How we GSD at Thumbtack Design
This post is about how we Get Sh*t Done (GSD) on the Thumbtack Product Design team. Over the past 2 years we’ve more than tripled the size of our team, pivoted to a new product strategy and shipped a rebrand. Here’s some reflections on how our team has navigated these changes and found a way to stay sane, have fun, and GSD.
Our Team
Who are we? Our team is made up of 3 functions: Product Design, User Research and Content Strategy. 2 years ago we were a small team of 8, and today we’re 25 and growing. Since we don’t have any producers or program managers yet, everyone on our team does some operational and process work. Yes, it can be tough at times, but we think of being a self-run team as an opportunity for everyone to grow and stretch, giving everyone a natural way to take on some leadership responsibilities.
As a growing team, how do we GSD?
Our team and company have changed a lot over the last 2 years. In late 2016 we started to pivot our business to an Instant Match model. We also started the work to do a complete rebrand. These massive undertakings underscored our team’s rapid growth, and forced us to get creative about our process, collaboration and team organization.
No briefs, no problem.
With Instant Match on the horizon, our team jumped into the new product initiatives head first — way before there was even a brief — which meant sometimes we had to be unofficial PMs. We started where lots of teams start — a sprint. It was the first sprint we’d ever done as a company, and it brought together a diverse group of people that had never worked together. The sprint output was also the first time the entire company saw an end-to-end vision.
This laid the foundation for a culture of design sprints and visioning. Going forward, designers partnered to do research and strategic exploration before product planning even started. After that, project teams used our early exploratory vision work to plan, engineers used it for scoping and PMs used it to help guide feature prioritization and project planning.
Rebranding + Design Systems
Shortly after we started the structural work to shift our product strategy, we began thinking about rebranding. We had a fairly utilitarian and dated brand, and our goal was to pair the new product work with an updated brand that was more memorable. To do this we needed a design system.
We weren’t exactly starting from scratch — we had a UI kit, but it wasn’t mapped to anything engineering was doing. There was no shared vocabulary for our patterns and components, which made it hard for eng and content strategy to collaborate. Around this time, a designer on our team was passionate about design systems and persuaded leadership to invest in a full fledged DS team. Today that team has grown to 4 people (2 designers and 2 UI engineers) who have built a full range of UI kits, sketch plugins and tools, and aligned their work with eng.
Collaboration
As Thumbtack grew and our Instant Match and rebrand strategies evolved, the question we started hearing over and over was “how do we keep everyone in the loop?”
We started rethinking how we share and collaborate. How could you find all of the latest design, research and content strategy work easily? Invision and Drive just weren’t cutting it — there was no easy way to “browse” the most recent work. So we created a doc called the “Design List” — a doc that everyone filled in weekly with links and snippets of their latest work. It’s low overhead to fill in, and it’s easy for the audience to get the information they need. It’s a scrappy solution, but we started sending it out to the entire company weekly and it quickly became the source of truth to help everyone know what the latest work was and who was working on it.
Design Crits and Tagups
Originally our design crits were focused on managers reviewing work with the team, but it didn’t feel useful to the designers so we scrapped it (as a growing team, no part of our process was sacred!). We rebooted crit and now designers run it on their own and give each other feedback without managers in the room. They also present at cross-functional product reviews to get a balance of perspectives.
To help make sure there was a forum for leadership feedback and collaboration, we created a “Design Tagup,” which is focused on larger projects. It’s basically a collaborative working session with our design leadership and VP of product.
Content Strategy and Research
Growing also meant thinking about developing the partnership between design, content strategy and research.
Before we had a team of researchers, our designers were often doing evaluative research on their own. It was a pain-point to do research with any frequency and to make sure we were conducting the studies with the right amount of rigor. We also weren’t doing any generative research. So we focused on hiring a team of researchers, who have helped shape our research prioritization process, build a more seamless participant recruitment process and get feedback from our users quickly and regularly. By instituting more structured processes, especially around participant recruiting and evaluative research, we’ve been able to free up time for our researchers to focus more on early generative research. In turn, we’re able to better answer some of the broader strategic questions we’re trying to tackle as a company.
As for content strategy, we hired a small team that’s gone from being focused on copy writing, to shaping the product narrative and information architecture. They don’t just fill in lorem ipsum last minute, but actually partner with PMs and designers throughout the entire project process.
Creating Team Culture
A big part of getting sh*t done for us was creating an awesome culture. As we grew we made the decision to start sitting together instead of in separate pods, and we made our workspace a reflection of our team — creative and playful.
While we like to socialize and grab drinks as much as any team, we strive to create more memorable bonding experiences. At our holiday offsite last winter we created an analog museum of our team’s work. We also did an industrial design prototyping challenge to flex beyond our day-to-day skillset. Recently we had a team dinner with a Thumbtack top pro chef and bartender that we got to interview after dinner.
We also built a culture where designers feel empowered to teach each other. They’ve created toolkits for the team, hosted brown bags on sketching, research process and accessibility. We even got a giant plotter and started covering the walls of the office with journey maps, large scale flows and future design ideas to get our teams more engaged with design.
Team Growth + Career Development
Over the last few months we’ve seen our team grow and mature. A lot of our team has really stepped up and taken on leadership roles unofficially. And we realized it was the perfect moment to add some more structure to the team officially.
We rolled out career tracks to help us scale, while retaining our culture and GSD approach. These tracks are still early, but we just added our first design leads and new managers, and are excited to see the org continue to mature.
Navigating change as we tackle the future
While we’ve grown a lot, we’re still a relatively small and flat team. And when you have a team that has grown as quickly as we have, and the product changes dramatically at the same time, the team feels every little shift. We’re proud that we’ve been able to maintain a sense of equilibrium throughout all of these changes, and even build strong processes and culture at the same time. We’re excited to continue to grow our team and product, and get sh*t done along the way.
We’d love to hear how you and your teams GSD! And if you’re interested in joining a dynamic and fun team, we’re hiring!
