The Clearleft Podcast

You are listening to the Clearleft podcast. I’m Jeremy Keith. Let me introduce you to two of my colleagues that you’ll be hearing from in this episode.

I’m Jon Aizlewood. I’m design director at Clearleft.

My name is Andy Budd, and I am one of the co-founders of Clearleft. And currently I’m predominantly looking after our events portfolio.

One of those events is Leading Design. Andy invites the best and brightest design leaders to come and speak. In this episode, you’ll hear extracts from talks by Kim Fellman, Jacqui Frey, Courtney Kaplan, and Meredith Black. She can tell us the origin story …of design ops.

Today I want to talk to you about design ops.

You know what dev ops is? Design ops is like that.

A discipline that’s gaining a ton of momentum right now.

The reality is they’re not the same thing.

Design ops is becoming a real thing, which is really exciting.

To understand what design ops is it’s also important to understand the problem that it solves.

Where did design ops come from?

So, the classic example is Hot Studio. They got bought by Facebook when Facebook started scaling up its design team.

Hot Studio got acquired by Facebook. My job during this acquisition was to transfer about 60 designers from Hot Studio into the monetization org at Facebook. That was a lot of fun.

Facebook realized that because it never had a design team before, they didn’t really know how to build that culture, how to hire, how to recruit, how to embed these teams.

But an agency that had been doing it for 10 or 15 years that had scaled the design team, really got that cultural element. And so a lot of the people that were at Hot Studio, that ended up being their job, bringing that cultural aspect of bringing design teams together. And then often they’ve gone to other places around the world and sort of spread the word of design ops to Pinterest and various other people.

After I had gained all this experience at all these bad-ass agencies and companies, I ended up at Pinterest where I was most recently, the head of design operations for almost five years.

I’m Kim. I work in design operations at Pinterest.

My name is Courtney Kaplan and I spent the last six years of my life at Facebook, building a design ops team.

I am Jacqui Frey. I am senior director of design operations at MailChimp.

I think predominantly design ops is a term more in the stable house of the mature organizations.

I think you are correct in the assumption that you need to be working for a relatively mature organization for them to realize the value of design ops. You also need to be relatively mature as a design org to be able to make the case for design ops.

They understand design, so they know what design ops is.

Quite often in companies that are maybe growing from 20 to 50 people, they’ll have a design director who is, as the name suggests, directing the design activities of the team, and then a design ops person is looking after how everything functions.

Design is really uniquely qualified to solve these problems for their teams. And we really can push the boundaries of what and how we design by creating an experience for our people and by measuring it.

And you could see this replicated in larger companies where you have the COO and the CEO and the COO does all the operational stuff, freeing up the CEO to look more at the strategy and that side of things.

Essentially the role of design ops is focused on literally everything but design.

We do budget management, vendor management, and supply chain management.

Oh my gosh. Onboarding. We need to research better design tools. Who owns critique? It doesn’t seem like they’re very effective anymore. Communications, design standards, production schedules. Our external resources. If things get really busy, who do we go to and bring in house. All of these types of things are important.

The role of design ops allows designers to design while ops people handle everything else.

You’re probably recruiting. You’re probably onboarding. You’re probably getting teams set up. You’re getting all of their equipment ready.

That’s basically what we do.

This is a terrible job description. Nobody wants this job. And if you can find someone qualified to do this job, they probably wouldn’t stay long.

It sounds like design ops encompasses a lot of activities, but I’m pretty sure that all those activities were happening before this term got popular. So, where did the phrase design ops come from?

A lot of the people started using design operations really as a way of convincing their companies that they needed this function.

So design operations, we design programs and think in systems.

The way they did that is basically jumping on a preexisting term, which was dev ops.

If you have dev ops in your development team, you should be having design ops in the design team.

The ops bit is everything that isn’t the previous bit.

If you’ve got a team of developers, you want them to predominantly be doing development.

And everything that isn’t development is ops. And the same is true of design.

