https://review.firstround.com/the-case-for-adding-designops-to-your-org-chart-lessons-from-invision
The day-to-day calendar and to-do list for early design hires at nascent startups and design leaders heading up mature orgs may look vastly different. But at the core, designers often struggle with many of the same stumbling blocks — fighting to bake design into the company recipe for success, rather than settling for sprinkles that are added as a flourish on top of the cake.
As design continues to mature and cement its status as a pillar in a company’s long-term architecture, there’s a double-edged sword to contend with. Design has fought for a booming, clear voice in the company’s end-to-end vision. But with that voice, a mountain of cross-functional work, process particulars and a calendar bursting at the seams with meetings comes with it. Before you know it, designers are too busy to design.
Enter a role that’s gaining steam in organizations at every stage of the growth journey: Design operations, tasked with crafting efficient workflows, optimizing design’s internal partnerships and creating functional growth that scales for the long term.
Here at the Review, we’re always on the lookout for roles that, although not widely recognized, may be the secret sauce your company is looking for (like this profile on fellow design function subset Growth Design). Sketching out the mandates for design operations has been on our editorial wishlist for a while now, so it was kismet when we came across Alison Rand, a DesignOps pro who’s long been tweeting, blogging and even podcasting about this amorphous discipline. Who better to serve as our trail guide for this trek?
Rand’s had a front-row seat to DesignOps’ vast transformation in just a short amount of time — before the function even earned an official title. She previously served as Director of Program Planning for Hot Studio (a design firm acquired by Facebook) and frog before taking on her first formal DesignOps role as Head of Design Operations for Automattic. Now, she’s Senior Director of Design Operations for **InVision,** a digital product design platform that builds collaboration tools for structured workflows, as well as providing education and community for product teams around the globe.
“My journey with design operations has really come full circle. I always laugh because at this point in my career I’m leading design operations for a DesignOps and collaboration platform — it’s so incredibly meta,” says Rand.
And while Rand spends her days immersed in the vast pool of design operations, she’s well aware that the discipline is still misunderstood. “There’s a lot of fogginess around the definition of design operations. It’s not dissimilar to the ambiguity around what it means to be the Chief of Staff,” she says. “At its simplest, it’s my job to make sure that companies are making the most of the incredible designers that they hire — their time, their skills and growth potential.”
Design as a function is really starting to mature in organizations of all sizes. It’s reached a tipping point where companies need to think about how they can scale their design process — and that’s the sweet spot for DesignOps to come in and make magic happen.
In this exclusive interview, Rand outlines what this role actually means and how it could be the boost you didn’t even know your company needed. But there’s a catch. This design function subset isn’t a pair of track spikes you can pop on your feet and take off running — the shoe’s got to fit. She’ll walk us through assessing your company’s own design maturity before outlining how to set your first DesignOps hire up for success. Whether you’re curious about adding this new discipline to your stable of leadership, or looking for operations best practices to lean on before adding any new headcount, Rand’s got plenty of frameworks to share.
“The definition I’ve honed over the years is that DesignOps builds a platform to enable design strategy and execution to work together in harmony,” says Rand. And as design’s footprint within a company grows ever-larger, that merging of vision and action has never been more critical. “It used to be that designers were mostly considered pixel-perfectors — brought in at the latest stages of product development. But we’ve seen a lot of evolution and maturity in this design thinking, and for many companies design now has a hand in every single step of the customer journey,” she says.
But with that widened scope, designers now face a vast slate of challenges, including:
Silos: “Although at most companies designers are expected to work closely with marketing, engineering and product teams, these departments are often completely independent from one another, without shared OKRs.”
Complexity: “Design tools and systems are wide ranging, ever-changing and increasingly complex — often resulting in bottlenecks. I’ve seen plenty of design teams that are reluctant to adopt developers’ processes and tools (like Jira). There are separate planning and tracking tactics and general misalignment across product, stakeholders and executives. That lack of quality assurance across development ultimately equals a poor customer experience,”
Career path: “Designers are often expected to wear innumerable hats — from creative leader, to producer, to project manager. That leaves little time to hone your craft. There’s also a lot of ambiguity around how organizations design the career paths for designers — if they even map them out at all.”
Strategic oversight: “Plenty of companies may say that design brings a strategic lens, but the reality shows that plenty of designers are purely in production roles. It’s all reactive — creating at the request of developers and product managers who lead strategy, rather than defining a direction for the product’s design at the ideation phase.”
The myth of the unicorn: “There’s a lot of nuance in different types of design roles that is often overlooked. Companies may be hiring for a visual designer, when what they actually need is a creative technologist. Or they might have a product designer that would be even better as a communication designer, but they aren’t tapping into those skills.”
These problems are particularly acute these days. “As companies’ digital transformations have been sped up so quickly by COVID-19 and the transition to remote work, the needs and desires to mature their design practices will be more pointed. There’s a tipping point here. When designers are managing all this process, they’re not actually designing — and they are going to become super unhappy,” says Rand. “If you want to remove those extra layers of process-management so your designers can focus on the craft, you’ve got to start thinking about the type of design operations person you could bring aboard.”