Bringing design in

Find out when to involve design, how to get support and what to expect.

Our process

Design engages at the start of the lifecycle, not the end of it. Six stages, and a loop.

  • Framing. Frames the problem space, before the spec exists.
  • Discovery. Drives the research and maps the customer journey.
  • Shaping. The intent, the risk, the oversight model.
  • Validation. Tests the real thing with real people, before it ships and after.
  • Build. The design system, agent behaviour, evals.
  • Learn. Watching how it behaves, and learning what needs to change.

Then back to framing. It’s a loop, not a line.

Design starts at framing. By the time a squad reaches build, the decisions worth a designer have already been made.

If the spec exists before the designer does, the most valuable work has already been skipped.

How you get a designer

  1. Speak to a Design Manager, not an individual designer. They see the whole portfolio.
  2. The work has to be tracked, even lightly. An idea brief, from customer feedback or a technology requirement, is enough to start; sustained work needs a fuller brief.
  3. Allocation is prioritised against everything else, not first come first served.
  4. Where products share a workflow, we try and form cross-app squads rather than duplicating designers.
  5. Designers are allocated to work, not to teams. When the work is done, or design isn’t what the work needs, they move on.

Capacity, honestly

Around 30 designers. More than 78 active investments. That arithmetic decides the shape of the support you get, and there are three levels of it.

Dedicated designer. Embedded in the squad, in planning from day one.

Shared designer. One designer across two or three related squads.

Self-serve. Helix, the published standards, design.ifs.com, and a design review before release.

What decides the level: customer impact, strategic weight (NGA first), risk, and whether the team engages design properly. A team that won’t do research or won’t bring design in early doesn’t get a designer.

Every investment gets design support. Not every investment gets a designer.

Research without a designer

Self-serve still means research. It just means the squad runs it.

What squads do themselves:

  • Watch how the feature is actually used, not how it was assumed to be used
  • Run a short usability test before release, not after
  • Follow the published standards, so the product still feels like one thing
  • Bring anything hard to reverse to your Design Manager first

Tools available to everyone:

  • Fullstory (DXI). Session replay and behavioural analytics, so you can watch how people actually use it.
  • UserTesting. Moderated and unmoderated usability tests, with no researcher needed to run them.

Self-serve without research isn’t self-serve. It’s guessing.

What happens when design isn’t enabled properly

This is what we do when the model above isn’t followed. It isn’t punishment. It’s how we protect a scarce resource and the people in it.

  1. A designer who arrives after the spec is written is moved to work that is still being shaped.
  2. A designer being used for project management, admin, or late-stage reviews is moved to work that needs a designer.
  3. Teams that engage design properly are prioritised when capacity is contested.
  4. A team that expects a designer without prioritising the work first slows the whole portfolio down, not just their own.

How we hire designers

Bar-raiser hiring. The default answer is no unless the evidence is clearly there. Every hire should make the team better than it is today.

No unpaid work. No take-home briefs. A short live exercise in the panel round instead.

Levels are calibrated. Titles are inflated across the market, so a level is a statement about scope, not about the person.

The hiring manager decides. The Design Manager or Director makes the final call on a designer hire. Product leaders are consulted and may sit on the panel, but they are not accountable for the hire, so they don’t have final say.

What we’re asking of you

  1. Bring design in at the framing stage, not after the spec is written.
  2. Treat the designer as a squad member, not a review gate.
  3. Hold your squads to the published standards and the shared definition of done.
  4. Get your design hiring requests in early. It takes six to eight months from approval to a designer in a seat, so what we decide now lands next year.