When you’re working on an in-house design team, you are likely working with many different projects — stakeholders and prioritization may change from one week to the next. Given the nature of this, things may not always run smoothly. Here are a few common phrases heard in organizations that are usually a symptom of a more significant problem.
Before you start reacting, take a moment to slow down and think about how it got to this point in the first place and work on ways to mitigate these situations later on.
“You’re a blocker.”
Surprise! You’re late on delivering something you actually had no idea about.
There was likely a breakdown in communication regarding deliverables.
Your engineering team is likely working an agile/sprint-based process.
TL;DR Long email threads
That email probably took longer to write than getting together for a 10–15 minute sync.
Communication just isn’t happening between the team; no single source of information.
Having keyboard warriors isn’t conducive to a productive or positive working environment.
“This design doesn’t make sense.”
In your head, it made sense but not quite so to everyone else.
There isn’t an unobstructed flow of how users will navigate your app, or the designs are too high level.
“We may have to cut features.”
But it’s not a killer feature anymore…
A lot of times this is said to mitigate the risk of missing a particular deadline.
“This doesn’t follow the X pattern.”
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Frustration stems from an array of patterns and components with no clear documentation on how something should be executed.