DesignOps FAQ
Table Of Content

All teams are working on the same project, a home banking app, but focusing on different functionalities of the app. So, you have a designer working on the transfer flow, another on the payments flow, another on insurance subscription, another on the simulation flow, and so on. Design has its own ways of working and processes, which do not always fit into existing development workflows or match the general planning in the Dev environment. Therefore, it is important to establish not only the DevOps mindset in the company, but also the DesignOps concept. By consciously taking care of those processes, you can significantly improve your team’s efficiency, motivation, and collaboration.
Design for DevOps – Best Practices - DevOps.com
Design for DevOps – Best Practices.
Posted: Mon, 03 Oct 2016 07:00:00 GMT [source]
From field service to project management.
Here, the executive producer and the design managers attend to the high-level planning and program management and get involved in the nitty-gritty, driving the day-to-day creative workflows. She specializes in the application of human-centered design and research practices to enterprise UX challenges. With over 15 years in UX, Kate has extensive experience in both conducting research and helping teams understand and apply user insights to overall business strategy. If you are a practitioner leading DesignOps conversations or efforts at your organization, take care to strategically frame DesignOps as a holistic, flexible practice that can shift to meet the needs of your team over time.
A Field Guide to DesignOps
To pioneer standalone headsets, we developed technologies like inside-out-tracking and self-tracked controllers. To allow for more natural interaction systems and social presence, we pioneered hand, eye, face and body tracking. And for mixed reality, we built a full stack of technologies for blending the digital and physical worlds, including high-resolution Passthrough, Scene Understanding and Spatial Anchors. This long-term investment that began on the mobile-first foundations of the Android Open Source Project has produced a full mixed reality operating system used by millions of people. Research Operations is a specialized subcomponent of Design Operations concerned with the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft in order to amplify the value and impact of research at scale. As we’ve previously written, the shape of a DesignOps practice can and should look very different from one organization to the next.

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For example, a rapidly growing team might hire a dedicated DesignOps role to focus explicitly on recruiting and onboarding. A design ops professional can come from a design background, a product background, or a project management background. With this approach, you will need to adjust your team’s thinking to make design a more integrated part of your product’s development plans and schedule. Ongoing measurement of these factors will help practitioners track and evaluate the impact of DesignOps tactics, pivot as needed, and continue to evolve the practice over time as design-team challenges and needs shift. The DesignOps function in this model is baked into specific project workflows to elevate and drive the design process in tandem with design leaders.
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In practical terms, this means the design ops role is responsible for planning and managing the design team’s work and making sure that design is collaborating effectively with product and engineering throughout the development process. The process opens communication, learning opportunities with fellow designers and other departments and allows everyone to share in team success. It determines the right time to bring a designer into the project eliminating the siloed feeling designers get when they become a service, no part of the workflow. That being said, it’s risky to narrow the value of DesignOps to one single mental model.
Better collaboration
With efficiency being so important these days, design teams will need effective management that keeps the team working like a well-oiled machine. Designers traditionally work on their own but need to collaborate effectively to share learnings and ensure a cohesive product experience. When designers are siloed off from each other and other teams, common challenges occur. Both are essential to creating beautiful software, however, both also create challenges when implementing at scale, across teams, and in direct support of overarching business goals. Depending on your dev team and business, DesignOps may have different characteristics.
In this type of organization, designers don’t have much interaction with members of other departments, making it difficult to demonstrate the value of their design work. Additionally, silos tend to reduce efficiency and limit collaboration. DesignOps is a mindset that frees designers to focus on problem-solving. The approach allows staff to optimize processes and ensure that design is an integral part of organizational strategy. If a DesignOps team of one can successfully benchmark and measure the growing success of initial DesignOps efforts, it often creates buy-in for additional DesignOps roles.
Design Systems & DesignOps in the Enterprise
Whether or not your company can afford a design ops role, it is important to integrate design ops thinking into your product team’s planning, scheduling, and collaboration strategies. Coordinating design’s work within the broader context of the cross-functional product team has proven successful enough in many of these organizations that design ops professionals and even entire teams are becoming more common. Design ops (sometimes written as the single-word DesignOps) refers to the practice of integrating the design team’s workflow into the company’s larger development context. When designers have the right tools and processes to create their best work, they can focus on delivering outstanding designs that delight their customers and aren't bogged down with unnecessary tasks.
‘The front of the house’ refers to the user experience with the product. The Design Manager is responsible for developing products that are highly user-friendly and valuable for the buyer. ‘The back of the house’ refers to the tools and processes that help designers support the creation of an enhanced user experience.
Even though they all work in the same space, each designer is individually working on a specific functionality; they’re all designers of the same company, but they are all part of different product teams. There’s no communication between them nor awareness of what other designers are working on. If you notice that the designers in the company where you work spend a lot of time on organizational stuff, then it might be time to think about a DesignOps role.
Recognizing the DesignOps structure used by your organization helps you identify strengths, build on existing successful programs and efforts, and become aware of potential dangers. In addition, it enables you to loosely plan the evolution of the DesignOps structure as it continues to scale in demand and size. In this structure, DesignOps needs a strong layer of leadership, with roles parallel to leadership roles in other departments in the organization. DesignOps is part of strategic conversations and is viewed as a critical component for delivering best-in-class design and maintaining a healthy team and culture. This approach is flexible and works well at organizations where teams have mixed needs or varying levels of acceptance for DesignOps, because any team can choose to have or not have DesignOps support.
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