Scaling design
Utilizing DesignOps to accelerate design.
What is DesignOps?
Design Operations (also known as DesignOps) involves streamlining the work of designers so they can provide greater value and impact.
As an organization begins to scale their product portfolio, a designer working alone is suddenly surrounded by a team of designers and developers working on various aspects of the same set of products. On the surface, this increases design output because there are now more people to do the work. However, without an established DesignOps framework, designers and developers will be asking you:
How are we supposed to work together?
How do we get feedback and approvals on our work?
How does our work create impact at scale?
Creating tools and workflows that support the evolving needs of your design team will ensure that designers can focus on what they love the most: the design itself.
Why should leadership care about DesignOps?
Design as a strategic framework is starting to be seen in organizations of all sizes. Companies are now thinking about how they can scale their design processes and apply both DesignOps and design thinking.
Designers have fought for a seat at the table with leadership, influencing the organization’s end-to-end vision. But with that voice comes a mountain of cross-functional work. Before designers know it, they are too busy to design.
DesignOps is not something that designers with a full plate should tack onto their day-to-day responsibilities. There should be a specific person (yes, full time!) that is responsible for building out the following:
- Strategic oversight: Designers shouldn’t be solely in production-related roles. Design is a mindset, too. Design thinking is a strategic lens that can be applied to your organization to break down silos and empower cross-functional teams to challenge assumptions and re-define new ways of working with one another.
- Process Design: Develop new evidence-based workflows for product teams so that there is a consistent and reliance sequence of steps to develop design solutions across a product portfolio.
- Design Tools and Systems: Build a toolkit that empowers designers to do their best work, streamline collaboration between teams, and effectively communicate their value at an organizational level.
- People and Culture: Create an end-to-end experience for the way a designer interacts with the organization, their work, and their team members. Work within a framework that allows for career development and communities of practices, as well as design mentorship and support.
“DesignOps can do so much more than keep projects on track. We think about the entire end-to-end experience of a designer — from recruitment, to onboarding, to role definition, to leveling and career path — plus the tools and processes we can arm them with to have the smoothest experience possible.” — Rody
Am I ready to get started?
Amplifying design’s potential within an organization is not about continuously adding resources to your team and hoping that will solve your problem — it’s about slowing down, understanding the problem that needs to be solved, and collaboratively solving the problem using the right tools within a reliable workflow.
Taking time to operationalize design within an organization can happen as soon as you have more than one designer, although this is usually not the case. Those in leadership often realize this role is needed when the footprint of their design team has grown and there seems to be a gap between vision at a high level and action at a product development level.
Contemplate the following questions if you’re feeling like you might be ready to bring on a DesignOps specialist:
- Are Designers leaving your organization after less than a year?
- Are your Designers facing road blocks within their workflow that decrease their ability to focus on their craft?
- Are your Design Managers facing road blocks within their process and workflow in the managing of project scope amongst a team of designers that leads to miscommunication of expectations and deliverables?
- Are your Designers and Design Managers touching base with other Designers (across the organization) at least once a week?
How can I get started?
The ‘People, Process, Platform’ (PPP) framework is a great starting point. Many organizations have been improving their operational efficiencies using this methodology since the 1960s. The framework allows an organization to have a fulsome understanding of how these three elements interact, and how tools and technology can be used to further optimize the processes and relationships between these three focus areas. Continue reading about the history of this framework here.
Now, back to PPP.
1. People 🕺
The People, Process, and Projects framework does not exist without a team of people to connect, collaborate, and continue evolving the processes that are put in place.
- Experience Research: Talk to anyone and everyone. Take 60 days to do some Discovery work within your organization. Don’t just interview designers. Connect with all departments that interact with design on a regular basis. Ground yourself in the feedback of employees, and use that as a starting point for building a DesignOps program that works best for your organization.
- Community of Practice: Designers benefit from authentic connections with others in their field. Start with establishing a Community of Practice to allow designers at your organization to have the time and space to build these relationships. Over time, you’ll see the COP evolve into multiple sub-practices specializing in Design Accessibility, Agile Design, and more. Meeting: 1x per month
- Career Pathways: Designer satisfaction and retention begins with valuing their unique skill set, and establishing a professional development and career pathway plan for each individual. Designers are incredibly driven. If they feel like their wheels are spinning they will jump ship.
2. Process 🔄
Practice is about having shared ownership of the creation and implementation of processes and systems. Establishing consistent weekly rituals will level expectations within your team, as well as with the client.
- Design Principles: These guiding principles can be established after experience research has been completed. A great place to co-create these principles with other designers in your organization would be at a kick-off meeting for the Community of Practice.
- Quarterly Goals: Have measurable goals and objectives that can be mapped back to your design principles every three months. Use your Design Principles as the destination, and your quarterly goals as the vehicle that will help you get there. Meeting: 1x per quarter
- Design Strategy Bi-Weekly: This meeting is an opportunity to take a look at all of the design work that is happening across the product portfolio, but with a broader lens. It should, again, map back to the Quarterly Goals and Design Principles, and is an opportunity to allow designers to hit pause on the operational work, and bring a strategic mindset to improving their craft. Meeting: 2x per month
- Weekly Design Reviews: At an operational level, establish a weekly touch-base for designers to review work and provide feedback to one another or with their product team. This will help foster a culture of sharing information and ideas frequently. Meeting: 1x week
- Design System: An organization’s Design System should be the single source of truth that cross-functional teams can refer to when designing and developing a product. For your Design System to have an impact in the workflow across the organization, build relationships with other disciplines (i.e. software development, architects etc.) early on through research and iterate your system based on their feedback.
3. Projects 👩💻
Recruiting, onboarding, and allocating designers onto a project based on their skillset is only half the battle. Designers need to be able to both effectively manage and execute their workload on a product team and know how to communicate the value of their work to team members and clients.
- Project Design Pipeline: Define the skill set of each designer within your organization, and the areas of focus within the Design Thinking stages (discovery, ideate, prototype, test) that each resource excels in. Leveraging the skills of your team will help reduce churn because each designer will have expertise in a slice of the design thinking process.
- Tools: Designers are notorious for having their own separate tools from the rest of the product team. While yes, a prototyping software is necessary, efficiencies can be built across the team through the consolidation of tools that are used. Through this, confusion about where to find what decreases dramatically. As the team’s growth ebbs and flows, so will tool preferences. As long as you’re continuously evaluating the effectiveness of the tools you’re using at present, you’re on the right track.
- Balance Strategy with Production: It’s always a challenge to have that non-billable time each week, when you aren’t shipping features and iterations of new design to your client. But it is necessary. In the long run, it can shift the culture of your organization and significantly reduce project misalignment between leadership, clients, and team members.
- Communicate value: Quantifiable metrics must be established for design teams to effectively evaluate and communicate their impact to the rest of their organization. The Community of Practice is a great space to have an ideation session with designers about the various ways to measure the impact of design.
“DesignOps builds a platform to enable design strategy and execution to work together in harmony,” says Rand. And as design’s footprint within a company grows ever-larger, that merging of vision and action has never been more critical.” — Alison Rand
In order to amplify the value of design at scale, spend time with the People, Process, Projects framework. It will help you optimize how designers work with one another by humanizing the experience of being a designer at a larger organization. Keep focussing on how the work gets done. Scaling means common repositories and design systems need to be built to expose bottlenecks in the design workflow and decrease the amount of friction in a designer’s day-to-day process. Communicating the impact of applying design thinking across an organization will only happen if consistent messaging is crafted to amplify the value of design.
