How we scaled our design process — and our impact

As a teenager, I spent pretty much every summer working a job of some kind. I sold ice cream on the beach, designed brochures for hotels‌ and worked on a construction site and in a restaurant. The last two left a lasting impression because cooking or building are fairly complex workflows that requires planning, timelines‌ and execution. It’s quite a feat just doing it on your own. Add some complexity to it, let’s say, by cooking or building with others and not just for yourself, but for hundreds or even millions of people. To be successful, the workflow needs to become a choreography, a designed sequence, where everyone needs to know what they’re adding and everyone needs to know what someone else is responsible for.

And you notice the effect: In a great restaurant, you can instantly sense and feel the choreography between the kitchen and the service team, and it’s reflected in the quality of the food and service. This consistent delivery of high-quality output is manifested in the restaurant’s reputation.

It’s an evolution from cooking for yourself (totally forgiving) to doing all of that for your friends (mostly forgiving) to asking someone to pay you for the service (not very forgiving). And it’s an evolution from a personal project for yourself, to a startup with a handful of people, to an organization of a few thousand people responsible for a product that hundreds of millions of people use, thousands of businesses depend on and many people invested in based on the product and vision. So you better deliver.

Where shall we begin

Good design shouldn’t be an accident. Just like good food in a restaurant shouldn’t be. It’s the result of clarity around goals and, more importantly, collaboration and alignment. Good design and an efficient product development process requires discipline and, you guessed it, timed choreography. And as Pinterest grew as a company, we found ourselves operating more like a startup, with a lot of improvisation and custom approaches. It’s true, every person has a different working model in mind — and so does each discipline.

During a retro in September 2022, we found ourselves renegotiating engagement models between Engineering, Product Management and Design. And then, also within Design among Product Design, Research, Content Design and Design Operations. We did have a design process, but while the Design department began to add specialized disciplines like Research, Content Design and Design Systems to the mix, our process and how we collaborate didn’t change.

Research isn’t just validation, Product Design isn’t just polishing designs, Content Design isn’t just UI copywriting. And just as we evolved the tools we work with (anyone remember creating comps in Photoshop?), we found ourselves at a point where we had to evolve our design process, or we risk creating inconsistent product outcomes.

Defining a design process through an international lens

Last November, we set out to create that very alignment within our Design organization so we can build high quality products in the most efficient way, and do so consistently across the board.

We needed something like an architect’s blueprint for the product development process—the documentation for the design of products and services instead of drawings for a building. As a global company with a diverse team of designers and cross-functional partners from around the world, we understand that design approaches will vary depending on the country, school and even the person involved. Everyone’s approach is a valid one, and it’s our job as designers to optimize to find the one that best fits our culture and organizational needs. We took a hypothesis-driven perspective—we already had the people and the tools, now we just had to get our choreography right.

To address this and to get a good understanding of where we were starting from, we collaborated with Hatch Studio, a boutique agency based in Barcelona with a great perspective on where design is headed globally. Beyond that, we believed their international team could really help us produce better collaboration models that account for Pinterest Design’s makeup — an international team working on products for an international audience.

We started by collecting documents showing how we work today. We met with Design team members from all levels of seniority, titles‌ and experience. We asked:

• What works well? What doesn’t?
• What are alternative models to work in?
• What are the tasks and responsibilities of each discipline?
• What habits and rituals exist? How do people come together on a regular basis?

The second step was to map out challenges and co-create principles for improved collaboration.

Change isn’t an option, it’s a requirement

We heard that Pinterest’s product development was fragmented and different for each initiative, user group and function. This limits our ability to create outstanding products. We lacked collaboration and understanding of Design roles and functions. This leads to talent loss, low job satisfaction and limited impact of the Design team.

We learned what behaviors, infrastructure and misses caused the problems to begin with. As a consequence, the team identified areas for improvement, including:

• Refining and articulating the roles and responsibilities of each discipline in Design to foster a greater understanding of how they complement and support one another.
• Establishing clearer communication channels and regular touchpoints to ensure effective coordination and information sharing across teams.

If we didn’t take these steps, the risk becomes circular. The debate of “what’s the ROI of design?” has made its rounds for years. Ascribing a value to the artifacts and deliverables we produce as designers and researchers is important, but outputs don’t always result in outcomes. And creating more artifacts doesn’t always mean better design — it can also point to inefficiencies due to a lack of alignment. And the more we listened to our teams, the clearer it became that we weren’t as aligned and efficient as we needed to be. All of this comes at a price — to the product experience (we don’t know how to leverage our discipline’s superpower) and the business (we aren’t as fast to the market as we could be).

What’s the fix?

Identifying the root cause was easy. The hard part was to know how to fix it. Throughout this transformative journey, we encountered challenges and had to make difficult decisions — what’s critical to resolve right now, what can wait, in what sequence are we tackling the problems. Though, because it was an open environment that we created the process in, we accidentally fostered a culture of trust, collaboration and accountability, empowering our team members and Design Leaders to take ownership of their work and contribute their expertise to the collective success of the Design organization. The success of our efforts in improving collaboration within Design turned out to be more of a proof of concept, demonstrating the value of a well-defined and disciplined approach. Kind of an MVP in its truest form.

The expected — and unexpected — results

Although our initial focus was on addressing collaboration within the Design organization, the journey we embarked upon yielded expected — and unexpected — benefits, including:

• A solution that can scale. The process we co-created and refined isn’t only applicable to Design but has the potential to scale it across all of Engineering, Product and Design.
• Enhanced cross-functional collaboration. By defining roles, responsibilities and communication channels, we created a streamlined process that promotes collaboration across teams. The principles we developed can be used in different functions in Engineering, Product and Design, allowing for greater alignment and synergy among departments.
• A shared sense of purpose. Expanding this process beyond Design not only enhances cross-functional collaboration but also fosters a shared sense of purpose and a collective understanding of how everyone’s contributions fit into the broader picture. It allows teams to work cohesively towards shared goals, leveraging their respective strengths and expertise to deliver exceptional products and services.
• Increased consistency and efficiency. It’s a testament to Design, with all its different functions, on how to build scalable experiences. In this alignment, redundancies are reduced, decision-making is improved‌ and time-to-market is accelerated. It entails a common language, rituals and collaborative norms that transcend individual disciplines. The ROI of designing a well-choreographed process for an entire organization promotes consistency and efficiency that our users, partners and investors can feel and see.
• More impact. To maximize the value of our process improvement investment, we’re creating a culture of collaboration, innovation and continuous improvement. In the end, creating desirable experiences for our users and driving our business’ success is at the heart of everything we do.

Our goal, as Design at Pinterest, is to set new standards for excellence in our industry by embracing change, fostering collaboration and cultivating a culture of continuous improvement.

For me, there’s one key truth: development never stops and while the choreography between teams within Pinterest Design is now more harmonious, reflecting the dedication and collaboration of every individual involved, it’s iterative and not done. In fact, it’s never done.

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