How to work with digital designers and developers

“It doesn’t make a sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do” — Steve Jobs.

Suppose there is an initiative to build a conference website. For sure you have a need of designer and developer skillset. The question here is that:

What’s your roadmap? What’s your job and what’s their? How to reduce needless complexity and tremendous details on product building flow?, How can you reduce workgroup communication issues up front?, What’s the best possible way to don’t have an illusion of agreements?

STEP 1

Concept creation— WHY to WHAT. You have to know things before you will invite talents to the table. Yes, it will be good to invite designers and developers to work with you to help you allocate and filter valuable information and initiate right product building roadmap.

1. Always be questioning: “What problem are we solving?” “Are we adding value?”, “Is this feature actual painkiller or is it just cool?”, “Whats the core(MVP) experience?”, “Will this change behavior and transform experiences?”, “Is this additional piece of information significantly going to change/improve behavior?” “Is there an easier way without losing common experience?”
2. Focus on what doesn’t change, the core. You don’t want to worry about the details too early. The longer it takes to develop something the less likely you’ll launch it — every feature has it’s time and communication cost. You don’t have to worry about things that don’t matter yet. There is an abundance of easy problems that need to be solved. Optimize for now. Don’t worry too much about what might happen. Focus on today. Assume that you are good at course correction, if not be one. You don’t do products that take months and years. Just make a dent in several weeks. Release the core flow first. Might find out that’s all you really needed to do. The second half may have been the wrong feedback anyway. Cut your scope way back. Yes, the first version of something should be barely releasable. Down the road, if they want to add those things back or add something valuable, you can iterate, iterate, iterate.
3. Get rid of abstractions. There is a high risk to get into an illusion of agreement. Everyone can read the same paragraph and think you agree. Keep in mind the distractions and the time spent on illusions of agreement. Get in the habit of asking yourself and those involved, How can we make this real? That will push you to find better ways to accomplish your goals. Don’t do projections like financial projections. Break big projects into as many small projects. Create a roadmap where the solution is short and there’s excitement and it’s a short weeks project and it leaves people in excited mode. Repeat this pattern for next release and you work happily. Client work doesn’t have to be depressing. It’s really easy to be a great client if you are great.
4. Written communication is a key. “There is no way to write a six-page narratively structured memo and not have a clear thinking”- Jef Bezos. Moreover, on this, written communication to engineering is superior [to verbal] because it is more consistent…, it is more lasting, it raises accountability. Ben Horwitz. Enough, right?. Here you can find resources to document a Digital Product right way.

STEP 2

Concept building —WHAT to HOW

People assume they’re talking about the same thing — until they realize that what on the same table, what one side sees 6 and the other — 9. Both of them are right and well experienced in their field. How many times has this happened to you? It is way easy to get into 6:9 situations and one of the reason is that there are very few people who have a capacity to see the future — people see what they expect to see. Well, the more you learn to see things, there is a high chance to lose your “common eye”, the eye you ___ for/with. Thank about it for a minute. Yes, sketching out your ideas can fix your team’s communication issues.

Moreover, instead of describing what something looks like, draw it. Do you think you can’t? I know that you can. Can you quickly sketch Twitter main page on a paper? Of course yes. Can you sketch Airbnb landing page? I mean with real texts, elements, boxes, containers. Of course, you can sketch the apartment page from Airbnb, right? I mean, can you focus and redraw and place information on A4 likely the same as it is on the page? Of course, you can. Well, if you know well what you want, what makes you say that you can’t transfer it to a sketch drawing? We have just unlocked that potential in you, it was there. If you want to improve your eye and pattern reception, for sure you can do this for every platform you like and even deeply focus on flows, copy, typography, etc and etc. Even more, read this article if you have an idea to design digital products, and asking me what's next?. Good thing is that on this part of work, all group members are involved because I assume they know what and have a critical, strategic mindset. all you need on this stage is not where search button or social media icons could be placed. Focus here to create a core of the concept.

With designer help, you can transform paper sketches to clean black/white wireframes with a right flow and a half-right copy. You don’t have to have comments with colors at this stage and slow the process, right?. You can create it in several work meetings with a workgroup. People from any disciplines love this process. Personally, I have done this with members of parliaments, judges and C-level people of enterprise sector many times. Literally, every time I have done this, they are stoked, because, in their life, they couldn't imagine that they would have that much involvement in digital product creation. After this, they trust you in anything, because the right people know their work and values others. Those one, who wants much involvement on the things what is after that, they are not professionally good people. Simply you can tell them that, for sure we both agree that Steve Jobs was right when he said that it doesn’t make a sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. You have to hire smart people so they can tell what to do. Always works. Easy.

As you always document things through this process from the first minute — ideas, initiatives, dos and don’ts, you have to create one shared simple doc where will be presented and describe elements of every page with a right copy. When I am saying simple, it means, really simple. One page about the project, one page about people and then information architecture description of pages and flows. Read all these resources to document a Digital Product right way.

STEP 3

Product building

You have to work closely with designers and developers in order to reduce needless complexity and save time. Before their work will start, they know the product, they know core pages (the others is an industry standard and same behavior pattern), copy and flow. Tell the designer that you are expecting from her/him drafts, not a final product. Ask them in general what’s was general thinking behind designing these elements and containers this way? Tell that, you will do this with her/him. They will give you the best work.

A-Ha, developers! When should you start meeting with developers? Show don’t tell. Love them, all of them. They love the way I work with them. When in my early years I have had an opportunity to work with 100+ devs at the same time during hackathons, my mindset enrichment speed skyrocketed. What they actually have from me? Simple product doc where most of the core functionally things are already agreed. That’s all they need to jump into the code. You can start work on back-end development before all pages and elements get colored because you already have a doc where core things, even functionalities are described well. Tell them exactly the same two sentence upfront what you have to say to designers and they will give you the best work.

At the end of the front-end work, the team has to take a week and test every possible functional occasion and interaction.

If you will work with people who have a high accountability and productivity rate, you will get unbelievable results in unbelievable short time and at the end of the project, you will leave every person in excited mode.

Personally, I have had an opportunity to do all this naturally more than 2 years as a solo — I don’t know the right title — product designer & product manager on to medium to large scale products. It is possible. Before you will hire an independent person or an agency, have in mind what I have shared with you here.

This year, I delegated many layers of this and have built a team of A-class Product thinkers and doers with a mission of wealth creation for people, with people by designing habit formatting digital products and lobby for experience transformations. We will be the next IDEO of the software world. Yes, we have everything to be 70% sure on this.

At first, I wrote this article to share with an internal Code for All civic-design community and later I decided to share it publicly to help even more to know more. My core work culture is from

, , from them I have learned many. Because I am not a native in English, I have used some part of sentences from their article or change wordings on sentences to clearly express and share what I wanted to say to the people who are interested in to know how to work with digital designers and developers.