DesignOps: An IBM Point of View
IBM Design Community,
We now have more than 2,500 practicing designers working in literally every part of the IBM company. As the scale and complexity of our design teams and organizations has grown, it has required us to take a more sophisticated approach to how we operationalize design. We do this in order to make sure we are working in the most efficient and effective way possible, and are generating consistently great outcomes for our users and clients. The practice of DesignOps has emerged in recent years at IBM and across the design industry as a way to meet this need.
An active community of DesignOps leaders from across IBM has come together over the last year to exchange experiences and best practices. The following post is an initial statement on the role of DesignOps at IBM drafted collaboratively by that community. There are as many questions as answers here, but our hope is that it will be a resource for teams wrestling with this challenge, and a beacon for those of you looking to connect with fellow DesignOps practitioners. If you are looking for more on DesignOps, be sure to join the conversation and community on the #ibm-designops Slack channel.
Doug Powell
IBM Distinguished Designer
Vice President, Designer Practices & Community
Building the value of design through DesignOps
The Nielsen/Norman Group defines DesignOps as “the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact at scale.” Because DesignOps is so new, the role is still taking shape within IBM, and is implemented in different ways within various organizations. We compiled data from a recent survey to find out exactly how IBM DesignOps professionals are spending their time. While we don’t have all the answers yet, we are seeing that an individual in a DesignOps role typically spends their time focused on:
Design Team Management:
- Hiring plans, staffing, and optimization of designer skills to match business strategy
- Designer community-building, engagement, retention, skills, training and recognition
- Advocating and tracking budgets to support design
Design Culture and Engagement:
- Optimizing communication, collaboration, and workflow
- Removing blockers and addressing pain points
- Creating a positive team environment and addressing team health and morale
Design Craft and Business Acumen:
- Sharing best practices to increase design excellence, quality and standards
- Ensuring designers have an optimized design, research and delivery tool stack
- Aligning planning and prioritization decision-making with key stakeholders and leadership
- Measuring and sharing the impact and value of design
These initial survey findings of the areas invested in the business demonstrate IBM DesignOps practitioners’ ability to traverse across essential areas that support and build design team health through elevating the practice of world-class design, team culture, and operational excellence.
A diverse landscape of IBM DesignOps practitioners
Today DesignOps is not a specialized design discipline in the IBM design career framework, like Visual Design or Design Research. Depending on the scale and maturity of a team, DesignOps can be a full-time dedicated role OR it can be a function that is shared among researchers, design leads, managers, program managers and others. In fact, you may have been doing DesignOps tasks in your current role for years but didn’t use that specific term to describe it. There is not a “one size fits all” approach to a DesignOps practice outside or inside IBM. Your organization’s size, maturity, complexity and painpoints will influence who is responsible for leading DesignOps, how they operate and who they report to, whether it is a dedicated role or fully-scaled DesignOps team.
It’s important for a DesignOps leader to partner with Business Ops, Finance, HR, Program/Offering Management, Executives and other stakeholders. In a large and complex organization like IBM, there will be centralized and de-centralized DesignOps functions. This is analogous to how the CIO or corporate HR departments are responsible for tools licensing and skills programs for designers across the company, while org-specific education, tooling templates, and workflows may also be needed.
See the list of resources below for more information on the value of DesignOps and what it looks like in practice, including industry examples and profiles of a few DesignOps practitioners in IBM.
Meet DesignOps practioners at IBM and learn more about their current responsibilities, here.
DesignOps is a growing discipline
A dedicated DesignOps role provides for differentiated ROI correlating directly to the business needs and design team outcomes. According to the Nielsen/Norman Group, “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.” While there is still much to learn about this emerging and evolving field, we do know that DesignOps is focused on removing friction for our designers — which means happier designers, more effective teams, and higher-quality design.
IBM has assembled a core team of DesignOps practitioners to further refine a point of view for DesignOps at IBM, with aspirations of a Playbook. There is also an internal DesignOps monthly community call and Slack channel (#ibm-designops) for those who want to get involved. Stay tuned, ask questions, and engage with us along this journey. As an IBMer, to be added to this private channel contact Jenny Price on slack.
Resources:
- DesignOps 101 by the Nielsen/Norman Group
- DesignOps — A New Discipline
- An Overview of DesignOps by UXMatters
- How Atlassian is using DesignOps to unleash the power of their design studio
- DesignOps at Airbnb
- DesignOps — The Questions You’re Probably Asking Yourself Now
- DesignOps Summit presentations
- Invision DesignOps Handbook
Special thanks to Doug Powell, Brittanni Risher, Kristine Berry, Charlotte Hill, Edmund Chow, and Karen Masood for their contributions to this effort.
Jenny Price is the DesignOps Lead for the Digital Growth & Commerce Team at IBM Studios Astor based in the heart of New York City with team members co-located in Austin, Raleigh, Boston, and Bratislava .
The Digital Growth & Commerce design team drives innovation at IBM, one of the enterprise digital information technology leaders in the world, and creates the next generation IBM.com experiences to help users while driving business results. The Digital Growth & Commerce Team and F&O Support Experiences are led by Nigel Prentice, Design Executive.
Please visit www.ibm.com/design for more information on Design at IBM.
The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
Special thanks to Allison Biesboer.