At the end of the day, would you rather have your designer spending their time working on email communications, project plans, budgets, resourcing, team development, or do you want them designing? What is going to be most impactful to the business?

When you have a small team that tends to be the preserve of maybe the head of design or maybe a few of the more senior designers, but as your team scales from five to 10 to 20 to more, all of that work bubbles up to the point that it really can’t be fitted in around the design leader’s other tasks. So this is when it often spins out into a separate function.

What if your team had a dedicated resource that could help solve these problems on a regular basis?

I’d say to some extent, design ops is quite hard-nosed business function, you know, let’s keep the designers focused on design.

It’s about operationalizing design. It is about making the design team as efficient and effective as possible.

Allow teams to collaborate better, collaborate more efficiently, become more consistent and effective.

So, I guess design ops goes hand in hand with growth and scale. If you’re a small company with a small design team, maybe it’s not something to worry about. Yet. But when should you start to seriously think about design ops?

Design ops are often hired when design orgs are hitting major business transformation and you need somebody else on the team, who’s just got high business acumen.

A lot of these things start at the point where the pain starts, when people start falling over each other, where people start feeling that things are grinding to a halt.

Design orgs are complex networks of humans, aren’t they ?

And when you’re a team of three or four people, you’re probably super efficient because you’ve only got like, you know, six connections to manage. If you’re a team of 60 people, the number of connections you’re managing is exponential. And everything slows down. So the role of design ops is to speed that up again.

In early 2018, our team was about 60 people. And we ended up in this time where we were not as healthy as an org as we really wanted to be.

Not everybody felt like they could do their best work. Only 43% of our team felt like there were career opportunities for them in the future at the company. As you can see, our retention rate was, like, way less than ideal and only 59% of people on our team felt like they belonged at the company.

These numbers, they suck.

Design ops is a thing that you are probably doing, even if you are a team of three or five people, but it’s probably something the design manager, leader, whatever is doing a 10th of their time. They’re thinking about culture. They’re thinking about onboarding. They’re thinking about tool sets.

I think it stops being viable to be spread around a group when the group starts to get much bigger than sort of 20 or 30. So I think 20 or 30 is when people start thinking about this stuff, 50 or 60 is often where it becomes really important. It becomes a blocker.

Everything’s on fire. You’re like that meme of the dog surrounded by the flames, everybody’s leaving the company. And it really doesn’t give you the space to come up with a lot of solutions.

And so lots of companies and lots of design leaders and design practitioners who are in those companies who are now feeling the pain of scale are naturally trying to figure out tools and techniques and approaches to remove that pain. Design ops comes hand in hand with the scaling of design and the realization that design can affect the bottom line.

Start with the low hanging fruit. Start by identifying what the top needs are for running your design team at a higher level of efficiency.

Analyze how efficient or otherwise you are being, make some judgments on what you can do to improve your efficiency. Turn that into some kind of, you know, value proposition or costs and say, "Hey, look, you know, if we invest in a design ops team here, it might look like it’s going to cost you three people, but actually it’s going to save you all of these inefficiencies over a team of 60 people who are doing the same things and making the same mistakes over and over and over again."

Then start building trust with your design team. Especially if people don’t know what this role is. You know, it only takes one person to see the value in this role and tell others how nice it is to have someone in the room like you to do X, Y, and Z. Once that starts to happen, you’ll notice that the demand will happen. More people will see the value and more people are really going to want the help.

So while designers are being all creative, the design ops people are taking care of the process. Is that a dirty word: process? Does design ops impose too much process?

You can’t force process. People don’t like to be told what to do. So ease into having this role and make sure that the role is actually adding value versus rigidity and just process.

Is design ops the result of an industrialized design process? I think it is.

