About Beamery:
-
B2B enterprise scale-up in HR tech, 300+ employees
-
We enable executives, talent acquisition managers and recruiters of Fortune 500 companies to manage their end-to-end talent lifecycle with our AI-assisted tooling.
The context:
-
Historically, Product & Marketing departments haven't been collaborating enough. As a result, there was disconnect between the way we show & tell our products when developing vs advertising them.
-
Marketing Design team sat right in between Product & Marketing, and was perfectly positioned to help bring both departments into cohesion.
-
The design leadership team has initiated the process of merging Product and Marketing design under the same department.
My role and teams involved:
-
As a Design Manager, my role was to take the ownership of the team, and set it up for success.
-
I deeply embedded myself into the Marketing to establish relationships and build connection with Design org.
-
My team consists of 4 marketing designers and 1 Design systems/Design Ops designer.
The problems:
-
The team didn't have a manager, and was operating as an internal agency. They were bombarded with loosely framed requests under tight deadlines.
-
As a result, Marketing design was both stretched and underutilised. There was no breathing room to invest into quality of work.
The goals:
-
The main focus was on setting the team up for success by eliminating the barriers to their efficiency.
-
Once this is achieved and the team's potential is unlocked, we needed to bring the quality to the high level set by our Product Design team.
The approach:
- Step 1: Collect the data
I've collected qualitative and quantitative data to assess team performance and identify key issues by interviewing stakeholders and analysing Asana analytics. This helped isolate and prioritise critical problems.
- Step 2: Formalise the process
To reduce chaos, I streamlined the design process from inception to completion, improved the clarity of the Asana request form, and thoroughly documented and communicated all procedures.
- Step 3: Eliminate disruptions
Continuous communication with job owners and enhancements in tooling significantly reduced urgent and bespoke requests, allowing the team to maintain high quality at pace.
- Step 4: Empower with the design system
I identified an opportunity for synergy between my design system and marketing design teams. We've already enabled product designers with the design system and Figma tooling, but marketing design hasn't benefitted from that yet.
We built configurable Figma components for all standard marketing deliverables, and trained designers to use Figma efficiently. This has demonstrated a 2x-3x increase in performance from the very first project!
Outcomes:
- The team’s potential has been unlocked
The new processes eliminated the hectic environment and inefficiencies that hindered the team’s performance
- The quality of work has notably increased
The new predictable and optimised workflow has allowed team members to focus on quality of the outputs
- The team’s customers are happy
Continuous customer engagement research demonstrate tangible results