Throughout our journey, we've encountered some obstacles. Maintaining design consistency and promoting effective collaboration has been challenging due to the lack of communication between our graphic designer and product designers until recently. We are a diverse team, and everyone brings their unique working styles and personalities to the table. Additionally, without clear objectives and success metrics for our Design Team, measuring our progress and impact within the company has been a bit of a puzzle.
Creating a Team Charter
After FarmIQ underwent a restructuring, the long-serving graphic designer moved to the Design Team, along with a newly hired product designer. This presented the perfect opportunity to collaboratively create our Design Team Charter. The process took several months and allowed us to have open and honest conversations about our strengths, weaknesses, and preferred ways of working.
Our team's charter outlines our mission, goals, roles, responsibilities, values, and communication agreements. It is a dynamic document that provides a framework to ensure everyone is aligned with our collective goals. Every three months, we review and update it to continuously improve and grow as a team.
Understanding our different personalities
We started by individually completing a 16 Personalities (MBTI) assessment, delving into our diverse personalities. As an ENFJ-A, leading a team of INFJ-T, ENFP-A, and ISFP-T, I find our diverse mix of personalities both enriching and inspiring.
With each team member bringing unique strengths and perspectives to the table, we embrace the opportunity to collaborate and innovate together. Through understanding and respecting our personality types, we strive to foster a supportive and inclusive environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best work.
Co-Creating Team Objectives
I facilitated workshops where the entire team participated by aligning the purpose of our design team with our overarching strategy outlined in FarmIQ's strategy-on-a-page and vision. This foundational step led us to recognise that our design mission inherently embodies our Design Principles. By contemplating questions such as "How do we want to positively influence our customers' and users' lives?" and "What do we aim to achieve for FarmIQ?", we honed in on the purpose of our team.
In these workshops, I ensured that each team member had a voice in shaping our collective goals and felt empowered to take ownership of our success.
Our team objectives and key results (OKRs) enable us to measure our goals and track the outcomes weekly as a team. We can now easily monitor our progress in design leadership across the company. Every three months, we evaluate our progress and present it to the entire company during our Seasonal Planning. This is important as it allows us to showcase all the essential behind-the-scenes work that the Design Team does to ensure the overall success of our product.
We reviewed FarmIQ's purpose and vision which led us to create our Design Team's Mission
Our Design Team objectives & measures of success I presented at Spring 24 Seasonal Planning
Implementing Design Consistency Practices
To promote a highly collaborative team dynamic, we need to stay updated on each other's workloads. To achieve this, we have established two recurring meetings that take place several times a week. These sessions help us stay on the same page and make it easier to make necessary adjustments to our priorities, workloads, and design processes.
Our weekly Design Jams give us the chance to tackle challenges and come up with solutions together as a team. These sessions take place three times a week and encourage collaboration, creativity, and problem-solving among our Product Designers. We also have a weekly Design Team Meetup where we discuss company updates, talk about team goals, and focus on graphic design aspects that affect us all, such as our external website or new iconography styles.
I've been leading the development of Design Libraries, with our Graphic Designer set to follow suit. Our libraries revolve around collaborative efforts, striving for best practices, and ensuring the success of our applications by enabling a seamless user experience. This initiative perfectly aligns with the ethos of our team.
Results
At FarmIQ, we have successfully built a cohesive and effective design team by creating a team charter, understanding our team's personalities, and co-creating design objectives. These initiatives enhanced our collaboration and design consistency, and ensured that we measured and celebrated our progress.
This case study highlights the importance of structured team development and the positive impact it can have on both team dynamics and company outcomes.
Work completed whilst at FarmIQ