Bringing Order to the Design Chaos
A thoughtful take on a better design process
This isn’t a launch story—it’s an exploration. Alex Traykov and I mapped out what a scalable design process at Quickbase could be, creating a framework that aligns teams, speeds up workflows, and makes collaboration smoother. Maybe one day it’ll ship.
Collaborated with
+ The wonderful folks @ Quickbase design
Q3'24
The Problem
A Team Without a Process: Designers at Quickbase were mostly freestyling their workflows, leading to inconsistency, silos, and lack of visibility within the team.
Siloed Work & Poor Stakeholder Engagement: Work wasn’t shared effectively among designers, and key contributors—like the content designer—were often looped in too late in the process.
Limited Visibility & Alignment: Design managers lacked visibility into projects, making it harder for them to support, mentor, and advocate for the team’s work.
Designing the Blueprint Together
This exploration wasn’t done in isolation—Alex Traykov and I bounced ideas off each other, bringing different perspectives to the table. As a design lead, Alex provided insight into how design leadership at Quickbase could be structured to better support the team. We discussed pain points, mentorship gaps, and how a well-defined process could enhance both efficiency and creativity.
We constantly iterated, refining ideas based on our combined experiences, ensuring that the process was flexible enough for senior designers while structured enough to support junior designers and new hires.
Gaining Leadership Buy-In
A structured design process wasn’t just something we explored in isolation—it was a recurring topic in my 1-1s with my direct manager, our Director of Design. I consistently brought up that all successful design teams adhere to a unified design process, especially those working with a design system, because structure enables teams to work more efficiently, maintain consistency across products, and reduce unnecessary rework. Without a shared framework, design teams risk fragmentation, with each designer solving similar problems in different ways—leading to wasted effort, misalignment, and slower execution.
Beyond that, my onboarding experience was patchy, and from discussions with other colleagues, theirs was too. A structured process would not only bring clarity to design execution but also streamline onboarding for new hires, helping them ramp up faster and understand how we work as a team.
While leadership agreed on the importance of a structured process, they wanted to see something tangible before committing. However, there was hesitation about the next hurdle—we would inevitably need buy-in from external stakeholders, including product managers, engineering, and leadership beyond design. The concern was that getting these groups to adhere to a new design process would require significant alignment efforts, and we didn’t get far enough to tackle that step before higher priorities took over.
Despite gaining initial buy-in, the project was deprioritized due to shifting business needs, and it never reached full adoption. However, the discussions set the groundwork for future improvements and reinforced the need for better design operations within the team.
Mentorship & Leadership Experience
While at VMware, I mentored two junior designers, helping them build their design thinking, execution skills, and ability to work across teams. I don’t see leadership as a personal spotlight—it’s about making sure the team has the right tools, support, and direction so their work speaks for itself. Good design leadership isn’t about making big speeches; it’s about creating the space where great work can happen without forcing it.
An Adaptive Approach to Design Collaboration
Each step in our framework followed a consistent structure:
📌 Key Activities – What happens at this stage?
📌 Objective – What are we trying to achieve?
📌 Benefits – How does this help designers & stakeholders?
📌 Deliverables & Deep Dives – What artifacts are produced?
Not every step was mandatory – the process was designed to be flexible, allowing designers to mix & match steps depending on their project’s needs.
1. Project Initiation
Every project starts with clear goals and scope to prevent misalignment. We define success metrics, align stakeholders, and establish communication channels.
🔹 Outputs: A structured project charter and kickoff meeting notes to align the team from day one.
2. Research & Planning
To avoid assumptions, we gather insights from users, competitors, and internal teams to frame the right problem. This helps designers move forward with confidence.
🔹 Outputs: User personas, journey maps, and competitive analysis to guide design decisions.
3. Conceptualization & Ideation
Instead of jumping into high-fidelity designs, we explore multiple directions first—sketching, brainstorming, and validating different approaches.
🔹 Outputs: Wireframes, early prototypes, and ideation workshops to refine concepts before committing.
4. Design Development
Once we have validated concepts, we turn them into high-fidelity mockups and iterate through feedback loops with designers, engineers, and product teams.
🔹 Outputs: Detailed UI components, refined interactions, and structured design reviews.
5. Prototyping & Testing
To ensure usability, we create interactive prototypes and test them with users, gathering feedback to improve before final implementation.
🔹 Outputs: Usability testing reports, iterative design updates, and refined flows.
6. Refinement & Iteration
We keep refining designs based on feedback from usability tests, internal stakeholders, and engineering constraints, ensuring the best experience possible.
🔹 Outputs: Updated prototypes, stakeholder feedback documentation, and technical feasibility reviews.
7. Finalization & Handoff
Before engineering starts development, we ensure all assets, interactions, and guidelines are clear to prevent rework and confusion.
🔹 Outputs: A detailed handoff package, including Figma specs, interaction guidelines, and documentation.
8. Deployment & Review
Once launched, we track adoption, collect feedback, and evaluate success to refine future iterations.
🔹 Outputs: Post-launch analysis, user feedback summaries, and team retrospectives.
Challenges & Lessons Learned
🚧 Scaling a Design Process is a Team Effort:
It’s not about rigid rules—it’s about constant iteration and collective ownership.
🚧 A Moving Target:
The best design processes evolve with the team—not something you build once and forget about.
🚧 Getting Buy-In Beyond Design:
Leadership buy-in was only the first step—the real challenge would have been getting cross-functional teams to adopt and adhere to the process.
🚧 Making it Bite-Sized:
The framework was too big to absorb all at once, so we explored ways to break it down into more digestible pieces.
Final Thoughts
Working with Alex on this project was a blast—his insights, experience, and ability to challenge ideas helped shape this exploration into something far bigger than just a theoretical framework. While this process never fully landed at Quickbase, it reinforced something more important: great teams don’t just need a process—they need an environment where collaboration, visibility, and iteration are second nature. That’s what truly makes design work.