DesignOps Summit 2021- Advice for DesignOps Employee #1 (Amy Zuccaro)

Director of Design Operations, SAP Design Systems

I’m here to give you advice as Design Ops employee #1 in your organization

  • 70% of DesignOps teams are one person only
  • I started at SAP 2 years ago as Design Ops Employee #1
  • My goal today is to help you build a strong foundation for your practice in the organization you’re currently in and the next ones you’ll be in, in your future career endeavors

My Story

  • I spent 13 years with Semantic, starting off as a Senior Designer and ended up as the Head of Global Consumer Ecommerce UX
  • My team sold the Norton products online
  • I managed the people and made sure they had what they needed to be successful, optimize the processes, help set the design strategy, and dealt with the workflow – how we interacted with other teams in our organization
  • I left Norton to join SAP about 2 years ago, as Head of Design Ops for the New Ventures and Technology group – we were responsible for future proofing SAP

Future Proofing SAP

  • One way we did this was through the Venture studio
  • We have 4-6 employee led product teams
  • Functioned essentially as a startup company within the giant framework of SAP
  • They get funding, unique branding, and they’re left a little bit to their own devices on how to run their companies and eventually get on the SAP price list
  • We broke out our design team and we ran it like an agency model
  • Our essential design team → we would loan designers to these companies to help them get started
  • Once they were at a maturity level where they could hire their own designers, those people became part of our extended design team → they were not out there by themselves, they could still be part of the design community
  • A Couple months ago I moved to the SAP Design System team, leading the design operations for the team that builds the design systems for all our SAP products
  • I’ve learned a few things over the years and even though the teams I’ve worked on were vastly different there’s a few common threads that run through them
    • To be successful you must break down your approach to the simplest questions.

Where to start on day 1?

  • Do you look at the people and organization and see how things are organized?
  • Do you try to tackle the tooling your designers are using?
  • Do you set up a research process?
  • Do you fix workflow?

It’s overwhelming

My first piece of advice is to start where the biggest problems are

#1 Understand the Root Cause

  • Ask yourself what was the catalyst that got your head count approved, why are you here, what made leadership see the value of design operations
    • If you understand the root cause of why you were hired, it will make your job a lot easier
  • Meet with your team and figure out where or what in their job needed more love and find a solution

#2 Set the boundaries, and respect them

  • Establish roles and responsibilities and know who does what. Then stick to it
  • Establish the roles and responsibilities early on and if issues arise → be transparent and communicate

#3 Make lots of friends

  • Talk to anyone and everyone who will take your call, both inside and outside your organization
  • Have one on one meetings with your team – build trust
  • When you listen to people, they will tell you all kinds of things
  • You need to have friends everywhere in every department → This will help you find out how things get done in your company

#4 Find the gaps and fill them

  • If you listen, people will tell you what’s broken, and help you understand how you can fix it
  • You’ll only know where the friction in your process is, if you talk to the people who do the work – listen to them and make a list
  • The more people that tell you about a particular issue, the higher that prioritizes that issue on the list, then you can start to fix it

#5 Get comfortable with “I don’t know”

  • Nobody expects you to know everything, and that’s okay. But they do expect you to learn
  • Be sincere when you don’t know the answer, don’t pretend like you do.
    • Gives you the space you need to find the answer
    • It sets the expectation about timing accordingly
  • If I don’t know, it’s okay that you don’t know, that way we can solve these problems together
  • There is a second part to “I don’t know,” and that’s “I’ll find out”

Recap: