DesignOps 101 - NN/G

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July 21, 2019 2019-07-21
DesignOps: The orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact at scale.
DesignOps is a collective term for addressing challenges such as:
The goal of DesignOps is to establish processes and measures that support scalable solutions for these challenges, so that designers can focus on designing and researching.
All fields must figure out how to mitigate growing amounts of bureaucracy and overhead communications as they scale. Each field will have its own solutions, and DesignOps is ours. However, UX professionals have more need than most for figuring out how to efficiently handle “more.” We often grow at a faster rate than the rest of the company, as the organization realizes the value and high ROI of UX and begins to expeditiously add staff and responsibility to the UX team.
Though we use the blanket terms “design” and “designer” throughout this discussion, DesignOps applies to anyone using user-centered and design-thinking processes to solve problems. The term “designer,” then, includes UX designers, user researchers, visual designers, content strategists, service designers, communication designers, and anyone else contributing to the end user experience.
Shifts are happening in the way designers work and interact with each other and other teams, and these shifts are shining a light on the necessity of DesignOps.
In many ways, designers have won the fight to be “at the table.” More and more, we are part of broad, strategic conversations, and many organizations don’t need to be convinced of the value of design anymore. They get it. (Yay! What a time to be alive!)
Unfortunately, this recognition often means that we must manage the additional workload of being involved in strategic work alongside our “day jobs” of designing and researching. In short: Designers are often too busy to design.
Couple this reality with the fact that designers are wrangling more complex contexts than ever before: As many organizations embrace embedded product- or project-specific team models, there is a growing lack of connection among designers who are spread across those teams. The products and experiences we design continue to become more elaborate, and teams are often dispersed across locations; as a result, workflows and decision making are increasingly distributed.
In order to manage rapidly escalating design complexities, we need to scale design by applying our own design-thinking and user-centered methods to design processes. (Meta, I know.)
DesignOps is an intentionally broad topic, because there are many elements related to enabling consistent, quality design.
I like to think of DesignOps a bit like a curated potluck dinner. There are a lot of components within DesignOps, and what an organization chooses to select — or to pass on — should depend on the current needs and most poignant painpoints of that organization. So, the shape of DesignOps will and should look very different from one organization to the next. And the focus of DesignOps within a single organization might shift as challenges evolve or change over time.
Here is the comprehensive DesignOps menu: the universe of elements that organizations might choose to focus on when planning and implementing processes to support designers. There are three main areas:
DesignOps helps us plan for how we:
DesignOps helps us plan for how we:
Finally, DesignOps can help us think about how to:
It’s impossible for a single person or team to focus on all of these components at once. DesignOps teams and thinkers recognize and target areas of particular gravity for a specific context.
Before embarking on DesignOps, plan internal research (e.g., listening tours, stakeholder interviews, and surveys) to assess the biggest pain points and the areas with the highest potential ROI, and start there.
Anyone can do DesignOps. There are two approaches to thinking about DesignOps that help you determine how to approach it within your organization: DesignOps the Role and DesignOps the Mindset.
DesignOps the Role means that there is a specific person or group of people tasked with ensuring that the design team is supported so that it can focus on designing or researching. In more mature practices, common DesignOps roles are:
Not every organization needs DesignOps the Role. Very large teams, embedded teams, or agencies with short timelines and lots of moving parts may need DesignOps the Role before other types of teams.
Any team, however, can benefit from DesignOps the Mindset, which simply means recognizing the need for and implementing an ecosystem, or a set of standardized processes, methods, and tools that support design and allow design to scale efficiently. No DesignOps-explicit role is required to observe current processes with an eye toward increasing efficiencies and bettering outputs.
DesignOps is the glue that holds the design organization together, and the bridge that enables collaboration among cross-disciplinary team members.
DesignOps cannot be an afterthought in a landscape where design teams continue to grow in size, UX work continues to be requested at an increasing rate, design-team members continue to become dispersed, and the complexity of our design processes skyrockets.
How we work together, how we get our work done, and how our work creates impact must be intentionally and intelligently crafted.
Define, share, and implement design operations
Empower and guide UX and product teams to reach their full potential
Envision, plan, and successfully lead a user-centered culture
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