What’s a good design team anyway?

I’ve been a head of design since March, working on several GOV.UK products and channels: app, chat, pay, notify, forms, emergency alerts. I’m having a lot of fun but there’s a lot to adjust to and to make sense of.

The job is largely about building a brilliant design team that’s fit for what we need to do. To do that job, I need to have a really clear sense of what a good design team means today. Here’s my current list. It’s a snapshot in time, because what I think is right changes, all the time!

Good design teams:

• Work together as a trusted, collaborative team
• Are made up of people with all sorts of skills and life experiences, and can create space for others to design with them. More perspectives on a problem make solutions better
• Have a deep understanding of the material they are working with, or know who to work with to get it. Our products need to feel as right for their platforms as GOV.UK feels for the web
• Make things, all the time. I don’t know a better way to end up with a good outcome than trying all of them. Design teams need to make prototypes of all sorts of things, and most of them should be borderline ridiculous because it’s what it takes to arrive at the best option
• Have a shared idea of what good looks like, supported by bold leadership and forged by regular critique
• Can ship, but can also dream. The two are slightly require slightly different skillsets but are both as important as the other
• Care about user experience more than other things. That doesn’t mean not caring about or understanding delivery pressures, stakeholder expectations, technical constraints. It’s just that our job is to make the case for user experience over those other things
• Are stupidly ambitious. I think most of the problems where I work at the moment are design problems, and designers need to lead the way in solving them. Our mission is to reimagine public services so that they are more proactive and joined up. That’s not about tinkering at the edges or exclusively iterating on an existing way of doing things, but about trying new approaches
• Make an often cold practice of working with technology or of serving abstract metrics, more human. They do this by working with user researchers to bring users in, and by telling really clear stories about the work
• Are obsessive about all aspects of the things the organisation puts out, and often care about things that others do not even see