Principles for building the Oda UX design team
By: Mike Jones
Tags: Org Design, Product Design, UX Design, Design Management, Service Design

Previously on Medium we’ve talked about how we design new services and new features. We’ve also written about our way of working and our general approach to product development.

We are now in an ambitious scale-up phase, and that means putting an equal amount of attention into designing Oda the company as Oda the product. We are growing really quickly: from 5 to 25 designers during Corona, and we’ll probably double again in the next 18 months. Having principles allows us to maintain some stability and consistency as we scale, and set the working conditions for designers to thrive.

Our six principles for growing and organizing the UX design team.

1) Embedded designers, cross-functional teams

Oda takes teamwork very seriously; a short-hand for our culture could simply be a “team of teams.” Most everyone within product development works in cross-functional teams: a team put together of people from several disciplines, working together towards a team mission.

We roughly follow the Team Topologies team types, and most UX designers are working on stream-aligned, or product teams. These are teams that have missions to deliver value in a specific customer problem domain or “slice” of the customer journey, rather than a project or deliverable, and owning all technology and expertise for that area. Such teams include Activation (new user experience part of the customer journey), Recipes (solving dinner), or Inventory (making sure we get the right products at the right time).

While no two product teams are alike, the “standard” team molecule at Oda is actually quite large: one Product Manager, two data people, two designers, and 5–6 engineers. It’s a big team, but it’s rare that all 10 work on the same thing at the same time. We then make smaller groups — like a designer and a data analyst, or a designer and two engineers — to take on projects within that team’s domain.

A “typical” product or stream-aligned team at Oda. Not every team is this big, and the team member mix is always custom to the domain or responsibilities.

This is in keeping with Oda having a quite healthy designer-to-developer ratio: across the product org, we are about 1 designer to every 3–4 developers. This ratio serves as a general rule of thumb about how many designers we need. This keeps designers from being spread too thin, and gives them more capacity to do strategic and or discovery work.

Designers on these product teams are full team members, and the team sticks together over the long term. The product team is the designers’ first allegiance and where they get their tasks. They then report to a design manager or design director outside of the product team, and are part of the UX Design Discipline, but tasks don’t come from the design discipline.

2) Designer duos

As illustrated above, our ideal team setup has two designers, and these designer duos is a core principle to how we’re organizing the UX design team.

Everyone needs a sparring partner.

First off, it’s just more fun to have another designer on the team; someone who knows where you’re coming from, who is living in your problem space, and is right beside you for quick questions. The domains that each product team work within are quite complex; it can be difficult for a designer who’s not in that domain to have the contextual knowledge needed to be a good sparring partner.

Second, this helps Oda grow and maintain expertise. New teams at Oda are usually the result of a bigger team being split in two (the absorb and split model), and when we make these splits we can send one designer to each team. Then we hire two new designers, make two new duos, and expertise is passed along.

Absorb and split team growth model. Image and concept from Jason Yip

Similarly this makes internal mobility much friendlier. A designer looking for a new challenge can move to a new team without stripping the old team of all its design expertise. Single-person dependencies are never good so this makes it easier for us to manage life in general — designers can take long vacations or parental leave and design work doesn’t come to a halt.

Finally we believe this addresses one of the core challenges of the design industry: no jobs for junior designers. If there’s only one designer on a team, that person really needs to know what they’re doing. A junior designer hired into this structure will be essentially set up to fail. Two designers on a team allows us to put people together with both complementary skillsets and complementary levels of experience. To back this up, we are now hiring two new-grad designers each year, right from our summer internship program.

3) Service Design + Digital Design = ❤️

With a healthy ratio of designers and two designer duos, our design team can stretch itself pretty far, from very up-front research and problem definition work through detailed implementation. But it’s extremely rare to find designers that have expertise and mastery across the spectrum. To acknowledge this, we’ve defined two types of UX designers in Oda: Service Designers and Digital Designers.

The line between service designer and digital designer is blurry, and is more about expertise than job responsibilities.

Service Designers are stronger on the Discovery portion of the double diamond: bigger picture, customer journeys, architecture, modeling, customer insight, integration with business logic and human processes, and making sure we “design the right thing.” That said, Oda is a digital service, so this is service design within the context of technology, and we expect our service designers to be software savvy, and be capable of drawing out the UI necessary for a screen-supported workflow.

A prototype “label printer”, for testing out a new workflow at the fulfillment center.

Oda is not just a software company either; we have a massive logistics operation behind our digital storefront. Service design gives us tools for accounting for all the other non-software elements of the system: the food (and its needs from temperature to handling), operators and drivers (and their incentives, ergonomics, and training), and hardware (conveyor belts, printers, robots, boxes, trucks, and much more).

This is likely a quite different framing of UX and Service Design than people outside of Oda are used to. In a way, we’re “reclaiming” the term UX from software design to again mean the holistic user experience, and treating service design as a skillset and perspective that contributes to that UX. For us, service design is quite literally the design of services.

