Benefits of DesignOps as your design maturity curve evolves
With the design now becoming a central function in product development, design teams, and indeed, entire organizations, are judged by their design maturity.
Design maturity goes beyond just how skillful your design team is. It takes into consideration other parameters such as the ideology that you use to approach design, the design processes your team follows, the tools you use and how effectively you use design to deliver better experiences to your customers.
For growing design teams, achieving a high level of design maturity can be a challenge. However, DesignOps can help you scale that curve a lot more efficiently. Here’s a quick read about how your team can benefit by using DesingOps for design maturity.
Elements of design maturity
Before we dive deeper into how DesignOps elevates design maturity in an organization, let’s take a gander at the elements that make up design maturity.
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Culture
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People
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Operations
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Knowledge
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Strategy
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Leadership
Let’s look closer at the role of each of these elements in design maturity.
1. Culture
An organization with a high level of design maturity encourages a work culture that puts people-centric design at the forefront. It also encourages a culture of collaborative working, in that the design team does not work in a silo.
Instead, the team involves other stakeholders and proactively seeks out their feedback to incorporate into the design. This makes design an irreplaceable part of every aspect of the product life cycle, from ideation to deployment and even future upgrades.
2. People
A high design maturity organization not only hires highly skilled engineers but also ensures designers have the freedom to bring on board and standardize new, more efficient design processes.
Ideally, design teams will also have resources that are embedded in engineering teams, ensuring there’s better communication and collaboration between the two functions.
And finally, an organization with high design maturity will ensure the ratio between the number of engineers and the number of designers in a team is not askew.
3. Operations
A team that ranks high in design maturity uses DesignOps, enabling operational and design excellence by setting up processes and frameworks that optimize design workflows.
Attention is also paid to ensuring clear communications between stakeholders, ensuring better feedback mechanisms, and empowering teams with the right tools and data.
4. Knowledge
Having a knowledge repository that serves as a single source of truth for all things design related, including onboarding, training, processes, best practices, templates, artifacts, and more is an integral part of a successful design team.
5. Strategy
The ideal design strategy brings together form and function to deliver a product that is both valuable and profitable.
A strong design strategy uses design metrics to align design teams with the business vision and project goals, while also addressing design ROI and making design essential to the planning process.
6. Leadership
Design leaders in high-maturity organizations promote the design vision of the business by assessing team strengths, allocating tasks accordingly, and reviewing performance periodically while clearly defining goals, visions, and processes to ensure the project goals are met.
How DesignOps redefines each element
1. Inclusive Culture
An inclusive culture is an essential element of any successful organization, and DesignOps plays a significant role in creating it. A well-designed inclusive culture means that everyone has the opportunity to contribute their unique perspective and skills, which leads to more innovation and better outcomes.
When organizations have an inclusive culture, they benefit from having diverse perspectives on design challenges. This enhances creativity as designers think outside the box with various cultural backgrounds influencing designs. As a result, silos are removed and design maturity is sure to improve.
2. People Management
People management is an integral part of DesignOps. It involves hiring, training, and managing people within a team or organization. People are managed based on their skills, knowledge, and experience rather than just their job titles.
DesignOps can play a critical role in managing a well-oiled design function by assigning tasks to team members based on their competencies & availability.
It also enables better communication between different teams, making it easier to collaborate.
3. Project Management
DesignOps makes it possible for project managers to define processes and create frameworks that optimize design workflows.
One of the key benefits of project management is that it allows for better control over timelines, budgets, and resources. By using tools like Gantt charts or Kanban boards, project managers can track progress in real-time and adjust plans accordingly.
4. Knowledge Management
Effective knowledge management empowers design teams to avoid repeating mistakes made in previous projects by providing them with a repository of best practices, case studies, and research findings. Designers can then use this information to make informed decisions that deliver better outcomes for clients.
From onboarding and training new designers to store design processes, artifacts, and templates that can be recalled whenever necessary, these knowledge repositories are instrumental in the organization’s design maturity improving.
DesignOps professionals should ensure they invest in reliable knowledge management systems that facilitate the seamless sharing of insights within their organizations. By doing so, they will empower their teams with the resources required for success while promoting a culture of continuous improvement based on shared learning experiences.
5. Strategy Alignment
Strategy alignment involves aligning the design team's goals and objectives with those of the organization, ensuring everyone works towards a common purpose.
With strategy alignment in place, DesignOps teams can focus on delivering outcomes that are aligned with both business needs and user requirements. This results in improved overall performance for an organization.
This also makes design a key factor for planning product-based activities and makes design ROI measurable. It improves the overall quality of the design output by aligning the design with the overall product vision and strategy.
6. Streamlined Collaboration
With a more streamlined workflow and clear communication channels, team members can easily share information and feedback. This kind of collaboration empowers everyone involved to be more productive and efficient in their work.
The improved visibility makes collaboration easier, since everyone is aware of each other’s progress, while the improved communication enables more effective idea exchanges, and as a result, collaborative efforts as well.
How Cubyts helps organizations grow in design maturity
A great place to start is to use the Cubyts design maturity assessment to figure out where your business currently stands when it comes to design maturity.
Once you know where you are, leverage Cubyts as an easy-to-use and efficient DesignOps platform to give your design team the knowledge repository they need, to help them use industry best practices, define processes, standardize the design tools they use, and do much more to ensure your entire organization scales the design maturity curve.
Sign up with Cubyts today and make use of our free trial period to fully understand the advantages DesignOps has to offer your design team.
Summary
The efficacy of the design team is now a key factor in determining the success of any product company. And this efficiency is measured by the team’s design maturity.
By investing in DesignOps practices, businesses can create an inclusive culture that values creativity, aligns with strategic goals, manages people effectively, organizes knowledge efficiently, and ultimately improves collaboration across the board. So why wait? Start your journey towards successful design operations today!