DesignOps Summit 2021- How to Design Your Operating Model (Sabrina Mach & Nina Wainright)

 

Not all organizations have a design operating model, but not all organizations are intentional about creating it

  • Often it gets established by accident, or without deliberate thought

In this situation, design gets fitted around other work and priorities of business or technology

  • Worst case scenario design ends up being the means to fix what development has delivered and as a result, organizations struggle to create valuable experiences for customers

Organizations need to be deliberate about shaping and evolving their design operating model – bringing the design, business, and tech perspectives together at an even eye-level

Seeing people use products and not leverage a massive number of features made me question:

  • What have I missed?
  • Why are they not using it?
  • Is this relevant or did I just code for the sake of coding?
  • I learned:
    • The starting point is not to assume that everyone understand design or how design works for business and technology

One of the things that I really advocate is bringing design on an equal eye level with technology and business

I believe that our role as designers (beyond design itself) is to

  • Invite others into the process
  • Create an environment that encourages creativity and collaboration
  • What is the purpose of an intentional design operating model?

The purpose of the design operating model is to:

  • Place the customers at the center of the whole organization, not just designers
  • Focus on customer value outcomes as strong digital product teams
    • Not being driven by outputs which is null value to customers
  • Create the conditions and environment for design to flourish
    • Where design is a cross practice collaboration and embraced by all with no boundaries to collaboration
    • Design is leading rather than following
  • How do we put the customer at the center of everything that we do?
  • How do we get everyone (product teams and the wider organization) to focus on customer value outcomes?
  • How can we create the right conditions and environment for design to flourish?

Design Operating Model

  • It enables us to zero in on the dimensions we need to consider, and the levers we can use to bring design on even eye level with business and technology

4 Dimensions

  1. Customers, users, market – for whom we are creating products and services
  2. Organizational context
  3. Product teams
  4. Practices such as design, business, and technology

3 of these dimensions are within the organization

We may ask:

  • How is the purpose of the design operating model realized?
  • How does the organization place the customers at the center of their strategy?
  • How do teams stay focused on customer value outcomes?
  • How do communities of practice create the environment for design to flourish?
  • How does the organization foster this?

Across the organizational dimension we have 3 levers and constraints affecting change:

  • People: Their capabilities, mindsets and incentives that drive behavior
  • Rituals, processes, tools: Can include things like as a design system
  • Structures: The organization, program, and team, but also the physical environment

However, these levers alone are not sufficient to affect change

  • It requires:
    • Strategic and operational alignment between product teams and the organization
    • Socializing the message across teams, departments, and the organization, to take people on a journey with us and see the value that the design operating model creates

 

Looking closer at this model you will notice that it represents an integrated approach

  • At the core of the operating model our design, business and technology collaborate, jointly shaping strategy and a common governance model
  • This is key to enable organizations to lead by strategy
  • Where we have a common goal

This contrasts with organizations who lead by structure

  • Often built around power, and dividing work by department or supplier

Design operating model

  • We can use it to be intentional about designing our design operating model
  • Also helps us to assess where our organization is today

True Start

  • Design needs to be positioned to co-create with business and technology
    • Design needs to start to land ready for Sprint 0/1 for development
  • Co-creation is critical to reduce redundancy at a mass level and ensure High Design Fidelity

False Start: Digital Product Team

  • Design is not ready at the right time and its suffering because it’s not being considered at first thought
  • In the best-case scenario  Rework
  • In the worst-case scenario Product failure
  • Product team it might not be perceived as having a false start because during all of this they’re under time pressure, technical release pressure, and think that by doing the sprint showcases, they’re doing their jobs

However, no journey can be without it flaws

Today we see a large program of work with teams and over 100 people and they are a high-performing programs with an efficient design operating model

Key to success

  • Teams have visibility of stories 2 sprints ahead of the delivery sprint
    • This creates an environment that gives teams time and space to prepare
      • Carry out research with users
      • Create designs
      • Carry out experiments
      • Create new components for the design system that are ready and added into the that design system, before they are used the first time

 

Today’s process and the key rituals that enable it

  • Prioritization
  • Takes place every 4 weeks
  • Involves all Product Owners from all teams, across the program
    • Sit together and prioritize the stories for the month ahead
  • It’s a big coordination effort, but it provides the needed visibility for teams: 2 sprints ahead of the delivery sprint
  • Allows for adaptability of what comes next at a 4-week cadence

Assigning a “Feature Driver”

  • This can be a Business Analyst, Designer, or Developer who is responsible for feature kick-off and preparation
  • Collaborate with others to achieve it

Research and Solutioning Phase

  • teams create shared understanding of customer needs and collaborate on a solution
  • This is not a linear process
  • Teams iterate to explore and find the best solution

The Design Huddle

  • Key ritual for designers where they do design critiques
  • Discuss everything that happens in the application to be able to create a coherent service design
  • Discuss new components that are needed for the design system

