Design Operations Focus
For the past few weeks, I’ve been contemplating the most valuable activities and practices to start a design operations practice. The key metrics I’ve focused on are team effectiveness, reduced time-to-money, reduced operational overhead, and overall product team health.
Accessibility and Inclusive Design
One of the most crucial aspects underpinning all of our products as an edtech company is the need for accessibility and inclusivity. To create truly great accessible products, the entire team must understand and value accessibility, and test with real disabled users. Achieving this requires someone dedicated to the practice who can educate the rest of the organization.
Having a DPM whose entire focus is accessibility signals its importance to the organization. This individual should understand and communicate market requirements and coach teams on how to meet them. By creating resources and running workshops on building and designing for accessibility, this person becomes a practice multiplier, spreading their skills and knowledge among product teams.
Additionally, given the specific nature of edtech products, this individual would handle responding to the accessibility portions of sales RFPs and conducting product VPATs (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template), to assess our products’ current accessibility status and identify areas for improvement.
Product Development Lifecycle
This is pretty standard across any large organization. To continually improve our product development processes, we should constantly evaluate our current practices to see what can be improved, added, or removed.
A DPM focused on the product development lifecycle would partner with the product leadership team to facilitate the creation and communication of the overall product vision and strategy to individual product teams. This DPM would also work with teams to identify internal roadblocks in design and development workflows. To support team autonomy and reduce time-to-money, we need to ensure that design and development teams are not hindered by invisible obstacles.
Additionally, this individual should have a firm grasp of the overall planning process, evaluating it for inefficiencies and improving aspects like dependency management, inter-team communication, and the activities of individual teams as they prepare for planning.
Product Discovery and Research
This practice might seem like it could be rolled into the above, and while they are related and could be led by the same DPM, a few unique aspects make it worth being its own practice.
First and foremost, this individual should focus on how we conduct research and discovery. While the Product Development Lifecycle practice focuses on the entire operation through delivery, this practice zeroes in on how we conduct discovery.
As a larger organization, it can be easy to lose past research or discovery findings without a strong documentation, storage, and retrieval process. Research done by one team may be applicable to others, but if the data isn’t easy to find or access, subsequent teams may feel the need to conduct duplicative research because they are unaware the information already exists.
This individual would also be responsible for removing logistical constraints on product teams. Instead of having multiple teams spend time and money figuring out how to contact users or conduct interviews, this DPM would streamline and automate this process where possible.
Finally, like the other roles, this individual would be responsible for creating resources and coaching teams and individuals on how to conduct product discovery.
Design Culture and Team Operations
When it comes to improving team effectiveness and ensuring overall team health, the organization’s culture plays a significant role. Whether implementing something like Google’s infamous “20% time” or facilitating casual gatherings, being mindful and intentional about the team culture you’re trying to build is critical.
In addition to culture building, the daily operations of the design organization fall under this person’s responsibilities. This includes coaching on how to conduct design critiques, facilitating skills gap analysis, and working with design leadership to protect “heads down” design time by reducing extraneous meetings.
Other Opportunities
There are many other practices and activities not covered here that fall under the purview of design operations. The list above is a short list of what I believe are the most valuable focus areas for a new operations practice in my organization at this time.
I already see other potential practices within my organization today, but they aren’t as pressing. Since we’re just starting down the design operations path, it’s important to prove the value of the practice first.
My hope is that over time, we will continue to grow the design operations team and provide additional support across new avenues for the business, resulting in better products for our users.