Design Systems and Design Operations for small design teams

Are you a design leader of a small or medium-sized design team?

Do you want to set your team up for success and increase your chances of delivering more value to your company?

This post focuses on things to consider when you are structuring your team. And the importance of considering the business value of every role in your team.

Scaling technical teams

Many companies are currently making redundancies or exploring ways to reduce the costs of their tech teams.

Many of these companies have scaled their teams rapidly over the last few years. Trying to meet the demands of increased investment in digital transformation programs. The COVID epidemic also heightened this rush to ensure that companies could meet their customers' digital needs.

Design teams are, and have been, a critical component in this hiring surge across the tech industry. Design leaders have secured more and more budgets to scale their teams.

Business and Customer Value

Extra demand has been put on design leaders to grow their teams to support business ambition and growth.

Have design leaders spent enough time considering how every new role they secured would provide business value?

When one of your designers decides to leave your team, how many times do you stop and consider the value that role was delivering to the company?

Instead of rushing to get the role advertised on LinkedIn and hoping to backfill the position quickly, design leaders have a duty. A duty to their companies to invest their time reviewing the business and customer benefit that role was delivering.

This can lead to uncovering and identifying different unmet needs of your team and company.

For example, how much time was the designer spending doing actual “design work” that resulted in an improved experience and quality of the product or service they worked on?

Were they bogged down by poor internal processes or working in an environment with low design maturity?

Did they spend more time justifying the need to carry out user research before needing to deliver solutions to development teams?

Maybe, just maybe.. hiring a replacement or bringing in a new role is not the smartest move.

Maybe there is a need to fix something first.

Something that, once fixed, would improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your existing design team. Meaning this role may not even be needed.

Or, something that would ensure that the incoming replacement would have an environment that enabled them to work smarter.

An environment to enable them to deliver increased business and customer value than the previous role was able to.

Role of design leader

I am the VP of a global design team at Alcumus. I am responsible for setting the design and user experience strategy across the product portfolio and defining the overarching product vision alongside Product Leadership.

Our team is responsible for establishing a user-centred culture across the organisation. It is my responsibility to ensure every member of the team is working in an environment for them to be successful. And they are delivering real business value.

Delivering impact

As a small design team, we need to ensure that the team is set up and structured to enable every role in the team to deliver impactful results. Both for the company today and in the future.

All design leaders strive to find that balance between delivering value today and investing in capability initiatives that will set the foundations for future successes.

For small design teams looking to develop and grow within their companies, ensuring you have that balance right is critical. Not enough focus on today will limit your ability to influence your company to invest further down the line. Especially if you have been unable to show how user-centred design can achieve improved business success.

Whereas only focusing on today, will, in most cases, deliver inconsistent results. And mean you are not setting your team and future teams up for success.

At Alcumus, we have been structuring our design team and strategy to enable us to provide impact today and tomorrow for our company.

Based on our experience, these are two recommendations for design leaders looking to do the same.

1. Focus on Design Operations

There have been lots of articles written about the optimum design team size to introduce a dedicated DesignOps role into the team. I have noticed many of these articles tend to speak more about the team size as a trigger rather than focusing on the maturity level or wider business context.

I have previously led the Design Operations teams at BT Group and Centrica, which both had large design teams.

I understand the need to introduce DesignOps roles for large design teams.

But, small design teams also need to work efficiently.

Perhaps more so than large teams. As business value is more in the spotlight.

Designers need to have the right environment to focus on their craft. DesignOps roles are a critical component to deliver impact today and tomorrow.

Let’s say a small design team has scaled rapidly to 20–30 roles. The design leader identifies that they need to bring in a dedicated DesignOps role to ensure the team is working efficiently.

Some problems may include:

• Inconsistencies in design execution
• Designers are not integrated well within their product teams and with engineering partners
• Designers spending more time on operational activities

Yes, DesignOps roles and initiatives can fix these issues. But they will have a lot of process and cultural ways of working debt to wade through first. It will take time before seeing the impact of their work really driving improvements to key metrics.

My recommendation is to consider a dedicated DesignOps role earlier.

Create the right environment today for your designers to do their best work.

Especially in small design teams, where you need all your designers’ time dedicated to delivering better digital experiences for your customers.

So the next time you have to backfill for a designer that has just left your company or you secure some budget for another designer to join your team, take a moment to think if the conditions are right for that person to be successful and if not, understand why not.

I believe, in most cases, it will be because the current environment needs to be improved.

These are some key focus areas that our DesignOps Lead at Alcumus is currently focused on. They work in service to our Product Designers to enable them to deliver the best work they can:

• Defining new processes to improve how designers work within our multi-discipline product squads
• Delivering new toolsets to enable designers to conduct research activities
• Creating a customer research participant pool so our designers can get quick and easy access to their end-users
• Developing our experience principles and criteria. To create an aligned understanding of what good design looks like.

2 . Invest in a Design Systems team

Design Systems greatly benefit companies looking to deliver more consistent and accessible digital experiences to their customers.

They can speed up the design and development process. This allows companies to increase their cadence of delivery. And get new products and features into their customers' hands faster.

But, the real value comes in providing designers with more time to conduct user research. More time to learn about their users’ needs, pain points and opportunity areas.

And, more time spent ideating and testing different solutions and concepts.

For a small design team, the additional time to focus on these upstream activities is invaluable.

Product Designers will struggle to help your company become more innovative and solve complex customer problems if they spend most of their time working in design tools such as Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD to document designs for development handovers or building out different states and interactions for components.

“Having the design system ready to use makes creating designs much simpler. Instead of spending time creating a component — for example, a button or form field — and the various states for it, I can just pull it in from the design system, knowing that it’ll work in my designs and prototypes. This means I can get designs in front of customers and internal stakeholders quicker, and gives me more time to focus on problem-solving and carrying out user research.”

Mike Smith, Product Designer @ Alcumus

You might be a design leader needing to deliver real business value in order to influence your company to invest in scaling your design team. Have a look at your current team structure and roles. And, if you don’t currently have any of your team dedicated to design system work, now might be the time to start.

At Alcumus, we have dedicated a Product Designer to focus on building our Design System. They work alongside a small team of dedicated Design System Engineers.

This Product Designer is key to enabling our other Product Designers who are focused on our customer-facing products to deliver better experiences today.

The output of their work is also setting the company up for success tomorrow.

Final thoughts

Hang Le, Director of Product Design @ Dropbox, wrote a great article in 2021 about the role of a design leader. (She also includes many great resources for design leaders looking to improve their approach to leadership.)

“Design leaders build strong teams.”

Hang Le, Director of Product Design @ Dropbox

Hang Le talks about how a core role of a design leader is to build a strong team.

A strong team is a team that is delivering business value today and tomorrow for their company.

Is every role in your team currently delivering value, and are they set up for success?

If the answer is no, consider what you can do to change that today.

We have a lot of work to do at Alcumus to enable this success for our team. But, focusing on how to get the most business value from each role will help us get set up for success today and tomorrow.