Summary
What do you do when Mergers and Acquisitions is your company’s growth strategy and all the products look different. Key design principle to solve this is UX Consistency. But how much consistency is needed? How can you engage all these different teams and align them on a common goal, especially in a decentralized product design environment? Lastly, having design alignment or a common design system is not enough, but ensuring that all the products implement the agreed design consistency across product. Learn how you can influence and scale to achieve balanced user experience across all products.
Key Insights
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Mergers and acquisitions frequently introduce multiple design systems, complicating UX consistency.
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Hybrid design organizational models balance centralized alignment with decentralized product flexibility.
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Achieving around 30-40% design consistency with 60-70% product freedom avoids cookie-cutter experiences.
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Forming cross-product design network groups encourages democratic, collaborative decision-making.
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Visual elements like color palettes are effective starting points to unify diverse product designs.
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Tracking implementation progress and involving engineering early is key to embedding consistent design.
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A service leadership approach fosters collaboration better than command-and-control management.
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Communicating regularly with product and engineering leadership ensures alignment beyond design teams.
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Design consistency can reduce training needs, customer support, and speed up delivery through component reuse.
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Balancing organizational culture differences and product needs is necessary during post-acquisition alignment.
Notable Quotes
"Design consistency is a key principle in design and in life; to achieve something, you have to be consistent and disciplined."
"When things behave the same way, users don't have to worry about what will happen – that's consistency that brings intuitive factor."
"In a hybrid design model, product teams get flexibility but a central entity keeps common elements aligned."
"Setting 100% consistency is setting yourself up for failure; about 30-40% consistency is a realistic goal."
"Create network groups where one designer from each product team collaborates to arrive at design decisions."
"A picture is worth a thousand words – compiling screenshots from all products can show stakeholders inconsistency clearly."
"Opt for collaboration instead of command and control; approach with a service leadership model."
"Changing mindset takes time, like turning a big ship in a different direction – it could take several hours."
"Tracking implementation commitments and following up regularly keeps projects on track in an agile environment."
"Human capital, design talent, is the most valuable asset – empower them to be part of the decision-making."
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