Creating a Culture of Design at Filevine

UX Designers don't actually make anything at all. Instead, we help others visualize solutions and then ensure what is built meets the expectations of that vision.

My Role

I joined Filevine as Senior Director of User Experience in March of 2021. I had two key focuses: (1) Establish and direct the implementation of a design system for the Filevine application and (2) Build and direct a team of UX designers to work alongside engineering and product.

The History of Design at Filevine

Prior to my joining of Filevine, Filevine had limited to no UX discipline. While Filevine had employed one designer to work with the technology team, this designer was not able to have significant impact due to the size of the Filevine application and technology teams.

Filevine had been in operation for at least five years prior to me joining. In that time, engineering and product owners had made virtually all of the design decisions for the product. In the early days, this allowed Filevine to work quickly and build a functioning product. But as time progressed, this was causing significant problems with consistency and the overall experience.

Defining a Design Team

After joining Filevine, my first action was to create a plan for a design team. While my output for this work would be a simple headcount number, I was fully engaged in understanding the best possible ways to integrate a design team into the company and technology organization. I met with every single product owner on every team to discuss design needs, direction, and project loads. I also met with engineering leadership to determine what skill sets existed on engineering teams and where design support would be the most useful.

After these discussions, I outlined a potential team using a digital whiteboard. I took this back to technology leadership to discuss the strategy and fine-tune coverage. With more than a dozen engineering teams, we would not have the resources to hire a designer for each individual team. Instead, we needed to take a multiple-team coverage approach.

With this in mind, I also began to think about the seniority and experience for each position. I wanted a healthy mix of senior-level, mid-level, and junior-level designers. This allows for better use of resources, gives senior-level designers a space to mentor and teach, and provides ample room for growth for junior-level designers.

Finding and Hiring Talented Designers

With approval from leadership, I began to source designers. I worked closely with the recruiting team as they started to identify potential candidates. The market in early 2021 heavily favored the designers over the hiring managers. It was exceptionally difficult to find designers as so many companies were trying to hire. We were competing for a small number of designers and we had to differentiate our outreach.

We relied heavily on internal referrals and were able to bring on a number of experienced designers through technology team contacts. But even then, we still needed to find additional candidates. We spent hours on LinkedIn, design forums, and other places where potential candidates may be. Eventually we were able to source all of our roles.

We tried to avoid hiring the team in a single month. We wanted to establish the roles for our senior designers first, so we prioritized finding experienced designers early in the process and then filled in remaining roles over the coming months with junior and mid-level candidates. After 5 months, we had finally hired our entire team.

How We Added UX Designers to Established Teams

With our designers serving as shared resources across multiple teams, we kept the design team centralized and moved resources around fluidly based on the needs of engineering teams. We tried to keep designers aligned with specific teams as much as possible, but in some cases we were forced to move designers from time-to-time to completely different engineering teams.

This was a challenge for us as we were trying to establish strong relationships with the engineers. We also found that our engineering team members had a variety of communication styles. Some engineers preferred a strong, open, and collaborative relationship with designers. This style of communication allowed for a better overall process and design output, but this approach didn't work well with all of our designers. Some designers preferred a slower waterfall-style approach to work, wanting to build out large, overarching designs that engineering would break into pieces and build.

We worked closely with each team to determine how each team communicated and worked, and then gradually aligned the designers to teams that fit their communication and work styles. Eventually, we found a groove and our designers began working exceptionally well with their engineering counterparts.

As leaders, we encouraged individual contributors from engineering, product, and design to work closely together as they planned project work, researched ideas, and prepared final requirements for engineering teams. Using the Shape Up model as a guide, teams began to adopt the model and found ways to work better together through the entire process.

Top-Down Collaboration

Integrating a design team into an existing technology organization is no small task. And while we had been able to bring our designers and slot them into teams comfortably over time, I also knew I needed to establish strong relationships at the top level.

As early as I could, I established consistent 1-on-1 meetings with every engineering and product director I would be working closely with. I used these meetings to not only discuss ongoing design work, but to also build personal rappore and create a connection with each leader. These connections were important on many levels. They helped create a bond of friendship and open communication, and they also served as bridges for creating positive change across the org. With strong relationships at the leadership level, it would be easier to promote strong relationships for individual contributors.

In addition to working with other leadership, I also spent a significant amount of time evangelizing relationships with designers. I held a number of workshops and Tech Talks that addressed good design practices, collaboration, and how to use design tools like Figma and Miro.

Finally, I feel the best way to build strong relationships with others is to be open, fun, and supportive of others. As a remote employee, I prefer to join as many technology team communication channels as possible and provide positive communication and fun where possible.

Using Flexibility to Build Relationships

While using the best-possible experience and design practices is a key objective of my work, that doesn't mean it is the best place to start the influence of design. When establishing my design team, I made it extremely clear to my designers and the people we worked with that flexibility was key for us. Building strong relationships is paramount to making perfect designs, especially early on in a relationship. Designers were instructed to be flexible with requirements and implementation of design practices early and instead focus on creating relationships and building trust. Once trust was established, designers then began to tighten up on requirements and expectations as engineers better understood the role of the designers.

Expanding the Role of the Designer

With trust established at the individual contributor level and at the leadership level, designers were better able to work and function in their roles. At first, designers were delivering on requirements and providing only mock-ups of work. As time progressed, designers began to absorb more of the research work from their product owners, eventually partnering with team leads on shaping the requirements of future work and product direction.

Relationship-building is a continual process. Designers and leaders alike must work every day to create, maintain, and grow relationships with product owners and engineers.