DesignOps for Design Agencies
How to implement the large-scale organization model to your agency for maximum output and fast scalability.
“Plan”, they say.
The truth is no matter how much we plan, the plan always changes! It happens at all levels — individual, team, and organizational. As design leaders and design practitioners,
- How do we coordinate ourselves to stay right on track?
- How do we make sure design output is achievable, practical, and accountable?
These were Kristin Skinner’s opening lines at DesignOps Summit 2017 and we kinda thought hard about it.
Let’s dig deeper.
Where is the big challenge?
The problem faced by designers —
Designers are a creative bunch of people who often get lost when swamped with work other than design. When designers have to shift focus multiple times in a day towards administrative tasks like managing workflows and libraries, coordinating with the team, collaborating with the developer, or just jogging their memories to fill timesheets — they get agitated.
If designers are not designing, they are going to be super unhappy…
If the designer’s mind isn’t free enough to focus on problem-solving, it impacts the whole organization in terms of creative outcomes, team communication, and collaboration.
Amidst the mountain of cross-functional work, process particulars, and a calendar bursting with meetings, the designers are too busy to focus on design. But the clock is ticking and the deliverables need to be concluded according to the timeline; the next phase of the project must begin.
Compared to other corporate functions like engineering and marketing, designers have never worked with process-driven, effective, and agile teams so they usually don’t know how to realize their potential while being a team player.
If this goes on how can designers work happily and reach most of their potential?
The problem faced by design agencies —
The burnout of designers impacts the overall productivity of a design team or design agencies — what could have been achieved in a month doesn’t get achieved in a long time or at all. The focus is shifted from essential collaboration to trivial matters and mundane tasks.
Design agencies often face difficulties in
- Scaling the design team and process
- Setting hierarchy and structure in the organization
- Communication and collaboration among inter departments
Small design teams
When the design team is small, say just 5 members, its organizational model is straightforward — it’s a design team. The team focuses on a couple of key projects and doesn’t have to worry about size or structure. It’s horizontal and free-flowing.
Growing design teams
Once the team grows, if nothing is done about the structure, everyone will report to the boss. An undifferentiated mass of designers will try to work together. This isn’t sustainable. At this point, the design team must evolve in a design organization with explicit consideration around structure, projects, and collaboration.
To get the most out of the design team, talent and skill aren’t enough.
Sensitive management, visionary leadership, and smooth operations are crucial.
The solution
Designers used to think that to deliver great user experiences, they just need to get the design right. True but incomplete. Later, the designers figured that they need to get the strategy right. Now, design has evolved and penetrated across all levels so they realized they need to get the organization right.
It’s the unseen things about the organization that ultimately affect the quality of work produced. We need to design and redesign the organization to orchestrate processes and tools, develop a design team culture and amplify design’s value and impact at scale.
Sounds fantastic! But how do we reach this level of administration that prioritizes speed, efficiency, and automation that too in the design domain with a bunch of creative heads?
*Enter DesignOps*
What is DesignOps and how does it fit the bill?
DesignOps is a collaborative approach to design that emphasizes efficiency without negotiating on the designer’s abilities to focus on the craft. Design Operations is tasked with creating efficient workflows, optimizing the design team’s internal collaborations, and creating functional growth that scales for the long term.
Even today, designers wear many hats. They do the UX research, write user flows, create wireframes, and even do frontend coding. This approach might still work for small teams, but it is unproductive at scale. This is where DesignOps comes in.
It helps orchestrate teamwork and build clear structures and roles that work in the favour of both the designer and the organization to achieve the highest potential and productivity, respectively.
DesignOps is a mindset
DesignOps is a collective term that addresses challenges about people, processes, and projects in the organization to achieve maximum ROI.
- People: how we work together
Growing, building, and evolving design teams by hiring people with the right skills and common purpose - Process: how we get the work done
Creating efficient design processes and systems, reduce operational inefficiencies like miscommunication or organizational silos - Projects: how our work creates impact
Build lasting cooperation between interdepartmental to improve the quality and impact of design outputs, measure and improve design output at regular intervals
We can’t apply the “one size fits all” motto for DesignOps.
How big organizations implement DesignOps
Big organizations with design departments can hire DesignOps folks to confront complexity with structure and flexibility. They might need to run larger programs focused on employee onboarding, training, and development and their job role can be to support all functions of the design teams and make sure they run efficiently.
But what about small and mid-level design agencies with tight budgets and timelines?
How small organizations should implement DesignOps
Start small but stay consistent
Start by taking one project at a time and figuring out the right organizational workflow. If you can’t hire a DesignOps specialist, take one managerial champion who corresponds to its duties and recognizes the need for design facilitation.
Implementing DesignOps in a design agency
According to the research conducted by NN Group, the DesignOps practices should be defined based on the organization’s biggest gaps or pain points in the 3 main areas people, process, and projects. Here’s the reference to the DesignOps landscape to gain perspective about what is included in all three aspects.
Steps to implement DesignOps in design agencies
1. Clarify the vision
Vision is not something that you achieve on the way, it’s something that defies your direction. Have crystal clear clarity about your vision. Establish why you are doing it, know what you are going to do with regards to it, how you are going to do it, and who will derive value from it.
