Design Operations
Getting work done well in a fast-paced agile environment
I truly enjoy solving process problems and as an Experience Lead and Manager for a large team, I get the shape and evolve how we work together, with other teams, and across the organization.
My team is large, but we’re outnumbered by about 20:1 in a fast-paced agile environment. To scale the value of design, we needed to standardize and streamline the way we work, collaborate, and create impact.
How We Work
- Worked with designers, engineers, and business stakeholders to identify opportunities to optimize our design process from initiation, through to testing and delivery.
- Defined purposeful checkpoints to ensure the quality of the design work while not creating bottlenecks for delivery.
- Established a peer-based audit process to enforce the use of the common design toolkits and established patterns and visual language which helps with engineering efficiency.
How We Collaborate
- Established weekly knowledge shares (conference summaries, field research insights, etc.) to facilitate cross-pollination of knowledge.
- Evangelized and helped establish, a robust design system which serves as the single source of truth for designers and engineers, along with establishing, and periodically evolving, the governance model.
- Built an openly available research repository that systematically pulls in insights across all product lines’ research and usability studies.
- In addition to encouraging organic collaboration, established a weekly standing design collaboration sessions where projects with a particularly gnarly problem can collaborate on solutions with the larger design team.
How We Create Impact
- Created design quality metrics for evaluating work and tracking those metrics on a month-by-month basis.
- Capturing and sharing success stories of user-centered design processes across the organization.
- Recognizing and rewarding teams and team members that exemplify design best practices in their work.
- Established an on-boarding program for new product designers, allowing them to get up-to-speed on how we work and collaborate, and connect with people across the organization that can provide advice and support.
