The Secrets of Effective Design Teamwork

Collaboration matters. Here’s how to get it right

Joanna Ngai
4 min readFeb 20, 2018

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A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.
— Simon Sinek

Teamwork can be defined as a group of people working together towards a common purpose or goal. But this is easier said than done. Even bringing together a group of designers can bubble up many different perspectives on how to accomplish a goal. Sometimes despite your best effort, there may be natural friction between people of different personality types, miscommunication and other conflicts.

Here’s are 4 tips to build effective design teamwork and collaboration, and help ensure that your team is both productive and happy.

1. Build a strong structure

Clear communication on a compelling team direction provides such structure to a fast moving design team. The purpose of providing underlying structure is is to provide additional streams of communication through tools, organization and a timeline of needs so everyone is aware of the common goal(s).

Design teams are most productive when they know that the work is meaningful and adds value to the long term strategy of the business.

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Joanna Ngai
Joanna Ngai

Written by Joanna Ngai

UX Designer at Google, illustrator, green tea drinker dribbble.com/joannan | UX for Beginners https://amzn.to/3ekRM00

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