irst off, it’s just more fun to have another designer on the team; someone who knows where you’re coming from, who is living in your problem space, and is right beside you for quick questions. The domains that each product team work within are quite complex; it can be difficult for a designer who’s not in that domain to have the contextual knowledge needed to be a good sparring partner. Second, this helps Oda grow and maintain expertise. New teams at Oda are usually the result of a bigger team being split in two (the absorb and split model), and when we make these splits we can send one designer to each team. Then we hire two new designers, make two new duos, and expertise is passed along. A diagram showing how teams can grow by absorbing new team members until the team grows too big and splits naturally into two teams. Similarly this makes internal mobility much friendlier. A designer looking for a new challenge can move to a new team without stripping the old team of all its design expertise. Single-person dependencies are never good so this makes it easier for us to manage life in general — designers can take long vacations or parental leave and design work doesn’t come to a halt.

Designers on these product teams are full team members, and the team sticks together over the long term. The product team is the designers’ first allegiance and where they get their tasks. They then report to a design manager or design director outside of the product team, and are part of the UX Design Discipline, but tasks don’t come from the design discipline.

We roughly follow the Team Topologies team types, and most UX designers are working on stream-aligned, or product teams. These are teams that have missions to deliver value in a specific customer problem domain or “slice” of the customer journey, rather than a project or deliverable, and owning all technology and expertise for that area. Such teams include Activation (new user experience part of the customer journey), Recipes (solving dinner), or Inventory (making sure we get the right products at the right time).