DesignOps Summit 2021 – State of DesignOps Panel (Meredith Black, Tim Gilligan, Bria Alexander)

Emcee for panel session: Alana Washington – Senior Design Manager, Uber Freight

Speakers:

Meredith Black – Co-founder and Chief Community Officer, DesignOps Assembly

Tim Gilligan – Design Chief of Staff, Capital One

Bria Alexander – Design Program Manager, Adobe

Alana: I want to hear from each of you, about what you’re passionate about, what’s really top of mind for all of you, inside or outside of the DesignOps World?

Meredith: I launched a podcast called Reconsidering – Why I’m so passionate about this podcast is because I think, like so many other people out there, during the pandemic, there are so many people re-evaluating their lives; what we want to do for work, figuring out if a career change is there, personal values, and re-shifting your career course

• The podcast focuses on this topic, and we don’t have all the answers. We’re interviewing authors, journalists, and experts in these fields, and learning what they know about this and sharing it with the world and I’m figuring out what I want in this process as well

Bria: I’m incredibly excited about the capabilities of Adobe’s Airtable – It can combine a lot of our tools we use at Adobe (Wikis, Notion, note taking etc.) We use a lot of DropBox paper, Microsoft Word Suite and replacing it all in one tool where designers can go, in one place, at one time, and find everything from notes for the different cadences we have. Depending on your team, you have a lot of different cadences, a lot of different team meetings, resources for the team, and sometimes I use it I use it as its intended as a database or ticketing system to try a build a buffer between the designers I support and the entire wide world of people that want resources (product teams, engineers, even designers)

• So, for me what’s on top of my mind is the advancement of tooling

Tim: I’m passionate about purpose-built communities, like this one, and what models from corporate and distributed systems of experience delivery are extensible outside of the context that we work in from 9 to 5 and how we tend to complicate those systems when we bring them outside of the corporate space. I think there are powerful connections to be understood and examined between more intimate and scaled experiences. I can’t wait to see what happens as we continue to explore together.

 Alana: Which of the DesignOps skillset are you seeing or hearing about being most underutilized at the moment or maybe most over indexed on?

Meredith: Underutilized – this might be a controversial response, but I think for those of us who have been in design OPS for a while, we had to do everything, we had to be super scrappy but now Design people recognized the need and want more operational skillsets and more Ops people in their organization. Other functions (Product, HR, Sales) are observing this and wanting it too, but instead of leveraging DesignOps to help build out a process, a lot of these different functions are building their own Ops teams and I think it’ll lead to getting a little chaotic and messy and people under appreciating what Ops is because there’s almost going to be too many people in the field. Yes, there is a need for Ops and there are a ton of people who are passionate about it, working hard to quickly get it into their companies, but how do we take a step back, slow down and think about how this could benefit everyone in the long-term vs just throwing a band aid on something?

Alana: Have you witnessed any organizations bringing these Ops teams together and what have you seen be successful there?

 Meredith: I don’t know I can say I’ve seen success yet because it’s still new and there are certain organizations who are pulling them all into ProductOPS as opposed to DesignOps and are trying it out, but I haven’t seen it come to fruition yet because it’s only several months in. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over time and what those skillsets look like: Are we ready for that? Are we equipped for that? We’re constantly reiterating and reevaluating, and it’ll be interesting to see how DesignOps morphs, how it becomes defined and what the impact of that looks like within organizations.

Alana: Bria, you mentioned your mantra – “where you start, isn’t where you’ll end up”- I’m curious following on that thread Meredith mentioned, in the micro where have you experienced pivots in your own career and helped chart them towards a preferable evolution of your role as you have it

Bria: At the very beginning of my career before I joined DesignOps I was a Sales Enablement Program Manager working a lot on tactical sales techniques for software sales. It was a lot of fun, but I found the hyper competitive environment tiring and got burnt out. When I was thinking about what moves I wanted to make when leaving the sales environment, I was looking at where my transferable skills would find a home. I’ve been program managing for a long time and when I first came across DesignOps the thing that appealed to me most was the brand experience side of it. When I stepped into the role, I was pleasantly surprised by how much of it relates [to my experience in sales]. I’m a passionate tools person even in my previous role I was always in a smartsheet, Google slide. I have a finance background so I was super familiar with the macros of excel and I was happy to see those transferable skills could be used in such a creative way or UX first way, which was piquing my interest as to where I wanted to grow my career at the time. There are so many transferable skills for what we do here

Alana: Tim, you’ve been at Capital One for over 4 years now and I’m curious what skill sets you’ve seen lend well to DesignOps practitioners and as you think about the DesignOps practitioner of the future – what skill sets do you think they’re going to need to continue to develop and grow into

Tim: I think for me and my OPS journey especially at Capital One, my first formal OPS role, a multi-hyphenate skill set (bringing a bit of finance, bringing a bit of culture from HR) and along with that multi-hyphenate skill set I think there’s a demand to have a desire to serve the team, the process, or the organization – that’s a powerful motivator.

As I’ve grown my own team, I looked to identify where I’m weaker, and then bring in those skill sets. I think as Ops team scale there’s an opportunity to create complimentary systems with the operators that you bring in. As we scale more as an industry, as a discipline, there will be more opportunities for specialization and nuance, but those that are most successful today are those who set clear boundaries, know their value and interests, and can craft strategies to turn their influence into outcomes

About the future– Tied to what Meredith said, I think we spend a lot of time optimizing design for the organization and I’m curious about the opportunity for us to design the organization, flip it on its head, to look out to our partner groups, to really introduce more rigor in the business and the PML, not only how design influences the PML, but how can we redefine how the business does the business. I think those are places in DesignOps or whatever we become, may be super powerful

• Organizational strategy, finance, those deep skills of knowing how to maneuver business will be powerful to future folks entering the field

Alana: When you say you hire folks who can fill in for the skill sets you don’t have – how does that impact career pathing and how you’re thinking about the levels and finding a way up for those folks. That was something we got in our survey a lot “how do we chart the course of saying – this is my strategy, this is my boundary, but what’s next?

Meredith: This is a hard question to answer, like I said before, we’re all still navigating this, but the one thing, in terms of growing your role within this field is to look for the business opportunities. That’s where you’re going to grow. It’s such a new role within the industry, so it’s hard to say there is a clear trajectory because we don’t really know what the top is yet – Is that a head of DesignOps? Is that a COO at some point? – We don’t really know, so I will say look for the business opportunities where you can make the most impact and it doesn’t have to be within the design organization but the greater organization. Show them what DesignOps can do and what you can do. Be your own salesperson to move and when the need come or the demand happens, you’re there front and center  You’re your own best advocate and I think DesignOps people had a hard time advocating for themselves because we’re always behind the scenes. I think it’s important to identify those opportunities, identify what the business needs are, and advocate for it

Bria: The only thing I would add is that a broader scope doesn’t necessarily mean you’re having a greater impact. The awesome opportunity with our industry being so new is that we can basically make it what we want. How lucky are we! As far as we can extend ourselves is as far as we can allow ourselves to go

Meredith: (Bill Burnett) If you know what your jobs going to be 5 to 10 years from now isn’t that kind of boring?

• We have the opportunity to change this
• We have the opportunity to define what this means

The fact that there are more people who are interested in doing this compared to 5years ago, shows that were on the right path, were on the right trajectory and I think there’s only going to be more of a demand for us in the future