DesignOps 2020: Automatization for Large Enterprise Teams (Session Notes)

Speaker: Farid Sabitov, Senior Experience Designer, EPAM Systems

— Farid is an Enterprise Designer at EPAM Systems and  has ten years in design experience
— Farid has been involved in the growth and scaling up of products in different domains
  • His focus now is on growing DesignOps in the design discipline
— The goal for this talk is about large teams, and how automatization can improve their performance

— Farid works in EPAM Systems, which has 40,000 plus employees and offices in different companies including Minsk.
— He is sharing his story and how DesignOps can work in consultancy work

— The plan for the talk is to provide a definition of DesignOps consultancy and a proposed approach
— The talk will include practical advice, and personal advice
— The end goal is to motivate you and your organization to invest in automation for your DesignOps practice

— Farid did a lot of research and came up with a definition of what a DesignOps consultancy is
— His view is that a DesignOps consultancy is focused on operations inside/outside design teams to help increase speed/efficiency and quality of deliverables
  • It’s not focused just on designers but how the designers work with other teams
— The first part of a DesignOps consultancy is focused around the people of the organization, which includes talking about the culture of the team
— The second part of a DesignOps consultancy focuses on practices, specifically governance models and how they can be used to figure out most efficient path and making sure everyone is aligned
— The final part of a DesignOps consultancy focuses on tools like Design Systems that are used by the organization

— To begin, let’s think about the DesignOps consultancy approach and why there is a need to automate
  • First one needs to figure out challenges Design Team has
  • Next, one needs to optimize the process, by implementing design-thinking processes to come up with hypotheses and test them out
  • Then, one needs to confirm practices can be scaled through the organization (for instance needing to make sure proper onboarding is available)
  • Finally, automation needs to be considered- How can we automate routine work on more important things for research and innovation

— First there needs to be an assessment of the current situation. The DesignOps consultancy will have different workshops with the design teams and will find weak-spots in team and figure out where team is at overall
— The consultancy will then come up with a roadmap for improvement

— Farid is now going to review of all tools EPAM uses, and encourages attendees to put these tools into practice in their organization
— Design Handoff process as example
  • Get feedback from everyone in process (Business Analysts, Design Managers, the designers themselves)
  • The Farid articulates the main challenge: How to make sure the hand-off process seamless and nimble and that the production process is the same as the design process?

 

—Main key components to think of and start  to understanding the process are as follows:
  • People: What kind of roles are involved in hand-off process? Do we have the right people on team based off skills? Do we have communication gaps between other disciplines?
  • Activities: What needs to be performed to achieve the result? What main steps need to be articulated (i.e. checklists for deliverables)
  • Tools: Helping us know that quality of deliverables are better and tools are helping us make them. Tools should work for whole organization.
    • Different tools can be used to accomplish this
  • Ceremonies: Key component in analyzing process, to understand what is done to make decisions together
  • Deliverables: What is created by specific teams, and how what is created is used by others
—One can also create a co-creation session to help understand key components of the process

— There are different ways to visualize the process
  • Tools can be a pipeline/workflow/journey map
— One also needs to think how much time is spent on each phase of project
  • (i.e. time spent on each phase of design handoff, tool-sets used, actions performed, actors involved, hypotheses considered)

— Once the analysis work is done, the team can have a clear view of time spent, communication gaps in the team, and manual work that can be automated

 

— For optimization, it is important to test all hypotheses people came up with, including feedback from all team members
— The assessment phase begins with journey map, where you could see hypotheses you cam up with
— Focusing on design linters helps make sure deliverables are all consistent

— For testing the results of the new process, find participants, and develop scenarios for testing
— After each test one will get sense of how much would be saved from new method through metrics like ease of learning

— Feedback from the example Farid provided, included ways to reduce time spent
— Always consider the price of scaling, and tools that may require payments, as a significant part of time is spent on adaptation and onboarding

 

— At this point, Farid understood there is a hypothesis that can be tested, and got initial feedback
— Bringing the project to scale involved making sure hypothesis could be scaled for organization as a whole to let people see best practices

— Farid went back to the journey map, some components of the process were already tested
  • Thinking of detailed flows, you need to share detailed flow to achieve results, and provide more notes to add during flow
  •  Notes that can be added to the flow deal with automation, templates, and things that can be re-used, so designers don’t reinvent the bike for every single process

— Detailed flows start as a reference point, so designers have a base of knowledge, and a source of feedback for other designers
— For the example, Farid got feedback from front-end team on how to improve the process
— More detailed way of seeing things, by capturing the time spent on each task in the process
  • Time is important: by capturing time spent, tools used, actors involved, you can see where spots in process and can automate them

— For other deliverables, make sure to prepare onboarding materials and create a page in knowledge base that explains why the practice is important
— Have video to explain process at designers
  • Have list of all resources to master process
  • Have FAQ section at bottom to scale process for entire organization
— Gathering everything in once place in FAQ helps people see everything. More detailed flows are placed into a one location
  • This is not about efficiency but unlocking new possibilities in learning new information
—  A best practices page can motivate other designers to learn more and better ways of doing things

