In growing organizations, the relationship between design and engineering teams can make or break product development. Many companies start with strong engineering teams and bring in design expertise later. As EdTech products scale, lurking usability problems become emergencies that tax customer support teams and divert engineering teams away from the roadmap. The most successful growing products emerge from strong partnerships between engineering and UX. Drawing on our experience working with growing organizations, we’ve identified key patterns that lead to successful collaboration between design and engineering teams.
This article is the last of a three-part series examining how EdTech product leaders can optimize their UX program for growth. Part One focuses on user research and testing strategies and Part Two explores ideation and planning processes. Together, these pieces provide a comprehensive framework for scaling your EdTech product thoughtfully and successfully.
The Hidden Costs of Broken Collaboration
When design and engineering teams work in silos, the consequences can be severe and long-lasting.
- Technical and design debt accumulate silently, manifesting as user frustration that becomes increasingly expensive to address.
- Teams discover “unknown” technical limitations late in development, forcing costly redesigns.
- Members of your teams feel out of the loop, leading to a counterproductive “UX vs Engineering” dynamic that can poison team culture and slow development to a crawl.
These issues compound over time. The longer organizations delay addressing communication gaps between design and engineering teams, the more design and technical debt accumulates. For growing companies, establishing healthy collaboration patterns early is crucial for sustainable growth.
Starting Strong: Three Paths to Collaboration
We’ve observed three common ways that projects begin, each requiring a different approach to fostering design-engineering collaboration:
- Product-Led Initiatives: When product teams bring forward validated ideas or new opportunities to explore, UX can play a crucial facilitation role. Through structured activities like sketching sessions and collaborative ideation, design teams can draw out valuable insights from both product and engineering stakeholders.
- Engineering-Driven Innovation: Sometimes engineers identify technical opportunities to solve existing problems. They might kick things off with a proof of concept. Here, design’s role is to probe deeper through thoughtful questions: What user needs drove this solution? What constraints shaped the current approach? Look for opportunities to simplify or improve the user experience or to reduce cognitive load.
- Design-Identified Opportunities: When design teams spot opportunities for improvement, success depends on bringing in an engineering perspective early. Rather than delivering fully-baked solutions, engage engineers in exploring the problem space together.
Regardless of how a project starts, design teams play a crucial role in establishing shared language around goals, problems to solve, and user needs. This foundation of mutual understanding prevents misalignment down the road.
Creating Sustainable Feedback Loops
Successful collaboration isn’t just about kickoff meetings — it requires ongoing engagement throughout the project lifecycle.
Listen to engineers while designing
During the design phase, engineers can provide invaluable input on technical feasibility and architecture implications. “At that point, it’s almost like the engineers are playing a backstop role to design,” articulated one of our Lead Designers. “They’re looking at designs to make sure that they make sense for the way the product’s architectured.” They may also have solution ideas that have come up in their work that they can share. This also allows them to start thinking about how they would build any of the developing solutions.
Be available to solve problems during development
Once development begins, the roles can flip. Designers become the backstops for engineering, ensuring the implementation maintains the intended user experience and helping tackle edge cases that inevitably emerge. In one recent client project, ongoing communication between teams revealed that certain error messages needed UX input. While the engineering team could have created technically accurate messages, having designers involved meant the errors were presented in a way users could understand and act on.
This doesn’t mean endless meetings. Modern tools like video updates, chat channels, and asynchronous reviews can maintain alignment without overwhelming busy teams. The key is establishing clear communication patterns that work for your organization’s size and culture.
Late to the Party? It’s Never Too Late to Align.
While early collaboration is ideal, teams often need to establish working relationships mid-project. The key is to pause and align on fundamentals:
- What business and user objectives drive this work?
- What research insights inform our decisions?
- What constraints shape our solution space?
Bringing a design mindset to an engineering-led project
Engineering teams naturally think in solutions, while design teams focus on user needs and problem framing. When joining an engineering-led project, designers can add value by helping “peel back the onion” — moving from implementation details to core problems and opportunities. Sometimes engineers have existing technical discoveries or proofs of concept that can accelerate the solution, but need help ensuring they truly serve user needs.
Seek technical insights and improve outcomes
Similarly, when designers bring engineers into an existing project, creating space for technical perspective and constraints leads to better outcomes. We’ve seen projects where late engineering involvement led to multiple redesigns due to technical constraints that weren’t considered early enough. In one case, cross-platform development requirements meant certain features worked differently on web versus mobile, forcing late-stage compromises in the user experience.
This situation creates what one of our designers calls a “chicken and egg” problem: Should technical discovery happen first, or should design exploration lead? The answer often depends on project specifics, but the risk of working completely separately is high. When design teams get too far ahead without engineering input, organizations essentially place a bet: either the designs will be buildable (saving time) or they’ll require extensive rework (doubling effort and potentially burning out teams).
Five Keys to Success
Whenever and however your collaboration begins, here are five priorities to remember:
- Establish shared goals and language from the start
- Maintain appropriate involvement from all teams throughout the project lifecycle
- Create sustainable feedback loops that respect everyone’s time
- Address technical feasibility and user needs in parallel, not sequence
- Focus on building rapport and breaking down silos, regardless of project phase
Growing organizations face unique challenges in balancing innovation speed with sustainable practices. The investment in strong design-engineering collaboration pays dividends through faster development, better products, and happier teams.
At Openfield, we specialize in helping growing organizations establish effective collaboration patterns between design and engineering teams. Whether you’re bringing in design expertise for the first time or looking to level up existing practices, we’d love to help you build better products together. Reach out to schedule an introductory meeting.
This article completes our three-part series on optimizing your UX program for EdTech growth. For a comprehensive approach, be sure to read Part One on strategic research methods and Part Two on effective ideation and planning processes that set the foundation for successful design implementation.
