What Is Design Ops (at Zalando)?
Jay Kaufmann, Ekaterina Klykova and Franziska Vieser shed light on the ins and outs of our Design Operations team.
What is Design Ops?
Design Operations (or Design Ops for short) is trending in the industry. It may seem like a buzzword, but what, in fact, is it?
As defined by the Nielsen Norman Group, Design Ops creates and oversees scalable solutions for the challenges of evolving design teams.
Ops supports design managers individually and aligns them collectively to ensure a consistent, high-quality employee experience. Design Ops also adds an operational efficiency focus to creative teams. With a renewed understanding of the value of design, many larger companies (such as Spotify, airbnb, Amazon, Twitter, and Pinterest to name a few) have dedicated Design Ops teams to maximise the impact design has company-wide.
What is Design Ops at Zalando?
At Zalando, the full community of practice is actively engaged in Design Ops topics. A lean core Product Design Operations team of three supports Zalando-wide design teams, and works closely with multiple regular collaborators from other areas such as employer branding, talent acquisition, and training.
Our mission
We aim to make customer-centered product design at Zalando as effective and frictionless as possible and enable the community to bring the customer experience vision to life and deliver greater customer impact. We engrain Our Founding Mindset into the culture of our product design community of practice.
In short, we’ve framed our mission statement as follows:
“We support and advance people, craft, and processes to amplify the value of design for the business.”
Who do we work for?
Our primary customer is the Product Design community. We ensure that all of our UX writers, user researchers, and product designers enjoy the best possible experience at every stage of their journey — interviewing, onboarding, working, professional development, project assignments, team rotation, offboarding, alumni activities, etc.
We support the Product Design management team on topics such as project staffing, hiring, design organisation, and design practices. Since we act as enablers, the design managers are also our primary collaborators in ensuring a great employee experience. We additionally advise multidisciplinary executives on how to best leverage design.
What we do
Our work is divided into five pillars: talent, ways of working, staffing, infrastructure, and culture.
Hiring, growing & inspiring talent
We oversee the hiring process for all Product Design roles at Zalando, and aim to establish a best-in-class candidate experience.
We support the professional growth of our existing talent to ensure the needs of our community are met through, for example, training offerings and sharing opportunities. We define career development frameworks which ensure that employees understand the expectations of their roles and how to grow their careers — this also ensures equitable compensation. We also help enable job transfers and rotation through different design teams in the Zalando community of practice at the appropriate times.
Working with our central employer branding colleagues, we attract global talent by raising awareness of Zalando Design through social media (e.g. Instagram and Medium), and by equipping our community to speak at professional and industry events.
Staffing projects with design talent
To ensure that our valuable UX writers, user researchers and product designers work on the most impactful projects, we align our contributions to both local goals and larger company priorities. We serve as a single point of contact, monitoring designer allocations and ensuring that projects are staffed according to defined priorities in line with our allocation principles.
Ways of working
We enable product teams and senior executives to make customer-centric decisions and ensure design quality — through levers such as design principles, design critiques, design reviews, and design quality assurance. We educate stakeholders on design methods and demonstrate the business value of design. We also advise the business on organisational design and evolve Product Design team structures to enable best practices.
Providing an infrastructure
We provide the tools, space and resources that allow creative teams to focus on what they do best: create. This means guiding our software portfolio, equipping office (and remote) workspaces to enable collaboration, and managing budgets.
Fostering an inclusive & creative culture
We foster a diverse, inclusive and creative culture — an environment in which people want to work and teams thrive. We define and host rituals and establish community principles to encourage networking and collaboration between all our Product Design teams and to gauge team health.
In collaboration with central Diversity & Inclusion professionals and Employee Resource Groups, we ensure an inclusive and diverse workforce. We aim to celebrate our diversity and ensure that members of the design community feel welcome and included.
How we do it
Our approach is ‘for the community, by the community’. In a broader sense everything we do is done together — our customers are our collaborators.
Design managers and the design community unconsciously make lots of contributions every day — by sharing resources in the chat or demonstrating the product development process. They also contribute to Design Operations topics more formally in the form of workstreams around specific topics like employer branding or professional development.
We work hard to live “high challenge, high support” by walking the thin line between proactive support and sustainable empowerment.
Like our mantra says: We’re all Ops!
