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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

DesignOps 101
Summary: The practice of Design Operations focuses on processes and
measures that support designers in creating consistent, quality designs.
By Kate Kaplan on July 21, 2019 Topics: Design Process, Managing UX Teams

What Is Design Operations (DesignOps)?

Definition: DesignOps refers to the orchestration and optimization of
people, processes, and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact
at scale.

DesignOps is a collective term for addressing challenges such as:

growing and evolving design teams

finding and hiring people with the right skills
creating efficient workflows
improving the quality and impact of design outputs.

The goal of DesignOps is to establish processes and measures that support

scalable solutions for these challenges, so that designers can focus on designing
and researching.
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All fields must figure out how to mitigate growing amounts of bureaucracy and
overhead communications as they scale. Each field will have its own solutions,
and DesignOps is ours. However, UX professionals have more need than most
for figuring out how to efficiently handle “more.” We often grow at a faster rate
than the rest of the company, as the organization realizes the value and high ROI
of UX and begins to expeditiously add staff and responsibility to the UX team.

DesignOps Applies to All UX Professionals

Though we use the blanket terms “design” and “designer” throughout this
discussion, DesignOps applies to anyone using user-centered and design-
thinking processes to solve problems. The term “designer,” then, includes UX
designers, user researchers, visual designers, content strategists, service
designers, communication designers, and anyone else contributing to the end
user experience.

Why DesignOps Matters Now

Shifts are happening in the way designers work and interact with each other and
other teams, and these shifts are shining a light on the necessity of DesignOps.

In many ways, designers have won the fight to be “at the table.” More and more,
we are part of broad, strategic conversations, and many organizations don’t need
to be convinced of the value of design anymore. They get it. (Yay! What a time to
be alive!)

Unfortunately, this recognition often means that we must manage the additional
workload of being involved in strategic work alongside our “day jobs” of designing
and researching. In short: Designers are often too busy to design.

Couple this reality with the fact that designers are wrangling more complex
contexts than ever before: As many organizations embrace embedded product- or
project-specific team models, there is a growing lack of connection among
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designers who are spread across those teams. The products and experiences we
design continue to become more elaborate, and teams are often dispersed across
locations; as a result, workflows and decision making are increasingly distributed.

In order to manage rapidly escalating design complexities, we need to scale

design by applying our own design-thinking and user-centered methods to design
processes. (Meta, I know.)

Components of Design Operations

DesignOps is an intentionally broad topic, because there are many elements
related to enabling consistent, quality design.

I like to think of DesignOps a bit like a curated potluck dinner. There are a lot of
components within DesignOps, and what an organization chooses to select — or
to pass on — should depend on the current needs and most poignant painpoints
of that organization. So, the shape of DesignOps will and should look very
different from one organization to the next. And the focus of DesignOps within a
single organization might shift as challenges evolve or change over time.

The DesignOps Menu

Here is the comprehensive DesignOps menu: the universe of elements that
organizations might choose to focus on when planning and implementing
processes to support designers. There are three main areas:

How we work together

How we get our work done
How our work creates impact

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The DesignOps menu helps organizations plan where to focus their DesignOps
efforts across 3 main areas: How we work together, how we get work done, and
how our work creates impact.

How We Work Together

DesignOps helps us plan for how we:

Organize: How do we structure our teams, and build the right team?
Organizing may include: TOP

Designing organizational structure for design teams

Creating complementary, skills-complete design teams
Defining both the role of individual designers, and the role of the design
department as a whole
Collaborate: How do we create environments and gatherings that enable
effective communication? The collaborate component could include:
Defining a structure for regular rituals and meetings
Ensuring that group spaces and environments are conducive to
collaboration
Establishing communities of practice for skills and interest sharing

Humanize: How do we ensure that hiring, onboarding, and professional-

development practices treat employees like humans first? Humanizing could
encompass:
Designing interviewing practices that are specific to the needs of the design
team
Establishing consistent hiring and onboarding practices to set up new team
members for success
Standardizing transparent career pathways for both management and non-
management roles

