How to Define and Maintain a DesignOps Roadmap
Summary
DesignOps helps design teams be more efficient, effective, and happy by creating the best possible circumstances for design. Whether there are one or more full-time DesignOps professionals available or just several people with the DesignOps mindset, coordination of DesignOps initiatives is necessary to have the biggest impact. It is therefore crucial to be working with a continuously updated roadmap for DesignOps, featuring prioritised initiatives, their rough planning, and expected impact on the design team’s metrics. This session teaches you how to make sure the right DesignOps initiatives are executed with the right people, to have the biggest possible impact.
Key Insights
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Design ops initiatives improve the circumstances for designers by addressing processes, practices, and people.
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Effective design ops roadmap management relies on distinguishing between individuals with a design ops mindset and those with a formal design ops role.
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A thorough inventory through wide stakeholder interviews radiating from design is crucial to identify and prioritize design ops issues and initiatives.
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Prioritization of initiatives should be aligned with the design organization's goals or KPIs to ensure strategic impact.
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Visual roadmaps using time horizons like now, next, and later combined with initiative categories help communicate plans clearly.
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Distributing work across teams encourages shared ownership, and linking contributions to performance reviews can boost engagement.
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Measuring impact with relevant design ops-specific and design organization metrics drives data-supported progress storytelling.
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Regular iteration and quarterly reviews of the roadmap with stakeholders keep plans relevant and adaptive to shifting needs.
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Design ops managers can benefit from positioning themselves outside direct reporting lines of design leadership to maintain influence and say no when needed.
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Tools and automation, like bots to track UX bugs, can effectively support faster problem identification and resolution within design ops.
Notable Quotes
"Design operators continuously improve the circumstances for designers and the design organization to increase the chances of good design happening."
"The design project tracker used 1900 Excel functions mostly for capacity planning in quarterly design cycles."
"If you have a design ops team, they will be the ones managing the design ops roadmap, but if not, it falls back to people with the mindset coordinating amongst themselves."
"I do an inventory first to make a long list, then I prioritize to make a shorter list, then distribute the work, coordinate progress, and finally measure the impact."
"You want to write a brief for each initiative and confirm it with your stakeholders before putting a team together to execute it."
"Your metrics allow you to tell data-supported stories to communicate progress effectively."
"It helps if contributing to design ops initiatives is part of people's performance reviews or career ladder criteria."
"I took roughly three months to get the first shareable version of the roadmap, including onboarding and interviews."
"I reported to a head of product excellence, not the head of design, so I could say no to requests from design leadership with backing from my manager."
"We created a Slack bot that automatically created tickets from UX bug reports to help design managers discover issues faster and track recovery time."
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