Designing Design (Teams) for Growth
The weight of a quickly growing design team does not need to be burdensome. Why design operations will help you grow your design practice, processes, and team at scale.
Design is growing. Not only that, but the general public’s understanding of the field and appreciation for its value is making the case for its importance in the private and public sectors. All that to say, design teams are growing too.
Perhaps your team is approaching a phase in its maturity where you are either long overdue for, or just beginning to consider new strategies for the growth you’re experiencing. Growing your team and its impact is what you’ve long envisioned. But just when your vision is manifesting itself, all that progress is starting to seem like a double-edged sword on a precarious backswing.
Among the many strategies your organization attempts to vet, have you considered introducing and adopting Design Operations?
The orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft to impact design’s value at scale.
Enter DesignOps
Design Operations, a new-ish mindset, also known as DesignOps, is the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft to impact design’s value at scale. Its focus is on the well-being of people on a team, the quality of their practice, and the success of product delivery. DesignOps is intended to enable designers and design teams to produce quality and innovative work together.
Imagine you are part of a successful design team that is consistently making an impact and delivering great work. You’re hitting your objectives and key results (OKRs) that align with your company’s overall goals and improving your customer experience.
Now, take a closer look at the individuals who make up that team. You might see designers, researchers, writers, strategists, and even folks with specialized skills and talents — all leaders in their field and communities of practice. They are stellar contributors with great experience from various backgrounds, who have technical prowess across toolsets, strategies, and methods for the great work they do. The folks get along with each other and often they come together to share ideas and help each other solve problems.
However, there’s a palpable sense of exhaustion and imbalance that tends to burden you and your colleagues. Do any of the following experiences sound familiar?
“We admired your perspective on how we could pull together designers on the team to share ideas and build a sense of community. How would you like to help put together an agenda for some new rituals to introduce new designers to the organization?”
“Your experience and expertise in this platform have been integral to the success of your team’s work. Can you prepare an ongoing deep dive of your process for next week?”
“Do you know where I can find the research from that opportunity you discovered? I know other designers have worked on something like it in the past, but they have moved teams a couple of times since then. Who knows where to find all it now?”
“Your OKRs sound just like mine. I didn’t know your team was working on that too.”
So, the team is successful but spread thin.
Each of your designers has unique gifts and expertise, but they have their own core teams and work to focus on and apply that expertise.
The group has made incredible discoveries and uncovered profound opportunities, but the data and insights seem to live in the ether.
Note, there’s nothing wrong with this team, yet they’re often burned out, not in the same place mentally or physically, and they’re out of the loop on what their partners are achieving. These are not uncommon conditions for growing and distributed teams.
Of course, this [product] design team we’re describing can carry on — even if nothing changes. But how would they feel? How can they become more unified? And how much more successful would they be at this rate? How attractive will your team’s culture be to new talent?
The more appropriate question is, “How may we help them?”
“In every domain of industry, new problems have been posed, tools capable of solving them have been created. If we set this fact against the past, there is revolution.
In building, the factory production of standardized parts has begun; on the basis of new economic needs, part elements and ensemble elements have been created; conclusive realizations have been achieved in parts and in ensembles. If we set ourselves against the past, there is revolution in the methods and the magnitude of enterprises.” (Le Corbusier: Toward an Architecture, Architecture or Revolution p.292)
Though we’re not exactly on the course of turning the design field on its head, we are eager to solve problems. Ahead of his time as an architect and product designer himself, Le Corbusier makes a good point that there are methods that can be adopted to influence business outcomes by comparing to the past and leveraging successful frameworks.
The burgeoning of design thinking and ideals like, “there is no single solution for any given problem,” has made us obsessed with one methodology after another. Our hope is that the next radical approach will solve all our problems. Sure, Lean Coffee was great for your former design team, but it’s too rigid for others. What works for one group doesn’t seem to deliver the desired outcomes of alignment and knowledge sharing for another. We tend to rely on the success of one team member’s approach, but without the broader context, we tend to overlook how we can make it work as a group.
Let’s agree that incremental progress is progress. But if your team doesn’t operate with a unified mindset as it grows, chaos will ensue. Okay, maybe not complete chaos. But your teams will experience burnout, lack synchrony, and will risk shooting in the dark.
DesignOps offers a more flexible path for adoption and maturity within a design organization. Again, it is a mindset that focuses on three fundamental areas that ensure success, or at least it presents a path toward it.
These areas of focus are:
- How people collaborate, get work done, and continue to grow as designers
- How to show the impact of design as the team scales
- How to foster a culture of collaboration and innovation
You should recognize that, if done well, DesignOps can and will impact all areas of your organization that are associated with your product. Namely, the teams are made up of designers, researchers, developers, product managers, and delivery managers. The benefit of adopting consistent toolsets and frameworks will promote creating a shared language and empower them all to be innovative and create better work. DesignOps can enable leadership to measure how the work impacts the bottom line and influences the company’s efficiency. And because you’ll be solving all these problems, your customers will have better products and experiences.
Some aspects of DesignOps that are attractive and seem beneficial, but they may not warrant a complete overhaul or costly adjustments…
Adopting DesignOps does not need to be as prescriptive or rigorous as other end-to-end approaches to collaborative outputs. The point of this approach is more about improving outcomes and learning, thereby, making up for penalizing practices, burnout, costly distractions, and drift from product strategy. Certainly, we can go on, but we’re still learning ourselves.
There will be trade-offs though. And that begs the question, “who is responsible for all this, anyway?” Good question! Design Operations is known to either be performed as “a role or a mindset”. The latter implies putting the onus on multiple team members, likely designers themselves. There are great benefits and opportunity costs to either. We can refer to the delegated contributions of multiple team members as accountabilities. Broadly, the role of a devoted DesignOps person or manager has authority when dealing with stakeholders and advocating for the team. Their oversight can allow them to be more holistic when leading the team through adoption.
Do your due diligence when considering what you need for your specific team. There may be some aspects of DesignOps that are attractive and seem beneficial, but they may not warrant a complete overhaul or costly adjustments to your organization. There are plenty of resources and points of view on DesignOps that will help inform your decisions. CarMax is investing in DesignOps as we scale our team and our capabilities.
Soon, following this entry, we will hear from Courtney Allison Brown, CarMax’s Head of Design Operations. She will share her view regarding the path from the adoption of Design Operations to its implementation.
