Booking.com has several offices across the world. The headquarters is in Amsterdam, but we have product teams in Shanghai, Manchester and Bangalore as well. For most of the teams, they work independently and autonomously on their own products.
For my project, the team is spread across Amsterdam and Shanghai as the product leads sit in Amsterdam, while the engineers are in Shanghai. The Shanghai Product Managers acted as the in-betweens. While this was a clear allocation for Product and Engineering, the same model did not work for UX. We had one team of 3 in Amsterdam, with 3 teams of 5 in Shanghai.
I’ve selected this to showcase how I play a role in designing team experiences across 2 different timezones as an Individual Contributor.
Distributed global team model for better collaboration
An in-person crit session with the team in Shanghai
Team experience redesign
Context
My UX designer, researcher and myself on the Amsterdam global UX team were tasked to be in-charge of the strategy while the 3 Shanghai local UX teams, consisting of 4 designers and 1 writer, were the ones implementing it. It was quite difficult to have a clear-cut division as my team became unfamiliar with the challenges of implementation which could affect the strategy. This also limited the opportunities for the Shanghai local UX teams to grow their strategic skills.
Solution
Redesign the collaboration model to be more equally distributed in terms of ownership, accountability and growth opportunities.
Role
Senior UX Writer
What I did
I proposed a new team structure:
the global team was in-charge of orchestrating how everything worked together in a single product experience, developing the high level end-to-end experience from strategy to launch
the local teams were in-charge of the individual features that went into the product, from strategy to launch
I worked with my UX designer and Shanghai design manager to test out the new collaboration model.
Impact
Both teams each have strategic and executional responsibilities. Teams can also now work efficiently and with clarity. This working model is now being used for the upcoming UX roadmaps as well.
Iteration v1
I tried many other ways to tackle this situation. One of them was being diplomatic and sharing the strategic work equally. This meant we worked on the exact same thing together.
This actually worsened the situation. The roles and scope overlapped and became unclear, while accountability still lay with the global team. Everyone was confused and stressed.
Interested to understand more? I wrote a post about my own insights and learnings from this experience.