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
-
•
Design ops was initially embedded but undervalued and misunderstood at BBA Mexico, causing operational crises when removed.
-
•
The design team at BBA grew from 21 designers in 2016 to about 190 by the time of this talk, necessitating scalable ops support.
-
•
Splitting design teams into specialized groups by activity (discipline, pools, operations) without proper design ops support led to fragmentation and coordination failures.
-
•
Removing the design ops team caused designers to struggle with basic tasks like onboarding, printing, and project staffing.
-
•
Design leaders became overwhelmed trying to cover design ops responsibilities, detracting from their design focus.
-
•
Design ops functions include staffing, budgets, agency coordination, onboarding, career planning, and maintaining design practice standards.
-
•
Recognition among designers for design ops grew significantly once the team was absent, revealing their vital behind-the-scenes role.
-
•
Rebuilding design ops involved creating roles embedded directly with design heads to maintain alignment and responsiveness.
-
•
Ideal design ops ratio is around 1 manager per 14 designers, but practice often settles for less due to budget and project pressures.
-
•
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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Accessibility isn’t a checkbox you run automated tests for; you must involve people with disabilities to benchmark success."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
June 7, 2023
"Transparency is one of our key values, so everyone in the studio was involved in building and maintaining the evaluation system."
Ignacio MartinezFair and Effective Designer Evaluation
September 25, 2024
"Transformation is metamorphosis; it's often messy and aims to create systems out of chaos."
Sarah Kinkade Mariana Ortiz-ReyesDesign Management Models in the Face of Transformation
June 8, 2022
"Companies today are embracing these principles, seeing the value of user connection and self-actualization for business success."
Daniel GloydWarming the User Experience: Lessons from America's first and most radical human-centered designers
May 9, 2024
"Those fishermen didn’t want political news—they wanted reliable weather forecasts to stay safe at sea."
Patrick BoehlerFishing for Real Needs: Reimagining Journalism Needs with AI
June 10, 2025
"You can chat with large sets of data in real time, not waiting hours or days for answers."
Andy Barraclough Betsy NelsonFrom Costly Complexity to Efficient Insights: Why UX Teams Are Switching To Voxpopme
September 23, 2024
"Policy is ideally driven by values, while UX in the private sector is driven by delight and profit."
Alexandra SchmidtWhy Ethics Can't Save Tech
November 18, 2022
"Our job as design teams is to teach others what we do, not to feel insecure about sharing."
Louis RosenfeldDiscussion: What Operations can teach DesignOps
November 6, 2017
"Carbon is just the starting point for what can be imagined. We're hired for our expertise to adapt, not just follow directions."
Mitchell BernsteinOrganizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape
September 29, 2021
