marketing, structureI am involved in a 6 person software based startup and we are about to take on our first UI/UX designer.
This is an important hire as it’s something that we have been lacking across our platform (both web & mobile) and no-one has had the design skills or experience to take our UX to the next level. We’re deliberately taking on a senior designer for this very reason.
We also have a junior marketeer hired who is working on the brand, sales, product etc who is doing a great job.
It is my intention that the new designer now has sole responsibility of the delivery of the design and the aesthetics across the company, but the marketer is already pushing back on where the responsibilities lie in terms of design, arguing that aesthetics has a huge part in brand positioning and communication, which I can’t disagree with.
What I have come up with is tell the marketeer that the sole responsibility of the product design will now be attributed to the designer, but that the marketeer can have sign off of any public deliveries and has a certain degree of veto, as long as any push-back is within the area of marketing.
I know that in a larger organisation we would have a marketing director that designers would then report into, but I don’t think that structure suits a small team.
I would love some thoughts on the set up here and how I should define the roles between marketeer and designer in a small business / startup.
It’s definitely a key moment for a startup, when accountabilities start to overlap in a way that is likely to generate friction.
So I’m going to suggest a structural answer, underpinned by a positive cultural norm.
The cultural norm is the following package:
We are one team, always
It’s OK to disagree with an idea, and to argue with passion about important current decisions until we come to a decision
We are a learning organization, so when we decide, we pull together behind the decision so we can keep moving forward into new learning
If you feel this is already where you are, it does no harm to set it down. If you don’t, then in my view, you should kick off the discussion here, not with the structures and processes. But once you’re there (or at least somewhere that you feel comfortable with), you have to provide a solid structure.
Being serious about UX means recognising that the core team has and holds the final say, while delegating authority within agreed boundaries to particular roles and individuals. Your task at this point is to identify the boundaries within which the senior designer must hold the delegated authority and accountability, and map out how that interacts with the processes that make up the marketer’s role. This should lead you to areas of potential friction, and to some insight on where that might be productive creative and where it’s not. Then you resolve (as far as you can) every negative tension by agreeing a framework or process.
So all this sounds a bit theoretical. What does it look like? Let’s take the example of a brand book. Its role is to put clear boundaries in place for some activities, and to provide guidance in other cases. Its adoption should always be by the top team, because it’s important. And when it proves inadequate, that should trigger current or future review.
So you would be looking to your UX authority to be the expert who develops and puts forward successive versions of the brand book, while marketing can highlight actual situations where they believe additional guidance is needed, or where the constraints may be too tight for a specific occasion.
The brand book helps depersonalize the friction, because first it’s an object not a person, second it has the authority of the team and is not the property of one person or role, third because you can map out practical, low temperature processes for the problem cases.
All this can seem a bit dull and inward-looking, or worse still, a bit heavy and corporate. The thing is, you will have tensions between roles and individuals over time. The question is, whether you want to spend your life making Solomonic judgements over disputes, or to gradually introduce processes to let tensions resolve in consistent and intelligible ways.
In a small team, several of you should share in the look and feel. But ask others. Get a beta site set up, and invite a trusted group of people to test-drive it. Be prepared to ask them a set of pointed questions – about the look and feel (the emotional experience of the brand), the ease of navigating, the readability, the content, etc.
I don’t think one person should control something like this. It’s way too important to the brand. But if you have to ‘assign’ this to one person, here’s my answer: Let the Designer design the experience and modify it based on feedback from beta testing. Give the role of brand stewardship to the Marketing person. Someone should run the strategic side of this (which includes the tone and manner of your brand) - let the Marketing role own that. Hope this helps.
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