The Case for Adding DesignOps to Your Org Chart — Lessons From InVision

Drawing on her experience in design operations at InVision, Automattic and Hot Studio, Alison Rand explains what DesignOps can achieve for your startup, and how to get a successful team up and running.

WHAT IS DESIGN OPERATIONS — AND WHAT PROBLEM IS IT SOLVING?

“The definition I’ve honed over the years is that DesignOps builds a platform to enable design strategy and execution to work together in harmony,” says Rand. And as design’s footprint within a company grows ever-larger, that merging of vision and action has never been more critical. “It used to be that designers were mostly considered pixel-perfectors — brought in at the latest stages of product development. But we’ve seen a lot of evolution and maturity in this design thinking, and for many companies design now has a hand in every single step of the customer journey,” she says.

But with that widened scope, designers now face a vast slate of challenges, including:

• Silos: “Although at most companies designers are expected to work closely with marketing, engineering and product teams, these departments are often completely independent from one another, without shared OKRs.”
• Complexity: “Design tools and systems are wide ranging, ever-changing and increasingly complex — often resulting in bottlenecks. I’ve seen plenty of design teams that are reluctant to adopt developers’ processes and tools (like Jira). There are separate planning and tracking tactics and general misalignment across product, stakeholders and executives. That lack of quality assurance across development ultimately equals a poor customer experience.”
• Career path: “Designers are often expected to wear innumerable hats — from creative leader to producer, to project manager. That leaves little time to hone your craft. There’s also a lot of ambiguity around how organizations design the career paths for designers — if they even map them out at all.”
• Strategic oversight: “Plenty of companies may say that design brings a strategic lens, but the reality shows that plenty of designers are purely in production roles. It’s all reactive — creating at the request of developers and product managers who lead strategy, rather than defining a direction for the product’s design at the ideation phase.”
• The myth of the unicorn: “There’s a lot of nuance in different types of design roles that is often overlooked. Companies may be hiring for a visual designer, when what they actually need is a creative technologist. Or they might have a product designer that would be even better as a communication designer, but they aren’t tapping into those skills.”

These problems are particularly acute these days. “ As companies’ digital transformations have been sped up so quickly by COVID-19 and the transition to remote work, the needs and desires to mature their design practices will be more pointed. There’s a tipping point here. When designers are managing all this process, they’re not actually designing — and they are going to become super unhappy.”

The goal of DesignOps is to look at these challenges end-to-end, and architect agile design systems and processes that can tackle them at scale. But before we dive even deeper, a quick point of clarification from Rand: “ If I were to debunk the biggest misconception about design operations, it’s that it’s purely a project management role. Companies thinking of it that way and hiring that way are doing themselves a real disservice,” she says.

Get started with the People, Practice, Platforms framework.

After spending the bulk of her career as a consultant, Rand kicked off her first in-house DesignOps journey at Automattic. Getting started, she armed herself with a playbook that gives us a bird’s-eye view of understanding the magic of DesignOps before we dive even deeper.

“I first tackled my new role by going on a massive listening tour across the organization — not just talking to every designer at the company, but all the cross-functional partners. I had my own ideas about what I wanted to shift, but first I needed to level-set on what was working and what wasn’t. I was conducting my own design maturity assessment,” she says.

Next, she compiled the notes from her listening tour and highlighted common themes, breaking down the next steps into the People, Practice, Platforms design management framework. (She’s gone in-depth on this over on her Medium page if you want to really dig in here.)

• People: “I think about the entire experience of a designer, from recruitment, to onboarding, to role definition, to leveling and career path. I scrutinize the authenticity of the talent brand, as well as what diversity, equality and inclusion actually look like in the day to day,” she says. More tactically: “ To address concerns around career development, we built out Personal Professional Missions for each of our designers and established a centralized partnership model for all of Automattic’s designers.
• Practice: “I consider each aspect of the production realm, including your traditional program and pipeline management, capacity planning, budgets and annual planning,” says Rand. “ We established our Design Principles and developed OKRs that explicitly map back to those principles, lighting the way for our designers to look to clearer priorities and how they relate to our product objectives. We also created a weekly Visual Status meeting, fostering cross-functional partnership by reviewing work early and processing feedback together.”
• Platform: “This includes the infrastructure around staffing, contracts and measurement and thinking about the design systems, like a Center of Excellence, that gets you closest to your customers,” she says. “We grounded ourselves in customer research and empathy for users — and more importantly, bringing that lens to the product roadmap so it gets put into practice. This is aligned to the Four Planets of Design: Discover, Hypothesize, Deliver and Listen.”

