide a common ground and goals that cross-functional team members can use to more effectively perform their jobs — and grow in their careers. Revisiting these standards regularly ensures team buy-in and any necessary updates.
“Our design system community, which might include developers, designers or product owners, meets monthly to highlight topics that require further discussion or collaboration,” Caffrey explained.
OCC’s design system doesn’t stand alone. At Morningstar, the design system is an “overarching link” between developers and designers, UX Design Manager Courey Gruszauskas said.
“There’s real chutzpah behind helping that system thrive on both ends,” Gruzsauskas said.
When those systems thrive, so do the user experience and the final product that are realized through teamwork. Built In Chicago sat down with Caffrey, Gruszauskas and other user experience leaders to learn their secrets to successful collaboration between designers and developers.
Morningstar ’s solutions help investors explore new opportunities, take on market volatility and deliver empowering client experiences. Investment professionals can find data, insights and research tailored to their work that can help them grow their businesses.
What kind of communication channels or collaborative strategies does Morningstar use to facilitate communication between your design and engineering teams?
Communication and collaboration strategies vary from team to team, but that’s actually the beauty of it. Our design and engineering teams are empowered to create ways of working that fit their needs. Collaboration runs the gamut from shared planning ceremonies to hands-on design and coding sessions and everything in between. And lots of Teams chats. Lots.
The gist here is that design and engineering come together to figure out how to get their best work done, and if something isn’t cutting it, they’re given the runway to make changes. That autonomy and ownership make our approaches successful.
Design and engineering come together to figure out how to get their best work done, and if something isn’t cutting it, they’re given the runway to make changes.”
How does Morningstar’s culture foster the kind of collaborative relationship required to make the two teams successful?
Our design and engineering teams are both heavily involved with our design system and how it evolves over time. That spans its day-to-day application in our products and how it can continue to grow to meet larger needs. It’s more than a reflection of our brand. It’s our design and engineering principles brought to life, and it requires the bandwidth and brainpower of both teams to work. That shared ownership helps create a stronger bond between teams.
What advice would you offer to other companies looking to build alignment between the two teams?
Listen. Don’t assume you know what works, let your designers and engineers tell you. Give them the space to talk it out with each other, try new things, fail, learn from that failure and try something else. It’s worth the time and effort to get this right.
The Options Clearing Corporation clears and settles trades for the options industry. It delivers risk management, clearing and settlement services for financial products like standard options, stock loans and futures contracts.
What kind of communication channels or collaborative strategies does OCC use to facilitate communication between your design and engineering teams?
We leverage people, process and technology to collaborate across teams. OCC embraces Agile methodology for organizing work into product areas. We’re currently working on a large initiative where many product teams are delivering functionality to a new technology platform. The UX team ensures that technology is consistent and user-friendly. To do this, we built a design system from which design, product and engineering can work, and we centralized UX talent to one team and embedded some UX team members onto product teams.
There’s a lot of collaboration that must happen between the central UX team that defines the standards and the product teams that implement the standards. One of the most effective ways to ensure collaboration is through virtual meetings. The team regularly meets to discuss and review work in progress and the defined standards. It allows everyone a seat at the table and includes developers and designers. We use technology tools to capture collaboration, such as online chat or online whiteboarding where everyone can contribute. However, nothing beats the ability to show your work and ask questions of your peers in real time.
How does OCC’s company culture foster the kind of collaborative relationship required to make the two teams successful?
OCC organizes events to bring employees together, and our Employee Network Groups (ENGs) also organize events to further our diversity, equity and inclusion goals. These are opportunities for people to meet in person or virtually with peers and allies, which truly fosters a culture of inclusion.
What advice would you offer to other companies looking to build alignment between the two teams?
Every person on the team is a user of technology and has their own personal user bias, which means that individuals start from a certain viewpoint and develop a solution or design a great user experience based on that bias. Acknowledging user bias at the outset is important to the team culture. Managing expectations around this and allowing opinions to flow into design is crucial to help everyone feel included.
It’s key for leadership to understand this and have a vision of delivering an application that users can easily use. Once UX is a priority for the organization, user-centered design becomes an expectation for design and delivery teams.
Once UX is a priority for the organization, user-centered design becomes an expectation for design and delivery teams.”
Establishing standards vetted by users, following industry best practices and capturing competitive analysis allow our team to build consistent and usable applications that work for our user community. Bring everyone to the table and then set a standard — in a design system if you can — validate with your user community and adjust as necessary. This will align teams to each other and on the goal of delivering a great user experience.
