DesignOps 2020: Practice What You Preach (Session Notes)

Speaker: Michelle Morrison, Design Operations Manager, Dropbox

—Michelle is excited to be present and wished she was physically in person in New York to be together with other conference attendees.

—Michelle’s background is as a Type A middle-child, spreadsheet-lover, who loves process

  • DesignOps field has either fulfilled processes neuroses or fulfilled her strengths

 

—At a high-level, DesignOps deal with best ways to work and reducing stress for  the design team.
  • Through tools, organizational planning, practice design, and other methods.

—DesignOps is about identifying what do great practices look like from perspective of who designs them. This approach has been pressure-tested by the crisis that has afflicted everyone in 2020.

— After designing processes for many years, Michelle received a set of common. That feedback included the following themes:
  • Processes are scary
  • People don’t want to be told what to do
  • Conflict arises when people are not on same page
— Lots of passionate people in field, but:
  • People feel zapped
  • Communities feel fragile
  • Norms shifted  have dramatically
— DesignOps needs to evolve ways the field currently operates
— Michelle provide project of shifting Dropbox to distributed model from HQ model as an example, and how Designops was used to help achieve this transition.

What’s the Difference Between Process and Practice

—A few definitions of process versus practice:
—An example of a process is assembling an IKEA bookshelf, which is operationally effective:
  • All products are flat-packed, which allows innovation in a unified  company-wide way and creates cost-savings.
  • The process helps IKEA scale, and every IKEA products comes with instruction manual, tools, and screws to build it.
—But have you assembled an IKEA bookshelf?
  • Obviously yes, given Michelle is speaking to designers.
  • Instruction manual of bookshelf and how you build bookshelf are different experiences

 

—Process: Step by step-guide to achieve a certain outcome.
—IKEA instructions can help assemble book-shelf with a step-by-step guide.
  • This is necessary, but doesn’t allow creative or critical thinking.
—Examples of Process include:
— Assigning a lead builder for instruction manual, and helper who unpacks, and organzies. Know process you work at. Find lead builder and interpreter of instructions

 

— As move from one big step to another, do checks to see where you are marking mistakes
  • Following steps, and critical look, avoid arguments and pain-points

—Practices: About approach and guardrails you use for success
  • Focus on resolving conflict
  • Identifying who does what
— Guard-rails to help people become innovators
  • Some solutions require process, but for designers their work is primarily involved in practice
—Why should you care as a designer?
  • Your craft informs practices for how to perform ambitious work together
  • Doing right, you will reduce work arounds for team

Thoughts on the Future

—Michelle is reading a lot about the future of the work. The current theory is enabling people to work from hands to heads to hearts, and allowing people to work better.

 

—An example of how Drop-Box is implementing these practices
Dropbox building a more enlightened way of working
  • What does that mean though? It sounds abstract.
—Partnered with Jennifer Brook to clarify what working is
  • Expanding individual team agency to create more equitable and inclusive work and humane.
  • Understanding relationship to navigate tensions to stay true where you are.
—Tensions Trying to Navigate Today, include:
  • Chaos to Harmony
  • Collective Fatigue to Stability
  • Others
—Key to develop cultural spaces where people can work together
  • Culture is how to act on your beliefs
  • Community is who shares common sets of beliefs
  • Practices allow you to act on the beliefs

— Michelle’s question: What is greatest opportunity design ops?
— Michelle’s answer: If you get it right, teams more resilient and greater impact, and more value
— Shift to virtual first and changing aspect of community and culture is uniquely scary
  • Looked to DesignOps to help get through it
— When DesignOps gets it right, DesignOps takes pain out of process of making the transition
  • Guardrails to protect time space, and well-being of designers
  • Common practices help everyone work together

DesignOps Tactics and Strategies

—Time and energy are the most precious resource that Dropbox’s creatives have.

—To help people with Zoom fatigue:
  • Establishing team curfews and encouraging people to sign-off and let people come in fresh in the morning
  • Core collaboration hours to allow non-linear work-days, and providing flexibility for people to be employees and caregivers
—To help with employee autonomy:
  • Companies that let employees work autonomously makes them more productive (as opposed to the get butts in seats in model)
  • Prioritize mutual trust and outcomes as opposed to just activities
  • As opposed to measuring activity, measure impact of work (i.e. improving adoption of practice of X)
  • Minimize people simply marking themselves as present, and encouraging smart goals and impact
—To foster well-being:
  • Weekly well-being check-ins (Slack message with emoji and emotional bandwidth)
  • Allow people to support each other. Emoji can tell you a lot about what’s going on with a person
  • Instating monthly mental health days and work-being. Allowing day for rest and reflection
  • Schedule breaks for quarterly planning, and having plan to recover after sprints
—To get crisp communication between team members:
  • Dialing through Zoom, doesn’t get you office whispers that provide key communication
  • Being intentional about communications and inclusive communication style
  • Managing loneliness with team and people
  • Lean into asynchronous communication. Focus on sharing what you mean and getting transparency, when not physically together
  • Have check ups
—To build out products
  • For 2020 Dropbox focused on fundamentals, and prioritized well-being, mindset, and communication required
  • There is a golden opportunity to reduce pain and increase purpose of people

 

Questions

  1. Is use of Dropbox templates a rigid process?
—Templates can make notebook very good, and illustrations on brand team. Not necessarily rigid, but if rigid create templates to induce creativity
  1. How to make workers feel safe communicating vulnerably?
—Two things to keep in mind: first people have been working from home for most of year. Second, there are two groups of people working from home, people who already had office connection, and people who had no official office connection.

 

—Theme is that what fosters belonging and psychological safety, are relationships. When you have relationships, invest with them and create space for how you are working with others.

 

—If leader  communicates value is important, people follow. One team use buddy system to communicate how this can be done. If you prioritize it, it needs to be part of approach, and risk of unheard voices.

 

  1. How many hours are allocated for collaborative time? Patterns for when. You schedule in week?
—Big blocks on calendar for “do not schedule” (DNS) time and wrap-up time. Schedule guarantees hours allocated for work you need to.
—Biggest thing that changed band-width has been putting DNS time on calendar. Sets boundaries and let people know you have work to do?
  1. How to share emoji feeling and bandwidth without doom-spiraling?
—Have slack integration of how you are doing, and what can be celebrated. Do emoji exercise as a wrap-up to reflect on week, and having planning session on Mondays
—Have leaders model behavior, and let people say how they feel. An emoji is a safe way to be expressive without being specific.
  1. Measured team’s feelings on Slack? What to measure? And what to do when off Slack?
—Measure with Slack and Bandwidth (1 is great, 10 is terrible). When you have someone say they are a ten, find things both of you can say no to, together.
—The bar is excellence in the field. Looking at signal and individual check-ins to achieve the best possible performance.
  1. Expanding on team curfews and effectiveness?
—Have working hours set for specific time.For scheduled curfews, you wouldn’t be expected to respond to anything until work day starts again

 

—You are not on the hook to respond to calls. The initiative was piloted by the brand team, and became  a company norm. If you take rest seriously you will be higher performer through they day.
  1. I work at Google, and can’t use Slack. Are there any tools similar to Slack or bots that can be used?
Tons of plug-ins are available. If this-then-that add in a g-chat rule and way to social engineer what you want and forms to meet regularly and bi-weekly.