Communicate design value through Disciplined DesignOps

What is DesignOps?

Growing companies often see a sharp increase in their design needs. This can be due to expanding product lines or the creation of new business lines. Often, there is a commensurate increase in the stress, workload, and pressure that design teams face which can be a bottleneck to further growth. DesignOps aims to establish processes and measures that support scalable solutions for these challenges so that designers can focus on design and research. 

At Cubyts, we would like to go a step further to define DesignOps as ‘DesignOps is about breaking silos and communicating design value to all stakeholders’.

Value/Benefits of Disciplined DesignOps -

• Removing any bottlenecks and obstacles in the design process.
• Standardizing and optimizing the design process.
• Coordinating communication and collaboration across all teams.
• Allowing designers to focus on design. 

Prioritizing DesignOps improves the value of your total design team’s output. Be sure to measure as you go, adjust as you learn, and be as inclusive as possible when increasing the scale and distribution of your operations.

Once a strong design-thinking culture is established in the organization, it’s natural to move to the next orbit by scaling design operations to keep design seamlessly integrated into the organization and constantly communicating its value to all internal & external stakeholders. Achieving this stage will help companies get in a positive spiral of design efficiency & maturity. In that sense, DesignOps helps above & beyond design thinking to cement companies positioning as a continuous user-centric innovation company.

At Cubyts, the following are the key features of the Disciplined DesignOps -

1. Cross-functional Collaboration
Cubyts allows cross-functional teamwork, which creates a collaborative culture because it gets more team members working together, regardless of what department they are in.  It also allows team members to learn about the varying tools other departments use and if they can benefit from incorporating them into their work. It allows to share the documents with other team members and give feedback in very little time, making the whole process smooth and hassle-free.

2. Competency Management
Cubyts enables organizations to have clearly defined competencies that allow employees to know exactly what is expected of them and how they should accomplish their tasks. Productivity is improved by mapping & evaluating skills, Cubyts identifies skill gaps and provides the necessary support. 

3. Recommendation of processes & frameworks
Cubyts recommends a set of best practices, processes, frameworks, and templates personalized for different project types. It hosts a common repository of design systems, brand guidelines, and UI guidelines of all the current & past projects to search & (re)use.

4. Track and Manage people, projects, and tasks
Cubyts enables strategizing, managing, and measuring the teams and activities and brings them all together working towards a common goal, ensuring all this under one platform.  It aligns goals, projects & people to ensure desired RoI & Impact, which enables the quality and consistency of work in a thriving environment.

For you to scale the design function, it is important to integrate DesignOps thinking into your product team’s planning, scheduling, and collaboration strategies.

In the end, we would like to conclude with the quote by Dave Malouf, 

“DesignOps is everything that supports high-quality crafts, methods and processes”