Design Operations

Plus sign made of black lines on white background

The goal of Design Operations is to establish processes and measures that support scalable solutions, so that designers can focus on designing and researching.

While the shape of Design Ops will look very different from one organization to the next and the focus might shift as challenges evolve or change over time, there are three key areas Design operations focuses on:

  • How design teams work together

  • How teams get their work done

  • How design work creates impact

To better understand how operations supports Design and research it helps to think and map out tasks in journeys.

  1. The employee journey

  2. The product development lifecycle

During my time as the Global Design Operations Lead for PayPal I supported the global Design teams at various stages of the employee journey. For example by reviewing and adjusting job descriptions at all levels to apply hiring best practices. Or by ensuring a smooth hiring & onboarding process for new talent and by aligning job descriptions clearly to the career pathing system.

The various stages of the employee journey are illustrated on the left - at a high level these will be similar across organizations but how these are filled with life is entirely dependent on your team and wider org. Working closely with the wider Product and in particular the People & Culture team is what impacts the overall experience here.

another crucial area for design ops is to support teams across the product development lifecycle.

The visualization I find most here is the triple diamond - taking a meta view at design work, and looking at the work as the product. You might know the triple diamond from Product management discussions about how best to develop a certain product or feature - and this image is just as useful for looking at how to do the work of design.

That means it’s talking to teams about process, without talking about process in order to make Design (and Research) teams efficient and impactful.

For example by focusing on high priority pain points such as the Design to Dev handoff process, or introducing a Figma governance structure that aligns with the Product portfolio.

Sharing best practice examples between teams and different centres of excellence (or guilds), or working out with leadership which KPIs and metrics should get tracked to measure success.

benefits of design operations

Group of four women collaborating around a table with colorful papers and sticky notes, smiling and engaged in discussion.

  • Depending on the organization and it’s biggest needs this involves defining how teams are organized and set up.
    It also includes creating environments that help collaboration, in rituals, meetings, or communities of practice.
    And it means thinking about the full employee experience or journey from hiring through onboarding, training and development.

  • This involves asking how teams can facilitate design quality through consistent tooling and design processes.
    Defining shared ways of working, from best practices, to templates, team agreements and assessing as well as rolling out design or research tools.

    It includes building design system governance or an organization-wide research library to ensure insights are widely used and available.

    Prioritization, understanding bottlenecks in the workflow or correctly allocating time and capacity also falls into this category.

  • Finally it’s about measuring and tracking design progress and quality (in collaboration with the wider Product organization).
    Story telling, sharing the value of design, recognizing teams and sharing success stories with stakeholders is of importance here. As well as enabling teams through skills training and sharing design thinking or other design practices with the wider organization, to scale the impact of design more widely.

HELPING YOU SET-UP DESIGN OPERATIONS, ALIGNING DESIGN TO THE PRODUCT PORTFOLIO, FIXING BOTTLENECKS IN YOUR WORKFLOW OR TALKING ABOUT PROCESS WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT PROCESS….

let’S talk!

DESIGN OPERATIONS SUPPORT FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION