Talent, Culture, Flow and Impact - The DesignOps value streams
Design Operations, aka DesignOps, has been rising for the past years. More companies realize that design without a proper organization and operations model cannot be delivered effectively or provide the expected value, especially at scale.
DesignOps is the key to scaling digital product design teams with more efficiency. As companies mature and invest in design, they need to operationalize workflow, hiring, alignment between teams, and more so designers can focus on design work while someone else takes care of the rest. Learn how creating these centralized services and systems helps grow integrated, high-functioning teams at the best companies in the world.
— The DesignOps Handbook
As your design organization and, ultimately, DesignOps can get complex, it can be easy unintentionally lose focus. It is typical to move from the outcome mindset to the output. As a result, one of your key competitive advantage, the art of problem-solving, starts to fade as you expand.
In the previous post, we covered the concept of DesignOps Value Streams. The purpose of these small units, micro-services, is to generate outcomes providing value at different levels and reflecting the situation or plans of the organization. Moreover, the Value Streams concept is designed to fulfill and scale DesignOp’s ultimate mission — Grow a mature design environment.
In the following lines, we will look more in-depth at the core Value Streams — Talent, Culture, Flow and Impact.
TALENT
People are the cornerstone of any organization. You can hire great talents, yet they struggle within your current organization. It can be due to a lack of career opportunities to grow and learn, an insufficient mandate to make decisions, or an inability to build true ownership and commitment. Or maybe you are building a flat TEAL organization to embrace purpose over profit with a democratic, decentralized, and collaborative culture. Still, you found that your people demand a direct, centralized, and rule-strict organization.
Hiring great talents and structuring an organization has to be in synergy. That is why the Talent stream focuses on two major areas:
- Design org. structure — a zoom-out view where the structure not only represents how the design organization is assembled but how decisions are made and how it is perceived and functions — inside the design organization and the entire company. Identifying pains, needs, dependencies, and what you have available helps you understand the current state and better manage future evolution.
- Designer’s journey — a zoom-in view to understanding how talents integrate, progress, and grow. Looking from the perspective of a journey empathizes and gives the ability to understand the context in several stages, such as Attraction, Recruitment, Boarding, Performing, Leaving, or Alumni.
The Talent stream does not focus only on how to structure design organization or the lifecycle of individuals. It is also about the potential, value and impact, that talents can make inside and outside the company as they progress. Moreover, what you can leverage from that.
An outcome can be Continuous Growth and Progression, so any change or evolution can happen at every instant. That can be represented by:
- Engaging individuals through possibilities and support where can gain the experience and knowledge they strive for,
- Building a capable design organization with enough influence and scalable growth.
- Increasing design maturity inside and outside of the design organization.
Increasing design maturity is not just about the Talent stream, it is closely connected with the Flow and Culture stream as well. Having the proper design process in place or a culture that constantly advocates the value of design is vital for your design program’s success.
How we grow?A question that can help us not only to think about How we are now but also the past and future state. Defining shared OKRs and metrics helps track the progress and unite on your mission.
CULTURE
Although some of the following can be split into different areas, I generally recognize Culture as an umbrella representing a shared set of values, attitudes, norms, goals, and behaviors (or practices) that define and characterize an organization. Ultimately, the entire company. All these determine how a company’s employees and management interact — inside and outside of a company.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
— Peter Drucker
A great company culture promotes curiosity, respect, teamwork, and employee health. Regarding employee health, supporting individuals and their families is more crucial than ever. Building teams means creating a safe, diverse, and inclusion-friendly environment — creating Psychological safety through the stages of Inclusion safety (1), Learner safety (2), Contribution safety (3) and Challenger safety (4).
Psychological safety is a condition in which you feel included (1), safe to learn (2), safe to contribute (3), and safe to challenge the status quo (4) — all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way.
— The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, Timothy R. Clark
Fostering company culture is a long-term activity that is everyone’s responsibility. It not only stands on the people or common behavior patterns but also reflects the company’s situation. A different culture will be when we talk about an early startup, scale-up, or international enterprise. To better recognize the culture style, I found useful Cameron’s and Quinn’s Competing Values Culture Model and The Eight Distinct Culture styles from Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng.
How we perceive our working environment?A Culture stream outcome, the Mature design culture, enables smoother change(s) and makes everyone aligned.
- The environment where employees spend time largely dictate the quality of their professional life and the quality of their outputs.
- When understanding the purpose and connection to specific roles and functions, it is easier to enable cross-team and cross-department connections as you typically share a common mission. Less ambiguity, more transparency, and better communication are the vital signs.
- The more employees align their beliefs and attitudes with the company (and its culture), the more will work hard toward and remain with the company for the long haul.
Looking at the vital signs helps determine the designer’s and the design organization’s health. The interactions and emotions, especially regarding How we are doing emotionally, should not be overlooked when analyzing your design culture. Silence is golden but not in this case. It is a typical sign that something is not good.
How to start?
Culture is a complex one with many aspects that impact the overall state. Yet, there are a few simple techniques that can help to start. First of my favorite is to ask employees and leaders about the mission - WHAT is the company mission and HOW they understand it. Focus on the answers and how people respond during the dialogue. Do they feel confident or nervous? Do they believe in that, or is it just another sci-fi story that ends after 5 p.m.?The second is more sophisticated - an Organizational Culture Assessment based on the Competing Values Framework. There are many questionnaires and tips on the internet. A good start is the well-known OCAI.
FLOW
When it comes to DesignOps, there are typically mentioned Tools and Processes. People tend to talk about the new trends, powerful tools they want in their stack or describe a necessity of a new process that will, for example, ensure the design will be implemented as it was intended.
Let’s put it straight, Tools and Processes are here to serve us, not that we have to serve them. There can be rare cases where this is questionable, such as legally required processes. But that are minor cases.
Instead, let’s focus more on what outcome can be brought. All the tools and processes should help people get in the Flow.
Flow, also known as being in the zone, is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost for the sheer sake of doing it.
— Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, psychologist and the “Father of Flow”
In other words, being in Flow means being entirely focused, involved, energized, and enjoying certain activities. According to McKinsey and other studies, flow dramatically increases productivity. However, productivity is one of the common challenges these days, as many people complain about not having time to focus. Not always is it caused by the tools or processes. How we plan our agenda is crucial too.
Many other areas probably come into your mind when we shift our attention from Tools and Processes to Flow and Productivity.
How we utilize the time and resources (for designing)?An outcome here is to be Productive and focused. There can be many ways to achieve that — typically, we look at how to optimize, automatize, reduce complexity and enable collaboration.
One more thing. Flow is a variable and complex area with many dependencies that can be out of your influence. Introducing a new tool in your design organization can take days to months involving designers and others like procurement, legal, or IT department. Things can also get more challenging when you run a design organization in an embedded model. Aligning and joining forces with others is fundamental to making changes effective and adopted within the RND or, for instance, Marketing — not just by you.
IMPACT
Although all the previous value streams, Talent, Flow, and Culture, are closely connected, they can (and will) generate an outcome independently of each other. If they do not sync, they can accidentally create Silos.
Since 2010 the phrase “silo effect”, has become popular in the business and organizational communities, it refers to a lack of communication and common goals between departments in an organization. It is, of course opposite of system thinking in an organization …
— Silo Effect a Prominence Factor to Decrease Efficiency of Pharmaceutical Industry.
That is where the Impact stream comes into the game — oversee the other Value Streams and align to make DesignOps a strategic service for the design organization and scalable to the entire company.
How well does our strategy counterpart the company's purpose?
How is the design organization capable of implementing our strategy?
Understanding the impact and its positive and negative parts is essential to any activity. The Impact stream connects all the current and future value streams in one momentum. Impact stream addresses the following:
- Design Quality. Provide an understanding of the overall design quality by monitoring and analyzing produced outputs, the design state within the organization, the experience we deliver to our users and customers, or how changes progress.
- Design Debt. Design debt can be translated as all the great design concepts or solutions we skip or demote their full potential to reach short-term goals. That means it is not only about design outputs but also processes, frameworks, tools, etc. that influence that.
- Design Initiatives. The Impact stream is not only about data or monitoring. By overseeing the big picture, the Impact stream is ideal for aligning and starting cross-streams or department initiatives. It can be on small initiatives like implementing eNPS measurement that can also leverage the other departments or to more complex ones serving the entire company — the Design system.
The design system is a common language that connects the entire company to make mature products and scale design.
Rather than a platform or a service, I think about a Design system as a common way we talk and think about design in the entire company. It is an excellent example of an initiative that covers all of the above and provides value to a broader audience — internally and externally. The times we started building UI kits, Pattern libraries, and use case documents are gone. They are not enough in the fast-paced TECH industry. These days design systems serve as a central place for processes, standards, practices, and repositories. More departments contribute to the design system than before, and with rising tools like Figma, we integrate more, automatize and optimize than before.
If we integrate initiatives from DesignOps Value Streams and other departments, balance what to communicate internally/externally, we can gain even more. It can attract great talents, partners or get a positive perception in the community.
How we meet our purpose?The Impact stream outcome is to Align and amplify. In general, the Impact stream continually monitors, translates and aligns design quality among the company, empowering to reduce design debt and serving as an incubator for cross-company design initiatives. Not to speak, that is essential in planning, prioritizing, allocating resources, and change management.
TALENT + CULTURE + FLOW = IMPACT
In the previous story, we covered the concept of value streams in DesignOps. This story looks at the core value streams of DesignOps — Talent, Culture, Flow and Impact. These streams drive the momentum inside and outside an organization by providing capabilities to effectively execute your design strategy and further scale. This flexibility is a competitive advantage, especially in a fast-paced industry or a situation such as economic headwinds and changes in market conditions.
Thanks for the reading 👏 Do not miss the following story about how the value streams model can be scaled or how to think when measuring a DesignOps.
Zdenek (@zdenek.zenger) is a design enthusiast who shares his experience & thoughts about Design Leadership, DesignOps and Product Design. This article and the opinions are personal. It does not necessarily represent any positions, strategies, or opinions of any business subjects.
