“Table Stakes” Initiative
Tables Stakes was an initiative I created as Head of Design for Commercial Card by leveraging the highest priority effort of the product organization to create alignment and focus around one of the most critical pieces of functionality in our platform.
The result was not only collaboration across the commercial design team and more consistent experiences across our platform, but the evolution of this team subsequently ran Commercial’s newly established QA process
here’s what drove this organizationally
I noticed a number of independent projects happening that were about to collide that drove me to pull this initiative together:
Our design system was leaping into the future.
A new creative director was moving into a new hi-fi, longterm vision.
Wireframes for a new product were about to urgently move into hi-fi. They didn’t know if they were going to use the new or old visuals.
A vendor-based reporting engine (i.e. tables) was going to be replaced due to a cyber security finding.
An Angular migration meant the existing product platform was being updated using the existing design system.
And quietly, I knew a reorg was coming. I wanted this group to come together and build relationships safely before that occurred. Not to mention that all of these efforts touched tables but the collectively knowledge and power of this group wasn’t being leveraged!
CONSOLIDATING THE EXISTING WORK LEAD TO SOME REAL “AHA” MOMENTS
The existing, in production, visual experiences.
An Airtable of all of the visual patterns, screens, and locations to create insitu context
An inventory of the 189 fields within tables to ground worst case scenarios (this also kicked off a content project)
The future design system components that would eventually be mandated by the enterprise
psychological safety isn’t lip service to me. it creates better humans. better teams. Better products.
This problem had a pretty simple solution on the surface; I’m proud of this work because human interactions within a team are inherently complicated. Managing those dynamics is my speciality.
We can talk about creating psychological safety within teams. But why is that important? Because if you trust each other then you can respectfully, and spiritedly, debate. If you can respectfully debate you can learn and build better products through diverse perspectives.
The tentacles that came out of this project are long:
Creative direction was aligned with the approved, and mandated, components of our future design system.
Our design system was balancing products in production on the old design system, while designing and deploying components in the new direction.
This team together became the team that executed the newly established visual QA process.
They enjoyed working together and pushing each other — and they enabled our team to produce higher quality and consistent work more efficiently.
“You have a special talent for helping others understand what might feel complex but breaking it down into a story that resonates with those who need to understand it.”
“As a people leader and partner you see individuals for how they are — and you respect it, embrace it, and work with it.”