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For many Product Owners or product team leaders, design systems still seem like a nice-to-have, rather than a must-have. Companies may have a design system implemented up to the point of a design kit (which aligns the work of designers within their own teams, but does little to support cross-functional work), or have multiple, mostly independent design systems that cover each of their products, which aren't helping with speed and scale for the overall business.
Employee satisfaction is the new buzzword on the lips of the C-suite across the world. While hardly a new concept — studies on job satisfaction go back decades — the employment turnover rate in the US for the tech industry is projected to reach 70%, according to a study cited in a recent article in Forbes.
Over the past couple of years working at Rangle, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a handful of design systems (DS). One consistent ask for the design systems I’ve worked on is to “make the design system accessible”, or get it to a point where they can certify that everything within the design system meets their minimum legal requirement for accessibility (like WCAG 2.x AA). On the surface, this sounds achievable, but this doesn’t mean what they think it means.
The countdown to Web Summit is on, which means we’re only days away from our CEO Nick Van Weerdenburg’s keynote presentation at the exclusive Corporate Innovation Summit (CIS), an invite-only conference ahead of the main event.
For many enterprises undergoing a digital transformation, the reasons are usually centered around the customer or end-user — improving their online shopping experience, the ease of interfacing with their company online, or giving them a best-in-class, personalized app experience.
The goal of most modern organizations is to create a business that centers their customer. Customer-centricity is a byword for enterprises, but too few really treat their users as the experts, and instead rely on what the executive thinks they know about the market, based on their decades of experience. Being focused on the customer then, is a process of unlearning the traditional business decision making practices that many executives were raised on, and radically shifting the mindsets and decision making flows to support swift reactions to market changes.
Many organizations only begin the work of replatforming once it’s an imperative. Their current technologies are making great customer experiences impossible, and the outdated tooling causes such a headache for their customer-facing teams that more resources are spent merely maintaining and finding workarounds for the system than actually bringing new customer experiences to market.
At Rangle, we believe in sustainable development practices. This is not only reflected in our lean and agile approach to meeting our clients’ needs, but also in our emphasis on individual and team happiness. We express this at the organizational level through things like communities of practice, workshops, lunch & learns, and organization-wide surveys, but also at the individual level through one-on-ones.