Design ops, short for design operations, is a framework that focuses on streamlining design processes and improving team efficiency by aligning workflows with broader organizational goals. It encompasses everything from team structuring to tool standardization, ensuring that designers can concentrate on creativity and innovation.
In this article, we’ll explore the growing relevance of design ops, its key pillars, and its impact on modern design teams. Finally, we’ll address frequently asked questions to help you better understand this transformative practice.
Table of Contents
Why Design Ops Matter
Today, with business and user requirements becoming more complex, customer expectations have skyrocketed. According to PwC, a third of customers abandon a business after one poor experience.
Faster development cycles can lead to miscommunication and inconsistencies between design and development teams — design ops helps resolve these bottlenecks.
In the past, designers juggled multiple roles, from UX research to wireframing, which is unsustainable at scale. As companies scale, bureaucratic hurdles and communication overhead become inevitable.
By applying design thinking principles to operational workflows, design ops tackle challenges like managing growing teams, recruiting skilled talent, creating efficient workflows, and enhancing the quality of design outputs.
This includes planning and managing the design team’s work to ensure seamless collaboration with other teams, such as product and engineering. The ultimate goal is to allow designers to focus on design and research by mitigating operational inefficiencies.
The 3 Pillars of Design Operations
Design ops encompass various aspects of design enablement. We can break it down into three pillars: working together, getting work done, and creating impact.
1. Working Together
This pillar addresses how design teams organize, collaborate, and humanize their operations. These practices ensure designers work efficiently as part of cohesive teams while fostering human-centric environments.
- Organize: Forming an effective design team structure is foundational. This includes designing organizational layouts, assembling complementary and skills-complete teams, and clearly defining roles for individuals and the design department.
- Collaborate: Communication is critical to team success. Collaboration practices include establishing regular rituals and meetings, creating conducive group environments, and fostering communities of practice for knowledge sharing and skill development.
- Humanize: Teams thrive when treated as people first. Humanizing practices include designing tailored interview processes, setting consistent onboarding protocols, and providing transparent career pathways for designers in management and individual contributor roles.
2. Getting Work Done
The focus here is on establishing systems that enable consistent, high-quality output while managing workflows effectively.
- Standardize: Achieving consistency through brand standards is key to quality. Standardization involves documenting design processes from start to finish, aligning design activities, and enforcing the use of unified tools to facilitate collaboration.
- Harmonize: Shared understanding accelerates progress. Harmonizing practices include scaling design systems, maintaining accessible user-research repositories, and using asset management systems to share templates and resources.
- Prioritize: Strategic decisions drive impactful work. Prioritizing involves identifying workflow bottlenecks, assessing team capacity, and employing objective methods to determine project priorities.
3. Creating Impact
This pillar ensures design efforts align with organizational goals and demonstrate measurable value.
- Measure: Accountability fosters improvement. Measuring practices include defining “good” and “done” for design teams, tracking quality metrics, and applying design principles as benchmarks.
- Socialize: Advocacy amplifies influence. Socializing involves communicating design’s value to stakeholders, sharing success stories, and recognizing teams that excel in applying design practices.
- Enable: Empowerment extends design’s reach. Enabling practices include training non-designers to use design tools, creating playbooks for accessible activities, and offering skill-building workshops to democratize design knowledge.
Incorporating Design Ops Into Your Team
To integrate design ops, make design an intrinsic part of your product development. This involves estimating the resources and hours needed for design tasks, aligning them with development cycles, and establishing a clear handoff process between design and development teams. By embedding design into broader development timeframes, teams can ensure a seamless collaboration that eliminates silos and improves efficiency.
Adopting a design ops mindset doesn’t necessarily require creating a dedicated role or hiring additional staff. Instead, it involves a cultural shift across the organization where design becomes a collaborative effort led by various team members, such as product managers, designers, or other stakeholders. This approach emphasizes partnership between design, product, and development teams and fosters a unified workflow.
On the other hand, for organizations experiencing increased complexity in product development, assigning a standalone design ops role can be beneficial. This individual should possess strong design expertise coupled with organizational and process-management skills.
Whether from a design, product, or project management background, a design ops professional can coordinate cross-functional efforts and ensure design activities align with business goals and development processes.
Design Ops: Key Takeaways
Design ops is an indispensable practice for modern design teams. By focusing on organization, collaboration, and impact, design ops foster efficient workflows and high-quality outcomes. Teams that embrace it streamline their workflows and deliver better products, all while staying focused on user and business needs.
While design ops is still a relatively new term, its principles are rapidly being embraced by advanced product organizations. Whether or not you assign a dedicated design ops role, embracing its core practices will empower your team to navigate complex challenges and create impactful designs.
Design Ops FAQs
1. Is design ops only relevant for large organizations?
No, design ops principles benefit teams of all sizes by introducing structure and clarity, making even small teams more efficient and impactful.
2. What’s the difference between design ops and traditional design?
Unlike traditional management, design ops focus on operational processes, tools, and cross-functional collaboration rather than solely overseeing projects.
3. How can companies start implementing design ops?
Begin by identifying workflow bottlenecks, standardizing tools and practices, and fostering communication between design and other departments.
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