In the world of digital product design, having a clear, comprehensive strategy is crucial for any design team aiming to make a lasting impact. Starting last year, together with my team Ive explored the process of developing such a strategy hands-on and documented it through a five-part article series published by The UX Collective. This article is supposed to serve as an overview of and guide to the approach we took, offering a rough birds-eye view of the entireseries.From defining a teams mission to crafting an inspiring vision, well walk through each critical component of a design team strategy, including the Strategy House as a helpful visualization. Youll discover howto:Create a roof that embodies your teamsmission.Build robust pillars representing your most important objectives.Construct your strategys foundation with carefully defined teamvalues.Establish design principles that operationalize yourvalues.Cap it all with a vision that guides your team towards a successful future.Whether youre leading a design team or simply interested in strategic thinking, this comprehensive guide in five parts will provide you with practical insights and actionable steps to elevate your teams performance and align your efforts towards sharedgoals.Made with Microsoft Designer.Part IThe strategy house: how to define a design teamsmissionThis article focuses on an introduction to the Strategy House Modela visual representation of a teams strategy, with the mission as its roof, the most important topics as its pillars, and the values as its foundation. It goes into detail on how our digital product design team at BestSecret developed their team mission by brainstorming stories of value; extracting actors, actions, and outcomes; and finally compiling the overall mission statement fromthose. Speicher, Maximilian. The strategy house: how to define a design teams mission. UX Collective. February 3,2023.Part IIPillars, objectives, and OGSMs: how to define a design teams most important topicsIn this article of our Design Team Strategy series, we explore how to define the most critical topics of a design teams strategy by brainstorming current and future objectives, clustering them into overarching themes, prioritizing them, and formulating corresponding OGSMs. By following these steps, you create the pillars of your teams Strategy House, which will guide your decision-making process and ensure that youre staying true to your overall strategy. Speicher, Maximilian. Pillars, objectives, and OGSMs: how to define a design teams most important topics. UX Collective. March 2,2023.Part IIITeam values: the foundation of anystrategyIn this article, we explore the importance of team values in creating a cohesive and effective strategy for a design team. Team values are the guiding principles that shape a teams culture and determine how its members interact with each other and stakeholders. Defining them is a collaborative process that in our case involved revisiting our stories of value, brainstorming our proposed team values, agreeing on a final set through an affinity diagram, and, finally, creating posters for each to make them salient and memorable. While design principles are important to a design teams work, they are not the same as team values. Team values serve as a framework for making decisions, setting priorities, and guiding behavior. Speicher, Maximilian. Team values: the foundation of any strategy. UX Collective. April 19,2023.Part IVDesigning together: the importance of shared principles for designteamsDesign principles operationalize a teams values into concrete guidelines that inform the design process. The specific steps we took for developing our own set of principles were: Brainstorming already established principles, inspiration from other teams, and what prevented us from becoming more successful; Revisiting our nine team values; Conducting a closed card sorting to map the brainstormed principles to the values; and Clustering similar principles within each value category while distinguishing between design principles and team principles. The end result was a set of principles that provide common understanding and guidance for executing our teams design work in line with our values and standards. Speicher, Maximilian. Designing together: the importance of shared principles for design teams. UX Collective. August 9,2023.Part VCrafting a Vision thatInspiresA team vision is the North Star that guides a design teams collective efforts towards a shared purpose and ultimate goal. In this article, we explore the importance of a team vision, how it differs from other components of a strategy, and provide a step-by-step guide on how to craft a team vision that resonates with everyone: Crafting stories from the future; Extracting the essence of those stories; Formulating individual vision statements; and Crafting a collective vision that brings it all together. We share our own experience and the exercises we used to develop a vision that aligns our teams efforts and inspires us to work towards a commongoal. Speicher, Maximilian. Crafting a vision that inspires. UX Collective. August 9,2024.Copyright 2024 by Maximilian Speicher Originally published by The UX CollectiveDesign team strategy: the complete guide was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.