Developing Copper Product Design Principles

Why did we develop Product Design Principles?

“The purpose of having design principles is to really align people around what matters.”
Julie Zhou, VP of Design at Facebook

When our product went through a rebrand and our team began to grow, we began to notice that there was something missing in our design decision making process. We needed to rally around a set of values as a design team that we could utlize across our product org. These were Design Principles, which we state as a set of fundamental truths or propositions that serve as a foundation for guiding or directing design decision making. 

How did we develop these Principles?

  • Researched other company design team principles.
  • Collected existing ideas from our previous 3 workshops
  • We ideated on more, and then sorted and prioritized these ideas (see next slide)
  • We generated value statements based on user and business needs
  • Experiment! We are in the phase of refining/seeking feedback on the Principles
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What makes a good Design Principle?

We used Design Systems, A practical guide to creating design languages for digital products as a vector to test our value statements and principles. Are they Authentic & Genuine? Practical and actionable? And so on. This helped us to flesh out our ideas further. 

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We ran the ideas and ranked them through these 4 themes. We dot voted and arrived at these as a group…But they still needed to be expanded upon. We developed our Principles, drafted a doc, and started to write down some examples for our design team and PEQ.

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We ran the ideas and ranked them through these 4 themes. We dot voted and arrived at these as a group…But they still needed to be expanded upon. 

We developed our Principles, drafted a doc, and started to write down some examples for our design team and PEQ (Copper's Product Org). For each Product Design Principle, we include a value statement, and uses cases in Design and Product.

Introducing Copper Design Principles

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Next Steps

This is our first draft, and we plan on iterating on our principles as needs and objectives change. We presented this to our team, and regularly discuss how we utilize (or do not utilize) our principles in our standups.