Defining DesignOps for your UX organization

UX teams are growing in size and our influence over the experiences of services and products is expanding. New team members and diverse disciplines change processes, culture, and mindsets. Who on the UX team is responsible with making sure the team feels supported throughout this change?

The long list of growing demands and complex environments that UX teams face is quickly becoming the focus of DesignOps.

Growing a UX team? Consider how you work now and how a larger team needs support and how it will impact existing processes.

What is DesignOps?

DesignOps is a mindset that focuses on coordinating and optimizing the way a growing UX team works to scale its value. In general, the practice looks at how a team leverages processes, methods, and craft with respect to its people, workflows, and tools. As opposed to product design where the attention is on the end-user, DesignOps focuses refining the experience of the experience team as it works to better the experience of the end-user.

Some of the challenges may include:

· Growing UX teams to include a more diverse set of skills

· Examining and changing workflows to address bottlenecks

· Facilitating the creation and communication of the team mission and vision

· Recruiting and hiring people that will help further the team’s mission

Who does DesignOps?

When I started leading UX designers in an Agile process, that is when I started thinking about Ops beyond the perspective of one person. Working closely with my PM’s and Dev leads, we constantly discussed how we could improve our process.

DesignOps focuses on the experience of the experience team

If you review articles defining DesignOps and compare them with job descriptions of Design managers and directors, Ops responsibilities fall on a lot of people in senior positions. The truth is without a point person or team, these challenges listed above rarely become the highest priority despite often becoming a constant pain point. This is where a DesignOps Manager or team can be more effective by forwarding the initiatives meant to improve communication, efficiency and impact.

Think about how people are organized in relation to their expertise, workflows, and dependent stakeholders.

Why is DesignOps important now?

In today’s crowded and competitive environment, companies have found that providing a memorable, hassle-free experience is the differentiator. Using banking as key example, Capital One found a way to remove the common staples of operating a bank that also made managing our finances a chore.

Customers no longer need to line up to talk to a teller in a stuffy branch office. They can have a casual conversation with a representative in a Capital One Café. Do your work, have coffee, and get in-person help. The products and services teams developed this idea and other experiences after talking to customers about what they needed to help them feel more confident with their money decisions. In other words, the company prioritized the users’ experience and intentionally focused on their problems first.

McKinsey and Company, a management consulting firm, published a study that quickly coined the term, “the design index.” The study tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies for a five-year period. Those companies on average outperformed the industry-benchmark for growth by 200%. Their average return to shareholders was 5% higher as well.

Arguably, this study ignited a desire for companies to invest in growing their own UX teams. Over the last ten years, the number of open positions has ballooned exponentially. The types of UX roles have also diversified. So, we now have larger UX teams with potentially varied responsibilities ranging from UX research, design strategy, product design, visual design, design systems, content strategy, and on some teams front-end development.

Bigger UX teams mean better outcomes?

Not so fast. Does the company know how to integrate the team? If you look at another study on Design Maturity by InVision App, you will see that nearly half of the participants surveyed felt that their companies are not leveraging their UX teams fully. 41% of the participants felt that most of their work focused on only the visual aspects of design, (i.e UI or user interface).

On a promising note, a small but growing number of participants (21%) felt that they have a more collaborative work environment with their non-UX counterparts. The same amount felt that they have shared ownership and joint accountability over their process and outcomes. These numbers are small, and that means there are a lot of underutilized skills.

More complex experiences

Companies are starting to understand that the experience does not stop at the software level. Experience intersects with varying levels of product and service adoption. Different company representation surfaces in the form of marketing, sales, back-end processes, support, and so on. UX teams need to adjust how their workflows and communications intersect with different internal business units to ensure a smooth experience for the end-users.

How does a dedicated DesignOps practice work?

Any a highly functioning team benefits from norms and structures that encourage the right balance of collaboration, autonomy, and creativity. A growing, multi-disciplined UX team needs focus and coordination in key areas (detailed below) to ensure clear communication, an inclusive and dynamic culture, and relevancy of its work.

Develop processes to enable workflow

Know we are working on the right things at the right time. Coordinate with how stakeholders and internal teams like Product Design, UX Research, and Design Systems need to review, pickup, and work with each other’s living files and artifacts.

· Clarity on priorities

· Optimize the UXer’s workflow

· Elevate our work

· Reduce redundancies

Attract the right people that elevate the team

Quality people who care about their team and its work are central to furthering the practice of a newly established UX practice

· Recruiting and hiring quality people

· Retaining and promoting from within

Align on an effective and efficient tool set

Remove inefficiencies such as file formats, access, and team and project organization

· Standardize tooling and systems

· Introduce new tools and onboard UXers

Nurture a vibrant team culture

Align on the values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that make a team with protecting.

· Fostering connection internally and externally

· Building trust from our work and actions

· Encouraging fun in all of our interactions

· Socialize the UX process to the company

· Promoting strong cross-disciplinary collaboration

Closing thoughts

Growing a UX team and inserting it into an evolving company requires thought and intentional action. Just adding more people does not equate to a better product or service in the market. And a team that does not prioritize its own people’s experience will not survive the constant pivots of a competitive landscape.

Change with friction is normal. However, intentionally surfacing and planning how we coordinate and organize people, is the responsibility of the UX team’s leadership. The DesignOps manager helps frame the approach with the team’s experience in mind.