Summary
DesignOps teams are increasingly being leveraged to solve ambiguous organizational problems like career development, culture or belonging—they’re cornerstones for any successful team. Creating a measurable strategy for these problems is complex, and it can be hard to prove the value of dedicating full-time resources to maintain this work in the long-run. Based on our learnings at Pinterest, I’ll share tactical approaches you can take to craft programming for this problem space, define what ideal states look like and how you can measure and prove value.
Key Insights
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Design operations teams often become default problem solvers for people-related issues beyond traditional project scope.
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Measuring the impact of people-centric programs requires framing subjective feelings into concrete, trackable metrics.
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Design thinking methodologies can successfully be applied to organizational health and people problems, not just product design.
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Engaging diverse stakeholders early in ideation builds credibility, trust, and leadership support for people initiatives.
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Small pilot programs and prototypes allow quick learning and iteration without heavy upfront resources or perfect plans.
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Even without direct budget, scrappy approaches leveraging internal expertise and community input can drive meaningful change.
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Setting realistic but ambitious numeric goals (like increasing survey scores by 5-10%) helps balance progress and learning.
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Regular open communication with leadership through sharing loops maintains visibility, invites feedback, and uncovers help when stuck.
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Clear, scoped problem statements that invite broad ideation but remain manageable for the team lead to better solutions.
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Improvements in team belonging, motivation, and retention directly relate to better product outcomes and business health.
Notable Quotes
"Design operations teams are being leveraged to solve these organizational people problems in addition to product work."
"What does best work mean? It means something different to every single person, and you get a lot of I want or I need."
"We decided to choose design thinking to try and solve all these complex people problems."
"Focus groups were awesome for understanding how a specific set of people felt and built empathy in the room."
"Could you prototype and test an idea with a small group in the next month? That’s the bias to action we had."
"The pilot didn’t go well. The definitions were way too long and complicated to use in everyday conversations."
"Love letters made people feel so valued and appreciated and really were making a change."
"You want to be ambitious but also leave room to learn if you fail and be able to iterate quickly."
"We went back to the beginning of design thinking to stay connected and learn how to shape the future."
"Our discipline is uniquely qualified to solve these problems for our teams, designing an experience for our people that we can measure."
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