What is DesignOps and Does Your Startup Need It?
“The definition I’ve honed over the years is that 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.
designers now face a vast slate of challenges, including:
Silos: “Although at most companies designers are expected to work closely with marketing, engineering and product teams, these departments are often completely independent from one another, without shared OKRs.”
Complexity: “Design tools and systems are wide ranging, ever-changing and increasingly complex — often resulting in bottlenecks. I’ve seen plenty of design teams that are reluctant to adopt developers’ processes and tools (like Jira). There are separate planning and tracking tactics and general misalignment across product, stakeholders and executives. That lack of quality assurance across development ultimately equals a poor customer experience,”
Career path: “Designers are often expected to wear innumerable hats — from creative leader, to producer, to project manager. That leaves little time to hone your craft. There’s also a lot of ambiguity around how organizations design the career paths for designers — if they even map them out at all.”
Strategic oversight: “Plenty of companies may say that design brings a strategic lens, but the reality shows that plenty of designers are purely in production roles. It’s all reactive — creating at the request of developers and product managers who lead strategy, rather than defining a direction for the product’s design at the ideation phase.”
The myth of the unicorn: “There’s a lot of nuance in different types of design roles that is often overlooked. Companies may be hiring for a visual designer, when what they actually need is a creative technologist. Or they might have a product designer that would be even better as a communication designer, but they aren’t tapping into those skills.”
The goal of DesignOps is to look at these challenges end to end, and architect agile design systems and processes that can tackle them at scale.
People, Practice, Platforms design management framework. (She’s gone in-depth on this over on her Medium page if you want to really dig in here.) “DesignOps’ purview is massive — what I love about this framework is that it boils it down to operations’ most essential elements. You’ve got to start somewhere,” she says.
People: “I think about the entire experience of a designer, from recruitment, to onboarding, to role definition, to leveling and career path. I scrutinize the authenticity of the talent brand, as well as what diversity, equality and inclusion actually look like in the day to day,” she says. More tactically: “To address concerns around career development, we built out Personal Professional Missions for each of our designers and established a centralized partnership model for all of Automattic’s designers. We implemented discipline-specific Communities of Practice areas that covered the full breadth of our design talent, including Product Experience, Creative Technology and Emotional Design.”
Practice: “I consider each aspect of the production realm, including your traditional program and pipeline management, capacity planning, budgets and annual planning,” says Rand. “We established our Design Principles and developed OKRs that explicitly map back to those principles, lighting the way for our designers to look to clearer priorities and how they relate to our product objectives. We also created a weekly Visual Status meeting, fostering cross-functional partnership by reviewing work early and processing feedback together.”
Platform: “This includes the infrastructure around staffing, contracts and measurement and thinking about the design systems, like a Center of Excellence, that gets you closest to your customers,” she says. “We grounded ourselves in customer research and empathy for users — and more importantly, bringing that lens to the product roadmap so it gets put into practice. This is aligned to the Four Planets of Design: Discover, Hypothesize, Deliver and Listen.”
’Oh, if I want to level up design, I’ve just got to hire more people. But more people does not mean better collaboration — in fact, it’s usually the opposite.”
Maximizing design’s potential is not about throwing bodies at the problem, it’s about understanding the problem to solve and solving it intentionally with the right collaboration models and structured workflow.
If your company only cares about design from a pixel-pushing and ship-only mentality — and is not ready to change that mindset — you’re not ready for DesignOps.
“What we’ve seen from the research is most companies overestimate how mature their design function is. They say that it’s a major part of the strategy and decision-making, but once you dig into the details, those assertions really fall apart,”
She outlines the unique mix of hard and soft skills the best DesignOps hires bring to your org:
The People Person: “Relationships are so crucial to successful outcomes for both design and DesignOps. They’ve got to bring stakeholders together to clearly understand the problem and align on the desired outcome.”
The Innate Leader: “Look for someone who is willing to do the work to set up the team for success. Fostering a cohesive culture is a fundamental part of the DesignOps role — that culture will make the team feel comfortable working with shared processes and standards.”
The Scientist: “The best DesignOps leaders are masters of data-driven design. They have sophisticated practices for analytics, experimentation and measuring the success of specific efforts.”
The Visionary: “Ultimately, what separates the most mature design organizations and DesignOps leaders apart are their understanding of business strategy and prioritization. Everything else trickles down.”
Rand’s found comfort and clarity in Walt Disney’s triumvirate model of creative leadership: the Dreamer, the Realist and the Critic.
The Dreamer presents a vision for the future as it could be, and pushes the boundaries beyond what others may see. They focus on the what.
The Realist considers the dreamer’s vision within a logical planning style. They focus on the action plan and the how of the idea.
The Critic probes the barriers of bringing the idea to life. They suss out the weak points and the logic behind the vision, and ultimately consider the why.
For those companies that aren’t yet ready to make the leap towards a dedicated DesignOps team, that’s no reason to completely put this on the backburner.
To start fostering collaboration and harmonious cross-functionality early on, Rand advises a few key tactics to borrow from her playbook:
Visual Status: “I learned this from Meredith Black, who was the Head of Design Operations at Pinterest. It’s as simple as meeting once a week for about an hour, and reviewing all of the cross-product design work so that everyone has a better understanding of how the work is connected (or not).
Advisory Council: “A design advisory council is a small group that consists of multiple cross-functional partners — and it doesn’t have to be just leadership.
Structured Communication: “Build a communication strategy that you can wash, rinse and repeat over and over again.
To get started, she suggests you borrow from her own playbook and put together Personal Professional Missions for your company’s designers. “We look at three key areas — what they love to do, what they’re doing now, and what the company mission is. We’re looking for the closest alignment between what they love to do and what’s best for the company,” she says.
“I worked with visionary design leader John Maeda at Automattic. He was interviewed for Fast Company and the headline was ‘In reality, design is not that important.’ He got so much Twitter hate for that! But in a way, he’s right and I totally understand what he was saying,” she says. “Engineering, product and design should be a three-legged stool, but often we don’t act like it. Everybody thinks their leg is more important. We need to chip away at that protectiveness and understand that it’s not about any one discipline, it’s about the customer.”
Posted on December 30, 2020