IS YOUR COMPANY READY FOR DESIGNOPS — AND WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR?

Deeply embedded in the world of DesignOps for her role for InVision, Rand estimates that there are now over 800 design operators in the industry — and that number keeps rising. But that doesn’t mean all the ambiguity surrounding the role has lifted. “I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with recruiters who reach out to me just to get a better understanding of the role they’re hiring for. All these open recs are coming in for DesignOps, but the business hasn’t really defined what that means — so recruiters are lost,” she says.

If you look even closer, there’s more to it than simple miscommunication between hiring managers and recruiters. “Time and time again I’ve seen companies or hiring managers expect that just upping the manpower will tackle the problem. They think, ‘Oh, if I want to level up design, I’ve just got to hire more people. But more people does not mean better collaboration — in fact, it’s usually the opposite.”

Before sitting down to craft a job description, ask these questions first. If you’re seeing plenty of ‘yes’s,’ you may benefit from this new hire:

• Are your designers and design leaders so taxed with process work that they’re less focused on craft and delivery?
• Are design leaders in the room where big decisions happen?
• Are you experiencing increased designer turnover?
• Are you expecting design to be your company’s competitive advantage?

There’s one more assessment that Rand believes is most important of all — although the answer requires some soul-searching. “At the heart of it, design and change are inextricably tied. When you’re trying to become a more mature design organization, that means fundamentally changing the way you operate.”

Tips for DesignOps hires: How to paint a masterpiece on a blank canvas.

“Joining a company as the first hire in any discipline is super overwhelming. It’s like being given the final destination where you want to go — without any directions or vehicle to get you there,” she says. Rand’s found comfort and clarity in Walt Disney’s triumvirate model of creative leadership: the Dreamer, the Realist and the Critic.

• The Dreamer presents a vision for the future as it could be, and pushes the boundaries beyond what others may see. They focus on the what.
• The Realist considers the dreamer’s vision within a logical planning style. They focus on the action plan and the how of the idea.
• The Critic probes the barriers of bringing the idea to life. They suss out the weak points and the logic behind the vision, and ultimately consider the why.

Learn from the best DesignOps pros out there.

On the hunt for some inspiration as you start your journey into the vast DesignOps landscape? Rand recommends a few guideposts that have caught her eye:

• Pinterest: “They’ve done a great job of championing design operations from day one and evolving the team around employee and customer experience.
• USAA: “The Chief Design Officer, Meriah Moulton-Garrett, brings a strong design-led thinking lens.
• DesignOps Summit: “Rosenfeld Media hosts a DesignOps summit every year that’s a can’t-miss event if you’re interested in learning more about the discipline and getting started.
• DesignOps Assembly: "This super-active Slack channel is run by two rockstar DesignOps leaders.”

HOW TO IMPLEMENT DESIGNOPS PRINCIPLES WITHOUT ADDING ANY HEADCOUNT.

For those companies that aren’t yet ready to make the leap towards a dedicated DesignOps team, that’s no reason to completely put this on the backburner. “Not every company is at the point of dedicating headcount to DesignOps. But the habits that you build around design — the vision and strategy, business objectives, cross-functional work, career planning, prioritization and mapping back to OKRs — you’ve got to get that right. Otherwise, by the time you do decide to bring on DesignOps, they will be so underwater that it will take many, many months to move the needle.

To start fostering collaboration and harmonious cross-functionality early on, Rand advises a few key tactics to borrow from her playbook:

• Visual Status: “I learned this from Meredith Black, who was the Head of Design Operations at Pinterest.
• Advisory Council: “A design advisory council is a small group that consists of multiple cross-functional partners.
• Structured Communication: “Build a communication strategy that you can wash, rinse and repeat over and over again... This will vary from company to company, but start trying out different ideas and see what sticks.”

Looking beyond the processes to make design’s job easier — not harder — requires carefully considering career planning for designers long before a DesignOps leader joins the org. “There’s a huge risk when organizations overlook this.

If we’re not remembering that our user experience and our employee experience are inextricably tied, then we’re thinking about things in the wrong way.