Hahahaha structure!

Nah, all jokes aside; many organisations I've worked with/for had setups for infrastructure. Unfortunately, my current one is so fast-pased that I find myself wearing ALL the hats, some of the time.

• Generally a brief consists of "we need a website for X", or "we need to build product Y", or "we want to market service Z".
• My next move is to find out more about the product, catalogue it.
• Chase all stakeholders to help me write a description of the product (features, pricing, target audience, etc)
• Solo whiteboard session for brainstorming the ideal solution
• Talk to dev/CEO to identify what resources we have
• See how close we can get to that ideal solution with the provided resources and available infrastructure
• Hand-drawn/Photoshop/HMTL mockups, or straight-up implementation

This includes a lot of copy-writing and coming up with slogans and any/all research I can do into the target audience.

It's rough, but it's a real-world example that I want to share because a lot of organisations (even medium sized businesses) still work like this.

Not ideal, but we achieve a fair bit!

In my org design sits in product (product design). These designers work within engineering teams directly, and have regular sync ups with each other via 1 large standing review period, bi-weekly retrospectives and twice-per-week standups. The process here is well defined and highly collaborative. PM & design work on solutions together (2 designers + 1 PM per unit) and everyone reports to the Chief Product Officer.

Marketing has a separate design team. We realize design should probably be its own sub-org but haven't yet made the investment to switch it to cross-functional.

The product designers report through me into the VP of Product.

We work closely with product management on requirements, and engineering (both back and front end) on possibilities.

Each designer is different, and each engineer is different. Sometimes a designer will go sit with an engineer to work on something, other times they won't: whatever works best for the pair and the project.

We have a weekly design review on Wednesdays for the designers to get together, share work and solve problems together.

On Fridays we have product design review, when we review work with product management. Naturally, we also share work in between these meetings, too, but that is more informal as meeting-heavy schedules aren't particularly productive, unless the meetings are productive. The Friday meeting is usually used for sign-off/buy-in between product management and product design, as well as talking status with our project manager.

I should also mention that we "Work from Anywhere" on Tuesdays and Thursdays here at Dialpad. This creates a healthy, productive structure for the week: Monday, Wednesday and Fridays are great for meeting, fact-finding, etc. Tuesdays and Thursdays are great for making updates without distraction.

Designers and organizations can mean many things. For example, at my employer, "Designer" is a job title that manages construction personnel, obtain permits and easements for facilities, and liaise between construction partners and the customers. These designers reside in an engineering department within other separate business units.

Visual designers sit in Corporate Communications

Product designers sit in Marketing

The content designer and UX designer sit in Marketing (not in the same unit as product designers) and work on the corporate website.

IT has no UI/UX/interactive designers

Note: Corporate Communications, Marketing, and IT all report to different leadership. From my incomplete knowledge interaction between product management and visual designers only occur within a new product design/launch. IT-based design work is ad-hoc and may occur on projects.

Context: 12,000 employees

3 Designers and 1 Dev.

One of our Designers is also the Project Manager – she's got the granular understanding of who's doing what. She acts as kind of the on-field captain, asking if anyone needs help or if everyone is up to date on what they need to be doing.

All 4 of us have direct contact with clients, and as such we all have to manage our own projects and clients.

Above us we have a Director/Sales person who gets the work in, makes decisions re project costs and ultimately acts as the buffer between the Design Team and anything genuinely bureaucratic. Without him our jobs would be much harder.

The reality is that all of us have to be very versatile as we wear multiple hats in a single day. Team work is the most important thing above all.

In addition to this: Should designers sit within the Tech team? The startup I'm currently at seems to have us designers sitting as a function of the tech team, under the management of the tech lead - and I don't think it's right.

I'm waiting on seeing an org chart before suggesting changes though.