What is DesignOps?

What is DesignOps? What role does a DesignOps team fulfil? Is it the new Head of Design? How is it different from having a Design System?
Let’s get a proper introduction for what DesignOps is, its definition, its role, its impact on design organizations, and why it’s important to talk about it now so you can be better equipped for tomorrow.

Origins

We can track the emergence of DesignOps in early articles around 2015, but it was mainly in 2018 that it started to gain strength, with references by TechRadar (late 2017) and the release of Invision’s book “DesignOps Handbook” (June 2018) strongly helping its deployment and adoption by the community.

A combination of the terms Design and Operations, bringing to mind its technical equivalent: DevOps. Although the comparison between these two fields may seem a little simplistic, it is mainly because they share the same philosophy and goals: collaboration, communication, and automation. What lies within the term Operations are all the processes, tools, and methods to bring teams together to work better together. DesignOps is therefore not only about designers but also about everyone involved in the design process.

Role & definition

Nielsen Norman Group’s definition of this topic is quite interesting:

DesignOps refers to the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact at scale.

At zeroheight, we like to define it this way:

DesOps is the combination of practices and tools that increases an organization’s ability to quickly deliver quality UX

The role of DesignOps is, therefore, to optimize the execution of projects as a whole, with the least possible friction at each stage. The aim is to establish robust and efficient processes that deliver qualitative and measurable results. Its approach encourages collaboration and breaks down silos, with objectives, tools, and methodologies shared by all the different teams. In this way, DesignOps brings together design, product, and engineering under the same ambition: to reduce unnecessary wasted time and thus optimize production quality while continuously improving.

The role and mindset distinction

At this point, it is essential to make a distinction between the DesignOps mindset and the DesignOps role. Indeed, as soon as we seek to optimize the quality and efficiency of designers’ work within a company, taking a DesignOps approach. For example, having a shared naming system for files and folders is already an approach that aims to ensure internal consistency and optimization. We can then talk about a DesignOps mindset, regardless of the size of the team. However, it is a different matter to have a dedicated person for all this thinking. Hiring or nominating people to take on the role of DesignOps can be an issue when the team starts to grow significantly, when the internal design organization is too fragmented, or simply when it is a question of formalizing the role of a manager who is already in the DesignOps mindset.

Is DesignOps the new Director/Head of Design?

Well, yes and no. Up until now, team leaders/directors/managers and other “Heads of” have always been in charge of these questions of tools, processes, planning, etc., but without having this notion of Ops associated with their title. The DesignOps mindset was therefore already present for these people. But as design teams grow and become more established, the DesignOps role makes sense to give all these logistical and functional issues to someone who is in charge of dealing with them. This will help other members of the design team to focus on the essential part of their work, freeing them from the questions, tasks, and problems that hold them back in their day-to-day work.

What does a DesignOps person do?

Industrialising

One of the main missions of DesignOps is to improve the workflows of the design teams. There are several ways for DesignOps to industrialize everyday design tasks:

• Auditing the existing system to identify deficiencies
• Setting up optimization processes to solve them
• Defining success indicators that will be used to measure their work over time
• Getting teams to adopt a common language on how they name, organize and classify their work
• Identifying and connecting the right people to the right key stages of projects to get clear governance over deliveries

Tooling

This is the foundation for driving all other tasks. That’s why this question of tools is crucial because it has a real impact on everything that DesignOps will want to put in place in order to optimize, standardize and facilitate the adoption of the different work processes by the design teams. These tools should cover all design and non-design needs, namely :

• Collaboration and communication tools
  Slack, Mural, Freehand, Skype, Whereby, Dropbox…
• UX, UI, and prototype design tools
  Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD, Axure, Invision, Flinto, Principle…
• Benchmark, mood boards, and tree structure tools
  Boards from Invision, iObeya, Pinterest, Dribble, Whimsical…
• Observation and user testing tools
  Lookback, Testapic…
• Survey, analysis, and data processing tools
  Airtable, Google Forms, Optimal Workshop, Surveymonkey, Typeform…
• Design Systems tools
  zeroheight, DSM, Frontify, Nucleo, Specify…
• Documentation tools
  Confluence, Notion, Sliite, Git, Docz…

