DesignOps at Cisco Umbrella: Delivery

In my article Six months as a DesignOps manager, I discuss how I think of DesignOps having three main pillars: process and tools, team, and delivery. This post is about the third pillar.

An all-star team and a great process do not matter if designers are unable to deliver great experiences. Whether is design or research, UX professionals are responsible for performing activities and producing artifacts that enable the organization to deliver value to customers and users.

These are what I consider delivery traits of a high-performing design team:

Designers produce the right artifacts at the right time

There is a myriad of artifacts that designers can produce. This doesn’t mean that they should use them all, all the time. Artifacts (or deliverables) are meant to record work that has happened and to communicate concepts and ideas. A good designer knows which deliverables to produce at what time depending on the type of work and the audience. This includes choosing the right level of fidelity for mockups and prototypes.

Designers are not blocking engineering

This gets into the whole “agile and UX” conversation which is a much broader topic I’m not going to get into. All I can say is, I’ve worked in both agile and waterfall organizations, and there is always the possibility of engineering getting blocked by design — whether it’s waiting for specs, UI reviews, test results, etc. As a manager, I consider a designer’s ability to keep the engineering team moving as a key performance indicator.

In general…

Engineers can’t deliver great experiences without design, and designers can’t deliver great experiences without engineering.

Designers stay involved through project delivery and post-delivery

Once the UI has been implemented and it looks and works well, designers are typically tempted to move on to the next big thing. A good designer, however, knows that the stage of a project that goes from engineering implementation to actual delivery of a product or feature is critical because it’s an opportunity to measure success and continue to iterate.

Finally, a note on design systems

Design systems are a delivery catalyzer. They enable designers to produce better artifacts faster and reduce friction during the designer-developer hand-off. Building a design system and a well-oiled process around it is a whole sub-domain of DesignOps.