DesignOps for a Competitive Advantage in Innovation.
Report from the DesignOps Summit 2019, sponsored by Originate
Last week Originate sponsored the 2019 DesignOps Summit and hosted a kick-off event at our NYC office. At the kick-off event, we had the unique opportunity to speak with attendees ahead of the Summit to share perspectives on how DesignOps can play a meaningful role at any organization, regardless of size or industry. At Originate, we find this to be no less true on the digital innovation work we do with our partners.
The Summit gave almost 1000 DesignOps leaders from all over the world a forum to learn from each-other, leaving attendees with a better understanding of how to implement meaningful design-ops practices into their organizations.
Scaling design in business to connect and deploy valuable digital experiences, is becoming an operative goal across industries. The absence or presences of DesignOps culture can help determine the ability of a business to either succumb or rapidly adapt itself to market needs and changes.
In the acceleration of ideas from concept-to-market, design plays a key role.
Having a short and long term vision for how DesignOps will evolve during the product or solution life cycle creates the right conditions for businesses and organizations to move at scale, exponentially.
During the event, leaders from some the most successful digital companies shared their tactics, lessons, and the positive outcomes gained by establishing DesignOps cultures.
Employing DesignOps gave IBM the benefit of an improved understanding of why decisions were being made across its organization. This resulted in more rapid alignment by empowering teams with the knowledge needed to advocate for design, creating cohesion across departments and practices.
Having a design system in place through libraries & playbooks creates a competitive advantage.
Brett Grau, Design Director (Originate NY), said: “by codifying our process and tools, we are able to quickly align our teams internally, as well as educate our partners on what to expect of our process, allowing us to work together effectively. We are all able to focus our energy on what the problem at hand is, and adapt our process to fit the challenge, allowing us to move confidently and efficiently.”
In their DesignOps practice, Pinterest prioritizes alignment around what the problem they are trying to solve is and has established a clear methodology for measuring the impact solutions create.
Design on its own lacks a solid and consistent methodology for measuring results. This because the impact of design is measured not only in explicit but also in implicit factors and ripple effects. Turner Carroll, Design Director (Originate Berlin), shared his point of view on how to best avoid this common scenario:
“We see in project after project that having key stakeholders in the room, and giving them space to explore and articulate ideas within a collaborative and process-driven framework, ensures a higher success rate, clearer objectives, and better working relationships throughout the project. For many people it’s the first time they’ve ever been able to work in this way, and sometimes we even see clients changing their own processes to incorporate designOps.”
Photos from the kick off event at Originate:
