Framing DesignOps or design leadership focus

Reflecting on where you focus your efforts as a design operator or leader

How to do it

1. Take a copy of the template or draw a diamond (a rectangle rotated through 45 degrees)
2. Mark with a dot where you focus your design team efforts but avoid the central zone
3. Potentially mark where you should shift your focus

The background

I’ve been a bit late to the DesignOps party. To be honest, I couldn’t really get to grip with some of the rationales I assumed were driving it. Things like scaling design. Making design an effective operation. Design systems. Design team structures. They just seemed to miss the point for me. And position designers as replaceable cogs in an engineered system

Despite my preconceptions, I had my mind altered by some presentations at Leading Design 2018. Also, my friend and fellow Human, Dave Malouf — Mr. DesignOps to some — does talk and write eloquently around it.

As I was preparing for running a shaping workshop for the DesignOps summit I started getting my old anxieties. I hadn’t had them for a while with this workshop because I know it works for practitioners and design leaders. But the DesignOps community is a different beast and I had a full day rather than the usual half day . There were more project managers, producers, HR people than design leaders and practitioners. And some of the biggest and apparently most mature orgs were attending my session. Including: Paypal, Google, Intuit, Facebook, and more.

So I wanted to introduce some new frameworks. I reflected on some presentations from Meredith Black and Kristin Skinner. I read some Malouf Mediums. And I quickly scooped out a set of key categories: People, Product, Process and Profit.

I wanted to put these different categories in tension and get attendees to think hard about which ones were more important.

I positioned the categories in a diamond and created an exclusion zone in the middle so no one could position a dot in the centre. That’s sitting on the fence in my opinion.

So, attendees had to place a dot of where their focus was as a design operator. I don’t think people liked being asked such a tough question but they said it made them think.

A few people added arrows to show where they wanted to shift focus.

One person illustrated the different passive vs. active focus

Or indicating the difference between their focus and the company’s

Once again, there is no right answer, but the forced positioning meant that you had to trade off what was more important against what was less important. And with any of these frameworks it’s the dialogue you have around it that matters more.

Want to find out more, follow the series

If you want to learn more about the Shaping Workshops I run, and what I have learned over the years, follow me, or read some other articles in the Medium Publication.

Keep your eyes peeled for another post tomorrow.