A clever short-hand for what service designers and digital designers do. Credit Phil Morten

Digital Designers are stronger on the delivery side of the double diamond, or “designing the thing right.” Digital designers go deep on user interface design, work through task flows and use cases, have more expertise on the depth and details of specific touchpoints, own our design systems, and work closely with developers through software implementation. Again, our expectations for this role might be different than in other companies; this is not just a visual design role, we fully expect digital designers to handle UX projects end-to-end including up-front problem framing and user interviews.

These aren’t two different jobs: there’s a big overlap between these two around interaction design, and we definitely don’t want any hand-overs. They’re just two flavors of the UX designer job. In fact, we discussed as a team whether we should drop the labels entirely and just call all us UX designers, but we see that as we grow it helps set expectations about where each of us is strongest, sets people better up for success, and makes it easier to find the right people in the org to talk to.

This works really well for us: we get people collaborating who approach problems from slightly different perspectives, and together have exceptional skills across the UX spectrum.

4) Full-stack designers, in attitude

Even though we acknowledge that designers lean one way or the other in their skillset, we encourage designers to be “full-stack in attitude.” We think it’s better to have service designers leveraging our design system to design UIs, taking it to 80% as good as it can be, and then getting it out there in the world. Similarly, we can’t have digital designers who wait for a wireframe or even a brief — they too should be comfortable taking a project from start to finish; getting up from the desk, drawing out workflows, or talking to customers.

This is something we pay attention to a lot when hiring: we’re not actually waiting for hypothetical unicorn designers who are great at everything, but instead looking for designers who have the right combo of optimism, humility and guts to take on things outside their expertise, and have a bias towards action. Designers should try any task that helps move the team forward, without thinking that it’s either beneath them or not their core expertise.

5) A strong home base

When designers all work on embedded teams, they can feel a bit detached from a central core within the org. For this reason, we work hard to build a strong home-base for designers in the UX Design discipline team.

Every 7–8 weeks (every Flex period), we get the entire design org together for a full Designers Day. This is a chance to reflect on how we are doing as a design team generally, revisit our principles and ways of working, build some pet passion projects, and just be social. We are trying out alternating between “head” days and “hands” days to balance talking with doing.

Designer days are remote these days, and lend themselves to photo ops.

The other aspect of this home base is to make sure we’re building a culture for critique and for learning. We’re pretty good at moving quickly in Oda, but we don’t want to lose our sense for quality along the way. Discussing work helps us have a shared idea of what “good” looks like.

To help this along, we run smaller design team session every other week within two groups, oriented around the user groups they design for: Shop & Growth designers, and then Logistics Designers. This is when we can get into the real nitty gritty details, with the people with whom we are trying to build a cohesive experience.

We have established Communities of Practice for driving common personal development goals, such as Data for Designers, UX Writing, and Visualization. This is new, but the concept is that groups of designers commit to one of these for half a year. Each of these has a practice lead who keeps the group moving forward (and people accountable).

One small thing to help share work is setup a UX-high-fives slack channel where designers can share work that other designers are doing that they think is great. Designers want feedback and want to see what others are doing, but at the same time, think their own work isn’t worth sharing: it’s not good enough, interesting enough, or finished enough. Which of course is nonsense. So it’s much easier to share the great work that others are doing.

Threshold for sharing the work of other designers, rather than your own, is much lower

6-Shared purpose

While we do a lot of different design tasks, the core purpose of the UX Design team is to keep Oda focused on delivering value to customers. This sounds pretty basic, and something that Oda as an org is pretty good at, but we don’t want to ever take it for granted: when we build things and grow really fast, or push for growth features, or make strategic partnerships with other companies, it’s important that someone is thinking about whether this is going to be for the better for customers.

“Relentlessly keep the spotlight on our customers’ needs, and design the world’s most loved everyday service.”

This applies for everyone, even for those not working on customer-facing interfaces: for designers working in logistics, we try to think through the customer impact of proposed changes, and push for improvements that benefit customers: more precise delivery, fewer damaged or missing items.

This has also led us to build our common design platform/operations around a Customer Insight team, rather than design systems. While we do maintain two design systems, we treat them as services we provide for developers, rather than the core of our UX discipline. Treating customer insight as the thing that ties us all together gives us much more meaning and value in our work.

This mission and vision helps remind us why we’re all here, why we have a UX design team in the first place, and what we’re trying to achieve.

Going forward

The design team is a living thing, and it’s likely what works for us now as we approach 30 people will need to be tweaked as we round 50. As we like to say, “we’re happy, not satisfied.” There are lots of way we can further strengthen the design team: get better at critique, articulate standards for what good work is, create more opportunities for senior individual contributors, increased team diversity with more international designers. Principles keep us stable and allow us to grow without losing sight of where we want to go.

Does this sound like a design team where you would thrive? Reach out, even though we might not have ads currently up. We are currently looking for designers in Oslo and Berlin.