DesignOps

Overview

The Opportunity 

For years the Smashing design team was unable to successfully build and refine our internal resources to help ensure consistent outputs within projects. Though we had a good start on documentation, we lacked a complete set of processes and systems required to make high quality design output repeatable and scalable. As a result, learning across teams was unbalanced, project quality suffered, and teams were not feeling supported. As Head of Design, addressing this issue was one of my key initiatives as I took on the role. 

Details

Project Length: 1 Year
Business Impact: Improve efficacy of design teams on projects, increase velocity, enable design team growth
Team: Entire design team - 3 Design Directors and 12 Designers
My Contributions: Setting the vision, Hiring to bring in capabilities, Project Oversight

Solution

To address this issue we needed to do some homework to better our understanding of what a successful operation looked like. While much is written on the subject, we had to find and tailor our assessment framework to one that worked for our agency model. Eventually, we found a compelling article written by Verne Ho that outlined what we were looking for - the underlying traits & components and markers of a healthy DesignOps system that was agnostic of any one type of design organizational structure:

Design Practice Traits

A health design practice needs to be…

• Scalable: it enables you to integrate new members into the team seamlessly (hiring)

• Repeatable: it ensures great work isn’t a lottery

• Autonomous: it removes the dependency on gatekeepers (missing knowledge though)

• Intentional: it ensures decisions aren’t made arbitrarily

• Transparent: it is clear and accessible to everyone in the company, not just the design team

• Informed: it upholds rigorous process for understanding the problem space through research, customer interaction, and collaboration with the strategy team

• Self Improving: it contains a culture of feedback where designers can continue to grow and the work gets pushed to its potential

Design Practice Components

A health design practice must have…

Tools: A healthy design practice must have tools to facilitate collaboration and workflows in the design space, with considerations around scalability and financial impact

A production model: A healthy design practice must have a system of techniques to employ as a team to conceptualize and produce great work which addresses such questions as…

• How do designers on the same project work together?

• How do they integrate with other disciplines (development, project managers, strategy)?

• How do activities change and adapt through the life cycle of a project?

Rhythm: Rhythm deals with everything we do as a design team, that builds and maintains the momentum of learning, sharing, and collaborating as a discipline independent of any one particular project. 

Armed with this framework, we made a rubric and assessed our existing process:

The audit helped us pinpoint areas that were sufficiently functioning and provided clarity and definition to areas that needed to be addressed.

Lots on our plate!

After synthesizing the information, we were able to quickly generate ideas about how to address the issues, but with so many areas in need, it was unlcear where to start.

Bringing focus
To tackle the issue of focus, I instituted the use of WIGs (Wildly Important Goals) that help bring focus from the many things that the team to tackle down to no more than 2 at a time. Essentially we used a Kanban board that contained all the possible things we could consider propping up as part of the system and evaluated them by asking a simple question: “If every other area in the design teams processes remained the same, what is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?"  This allowed us to have open discussions about what each person thought was important and help build consensus around agreed upon goals, effectively bubbling 1-2 WIGs to the top of the Kanban board for the design leadership team as well as the broader design team. 

Our first WIG: Make it easy for the design team to consistently scope, plan, and deliver great design work
Business impact: Improve the scalability and effeciency of the design teams ability to deliver great design work
The Smallest amount of work to make these happen is: Gather and organize existing materials to create a project run framework

Same team, different needs
With a set of Design Directors already in place, the team had a natural hierarchy, but we needed to create a decision making model for what got done that didn’t rely solely on a top-down model. As a result, we introduced WIGs and a method of allowing both design leadership to set goals for themselves and one that allowed the team to do so as well. This revealed that while there was considerable alignment between leadership and the team, some of the areas did not align, which was critical to help come to an understanding of how each party got the the WIGs they selected and how the complimented each other.

With that distinction in place, both sides felt motivated to get behind what needed to be done for the each team and how it could support each others goals and stay compelled to do so. This set up a natural dynamic between the designers and the directors, with parts of DesignOps being managed by either set, and some being co-managed.

As a result, the distribution of activities and owners looked like this:

Rhythm

To address the issue of rhythm, we instituted three weekly meetings, one for critique and two for “office hours” which contained check-ins on bench work, as well as evergreen and topical learning.

Results

Rinse and Repeat

The last piece of the puzzle was to set up a cadence for the bigger picture. With weekly activities like office hours, crits, and WIG goals, it was critical to set up a quarterly cadence to monitor progress and hold regular retrospectives for the design team to give feedback on the efficacy of the DesignOps system. 

Results

By going through this process together, the team has aligned on a shared vision of how DesignOps can help educate the design team, has had exposure to all the different design resources available to them when they need it on a project (previously a tough hurdle to overcome), and are engaging in activities that push our work and our shared knowledge to its potential.