DesignOps Summit 2021 – The State of DesignOps 2021 Global Report (Angelos Arnis)

DesignOps Lead, Posti Group

For the past years of my professional experience, I have been involved with DesignOps in one way or another, like a lot of you likely share the same experience as me

Earlier in your career you did the job, didn’t call it anything specific but you spent your time trying to figure out how you could have made the onboarding experience of your colleagues better or how you could create a style guide so that your work didn’t start from the beginning every time

Establishing a baseline

  • Many parts of the DesignOps profession are still mysterious but people are curious and interested in learning more about DesignOps
  • To start with it was important to get a baseline of where we are now
  • I created this report and hope that in five years from now we look back and see how we’ve progressed
  • We started with more than 200 companies globally with 211 participants

Profiling the Professional

Demographic of the participants

  • 211 participants all over the world
  • 53% from America
  • 21% from Europe
  • 15% Other
  • More that 50% identified as white

What did we learn about the DesignOps professional?

  • Daniel Goleman describes emotional intelligence as
    • The array of skills and characteristics that drive leadership performance
  • Emotional intelligence is typically associated with empathy because it involves the individual connecting with other individual’s and their own experiences
  • We see empathy turn inwards towards our own people but as well as stakeholders
  • Empathy is not an easy skill to learn, it takes practice but is an important part of DesignOps

Demographic of participants (continued)

  • Almost half of the respondents identified as women
  • 47% aged 35 – 44 years old
  • 60% of survey respondents had 10 -20 years of experience
  • Only 31% of the participants pursued a design degree

DesignOps professionals need to be season for the role, they need experience and insights

Most of the participants came from the design craft or management field and described their roles as Manager, Director, or Lead

Interviewees expressed that it’s vital for a career projection to exist for these roles and companies should hire people who can grow within them.

When a company is hiring, they should look for a person with high emotional intelligence

  • A good team player
  • A person with a calm and collected persona
  • Strong organizational skills and advocacy for design
  • Understand the dynamics and politics within the company
  • Ability to create partnerships in the company
  • Empathetic towards designers and cross functional partners.

Domains & Competencies of Emotional Intelligence

4 Domains with 12 Competencies nested under them

  • Self-Awareness
  • Self-management
  • Social awareness
  • Relationship management

These are good for reference when hiring and for growing seasoned professionals

  • Majority of participants worked 40 hours or less
  • In Europe it’s more likely for the people to work 40 hours or less when compared to America
  • But equally likely for people to work more than 50 hours per week

Mapping the Space

Taking a 360 view of companies, teams, and people that DesignOps people interact with – a majority of respondents work in tech in financial services or design

The results showed that most DesignOps people report to senior leadership unless otherwise established

There is an increase in the amount in Design Operations – Design Leadership needs it now more than ever

Teams have become remote and distributed around the world – There’s no central hub

  • Prior to the pandemic, everyone worked in the office but now people are working from home

In most companies DesignOps is made up of 1-10 people

The impact of these small teams is strong but there is no discernable ratio for a DesignOps team

The only constant pattern is – in most cases one DesignOps person can work for a handful of designers up to 200

Teams of one can be challenging and you might be doing your job adequately but not flawlessly because there is only one of you

From the interviews we heard that in a DesignOps team of 1:

  • You must choose your battles
  • You must be able to focus on the whatever the highest ROI
  • How to solve for efficiency for the most important initiatives

The real challenge is to identify whether your teams need someone who can manage projects or someone who can help with organization and structure

  • Could be both – You must figure out how to prioritize

Larger teams – you can split the focus between product and team level

Experts mention that it’s important to evaluate what a company needs to understand about designing, so that designing can fit to the needs of the company

Teams need to create the right environment for designers to do their best work

  • Setting up the roles and measures to meet the needs of customers

Understanding the Job

What are they doing and what kind of tools are they using to enable such work?

The Pocket Guide to Design Operations (Rachel Posman, Salesforce) – Outlines the breath of focus areas for DesignOps practitioners

6 Areas of focus for DesignOps

  • Communications
    • DesignOps is involved with internal and leadership communications as well as status and team updates
  • Tools, Systems and Processes
    • Practices involving design systems management and processes
  • Team Growth and Learning
    • Knowledge sharing on boarding and skill building
  • Community and Culture Building
    • Teams focus on team health and recommendations of their peers
  • Partnerships
    • Recruiting and HR
  • Products and Programs
    • Planning, prioritization and tracking
  • Guidelines and Governance
    • Best practices and templates

Leaders are leaning on DesignOps professionals to provide contracts and tools

  • with remote first policies it becomes a bigger part of the role
  • Experts mention that they reach out to peers or communities for advice
  • The biggest hinderance of adopting new tools: company policy, security, and budget

The Future

A recent article reported that 40% of Tech workers have quit or plan to by 2022

The space of DesignOps has great potential for growth in the future  – Leaders will keep turning to DesignOps to create the environments for designers to thrive

Looking at the demographic of our participants, it’s clear that more work needs to be done when it comes to inclusions in the DesignOps professional world

  • Hard to move from traditional work structures to new ones especially when they are a lot of power dynamics and politics involved in large organizations
  • DesignOps is a profession that’s maturing as we speak
  • What do we do with all the information that we have now?
  • Learn what other teams are doing, where are they focusing most, what are their challenges and then apply that knowledge to do your job better
  • If you’re a starting professional in the field or starting DesignOps within your organization, you have the base areas you should focus on and where the impact of DesignOps lays
  • Seasoned professionals
    • Check notes with other leaders and teams and see how they’re doing – Do you need to change the way your teams are doing things?

Summary

  • DesignOps is a role that has a lot of maturity within it
  • DesignOps teams are small (even teams of 1 in many cases) but they still make a big impact
  • When it comes to functions of DesignOps communication systems and knowledge sharing are key

The future is remote, and the role will become more relevant than before

Thank you for staying with me for this journey!