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- Cross-Functional #186: Design and Developer Pairing
Cross-Functional #186: Design and Developer Pairing
Half baked adoption of OKRs, planning research with Gen AI, the rise of design engineering and infrastructure from code.
Rory Madden
April 16, 2024
The Main Thing: Design and Developer Pairing
A few years ago the biggest problem to solve in product development was the gap between developers and operations. New DevOps practices emerged to ensure better collaboration between the teams.
Now the challenge has shifted to the need to build the right product. This involves bridging the gap between the designers, who understand the user needs, and the developers, who build the product. Many companies are experimenting with new practices including pairing designers with developers (Linear, Basecamp) or merging the roles into a Design Engineer (Vercel).
It seems like the conversation is shifting from designers needing to learn how to code to developers needing to learn how to design. In the end, I think people will need to become more generalist in their skills to be able to work in the cross-functional teams that are becoming more common.
The biggest challenge in designing something new is the seeming confusion.
How can we bridge the gap between design and development? |
This Weeks Updates
Enabling the Team
Why We Continue Our Quest for Silver Bullets by Johanna Rothman
Management are always looking to make software development faster. But we already know the answer - cross-functional learning and empowerment.
Onboarding New Employees - Without Overwhelming Them by Julia Phelan
Great onboarding can keep new hires engaged and committed but bombarding them with tasks can backfire. Julia shares three strategies to get the balance right.
Product Direction
Our Half-Baked Adoption of OKRs by Jim Morris
Many companies adopt OKRs but struggle to achieve them. Learning how to better implement the framework can dramatically increase your odds of success.
Release ≠ Launch by Ant Murphy
Separating deployment (releasing code), from release (making features available) and launch (promoting the features) reduces stress and improves outcomes.
Continuous Discovery
Jobs to be Done 101: Your Interviewing Style Primer by Nikki Anderson-Stanier
Nikki gives a primer on how to structure interviews to uncover the underlying jobs that people are trying to achieve.
Planning Research with Generative AI by Maria Rosala
With the proper context, prompts, and scrutiny, AI chatbots can be used to create a successful user-research plan.
Continuous Design
Developers and Designers Can Pair Too by Charles Korn and Greg Skinner
Pairing developers and designers improves collaboration, presents value to customers faster, and makes businesses and teams happier.
Design Engineering at Vercel: What we do and how we do it by Glenn Hitchcock, Henry Heffernan, John Pham, Rauno Freiberg and Yasmin Pessoa
Design Engineers at Vercel blend aesthetic sensibility with technical skills. The Design engineering team at Vercel share how they work.
Continuous Delivery
Infrastructure as Code Is Dead: Long Live Infrastructure from Code by Asif Awan
Writing code to build infrastructure can be complicated. Now programs automatically analyse your code to determine the best infrastructure for your needs.
InfoQ Software Architecture and Design Trends Report - April 2024 by Thomas Betts, Blanca Garcia Gil, Eran Stiller, Daniel Bryant and Rafal Gancarz
Some interesting trends on the latest in the architecture world.
THE UXDX MAJOR EVENTS
UXDX USA Only 54 tickets left  | UXDX EMEA  |
FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS
IN-PERSON Tomorrow: New York 23 Apr: Hamburg 25 Apr: Valencia 🔔 Want a UXDX Community event in your city? or, alternatively, if your company wants to host an in-person event please reply and let us know. | ONLINE Today: Agile Design, Team Building & Metaphor-Driven UX 23 Apr: Product Growth: Data, CX, and Research Strategies 30 Apr: Driving Success with UX, Generalist Design skills, and Engineering Culture |
New Video Released This Week
Fergal Reid, Director of Machine Learning at Intercom, presented on 'Fin,' a GPT-4 powered chatbot enhancing customer support. The talk covered the development of Fin, its impact on customer service, and the broader implications of GPT-4 in natural language processing and AI-driven communication. 👇👇
Join Optimal Workshop's Research on the Value of UX!
Are you a seasoned professional in the UX industry? Optimal Workshop is conducting essential research on the value of UX and we’d love your insight! Participate in a one-hour interview scheduled between April 22 and mid-May, and have the opportunity to edit any quotes used. As a thank you, participants will receive a $200 gift card. The findings will be showcased in whitepapers and at the UXDX New York event in May.
Interested? Email [email protected] to get involved.
Job of the Week
Product Manager, Enterprise
🏬 Airtable
📌 San Francisco, CA, USA
About Airtable
Airtable is a cloud-based platform that combines a database with spreadsheet features, enabling users to create, organize, and collaborate on projects. Founded in 2012, it allows for customizable applications without coding expertise.
The Results of Last Week’s Poll
The question was: Do you know if you scan all of your dependencies for vulnerabilities on each upgrade?
The number of people actively scanning for vulnerabilities is actually a lot higher than I expected. Some tools ensure that dependencies are always upgraded when available but there are not a lot of tools on the market to check fro newly introduced vulnerabilities.
The rewards of effective scams are great so I suspect the threat will continue to grow. Code scanning will need to shift to become another compulsory activity that teams must perform. Check out Socket (https://socket.dev) if you are interested (not affiliated but Feross has spoken at UXDX multiple times).