DesignOps Handbook Condensed

Page:Pitch Deck | Presentation
DesignOps

INNOVATION & IT
Agenda
• Why DesignOps Now?
• What is DesignOps?
• DesignOps models
• The DesingOps role
• Design research is special
• DesignOps I UFST

Why DesignOps
Now?

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Value of design
Companies are beginning to understand the value of design, and are investing in
the role of DesignOps to maximize design’s value and impact.
Collin Whitehead, Dropbox

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Wait a miniute
What is design?

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Wait a miniute
Design practices
Graphic design UX research
UX-design
Interaction design
Classic design Design thinking Computational design

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DesignOps
motivation
The rise of agile development has
necessitated much tighter integration
between design and technology, while
recent investment in design has
highlighted the need to figure out how to
deliver design at scale. Design Ops is
essentially the practice of reducing
operational inefficiencies in the design
workflow through process and
technological advancements.
In short it’s about getting [design]
improvements in the hands of your
users as quickly and with as little
friction as possible.

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Companies using it

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Need for
scaling design
There is a greater focus on design -
from all the different types of design
practices - in todays organisations.
That means designers are supporting
more parts of the organisation. At the
same time design solutions are
growing in complexity all the while
expanding product offerings. And of
course everything is high priority.
Demand
Design
Drivers:
Complexity
Product expansion
Awareness of design value

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Scaling
[In the beginning] we leaned heavily on the raw talents of individuals and the
close relationships that allowed people to easily share information across
smaller groups. As the team continued to grow, we reached a tipping point
where things suddenly became harder. Teams could no longer all fit on the
same floor. New people brought with them new ways of doing things.
Adrian Cleave, AirBnb

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High expectations to design
Business’ like Apple, Google, AirBnb,
Facebook have promoted design and
made the public aware and used to
high quality experiences, which
demands solutions that not just meet
user needs but also anticipates them.

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Great talent seeks challenges
Great designers are a rare
commodity, and they know it. This
makes recruiting more difficult than
days past. They don’t want to be in a
bureaucracy, but instead focus solely
on design, so they can progress,
develop themselves, be rewarded
and recognised.

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Design needs support
Design practice requires a collection of
balanced activities that support the
designers in actually designing. Such
activities include but are not limited to:
• HR
• Tools
• Methods and Processes
• Infrastructure

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Agile is a set of management
practices made for software
development. The practices and
processes are made for developers
in mind - and not designers. So agile
becoming the norm was much to the
harm of design
But there is problem … agile

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Agile is made for engineers and has been
the way to create great products -
Amazon, Google, Netflix, Facebook
Therefore designers have taken
themselves upon the method in order to
be in on succesful products - even though
it doesn’t fit their processes
Modern software
development

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What I saw was design practice
taking big steps backwards—vision,
exploration, deconstruction,
associative thinking, and
interruptions were suppressed in
favor of working the way developers
work.
Two different disciplines
Dave Malouf, General Assembly DesignOps handbook, ch. 1

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Design today
Many organizations expect their designers to wear many hats—project manager,
cross-functional partner, creative leader, and logistical coordinator. However, these
additional roles reduce the time your designer can devote to your product and
users.
Meredith Black, Pinterest

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Designers taking a lot of overhead
Production role instead of strategic
Superficial cleanup
Servant role to developers
Designers in a culture
optimised for engineers

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Developers and product managers
measures success by whether a
product ships on time, and not
whether the design satisfies user
needs.
Misalignment on success
Project manager: project done on time
Developer: all functionality implemented
Designer: design satisfies user needs

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Enabler for speed
When considering what it takes to scale and run a high performance design
team that needs to maintain pace in a fast moving company, this approach
made a lot of sense.

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The current solution
DUAL TRACK AGILE
http://uxandthecity.co/ux-in-the-scrum-team/dual-track-agile-post-image/

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TRI-TRACK AGILE
Expanding this
DesignOps handbook, ch. 1

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But production time is
still a problem
Often design doesn't mesh 1:1 with
that proces. Either there working a
sprint ahead, in parallel. What will
take engineering 1 sprint might take
design 3 sprints and what might take
designers 1 sprint might take
engineering 3 sprints.
Josh Ulm, Oracle

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Operationalising design
DesignOps is everything that supports high quality crafts, methods, and processes
… Tools, infrastructure, workflow, people, and governance is operations.
Dave Malouf, General Assembly

What is
DesignOps?

