Setting Design Strategies for Organizations | Yvonne Doll, Senior Design Director

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Crafting Design Strategy

Company

Jetpack (WordPress)

Role

Lead researcher, UX lead

App Audience

27 million

Company

Jetpack (WordPress)

Role

Lead researcher, UX lead

App Audience

27 million

As leader of an 8-person design team supporting seven engineering squads, I developed an agile design strategy that balanced immediate delivery needs with long-term user experience goals. This approach ensured consistent value delivery while managing organizational constraints and avoiding overburdened processes or misaligned priorities.

Long term cell-based strategy

To maximize impact, my long-term strategy involved organizing the team into core cells dedicated to specific focus areas: Retention, Acquisition, Growth, and New Features.

This approach ensures targeted efforts, more transparent accountability, and better collaboration across the organization.

Cell Structure:

Retention Cell
- Focus: Improve user retention by refining core product features, optimizing renewal workflows, and addressing churn-related pain points.
- Key Deliverables: Seamless subscription renewal flows, in-app engagement features, and user support improvements.
Acquisition Cell
- Focus: Drive new user acquisition by optimizing onboarding flows, designing marketing landing pages, and improving trial-to-paid conversion rates.
- Key Deliverables: High-converting onboarding experiences and a frictionless first-use experience.
Growth Cell
- Focus: Enhance product engagement and increase average revenue per user (ARPU) through upsell opportunities, cross-sell strategies, and personalized features.
- Key Deliverables include usage dashboards, add-on offerings, and innovative personalization strategies.
New Features Cell
- Focus: Innovate and deliver new features that solve unmet customer needs and keep the product competitive.
- Key Deliverables: Prototypes, MVPs, and validated feature launches.

Cross-Functional Integration:

Each cell would include:

2 Designers (or more, depending on staffing levels) to focus on user experience and interface design.
2-4 Embedded Engineers to ensure a close design-development collaboration.
Floating sales, product, and marketing stakeholders.

Phased Implementation:

This structure represents my long-term vision. In the short term, the design team remained more centralized to ensure adequate support for all engineering teams and projects.

Crafting design strategy

Crafting design strategies that work: Senior Design Director Yvonne Doll

Company

Jetpack (WordPress)

Role

Design Director

App Audience

27 million

Company

Jetpack (WordPress)

Role

Design Director

App Audience

27 million

I led an 8-person design team supporting seven engineering squads, crafting an agile strategy to balance delivery needs with long-term UX goals, ensuring consistent value and aligned priorities.

As the leader of an 8-person design team supporting seven engineering squads, I crafted an agile design strategy that balanced immediate delivery needs with long-term user experience goals. This approach delivered consistent value while managing organizational constraints, avoiding overburdened processes, and ensuring alignment with business priorities.

People and Processes

Design Strategy

Organizational design strategy framework

Flexible & tailored

My design strategy centered on long-term sustainability, team empowerment, and alignment across disciplines. It is flexible and reflects the organization's culture, way of working, and team's unique strengths. This approach ensures that the strategy is not forced onto the organization but evolves with it, enabling the teams to respond to business demands while continuously improving the user experience.

Design strategy building blocks

Design strategy
building blocks

Guiding Philosophy

Focus on continuous improvement over large, isolated projects.
Align design systems and user experiences with broader
business goals.
Build scalable, extensible designs to support future growth.
Prioritize impactful fixes and features that deliver high value.
Tight alignment across teams feeds autonomy, ensuring all members are aligned on goals.
Engage stake-holders early and often.

Key objectives

Achieve best-in-class design quality.
Ensure a consistent, cohesive user experience across products.
Impact over quantity.
Solve user problems with meaningful, impactful solutions.
Maintain velocity and agility in the design process, ensuring responsiveness to changing priorities.

Team empowerment

Empower designers and engineers to take ownership of solutions and collaboratively uncover user needs.
Encourage a culture of cross-functional collaboration, where all team members contribute to identifying and solving problems.

Lean ux Research

Drive research efforts using agile, micro-study approaches to constantly focus on the user experience while keeping pace with engineering velocity.

Embrace the "just enough research" principle to inform key design decisions and ensure consistent delivery.

CX alignment

Foster seamless collaboration between design, engineering, and customer experience teams to deliver a unified, cohesive experience across all touchpoints.

Ensure alignment of customer insights, design decisions, and product strategy. This will lead to a consistent,d user-centric journey that drives satisfaction and loyalty.

Governance

Regular strategy reviews, design reviews with leadership, team retrospectives

While a design strategy sets the overall direction, empowering teams to determine how best to govern and apply it within their context is crucial.

Long term cell-based strategy

My long-term strategy involved organizing the team into core cells dedicated to specific focus areas: Retention, Acquisition, Growth, and New Features.

This approach ensures targeted efforts, more transparent accountability, and better collaboration across the organization.

Cell Structure:

Acquisition Cell
- Focus: Drive new user acquisition by optimizing onboarding flows, designing marketing landing pages, and improving trial-to-paid conversion rates.
- Key Deliverables: High-converting onboarding experiences and a frictionless first-use experience.
Retention Cell
- Focus: Improve user retention by refining core product features, optimizing renewal workflows, and addressing churn-related pain points.
- Key Deliverables: Seamless subscription renewal flows, in-app engagement features, and user support improvements.
Growth Cell
- Focus: Enhance product engagement and increase average revenue per user (ARPU) through upsell opportunities, cross-sell strategies, and personalized features.
- Key Deliverables include usage dashboards, add-on offerings, and innovative personalization strategies.
  .
New Features Cell
- Focus: Innovate and deliver new features that solve unmet customer needs and keep the product competitive.
- Key Deliverables: Prototypes, MVPs, and validated feature launches.

Cross-Functional Integration:

Each cell would include:

2 Designers (or more, depending on staffing levels) to focus on user experience and interface design.
2-4 Embedded Engineers to ensure a close design-development collaboration.
Floating sales, product, and marketing stakeholders.

Cell Structure:

Acquisition Cell
- Focus: Drive new user acquisition by optimizing onboarding flows, designing marketing landing pages, and improving trial-to-paid conversion rates.
- Key Deliverables: High-converting onboarding experiences and a frictionless first-use experience.
Retention Cell
- Focus: Improve user retention by refining core product features, optimizing renewal workflows, and addressing churn-related pain points.
- Key Deliverables: Seamless subscription renewal flows, in-app engagement features, and user support improvements.
Growth Cell
- Focus: Enhance product engagement and increase average revenue per user (ARPU) through upsell opportunities, cross-sell strategies, and personalized features.
- Key Deliverables include usage dashboards, add-on offerings, and innovative personalization strategies.
New Features Cell
- Focus: Innovate and deliver new features that solve unmet customer needs and keep the product competitive.
- Key Deliverables: Prototypes, MVPs,
  and validated feature launches.

Cross-Functional Integration:

Each cell would include:

2 Designers (or more, depending on staffing levels) to focus on user experience and interface design.
2-4 Embedded Engineers to ensure a close design-development collaboration.
Floating sales, product, and marketing stakeholders.

Phased Implementation:

This structure represents my long-term vision. The design team remained more centralized in the short term to ensure adequate support for all engineering teams and projects.

Growth Design: Senior Design Director Yvonne Doll