Day 1- Changing Our Design Pressure Points
— Thank you everyone. Like most people have had variety of job titles over design career
— Each reflects a moment in time and shows how adaptable design has been and moved beyond platforms and tools and language to suit situation and meet challenges
— Cannot ignore trends and uncertainties across industry
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Product orgs are hovering between caution and conservatism and a desperation to differentiate in what is becoming a commodity market
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Designers outfitted to take a lead, and elevate products and services through considerations of factors like impact and ethics
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There is risk of us though as being seen as nice to have commodity
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— Formalizing core pillars of DesignOps have given credibility to peers and foundation to build on
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Operation on business, process, and workflows has helped demystify design in an org
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See the above example from Design Better
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— Also see the example from Nielsen Norman Group for your reference
— The danger though is that models are too rigidly and risk to reducing UX to set of artifacts ands outputs
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We need to head back to outcomes
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Position design and DesignOps as strategic operations
– I’ll provide a set of principles to follow:
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1, From Product to Service Thinking: Move impact higher up the stack
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2, Changing Our Design Pressure Points: We can change how perceived by peers and clients, if we designers are confidently driving design decisions
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3, Evolving Operations: Current models must evolve as we move to leadership and governance from our craft focus
— A successful product focus is still the north star for many businesses, but product mindset brings limitations and blindspots
— We run the risk of over-optimizng processes and artifacts to a set of calculations
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I’m picking a bit on SAFE methodology, but it represents honed and refined mechanisms for scale and growth
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Orgs still measure success through quantity, but not quality of underlying experience
— Here’s a quote from portfolio manager of one of our clients
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Of 90+ product, they couldn’t see what was in dev, what was in testing, and which ones were actually used by customers to solve problems
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Teams adept at spinning up new products (and crafting an internal success story), without thinking how they integrated work
— But where was success coming from?
— Structured rebuilt for the product stack and crafted vertical value streams around products and services
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We had autonomous specialists crafting solutions
— Above the specialists was a strategic vision, that was supported by operations and enabled horizontally
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Ideally we would harmonize the vision with the specialists to deliver clear portfolio with clear value prop
— Teams, however, struggled to see themselves in bigger picture, and start to revert to old silos
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Stronger teams with high-performing products diverged with their own shadow strategies, and others retreated to aproduct panic room where they relied on feature output and comfort metrics
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Underperforming offerings, become more selective on customer feedback
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— Due to vision gap with lack of shared objectives or relatable narrative to connect the product’s value stream to leadership vision
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Without a clear ‘why’ connecting teams, won’t have unified service offering
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How do we align at service level?
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How does DesignOps support design as a strategic influencer?
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— I’ll provide an example for how this tension was resolved.
— Our client was experiencing the early stages of divergence
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Cutting edge product with digital and physical touchpoints, and immovable milestones
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Delivery pressure made hard to connect work to strategic direction, and keep it in view
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Risk of team divergence
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Team asked to realign value streams and give clear product priorities
— First thing was needed for common narrative to fill that gap
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A service blueprint of the customer journey gave a great hook for connecting product teams
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Service blueprint worked to harmonize around customer experience
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Hugely powerful way to show cross-team dependencies in clear and transparent manner and measure it as such
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Showing up and downstream helped from helpful connections across value streams
— Helped deliver compelling outcomes and experiences
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Cross-functional teams helped focus on shared challenges and kept silos from forming
— Fostered autonomy and expert ownership, which relate to dimensions of intrinsic motivation
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Management of blueprint and alignment artifacts supported by the ops org itself, which influenced the priorities of the org
— Enablers now connected to things achievable
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Designers now driving capabilities to make team succeeed
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Service-level view can’t be underestimated
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Methods helped democratize vision and value prop and product strategy
— Teams of product delivery excellence in a vacuum won’t deliver success by itself
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We need to ask: Where do we want to go?