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DesignOps
For us, DesignOps enables the product and design teams to learn faster, build
better things and focus on their craft
Alastair Simpson, Atlassian

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DesignOps is … managing
DesignOps teams help to forecast
work, manage resourcing, drive the
day-to-day project flows, oversee
budgets, support team health, and
basically facilitate anything that
allows creative teams to focus on
what they do best.

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DesignOps is … protecting
Building a process that will protect
the integrity of the product and
design team’s work.
The job of the DesignOps team is to
protect the time and headspace of
everyone working with design, which
allows everyone to focus on their
respective craft.

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Example
There are so much political struggle about how much time may go into
development and how much goes into operations, so for now there are no budget
for developing. But if there is no development there is no design.
Anonymus designer

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DesignOps is … stakeholder
management
Scale, pace, and complexity can add up
to an environment where creative
teams feel like they are always reacting,
and never exploring and refining ideas.
Therefore DesignOps:
• Managing requests
• Prepares the team for upcoming
projects
• Gets the team early involved on to
help define the problem
• Sets stakeholders expectations
• Manages stakeholder feedback

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DesignOps is … operations
Business operations
• Budgetary and political capital to facilitate design
Workflow operations
• Design standardisation and optimisation
• Product lifecycle management
People operations
• Hiring, support, rituals, and defined expectations

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DesignOps focus area

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DesignOps vs DevOps
It’s worth noting that while Design Ops and
DevOps are the result of similar drivers, the
practices are considerably different.
DevOps obviously has a much stronger
bias towards tools and server-based
solutions, while Design Ops tends to focus
more on the process and operations side
of the equation.

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Focus areas at Airbnb’s DesignOps
Production design
The overarching mission is to create
the best user experience possible
Language
Design systems
Embedding quality assuancere
Operational strategy
Measure impact
Team coordinators
Design Program
Management
LocalizationsDesign tools
Sketch
Abstract
etc.

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DesignOps is … building a
design culture
How we manage our particular
operations is our culture. The drive of
an organisation should be based on:
• values
• principles
• mission

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DesignOps
This is why we’ve created DesignOps, to ease collaboration and
amplify effectiveness, not only across product disciplines, but also
between the increasingly complex world of Product Design.

DesignOps
Models

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DesignOps models
DesignOps can have many types of
responsibilities, so implementation
depends on what your organisation
needs the most. The following
presents two models:
DesignOps as team support
DesignOps as project support
DesignOps as own division

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Embedded DesignOps
Product team Product team Product team Product team Product team Product team
Rest of organisation
Product
management
Product
management
DesignOps
DesignOps

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DesingOps as team support
Focus on organisation and
collaboration:
Stakeholder management
Alignment, responsibilities, and goals
Project intake
Innovation projects
Project support
Knowledge management
Career development
Facilitating critiques
Legal
Procurement
These clear responsibilities also
delineate what folks
should not work on, like tasks
that can best be handled by
someone else or that are out of
scope.

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Product team Product team Product team Product team Product team Product team
Rest of organisation
Product
management
Product
management
DesignOps

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Focus on improving and empowering
design:
Tools
Design language
Principles
Method catalogue
Critiques
Innovation projects
Knowledge management
Career development
Facilitating critiques
Recruiting
These areas include design tooling and systems,
communications, recruiting, team development,
and budgeting. The DesignOps team can
standardize the tooling and systems used to
scope, resource, track, and archive projects.
While some of these systems can drive high-level
strategy, others—like file nomenclature and
folder structure—can be just as vital to a team’s
success and sanity.

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Division model
Engineering
Management
Design Test
Front-end
Back-end
UX-research
UX-design
QA
Integration
Security
GDPR
Network
DevOps DesignOps Automatisation
Vulnerability &
exploitation

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Challenges
When unifying design disciplines into a single organisation, we faced challenges
spanning from the tactical to cultural
Kate Battles, Fitbit

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Remember
DesignOps form for many reasons, and
grow and morph in many ways to fit the
needs of an organization.

