Manik Rathee

Manik Rathee

Staff Engineer, Engineering Manager at Google

Helping craft the future of @nest Previously, User Experience Engineer for @BarackObama

4 action items

Maintain the quality of design work as your team grows

    • This answer will vary drastically by team size, but the concepts are the same: The underlying difficulty with maintaining quality at internal scale is communication — with more people, it becomes tougher to keep up with what everyone is doing and the existing communication mechanisms function poorly as time goes on. The key to getting around this is to create spaces to share work regularly. By sharing and reviewing designs frequently, the team will align and produce work that is cohesive. From there, you will need to develop a pattern library or style guide for reference and enforcement.

    • Foster a culture of sharing

      Create a culture of sharing so people get quality feedback early and often. In sharing and discussing work, the team will start to unify around common patterns.

    • Give the team a venue to share and critique

      Whether you use Slack, Wake, Hipchat or Hangouts, look to to create a space for design and lead your team to start sharing their work before formal reviews or in-person critique sessions. It is important to call out new design patterns or changes to existing patterns so that the team can address inconsistencies.... See more

    • Ensure clear approvals/rejections

      There must be clear approvals and rejections in your workflow, whether this is a single person, a team lead or a creative director. With clear approvals, your team will be able to prioritize critical feedback against peer reviews. Feedback loops are essential but so are clear instructions on whether a design is solving the problem effectively.... See more

    • Create a style guide

      Once you have a team that is working well together, you'll need to create a pattern library or style guide. Style Guides should be used as a reference for design and interaction patterns, as well as a source of truth for production-ready options.... See more