Building Design Operations @ Hyperspeed
When I joined DoorDash in January of 2021 as the first Design Operations hire, we were a Design team of 30 Product Designers, Content Strategists, Researchers and Design Infrastructure Technologists.
Reflecting back on why the Design Operations function needed to be introduced, it was clear we had reached a “tipping point” where developing the team’s operational backbone could no longer be a distributed effort amongst our ICs and design leads. It’s a natural progression for a growing team — a small task taken on by one person evolves into a bigger effort across the team, ownership of the area becomes unclear and the team’s understanding of how we work becomes muddled.
But while building at hyperspeed, it is even more critical to acknowledge that these gaps in foundational work will continue to expand at an exponential rate, relative to the team’s growth. So by bringing in a centralized Operations support arm, teams can have a point person for developing processes, aligning cross functional partners, and standardizing resources that scale sustainably.
And in the year and a half since joining, our Design team has quadrupled in size from 30 to 120. One could think of this type of growth as not only “building the plane while flying it,” but converting the plane to a Boeing 737 at the same time. In a relatively short period of time, we had brought in a ton of people and everyone managed to scrape together enough information to build their respective parts, but at our pace of growth, it was becoming increasingly difficult to understand what had already been done, by who, and how others could replicate or build on top of what already existed, hindering our ability to work in an efficient way.
My goal throughout this time was to keep pace with the growing organization by both formalizing the foundations of how we work after the fact and proactively solving for scalability issues before they arose. By adding structure and ownership to these areas, our Design Team was empowered to focus more exclusively on producing their best work.
In this article, I’d like to share three tenets that helped me navigate this period and my hope is that it will showcase the value of prioritizing your operations efforts, regardless of what stage of growth your team is in.
Create a ‘North Star’ vision to follow
Similar to how our team develops a Product vision by evaluating the needs of our customers, Design Operations practitioners look for long term solutions that will help our teams sustain themselves at scale. We assess the current climate and ruthlessly prioritize what needs to get done now, what can wait, and what we have to keep an eye on to ensure we’re not creating more operational debt.
By establishing a goal for how we’d ideally like the Design Organization to function, we can move forward by scoping projects that move us towards our north star. And it is important to note that although the impact of a lot of this vision work won’t be immediately apparent, the downstream benefits to a centralized approach will have a multiplier effect across the entire organization.
For instance, improvements to our onboarding process won’t be effectively measurable until at least 3–6 months after a substantial cohort of new hires have been run through it. But once those changes have been made, we can assess progress against correlational measures that influence an Employee’s Lifetime Value (ELTV), effectively decreasing ramp time and increasing productivity for every new employee who will benefit from these process improvements moving forward.
Tackling this as a one person Design Ops team meant that trade offs had to be made to drive improvements across all the areas that would impact our team members’ ELTV (work I endearingly nicknamed “Scrappy V1s”.) From templatizing our team’s onboarding document, to standing up an illustration request process, to standardizing our review format across teams — this work created the foundations that could be iterated upon in line with our North Star vision.
Allow space for quick wins
When you work somewhere that moves as fast as DoorDash, it’s inevitable that Design Operations will have to field requests that veer off course from the north star vision or change priorities entirely. The goal is always to help unblock the team, but to also dance a fine line of not allowing these to distract from the top level priorities or derail efforts entirely. In these instances, it’s important to ask two key questions:
How would the request impact our long term vision?
Sometimes these requests align with the long term vision, in which case — congratulations! You’ve hit the Design Ops jackpot. I love when team members come forward with solutions they’ve developed for themselves that make sense for Design Operations to roll out to the entire team.
However, there are some instances where requests don’t have enough significant impact to prioritize, could potentially be a wasted effort, or worst of all, could be damaging to the long term vision for the team. Design Operations has a unique vantage point in that it sees how the entire team functions, so our role in this scenario is to recognize the validity of each individual challenge and help contextualize or reframe the ask, but, if it is not aligned with the North Star vision, deprioritize the request for a later time, consult the team member on how they could lead the initiative themselves, or advise against making changes entirely.
How much effort would be required to implement?
Although we want to be protective of our scope, we can always find 5–10 minutes in our day to unblock something which could have a huge impact. On the Action Priority Matrix, these are considered “Quick Wins” which should compliment “Major Projects” and collectively be the vast majority of our work. Any request that requires a high amount of effort should be properly scoped as its own project and prioritized if deemed urgent, with leadership alignment on the projects that would need to be deprioritized as a result.
Make the work as urgent as the rest of the team
At DoorDash, our Design Team is passionately customer-obsessed and exerts a huge amount of effort to move quickly to solve complex user problems. So when pitching the value of doubling back on the fundamentals in an environment that has no time to spare, it can feel daunting to advocate for the project that won’t have impact right now. But Operations is a scaling game with exponential consequences, so what starts as a small, insignificant issue today will become a massive headache in a few months or years. It is imperative that Design Operations moves with that same sense of urgency because we, too, have no time to spare in solving these problems.
A valuable piece of advice I received early on in my program management career was to “Put a stake in the ground and move towards it.” Simply put, make decisions quickly and execute against them. Effective program managers quickly triangulate core issues, set deadlines (even if arbitrary), and rally teams towards producing a solution. Even if that solution isn’t the right one, we’ll have a data point to work from and be able to pivot to the next iteration.
Final Thoughts
Having witnessed this incredible growth in such a short period of time, it’s amazing to see how seemingly small efforts to streamline the operations of the team early on have evolved into full blown programs and processes relied on by not only our Design team, but our extended partner teams as well. By bringing clarity to an overarching operational vision, adapting as things arise, and moving with a sense of urgency, we were able to keep pace with DoorDash’s hyper growth and proactively solve for problems that may have arisen because of it.
It’s also important to note that the most impactful Design Operations teams have strong advocates, often at the leadership level, who are imperative allies for aligning their teams on operational goals. To that end, I’d like to thank Helena Seo, Brian Hale, and every Design Lead on our team for supporting the work of our Design Operations team. And a very special shoutout to Joe, Randi and Nayana who have joined the effort as my amazing Design & Research Ops counterparts and are working tirelessly to make our team operations better every day!
We are always learning and growing in the field — if you are a Design Operations practitioner, we would love to hear your best practices! Drop a comment below or reach out if you are interested in connecting about how to grow or establish your Design Operations team.
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