Are design management roles shifting to DesignOps?
In 2–5 years, we’ll see Design Practice management evolve back to the core essentials and specialization of creative direction, design innovation, storytelling, and development of their designers.
Design management roles shift to Design operations.
If the Design organization is a business within the corporation, we need to run it like a business. Imagine a Design Organization’s customers are their partner organizations in Engineering, Product Management, Marketing, and the Executive Suite… and so on.
When Operations is running the Design business, success means being profitable. In our Design Org, our profit is ultimately bringing good to the world through the corporation’s products and services (and minimizing the harm) — serving change, opportunity, and value to the environment and humans of the world.
Adapted from data published by Entrepreneur magazine, most businesses fail because of 7 reasons. I’ll walk you through what these are, and some ways DesignOps will ensure our business doesn’t fail.
1. Failure to deliver value.
DesignOps researches and understands the fit of Design within the corporation. Based on the Design Maturity level, we make a business plan for the immediate to long term.
DesignOps sets goals on what it means to be successful. What’s Design’s intended value? What is its perceived value? DesignOps sets and reports out on KPIs for the business.
2. Inability to control expenses.
DesignOps regularly assesses the cost to run the Design organization.
This includes ensuring that we have the resources we need to execute on the priority projects for the roadmap — people, time, resourcing. We run portfolio management and are the face of the business for our customers — negotiating capital and investment.
We set up infrastructure we need to run effectively — for example:
- A design system for Product Design and Dev that are easily used to speed up delivery. We also define contribution models to ensure this gear is well oiled.
- We set up and manage tools, vendors, and technology to run the business. To succeed and operate with little friction, our talent can focus.
We also manage the literal budget of running the organization — cost for skill development training, inspiration and motivation through speakers, team building, headcount, incentives, and tooling.
3. You have the wrong people.
The wrong people has an impact on productivity, financial, employee morale, and reputation costs.
DesignOps partners with Design Practice managers, understanding the needs of the Design teams — including hard skills, soft skills, and diverse perspectives needed. We partner directly with Recruiting on hiring programs and talent brand projects to attract the talent we need to be successful.
We manage the org roster and create talent intelligence, in partnership with Human Resources, to make calls for rotation, push for performance improvements, and call out that we are not representative of our users.
4. Failure to connect.
An inability to connect with your audience means that not only are you unaware of potential wants and needs, but you’re also oblivious to how you can best help them.
DesignOps becomes fluent in the corporation’s core metrics, with the ability to balance negotiations with our customers. By understanding the metric goals and understanding goals from Design — we can ultimately arrive at the best place to move projects forward, or stop projects.
We create transparent tracking systems, and by sharing funding models and capacity models. This enables understanding and allows for better funding decisions — while also protecting the teams.
We become trusted with our customers.
5. Failure to create systems.
Without systems and automation, the amount of work can become overwhelming and the details can easily be overlooked.
DesignOps creates workflows customized or standardized to reduce friction, create predictability, and enabling focus for our practitioners.
6. No employee experience.
Employee culture is crucial for long-term success. Most businesses will fail because they forget about their employees.
DesignOps understands that its employees are the heart and center of their business.
We build space for practitioners to explore and feel safe. We create programs to develop, learn, and stay inspired.
7. Lack of effective leadership.
Without real experience in the business world, most leaders struggle with the overwhelming amount of demands placed on them.
This may be the most controversial, but can DesignOps shift to be the ultimate strategic voice to position and protect a Design organization?
I think we can. Think about what we are aspiring to do above in #1–6.
The future will include further specialization of labor within the Design organization.
DesignOps roles will run the labor of the business, aka the Design organization. And, Design practice managers will run the design and product strategy, and design innovation.
Is the future now? Let’s get to work.
Ideas expressed in this article are from my lightning talk at the Oct 2020 DesignOps Summit conference from Rosenfeld Media. This article is cross-posted from my LinkedIn Article.
Sources:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/299522
