When is the right time to think about DesignOps?
Deciding when your organisation is ready to introduce their dedicated DesignOps practice is a critical aspect for any Design team. These 6 signs will help you to understand if the time for DesignOps has arrived.
DesignOps has become a hot discipline and an increasing number of organisations is introducing a design operation function to support their teams.
Despite the advantages and benefits that DesignOps brings to an organisation, not all teams and businesses need a full-time DesignOps practitioner: smaller, stable, and efficient teams with consolidated processes and workflows would not necessarily need a dedicated DesignOps resource.
It’s critical to remember that DesignOps is a function that helps organisations to scale their design capacity by improving design teams’ performance and quality of output while increasing teams’ health metrics.
For this reason, a stable team of just under 5/8 designer may certainly benefit from improved design process and better engagement models, yet a full-time design operation function would not be critical in most cases: this is because a small and consolidated team can have a predictable level of complexity and the inefficiencies can be tackled through basic management and administration.
Moreover, in small teams with no significant growth, the E2E processes can be discussed and reviewed internally with the stakeholders and the designers, and the overall tools and licenses’ management, the resource planning, and the teams’ workflows are all quite straightforward tasks that can be routinised. In these cases, it is more a matter of maintaining the status quo than designing operational and growth strategies.
Yet, if the organisation is on an ambitious growth path and if the design team is evolving and changing, chances are that the design team will soon undergo some major transformation and it maybe time to think DesignOps!
There are several articles that proposed different signs to look at to understand when is time to introduce DesignOps(see InVision’s and Abstract’s approaches).
These approaches focus on changes that happen in the design team. However, as a discipline that connects Business and Design and that is meant to have an impact both on the business metrics and the design teams, there are additional signs that happen before changes in the design team become visible and which should be taken into account to ensure the organisation introduces DesignOps at the right time to maximise impact.
It is in fact important to introduce DesignOps when the changes and the transformation are in their early stages, to ensure there is a clear efficiency and result driven operational strategy that can maximise business and design impact.
1. Business Expansion
DesignOps supports design teams to work more efficiently and to maximise the business value and the impact of design. Therefore there is a clear correlation between business growth and design teams’ efficiency (see McKinsey 2018).
The signs to look for are very broad and they may not impact the design team directly at first, such as:
- Expansion in new markets: this may be a global expansion into new areas/countries or new segments within the same market. Expanding into new markets means additional efforts to efficiently serve all the users on the medium term.
- New product lines: growing the product offering, increasing the functionalities of a product or service, creating new functionalities… these are all strategic aspects that require more design capacity to deliver products and experiences that customers will love.
- The business may just grow fast, through investments or increased market demand: a growing business is a business that is healthy and which needs to scale effectively and efficiently to ensure organic growth and a positive return of investment.
2. Increased demand for Design
If the business is expanding, it’s likely that the design and product development processes will soon need to be redefined to enable the growth path and trajectory.
A growing pressure on design teams can be detected by considering 2 main criteria: a quantitative one, the growth in demand for design, and a qualitative one, the need to increase the quality of the processes and outcomes.
- Generally a business expansion leads to increased pressure on design teams as new products/services will involve the need to solve for additional user problems requiring teams to define and test new hypothesis, assess and prioritise opportunities, and to deliver more functionalities.
When the business expansion means an increase in the number of solutions to be delivered, there is an objective and clear need for more designers. - When design teams are expected to deliver more, messy, unstructured, and confusing E2E design processes are not acceptable. Increased pressure on designers requires additional rigour and a more structured approach to design processes to maximise designers’ capacity to deliver quality at speed.
When the quantity of work increases, the quality of design processes needs to become a priority to streamline designers’ ways of working and to maximise their capacity to deliver quality at speed.
If the effort required by the design teams grows and if there is an expectation to increase the quality of the output from the stakeholders, it is a clear sign that the design teams can benefit from some stronger organisational approaches.
3. Design teams’ growth rate
As a consequence of the previous points, design teams may be growing to fulfil the increased demands. As more designers are being hired and teams are growing, there are 2 aspects to look at:
- a 35–50% grow YoY is a critical indicator that signals that design teams are scaling and that processes and operational aspects need to be properly managed to ensure new members become part of the team with shared values, unified ways of working, and clear goals.
