Raphael Thys
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The 1-hour Design Principles Workshop
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8 min read
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Sep 5, 2018
Design principles are a valuable tool for any team that works together towards a shared outcome. Written well, design principles can create alignment, speed up decision-making, and increase the quality of the team’s output.
Lately, I’ve worked with two of my teams to write design principles. Turns out writing down design principles is easy¹; agreeing on principles as a team is much harder. In earlier writing, I missed an important quality of good design principles:
Good design principles are written as a team.
I learned this lesson the hard way. If you bring fully-formed principles to your team to adopt, you’re missing an important opportunity to align with your teammates.
Based on this experience, I’ve designed a workshop to enable teams to collaboratively write design principles.
Planning
1. Decide who should attend
Here’s a great parable that was told to me by Marina, program manager and scrum master extraordinaire:
Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road. Chicken says: “Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!” Pig replies: “Hm, maybe, what would we call it?” Chicken responds: “How about ‘bacon-n-eggs’?” Pig thinks for a moment and says: “No thanks. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”²
We use the chicken and pig parable to describe two kinds of team members: ones who contribute as consultants and experts, and ones who are accountable for outcomes. Chickens are trusted collaborators, but pigs are the ones with skin in the game.
Writing design principles is a job for the pigs. Include those who are directly affected by the outcomes of your work, and alignment and shared values will be much easier to attain.
A note about remote teams
You don’t need your team to be in the same room to run this workshop. If some (or all!) of your team is remote, use real-time feedback tools like Slack, Google Docs, and Zoom/Hangouts/Bluejeans/etc. in the place of writing, sharing, and voting on principles.
2. Gather your materials
You’ll need your standard design thinking toolkit for this workshop:
- Tons of post-its: As a team of 8, we used more than 100 post-its. Seriously, bring…