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1. Do you have visibility into what the
design team is working on?
2. Are designers reacting to things or
acting on new ways of doing things?
3. Are designers designing or are they
fulfilling other roles?
Reflection questions

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DesignOps
As design teams and companies invest in DesignOps, they’ll realize better creative
results faster, and they’ll see how better work processes can impact the entire
culture of collaboration.
Collin Whitehead, Dropbox

The DesignOps
Role

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The essence
DesignOps makes teams run more effectively by letting designers focus
on design while leaving everything else to the operations team.

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DesignOps people are able to build cross-functional relationships while
representing design, and someone who understands the design
process. These relationships will necessitate understanding the product
development process and product engineering principles.
The role also calls for excellent project, time, budget, and resource
management, and an understanding of different project management
ideologies (like waterfall and agile, among others)
Finally, this role calls for calm in ambiguous and changing
environments.
Who they are

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What they do
• Make sure they have what they need to develop their best work.
• Identifying the critical gaps and weaknesses where design
could provide the most value
• case for change
• Design tools
• Design systems
• Communication protocols
• Skills, specialists and recruiting (internal/external)
• Team development
• Budgeting
• Track ressource usage on projects (high-level into strategy)
• Nomenclauture and folder structure (low-level practical)
• Think strategically with 1:1 meetings - take responsible for
some of the 1:1
• Design team meetings
• Meetings with other managers and leaders
• Good meeting hygienje - only go to meetings that has clear
agendas
• Facilitating critiques
• Makes it easy to get content from communication and
translation departments
• Onboarding new people
• Teammate recognition
• Organising special projects (hack weeks) or innovation sprints
and other projects where there is no natural owner.
• Establing clear roles and responsibilities for designers - when
they are assigned to projects - ie. Also what they are not
working on
• Creative scheudle and milestones for the design team.
• Documenting tasks outside projects, delegating according to
capacity and follow-up
• Handling project intake
• Preparing designers for new assignements/projects and push
them in to help deﬁne the problem
• Roadmap
• Organising design QA
• Develop a long term plan to scale operations in the org
• Establishing and fostering strong cross-functional partnerships
• Socializing process proposals to other teams and make case for
change
• Integrate the team processes with those of the greater product
development team.
Tasks

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Initiatives
• Ressources
• Program management
• Onboarding
• Education
• Budget
• Communication
• Framework and responsibilities
• Tools and processes
• Strategy
The work of the design operations
team has contributed to a team that
is central to the development of the
Fitbit’s strategy; ranks at the top in
company engagement metrics; and
is creative, open, and fun.
Kate Battles, Fitbit
“

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Build culture
• Define the culture and prioritize it.
• Build a design culture: vision, models
and tools
• Address areas of friction head on to
deliver better outcomes sooner!

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Facilitate conversations at the design leadership level to ensure
success is being defined based on the company’s goals.
Communicate the defintion to team and between team, managers
and leadership (and engineers), and then set expectations.
Define success
"Goals that are shared and agreed upon are goals that can be met.”
Kate Battles, FitBit

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Are there regular design critiques or feedback sessions?
Symptom
In my experience every year some designer is bringing
design critiques back in to the organisations, but they
always seem to fade out, probably because people
aren’t doing that much design.
Example

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Week 1
Build relationships within and beyond the
design team. Identify what designers have
and what they need.
Month 1
Finding solutions to what they need and
building infrastructure for designers. Set up
tracking for performance.
Plan for integrating
Year 1
Performance report and
communicating the goals achieved for
the organisation to see the value.

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Pay-off
Teams will be better organized, leadership will gain a better
understanding of what makes their teams tick, and cross-functional
teams will have more visibility into—and a better understanding of—
the design process. This creates better organizational awareness of
design, and mitigates misconceptions that “designers design in a
black hole” or that design projects take too long.
Meredith Black, Pinterest

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1. How many designers are there
today in the org?
2. And how many are doing
design?
3. How much does design matter
to the org?

