MD Wed Oct 01 2008 at 07:07 am

Hi,

You do great work. I’m new to leading design w/in a company that focuses on application development vs. marketing or simple websites. How many people do you all have w/in your design group & what’s your biggest challenge working w/ application design?

Michael Sigler Wed Oct 01 2008 at 09:37 am

Thanks for the compliments. We have two design groups at Jive. Two in marketing and four in development. Lots of communication between the two but we find that it’s best to have people dedicated to both if possible. It allows designers to focus on similar, yet different disciplines. It also allows us to have better critiques of one another’s work. Always someone who can give an outside perspective.

Creative direction, time management, coordination, etc. are all challenging but there are clear guidelines out there one can follow. The single hardest thing for us is always in determining what we are going to do. Setting yourself up for success is critical and it takes a lot of discipline, agility and wisdom garnered from mistakes to figure it all out.

We have our own internal desires for our products. We have set up Customer Advisory Groups with some of our largest customers so that we know how our product is being used and what they’d like to see in it. We have Support, Engineering and Security requirements to meet. Everyone at Jive provides constant feedback on the app. Then of course there are the business needs that drive a product, such as evaluating your competition, keeping up sales, having new things to market.

Gathering all that information together, distilling it down to its core essence and then determining what to develop and design is a monumental task. There is no one way to do it.

The best advice I can give is to divide the tasks to the right people and trust them to do their jobs.