How DesignOps Work – The Mindset of Design Operations

How DesignOps Works

You’re about to read a rewritten chapter of our ebook – DesignOps 101. Get the full ebook for free and learn even more about Design Operations. This excerpt is about adopting the right focus for starting with DesignOps.

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Key Things to Remember About How DesignOps Work

  1. There are three areas of DesignOps that focus on structure, process, and analysis.
  2. DesignOps mindset embraces those three areas and forms a methodology out of them.
  3. Getting into DesignOps may require a mindset shift on individual and team levels.
  4. The DesignOps mindset involves working together, harmony, defining priorities and success measurement.

The DesignOps mindset is essential for teams of any size – even for a freelance designer working alone. It helps create long-term processes and efficiencies that result in better, more consistent work.

DesignOps Mindset

Gus Correia of UX Collective wrote about the DesignOps mindset as follows: 

DesignOps is not a new design department. It’s ‘how’ interfaces between design, product, engineering are managed. Also DesignOps is about creating a culture of use centricity and agility over time. It puts design not as just another step along the way but as a continuous ritual of handovers and feedback.

The DesignOps mindset takes the same strategies and thinking for design projects and applies it to your company structure and work mentality. In Chapter 1, we looked at the Nielsen Norman Group’s definition of DesignOps in three main areas:

  1. How we work together: Organize teams, collaborate, and humanize environments and gatherings for more efficient work.
  2. How we get work done: Standardize processes, harmonize, so there’s a shared understanding of design intelligence, and prioritize projects.
  3. How our work creates impact: Measure work to create accountability, socialize as a tool to educate others on the value of design, and enable the use of design thinking and related activities.

The DesignOps mindset combines these three areas into one methodology, simplified as:

The DesignOps mindset helps us work together to get impactful things done.

This mindset is true for an individual as well as a team of multiple designers.

You apply the DesignOps mindset at the individual level when using common naming structures for files and folders. You know exactly where to look when you need to find something.

The DesignOps mindset uses standardized tools, templates, workflows, and processes and procedures for design-related tasks at the team level. Everyone follows the same process and protocols.

Airbnb’s DesignOps Mindset Shift

During Airbnb’s early stages, its Product Design Organization’s designers, product teams, and engineers worked closely. They all knew each other, and most of the org worked on the same floor.

As the Product Design Organization grew, new members brought new processes, workflows, and ideas. The cross-functional team structure meant designers were no longer together — access to information, design standards, collaboration, and design quality became serious issues.

What Airbnb needed was a new mindset. A DesignOps mindset!

Airbnb started by standardizing its Design Language System, a process that gave birth to Airbnb’s DesignOps. Next, the team set about answering several questions:

  • What are the criteria for disciplines that should be part of DesignOps?
  • How do we identify and define entirely new roles? e.g., Design Tools.
  • How do we avoid working in a silo and listen to our partners in Design and Engineering?
  • How do we socialize, build awareness, and define the interaction with this new team?
  • Education and adoption of new processes and tools are hard. Early and often is critical.
  • Most importantly, how do we measure success?

One thing that’s important to note is that DesignOps is never perfect. It’s about starting small and scaling. As Adrian Cleave, Director of DesignOps at Airbnb, says, “Of course it’s not as straightforward as it sounds, and not everything is running perfectly, but as long as we start to see small efficiencies compound, we know we’re moving in the right direction.”

Think about your organization and workflows. Is the start of a DesignOps mindset already there? Let’s take it a step further.

Work Together

In the Nielsen Norman Group model, team collaboration is the foundation of the DesignOps mindset — which isn’t a unique concept for organizations working with multiple teams.

Here is how it works: 

  • Teams work together to organize tasks, structure, roles—your company’s organization chart with names, roles, and job descriptions. Well-organized teams help ensure the success of people in their roles, assigning appropriate functions and team structures.
  • Teams create their processes, cultural norms, and communities. Meetings, the work environment, and even unwritten rules of governance for the organization incorporate this collaboration.
  • Teams humanize the overall experience. Unlike computers or algorithms that assign tasks and roles, the DesignOps human experience emphasizes hiring and retaining talent in the workplace while facilitating personal and team growth. The mindset focuses on people as the key element of operations.

