The concept of value streams in DesignOps
This year, one of the hot topics at UX Camp Europe 22 in Berlin was Design Operations (aka DesignOps) and culture. The good news is that more and more companies recognize the need to scale properly to avoid ruining internal culture, sacrificing quality, or even jeopardizing their position on the market by releasing invaluable products.
Ideally, the design ecosystem should sync with the RND teams and the company (vision, product strategy, etc.). When it comes to this, most typically dream of Continuous Discovery and Delivery — an outcome of a mature practice, supportive culture, or smooth processes and integrated industry-standard tools.
Frankly, many companies got learned hard lessons during the pandemic. Going remote brought new challenges to teamwork and impacted internal processes, strategy, and hiring. Some even had to change their process or radically reorganize. On top of that, finding and retaining talent becomes more difficult, especially when the market goes through disruptive changes and many countries experience challenges due to inflation or high energy costs.
I believe these are some key reasons that DesignOps got more attention than before. So, let’s dive in 😎
The rise of Design Operations
According to Google, there are almost 600 000 000 definitions and articles about Design Operations. When you look at the term DesignOps, you get nearly half. The positive is that this topic has gotten more attention and popularity in recent years, especially since October 2020.
Although DesignOps is essential for any type of company that invests or means it seriously design, its popularity and interest are far from the disciplines like Product Design. Interesting is that Design Operations has ten times more articles than UX Design, yet the interest is not even half.
Even though there are more and more passionate people evangelizing DesignOps, we are still at the beginning. At least in terms of popularity. Some of you may argue that DesignOps was here years ago. And you are right! We always did it somehow, but we did not name it or talk about it like that. The rise of this term is a good sign that all the initiatives helping lift design, talents, or organizations got structured, more attention, recognition, and support.
Let’s look at what some typical definitions of the DesignOps umbrella are.
What’s DesignOps?
DesignOps refers to the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact at scale. — NN/g
One of the most quoted definitions of DesignOps from NN/g. I consider myself as one of the designers that grew on studies and trainings from NN/g. Yet, after reading this definition, I got that robust and academic feeling. It is also not that easy to understand what is under the hood. Not speaking about how sounds the part “Optimization of people” or what is the outcome (and value) of the DesignOps 🤔
Maybe it is one of the reasons why there are other definitions and acronyms. The most popular are the “three based ones” such as 3P: People, Practice, Platform or Projects, Process, People. An exception to that is Dave Malouf’s definition.
Many understand DesignOps as a tool to remove any bottlenecks or obstacles so that a great design can happen. It is typically split into different areas with initiatives that run in the short or long term. It can be under the responsibility of one, the whole team side job, or there can be an established department fully dedicated just to DesignOps.
How we design?This was the ultimate question I asked multiple times to understand the past, current, or future state. The hidden power of DesignOps is not to make the day-to-day agenda of designers better. But also to empower scaling and make design a strategic partner for the teams or the whole company. That is why I think about DesignOps in the following way:
DesignOps with the outcome mindset
During that time, I realized that a mature design organization is more than a well-defined design process, great tools, or the ability to hire top talents. Moreover, I find some of the definitions scoping “Ops” initiative more into the Output than an Outcome ocean.
Output (The What) is an action or tangible deliverable. Can be measured, yet it does not address the impact or value, even not an appropriate indicator of effectiveness.
Outcome (The Why) represents a result — change, state, the difference we want to achieve. The impact of an outcome can be measured and quantified.
For example, a typical Output is a checklist of things to do when a newcomer joins the company. Yet, if we think more about How to integrate newcomers into a team better (an Outcome), we can achieve better results and more solutions to support it in different situations (buddying, welcome session, intro design jam, collective cognitive walkthrough & role play, etc.).
Despite DesignOps being mainly connected with “operational” aspects, I believe the primary purpose, the ultimate mission, of DesignOps is more than that, as design should be a strategic partner for your business:
Grow a mature design environment.Positioning DesignOps as a strategic partner that co-creates value not only for designers but also impacts the entire organization makes the design more accountable and valuable.
I tend to think about value in terms of “How much is something worth.”, e.g., How much is DESIGNOPS-INITIATIVE-X worth?, and asking the following questions:
- Why do we need it? Effectiveness.
- How we do things? Efficiency.
- What we need to do it? Efficacy.
- What we learn? Experience.
Thinking about value from that perspective, I started to perceive aspects of DesignOps as a set of areas with different scopes and attributes that provide a diverse value — the Value Streams.
Value streams in DesignOps
Value streams were popularized in the 1980s by Womack and Jones, but some sources date this term to the beginning of the 20th century. However, the inspiration to split DesingOps into value streams comes from Six Sigma and Agile methodologies.
There are already definitions for value streams that typically vary per framework. Mostly, the focus is on workflow and delivery. Although it is in some way essential, I tend to think about value streams for DesignOps beyond that:
Value streams in DesignOps emphasize a collaborative (cross-functional) team effort highly focused on improving performance and perception by systematically removing waste and reducing complexity to co-create value.
In other words, by relatively small, highly focused areas, you can better line up not only the individuals but also the organization or the entire company. Similarly, as in a design system, the impact of certain activities is inside-out; it starts locally to become visible more internally and get a positive perception externally.
Thinking in Value Streams brings the following benefits:
- Better identify, categorize and focus on value-added activities and eliminate the ones with no value.
- Faster see the results in various areas and levels within the organization or entire company.
- Support business in a short and long-term run on various levels — operational, tactical, and strategic.
- Give various initiatives and projects respective space, support, or resource allocation.
- Design is more scalable and flexible when a company grows or has to do (re)organization.
Moreover, by deconstructing DesignOps into smaller aspects, Microservices, you avoid thinking in a Monolithic structure, thus increasing the complexity or running into troubles with scalability.
Value streams and teams
Value Streams are intended to be long-lived — practically permanent as they are fundamental and should always generate value. Teams or Individuals, on the other hand, are organized around initiatives and projects that started or are connected to Value Stream(s). Depending on the complexity and scope, some teams can be for a couple of years and some just for a couple of months. Despite the project and scope, the lifespan of a team is typically recognized by defined milestones, results, or budget.
Value streams are the core of DesignOps’s mission to Grow a mature design environment. Each stream should generate a specific outcome that provides value on a certain level(s) or audience to reach the DesignOps mission. Typically the reason why we do a particular initiative(s) is not to implement a new tool or practice but to be productive, increase (or maintain) quality, or reduce costs.
That is why I, instead of DesignOps areas like People, Practice, and Tools, think about value streams like Talent, Culture, Flow and Impact.
- Talent focuses on the people’s journey and the structure of a design organization or team, not only to secure continual and balanced growth but to develop a capable design organization with needed influence.
- Culture is essential to any organization as it impacts the overall perception, collaboration, engagement, and quality of the work.
- Flow enables people to be focused and productive. After all, we are hired to make not to attend a meeting.
- Impact helps to align and amplify the mature design practice among individuals, teams and organizations.
The concept of Value streams for DesignOps reduces the complexity and helps to better plan initiatives. Organizing DesignOps into small, highly focused areas, the Value Streams, we better secure continual value delivery to achieve the ultimate mission — Grow a mature design environment.
In the following stories, we will look more in-depth at the concept of streams Talent, Culture, Flow and Impact.
Zdenek (@zdenek.zenger) is a design enthusiast who shares his experience & thoughts about Design Leadership, DesignOps and Product Design. This article and the opinions are personal. It does not necessarily represent any positions, strategies, or opinions of any business subjects.
