The future of Design Operations
I’m the Design Operations Lead in the Digital Experience team at Sainsbury’s. This is my second blog post on the discipline of Design Operations. If you haven’t read my first post – A short history of Design Operations – you might want to read that first.
Design Operations has been a hot topic over the last few years, with increasing recognition of its integral role in embedding the practice of user experience design into big business. A quick google of “Design Operations” will bring up reams of podcasts, blog posts, handbooks and articles from experts in the industry who understand from experience how important it is to operationalise and optimise the practice of design when you need to deliver digital solutions at scale. InVision has even collaborated with heavyweights in the industry to create a Handbook on Design Operations, summarising the discipline as:
…the key to scaling digital product design teams with more efficiency. As companies mature and invest in design, they need to operationalise workflow, hiring, alignment between teams, and more, so designers can focus on design work while someone else takes care of the rest…. creating these centralised services and systems helps grow integrated, high-functioning teams at the best companies in the world — DesignOps Handbook
Businesses are investing in DesignOps.
As someone who has been practising the art of operationalising design for 15+ years in various forms, this is music to my ears. Design cannot be delivered effectively at scale without organisation and operations and the growing need for this mindset in the digital workplace is demonstrated by companies like AirBnB, Spotify, Lloyds Banking Group, Skyscanner and IDEO all investing in their Design and DesignOps teams. And the type of people who thrive in design operations roles? Those with a deep knowledge and empathy of design, a love of problem solving and getting the best out of others. And of course some of the best project managers out there who are able to flex between traditional and agile approaches depending on the situation. They will be passionate about driving customer-centric design and always looking for ways to improve. They will own an impressive suite of soft skills: judgement, negotiation, diplomacy, tenacity and the general mental strength to persevere to ensure the team are set-up for success.
I recently attended the first UK-based Design Operations Conference in Manchester. The agenda was jam-packed with representatives from the likes of IBM, AirBnB, Co-Op, Lloyds Banking Group, Google, FutureGov, BT and Centrica to name a few, as well as multiple agencies. All spoke about the challenges and achievements of delivering design at scale in or for big brands. Many had Design Operations teams or individuals that worked alongside Designers and Design Leads to drive their successes, but what sat at the heart of all the stories was how they were able to successfully operationalise the practice of user experience design with great results for the team and the business. No one company will require the same set-up; you have to define and create what’s best for your business and customer needs. The Design Operations function may be one person or a team depending on the scale of the business. Their remit may be broad or focused depending on the strategic task at hand. It may include some or all of the responsibilities outlined in the image above — but crucially the role will be a key intermediary between design and wider business operations, such as finance, HR, recruitment, procurement and tech teams. And it should go without saying that it will be a respected peer of design and product teams alike.
Lloyd’s Banking Group (LBG) is a great example of a company committed to investing in design and DesignOps. They follow a federated model with squads of designers aligned to business areas and a centre of design excellence to set standards, conduct research, support, train, and drive adoption of the capability through guilds. And they have a growing design and research operations team to support the design function’s high performance. It’s pretty inspiring stuff. Spotify is another one, recently hiring a Global Head of Design Operations, with their job ad looking for “a symphony conductor — someone highly creative and passionate, detail oriented, acutely aware of movements within their orchestra, and an integral part in the creation of something magical”.
The centralised partnership model.
In my first post, I introduced my initial priorities when introducing Design Operations at Sainsbury’s being to establish relationships and identify demand, build our design capabilities, and to introduce the early foundations of a design system help us design better and faster. We are now a team of 35+ designers and researchers embedded in cross-functional product teams. Ensuring our designers could work seamlessly alongside our multi-disciplined technology teams was core to embedding evidence-based, customer-centric design into the heart of Sainsbury’s’ digital product development. The centralised partnership or federated model, much like LBG, enables designers to work in scrum on priority products whilst our core team of leadership, design systems and design operations act as a “centre of excellence” for the designers to call home and to help maintain a sense of design community and culture. As product teams have their own priorities and backlogs, DesignOps has been able to expand from day-to-day resourcing and project management to more strategic and continuous improvement opportunities associated with the larger operational aspects of delivering design at scale. Whilst Design Operations will always be the first port of call for new projects and the day-to-day support of the team, finding new ways to help the team deliver against its strategic goals is where it gets really exciting.
Democratising research with agile tools.
Over the last year, we have spent time introducing a more agile approach to our evidence-based design practice by arming our designers with more ways to gather customer insight and design validation at pace. We had learned that our research resources needed to be as agile as the teams who use them and therefore we extended access and training for our design team to our remote user testing tool of choice, UserZoom. Democratising research was a topic at the recent Better UX Conference where we heard stories from the likes of MoneySupermarket, AutoTrader and Booking.com who have also extended UserZoom access and training to their designers with great results. This is certainly a topic worthy of a separate blog post, but few may contest the ongoing challenge to integrate research seamlessly into the lean UX approach, and introducing wider access to UserZoom introduced the capability for our designers to gather insights, validate concepts and test designs with customers with relative ease. As an added bonus, it also encouraged a renewed interest in research practices from our wider product teams and as a result, user research and usability testing is firmly back on the agile agenda and Design Operations are continuing to champion this by ensuring our suite of tools and suppliers is set-up to support this. On top of the specific training for remote testing, we now are growing our research operations capability, with a move from researchers not only conducting research but also acting as operational consultants for designers, to support them to make the right methodology decisions and follow best-practice in terms of approach and analysis.
The future for Design Operations.
With so much opportunity for continuous improvement, it’s paramount to stay focused on the areas that will deliver longer-term value. And to constantly listen to the team you are supporting. Perhaps the future of design isn’t federated or centralised. Perhaps the natural evolution of design is that it becomes part of the essence of the organisation it’s designing for. Which is why many designers are naturally evolving to be facilitators of design — further embedding design thinking into the organisation by encouraging others to think creatively themselves. Design Operations needs to facilitate the maturation of its design organisation whilst continuing to conduct the “orchestra” day-to-day. Access to tools should be available to those outside the design team; design capability training opportunities should be expanded across the organisation, the design playbook or toolkit should be external-facing so new starters can learn about their new team and templates before they join, the Design System should be accessible and adaptable to all and research and accessibility principles should be embedded into the core of corporate strategy. And finally, tying everything together requires a strong and welcoming Community of Practice to help designers feel connected and that they can develop as well as deliver (another topic worth of its own blog post!).
With digital ecosystems growing in complexity and the overwhelming opportunity to define and refine how these ecosystems are experienced by customers and colleagues alike, the need to design better is greater than ever. The impact design teams can have is amplified when there is a Design Operations team to take on the business, people and organisational elements of the capability — leaving designers to focus on their craft and allowing DesignOps to do the rest.
Thank you for reading.