Harmonize

While the Nielsen Norman Group model is the starting point for how DesignOps works, harmonizing is vital to define the mindset. When the design team harmonizes, it increases the potential for success and efficiency—the gold standard of productivity.

Here is what a harmonious workplace looks like with the right DesignOps mindset:

  • Standards for processes and tools that make work easier
  • Use of design systems
  • Managing assets consistently
  • Creating research hubs for data development and collection
  • Assuring balance of workflow and asset allocation

When all these things happen together, the workplace and design flow are harmonious and efficient. It’s easy to envision and conceptualize, but it’s challenging to put into practice. That’s where prioritization comes in, particularly in the beginning stages of supporting a DesignOps workspace.

Get the DesignOps 101 ebook and discover everything you need to know to start with design operations.

Prioritize

Correctly prioritizing DesignOps strategies will ensure you create the most impact. When a manages itself effectively, workflows operate smoothly.

Think about your last design project.

  • Was the workflow balanced between team members?
  • Was the allocated time enough to complete the work?
  • Did you have the right tools and resources to work effectively?

If you answered no to any of these questions, you begin to understand the value of DesignOps mindset prioritization. DesignOps is only effective when you have what you need at the right time to complete the job.

When you instill a DesignOps mindset in your roadmap, it becomes a standardized process for your team.

Measure Team Capacity

Change and goals are hard to accomplish without accurate metrics or KPIs. For DesignOps to be effective, you need to measure results, define goals with KPIs, and facilitate further development.

These KPIs and milestones can impact your team’s capacity and efficiency, as well as design quality and consistency.

Measurables for design teams could include:

  • A grading system or checklist that makes it clear when a project is complete
  • Scale for design quality to meet standards or project goals
  • Use of processes and systems during a path
  • Sharing notations of success stories with the team
  • Training hours for employees who learn new tools or systems
  • Project timelines from start to finish

By tracking these metrics, you can measure the effectiveness of your DesignOps mindset.

Is your DesignOps culture helping create better, more consistent work, or are people finding the new systems and processes challenging? Instilling culture with mindset before codifying DesignOps rules can make the process feel more natural.

Co-op Digital’s DIET

UK-based Co-op Digital’s DIET (Design Impact Evaluation Tactic) helps measure three key design stages:

  1. Strategy: When you first hear about the project
  2. Problem: Once you have completed your research
  3. Solution: When you have designed and tested

DIET allows DesignOps to track and identify problems in workflows. If you have multiple teams and projects, this scoring system can help pinpoint common designer pain points for DesignOps to take action. 

DIET is a perfect example of how DesignOps can influence a mindset change, prioritize problems, and measure the results. Like the design thinking process, DIET is iterative, where DesignOps identifies a problem, makes the necessary change, measures the results, and repeats the process.

DIET helps instill the DesignOps mindset because designers interact with the thinking and processes while providing feedback to DesOps managers daily.

DIET is a fantastic methodology for transparency. Teams and stakeholders can visualize design challenges and DesignOps’ impact in overcoming those issues.

Looking Ahead

Now it is time to start thinking about how DesignOps roles or functions could benefit and work within your company or organization. Integrating DesignOps with the right tools and resources can be highly beneficial.

As we saw with Airbnb, DesignOps is not an overnight solution. Nor is it ever perfect. It’s about starting small and taking incremental steps. DesignOps requires planning, budgeting, and process management — whether it’s a single person, team, or simply a mindset change.

If your designers already follow a design thinking process, then you’re already on the right track. DesignOps will help refine those processes and streamline workflows while improving collaboration, consistency, design quality, and the overall user experience.

Adapting the DesignOps Mindset With UXPin Merge

Your organization’s design system is at the core of quality, consistency, and user experience. As we saw with Airbnb, DesignOps’ first project was to standardize its Design Language System so that designers all worked with the same elements and components.

UXPin’s Merge technology can help organizations standardize design systems and ensure that every department and team member works with exactly the same version. Better yet, every component is a fully functioning replica of the final product!

Merge syncs UXPin’s editor with a repository containing your company’s design system. You can sync React components directly from a Git repo or use our Storybook integration for other technologies including, Vue, Angular, Web Components, Ember, and many more.

UXPin Merge creates a single source of truth for your organization. Find out more about UXPin Merge and how to access this revolutionary technology that’s changing how companies design user experiences.

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