Way of working<!-- --> - Henri Schröter

Way of working

My particular approach to designing and building producs and services.

Process

Design principles

User and business goals at the center

Holding these central leads to profitable products that make users happy.

Function and form

A product's primary purpose is to allow the user to accomplish a goal easy and without friction. Beautiful esthetics can then be applied to delight the user.

Less, but better

Great products solve problems in simple, clear and focused ways without adding unnecessary features.

Make it easy to harmonize

To create harmonized experiences in a large organzation making hundreds of products, incitivize the right behavior by creating easy to use, harmonized assets that will save time.


Process in my current team

Our team works as a separate team close to the business. We use a form of agile scrum for project management. We align and review design work to make sure our decisions are consistent. Each designer is responsible for a product and hosts formal reviews with the product team. This includes the Product Manger, Product Owner, Subject Matter Expert, Architect and Lead Engineer for the product.

Our design process is close to design thinking (buzzword alert): iteratively learning how to best solve a certain problem. We apply design as the scientific method for business, allowing early and rigurous de-risking before going to market with a product.

Design thinking

We move through the first five phases iteratively with the product teams to get to a degree of certainty and common understanding before the engineering team starts on the implementation.

If the code base allows it we prototype there instead and the last phase will be enabling the feature for customers, however often a rigorous pre-development is still required for a new product.