A short history of Design Operations
I’m the Design Operations Lead in the Digital Experience Team at Sainsbury’s Group. Receiving a nomination for the Design Week Awards 2019 “Best In-House Design Team” and my attendance at the recent Design Operations Conference in Manchester prompted me to write a blog post about the journey the Sainsbury’s Digital Experience team has been on over the last five years. In particular, I wanted to focus on the role that Design Operations has played in embedding and amplifying the value of design in delivering and improving our customers’ digital experience. However, with Design Operations being such a diverse and broad capability, I couldn’t start without taking a look at how I got here. So, this is the first of two blog posts — first I’ve focused on my personal journey of design and creative operations and my second post will explore the exciting future for a capability that is needed more than ever as businesses must design even better to differentiate themselves in an experience-led environment.
I’ve been “doing” Design Operations for years in many guises.
From managing the production of a weekly technology trade magazine in the early 2000s at the height of the telco boom to running the design operations for the launch of the first “social mobile” for Three where we were designing the UX and building our software all in-house. From running global design operations for marketing and packaging development for the parent company of John Frieda and Molton Brown to running the design studio during a full rebrand of The Body Shop shortly after its L’Oreal takeover. The core of my role has always been the same: to deliver design at scale in businesses that don’t necessarily understand the crucial role good design plays in making their connection with customers a positive one to increase brand loyalty and ultimately sales. We all know design by its nature is subjective; what one person likes, another rebukes — and this is what makes working in design so dynamic but the process of delivering effective design so challenging. The role of design operations is to make this process as painless as possible for all involved through “operationalising” the practice of design to help deliver consistent, on-brand, high-quality experiences for customers — and to look after the people doing the work throughout.
Delivering design in this environment was final.
In the traditional design environment, the creative needed to be perfect first time and there was no opportunity to iterate. This required the production processes to be seamless and faultless. Particularly with packaging design — the financial impact of a design error on an NPD launch was significant and the accountability for making it perfect first-time landed firmly with the operations team. The process for developing a TV advert in 10 different languages was (and still is!) painstaking; the colour correction on CGI packaging; the retouching on the model’s hair and the timing of the VO — a passion for perfection is absolutely key.
My role across the years has had many iterations — production manager, producer, account manager, traffic manager, project manager, creative team lead, creative services manager, to name a few. All required a delicate combination of three key aspects — the ability to lead People and Process, and Practice — with a deep understanding of how to simplify the complexity of design to deliver great work quickly and effectively. And to do this with no ego or desire to “control”.
Embedding a respect for design thinking and the process that underpins it into the core of big businesses is a challenge.
Whether it’s cutting through that challenge to deliver a new campaign for The Body Shop requiring a roll-out of hundreds of assets for 3,000 stores in six weeks, or designing from scratch a completely unique (and beautiful) packaging structure and design for a new smartphone launch in three months, or managing the digital design team and process for the new EE launch whilst at Orange Digital. Every time we needed to deliver design to insanely tight timeframes and were under huge pressure to make it perfect. It was my team’s job to communicate the importance of the design process, look after the designers, manage stakeholders and ultimately — make it happen on time, on budget and to the quality we were all striving for.
Bring stakeholders on the journey.
Bringing your stakeholders, whether colleagues or clients, on the journey helps them to feel a part of decision-making process. Being an integral part of that journey takes it a step further which is why, every time, collaboration is the secret ingredient. It seems too obvious, but the traditional approach built on a transactional, “service-led” model between an in-house design team and the business does not work. As Creative Team Leader at one global company, we edged towards a different approach by introducing Design Strategist roles to bridge the gap between the business and design and introduce a customer-centric, evidence-based design approach into the process. No longer were we waiting for a perfectly curated brief from our marketing team only to misinterpret it and deliver something that didn’t align with their needs or expectations. We worked together to understand the business problem and customer need and defined the solution together using customer insight, weaving design thinking deeply into the heart of the project — not making it an after-thought. The Design Operations’ role was not only to manage the process and timelines but to translate requirements into a realistic and comprehensive plan that we could execute with confidence. Designers no longer needed to be “briefed”. They needed to be part of defining the solution. We needed to be on the same team!
Enter agile — the ultimate way of collaborative working.
Introducing the in-house digital design team headed up by my previous boss at Orange Digital, Charlotte Briscall, was a significant change of approach for Sainsbury’s and one that was met with many challenges I had faced before. Learning from previous experience, the approach was not to set ourselves up as an internal “agency”, but to partner and collaborate with the teams required to deliver the digital transformation that Sainsbury’s needed. But this was no mean feat. Agile teams were mobilised and poised to deliver and we needed to champion user-centred design and embed it into the ways of working — and fast. The scale of digital transformational opportunities at Sainsbury’s were vast and we needed to be strategic in our approach but also react tactically to what was already happening so design didn’t get left behind. The immediate priority at the time was to 1) establish and build relationships and identify the demand — and where possible integrate design into the process; 2) recruit the design capability we needed and set-up our designers with the tools and processes to deliver and thrive in a challenging environment; and 3) to introduce an MVP Design System that could introduce the concept of internal efficiencies and consistency of digital for Sainsbury’s.
Skip forward four years, and we are a thriving team of 35+ designers and researchers embedded in cross-functional teams delivering design at scale across customer, colleague and supplier teams throughout the business. Our designers are supported by a central hub consisting of Design Leadership, Design Systems and a Design Operations team, which you can read more about in my second post: “The future of Design Operations”.
Thank you for reading!
