7 tips to create high functioning design teams (Part 2)

7. Responsibility and Accountability

At some point your team will ask you what design owns, and you need to have a better answer than the user experience.

Alastair Simpson

One of the often overlooked things when setting up a great team is ensuring that they understand what they’re responsible and accountable for. This can be challenging in large, multi-faceted teams and is often changing as the makeup of teams evolves. As design has evolved, we often say we’re accountable for the “user experience” — But what does that mean? Performance affects the user experience, and we certainly don’t own that…

At Atlassian, we work as triad groups of Design, Product Management, and Engineering. The entire triad group is responsible and accountable for two key lagging indicators,

They are also responsible and accountable for other, more direct leading indicators, things like;

We recognise both the benefits and limitations of a metric like NPS, but over time it provides a well known barometer that the triad use as a guide. The triad need to balance decisions around design, functionality, and code to ensure all of these leading and lagging indicators move in the right direction.

We then go a step further and break down our NPS feedback into categories that map to our disciplines, this is called RUF.