Summary
As Design Operations leaders, we are constantly playing a game of breadth verses depth. It can be easy to get caught diving deep into fire drills or one-off problems, and never having time to scale your efficient operations to the greater team. In this talk, Cassandra will guide you through the process of defining and deploying an operational strategy. With this strategy, you will scale the impact of design operations without increasing the size of your program management team. She'll provide tips on how to get buy in from your key stakeholders to ensure their investment and guarantee their adoption of your strategy as their own. With this practical toolset, you can define your operational vision, empower yourself and your partners to deploy it, and finally get yourself the bandwidth you’ve needed to be more strategic.
Key Insights
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Design operations teams often juggle firefighting, making strategic thinking challenging.
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A design operation strategy serves as both the foundation and protective structure for design teams.
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Most teams already possess pieces of process documentation; leverage these instead of reinventing the wheel.
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Early documentation of roles and responsibilities, even if rough, builds clarity and secures early stakeholder feedback.
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Including cross-functional partners transforms design ops from a siloed activity to an org-wide collaboration.
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Framing team problems as 'How might we...' questions helps focus solution brainstorming.
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A single source of truth for roadmaps can reduce siloed planning and illuminate dependencies.
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Quarterly milestone planning bridges the gap between annual roadmaps and sprint-level details.
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Scaling design ops means moving from tactical process creation to strategic facilitation and organizational alignment.
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The process of design operations improvement is cyclical and continuous, not linear or one-off.
Notable Quotes
"Our small but mighty design operations team often gets stuck jumping from fire drill to fire drill."
"A design operation strategy is the foundation your team sits upon and also the roof above its head."
"You don’t have to reinvent the wheel — pieces of the puzzle already exist."
"Ugly is actually better. I’m a champion of ugly decks."
"Share early, share ugly is our mantra."
"Make sure you include your cross-functional partners to turn a design-only process into a whole org collaboration."
"How might we communicate status consistently across multiple teams, geographical locations, and leaders?"
"A single source of truth lets you visualize dependencies and ensure work happens in the right sequence."
"Scaling means you move from updating Kanban tickets to doing executive-level status updates and managing portfolio priorities."
"Operations have to be constantly improving, like product development — this process is cyclical, not linear."
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