Design Process

While working at Paypal, there were massive issues with the communication between the distributed team - where developers were stateside and the design team was over in India.

The team was churning through hours at 200% and was very overworked and overwhelmed because no one was here stateside managing team expectation.

A process needed to be put in place where the teams were communicating effectively and not being overworked

Both the off shore and the on site teams effectively communicating and not being overworked

The design process was broken due to lack of communication between the onsite and offshore teams.

The first thing I did was work with the design team in India to understand their capacity by setting up daily standups/check-ins. This allowed me to not only effectively communicate status in our onsite standups the next day but allowed me to understand their capacity.

Then the next thing I worked on is communicating that capacity with the team - this came from starting with the concept that the team could only work on one feature and a certain number of enhancements per sprint.

This capacity was a bit too much so after a couple sprints we took it down to basically one feature per sprint and work as they could on top of that

We believe a streamlined design process will increase work efficiency and team happiness

The two biggest challenges in getting the design team on track were there lack of consistent communication on capacity, or any communication at all really, with the greater onsite team, and the onsite team communicating with them on feedback in a timely manner

Setting regular cadences with the design, development and product owners that allowed daily and weekly communication of status and capacity