Please Don’t Drown
How setting a mission and strategy will keep you sane and help your team raise their game
I’m a terrible swimmer. I always have been. My biggest problem is I forget to do my legs. I’m all breaststroke or frantic front crawl arms… but unfortunately, very little leg movement. I just get carried away. As you can imagine this technique or lack of, leads to lots of splashing, slow progress, and generally a waste of energy.
This ‘lots of motion and not a lot of output’ approach reminds me of my experience of leading a design team for the first time at Percolate. Looking back to the propaganda I released on the First Round Review, my efforts gravitated to people development and team culture, both of which were noble causes — but my catch-all ‘Our design process needs to adapt to new technologies’ bet reveals I was missing a handle on the most important piece of the pie. Design.
There were periods when we pursued design activities. User research programs. Design sprints. Icon design. Usability studies. We’d also spin up projects where we saw gaps, and whilst our intention was good, we didn’t always follow through, which was frustrating for the team — and left me feeling like I was drowning and not leading.
As you know hindsight is a wonderful thing, and over this past year, I’ve built on my past experiences and introduced a structured approach to guide the design activities we do at Let’s Do This as we look to inspire and enable the teams around us. This post looks at how our approach has helped improve our practice and the impact we’ve had.
- Setting our mission
- Up-levelling research
- Going from 0–1 with content
- Showing the future
- Modernising our language
Setting our mission
At the start of 2021, our design team was growing from 3 to 6 people, and the most important thing we needed to was to set a mission of what we wanted to achieve together, and a strategy around what we thought was important to get us there.
The key thing was to do this as a team. As the team manager I leaned into my personal view, but I also knew the diverse thinking that would come from everyone was going to get us the best result — and give everyone a sense of ownership, which is so important when you are asking people to care and drive at the work that would follow.
We did a few working sessions to discuss our thoughts and got to a place where we had a clear view on a mission and strategy that felt focussed and exciting — Create the most incredible consumer experience to help people find, book, and prepare for events — through investing in research, content, future products, and design systems. I coined this the EPIC strategy…as who doesn’t love a name, and it was documented with supporting impact statements in Notion. From here we set an initial set of goals around research and content and got stuck in.
Up-levelling research
Until now we’d taken a diverse approach to research recruitment because we wanted to include a range of experience levels a.k.a. we didn’t really have a focus, sporadically did discovery research to understand problem spaces, and struggled to make time to do usability testing. It wasn’t looking good.
“Who are we designing for?” was the first question we needed to answer. We pulled together a working group of Product Management, Design, Data, and CRM to map out — based on what we knew from previous research — who the consumer segments were in the endurance sports market. By understanding the attitudes and behaviours of these segments we developed a hypothesis around which one would help accelerate event bookings. We decided to prioritise our future research and product development efforts around the Enthusiast. Someone who loved all sports, experiencing new places, and often took friends along for the ride.
Workshops helped us rally the wider team around our target segment, and since then our view of the Enthusiast evolved through regular discovery sessions and consistent usability studies on usertesting.com. This activity led us to firming up synthesis templates, and developing artefacts like journey maps that we are working on to help everyone understand the opportunities we have to improve the Enthusiast’s experience.
Going from 0–1 with content
From speaking with Enthusiasts during research we learned that the content that helps them immerse themselves in the event experience beforehand was what got them really excited about events. They wanted to understand what the scenery and terrain was going to be like, what kind of atmosphere they could expect, and how difficult the course was going to be. Our challenge was the content available from event organisers ranged in quality and volume, and didn’t always hit on the primary needs we were hearing about.
A few of our team bumped into Phil Hill at a Maverick event in May and we began chatting about doing a few event shoots together to capture photography and video. In the 7 months since, we have worked with some amazing photography and film teams to capture events across the UK — and learned so much about pre and post production as we begin to drive consistency across our imagery and video. A highlight was shooting runner portraits at the Maverick x Ultra Black Running event in July with Jane Stockdale. An important moment in the journey of making trail running more welcoming and pushing forward conversations about representation on the start line.
This part of our strategy is an example of how our design team enabled the company through the assets we captured — from marketing campaigns, sales collateral, to product experimentation. Getting content set-up and building a small team around it has been a big part of my role over the last 6 months — a huge benefit of this focus has been challenging our view on design and how we’re moving from mobile first to a content first UX.
Showing the future
Just show. I often come back to this from Katie M. Dill. It’s so powerful and perfectly captures the power of design — it’s what makes being a designer so exciting. 2021 was a year when design at Let’s Do This needed to show. We needed to help set direction for the future of our product and show our growing company the opportunity we have in front of us to build a company that inspires people to come together and experience moments that make them feel alive.
To make this happen we drew on past experiences from running design sprints and put together a schedule of activities to take us from what we knew from research — to prototyping a future state of our product. We actually did this a few times to provide guidance to 3 of our product teams, and also to share how we’d showcase iconic events hosted by our partner The Great Run Company.
These sprints were between 2 and 5 days long, typically a designer or 2 and myself in collaboration with stakeholders across the business, powered by adrenaline and Deliveroo…they were really full on, but their impact has been priceless. They’ve prompted technical conversations across our teams to figure out how we work towards new ideas, and they have influenced iterations of our website, organiser dashboard, and mobile apps.
Modernising our language
We started the year with the foundations of a design system in place. We’ve been working from the Base Web framework — customising the components with our design language and using Storybook to make the library accessible to our wider team. On the native side we have been building a UI system using a few libraries for our iOS and Android apps. All of which we are in the midst of bringing into Figma.
Around the middle of August we started to talk about how we would map our rebrand across our evolving design system. On the web side of things, the first thing our engineering team did was assess the coverage of our design system across core screens. This revealed where most effort was likely to be needed. From here we defined the scope of the project would be a visual update eg: new fonts, colours, graphical elements, with the exception of our homepage. The homepage was in much need of an overhaul to better reflect our value proposition so we got license to update this accordingly.
A good learning here was the pair design approach we took to figure out how the new brand would translate across our product surfaces and marketing touch points. At first I was thinking we’d split key screens by designer, but then someone suggested we break up into 3 teams of 2 designers and iterate through different sets of touch points. This was really good for bouncing ideas between teams and helped us cover a lot of ground quickly. We got the first cut live in September and continue to evolve our systems with the product experiments we build within teams week to week.
Having written all that, it’s hard to believe a design team can function without a strategy to guide how they work. By focusing on research, content, future products, and our design system, we’ve made good strides towards our mission of delivering an incredible consumer experience — the number of tickets booked on our service has increased with improving conversion rates, along with encouraging user feedback. These are a couple of signals that help us feel like we’re on the right track.
Our strategy kept us honest and focussed us on what really mattered throughout the year, and helped orient new joiners as the design team grew. But I know that our approach will need to evolve next year as our company and product scales — this will present new operational and design challenges for us to overcome if we are to continue to enable and inspire our team and customers.
For now I can sleep at night knowing we pushed things forward and demonstrated the value of design in 2021. My swimming progress on the other hand is a completely different story.
Want to work on a mission to inspire people to experience moments that make them feel alive? We’re looking for Product and Brand Designers and we’d love to hear from you.
