(gentle music)
- Last year at ConvertKit,
we were having a lot of talks about org structure
and how to grow the marketing and marketing design team.
And during those conversations,
I realized that I didn't know a lot
about how other companies organize their teams.
And so this was one of the driving factors for me
in starting my show, Inside Marketing Design.
I wanted to talk to people in other tech companies,
have an excuse to sit down
and have a conversation with them
and learn about how they were structured,
amongst other things of course.
By now, I've talked to 19 different tech companies
and while every company is a little different, in general,
there are two core models for organizing a design team.
Centralized or decentralized.
In a centralized model, the design team
kind of operates like an internal agency
where other teams submit requests or briefs
for the designers to work on.
And then in a decentralized model,
designers are more embedded
within the various teams who need design work.
In the latest episode of Inside Marketing Design,
I learned that the Shopify marketing UX team,
they call it MUX.
(laughing)
They recently switched from a centralized model
to a decentralized model.
And Lucy list, who is the design manager
on the core product marketing team,
told me a little bit about why they made this change.
- We used to be a centralized sort of marketing team
where everybody is all in one.
And we worked through all the marketing
and creative and we launched.
What we found there was that we were kind of treated
kind of like a service or an agency within Shopify.
And so we weren't close to product.
Since then, I would say towards the end of last year,
and mostly this year,
we've now become a decentralized marketing team.
So what that means is we have marketing teams that support
each and every product area that we have at Shopify.
- Can you tell me more about why the decision was made
to become decentralized and how has it worked out for you?
Are you pleased with the decision,
does it seem to be working out well?
- So as I was hired to help
the marketing side of the design system,
we also recognize that, yes, we are centralized.
We are connected together as a marketing team,
but we weren't really connected with the product side.
And so that was a huge sort of red flag where yeah,
we just need to get closer to product and become one team.
Yeah, so now I feel like we have
more of a seat at the table.
We're brought in earlier into the process, yeah.
It's very nice, and we're really,
really understanding the product more.
So we're given that time to sort of dig into the product,
as opposed to when it used to be sort of centralized
where you're kind of jumping from one project
to the other, you're launching and then you just move.
And so you don't really get that opportunity
to kind of develop and grow with the product.
It's been great, and I would say
we still do have some things that could be better.
Because we're all decentralized now,
we need to come together as a marketing team.
And so some of the work that I initially did
for the marketing design system
was sort of put aside because of the pandemic.
And we've kind of had to reprioritize
just Shopify's priorities as a whole to help merchants,
because yeah, as you know,
like some folks had to close their doors
and they didn't have an online presence.
And so we kind of had to, yeah,
rethink about like how we were going to help
and support merchants through this tough time,
just internally we reorged, and we set aside design systems
for a bit, and now we're kind of coming
to this sort of realization and it kind of happened early,
but we're just, yeah, having to focus on design systems
and now improving our processes, improving the way we work.
- Yeah, so that you can be more connected
across the marketing team, right?
- I know that last year there was a lot,
because a lot of new teams were popping up,
everybody is kind of focused on their sort of product areas
and building out their teams.
And now that we've gone through that process for the year,
we're comfortable enough to like look outside
and start like bringing everything together.
- Yeah, like individually,
these pillars are more stable now.
So now we can look at how we connect them all.
- Exactly, exactly. - So, as you heard from Lucy,
there are pros and cons to both the centralized
and decentralized models of organizing
a marketing design team.
In a centralized model,
the designers stay really close together.
It's really easy for them to stay aligned
and like share knowledge, share work,
but it means they have less context
on all of the various projects going on
around the company because they're like
changing what they're working on so often.
A decentralized model definitely solves for that.
You get a lot of context on the team
or like the product stream that you work on,
but then you're further apart from the other designers
and it's harder to stay aligned that way.
We went for a centralized model at ConvertKit
in the end because we are still so small.
We were a very small team and we were just wanted
to keep the designers closer together.
There's just not enough of us to spread out
across various teams in a decentralized way anyway,
but please, I really do wanna know
how things work at your company.
So do leave a comment and tell me about that.
You can add loads of other interesting details
about marketing design at Shopify
in my full interview with Lucy.
So go ahead and click right here to watch that.
And I'll see you over there.