DesignOps: what, where, and why?
The DesignOps team must solve the company and design team needs and pain points, this implies that we have the opportunity to collaborate in all contexts of building, maintenance, and health of the design team.
When I got there
When I joined Creditas in September 2020, I found an intense transformation moment. Even though this is not a new company, it was a place that needed new ideas, processes, culture, and people for new business strategies. I took over the leadership role of the DesignOps Team, at that moment under construction as the design team. This was a unique opportunity since I could build the Ops team and our goals, collaborating with the hiring process and design chapter composition.
DesignOps who?
Though many companies, teams, and new designOps leaders start the work from different perspectives, as a big fan of NN’s work this was where I started to compose our team. According to the NN Group, DesignOps refers to the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft to amplify design’s value and impact at scale. All the things that design squads used to do individually to ensure project standardization and workflows now can be created by a squad with specific skills, looking at the whole team considering its necessities and goals.
What I found
Our design team’s main need was revolved around an Ops team that should create the design system and is responsible for design tools. That’s it. It’s a common mistake to think that the DesignOps team is just responsible for the design system (being this most of the time just a style guide, but we’ll talk about it later) because it is a very complex and extensive work that requires a full-time team to make it happen. DesignOps should not be about taking the boring tasks that no other squad wants to do, instead, it solves design problems with scalability in mind whilst also moving Jira cards.
The DesignOps team must solve the company and design team needs and pain points, this implies that we have the opportunity to collaborate in all contexts of building, maintenance, and health of the design team.
Where did I start
As my first opportunity to collaborate with the team, I started mapping the biggest gaps and pain points within the design team considering the design changes that the company was working on and the team we were building. Before I arrived here, the DesignOps squad was a one-person team with different scope. At that moment, the most important design problem was to understand more about the team and the product we wanted to build and what we needed for it. However, I felt like what was being built was far from the team. To change that, I started to solve practical issues right away.
Figma’s implementation, review of the team’s necessary tools, shared files organization, and mapping of assets needed for the team to start sharing the same ways of work was just the beginning of this adventure with destinations outside of design as well. I went to a lot of meetings with engineers to understand how structured the style guide was and to present what changes we were bringing to the company.
DesignOps is a cross-team, not just cross design squads. Besides the engineering team, getting in touch with the marketing and product teams was very important to understand how they work. Thus, we could align expectations, and how and where we could collaborate better.
Collaboration is all about learning about others and their point of view, bringing empathy to the table as an Ops professional is essential. Therefore, I decided to start 1:1s with all designers to know them better, present myself, befriend them, and listen to their necessities and pain points backstage. All these insights were used to build the planning of what kind of team I would need and what would be our priorities, taking this opportunity to introduce the role of DesignOps to the team.
DesignOps at Creditas
In a nutshell, It was very important to map what we are and what we aren’t as a designOps team. Since DesignOps still is a very new squad and our roles still aren’t clear for the people who we work with, aligning expectations is also important with performance analytics in mind. Designers also need to know how and where we impact their work and vice versa. We also included a goal of what we want to be in the future when the first problems are resolved
Also, I still am a visual designer after all
I strongly believe that brand design doesn’t walk separately from interface design and I will spread this word at any company I work at. Between meetings and strategic planning, my graphic designer side was not deactivated. I dedicated myself to redesign the brand foundation: new color palette, new typography, new photography guidelines, new iconography pack, and so on. These jobs usually aren’t in the DesignOps scope, but here in Creditas we had the need and opportunity to create and solve problems for both of the design and marketing teams.
This was very challenging to create, present to the stakeholders involved and include its documentation on our new design system. All at the same time. However, once finished this was a big achievement I’m proud of and plan to write about in another post later 😉
The people factor
Other challenges are not part of our role but we face daily, such as Covid-19. Joining a company in pandemic times, trying to know everyone and start to solve some team’s issues is a big challenge every day. In this context we currently live, I found out the most efficient way to collaborate is to always talk with people with who you work closely, regardless of the imposed distance, and listen with active listening.
Listening to the people I understood that we needed a rebranding, a designer full time on the design system, and a service designer to collaborate with solving problems in both work and project dynamics: then I brought our first two Ops members and we started a very complex but gratifying journey that we’ll share later.
Back then, the design team's needs were seen just as new documentation, rules, and guides. We believe the team needed big changes in the creative process and new designers, vision and inspiration for us to achieve new flights as a product and team.
Where are we at now?
Until now we are this three people squad that helps the design team to create creative solutions for day-to-day issues and insights. We have a lot of work and much is still starting yet.
We’re still a small team but we know we’re building something big here because we know where we started, and more important than that, we love where we will go.
