Summary
When is DesignOps about more than building tools and systems that improve the effectiveness of R&D? For athenahealth, our DesignOps team has housed two cross-product teams—by organizational necessity at first—that have become critical early adopters of the instruments and programs their DesignOps colleagues have developed.
Key Insights
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Athena faced a massive 'mountain' of design debt from decades of federally mandated, checkbox-heavy healthcare software.
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The end of federal EHR incentives in 2016 forced Athena to shift focus from speed of payment to usability and design.
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Transitioning from waterfall to Agile enabled Athena to reorganize into product zones and scrum teams with generalist UX designers.
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Design ops was established to reduce friction for generalist designers by centralizing specialists and building supporting tools and systems.
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A key initiative was auditing 55 mission-critical workflows using Nielsen's 10 heuristics to create quantitative 'design quality' scores.
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Introducing design heuristics and scoring provided a shared language for leadership and product teams to discuss and prioritize design issues.
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Design quality audits were resource intensive but were scaled via asynchronous review apps and integrated into release dashboards.
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A major knowledge management challenge was caused by tagging knowledge based on unstable org restructuring, prompting adoption of a job map taxonomy tied to user needs.
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Design ops at Athena owns not just designer enablement but also influences product development processes and hosts cross-product scrum teams focused on visionary design.
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Ongoing questions include how design ops can balance operational support with strategic leadership and whether they should lead or enable cross-team collaboration.
Notable Quotes
"I actually joined our design ops team about six months after it was created and I am not the head of design ops but part of its leadership."
"We built software to make birthing clinics more efficient, and for 18 years we wrestled with whether we were a software-supported service or a service-supported software company."
"No doctor wants to use an EHR, and our competition was basically who was the least bad option."
"In 2016, the federal incentives stopped and the market shifted—the buyers started caring about usability, not just getting paid faster."
"We were a waterfall shop for years but kicked off a two-year Agile transformation that completely redesigned our product and design teams."
"Our new UX model placed generalist designers on scrum teams supported by centralized design ops specialists."
"We audited 55 mission critical workflows over nine two-week sprints and scored them using Nielsen’s heuristics for design quality."
"Introducing hard numbers and a shared language around design helped product and engineering leadership better prioritize improvements."
"We found that tagging knowledge by org structure was a mistake due to frequent reorgs causing instability and loss of findability."
"We see design ops as providing constancy in culture amid changing teams, priorities, and market conditions, operating as a 'slower changing' layer."
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