Agreements, not process

Every design team I have joined had a process. A diagram somewhere, usually with hexagons, describing how work should move from brief to shipped. And in every one of those teams, the process lasted until the first difficult deadline, at which point everyone went back to doing whatever the loudest person in the room wanted.

I stopped writing processes. I write agreements instead.

The difference sounds small and is not. A process tells people what to do. An agreement tells people what to expect from each other. Nobody feels much when they skip a process step, because a process is a document and documents do not notice. Breaking an agreement is different, because you made it with people, and the people notice.

At The Times we have four. Designers are embedded in product teams from discovery, not summoned when a screen is needed. Research is built into every project rather than argued for each time. Design reports what it is learning to leadership every week. And everything that matters gets written down and owned by a named person.

Four sentences. A new joiner can hold them in their head by lunchtime, and a stakeholder cannot misread them.

The part I care most about is that we wrote them together, in workshops, over two months. I could have written them alone in an afternoon and they would have been roughly the same words. They would also have been ignored by Easter. Nothing in them was imposed, and that is the reason they held.

If your team has a process nobody follows, the process is not the problem. Nobody agreed to it. They were just told.