If you go back 10 or 15 years, design was a cottage industry. Design was a bunch of artisans and a bunch of craftspeople sitting around in a workshop, largely doing their own thing. As organizations have scaled, design has had to scale as well. Designers then had to industrialize and there’s a realization that designers are very expensive. If they are doing a day out of a week or even a day out of a month, stuff that they don’t need to be doing, somebody else could be doing it more effectively, that is waste.

And so I would definitely argue that the result of industrialization in the tech industry has led to a move from craft to more of a production line approach. And design operations has come in to support that, but it was already being industrialized and without the design operations function in place, not only was the experience of the designers really inefficient, but it was also really frustrating.

So I don’t think design ops is industrializing the process. I think design ops has been put in place to make that industrialized process feel smoother and better.

You know, all this talk of efficiency is reminding me of the first episode of the Clearleft podcast. If you recall, there was a lot of talk about consistency and efficiency. The topic was design systems.

I think it was in relation to design systems that I first heard the term design ops. Amy Hupe worked on the design system for the Government Digital Services, GDS. I asked her whether it fell under the umbrella of design ops.

I think a lot of the stuff that GDS does probably comes together to create what what you would think of as design operations and the design system is kind of one part of that.

Quite often, the design system is the first thing, the first initiative that a design ops team will do, or even the thing that then makes the organization realize maybe we need a function that does more of this kind of stuff. Cause it’s basically making the team more efficient.

They focus in on building design systems so that designers, content strategists, researchers can get in and do amazing design work.

I actually had a quite an interesting chat with one of my old colleagues who was, for a time, the head of design at home office, because he talks about design ops a lot to try and understand what it actually meant and how he saw a design system fitting in with it.

It’s reassuring I’m not the only one who didn’t really get what design ops is all about. I mean, I kept hearing the term, but I didn’t have a good definition of it in my mind. It’s not just me, right?

So I want to do a little bit of a poll here. Raise your hand if you actually know what design ops is.

I have to be honest with you. I have a really hard time understanding design ops. Like it’s again, one of those words that gets thrown around and people talk about it as though it means the same thing to everybody, but it doesn’t really.

Each party thinks they’re talking about the same thing, but they’re talking about something different.

For those of you in the room who don’t know what design ops is, don’t worry.

I think labels, names, terms, words, language is incredibly important.

Design ops is still an oft-used term that can mean many things to many different people.

I’m a huge fan of language and I’m a huge fan of specificity. And when I’m talking to somebody, I want to understand that we are talking about the same thing.

So what is design ops?

Design ops to me is still predominantly in design systems and operationalizing kind of the process. Whereas you can ask other people and they’re talking about hiring and firing and the culture. So it’s such a huge, what we’d call a broad church, that it’s difficult to really quantify exactly what that term means.

What we’re talking about here is we’re talking about a shared body of practice and the language is useful for the people that are part of that body of practice.

Design ops people, does that seem right?

The term, it’s just a placeholder. The term is a placeholder for a collective agreement as to what this thing means.

So it starts professionally and then slowly over time, it filters out to the rest of your profession and then to the rest of society.

And with any new term, it takes time. Definitions evolve, practices evolve and new groups of specialists go to conferences and write books to explain what they mean by this term. And you can’t expect the whole industry to overnight go from not having understood a term to having understood a term.

So it will take time.

Using a short phrase or word to stand in for something that would otherwise take a long time to describe …that sounds like a good thing. As long as everybody’s up to speed on what the phrase means. Otherwise couldn’t it have the opposite effect to what’s intended? Instead of adding clarity, it could just add confusion.

Buzzwords. Jargon. They don’t help communication. They sabotage it.

I have to admit when I first hear terms like design ops or service design, without an accompanying explanation, it can feel exclusionary.

I’m not suggesting that we impose new language on people that don’t understand it in some kind of show of brute force.

What I’m suggesting is names are useful for collective identity.

We use this term because it’s useful for us. If you don’t find it useful, we’ll try and explain it to you in a different way.

Don’t use the terms if they’re going to confuse people . Use other terms, you know.