A 35 to 50% growth is an indicative number and it refers to medium/large size teams. If the size of the team is below 5 people, the growth can reach even a +200% YoY.
When teams grow and they grow fast, the need to harmonise ways of working as soon as possible becomes critical both for team’s health metrics and for business impact. - The other sign that concerns teams’ growth is the churn rate: if designers’ voluntary turnover is over 15/20% YoY, it may signal that there may be some issues requiring consideration and that team health needs to be looked at carefully.
Any significant variation in the team’s composition may indicate the need to look closer at how teams operate: teams’ health and performance are key metrics for DesignOps, therefore any changes in teams’ is a key indicator.
4. Teams’ Specialisation
As teams grow, there are also changes in teams’ composition and in the ways designers are organised.
Start up and smaller teams tend to rely on less designers, however those designers tend to be more versatile and to have broader skills: it is not uncommon in smaller design teams that a product designer may also execute other tasks, such as run research session or write copy.
However, as the team grows and matures, there is a tendency to move from generalist to specialised designers and to organise designers in practices (UX Researcher, Interaction Designers, Visual Designers…).
Looking at both individuals’ expertise and how they are being organised provides a clear signal regarding the maturity and complexity of the design organisation.
- Designers’ specialisation is one of the first signs of growing and maturing teams, and when this happens it is critical to acknowledge the evolution and to ensure the designers are properly supported in their development and growth.
- The more specialised the designers, the more likely they will be organised in practices such as Product Design, Content Design, UX Research… this is necessary as there is the need to support individuals’ growth and development through community of practices and more organised approach to the discipline.
The presence of practices for different disciplines is a clear indicator of the level of complexity and maturity of the organisation, and it can be a good proxy to define the need for increased operational rigour. The risk is that practices evolve without a shared view and that without a clear unifying approach, processes become inconsistent, leading to significant inefficiencies.
5. Number or/and location of teams
Beside practices, scaling design teams have further fragmentation in their organisation. A design team may have different practices but it may be growing in different directions as well: new teams may be formed in new markets to serve a specific geography, and there may be different design managers and leaders. Design teams’ fragmentation and the presence of multiple people in middle management and leadership roles indicate that processes may be at risk of fragmentation as well. So it is important to look at the level of fragmentation and to consider an operational role if:
- a design organisation has at least 2 distinct design teams with different design leaders driving independent strategies. The more the decision-makers, the more likely the risk of introducing different approaches and ways of working, undermining collaboration and harmonised and efficient design practices.
- the presence of multiple established and functioning practices, with clear domain experts/leads. A practice is a team of specialised designers, such as Content Designers, UX Researchers, Interaction Designers…
- The presence of at least one team located in a different region/country to focus on a specific market or segment.
6. Team resources
The final aspect to look at when considering DesignOps as a full time function is teams’ resources utilisation and ROI. Design Operations generates value by scaling teams, harmonising processes, and increasing transparency and communication within the team. This means that there are some very practical and operational aspects to consider, such as:
- Designers have different ways of working and they use inconsistent templates and processes with no shared and harmonised E2E process
- Each team/designer uses different tools, including tools not adopted by the organisation, causing collaboration issues and delays (beside possible security risks)
- Designers spend over 20% of their time doing re-work due to poor processes or collaboration
- Designers have no visibility and work in silos and isolation, causing duplication of work and misalignment
So when is time for DesignOps?
Each organisation and each team is different, therefore there is no universal rule. However, if your organisation and your team presents multiple signs, it is time to start considering DesignOps as a way to maximise the impact of your team.
DesignOps is clearly a discipline that is needed in times of transformation and to develop long-term high-performance teams.
Defining an operational roadmap, defining and measuring Design’s KPIs, defining the priorities, and ensuring all business, tech, people, and process aspects are looked after, it requires a significant effort and dedicated resources. And since Design leaders have the responsibility to set a clear can product and service strategy, having someone focused to ensuring the processes and teams are looked after becomes a strategic decision to set up the whole Design practice for success.
Note: this article is based on the slides presented at the Fintech Design Summit 2021.
