These days, most online users know when a website or software is lacking good design at first glance. A poorly designed user experience can feel clunky and confusing — with a bit of nostalgia for simpler times.
Design is an often overlooked cornerstone of a great product, but the reality is that UX design is essential to the development process. Good UX creates a sense of ease that brings users back time and again.
Businesses that invest in UX earlier in the conceptual phase of product development shorten their development cycles by 33 to 55 percent, according to a report from Strategic Data Consulting. Finding creative ways to integrate product experts with design experts is the name of the game when launching a well-designed product quickly.
Today’s product teams face the challenge of bringing an additional degree of rigor to their launches by incorporating UX principles and testing into the earliest stages of development. While this is no easy task, Built In NYC looked to two great recent product launches where design and product worked collaboratively to great success: Justworks and Ro. Built In NYC got the chance to check in with both teams to see how they rose to the challenge with their product launches.
Justworks is a cloud-based software platform that gives businesses easy access to corporate-level benefits, automated payroll, HR tools, and compliance support — all in one place.
Tell us about a recent launch that heavily relied on successful collaboration between your product and design teams. How did you align on goals? How did your team rise to the challenge?
We launched a new feature last year, “Expenses,” an expense management tool within the Justworks platform, which quickly became a best-in-class example of collaboration among our product teams and co-creation with our customers.
Our product design team led user interviews to discover pain points and areas of opportunity small business leaders face when managing expense reports. With these findings, our product and engineering teams identified short and long-term goals to solve the unmet needs we uncovered.
We also found an opportunity to expand our working group to our mobile product team. We launched version one to a cohort of customers to pressure test functionality and design. Desktop and mobile product engineers created a seamless experience in our platform, which allows teams to track expenses on the go, snapping pictures of receipts and submitting expense reimbursement requests right from their phone. We also made over 10 other enhancements based on this customer cohort’s feedback.
From the initial product design-led interviews to product management, engineering and customer feedback along the way, we brought a solution to market that we genuinely built with our customers.
What strategies underpin your product and design collaboration?
Create open communication lines. We gather an initial group of stakeholders, which may evolve throughout the project, and we set up regular brainstorms, check-ins and opportunities to pressure test ideas and share knowledge and milestones.
Leverage design thinking throughout the project. We encourage our teams to approach their work with empathy for the small businesses we serve. Maintaining this customer-centric lens allows cross-functional teams to solve problems with “design thinking,” which essentially means we’re not married to one solution at the start of the project. Rather, we’re gathering information from our customers and testing different approaches before selecting our path.
Establish a straightforward documentation system. We’ve found that setting reporting milestones from the beginning of a project is crucial for success. At these checkpoints, we only document the most essential options, with a clear ask for what needs feedback, and we identify opportunities to garner customer feedback. This propels us forward, allows us to map key decisions to a timeline very easily, and helps us maintain our customer-centric approach throughout the entire project.
What advice would you give to product teams that want to keep design at the heart of their work? What lessons have you learned along the way?
For product teams to be truly successful, they have to be wholeheartedly customer-centric. This allows us to prioritize design with the customer top of mind. In other words, by understanding user needs and behaviors and how they evolve, the product roadmap will be squarely focused on developing products and features for current and future customer bases.
For product teams to be truly successful, they have to be wholeheartedly customer-centric.
Collaboration across teams is key, and cultivating an empathetic and iterative environment allows for creativity. We’re always coming back to the core question, “What products and features will help small businesses grow with confidence?” and we’re always aiming for our cross-functional teams to answer it collaboratively, empathetically, and creatively.
Ro is a direct-to-patient healthcare company providing high-quality, affordable healthcare.
Tell us about a recent launch that heavily relied on successful collaboration between your product and design teams. How did you align on goals? How did your team rise to the challenge?
The launch of Ro’s expanded GLP-1 offering — a type of medicine used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity — in Q4 2023 required the collaboration of nearly every department at Ro — from design, product, clinical, legal, operations and marketing. To successfully design, build and launch this offering to patients, we needed to understand and solve problems across the entire end-to-end experience including the experiences of our patients, clinicians, patient support team members, and pharmacists.
Next, we spun up a cross-functional team to swarm on the problem of certain GLP-1 medication shortages causing a lack of patient access. Design and product collaborated by outlining the end-to-end user experience from how a patient would hear about Ro’s offering and want to switch their treatment, to how a provider would review the patient’s information, how the pharmacy would verify the medication using our fulfillment platform and how our patient support team would provide ongoing care.
To overcome challenges, we focused on two core things: transparent communication and maintaining focus on patient value. We did this by knowing when to diverge versus converge, being transparent about progress, and staying ruthlessly committed to the patient’s experience.
What strategies underpin your product and design collaboration?
Build strong relationships. Successful collaboration starts with a strong and trusted relationship, built on a mutual understanding that we care more about getting it right than being right — this is one of Ro’s principles. Tactically, this is understanding, and having empathy for, your team members. What motivates them? Why do they work in product and design? What’s their preferred communication and feedback style?
Understand the shared responsibility. Successful products are a result of successful collaboration, which includes knowing how and when to collaborate. The strongest designers and product teams see their roles like a Venn diagram, recognizing shared responsibility as opposed to only the points of handoff. Tactically, this may look like having a project kickoff with a defined problem, hypotheses, RACI, consolidated open questions and more.
Respect the areas of expertise. Design’s superpower is translating that shared understanding into something usable and delightful. We dedicate time to reviewing our progress; one tool we use is 30-60-90 percent reviews, where we increase design fidelity as we increase our understanding and confidence. This allows designers to get the right level of feedback at the right time.
What advice would you give to product teams that want to keep design at the heart of their work? What lessons have you learned along the way?
Design is much more than the output or the artifact, but its quality is often determined by the visual representation of the work. Design is the culmination of many micro-decisions made through understanding, ideating, testing and refining. However, we have one artifact — the experience — that represents the work through form and function. For design to be at the heart, we need to start with a clearly defined problem. Then, designers need to understand why that problem exists, what’s causing the problem to occur and what hypotheses we have that could reduce or eliminate the problem.
For design to be at the heart, we need to start with a clearly defined problem.
I’ve learned there is no substitute for understanding your users. To successfully advocate for them, we need to understand them through research, and testing. I’ve learned to be comfortable with my assumptions being proven wrong. It’s all part of the process. I’ve learned the most from the assumptions that have been proven wrong, both by successfully avoiding unnecessary risk and by ensuring we made decisions based on our patient’s reality, not our own.
