Amplify your design team using these DevOps principles

Four DevOps principles you can use today to scale your design team without hiring, and level-up your DesignOps practice.

Most people look at education or hiring, but there’s 1 more way to amplify the team.

I thought my time in DevOps wouldn’t translate over to Design and UX at all, but I’ve found quite the opposite. It’s not so different to DesignOps if you think about it. Both disciplines were born by recognising that embedding robust operational “glue” will scale up a team without resorting to hiring. Here’s a few concepts I learned from my time in DevOps, that I’ve seen translate well to DesignOps.

Here’s a great introduction to DesignOps if you haven’t heard of it.

Raise cattle, not pets

Don’t worry, this isn’t a vegan or vegetarian message.

When it comes to server infrastructure, we want to treat our servers as cattle and not pets. Pets are treated with special care and attention, often going above and beyond for their health and lifespan. In contrast, you’re expected to lose a couple of cattle from the herd. It’s not a big deal.

With cattle, the “farm” still makes a profit when a few die or aren’t up to par.

By following this metaphor, treating servers as cattle means we don’t care if one or two malfunction or disappear—our service is still up and available. When it comes to DesignOps, designs should be treated the same way.

Yes we should still apply a robust design process to discover, design, and validate our work, but that doesn’t mean being sloppy. The end goal is not to enable the team to deliver a high volume at speed, either. By making the design process cheap and easy, we become unafraid to try again.

If after conducting your research and validation activities the evidence points to no, it’s ok to let go. Your designs are cattle, and each one makes up the bigger part of the herd i.e. the product.

Takeaway: implement design tooling and processes to encourage effective, but disposable design artefacts and work.