A design team of 30+ needs a guiding set of principles. To provide design leadership to an organization of 3,000+, those design principles need to be tailored and relevant with top-down endorsement.

Over the course of two years, I brought together two sets of volunteer teams to tackle multiple exercises including:

• Comparing/contrasting our previous successes and failures launching principles;
• Auditing design principles across all creative industries;
• Surveying our design team and building consensus with full transparency into our process and findings;
• Interviewing cross-functional stakeholders to hone the final proposal;
• And leading writing workshops to hone the language and intent.

In the end, we delivered a truly collaborative internal product to make focus, clarity, and efficiency part of our culture and broadcasted our Design Principles across the entire organization.

I feel like Be Consistent— follow the style guide—and some of the other (principles) are so basic that they’re not ones we really need to focus on as much or actively. Where this (Be Brave) is one where we need to be more proactive and we need to remember to do. We need to be pushed to take risks.

Sr Director Product Management