Azion: building a design culture from the scratch
Every designer's dream: to be able to contribute to the construction of a design culture, its team, and career ladder, its processes and language. Here I will show you what I built from the scratch during 2 years as Head of Design at Azion.
Team
Company
Azion Technologies
Morgana Johann, Bruna Soares, Tamara Viegas
Type
Segment
Edge Computing; CDN; SaaS; Cloud
#culture #product #designops #process
Azion is a technology company that applies edge computing for use cases such for applications, security, networking, video and game streaming, AI, IoT and 5G, for example, delivery through a rich SaaS platform. In the company's success cases are clients such as Motorola, Samsung, Walmart, Americanas, and many other e-commerces, banks, and education platforms.
In 2020 investors Monashees and Qualcomm jumped in, which enabled the company to double the team and expand its headquarters overseas.
In 2018 Azion hired me as the first Head of Design. The company never had a design team and, despite that, the product was scaling up fast, with usability and visual concerns shared by the engineering and product management teams.
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That said, my first challenge was to assemble a design team to cooperate with engineering, product, marketing, answering directly to the CEO, a hierarchical structure that lasted a year, before design went under the Product area. This cooperation happened in the day-to-day by shared rituals, processes, and OKRs between all teams.
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At that time, some of the challenges as a design leader was creating profiles for new designers, understanding the product roadmap and the development framework, establishing a process of design-delivery to product, engineering, and marketing, establishing team performance indicators.
To thrive in the scenario described above, I began by building the design culture, defining roles and the work process we would perform to support product, engineering, and marketing teams with UX deliverables. The foundation for all that was the Design System, which was inexistent before the design team.
Regarding Azion's products, for two years we focus our efforts on improving the clients onboarding experience, with a walkthrough feature, a new welcome screen for the platform and a 100% digital product subscription environment, which before then needed to involve a sales representative.
When I left Azion, the design team entered the local design community spotlight, as we hosted some full house design meetups and joined many others as guests.
