Process
Projects are divided into two parts.
Part 1: Discovery Process
Dig in and understand the business, the challenges, and the customers.
Review
Review background and requirements
Deep Dive
Meet with stakeholders to clarify goals
Define
Clarify the problem(s) and key pain points
Strategize
Research, analysis and ideation
Concept
Wireframe and plan the information architecture
Prioritize
Prioritize and prepare for design and dev
Part 2: Implementation Process
Kick into agile development mode. Build fast, test, adapt and iterate.
Things I believe in
The quality of our web experiences should always be on par with the quality of our products themselves. Our processes should never get in the way of creating great user experiences.
Communication
Most problems are communication problems. Keep an honest, open dialogue. Be approachable, listen and welcome feedback.
Tenacity
It's important to do what's best for the user. It's imperative that all ideas are considered. Additionally, it's important to be reasonable and open to negotiation.
Vernacular
Succinct, articulate and meaningful language. Efficient and clear communication saves time, eases frustration, and builds stronger creative alignment.
Inspiration
Creativity should be welcomed in the workplace. Remove your limits. Try new things within reason. Don't worry about "how". Promote experimentation and support failure.
Processes need to be flexible and scalable to evolve with our customers, product and business needs.
And ultimately create white space to be creative, experiment, and have room to think.
Collaboration
How long do things really take? Backout the time needed to get to great. Know how much flex you have. Include all creative and dev phases, reviews, approvals, QA, and deployments.
Gated Approvals
Who is a reviewer vs approver? Identify major gates in the creative process. Assign stakeholders to the appropriate milestones. Guide partners in how to provide feedback on creative at the right times.
Tools
Email, Jira, Slack, SmartSheets, Trello? Tools don't solve problems, people do. Audit the tools being used. Find the things that work, and scale those up. Sometimes people just need to enter their flow state.
Prioritization
Organizing issues by prioritizing to optimize delivery. Everything we produce should be thoughtful, add value, and be impactful. Cut the things that don't matter. Continuously align on business priorities.