— Service design helps us move to outcomes over outputs
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We close the vision gap and prevent comfort zone retreat when things get though and pressure is high
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These are operational instruments to change behavior evenly across the organization
— Once we accomplished step on changing how design is perceived, we then showed how we can align teams and make design an enabler for strategic decisions
— In our key orchestration role, we can act as facilitators for complex conversations
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Helping shape products and services and shifting further left to strategy
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To leverage pressure points we need to move up and left
— Reach right stakeholders that benefits client stakeholders and colleagues as well
— Introduce way
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Short shaping session to play back understanding of what is needed and how to approach
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Simple and ask direct and focused questions for Design Manager and candid exchange within hour or two
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Helps challenge instructions and set expectations
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— Best methods require
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Fearless facilitation
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Rapid synthesis
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Capturing the voice of the user
— This is a perfect fit for the designer
— One thing to figure out is definition of success which will allow us to leverage future pressure points as designers
— Here is where we can make difference at program level and goal to enable in process work
— We’ll turn to an example of introducing gender neutral language with a conservative client
- Design systems served as vehicle for progressive design decisions across system
— Team charter to socialize principles
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Existing pressure points for org change and apply results through design systems and existing team charter
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Helped establish designers as trusted partners for leadership
— This allowed us to cohere around shared personal values
— Proactive interventions can enable forward facing discussion on:
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Accessibility
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Inclusivity
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Compliance
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Ethics and Harms
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Sustainability
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Oragnizational Design
— Blueprinting helped us connect over common customer experience, and helped designers join conversation on commercial and civic partnerships
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Service highly visible in public domain and risk of serious consequences if edge cases not addressed
— Dedicated blueprint for edge cases and cross-vertical internal teams
— We can then orchestrate and explore potential harms and risk mitigation processes and service-level agreements and response protocols going forward
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Shared with broader team with harms and risks in product
— Intentionaiy and building off perspectives
— Visibility establishes us as trusted partners and craft can be leveraged for more impact
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Capability and motivation for user-centricity across all parts of team
— We can then evolve operations to help us create new pressure points as we progress
— As we shift left, we need to take on governance and leadership responsibilities and make sure we have tools to succeed in these roles
— We were recently able to influence EU wide customer service program, and design our team changed its multi-year rollout strategy
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More fluid and how team will be operationally supported more
— Team needed to focus on where to be successful
— Focus on business impact and key enablers and abilities to achieve
— Reach stakeholders at level, while capturing customer insights through UXR
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Risk of being rigid and dogmatic
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Operations can be tough sell for org that only values design
— What else can we do?
— Connect enablers to the product experiment, and help validate hypotheses
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Easy to spin-up virtual experiment team and one that proves operations is working
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Experiment bubble lets team work outside org boundraries and set targets and show results
— If we can elevate design pressure points need to show rather than tell
— Find to have the right ops enablers for context, and demonstrate value to business effectively
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Need visible action and outcomes, and not just a manifesto
— Per Wendy Johannson:
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Seat at table is not final goal for design, but instead we should be voice that stabilizes wonky table to help orgs thrive and survive with heightened uncertainty
— To recap, we can:
- See bigger picture and bring whole perspective to vision
- Can drive and expand pressure points to leverage further opportunities for impact
- Evolve DesignOps fundamentals and break a few roles in making success
— So we end with a few questions to ask:
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What would you do tomorrow to find new pressure points for your teams?
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How could you leverage existing design work to elevate your impact?
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Who might be the best stakeholder partners to help you drive this change?
— Thank you, and any questions?
Q&A
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When should we shift left? How can we tell design mature enough for new challenges?
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Any opportunity is good one, and chance for putting designers and reps in the room with the right people is a huge step
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Don’t have to be expert, but just challenge and raise concerns
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Where does design leadership end and DesignOps leadership begin? How to clarify resposnbilities to reduce overlap? Or is overlap a feature?
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Context based and depends on org and what is best place for succeeding
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Can be overcomplicated with ops part. Whatever gets things started is what to do
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Can you recap the pressure points for design ops?
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Pressure points are what you make them (i.e. service thinking approach, looking for points, and moving ops to support)
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What is a pressure point is what works for you. For me, it’s placing designers to change strategic decisions.
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Being in right place in conversation and service design is a stealth strategy appraoch and the blueprint is a visual artifact to show first and second-order effects on the customer by team actions
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