Which are the main pillars of DesignOps?
Design can be a competitive advantage. To deliver great experiences, product teams need to get the design right. Therefore, teams constantly search for ways to streamline the design process to achieve a common goal, like reducing bounce rate or increasing conversions.
So what is DesignOps?
DesignOps is the umbrella term for creating effective workflows that help teams build digital products. It’s the operational management of designers and the optimization of design processes to maximize the value of design. Meredith Black, a DesignOps pioneer, has a more basic definition: “I like to say that DesignOps is everything but actual design,” she quips. DesignOps is a dedicated person or team in an organization that focuses solely on enabling the design team to work as well as it possibly can. It is made possible by closely analyzing the tools, processes, and working relationships the team has at its disposal and making sure these things are set up in a way that
a) enables excellent design work and
b) minimizes friction at any place it may occur — the discovery, collaboration, revision, or handoff stage.
“DesignOps function helps amplify design and enable cross-functional product teams. They take care of the tools and systems so that Product Designers can achieve greater efficiency and collaboration.”
“Keep designers focused on the work, and let DesignOps help with the rest,” says Black, who is a former DesignOps lead at Pinterest and currently serves as a consultant in the space. “Whether that’s strategy, taking notes, coordinating with cross-functional teams, helping ensure a successful launch of a project, building a learning and development program, or just being there to listen to a designer’s needs.”
4 main pillars of DesignOps
Let’s dig a little further into the considerations for building this function.
DesignOps focus on four pillars:
- Design Process
- Design Workflows
- Design Tools
- Design Culture
Pillar 1: Design Process
Design Process pays careful attention to how things are organized and processed. From discovery to review to handoff, the entire design process is evaluated, optimized, and tweaked to remove as much friction as possible. DesignOps teams have a goal to streamline workflows. When a DesignOps department starts to re-work the process, they usually do the following things:
- Identify the critical gaps and weaknesses of an existing process.
- Build a strategy that would optimize designers’ day-to-day workflow — maximize engagement and reduce duplicated efforts.
- Define clear metrics of success and ensure designers align with them. Metrics are decided according to the business’s goals.
- Unify design language across platforms. Unified language helps designers achieve consistency across all platforms.
- Reduce the total number of meetings by trimming all unnecessary meetings and making those that remain more productive (i.e., introduce a mandatory requirement for clear agendas before meetings and action items after the session).
Pillar 2: Design Workflows
DesignOps empower designers and engineers to build solutions as parts of a greater whole while accelerating design and development.
A systematic design workflow informs the team about the way design needs to be done within the organization. This helps in bringing a system and discipline, thereby enabling faster and more transparent execution.
Having a “DesignOps mindset” in your team is important, no matter how big your company is. It creates efficiencies in the long run, and generates more consistent work.
If the organization is a system made by smaller units, then a system can be broken down into discrete subunits. These sub-systems need to interact together and cooperate effectively on an ongoing basis to empower the system to accomplish its purpose.
From an organizational point of view, the significant sub-systems are:
- People
- Processes
- Technology and Tools
- Resources
And each of these sub-systems can be broken down into more sub-systems. By exploring and expanding the systems, the overlaps, and interconnectedness among the parts become visible, showing how every detail is deeply interwoven with the other system units.
For this reason, DesignOps operates simultaneously both inside-out(from the design teams to the organization) and outside-in (from the broader organizational level to design).
Pillar 3: Design Tools
Managing the tools to ensure we have what’s required to get the job done. DesignOps also keep new devices entering the market and ensures that new designers are seamlessly onboarded using these tools.
Design Tools are the systems and services that enhance speed and quality of execution, and the mission is to remove doubt in design.
DesignOps also determine what tools design teams need to work efficiently. They standardize the tooling and systems used and introduce new tools and make sure designers adopt them. It focuses on communication tools, collaboration, reviews, and feedback mechanisms to facilitate learning, inform decision-making, and drive better team efficiencies. Many dynamic and evolving cloud-based collaboration tools amplify a designer’s impact by removing friction points between design and collaborators in engineering.
Tools that could be useful:
- Theo — Theo transforms and formats Design Tokens. Theo can consume centralized Design Tokens and output files for each platform.
- Figma — Design tool with built-in cross-team design systems which can export to SVG and CSS.P.S. Here you can see our PWA app designs in Figma under an Open Source license.
- Zeplin — Collaboration Tool between Designers and Developers
- InVision Design System Manager (DSM) — Invision bought Brand to build a complex Design System Tool.
- Sympli is an enterprise-grade, integrated collaboration and workflow platform for building digital products.
Pillar 4: Design Culture
This pillar is all about creating the best working environment for our team and ensuring they’re set up for success.
Culture is how it feels for a designer to work in your organization. A meaningful culture empowers employees with a clear understanding of how their contributions enable the overall purpose and gives them the autonomy and agency to contribute in a manner authorized by process, tools, and structure.
DesignOps focuses specifically on enabling designers to accomplish the most meaningful work possible, bolstering creativity and overall impact. Of course, every organization’s design team will have a unique blend of goals and maturity levels. It takes careful orchestration throughout the organization to allow the design to become a part of the working fabric of day-to-day operations.
Design culture is a critical element that keeps design teams happy and healthy. That’s why DesignOps teams have goals to invest in creating a design culture and promoting the culture within a company. The process of building a design culture includes the following areas:
- Education: DesignOps figure out what skills are missing in a design team and how to gain them. They are also responsible for onboarding new team members.
- Retention: DesignOps protect designer resources from turnover by creating an environment where people want to stay for extended periods.
- Accountability: They are responsible for holding the designer accountable.
- Knowledge sharing: They create a culture where team members share their knowledge generously with others.
Conclusion
Simply put, companies that invest in great design get great financial results. They also develop a deeper understanding of their customers and make better decisions for the business due to the continuous feedback loop that the design process enables.
But great design doesn’t come easily, especially when it needs to be delivered at scale. Many of the world’s most recognizable brands — from Facebook to Airbnb and Wells Fargo to Pinterest — have instituted in-house design operations teams to manage the creative process effectively and efficiently.
DesignOps ensures the design is executed to the highest quality across all products consistently. Design Ops Is Quickly Becoming a Must-Have Mindset for Any Product Team
DesignOps is a role that focuses on scaling and amplifying design processes. Introducing a DesignOps role is not only a structural change, but it’s also a cultural shift. Understanding the design process matures, and there is no longer want to segregate different teams. Instead, designers, developers, researchers, and other team members work together during the design process, and the DesignOps team is the one who makes this happen. They create highly integrated and effective design organizations.