The Front-End Guild

  • Plays an important role in the preparation process
  • The Guild own’s and evolves the design system
    • Has its own backlog of work
  • How does the guild evolve the design system?
    • Designers fill the guild’s backlog, after they discussed the new components in the huddle then creates, documents, and makes the new components usable
      • The new component is ready and added to the design system before it gets used the first time in the delivery sprint

The Delivery Sprint

  • Designers and developers pull components from the design system and deliver the desired feature

Design System

  • Acts as a single source of truth and facilitates collaboration among design and tech
  • This is the ideal scenario but there are still situations where this fails, and a team needs a component faster
  • In that case, teams build the component first, and gets incorporated into the design system afterwards
  • These 6 rituals, processes, and tools fuel the design operating model
  • How did the program get here?
  • How did the team ignite design from day one?
  • How might you create traction?

 

They started with a lightweight design operating model

  • 2 challenges that emerged over time that were caused by team structure, but affected the people within the design operating model
    • Some Product Teams had more design work than others
      • Resulted in some designers being overloaded
    • Designers were not able to play to their strength

This led to the creation of a design pod

The program continued to evolve

  • More people joined and more teams were created
  • This was a change in both people and structure

With this new growth the way design operated wasn’t efficient and effective anymore

  • It created issues for Designers and Developers
    • Designers always had to recreate what they were building
    • Developers had to copy code from different code bases
    • There was no versioning
      • When they copied things, they didn’t know if it is the latest version
    • It also created issues for customers
      • The experience started to become inconsistent

This led to the creation of a design system

How did they gather so much momentum for the creation of the front-end guild?

How did the guild foster the adoption of the design system by others?

  • They did not achieve this by enforcing a top-down approach instead they did this by collaborating
  • Pulling in Designers and Developers from different teams to jointly evolve the design system
  • They used a lightweight bottom-up approach
  • They drove adoption through continuous selling  In some cases when a complex component is added it may require capability building so that teams are able to use the new components
  • The Guild gathered momentum through bi-directional knowledge sharing:
  • This is how they ignited the design system and front-end guild

 

For this new structure – The Design Huddle is very important to enable designers to

  • Understand what happens in other domains
  • Align on a common design and language
  • Negotiate on how to help other domains tackle workload challenges
  • Helping if another design pod is overloaded
  • Tackling capability needs
  • a design operating model must continuously evolve

Design operating model is not just to enable design as a first thought but also to protect the time and headspace of everyone

When you start to look at where the companies are in that unintentional journey, you start to identify

Today – Current challenges where Design is not heard

  • Position design as first thought – in the ideations of solutions, As is Journey, Analysis all different starting point

Next 3 Months – The scramble for quick pain relief

  • Here you want to identify the root causes for the next 3 months
    • Experience Strategy & Outcomes
      • Not messing with the bigger goals just sharpening the focus of where the design needs to be right there and then
    • Status of the Design System
      • Guidelines, tools, framework, rituals, governance etc.
      • In this case – There wasn’t one
    • Design Transparency across team
      • Maximize efficiency cross clusters by minimizing duplication of work
    • Find the relevant tools – quick things that needed to fix the broken system
    • Try to help design be there from the beginning
    • Boost UI development through Hackathons with Designers
      • Designers  Architects, business, developer, UX/UI etc.
      • The “verticals” will start to see the value in cross collaboration

Next 6 Months

  • Starting to optimize the design operating model for the people working in that model
  • Outcomes
    • UX Design is ready Sprint -2 for UI & development
    • Strengthen cross pollination of Design elements
    • UI Baseline Audit process
    • Let designer’s lead

9 Months & Beyond

  • Evolving the operating model and customer experience with design as an equal to business & technology
  • Outcomes
    • Continuous evolution
    • Continuously optimize service delivery for resilience
    • Experience Strategy goals & outcome
    • Establish design as a first thought

Design needs to be to equal and on the same level with business and technology

Design Igniters

Start Intentionally from Day One

  • Start small
    • Try things in individual teams before scaling your
    • Approach does not need to be perfect, it’s the intention that counts

Smart goals & out comes

  • Use your strategy to provide the focus on common goals and outcomes
  • Establish design ownership (within and beyond design) to enable faster adoption

Design needs to be aligned first

  • Common pitfall is assuming everyone is understanding Design and where it is in the organization
    • each team will naturally have a different level of maturity and beyond design people will have their own interpretation
    • Design needs to be one strong consistent voice

Collaborate beyond design

  • It is a default to collaborate within Design
    • However, for design to be successful we need collaborate with others across the whole organization

Continuously evolve and communicate

  • You need to take the whole organization on a journey
  • Continuous evolve the design operating model to adapt to change
  • Need to continuously communicate and sell its value

Create space & mechanisms for creativity

  • Design operating model is not just to enable design as a first thought but also to protect the time and headspace of everyone (within the design) which allows everyone to focus on their respective craft