Talk to everyone in the organization about it and make your vision a shared purpose, a common dream.
2. Take notes
Talk to the people in your organization to understand how they work — what made them deliver the best or what happened when they didn’t deliver up to the mark.
Document conversations and meetings to capture the best practices and prioritize the takeaways. Set up processes based on those takeaways.
3. Mature the design practice
Set up a pragmatic, well-defined, and well-executed process in the organization to craft great experiences for users. It’s not necessary to follow all the steps religiously, a permutation and combination of some steps can deliver equally amazing results.
Make sure that the design process allows designers to iterate and improve their designs.
4. Focus on building and nurturing relationships
If there’s no relationship, there’s no understanding and there’s no trust. Get to know them as people, seek to understand who they are outside of work. Deepen the bonds between team members through out-of-office activities, lunches, and dinners.
Create an open environment that allows designers to put across their ideas and gives them the space to implement and learn from them.
5. Treat team members as people, not resources
This quality is most evident in how people are managed and how their professional growth is supported. Considering the difficulty of finding, hiring, and retaining talent in the heated job market it makes more sense to invest time in thoughtful management that pays dividends.
- Reputation
Quality of work improves when team members are more engaged deeply, share a common purpose, and steer the company’s reputation through good work - Retention
Reduce churn, lower recruiting costs, and the overhead of onboarding - Recruiting
Satisfied and happy team members become the biggest advocates of the company saving additional recruiting expenses
6. Give value to the craft i.e. UX/UI design
Any design organization has a responsibility to grow its people. Given that design are a craft of practice, and not an assembly line process, the primary means for such are widening and deepening design skills.
The growth should also take into account soft skills and leadership skills to get the most out of designers.
7. Set clear expectations, not the path to achieving them
Don’t measure the designer’s work in terms of the amount of output and quantity, consider quality. Clarify their job roles and responsibilities to manage expectations person by person. Set realistic expectations around improving their craft and learning processes when they are junior and shift expectations to delivery, impact, and organization once they grow as seniors.
- Support, don’t manage
Avoid telling people how to do their work. Instead, encourage autonomy and help them develop their plan to achieve the set expectations. - Help remove the obstacles
When team members find themselves blocked and unable to make progress, figure out ways to regain traction. Often the problem isn’t the design but how people communicate. Be empathetic and coach the team to be the same to frame productive discussions. - Provide frequent feedback
Don’t wait until the performance review cycle to give feedback. Offer feedback frequently whether positive or negative. Most importantly don’t offer feedback in the lines of “this doesn’t look good” or “this doesn’t seem right” or “you can do better”. Instead, make it a process to offer constructive, creative feedback about what’s working, what’s not working with a valid reason and explanation from the purview of a superior or manager. - Go to the mat when necessary
Stand down or fight for the team when the team members feel unfairly treated or inappropriately challenged. It’s easy for managers to shrug and stay out of it but this will confirm to the team members that their best interests are not taken at heart.
8. Build a design culture
It’s one thing to have a vision for the company culture. It’s another thing to deliver on it every day. Take note, that design’s inability to make an impact is often the result of unintentional and polluted team culture. Design culture isn’t about free lunches and foosball in the office, it is about creating employment opportunities for people that are fulfilling as a career.
Here’s a simple framework to understand the components of design culture
There’s no one best design culture but there are set standards that make strong design teams.
- Create a positive and uplifting work environment that enables employees to deliver better.
- Collaboration is the key to success: designers must support and pitch in for one another.
- Respect the maker time of designers and allow them to work without distraction.
- Give and take critique with grace and respect.
- Encourage broad engagement and inclusivity at all levels
- Establish, define and uphold a certain level of quality of work, no less
It’s about the work and not the ego — Designers mustn’t get wrapped up in their ideas and allow iterations to freeflow while a strong design culture must recognize the personal investment of design in creating an output
9. Build interdisciplinary and inter-department collaboration
Cross-functional teams have become ubiquitous because companies must accelerate the speed to market. Design must collaborate with other disciplines and teams to maintain its own identity and practice. Have clear leadership and work with development teams as a peer and not as a subordinate.
For design agencies with a small development wing or vice versa (a development company with a small design team), both should treat each other equally and respectfully to solidify and elevate their combined efforts to reach the market. Ensure that design recognizes its role at the discussion table and that engineering takes customer perspectives equally.
Consider hiring an accountable product manager or a team leader who understands technology as well as the strengths and weaknesses of their team. The lead should be able to establish goals, resources, and deadlines; measure progress, and plan for adjustments.
Parting thoughts
Creativity and talent are insufficient. Business savvy, strong leadership, and operational effectiveness must be brought to the table to unleash the potential of designers.
Meanwhile, designers need to throw off their self-imposed mental shackles of working in a certain way, in a certain environment to achieve the best results. They need to let go of the ideology that design is a service function and uncover ways to create concrete designs.
Design agencies should address the challenge for in-house teams to maintain that creative spark by establishing processes and building a culture that supports delivery. They must realize that success isn’t defined by the number of projects completed and shipped to the market — success is defined by the quality of capabilities packed in a product.
Have you implemented DesignOps in your organization? Tell us how it brought changes and made an impact.
