During the “Design Thinking” era, we tried to stretch the boundaries of that scope as wide as possible. What we found was that this type of influence is zero-sum: the more we have, the less other functions get. Wherever design could even get the “seat at the table,” keeping it became the work of corporate politics rather than craft.
Design is once again going through an era of transition. As tools, frameworks, and organizations evolve, we need to decide: what role do we want to pursue? And are we willing to stop designing to get it?
I wrestled with this question for years. But at Justworks, I found another way — one that I think can be a model for our field as a whole.
Subject matter expertise isn’t enough to solve system-level frictions
What makes designing at Justworks unique is that the app is only a part of the whole. While the self-service experience is appropriate for meeting customers’ simple needs, their complex needs are most effectively satisfied by customer-facing specialists. Each domain where Justworks offers a solution (payroll, tax, benefits, and so on) has its own experts, with their own tools.
But to our customers, Justworks is one service. The typical Justworks customer journey flows across all of these verticals; the user experience is not only engaging with each domain, but also transitioning between domains — both on the front-end and in the back-office workflows. To the customer, those transitions can feel like friction — seams in the experience.
But there is another type of seam that impacts the customer experience: transition between the service layers. Every transition between self-service and full service comes with its own frictions. And yet these transitions can’t simply be avoided: if human operators can temporarily close the gaps in the end-to-end customer journey, product teams can deliver keystone features sooner.
But without making a deliberate effort to revisit these decisions(opens in a new tab), temporary solutions have a way of becoming permanent. Teams may be tempted to write off these pains as the cost of doing business, and continue shipping new features without considering the experience as a whole.
When I joined Justworks, I was not an expert in any of its solution domains. But in a way, that lack of subject matter expertise was an asset. Instead of doubling down on one domain, my expertise was in designing the holistic customer journey. And that was the problem that I was there to solve.
Doing this work helped me see that what I once saw as the trade-off between designing and leading didn’t need to be a trade-off at all. The zero-sum game was not the only game in town.
There is more to influence than just decision ownership
To date, the product triad(opens in a new tab) is the tech industry’s most successful attempt to delineate ownership between designers, developers, and PMs. It does so by subdividing the scope of the product team: taking the decisions that the team as a whole owns, and handing them out based on role.
The triad’s vertical focus on one product, a finite set of touchpoints, is helpful. It ensures that all the necessary decisions are made, and get carried out. But the set of decisions that the team owns is always going to be finite. Anywhere that intents compete (such as between viability and desirability) one option must always give way.
These explicit, intentional decisions often feel the most salient. There are entire ceremonies dedicated to assigning ownership and resolving disagreements. But these obvious decisions are in the minority of all the decisions that a product team ends up making.
For every explicit commitment to “do this, not that” there are dozens of seemingly insignificant decisions that are made unintentionally. Typically, these decisions will be about the fringes of the team’s scope, between the mandates of two different teams. Because these decisions are out of the spotlight, teams only catch them — if they get noticed at all — late in the product delivery lifecycle. By that point, the decision has already been made for them, in the negative space between everything else they explicitly chose to do. The seams between areas of ownership accrue more and more friction.
No one sat down and designed the experience that way. The decisions that shaped it weren’t made by a person. They were made by your process, by default. But because no one owned it, these decisions slipped past standard systems of review.
The reasoning (or lack thereof) behind these decisions doesn’t matter to your user. All they know is that the experience doesn’t meet their needs. And as long as these parts of the experiences are considered outside of formal vertical areas of ownership, they will never get caught, and they will never get fixed.
Fortunately, there is a cure for these gaps in ownership. That cure is Design.
One of Design’s most important contributions to a product team is to surface these unintentional decisions, and fill the gaps between mandates. When user journeys flow across features and product verticals, so does Design’s responsibility. It’s because we are responsible for the experience as a whole that we are the most likely to spot these silent decisions that didn’t make it onto the explicit list of requirements, yet still shape the experience of the seams.
When we bring them to our colleagues’ attention, we expand the whole team’s mandate. The game stops being zero-sum. The decisions become intentional. The seams begin to close.
Design an environment in which good design is possible
This is what design strategy without colliding with PMs can look like. No other function can replicate this function, because it comes from a practice; a mindset, rather than an artifact or a tool.
The reason I joined Justworks was that the Experience Design org clearly understood this. It was apparent from the beginning: subject matter expertise in HR wasn’t listed a requirement for the role, because the work wasn’t envisioned as a tug-of-war over ownership. My challenge would not be pushing a Design Vision through a reluctant group of stakeholders, but in bringing to light the questions that the company did not yet know it should be asking.
Justworks at-large also understands the value of a horizontal, experience-driven model of decision-making. The push for closing the seams between the product’s features came alongside a broader reorganization from vertical, domain-based orgs to horizontal, functional ones. Rather than fight Conway’s Law, we are turning it into a tailwind.
Experience Design is at the forefront of this change. The org pivoted from an embedded model into a centralized team, that could effectively shine a light into the spaces between existing intents. This is a transformation that is still ongoing, but it resonates with one of my most firmly held beliefs: before you can do good design, you must first design an environment in which design is possible. That environment must allow design to lean into its strengths, without ceding its seat at the table.