— The goal of automation phase is to see routine tasks people perform, and come up with tools to automate routine work to let designers focus on research and creativity

— For a practical example, let’s focus on Figma, as it is best tool in design for prototyping, with a great API,  online community, and new plug-ins every day
— There are ways to integrate with other disciplines as well. Different levels and things to focus on
  • Integrations can be used to automate different tools and automate, and plug-ins to automate work
  • Scripts can be used to test things out for a team and engage in team feedback

 

— For Figma scripts, there is a challenge where developers didn’t know what to use for Figma prototype
  • Decided to create script to generate list of all components for prototype and user story
— When thinking about value and metrics, you can think of design librarians spending twelve hours per week searching for a particular plug-in, and you can get a sense of how much of the budget is saved by automation
— Quality of deliverables more involved. Designers will not miss anything. Integration with git-hub will occur
  • Showing designers new versions of components and whether any thing developed by product team

— Regarding Figma plug-ins, Farid developed his product to be more specific, and got lot of feedback that spacing between elements was more consistent
  • Getting the right-spacing manager for instance

— For the Figma API, focus on tools to develop Design Tokens that can be used
  • He added a component ID to see visual inconsistencies
  • See the slide for more details
— The example exists of the Figma Flutter preview, where designers are doing screenshots through mobile and checking consistency of designs
  • Designers spending too much time to take screenshots, at the expense of their design work

— For more insights regarding plug-ins, follow Farid on Twitter or the EPAM Continuum Twitter Account

 

— In conclusion, think how to connect difference tools to each other for the best DesignOps Experience

— For the DesignOps consultancy phases, help find weak spots process and allow them to be automated

— How to start journey in automating:
— Consider the company maturity level
  • You must have a clear knowledge base with materials and everyone works with each other
  • Your next focus will be on scaling knowledge for whole organization and mentoring groups
  • The last part to be aware of is open-source projects, and not only having practices and scaling, but also investing in automation

— Farid presents a list of large enterprise level companies that are investing in organization
  • Leader is AirBnb, which shares their knowledge with other designers
— Investing in tools and automation will help with market recognition

— Check out personal statistics on Medium:
  • Articles on automations for design plug-ins attract interest more than  design case studies

— In the end several pieces of advice
  • Analyze your own process
  • Find ways to automate routine work
  • Let people focus on high-priority and high value items
  • Focus on research innovation and creativity
  • Important for design orgs to know how much onboarding time takes
  • When you share with the broader design community, you attract best talent in the world- for example, Spotify investing in their design community
  • In the end, DesignOps gives time for creativity research and innovation

— The world is changing, and speed/quality are now a great competitive advantage
—Operations is gaining popularity, and speed/quality will distinguish people from the rest
— Inspired by how front-end/back-end developers evolve and sharing everything with the community as a whole
— Help design discipline in world grow and evolve
— Focus on small details
— Let’s stay in touch and share assessment framework to focus on,  it will be especially useful for large organization and moving ball to next level.

 

 

Questions

  1. Thoughts on rigid connection to tools and APIs? How to cope with tool dependency when company has already incorporated certain tools?
— Farid has an analysis around tools like Sketch, Figma, and doing analysis of how tool will be able to remain market leaders
— You need to make analysis in next three years, you can also check market stats to see if tool will remain relevant.
  1. Organization works in cyber-security and can’t host cloud-based prototypes. Is there a localized version of Figma?
— The question can only really be answered by Figma
— But in terms of potentially adapting  a design tool-set, Figma has high level of security and allowing certification, and available for other tools
World is changing and need to adapt fast
  1. How would you define automation? What is ROI of automation benefits?
— Start with simple things. Do more research with your team helps you discover issues they are facing
— DesignOps consulting will have opportunities to solve these challenges and refine the definition of automation.
— As for ROI, it’s really high, especially for large organizations.
  • For team of 200 people, and if you had team for script and plug-in you can calculate how much time and people impacted by process
  • Market of design automations is not competitive compared to other disciplines, so investment is relatively easy
  • Small integrations, based on organization, allow for large ROI
  1. What are skills to be efficient in executing automation?
— Farid understands DesignOps consultant shouldn’t typically be able to code, but coding knowledge is a plus, as the knowledge provides a bigger view on how to integrate different systems
  • Designers with coding experience can also supervise development team and guide development in informed way
  1. Given quick technology landscape challenges, how much time investment in automation is too much?
— Important to come up with your own maturity metrics, based off focus areas like design systems
— Different types of levels from design library on
— If you see you invest enough for focused area. You will have will integrated design system and code
— Create templates and approach to work more efficiently and have knowledge sharing
  1. Does process imply part-time development team? What model used at EPAM?
— As mentioned, coding is a plus
— Give development to those focused on development
— Developing plug-ins is relatively easy to work on and won’t require too much in terms of skills
  1. How to perform audits for level of maturity of organization to do frame work? How big/small does org need to be to present assessment today?
— Assesment framework has four levels (based on Lean UX, and on product rather than operations)
— Each level requires different team configuration.
— Can be used with a small team, but need assessment to figure out the best process
— Would love to share assessment framework and governance model