Design Team

Over the 2.5 years we worked with the league, the team scaled to 8 members who specialized in UX, visual design, motion design, prototyping and video, as well as research. We continued to be a mix of contractors, full-timers, in-person and remote across multiple time zones. Those who we brought on board would elevate the team in more than just our deliverables——we cared deeply about our culture too.

Some of the ways we built a support system included:

• Team and individual retros
• Set individual goals every 6 months
• Identify opportunities for designers to reach those goals
• Daily stand ups for check-ins and status updates
• Brief daily recap videos for those in more extreme time zones
• Designers worked in pairs to tackle complex concepts
• Weekly group critiques along with team show and tells

To celebrate some major milestones on the team—–including promotions, new hires, delivering incredible work on tight timelines and meeting some of our remote designers—–I was able to surprise the team with a company-paid trip to Mexico City in October 2019. For a week we participated in Dia de los Muertos celebrations, bonded as coworkers, took calls with the NBA from cafes and Airbnbs, and conducted guerilla testing at bars and restaurants with some prototypes we had built specially for the trip.

Design & Product Teams

Our colleagues at the league were based in the NYC area, while much of Design was located in Chicago. Given the automatically remote nature of our relationship, both sides made strides to replace in-person conversations with as much communication as possible via Slack, calls, emails and working sessions.

Initially we held design review calls twice a week between Product and Design, and as our work picked up over the 2.5 years, we upped our cadence to four times a week. Around those times we were in constant communication, with Mondays being dedicated to broader project status updates in our project plan.

To offset how remote most of the team was, I scheduled trips to NYC every month from Chicago for facetime. I’d spend up to half the month onsite at the league offices, conducting reviews in person, managing discussions between different stakeholders, presenting to leadership and building close relationships with our main team. The time spent inside league walls was invaluable to building trust, respect and personal relationships with one another, which naturally led to better engagements and opportunities.

Design & Product & Everyone Else

Product and Design teams didn’t work in a silo, there was no way we could. Through the help of our PMs, we looped in content, marketing, ad sales and engineering teams throughout projects. During bigger efforts we’d have cross-functional kickoff sessions to hear about pain points, goals and dependencies.

Given that the NBA’s main development team was a remote vendor, we had to be intentional about when and how to share our work with them. When it came time to hand off work to developers, we scheduled walkthroughs of designs and provided support for questions throughout their efforts. During the much larger nba.com project, the engineering team was a growing in-house group that we sat side-by-side with to establish the architectural foundation and understand how data and content would flow into pages.

With the content team we held multiple working sessions to understand their needs, asks, priorities and what didn’t work in the existing site. Once the designs were close to completion we presented to the ad sales team to talk through new ad placement locations, sales packages, and promises that were made to partners for the next calendar year. And close to the end of our efforts, Adam Silver weighed in on our work for the final sign off to bring us home to launch.

More Projects