Standardizing Design at Scale
Summary
- Is standardization right for your team?
- How to approach standardization based on the needs or profile of your design team
- How to drive influence and create systems that are strong, extensible and will stick creating real impact for your team.
Key Insights
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Standardization at scale requires balancing quality, scope, velocity, and craft across diverse teams and domains.
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Biased standards, like soap dispensers favoring light skin and male-based crash test dummies, reveal the need for inclusive design at scale.
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Creating a cohort of senior design architects democratizes design innovation and levels up the broader team’s craft.
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Automation through no-code platforms connects fragmented tools, improving real-time data flow and reducing manual work.
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Data visualization dashboards help design ops measure capacity and prioritize resources effectively, enhancing decision-making.
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Human-centered design ops involves empathizing deeply with designers and operationalizing solutions that scale universally yet feel personal.
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Reducing cognitive load by automating routine decisions can free designers to focus on higher-value work.
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Removing single points of failure in teams ensures continuity and resilience amid churn.
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Leadership endorsement is critical to encourage designers’ adaptability and cross-domain skill sharing.
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Building community within and across design teams fosters connection, inclusion, and sustainable innovation.
Notable Quotes
"Standardization lives deep in my heart partially because of the teams that I’ve worked on and also because I’ve just had so many domains under the umbrellas of my teams over time."
"The Cheesecake Factory has basically cracked the code across what I am deeming four tenets of standardization at scale: quality, scope, velocity, and craft."
"The automatic soap dispenser was designed based on a bias by standard and distributed widely with the bystandard."
"Women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured and 17% more likely to die in a car accident because crash test dummies are modeled after the average male."
"We needed a mechanism for scaling The Architects influence and craft to the team, exposing the team to their talents while being inclusive of different points of view."
"Without automation, none of these tools are talking to each other, and operational overhead for your Ops and DPM teams is actually absurd."
"If it feels uncomfortable to get techie for a design ops professional, you’re probably in the right space."
"Human centered design Ops is about making sure nobody thinks they’re a robot."
"Reducing cognitive load means some decisions should just be made for the team to free mental bandwidth."
"Community building is what it’s about. The connection between the humans is the future of scaled innovation."
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