Throughout my time at Setel, as their first design leader in the team, I had the opportunity to implement many new initiatives and improvements for the design team, including process improvements, people management, design quality and more.
Designing processes and workflows for design team is an interesting way to level up and design leader. I get to see immediate values, receive constant feedback from the team and iterate on them over time as the team dynamic changes. Here are some of the initiatives to highlight:
Established a unified design system for Setel's mobile, web and portal products. My main goal at the time was to the inefficient practice of manually copying UI elements from different files, empowering designers to work with approved, reusable components.
Led the migration from Sketch to Figma, setting up organised file structures, with organisation-wide design libraries and handoff files to improve designers' efficiency.
Introduced the concept of design system owners — designers with additional responsibility to maintain and evolve the libraries while collaborating with engineers on code-level implementations. Dedicated Slack channels streamlined communication, updates, and requests.
Introduced design system guidelines for components usage to help designers and developers apply components accurately, fostering consistency and scalability in design and development.
Scaled the product design team to over 30 designers at its peak, interviewing & hiring even during the pandemic and successfully transitioned to remote/hybrid work arrangements.
Introduced UX writer role into the roster — shifting content design responsibilities from marketing to product design for better alignment and collaboration.
Groomed senior designers into design managers, enabling them to transition from individual contributor to management tracks, by managing feature teams under their portfolio.
Established rituals to foster better team bonding, including quarterly show & tells, retrospectives, weekly gratitude sessions, bi-weekly knowledge sharing, and more.
Read my article about growing a design team:
https://medium.com/@gaddafirusli/what-i-learned-growing-a-design-team-9736ae87b51d
Scaling a design team in a remote/hybrid environment required intentional planning to establish clear processes and workflows. Here’s what I implemented:
Introduced comprehensive product designer handbook covering relevant reading materials on team structure, tools, workflows, career growth and what to expect as a product designer in Setel
Implemented personalised "Starter note" to onboard new designers covering information about their team, immediate project priorities, roadmap insights, and relevant resources to help them self-onboard effectively.
Streamlined key design activities and processes into standardised & consistent workflows — to enhance efficiency, improve design output and provide better collaborative environment.
Introduced the concept of design spec and design enhancement documents to align expectations, improve communication, and minimize delivery conflicts when working with the engineering team.
Product and marketing design teams used to work in silos, resulting in visual inconsistencies across different channels. Marketing assets often didn’t align with the visuals in the product, disrupting the brand’s visual communication and potentially lowering the perceived quality of the product.
To address this, I formed a small team of designers to initiate the creation of a shared illustration system — inspired from the success of our design system.
We began by exploring an illustration style that is aligned with our brand identity. The system was then expanded to include an expansive list of assets, including human characters in various poses, backgrounds, buildings, vehicles, and other objects.
The final system allows product and marketing designers to access pre-made illustrations for their projects or create new visuals using modular characters and objects. This shared resource ensures brand consistency while maintaining creative flexibility.