SRAM builds bicycle components like shifters, derailleurs, chains, suspension and power meters. Its products enhance the cycling experience, and SRAM’s footprint spans the globe, from local roads and to famed mountain trails.
What kind of communication channels or collaborative strategies does your company use to facilitate communication between your design and engineering teams?
First and foremost, designers and engineers are allocated to "Pods," which are teams charged with ownership of specific products they work on week-over-week. This creates a concrete sense of roles and responsibilities and keeps the communication loop low in complexity. What helps make this team structure successful is the operating system the team works under, which is a scrum agile methodology. Work is tightly scoped and communication loops are frequent and low friction. Being in-person helps, but we also have communication software like Slack and Teams to help facilitate conversations as they pop up.
How does SRAM’s culture foster the kind of collaborative relationship required to make the two teams successful?
SRAM has an open-door style of work where teams interact on a daily basis. We’re not overly meeting-heavy with individual contributors, which allows for ad hoc communications to happen early and often. Daily rituals like standup are effective at putting the right people together to work on that day’s issues. It’s up to leaders to support this collaboration and advocate for teamwork and communication. As a leader, carve out ample time for teams to collaboratively incept and perform discovery around a given body of work. With much of the understanding of a space out of the way, design and engineering efforts easily fall into place.
What advice would you offer to other companies looking to build alignment between the two teams?
Your company has to have a clear operating system for conducting product development whether it be scrum, kanban or whatever. Without strong opinions about process and an understanding of and adherence to that process, chaos will ensue, and it will be hard to onboard people, change direction and most notably, produce results.
Make sure you have people on the team who can facilitate conversations by being intentional about the type of communication they’re seeking. Are you making decisions? Solving problems? Building a team? Brainstorming? Checking in? Leaders who know how to frame the context for a meeting and what types of meetings need to happen will create a better experience for participants and negotiate effective alignment.
Product development is a team sport, and it’s time to retire the notion that good tech or UX revolves around geniuses and ideologues.”
Check the egos at the door. Product development is a team sport, and it’s time to retire the notion that good tech or UX revolves around geniuses and ideologues. The more people can leverage the collective talent of their team within a clearly defined process and meeting culture, the more they will win at alignment.
FourKites helps its 1,200 customers enhance and digitize their supply chains and ensure their shipments reach customers efficiently and sustainably.
What kind of communication channels or collaborative strategies does FourKites use to facilitate communication between your design and engineering teams?
The FourKites design group leverages our own design material for any communication. Our prototypes often become the anchor points for any communication, especially with customers. This gives everyone, including engineering and product management, more context around what we are trying to solve in the product space and how we aim to scale and sustain our platform for the future. That means anyone in our company can be a representative when face-to-face with customers.
We share ownership of our products with aligned goals and measured design deliverables, and that makes us successful. These are the key components that keep our teams harmonious in the long journey together.
How does FourKites’ culture foster the kind of collaborative relationship required to make the two teams successful?
We stay very close to the engineering and product groups by nature. We promote collaborating to get more clarity in direction and commitment. We constantly review our aligned vision to share and welcome any changes because we embrace evolution before committing to revolution. And everyone regularly gives positive feedback and compliments on what we can build together today and tomorrow that we couldn’t yesterday. Our design team appreciates how open the engineering team is to design proposals that are aspirational, and designers fully understand there will be adjustments to get the product close to reality.
We embrace evolution before committing to revolution.”
We recently collaborated on concepts to improve our Dynamic Yard map builder and port congestion and ETA management solution. We learned so much about future challenges, and we are vigilantly finding efficient ways to address them and figure out prospective designs from this effort. This is the essence of our culture: We don’t always expect to find one simple answer, but we will diligently generate ways to get to the end goal. We don’t do it to seek credit but to share ownership and feel pride for what we do day-to-day at FourKites.
What advice would you offer to other companies looking to build alignment between the two teams?
It’s overlooked how teams’ goals are actually unintentionally aligned, but everyone can have different perspectives in making progress. We should remind ourselves that all of us are in this together, so we need to focus on collaboration and remove objects that distract us from moving forward.
From the design and user experience perspective, we must focus on scalability and sustainability in the long run. The nature of our product requires a lot of iterations, but we never veer from the path of our core foundation. The key to success is to continually share the evolution of our vision and to fully commit to skillfully bringing it to life.