How We Get Our Work Done

DesignOps helps us plan for how we:

Standardize: How do we facilitate design quality through consistent toolsets

and processes? Standardizing might cover:
Documenting and optimizing the high-level design process, from initiation
through testing to delivery
Defining and aligning purposeful design activities within the design process
Auditing and enforcing the use of the same design tools for efficient
collaboration

Harmonize: How do we share and expand design intelligence so that we all

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work from the same shared understanding and build common ground?
Harmonizing may include:
Scaling and managing design systems to create efficiencies for designers
Building repositories of user-research data that are accessible to everyone
Using digital-asset managers (DAMS) or other systems to share design
assets and templates among team members
Prioritize: How do we make decisions about what projects to work on, and
when to work on them? Prioritizing might consist of:
Uncovering and exposing bottlenecks in the design workflow
Understanding design-team capacity in order to accurately estimate and
allocate projects
Using objective and consistent methods to prioritize features or projects

How Our Work Creates Impact

Finally, DesignOps can help us think about how to:

Measure: How do we make design accountable by defining and measuring

design quality? Measuring could encompass:
Creating definitions of “good” and “done” for design teams
Choosing and aligning metrics for design quality, and tracking those metrics
over time
Creating and using design principles throughout the design process as
objective measures

Socialize: How we educate others on the role and value of design?

Socializing could consist of:
Crafting a consistent message of the role and value of design, and
proactively sharing that message with design partners
Capturing and sharing success stories of user-centered design processes
Recognizing and rewarding teams that apply design practices to their work

Enable: How do we cultivate the understanding and use of design activities,

even by those outside of the design team. Enabling might include:
Educating people outside of the design team on how to use design tools
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and activities
Creating accessible design-activity playbooks to avoid the design-team-as-
bottleneck challenge
Implementing skill training to ensure that activities are understood and used
appropriately

Adapt DesignOps Components to Your

Organization
It’s impossible for a single person or team to focus on all of these components at
once. DesignOps teams and thinkers recognize and target areas of particular
gravity for a specific context.

Before embarking on DesignOps, plan internal research (e.g., listening tours,

stakeholder interviews, and surveys) to assess the biggest pain points and the
areas with the highest potential ROI, and start there.

Who “Does” DesignOps?

Anyone can do DesignOps. There are two approaches to thinking about
DesignOps that help you determine how to approach it within your organization:
DesignOps the Role and DesignOps the Mindset.

DesignOps the Role

DesignOps the Role means that there is a specific person or group of people
tasked with ensuring that the design team is supported so that it can focus on
designing or researching. In more mature practices, common DesignOps roles
are:

Design producers or UX producers: People concerned with project-level

design operations
Design program managers or UX program managers: People tasked with
program- or organization-level design operations
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ResearchOps specialists: People responsible for owning the operational
aspects of user research, such as sourcing and screening participants,
overseeing the research-request pipeline, maintaining a research repository,
and managing research tools, spaces and equipment

Not every organization needs DesignOps the Role. Very large teams, embedded
teams, or agencies with short timelines and lots of moving parts may need
DesignOps the Role before other types of teams.

DesignOps the Mindset

Any team, however, can benefit from DesignOps the Mindset, which simply
means recognizing the need for and implementing an ecosystem, or a set of
standardized processes, methods, and tools that support design and allow design
to scale efficiently. No DesignOps-explicit role is required to observe current
processes with an eye toward increasing efficiencies and bettering outputs.

A Call for DesignOps

DesignOps is the glue that holds the design organization together, and the bridge
that enables collaboration among cross-disciplinary team members.

DesignOps cannot be an afterthought in a landscape where design teams

continue to grow in size, UX work continues to be requested at an increasing rate,
design-team members continue to become dispersed, and the complexity of our
design processes skyrockets.

How we work together, how we get our work done, and how our work creates
impact must be intentionally and intelligently crafted.

Learn More about DesignOps

Learn more about DesignOps in our full day course, “DesignOps: Scaling UX and
User Research.”

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