As the product design industry matures, new roles and processes emerge to streamline the work and improve the quality of designs produced.
One of the newest additions to the product design world is the inception of design operations — DesignOps for short.
Let’s take a closer look at what DesignOps is and how designers can benefit from it.
DesignOps is a set of practices and principles that aims to streamline the effectiveness of design teams. The ultimate goal is to build an environment in which designers can strive.
DesignOps ranges from workflow optimization to maintaining design systems to hiring and training design team members.
Although DesignOps is more about what we do as an organization, more mature companies often have dedicated roles that focus entirely on improving design operations. We’ll take a closer look at these later.
There’s no textbook definition of what DesignOps is and isn’t, although we can usually distinguish four primary areas of focus, that is:
DesignOps is all about having a straightforward, efficient, and scalable process of how ideas go from concept to production. This helps establish common standards and improve the overall predictability of the design process.
It’s also about cultivating a culture of collaboration within the organization. The bigger the design team gets, the more structured approach is needed to keep everyone aligned. DesignOps focuses on finding the gaps in collaboration and alignment and fixing them as soon as possible.
Part of DesignOps is regularly reviewing if the team has the right tools to do their job. It includes both cornerstone activities such as:
as well as more business-as-usual activities such as managing accesses, naming conventions, and so on.
There’s hardly a better way to simplify designers’ lives than having a well-thought-through, documented, and up-to-date design system.
All processes around design system management — defining goals, establishing design principles, creating components, documenting guidelines, and promoting design system adoption — is also part of design operations.
Lastly, let’s not forget about people.
The three most crucial jobs of DesignOps when it comes to managing talent include:
Now that we understand what DesignOps is all about let’s see how it works in practice. I’d distinguish four levels of DesignOps maturity in an organization:
Every organization does a DesignOps, whether you acknowledge it or not. Even a one-person team needs to figure out their workflow, get the right tools, and establish a decent UI style guide.
The most important thing is to start acknowledging DesignOps, consciously decide who in the team should be responsible in which area, and review the health of design operations practices regularly.
The bigger the organization gets, the more beneficial it is to have a dedicated DesignOps specialist:
This way, you not only ensure that all areas of DesignOps are taken care of, but you can also offload some operational responsibilities from other team members and let them focus more on their desired niche. Win-win.
Rule of thumb: Consider a dedicated specialist when your organization has more than ten designers.
As the organization grows, you might notice that one person is not enough to handle all design-related processes. After all, sometimes you need a few designers to take care of the design system alone!:
Rule of thumb: Consider building a dedicated team when your organization has over thirty designers.
A huge organization employing hundreds of designers might need an entire department to efficiently fulfill all DesignOps needs:
That can include having a dedicated HR Business Partner, recruiters, and L&D specialists. This split of responsibilities often helps heads of the areas narrow down their focus instead of trying to manage everything.
Rule of thumb: Consider a dedicated department if you have more than a hundred designers onboard.
Keep in mind that the levels of maturity described above are purely anecdotal and represent setups I worked in.
Each organization is different. Some are more centralized, whereas others might have more atomic teams with a dedicated DesignOps person in each team. I also saw organizations with hundreds of designers that still didn’t have a single DesignOps person, and it somehow worked.
The story’s moral is to acknowledge the need for DesignOps within the organization, but structure this in whatever way fits your context best.
Whether as a practice or as a dedicated department, DesignOps is incredibly beneficial for the whole organization. The main benefits include:
By streamlining processes, optimizing workflows, and choosing the best tools for the jobs, DesignOps reduces redundant work and uncertainty from design teams, allowing them to work at the peak of their productivity.
If you can’t meet your deadlines, instead of hiring more people, consider fixing your processes.
Standardized processes, design systems, and best practices help ensure consistency across products and features delivered by the team. It also leads to improved scalability and can help you avoid many troubles that come with a rapidly growing headcount.
Collaboration sometimes has to be forced. Here, I said it. We often expect people to “just talk to each other,” but the bigger the organization, the harder it becomes to stay aligned.
DesignOps ensures that collaboration actually happens by setting up the right processes and practices and facilitating the collaborative design process. It ensures that both other designers, as well as other stakeholders, are always aligned. If misalignment happens, the design operation model is usually updated to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
By hiring the right people, taking care of their development, and giving them the support, resources, and infrastructure they need to succeed, you are on a great track to build a truly empowered design organization.
Ultimately, taking care of design operations usually leads to higher job satisfaction, leading to better employee retention and overall productivity.
DesignOps, at its heart, is about building an environment in which designers can strive.
DesignOps is a part of every design team’s life, whether you acknowledge it or not. On a high level, everything related to:
can be qualified as design operations.
By consciously taking care of those processes, you can significantly improve your team’s efficiency, motivation, and collaboration. It also helps ensure consistency and scalability within the whole organization.
Although it’s perfectly fine to make taking care of the design process part of every designer or design manager, as the company matures, it might be worth considering getting a dedicated role, or even a whole team or department. It ensures that DesignOps doesn’t fall the priority list as the team is chasing their deadlines and other commitments.
Header image source: IconScout
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