Erica Rider & Stan Carrico

Breaking Down Silos Between Design and Development

How can three designers support over 1,000 developers? Learn how PayPal's unified process empowers engineers to own the user experience with a single, shared component library.

Breaking Down Silos Between Design and Development
#1about 4 minutes

The challenge of scaling design at PayPal

PayPal's internal tools team faced a massive 1-to-300 designer-to-developer ratio, requiring an innovative way to scale design.

#2about 5 minutes

Defining the principles of a quality product experience

A quality product must be discoverable, useful, usable, accessible, trustworthy, valuable, desirable, and measurable to succeed.

#3about 4 minutes

Unifying workflows with the DesignOps 2.0 model

The DesignOps 2.0 model merges traditional design and DevOps principles into a single, unified product development workflow.

#4about 7 minutes

Moving from siloed handoffs to collaborative prototyping

Replacing the traditional "telephone game" of requirements with a collaborative model where teams rapidly iterate on prototypes using shared tools.

#5about 3 minutes

Evolving team responsibilities for a customer-focused mindset

Product teams take ownership of user research and prototyping, while the UX team transitions to a mentorship and platform-building role.

#6about 7 minutes

Using a single component library for design and code

A single React component library is used in both the UXPin prototyping tool and Storybook documentation to eliminate drift between design and development.

#7about 6 minutes

Designing components for developers, designers, and end-users

Components must be designed to serve three distinct users: the developer implementing it, the non-technical prototyper, and the final end-user.

#8about 9 minutes

Building an opinionated platform for federated development

The "console" platform uses an SDK and runtime to allow many teams to develop and deploy independently while enforcing UX consistency.

#9about 4 minutes

Applying the equivalent responsibility principle for UX

The entire product team is responsible for the user experience, which encompasses not just UI but also latency, errors, and system performance.

#10about 4 minutes

Driving accountability with metrics and public reporting

Accountability for UX is enforced through mandatory prototyping, heuristic evaluations, baked-in analytics, and transparent public dashboards.

#11about 2 minutes

Summary of breaking down design and development silos

A recap of the five key principles for scaling design, focusing on customer outcomes, a shared component library, and creating shared responsibility.

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