A Remote “Hot Potato” Design Process

My team has an aggressive deadline this year and I have no idea how we’re gonna get everything done.

Dialpad is over 1,000 people. As much as we’d like to think we’re agile, waterfall processes have crept in. I hear the term “handoff” more than I’d like. Our engineers are used to having final designs before they start writing code.

I don’t think that’s gonna cut it with the deadlines we have this year.

One of the things I love about a mid-sized company is that we’re large enough to have a sizable impact, but small enough not to be constantly bogged down by politics and process. We’re small enough that processes can realistically be changed.

So I’m trying to change our product development process a bit.

I’ve been thinking about what Dan Mall describes as a hot potato process:

My team is remote, so we can’t walk by someone’s desk or grab a conference room to jam with our developers. We have to be a little more intentional about sharing in-progress work.

Here are a few tactics we’re using:

Start lo-fi

For design it means talking through workflows to give others an idea of how we might approach a design, and sharing rough wireframes and clickthroughs to illustrate early and incomplete thoughts.

For engineering it means surfacing known technical constraints, and sharing unstyled but working code.

Video walk throughs

For design it means walking through an unfinished Miro or Figma file to show how a design might work, and surface pros and cons of different approaches.

For engineering it means showing specific parts of a design in action so folks can see how things feel as they start coming together.

Regular reviews

For design it means inviting engineers to design critique so they may question and influence the design.

For engineering it means doing milestone demos and allowing time to polish a design before it goes live, and creating preview links so folks can test beta versions of a feature.

When done consistently, tactics like these prevent both designers and engineers from spending too much time on the wrong thing. It’s easy to disappear for remote folks to disappear days at a time, but things tend to move quicker when we shorten feedback loops.

That’s my hope anyway. We’ll have to check back in a few months to see how it’s playing out.

Until then ✌️

Stray Links 🧶

Someone travelled around the world asking people to show him their favorite dance moves. Guaranteed to make you smile.

I spent a long time playing with this interactive map about how opinions about global warming vary state by state in the US.

I love the idea of one question surveys. Quick to set up and easy enough that folks might actually complete them.

The talks from Parcel Unpacked on online, including one from your truly on design strategy.

The AI Research Lab at Meta is predominantly staffed by women, bucking the ‘boys club’ notion in tech.

Thanks I hate it: Bitcoin mining in the US now accounts for over 2% of the country’s consumption.

Gun violence in the United States saw a record decline last year, though to be fair the bar was incredibly low to start it. Still, good news!

Last year 10 people were killed in unprovoked shark attacks, making sharks less deadly than lawn mowers, ladders, and champagne corks. But guess which one of those things got a whole article on ABC news. If it bleeds, it leads.

Jobs from teams I admire

Dialpad is hiring multiple roles in product design, engineering, and marketing. Reply if you’re interested!

Wealthfront is hiring a Senior Staff Content Designer 💰190k-250k, 🇺🇸 US only

GitHub is hiring a Staff Product Designer 💰$118k - $313k, 🌎 Remote

Smartsheet is hiring a Sr. Product Design Manager 🌎 Remote

Thanks for reading ✌️
- Ted (@tedgoas)