You Need Your Own Definition of Design Maturity
Summary
What doesn't cut it: traditional capability maturity models, created through massive surveys to determine the organizational characteristics that contribute to business success.
After more than two years of the collective traumas and personal emergencies caused by a pandemic, a racial reckoning, and other existential crises, designers are deeply tired, worn out, and looking to work in organizations that are "mature", where their contributions are understood and supported.
You need to forge your own definition of design maturity, based on understanding and care for the people in your design team, the specifics of your organization, and the state of UX as a profession. With this deep understanding you can start the experiments and gain support for initiatives to increase the impact of design in your organization.
Key Insights
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Existing design maturity models may fail to capture team-specific contexts and emotional realities.
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Creating a custom definition of design maturity makes it easier to set direction and practical actions.
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Design maturity must balance delivering value to customers, business, team members, and society.
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Pandemic and social justice events shifted organizational focus toward care and empathy.
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Internal team conversations reveal feelings of invisibility and exclusion, especially among researchers.
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Design leaders need to use empathy to understand functional partners and demonstrate design’s business value.
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Four pillars—mission/vision/principles, people, processes, and design thinking—structure this team’s design maturity.
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Pausing team-wide design critiques improved psychological safety and sustained feedback via smaller groups.
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A one-size-fits-all designer-to-engineer ratio does not adequately reflect product or organizational needs.
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Team-defined design maturity fosters greater engagement, visibility, and pride among designers.
Notable Quotes
"We realized there was no way to make sense of the conglomeration of sticky notes."
"You need to come up with your own definition of design maturity based on your team’s understanding and context."
"Design maturity results from behaviors and structures that enable delivering value to customers, business, ourselves, and society."
"Researchers feel like second-class citizens when they’re not invited into early conversations."
"It’s not just about doing the craft of design but also figuring out how design fits into the organization."
"Business is just people who may be working with design but don’t quite get how design helps them."
"During the pandemic, we learned to have awkward and uncomfortable conversations about people’s realities."
"Team members told me they felt really seen for the first time during these discussions."
"We had to push back on the idea that we could just use existing models without understanding our team’s needs."
"Use your powers of empathy to see things from your functional partners’ point of view."
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