Design Ops & Design Systems

Let’s talk about risk. You are at a large enterprise company, maybe even within a highly regulated industry. IT has everyone locked down so as not to expose the company to malicious attacks. Everyone except for the design teams and most engineering teams. Designers need to be ahead of the curve on design trends which means testing out new software to see if it helps them get the competitive edge.

“Who has time to read those terms and conditions? As a designer, I’ll just check this out and see if it works for me.”

Now your enterprise has unauthorized software being paid for by an employee (if it’s not freeware) that agreed to a TOS that is currently using a VPN to access your data lake.

Having a DesignOps team to help vet software and get it reviewed through legal and procurement alleviates the burden of designers navigating the process while helping your company mitigate risks associated with software terms. A DesignOps team can also help strengthen partnerships within the organization by standardizing flexible workflows so that everyone from the top level down knows where teams are in the design and development pipeline. Below are a few examples of how I’ve helped build DesignOps teams and processes within enterprise organizations.

At a large healthcare organization, we had an in-house agency that worked across all lines of business. Our digital team was burnt out from being overworked and underutilized for their skillset. We started looking at how we could increase our resources satisfaction and clean up our customer service ratings.

Problem: our understaffed teams are treated as dedicated resources on multiple teams when they were shared services. Team members felt like production workers rather than problem solvers.

Identified pain points:

• • Underutilized resources
  • Overworked resources
  • Unsatisfied resources
  • Subpar design work
  • No approval process – anyone could publish anything, at any time, across any brand
  • No work filter – Overbooking on time

Working across all of the major teams I was able to gather feedback, garner support, and finalize a workflow that worked for all teams. (Product Management, Branding, Legal, Engineering, Creative support, and Design) by standardizing our process with all the teams that tapped into the Design team, we were able to start sifting through the pain points. Implementing meeting days at a ratio of 2:5 insured all of the team’s kickoffs and handoffs were on a regular schedule and meetings between were by choice of the designers. This freed up designers to have more creative blocks improving design, helping them feel less underutilized, and more satisfied with their work.

Product managers/owners and leadership saw an uptick in productivity as well as healthier conversations around their product status.

Within 6 months of implementing these processes, our teams went from a dismal 8% approval rate to 100% satisfaction rating. And the studio sustained this rating for another two years.