design team collaboration

Cross - Products Strategy

Nuwiya Amal, January 2022 - Present

UX Design Team Strategy

background

Role and Earlier Problem Found

Landing at TreeDots

In February 2022, I joined TreeDots Design Team as a UI/UX Designer dedicated to the Merchant App Team. By January 2023, I had progressed to Senior UI/UX Designer. TreeDots, a Southeast Asian company, acts as a tech-driven wholesale distributor for surplus and imperfect food supplies. They aim to bridge the gap between supply and demand while streamlining transactions for both suppliers and culinary businesses – not only offering imperfect produce, but also high-quality ingredients.

Initial Silos

Upon joining, the Design Team followed a product-specific approach. Each designer focused on a single product: Supplier Dashboard, TreeLogs (logistics and delivery), and the Merchant App (mobile grocery app for culinary business owners). While initially assigned with the Merchant App, a deeper dive into its documentation revealed a limited understanding of the bigger picture – the interconnectedness of all TreeDots products,

“the more I understood about Merchant App itself, the more I had no idea about whole business operated in TreeDots, while all products are related to each other. “

The company itself was still in ongoing exploration of optimal business models through a trial-and-error phase, further hindering design collaboration.

Advocating for Change:

These concerns led me to propose increased collaboration within the Design Team. Additionally, the team itself lacked maturity due to frequent leadership and member changes over the past 2-3 years.

Goal Statement

To cultivate a collaborative and well-informed Design Team at TreeDots by:

  • Fostering cross-product knowledge and a holistic understanding of the interconnected TreeDots product suite

  • Building a unified design system, that promotes design consistency, improves efficiency, and simplifies communication across the design team.

02. team goals

What does “Fostering cross-product knowledge and a holistic understanding of the interconnected TreeDots product suite” mean?

This will be achieved through the development of clear and centralized documentation. This knowledge sharing will not only improve collaboration but also provide a solid foundation for developing future product improvement strategies that consider the entire product ecosystem.

For example, there are similar features are being used in all platforms, such as: Select Address, Price Mechanism, Raise Issue, Delivery, etc. It’ll be very risky if all features work differently on each platform. So, we need to have problem-defining and problem-solving process together

02. team goals

And, how about "Building a unified design system"?

Back then, we still don’t have any benchmark on Design System. So, we want to standardize our Design System such as Components, Color Library and Icon Library for all Platforms (mobile and desktop)

03. process

What we do? -First, we do Generative Research by interviewing the stakeholders (key operations)

At the beginning, there were no documentations yet on how overall business operates in the company, so we interviewed all key operations people to understand their main responsibilities, current workflow, work collaboration (in the team or cross department), their work challenges also tools usage. Especially to understand overall business operations in the company.


Another highlight here, these people whom we’re interviewed are using multiple platforms (Supplier Dashboard, Merchant App and TreeLogs) to fulfill their responsibilities. So we definitely can understand their point of view about the existing platforms, whether to fix it or to add more features or could be other actions.

03. process

After gathering all informations from the interviews, we build Cross Functional Flow Diagram

Since I have experience on creating service blueprint, then I suggested to the team to adopt on how service blueprint visualizing all informations from previous interviews, especially how all departments collaborate. Now it has been more clearer about user journeys, detail process and which department/unit that responsible for specific activity. After that, we can map out which platforms that are needed to support those activity (mostly by launch a new feature or fixing existed feature). So that we can build a better planning what actions to take.

03. process

But wait, we can’t just plan new things and ignore the existing workflow that already happened in the company. Then, we dig deeper and documenting our observation by creating

Issues & Queries Analysis.

Sometimes we can’t only “ask” people/user to get whole informations, we also need to observe while they’re working. So, we asked them to invite design team member to their slack channels access and observe their activities, because that’s how they collaborate.


  • They have different slack channels for different issues and queries;

  • related to platform usage (Merchant App, Supplier Dashboard and TreeLogs)

  • related to products (food supply)

  • deliveries

  • order, etc


After that all Design Team’s member capturing those issues and queries from different slack channels in specific time duration. Then, we map everything out in Issues and Queries Analysis documentation.


This is a huge step for Design Team cause after doing this we received much credits from other departments on how helpful this is.

03. process

Set Brainstorm, Design Critiques and other sessions together in Design Team as Ideation process. Especially for same features in all platforms.

Each designer already created all research per platform base, like user persona. At first, we shared about each user persona in different platform to make sure that everyone on the same page.

And here is the fun part - Brainstorm session! We brainstorm together to ideate specific feature for all platforms. Not only “fulfilling the task” but it becomes our therapy session. After we created and discussed all wireframes, each designer creating the high fidelity designs for each platform and we set another design critique sessions. So, everyone will be aware how the same feature looks like on different platform.

03. process

Standardize Design System for all platforms.

While we’re doing vertical responsibilities (platform based) we also working on our horizontal responsibilities to fulfill Design System, such as Color Library and Icon Library, so all platforms will use from the same resource. Except for Dashboard and Mobile, we use different components library.

04. key takeaways

If we look back to where we started, now things much more clearer for the Design Team.

Not only have design documentation, but have it for how the entire business operates also important -especially for the startups company. Sometimes designers are too focused on customer, but forgot to support how the company “serves” the customer.


Also, being actively involved on how the company constantly improved it’s workflow by doing multiple feedbacks and testing, is a huge help to discover the problem.

05. obstacles

Challenges faced during the process:

  • On the business side, there is ongoing exploration of optimal business models through trial and error, posing a significant challenge for designers in providing assistance.

  • The tech winter has experienced a decline, resulting in the loss of valuable team members across design and development teams. This has led to designers being unable to fully dedicate themselves to their respective platforms due to the need to assist with tasks on other platforms.

  • Despite the Design Team's efforts to propose improved future feature planning, the tech team remains focused on resolving current version issues rather than advancing towards future plans, despite the clear benefits of incorporating new features. This situation is exacerbated by resource limitation.

Thank You!

Nuwiya Amal

Team

Diana Eddie (Design Lead)

Nuwiya Amal (Sr UI UX Designer)

Aye Aye Phyu (UI UX Designer)

Myat Kaung Hein (UI UX Designer)

Annetta Carolina (UX Researcher)