DesignOps 2020: DesignOps + KPIs = Measure your Impact! (Session Notes)

Speaker: Patrizia Bertini- iXD Design Operations Lead, Intuit

— Patrizia says she is learning a lot from DesignOps2020 and hopes to add two cents to conversation

— Patrizia would describe herself as a big experimenter trying new things
  • Like imagining new ways of old things
— She thrives in change and innovation
— She has stuck longest with Inuit, as one of the oldest financial technology companies
  • May have heard of Quickbooks
  • Around for 30-40 years
— Why? Intuit has continued to innovate

— First, two questions: Have you ever asked what is your impact and DesignOps footprint?
— DesignOps does things we do for a reason

—Let’s start with a bigger question of what is DesignOps?
  • Focusing on “What is Design” would take several days

— Operations refers to the action of transforming  resources/data to create better results
— Goal to create and deliver value to customers in a systematic way

— Who are customers getting value from items generated from DesignOperations?
— Three main customers: The Business, Design Leader, Design team
  • Each action is a balance between how three actors are working and operating together
  • All projects focused on balance between making business teams and design leaders happy

— What does value mean though? Does it refer to money? Is value = worth?
— Per Patrizia, value is really more “how much” people perceive something’s worth.
— To make it more explicit: look at photo of run-down house.
  • Unless you spent childhood in house, you see no value in house
  • If you have amazing summer of your life, than the house is valuable
— Value is a quality and not equal to worth
  • Quality emerges from a relationship

— From the book of “Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance “:
  • Value we deliver are a result of quality in a relationship

— Value is not universal, it depends on the context
  • It is dependent on experience

— Context is what determines priorities and strategies
— Look at two orange dots, one on left larger, and one smaller
  • Actually they are the same
  • Only context changes
—Helps us make sense of reality of how we create strategies and priorities and
— Help determine what is valuable for customers

— If value is relational and context determine priorities. What can we actually measure
— Efficiency is measurable

— Performance equivalent to input minus output
— If you look a light bulb, and think about energy spent to switch on light bulb. Output is brightness
— Performance is for less energy to get more brightness
— Efficiency has dimensions that matter to DesignOps

— For DesignOps consider triangle of Cost/Resources, Quality Scope, Time
— These are how we operate on efficiencies
— How we use triangle will give use idea of how to use KPIs and measurements in the future

— How to measure performance, use KPIs
— KPIs quantify efficiencies and measure how much operation is driving value for customers

— Per Patrizia, the worst is now done, now let’s consider who to put things in practice
Few steps are essential in measuring impact
  • First, know your strategic goals (if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there)
—With no clarity on strategic goals, you will have impact, but not right impact you want, based off the context you are in

— Know and define your customers.
  • Business
  • Design Lead
  • Design Team
— Know strategic context of each stakeholder

— Know efficiency dimensions that matter and how they are influenced
— Look at dimensions you can influence and act on, and compromise of performance
— Adding output

— For every customer get certain values
— The two triangles form a system. Change a part and whole system changes

 

 

— Creating a system made of relationships that are context based and are used to create value
— This ends in a complex system

 

— Magic of DesignOps is getting into system and figuring out where to start in improving system
— Here is where Patrizia starts transformation and creates value
— One or two efficiency metrics

— Change in one dimension will impact other customers
— Opportunities are created over and over
— Eventually get unique footprint of your unique organization, and how DesignOps creates value for the organization
— No DesignOps KPIs
  • Don’t exist as there are only KPIs that work with you in specific time
  • With systems you solve one problem, and generate another. Goal is to manage the system, not fix it.

— Seven months ago Patrizia heard from designers the follwing complaints
  • User testing too painful
  • No clear process
  • Asking people what’s wrong and getting an endless list
— Need to ask yourself what is the real problem that is causing the pains there
  • Need to elevate altitude and take helicopter view
—Problem: Designers  not doing designers work.
— Without data, even with problem identified, you can’t identify performance and. Impact that needs to be made.

 

— Focused on specific task of E2E recruiting user testing was taking too long for project
  • An effective extra week for designers, and working on non-design work with coding participants, scheduling sessions etc.
— Who has feeling pain the most?
  • The design team, which felt long hours, and focusing on irrelevant tasks, and no time to analyze data collected
— To solve:
  • Use hypothesis driven systems thinking to find a pattern for change, that could be used to maximize impact that is being driven

— From her own deck, hypothesize was that we need to boost operational efficiency to improve quality of research and decrease lead time
— Also concern that she couldn’t meet the actual metrics
Clearly problem with design teams and time was something that needed to be transformed
— Investigating various options

 

— Recognized if she gave designers more time and would improve quality
— More time could create more quality of what needed to be done, needed better quality design
  • Better experience
  • Less churn
  • Increase speed of innovation

— Efficiencies spiraled out, and it impacted each other.
— What we missed today is not applying system thinking but linear thinking
— Relationships are not linear, and combination of factors produce a footprint
— Process is highly addictive, but you can prove value of DesignOps to the organization, and adding less input and more output

— Find target, efficiency and context

— Three main takeaways
  • Know you unique context
  • KPIs are relational and depend on relationships
  • Always use hypothesis—Know where you want to go, and how you evolve
—This is how you create impact, and sell value of DesignOps to system

Questions

  1. Relationship between DesignOps KPIS and Design KPIS? Is DesignOps more responsible for system measures?
— All connected
— Created Design KPI system that is related to business KPI system
— Find priorities, based off strategic envrionment in
— If KPIs are competing, there is an issue. They need to be in relation with each other
  1. Translation of DesignOps works to business KPIs?
— Example of how working-days translate into how teams spend time and quantify value of designer not doing design work, in terms of time, costs, and relationships
— DesignOps should serve as bridge between design and business actors in order to create value