Combining business goals with user needs — meet our Product Designers

Hi Ula! How long have you worked at Boldare, and what exactly does your role mean?

I started my adventure with Boldare in 2017. I act as a Senior Product Designer and recently as a leader of the Measure & Learn Chapter team. I am also involved in the Distributed Chief Technology Officer (Distributed CTO) team. Distributed CTO focuses on the organization’s technology culture and I support them in the Product Design area.

How about your team? Who belongs to it, and what do you do?

I am part of a multidisciplinary Scrum team that includes designers, developers, QA engineers, and Scrum masters. It is essential we work closely with the client – actually, they are also part of the team and work actively with us. On a daily basis, we build wireframes together and implement new, usable solutions.

Efficiency is a priority, so I work with developers hand by hand and consult on all my ideas. This way, solutions are both useful and implementable. Constant contact with the client and interpreting their needs based on the business goals allows me to understand the acceptance criteria. It is vital in providing guidance on what needs to be done, how it should be tested, and when it can be considered finished.

So, consultancy and feedback are essential in your work.

Definitely. Besides creating appropriate acceptance criteria, I also collect and analyze feedback from users. To do this, I conduct surveys and interviews and gather feedback via analytical tools. With the results collected, we can validate the assumptions made about the product. This is work based on a continuous discovery approach and the Lean Startup methodology. Anticipating your question, continuous discovery is an iterative process that focuses on continuous improvement rather than building a fixed set of deliverables. The Lean Startup methodology focuses on customer feedback, iterative design, and rapid experimentation to find a profitable solution. It helps minimize risk by quickly identifying what works and what doesn’t, and pivoting accordingly.

What are other ways of working that make your team efficient?

A crucial element of my work is also co-leading Product Discovery workshops. This is an interactive and collaborative program designed to help the Scrum team and the client identify real market needs and discover new possibilities for the digital product. As a designer, I guide the team and the client through the various parts of this workshop that deal with researching user needs. During such meetings, we create proto-personas, customer journeys, and user flows. Sometimes, we even create mockups.

Is the client actively involved in other team meetings?

Yes. Besides Product Discovery workshops, we regularly meet our clients in ongoing Scrum meetings like refinements, reviews, or retrospectives. This way we can smoothly debate new features and ways to implement them. Close communication with the client is what sets working at Boldare apart. Personally, I very much appreciate the directness and fluidity of communication with the client, it helps to build the most effective solutions and strengthens the relationship.

Can you tell me more about communications in your team?

At Boldare, we work with Scrum, that involves working in sprints and transparent, agile communication. During the sprints, we meet daily to discuss plans and tasks that will bring us closer to achieving the sprint goal. We also talk about blockers we’ve encountered and things that get in the way of our successful work. All team members are available on Slack, so I always have someone to double-check design proposals. During the day, it’s also not uncommon for us to have spontaneous meetings on Google Meet and discuss current work together with the developers. It is salutary that there are often two designers in the teams working at Boldare, so we can directly debate on the usability of our ideas and share different perspectives.

Boldare people work on a basis of transparency and mutual respect. We make sure that all team members are informed about what we are working on that day and what hours we are available. We work flexible hours and respect each other’s time, so it is important to inform the team in the morning of your availability. We also follow the motto that there are no stupid questions - our environment is communication-friendly, and we remember that it is always better to ask twice about something than to implement unnecessary features or wrong solutions.

What besides mutual respect and transparency is significant for your team?

Business orientation, focus on goals, and agility. During a sprint, we focus on completing the tasks we have committed to. If difficulties arise, we help each other or organize the work differently. This ongoing adaptation to change and flexibility is a sign of our professionalism and expertise. Regular honest feedback is something we’re not afraid of, we desire it. Thanks to feedback from others, we can set appropriate self-development goals.

Let’s talk a little about working in phases. Some may already know that Boldare builds digital products by phase. What is it and does this unique approach impact the designer’s work?

