If you’re assigned to do design coordination on a project, this means you’re trusted as a responsible and experienced person who can follow up with other designers on the project’s design progress, quality and timeline.

The coordinators are experienced team members who:

• Can be trusted as responsible and organized
• Have good technical and soft skills
• Have good knowledge of team processes and best practices
• Are proactive and bring additional value to their projects - e.g., suggest process changes, point out when further discussion/clarification is needed, raise flags early and to the right audience, ...
• Can follow up with other designers on the project's progress, quality, and timeline

Assigning coordinators to a project

Ongoing projects — On ongoing projects, the coordinator is usually a person who has excellent knowledge of the project (usually the designer who previously worked on this project) or someone familiar with similar projects

New projects — The coordinator is chosen based on domain knowledge, availability, or designer working on the project (e.g., someone’s TL)

Benefits of coordination on projects

The idea behind coordinating projects is to deliver consistent design (product) quality across the board and within the expected budget and timelines.

The coordinator’s responsibilities include:

• Making sure that consistent design quality is delivered across the board and within the expected timelines and budget
• Making sure that the design is aligned with business expectations and that design decisions are made with users in mind
• Each coordinator is also a mentor who needs to make sure the designers grow and motivate them to show their best on the project, taking into consideration the project’s limitations
• Promoting best practices and speeding up the adoption process of the new knowledge inside the team

Coordination goals

As mentioned, the coordinator primarily keeps track of the quality of the project, but still, there are situations where mentoring is more of a focus. Coordination is not necessary on all projects and should be decided case by case.

It should be clear why coordination on some projects is being done, and that can be one of the following reasons:

• The project or domain is complex
• The project is strategically relevant (important client, business opportunity…)
• A less experienced designer needs support (mentoring)
• The designer working on the project requested mentorship

Some examples of the coordination goals are:

• Setting up a way of working
• Mentoring a less experienced designer
• Improving the UX of a specific flow in the following quarter
• Improving communication inside the project team
• Helping the new designer on a project understand the domain, etc.

For each project, the coordination objectives should be clear, and our way of working should be aligned with that in mind.

The coordination shouldn’t be done just for the sake of doing it without a clear goal. Also, if a project transitions into the support phase, it's likely that coordination may have become unnecessary, so periodic checks are needed to confirm this.

Starting with coordination

If you have just become a coordinator (congrats!), in order to fully understand what coordination is and how the process works, make sure that you go through these steps first:

• Discuss the coordination process and a way of working on the project you are assigned with your TL
• Have a meeting with a former coordinator on a project (in case you are taking over), discuss project setup and the general approach to the coordination goal
• Have in mind general rules regarding delivering feedback (some mentioned in this chapter)

Coordinating project

Make an introduction meeting with the designer and PM working on the project. Meet the project team and find out the developer’s and QA’s points of view as well.

Join the project’s internal and client Slack channels and ask the PM to include you in important project reviews, demos, and client meetings.

Make sure you understand the project's following aspects:

• Who is the client?
• Who is on the project team?
• What are the project requirements?
• What are the client's expectations?
• What is the timeline? What is the deadline?
• What are the estimates sent with biz dev proposal?
• What is the design process?
• What are the project risks?
• What is the client satisfaction so far?
• Is the team delivering on time?
• What weekly meetings do they have?
• Do they have a Slack channel?

Schedule weekly/biweekly/monthly meetings with the PM and designers to check in on the project. Frequency depends on the project phase, and adjusting it based on the timeline is okay. Support projects need less frequent checks than new projects, which require more attention.

Coordinator’s activities

• Recognize mistakes and challenges early
• Keep track of time spent vs. time estimated
• Dig into the design (screens, flows) and check the current progress
• Help designers better understand their work and what they need to improve on screens, flows, ideas, etc.
• If something needs to be changed regarding scope, process, or design, inform everyone on the team
• Raise red flags to PMs or management
• Make sure that best practices are being adopted and followed on a project

Red flags

🚩 in design

• The design process covers more than we can fit into the estimated design scope
• Design progress is too slow, or design quality drops below Infinum’s standards
• The UX is too convoluted
• The design doesn’t align with tech possibilities and/or business expectations
• Designers aren’t doing regular design reviews
• Best practices (e.g., technical, way of working, …) are not followed

🚩 in team and communication

• Clients who are unresponsive, have unrealistic expectations or there isn’t a clear decision-maker on the client’s side
• A lot of change requests or iteration requests from the client
• Designers are swamped with work and can’t fit planned design work into current deadlines
• The project team doesn’t acknowledge scope creep in design.
• Developers/PMs are ignoring design reviews or there is no time/budget to do the necessary updates within the current deadlines
• Designers are not getting the proper feedback.

A TL (of the designer working on the project) should be the primary contact for advice and handling problematic situations. Other than discussion with TL, use the #design-coordination channel on Slack for day-to-day discussions, questions, updates, etc.

Promoting best practices

Coordination should be a platform for promoting best practices and speeding up the adoption process of the new knowledge inside the team. When a new best practice is introduced (either through WoW on another project, critique groups, or team-wide education), it automatically becomes one of the coordination goals of the project. The responsibility of the coordinators is to:

• Let others know about the new practice (on a project you are working on or coordinating) you find worth implementing on other projects. Discuss it with the other coordinators or Lead designer. Write the summary of the new practice in the #design-coordination channel and add relevant doc/presentation/link with more info
• Keep an eye on the best practices promoted on #team-design-internal or #design-coordination channels
• Motivate and help the designer on a project to implement these practices
• Track the progress and adoption of new practices on the projects you are coordinating

Documenting coordination

The Coordination sheet is the most important and primary source of truth for coordination.

The coordination sheet contains a project list with coordination-related info, such as

• the project’s status
• engagement per project
• coordinator, PM, and designer names → Coordination sheet

Also, as non-mandatory documentation, we can have the project charter linked to the coordination sheet and coordination notes.

A project charter is a document that PMs plan to introduce on all projects and will be part of the project documentation in Productive. This is not our responsibility, but it’s good to be aware that this exists. This document contains relevant info about the project, such as:

• general info (description, scope, deliverables, team, links)
• milestones
• financials (limited access)
• risks, blockers, and dependencies → Project charter template example

Coordination notes are not mandatory but can be added if the coordinator feels they are helpful.

Tracking time

Generally, coordination time should be tracked on a project.

If that’s not possible due to budget restrictions, the coordinator, PM, and one of the TLs should agree on a solution (e.g., tracking time internally).

Team Leads' involvement

In the case of a D1 designer working on a project, the TL should be the project coordinator (if possible). If that’s not the case, the TL should regularly discuss the designer's progress with the coordinator so that they have a better understanding of how this person is doing.

Benefits of TL coordinating projects with the D1 designer involved:

• opportunity to be directly involved as a mentor
• having a better understanding of how this person thinks and operates on a daily level
• this way, a TL can mentor and guide a designer and be directly involved in the project
• the potential of tracking 1on1 time on the client’s budget

Other than mentoring D1 designers, we should see to include TLs only in strategically important/complex projects. TLs shouldn’t coordinate more than 1-2 projects simultaneously.

When not a coordinator, a TL should be the primary contact for handling problematic situations and advice.