Coordinating

As the DesignOps team has a keen understanding of the design profession, his or her role is, therefore, key to managing the commercial, human and financial aspects of his or her team. This requires handling and coordinating several elements:

• Staff management in order to properly distribute them and optimize their allocation to projects
• Human resources management with job descriptions, needs assessment, hiring, and integration of newcomers
• Managing turnover by maintaining a good team dynamic through career development and skills upgrading
• Budgetary management of tools but also and above all of the designers in order to estimate and correctly allocate people and key skills

Evangelize

This is a fundamental task in order to hold all the other pillars together. Establishing a design culture within the organization is essential to enable design teams to work in a healthy, productive, and dynamic climate. This evangelization can take many forms:

• Training to help designers (as well as non-designers) to improve their skills by identifying gaps and needs (this can also be done through recruitment)
• Knowledge sharing to foster exchange, spread know-how, and create a culture in which everyone shares with the rest of the team
• Popularising and translating design within other departments in order to help all the teams to understand its value but also and above all to speak the same language
• Amplifying this design value by having the whole optimization adopt the design culture and processes

Ultimately, DesignOps aims to free designers from all the “non-design” tasks they have to do daily so that they can better focus on their core work and thus bring their actual added value to projects.

It should be emphasized that the DesignOps role must be carried out by someone from the design world in order to be able to measure the challenges, constraints, and specificities of these design jobs. The role is always closely linked to design: designing processes taking into account operational and business aspects, allocating resources, understanding needs, collecting inputs, etc. while applying design methods to support these tasks: auditing, interviews, testing, documentation… DesignOps must also continue to produce design in one way or another to remain in touch with the tools and business reality and thus follow its various evolutions.

Design System VS Design Operations

It is easy to make a shortcut between a team working on a Design System and a DesignOps team (and Airbnb is one such case). A Design System does indeed initiate an approach similar to what DesignOps offers, yet there are many nuances:

• On the one hand, through the creation, maintenance, sharing, and connection of a component library and its documentation, the Design System facilitates consistency, cost reduction, and optimization of teamwork on projects.
• On the other hand, if deploying a consistent logical approach across projects and teams requires a sense of rigor, processes, and organization, DesignOps embraces more than the implementation of a Design System. Of course, Design Systems seek to simplify the work of design teams, but DesignOps focuses more on the relationship between the different teams (designers, developers, product owners, etc.) with the same goal of designing and delivering the best possible user experience.

While Design Systems seeks to improve efficiency, DesignOps seeks to solve cultural problems. Therefore, if DesignOps is essentially a cultural process, it is reasonable to consider the Design System as one of the foundations of DesignOps.

DesignOps is therefore the interface between management, designers, developers, and steering teams. That is why it is so crucial to set up the tools and the environment to facilitate all these handovers, team by team, to start each project with more agility, less friction, and better integration. It is not a question of a new department or creating a new stage in the design process, but rather of establishing and making this design culture a ritual within the optimization.

Why DesignOps is important?

Why talk about DesignOps now?

Because design has never been more important in the organization than it is now.

Both in terms of strategy and numbers, its impact is stronger than ever: design teams are growing, design’s role in strategy decisions is increasing, in-house teams are on the rise and tools have never been so powerful and adapted to meet designers’ needs. At the same time, the spread of agile development has required a strong level of integration between design and technology. There is also a real expectation to find a way to deliver design at scale in order to meet the consistency and optimization challenges of increasingly complex projects.

DesignOps is a natural response to these changes, facilitating design deployment, implementation, and evangelization.

The future of DesignOps

One of the remaining questions to ask would be how relevant and necessary it is to have a DesignOps team within your optimization. Three main reasons may drive the answer: a need for growth (the famous scaling up), a need to specialize, and finally a need to protect and support its designers. However, DesignOps is not a ready-made answer that will solve all of a design organization’s problems at the wave of a magic wand. It is a new discipline that is taking hold and establishing itself in the industry. So it is only natural that the role will continue to evolve over time. There will likely be some trial and error to allow DesignOps to develop and find its place, but no matter what, this will always be about getting teams to work better together. Even if we don’t have enough perspective to say so, there are several indications that DesignOps is not just a trend, but a real reaction to a context, an industry, and a way of sustaining design.