PRODUCT DESIGN & IMPROVING TEAMWORK
2024
Wevox Board
Atrae, Inc. (株式会社アトラエ)
About Atrae and
Wevox Board
Atrae Inc. is an IT service provider specializing in the Human Resources field. The company primarily operates a performance-based job site that leverages big data, while also developing new business initiatives. Atrae plans, develops, and manages job information websites across Japan.
As part of their offerings, Wevox is a platform focused on organizational engagement surveys and improvement. Within this platform, Wevox Board serves as a whiteboard tool designed to enhance team conversations by visualizing dialogue, data, and emotions.
My Contributions
Product Design
Supporting improvements in teamwork
Main Activities and Achievements
Challenges and my goals
I joined this project as a freelance product designer in May 2024. Initially, feedback from managers indicated that design had become a bottleneck in product development. After working with the team for few weeks, the key challenges identified are:
Lack of Agile Experience: The designer struggled to prioritize tasks and define MVPs, instead focusing excessively on detailed designs, which often conflicted with the agile process, causing delays.
Heavy Design System: The design system followed Google’s Material Design but did not align with the specific needs and goals of the organization, creating inefficiencies.
Team Misalignment: With the majority of developers as external vendors, there was limited context-sharing and transparency, resulting in misalignment with product goals, sprint objectives, and development practices.
Based on this, my goals of working with Wevox Board team have defined as:
Promote Agile Design: Foster a more agile design approach and prioritize outputs critical to development.
Enhance Team Collaboration: Connect cross-functional roles, improve transparency, and involve engineers early in the planning stage for better context alignment.
Approaches taken
Understanding Team Context: Engaged with team members to understand the AS-IS workflows, preferences, and decision-making contexts.
Facilitating Feedback Loops: Shared design solutions proposed improvements during retrospectives, gathering direct team feedback.
Transparent Design Process: Involved engineers in design discussions early to ensure feasibility and shared ownership of solutions.
Design Practice Sharing: Organized regular meetings with designers to promote best practices and improve collaboration.
Streamlined Design Files: Reorganized project design files to facilitate smoother design collaboration.
Outputs
Improved Collaboration: Team cohesion and transparency were enhanced, fostering stronger alignment.
Accelerated Design Tasks: Design tasks progressed more quickly and efficiently.
Smoother Design-Development Handoffs: Greater engineer visibility into decision-making led to more seamless transitions from design to development.
Key Takeaways
Gradual and Inclusive Change: While bringing valuable practices from past experiences, the key to driving change is ensuring team-wide agreement. I focused on understanding each member’s needs and preferences, introducing small, incremental improvements to minimize confusion and maintain motivation.
Challenges as freelancer designer: Freelancers often face challenges such as limited access to information and alignment with stakeholders. There are still limits but some good practice help me overcome these included: I prioritized visualizing my processes and solutions, sharing context transparently, and involving relevant team members to foster better collaboration and alignment.