02 / 07
Cross-Functional Team

The ACCUROgo project was the first time that we worked as a cross-functional team. So, it was quite a big change for every team member on their mindset and the new collaboration workflow. We adopt agile and sprint methodology. More importantly, we moved from the old school requirement first culture to a more user-driven culture.
As a designer, I had the opportunity to collaborate very closely with various roles, such as the Business Analyst, Product Manager, Product Owner, User Researcher, Technical Architect, Developers, QAs, etc. But we do have many challenges during the transition process.
ā
In 2019, I had the pleasure of participating in the NN/g Nielsen Norman Group Training for the specific topic of

Challenge 01 - Gaps in Collaboration
Before working in a cross-functional team, people tend to just focus on their own work driven by requirements. They don't need to know what other people are doing. With the new way of collaboration, every team member needs to understand what each role is supposed to do and the general workflow.
However, we don't have a clear document to define that. Most time, our brilliant product owner(PO) stands in the middle and communicates with everyone to fill the gaps to drive the project forward. But this makes him super busy and tired.

What IĀ Did
As a designer, I am not just focusing on product design. I take design as a way for problem-solving. So, as a team member, I am always observing and thinking about optimizing the workflow to make the collaboration more smoothly and efficiently. So I created a workflow chart and collaborated with the PO to refine it. I documented the general process and all the corresponding meetings on the key points. Also include different roles in the chart. With this information design, it's more straightforward for team members to understand the bigger picture and where they fit in this process. That helps to fill the gaps in the collaboration.

Challenge 02 - Design Managment and Delivery
I was the first designer in our company to adopt Figma as the primary design tool in an actual project. Before Figma, we used Sketch for design and Zeplin for design delivery. Figma combines these two and allows people to work online in the same file. This was not accepted by many people initially.
With a big canvas in Figma, where the designer may put all the different design versions together, quickly navigating to the right design is challenging. Also, in our collaboration with developers, they are already familiar with the way how Zeplin works. The design delivery in Figma is not static images as to how Zeplin does. So the design may get changed sometimes. That's where devs always complain.
During that time, Figma was not the mainstream, and there was no big community. I have to explore the solutions and find the best practices to optimize the design management and the design delivery processes.

What I Did
Initially, we had all the features in one design file in Figma. That makes it hard to navigate and even takes a long time to load the whole file. I started to separate all these key features and put them individually in their own file. This makes it much easier for developers to find the right design.
I also invented the tags mark to indicate the design status. So developers only need to focus on the designs with 'FINISHED' and ignore the others. The 'FINISHED' tag means the design has been reviewed and finalized, and the designer will not change it.
Later, as we put each feature into a single file, I invented a new file template to make it even better and also include other key sections like 'Light/Dark Theme', 'Multi-Devices', 'Tablet', etc. By doing this, designers could keep iterating the design concepts in a safe area while developers could implement the confirmed design without any worry.

Product Design Process In Cross-Functional Team
In the overarching product design process, we typically have two main focuses. Product concepting and implementation. As a product designer, I collaborated with different roles in both focus areas.
Concepting
For each feature of ACCUROgo, we typically began with user research, and UX research. This would encompass practices such as defining User Personas, establishing User Journey Maps, drafting User Stories, and so forth. Additionally, I would also perform research on a variety of different UX patterns. We involved various stakeholders first hand, to ensure that problems were well understood from multiple perspectives.
Depending on the complexity of the work, we also invested in establishing clear Information Architecture. From there, I would often jump into Figma to create high level mockups and wireframes. For this project, the UI work also happened in parallel. The continued investment in a design system largely reduced the time I spent in repetitive UI designs.
The next step we took in our iteration cycle was to perform User Testing to validate the design concepts and gather key feedback. I would work closely with our Senior UX Researcher, Product Manager, and Product Owner on this and prepared the Prototype in a timely manner to enable the user testing of the concept. Following the user testing process, I would iterate based on feedback to refine the product UX and UI to its polished state.
Production
Once in production, the designs required to be mostly finalized with refined specifications, so that developers can begin to implement the UI and functionality. It was also crucial for developers to be involved earlier in the concepting stage, so that they became familiar with the technical direction and were able to begin building early on with adequate context and awareness.
In this production cycle, as the designer I often played a supporting role to rapidly design any missing parts identified, and adjust the designs as new discoveries were made.
Once the product is built, I also worked closely with QA and Product Management to ensure the product was created as expected, and any identified design bugs or improvement opportunities were flagged and prioritized for future iterations.
This is a basic description of the workflow. In reality, we could have many features running in parallel, and it's essential for me to be adaptable and jump between these two focus areas as needed, while continuously zooming in and out to work on detailed designs whilst also considering the bigger picture of product strategy.

What I Learned In Cross-Functional Team
Working in a cross-functional team aided me to step back from the area of design, and encouraged me to think more about the product from a bigger picture and higher level. I began to think more broadly, considering factors beyond the product design, such as investing to support the team and cross-functional process to become more efficient and build stronger collaborations between our various team roles.