What is DesignOps?
Scott Purcell, UXC, SA
2 Decades of Pioneering Product & User Experience (PX/UX) Servant-Leadership | Product & Design Coach | Distinguished for Architecting Meaningful Outcomes
DesignOps, or Design Operations, is the practice of applying Design Thinking and Lean/Agile principles to deliver user, customer, and business value within a product, service, or system. It is the practice of inspecting an organization's design practice and systems as a whole and making adaptive changes to help UX teams maximize business Return On Investment (ROI) in UX. The practice is about having a strategy and culture that reduces waste, identifies restrictive design behaviors embedded into everyday workflows, and works to eliminate bottlenecks.
At the core of DesignOps is understanding the big picture and executing user-centered tactics that produce changed user behaviors in alignment with the business needs. The leanest tactical version of this practice is timeboxing work in small chunks with "plan, do, and measure" continuous cycles to deliver value. Reducing waste and being Agile means always starting, defaulting, or resetting to this pattern at every turn. DesignOps is the digital design equivalent of "measure twice, cut once," an adage often said by skilled workers in carpentry and tailoring.
Benefits of DesignOps
DesignOps build design operations that:
Who needs DesignOps?
DesignOps is relevant to all UX professionals that wish to see their work have a maximum impact on end-users, customers, and businesses and business leaders need DesignOps to help them maximize their UX investments in people, time, and money for more efficient value delivery.
A big part of DesignOps is understanding UX and Agile maturity and its relationship to the organization's culture, development teams, and the UX practitioner's ability to perform within those constraints. As DesignOps practitioners, we use UX and Agile maturity to assess the current state of an organization's impact through UX activities.
If you're not sure if you need DesignOps, NN/g has an assessment tool to help discover which stage your UX team is at:
https://forms.nngroup.com/s3/Maturity-Quiz
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Experience In DesignOps
One of the most exciting things about my unique career path has been the opportunity to work with diverse organizations at different levels of UX and Agile maturity. It forced me to have to think critically in each new engagement and operating environment about how my work can produce the biggest impact. In every instance and with every client, I practiced DesignOps whether I knew it or not.
"We don't know what we don't know."
Often, the businesses I've worked with are doing some of the core steps but lack the awareness to be mature in areas where there are gaps or fail to pivot when new knowledge about the user or business is discovered. Identifying risks in design operations can be difficult because the practice itself is so young, opinions and practical experience vary widely, and users keep evolving their needs. DesignOps works to mitigate uncertainty risks and offers solutions based upon the foundation of UX and Agile.
Opportunities of DesignOps
DesignOps is a counterpart to DevOps. Where DesignOps seeks to deliver quality user value, DevOps seeks to deliver quality code. Both seek to deliver quality in regular cycles by addressing common bottlenecks, with the goal of reducing the cycle time itself. Both practices are important and similar, however, they have different operational needs. Here is a high-level of DesignOp challenges:
TL;DR
Modern cross-functional product teams collaborate to produce working software in regular cycles to deliver meaningful customer experiences that produce high ROI. Many of the organizations I have worked with do a great job of delivering software regularly but fail to keep pace with customer demands because their design operations are not working self-sufficiently. DesignOps is the practice that can help businesses overcome design blind spots and risks.