organizing an impact-driven design process at chance

Design Strategy & Vision

At Chance, our design strategy revolves around making the user's life as simple as possible. We adhere to our design principles (detailed in a dedicated article), which emphasize keeping interactions intuitive and free of unnecessary complexity. By leveraging technology to handle complexity behind the scenes, we ensure that our users can focus on their goals without being overwhelmed by choices or friction.

Our vision extends beyond simplifying user experiences. We are actively working to diversify Chance’s offerings, recently designing and launching new products in community engagement and recruitment. These initiatives aim to reinforce our position as a holistic career partner, supporting professionals throughout their journey. In parallel, I’ve been collaborating with the product team to streamline workflows, clarifying ownership and responsibilities from problem discovery to solution design, ensuring alignment and efficiency across all projects.

Design Principles: Guiding Values for Impact

Our design principles are the foundation of everything we create. These values help ensure our solutions are consistent, accessible, and deeply relevant to the system we create.

More details about Chance’s Design Principles why and how we implemented them.

Key Rituals to Foster Collaboration

To create a cohesive and impactful design team at Chance, I established a set of rituals that encourage open communication, constructive feedback, and strategic planning.

• Weekly Design Sync
  • Purpose: A regular check-in to align the team on ongoing projects, share successes, and identify challenges.
  • What We Do: Each designer shares updates on their current work, highlights what’s going well, and discusses any obstacles they’re facing. We also use this time to present wireframes, mockups or prototypes for review, allowing the team to provide feedback, discuss new ideas, and refine our design processes.
• Quarterly Design Meeting
  • Purpose: To take a step back, assess team progress, and plan for the next quarter.
  • What We Do: We review achievements and lessons from the previous quarter, setting aside time to discuss broader challenges and strategic goals. Together, we outline priority projects for the next three months, ensuring we’re always aligned with Chance’s mission and evolving needs.
• Design Reviews
  • Purpose: A flexible space to receive feedback and refining designs as they progress.
  • How It Works: Designers can request feedback at any stage of the design process, either asynchronously via Loom or in real-time meetings. To ensure the feedback is productive and actionable, designers share the context of the project and the reasoning behind their design choices. Feedback is then provided using a Do, Try, Consider format, enabling other designers to offer clear, structured suggestions. This approach maintains momentum while ensuring design quality through thoughtful, collaborative input.
• Weekly 1-on-1s
  • Purpose: A dedicated time for individual support, focusing on both personal and professional development.
  • What We Do: Each week, I meet with each designer to discuss anything on their mind, whether it’s work-related or personal. This time is used to address obstacles, provide guidance, and support the designer’s growth within the team.

Design System Overhaul

Our original design kit was tailored to a single app, focused on helping talents access their coaching programs. As Chance expanded into new product areas, it became clear that the existing components lacked the flexibility to serve diverse interfaces. To address this, we undertook a significant overhaul, reorganizing our Figma libraries to create a more robust and adaptable design system.

We rebuilt the system with agnostic components, making them versatile across different apps, while isolating app-specific elements in separate libraries. To further enhance consistency, we introduced tokens and primitives, working closely with our tech team to align efforts. This cross-functional collaboration helped ensure design and development were in sync, overcoming shared challenges in maintaining consistency across our growing product ecosystem.

Elevating and Streamlining User Research at Chance

At Chance, there was already a strong commitment to user research across the organization, not just within the design and product teams. Our work as a design team focused on setting a higher standard for what effective, actionable user research looks like and creating a streamlined process that would make research both accessible and impactful.

• Defining Quality Standards for Research: We established clear guidelines for effective user research, including setting expectations for participant numbers and identifying optimal moments to conduct research. This encompassed three key phases: problem discovery (to deeply understand user needs), data interpretation (to validate patterns and insights), and solution testing (to validate hypotheses and test usability).
• Streamlined Processes and Templates: To make user research more efficient and approachable, we created a suite of templates for interview guides. These templates standardized the process, making it easier for non-design teams to conduct meaningful research without starting from scratch.
• Accessible Tester Database: To ensure consistent access to testers, we developed a database of beta testers from our core audience. This resource allowed us to quickly recruit participants from economically vulnerable communities, ensuring that our research always reflected the needs and realities of the people we aimed to serve.
• Continuous Feedback and Iteration: We’re working on implementing feedback loops through short surveys and follow-up interviews, making it easier to systematically gather user insights continuously throughout the product lifecycle. This will help ensure that users’ voices informs every stage of product development and that our designs are truly responsive to their needs.

This approach not only improved the quality of our research but also empowered more teams across Chance to engage in rigorous, insightful user research that kept our core audience at the center of our work.

Impact: Outcomes and Lessons Learned

Through these initiatives, Chance’s design function became more efficient, user-focused, and impactful, directly contributing to the organization’s goals.

• Enhanced Team Alignment: The consistent rituals, shared design principles, and a well-defined design vision fostered a unified design culture. This alignment enabled faster decision-making, improved collaboration, and a seamless integration of design across diverse product areas.
• Robust and Scalable Design System: Overhauling our design system to support company diversification led to greater design efficiency and consistency. By creating agnostic components and implementing tokens and primitives, we ensured that new product launches were smooth and cohesive. The collaboration with our tech team also reinforced a cross-functional approach to maintaining high standards across both design and development.
• Stronger User-Centered Design: By integrating user needs into every stage of our process, we launched features that directly addressed our core audience’s pain points. Simplifying user experiences and handling complexity in the background strengthened Chance’s mission to make professional growth accessible and manageable.
• Clearer Product Development Process: Supporting the product team in streamlining ownership and clarifying roles from problem discovery to solution design resulted in greater operational clarity and effectiveness.

Reflections and Next Steps

Building a design practice focused on inclusivity, impact, and strategic vision at Chance taught me the power of thoughtful, user-centered rituals and a robust design system. Moving forward, I aim to continue refining these processes and advocate for design approaches that prioritize simplicity, empathy, and mission-driven results. Our journey toward a seamless, technology-powered user experience will keep evolving, with a continued emphasis on making professional life transformations as easy and accessible as possible.