Day 3 Session Notes–Use These Words and Count These Things

— Glad to be here and let’s started with the game show

— With broad range of experiences:

  • Samta Menghrajani: Design Operations Leader, Chief of Staff to VP of Design
  • Amanda Dideminicis: Director, Digital UX Design, Marriot International
  • Victoria Johnston: Head of Design Ops at NatWest Banking Group
  • Peter Boersma: DesignOps Consultant

— Buzzwords surfaced for round in screenshot above show what designers can’t say

  • Amanda: Help understand where design team is spending majority of time, and if it’s going to right project and high impact and help make room for additional resources
  • Peter: Tracking resource of design ops initiatives lets you provide data informed stories that you are doing

— Introduce time constraint

— Samta: One would be if DesignOps asked for by function and not just project manager, if you need actual employee from function, that function is real

— Victoria: Watch how you are asked for and whether DesignOps is being engaged to fight fires, or being asked to look upstream to prevent problems and not just being a delivery function

  • Defining problem scope and approaches

— Peter:

  • Second half of considering what data is available what gets tracked and use it to best ability. If more is needed, define specific things to monitor and track those items— either manually or by kind of automation

— Amanda:

  • What executive management wants to know and what do they need to know and how to use that tell story for story to support design teams, whether additional people or budget

— Victoria

  • Consider why change is being made, as something not feeding directly into other priorities or is it too soon to change?
    • Or adjustment to data being collected and framing same information being captured
    • Missing relevant info to tell story

— Peter

  • Change what you track, when what you were tracking lost its value, and can even predict it and new things to track

— Santa

  • Quality over quantity to make sure what is tracked is showing impact, and spend time doing the work, as opposed to tracking
    • Focus too much on process, then too much overhead versus actual doing the work

— Amanda

  • Would say unique for every team, but generally keep it high level and leadership team wants digestible info, but if curious will ask you to dig in and story to tell

— Buzzword Blitz-off as pairing off

  • List of words you can’t use with responses, and if mystery buzzword said, other team can step in

— Victoria:

  • Think first consideration is that it’s consistent and working in siloed team and are you measuring same thing and talking in same way

— Peter:

  • Used in past showed results of initiatives or programs or progress for each initaitive and progress towards them and on Miro board so was accessible
    • Design leadership as well as ops team

— When reporting on design program data

  • Santa:
    • Figure out who data is relevant to, and who needs it and who to cascade to in a sense. Message would differ per audience— communicating up or down, and tailoring message based on audience
    • Be mindful of frequency and depends on situation, along with channel and mode of frequency for adequate communicate
  • Peter
    • Pass
  • Victoria:
    • Needs to be information sent and how to be engaged with information
    • Published via email and trailing month’s data

— Amanda:

  • When product teams proactively engaging with you, as opposed to coming to you reactively for design support and getting engagement goin is really cultural shift
    • Shows people bought into design org and want engagement from designers
  • Design team collaborating across all UX managers and directors, and not working on silos

— VIctoria:

  • Not jut how early in chain design engaged, and how high up ladder design sits in, and c-suite representations shows volume of buy-in
  • How broad and diverse specialist disciplines in UI
    • Breadth and depth up ladder of org

 

— Peter:

  • Have seen design leaders not willing to let go of design org agnostic responsiblities, for things like career ladders or design process
    • IT is not willing to make investments for measurements to elevate design

— Santa

  • Understanding of design Ops and core of company and designOps function and what ops does and different than program management and overlap with design leader and different area
  • Challenges and roles for DesignOps

— That concludes the game, and encourage you to use plain language to communicate value