Have DesignOps Fever? I Can Help.
From what I have seen lately, it seems that every design organization is wanting to scale and mature their design practice while doing so. During my travels for my workshops, I have been hearing the same issues repeated again and again:
- Where should I start? How do I start? Do I need to hire someone to start?
- Who should lead Design Operations?
- How do I measure my Design Operations?
- How do I sell Design Operations?
- What does Design Operations cover?
- What is the roadmap for scaling a design organizational structure?
- How does design and development work together?
- Do I need specialists/generalists? If generalists do research, do I need researchers? If so, how are they organized to work with designers and others?
This list can go on forever. The issue is that the answers to all those questions are some variant of "it depends". Oh, and it depends on a lot of things. Context is king and like any context, those living in the context have both wonderful insights, and huge blindspots. This is where myself or someone like myself come in. What we offer are outside perspectives, and a general breadth of experiences that we can extrapolate and apply to your context.
"He who represents himself has a fool for a client." - Abraham Lincoln
There is just a conflict of interest when doing this type of work to rely only on internal resources to bring clarity to the problem space. Now to be clear, you also can't have some consultant come in and just tell you what to do. That is as equal a fools folly. There is no playbook out there that will work for you, your team, and your organization.
My roles are of guide, facilitator, and coach. The things that I would bring to any engagement:
- Tools: Frameworks, canvases, and the like to assemble to meet a client's specific needs. But always open to bringing in something new that has already been working, or we can test/explore/craft as part of the engagement.
- Processes: Like tools, I have a set of different processes that we can explore through the different stages of working together. I do have preferences, but I also explore the culture and tastes of the client contexts to adapt them.
- Skills: Based on my experience as a design leader at a variety of different organizations, and through my experience in working with a breadth of clients, I have developed skills applicable to those different contexts. Facilitation and coaching in particular require specific skills in communications, counseling, synthesizing, framing, storytelling, etc.
There is no magic here. Anyone can learn these things. I've even helped educate people through articles here and elsewhere. While coaching organizations after facilitating kickoffs this is exactly what I do again and again.
So as it turns out, I'm available beginning middle of February and I would love to help your organization amplify the value it produces for its customers through better quality, more efficient, measurable, strategically relevant, data driven DESIGNING.
Contact me here, on LinkedIn to get a conversation started.