Summary
BBVA began 2019 with a full scale re-org based on agile principles, for the design team in Mexico that re-org included dismantling the 3 years old designOps team because it was considered redundant and a simple admin job that other teams could do. Regretfully it ended in a complete disaster and a steep decline in the quality of the design team with the following project problems and complaints of executives and stakeholders regarding the user experience. This was only stopped by rebuilding a more resilient and integral designOps team, revisiting shortcomings and failures of the Head of design and the team's effort to rebuild itself.
Key Insights
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BBA Mexico's design team's success was closely linked to having a dedicated design ops function from early on.
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Losing the centralized design ops team led to operational failures: fragmented recruitment, onboarding delays, and project mismanagement.
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Design leaders like Anna, Ilse, and Nacho became overwhelmed when forced to absorb design ops responsibilities.
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Design ops work is difficult to transfer outside of design without understanding its underlying philosophy and impact.
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The absence of design ops led to notably lower quality and delayed deliverables, noticed even by executives.
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The design team identified a critical gap in specifying the impact of design ops early on, a leadership blind spot.
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Rebuilding design ops alongside design heads improved coordination, clarity, and workload distribution.
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Benjamin recommends roughly one design ops manager per 14 designers, although real ratios are often less optimal.
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Executive leadership initially underestimated the impact of dissolving design ops, complicating change management.
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The experience led to broader discussions of agile organization models and design maturity levels within the company.
Notable Quotes
"It’s basically impossible for the design team to work without the design ops team."
"When we lost the design ops team, the level of work started to go like a cliff basically."
"Design ops allow designers to focus on design and not on a lot of other things."
"We gave them the list of activities but didn’t explain the philosophy behind them."
"Design leaders were overwhelmed trying to do design ops activities on top of their work."
"We started missing deadlines and delivering bad experiences noticed by our executives."
"One candidate was contacted by four different people who didn’t coordinate with each other."
"The agencies and contractors stopped being paid on time during the design ops absence."
"We realized we needed to regain some of those activities but distribute them properly within the team."
"The main thing we made was not being able to specify the impacts of losing design ops."
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