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Culture Design
Summary
Join us for a conversation on how Dropbox is powering community programs through Design Ops. Michelle Morrison, a senior design program manager, shares how her team is thinking about community building in a time of crisis and how she frames community and culture as business problems worth solving.
Key Insights
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Design Ops serves as a function to help makers make by setting conditions for creative freedom and removing obstacles.
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Investing in personal passion projects like 'Permission to Speak' requires minimal budget but yields long-term brand and talent benefits.
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Dropbox’s design team comprises around 200 people, including product designers, researchers, UX writers, and a brand studio.
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Design Ops at Dropbox operates with roughly a 10:1 ratio of designers to project/program managers.
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Diversity and inclusion efforts, through groups like Lady Sue Create and 3D, are crucial in fostering safe spaces and have led to 57% women in design.
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Culture design is defined as how people act upon shared beliefs and values, distinct but complementary to HR’s role.
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During COVID-19, pivoting to remote engagement involved piloting new community programs such as care kits and art classes for parents and kids.
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Measuring success in design Ops includes short-term programmatic metrics and longer-term cultural and brand impact indicators.
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Personal touches, including handwritten notes and consistent empathetic communication, deepen trust and cultural fabric especially in remote environments.
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Sharing operational playbooks helps scale culture and diversity initiatives across teams and leadership levels.
Notable Quotes
"Design Ops is the function that helps makers make by setting an environment where designers can do their best work."
"Investing in individual pet projects really can take so many amazing shapes and cost the company very little."
"We set a goal to hit 50% women on the design team within three years and we did it."
"Culture is really how people act on their beliefs. It’s the behaviors, messages, and norms that make values true."
"Design Ops’s mission is to take the pain out of the creative process and foster a culture that supports that."
"As soon as we started working from home, I sent an urgent email to say we have to change our strategy and experiment with new things."
"100% of people responded to our care kits offer and wrote back about their experience. That sparked community connection during isolation."
"Everybody has something to say, whether it’s a personal narrative or a feature implementation. So we run writing workshops quarterly."
"You are never too busy to send a handwritten note. It deepens relationships, creates trust, and enriches the cultural fabric."
"Sharing our playbook with engineering helped push design diversity thinking beyond our own team up to the C-suite level."
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