Design research
is special

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Organizing research activities to discover insights—and then making
those insights actionable—requires attention to many operational
concerns. This is especially true as you scale your research and your org
as a whole.
Why design research is
special

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What is design research
• User research
• Ethnography
• Interviews
• Remote and in-person moderated and unmoderated testing
• Journaling
• Participatory design
• User activities (purchases, usage, site, and app analytics)
• Market research
• Analyst reports
• Support and sales logs
• Customer interviews

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Design research mission
1. Scale design research, especially in areas that are horizontal to all
products
2. Operationalize research so designers can more eﬃciently and eﬀectively
do the research they were already doing
3. Evangelize and coach research, analysis, and synthesis methods to make
results more accurate and actionable
4. “non-user” related research: quantitative studies, analytics, market
research, and analyst reports

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• Usability lab - Different devices - booking - user experience of the lab
• Gear for doing field research. Microphones, video cameras etc.
• Digital tools for testing. That fit designers tools
• Digital tools for categorizing and finding insights. Engagement information, who
(demographics), what (system, prototype, process-step), where (physically, business area)
person engaged with
• Recruiting users and customer panel
• Disclaimers and non-discloure agreements - legal stuff
• Easy to test and access solutions (dev/design-dep). Aligment about when as well
• Budget, tools, licenses. Rules for gifts and incentives
• Transparent prioritization process based on business reasoning
Infrastructure

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Insights platform
Most importantly a tool for tracking,
collecting, curating and consolidating.
Prevents you from repeating the same
queries and answering the same
question. When you store data, and
make it easy to access (with help from
solid metadata), you make it easy to ﬁnd
and reuse existing information across the
organisation.
Fx products such as:
https://www.aureliuslab.com/
https://www.optimalworkshop.com/reframer
https://nomnominsights.com/

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Operationalising research
If you’re thinking of operationalizing research, think about the processes that lend
themselves to documentation, decision paths, and archiving.
Dave Malouf, IXDA, DesignOps Summit

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One space unique to research is the usability lab. A lab calls for
equipment that needs to be selected (measuring, recording, and
communication devices), a space architected into a proper test
environment (proper lighting and sound set-up), and ongoing
maintenance to keep everything humming.
Eventually this might call for a lab manager who keeps the space in tip-
top shape and administers all the equipment. A lab also serves as a
storeroom for equipment like cameras and microphones that are used
both in the lab and in the field.
Along those lines, you might require a mobile device lab stocked with
different devices and configurations of software and hardware. This is
especially true if you maintain legacy platforms.
Lab time is coveted by researchers, so you’ll need a system for managing
access. While first come, first served on a shared calendar can work, you’ll
likely need to implement some evaluation criteria based on project
priorities.
When you bring folks into a lab, you need everything to run smoothly. Your
lab manager or tech support might need to be on standby in case of any
unanticipated glitches. And don’t forget to be hospitable—where will
visitors wait for their interviews or tests? Will you provide drinks, snacks,
or lunch? The user experience extends to the lab.
Example Usabilty lab
The DesignOps Handbook

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• Is research a practice unto itself, or is it practiced by people tied to other functional roles (like
design, product management, or development)?
• Who leads which types of research activities?
• Do researchers plan and execute all the research for the benefit of others?
• Do designers and product managers lead their own research initiatives?
• Who do researchers report to?
• What other types of research does the organization conduct—market research, data science,
and analytics?
• If market researchers or data scientists are conducting research, who do they report to?
• Does research function as a service agency to the entire org, or are individual researchers
assigned to specific teams?

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The final destination
The goal is to reach a stage where the
process and tools fade into the
background, and we live in a world where
information is easy to find, people are easy
to locate, prototypes are quick to create
and work is easy to share — and we look
back and wonder how we ever did it
before.

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Win-win
DesignOps doesn’t just help the
design team—it benefits all parts of
the product organization.
Meredith Black,
Pinterest

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Kilder
Andre:
Blogpost by Chris Ward

https://blog.codeship.com/what-is-designops/ https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/designops
Airbnb DesignOps
https://airbnb.design/designops-airbnb/
Design in Tech Report 2017 by John Maeda
Primær kilde:
Design Better - DesignOps Handbook
https://www.designbetter.co/designops-handbook/introducing-designops

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