But what happens if you have a whole bunch of people that don’t understand the term knocking it or deliberately trying to resist the use of the term, what you actually do is you impede its progress and its usefulness.

We can get into a discussion around, "Well, no words have any meaning at all. We should just point and grunt at things."

Well, that escalated quickly.

Anyway, thanks to Andy, I now have a much better understanding of what design ops is. I think.

But isn’t design ops, the kind of thing that an organization needs to figure out for themselves. Where does an agency like Clearleft fit in?

I would say five years ago, product teams in house were quite naive. They were quite inexperienced.

But nowadays they’re pretty damn good at what they do. So there’s not much need for an agency to do what we used to do.

I often find that bringing in an agency is the first step towards building the case for a design ops team; recruiting and hiring a design ops team.

What we’ve been doing basically is working alongside those product teams to help them get better and help them adopt more of an agency mindset as far as efficiency and speed and quality.

A lot of the work we do at Cleftleft is offering design ops as a service. We are working with companies that are trying to scale and mature their design process, but they are maybe too small or too early to justify having a individual design ops person or design ops team, but there are a whole bunch of activities that team need to do in order to become more efficient.

We can come in and help create a spark and then help get that spark continuing by working alongside those product teams.

A lot of design leaders need help attracting the right talent. And some of that is around building an employer brand. Some of it is knowing how to talk to designers, going to events, writing articles, setting up a design blog that communicates all the great values you do, having a set of internal values or having team manifestos.

All of this extra administrative work isn’t the design, but it’s necessary to attract and keep the caliber of designers that you want. And so, you know, we do a lot with our clients once we’ve finished doing some of the design work with them to help them replace us by building out the talent pipeline and attracting the right talent and getting that talent up to speed.

I’ll be honest, I think that’s typically where we are finding a bit of a sweet spot.

It’s kind of the in between organizations that are quite large, and they, they recognize design’s value, but they don’t really know where to start or they don’t know how to kick on and get better at what they do. And that’s where we come in.

One of the first things that happens is the desire to build a design system and design teams have all the tools they need to build their own design systems.

But there’s lots of common pitfalls. There’s lots of common problems that if you’ve designed 10 or 20 design systems, you know what they are. And so having an external consultant like us come in, we can help those teams avoid those pitfalls, meaning that not only will the design systems be delivered faster to higher quality, but it’ll have much more likelihood of being utilized.

And I think that’s one of the big problems we see with design systems. Design systems often end up being a portfolio piece for the team that advanced them. But quite often, they then sit not being utilized. There’s no point having a design system if no one is using it. And so bringing teams in that have experience of making sure that design systems land and get used the first time around, not the second or third time actually unlocks the potential that design systems have.

We get asked to take looks at design systems currently in play to see what is working, what’s not working, and what could be improved.

Bringing an agency in to look at your design operations is often a sensible sort of risk mitigation.

If you’re going to hire a design ops person that costs a lot of time, a lot of money and once you’ve got that person, you kind of have to keep them. And so if you’re unsure whether you need a design ops person, kicking off a bunch of design ops initiatives, to be able to demonstrate the value and the return on investment, to be able to go back to your executives and say, ”Hey, look, we ran these three initiatives. And at the end of these initiatives, we’ve got this kind of return on investment. We believe if we hire a design ops person or design ops team, we won’t need the agency anymore. And we can save a bunch of money there and keep doing these, these amazing improvements.”

You’ve been listening to the Clearleft podcast. You heard from talks by Kim Fellman, Jacqui Frey, Courtney Kaplan, and Meredith black. Thank you to them for speaking at Leading Design. You can find those talks online at vimeo.com/clearleft

And thanks to my colleagues, Jon and Andy. If you like the sound of design ops as a service, get in touch with Clearleft. Send an email to info@clearleft.com

If you’ve got any feedback about the podcast, you can send an email to me, jeremy@clearleft.com

Or you can just grunt and point at things.

Thanks for listening.