Naturally, it impacts the designer’s work and approach. A designer works differently in a problem-solution fit team, which builds prototypes and MVPs (minimal viable product), to a product-market fit team, which is dedicated to product optimization, or a scaling team, which looks for new growth paths.

Problem-solution fit is the stage when the emphasis is on using off-the-shelf tools. It is important to validate the solution quickly with users, which we can do with prototypes instead of implementing a pixel-perfect solution.

Product-market fit is cyclic validation related to product optimization, business model, and finding the right place on the market. Here, it’s all about collecting quantitative and qualitative data over a longer period of time. It’s also not uncommon for us to work on a design system during this phase. We use a range of reusable tools to optimize the budget of the product. In each subsequent sprint, we validate a hypothesis related to a given user flow or functionality. Metrics and user feedback are key here and allow us to answer whether the product has embedded itself in the market.

Working in teams dedicated to Scaling is mainly about collecting user feedback and looking for new ways to develop the product and business growht. Sometimes these are new functionalities, or increasing the number of users. Product Designer helps optimize the customer journey and suggests new ideas for expanding the business model.

A phased approach to building products certainly makes the designer’s work more optimized. Implementation of such a work system can be challenging at first. That’s why designers who join Boldare are given a set of tools to help them validate assumptions and identify areas of focus crucial to each phase.

Speaking about challenges, what are the biggest pain points for designers?

The first may be poor access to users (and thus relying on subjective observations instead of feedback from real audiences). Another could be a lack of close collaboration with the developer and the client. When the designer is not part of the team and designs in isolation from the technical point of view and without ongoing contact with the client, they are unable to deliver effective solutions. For this reason, I value working in an interdisciplinary team. When I think about my work, it is my team and their approach that I am most proud of. We work side by side for a common goal, have consistency in our values, and a common North Star, which is to combine the user’s needs and the client’s business goal.

But your consistency and alignment do not mean that you don’t encounter adversity.

Of course, challenges appear. One of the biggest personal challenges I encountered after joining Boldare was learning how to plan wisely for teamwork in a project that consists not only of the design itself, but also its implementation and testing. For every feature we implement, we need to discuss it with the client and test it with users. First, we define the problem and the user’s need, then we talk with them about their perspective. On this basis, we propose a specific, tailored solution. Its implementation requires research, consultation with developers and the client, and finally validation with users. Prioritization, efficient task organization, and accountability are the basic elements that allow us to operate effectively in a self-organizing organization.

Finally, tell us how a designer can develop at Boldare to become efficient and fulfill their career path.

There are many self-development paths open to a designer, the choice of which is entirely up to you. Firstly, you can check and consciously decide in which phase of product building you feel most comfortable. This allows you to choose the way of working: do you prefer a short-term project in a rapid environment to quickly validate ideas, or more optimizing ideas and looking for new growth paths? Decide for yourself!

In addition to the freedom to choose the phase and the way of working, the designer as a member of the Scrum team has a real impact on the product being built. The designer’s evaluation is crucial in the implementation of all subsequent solutions. It is worth noting that the variety of products we work on at Boldare is very wide. Designers here, therefore, have a say in how they work and what they work on - which for many is an opportunity to enrich their profession with a missionary aspect and create projects that make an impact on the environment.

To gain knowledge and develop their passion, a designer can join various co-working and knowledge-sharing spaces. If your interest is design systems, you would be a great fit for Chapter Build. If you like to conduct or prepare research, you certainly wouldn’t be bored in the Measure & Learn chapter. Chapters are a kind of innovation hub in Boldare, which bring together people with similar passions. They exchange knowledge, develop specific skills, and help product teams with their daily work.

Finally, and importantly (and not at all common in the market), seniority at Boldare does not depend on the time spent in the company, only on your skills. If you’re growing fast, you can always take part in the Fast Growth process, which, depending on your colleagues’ evaluations, can result in a promotion. This is a process that fairly rewards and appreciates talent at Boldare.

Thank you for the conversation, it was great to learn more about the designer’s role in Boldare!

Thank you too.

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