Showing the Value of DesignOps by Not Having a DesignOps Team
Summary
Key Insights
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Design ops was initially embedded but undervalued and misunderstood at BBA Mexico, causing operational crises when removed.
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The design team at BBA grew from 21 designers in 2016 to about 190 by the time of this talk, necessitating scalable ops support.
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Splitting design teams into specialized groups by activity (discipline, pools, operations) without proper design ops support led to fragmentation and coordination failures.
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Removing the design ops team caused designers to struggle with basic tasks like onboarding, printing, and project staffing.
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Design leaders became overwhelmed trying to cover design ops responsibilities, detracting from their design focus.
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Design ops functions include staffing, budgets, agency coordination, onboarding, career planning, and maintaining design practice standards.
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Recognition among designers for design ops grew significantly once the team was absent, revealing their vital behind-the-scenes role.
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Rebuilding design ops involved creating roles embedded directly with design heads to maintain alignment and responsiveness.
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Ideal design ops ratio is around 1 manager per 14 designers, but practice often settles for less due to budget and project pressures.
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Leadership found it difficult to communicate design ops’ strategic value to C-suite executives during organizational change, impacting support.
Notable Quotes
"It’s basically impossible for the design team to work without the design ops team."
"The designers started to send notes of thank you to the ex members of the design ops team for making their life easier."
"We didn’t explain the philosophy behind the design ops activities, so others didn’t understand why some activities couldn’t be done outside design."
"Losing design ops led to missed deadlines, bad experiences for customers, and overstretched design leaders."
"The design ops team helped designers print in BBA’s complicated systems, something they had to do alone after we lost the ops team."
"We didn’t have the maturity of the practice itself to specify the impacts of losing design ops until it happened."
"We realized that the extended design discipline needed to regain some design ops activities to function properly."
"For me, ideally one design ops manager per 14 designers is the ratio that works best."
"The C-suite often sees big change as resistance to change rather than needs for careful transition and impact understanding."
"We need to share the importance of design ops visibly so everyone understands their role in enabling design success."
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