EFG Hermes is the leading financial partner in FEMs and the top MENA ECM advisor. It also the leading investment bank in the MENA region; but the need to expand into a more consumer-based market, specifically a trading platform, has led to the conversation of how to best internally educate stakeholders the value of design to best prepare for the launch and set expectations.

Before diving into any design work, it was important to understand how much support design currently has and where design can add value. We conducted interviews with Product Managers, Engineers, and Leadership to better understand the current design landscape.

It was clear after our listening tour that there was misconception when it came to what design is. The tangible elements that stakeholders could articulate included things like lack of alignment and collaboration, lack of understanding of what success looks like, and more.

After we identified areas where design can add value, it was time to set tangible metrics to be held accountable for, collaborate with relevant stakeholders, and work towards those metrics. Some of these metrics include but are not limited to: adoption of design process, time-to-development, and streamlining of design.

One of the great things about getting a clean slate is having the time to properly document processes and outline best practices. With our listening tour and stakeholder interviews, we were able to emphasize on missing practices that developers had been wanting.

While the main focus of our initiative was to focus on stakeholders, it was also important that our work within Figma was scalable and could support other functions. Where needed, we used advanced components like slot components — similar to React props.children

While the metrics are far too many to list all in one place, adoption of design greatly increased after our listening tour and implementation of processes. Namely time-to-development which decreased by more than 15% after implementing our design system, and having a seat at the table when it comes to making business decisions.

There were a lot of key takeaways for me from this experience:

- Changing how an organization works takes time. This was roughly a year and a half long project, and I would still consider it an on-going effort. 

- Listening to stakeholders you interact with daily and understanding their pain points is far more important than anything else early on.

- Get buy-in from key stakeholders have them be an advocate for your efforts.