Upleveling product excellence prior to launch.

Company: Stripe
50+ cross functional partners

Problem

Prior to this program, there was no consistent way for Stripe to assess design quality prior to launch. Stripe needed a way to “check off” for design quality to ensure the products being launched were meeting a consistent quality bar. An added challenge was that each product org and team had their own way of launching features, and as the company matured, there was an opportunity to strengthen the product design quality bar.

My Approach

• Collaborated with Product Design Managers to draft a Design Approval Guide Template, giving clear expectations on how to execute an approval and shared guidelines on design quality.

• Authored and shared a playbook with all product teams who interact with the Design Approval program to scale education and knowledge.

• Moderated fortnightly meetings to share out feedback and learnings to Product Design Leadership.

• Worked with cross functional partners company wide to socialize and implement this new way of checking for design quality.

• Recorded and tracked design approval feedback and identified any patterns we can proactively address and support during the development cycle.

Results

As this program matured, the quality of the products shipped increased:

• In the first half of launching this program, we had a Design Approval rate of 87%.

• In the second half, we had 100% Design Approval rate.

By leading this program, I was able to aggregate themes from the reviews. I summarized and shared these findings with teams and in doing so, teams were able to proactively catch quality issues upstream.