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
"Decision makers often have to try to piece all the pieces of the puzzle together themselves."
Brad Peters Anne MamaghaniShort Take #1: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
December 6, 2022
"Leadership knew design transformation would be hard, which is why my role was created to help guide that change."
Lona MooreScaling Design Beyond Designers
June 11, 2021
"The Pinocchio pattern is about turning an idea, a concept, into a working reality with machine intelligence as a collaborator."
Josh Clark Veronika KindredSentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)
January 15, 2025
"75% of democratized studies don’t see full reporting mostly because stakeholders don’t have time for the analysis."
Erin May Roberta Dombrowski Laura Oxenfeld Brooke HintonDistributed, Democratized, Decentralized: Finding a Research Model to Support Your Org
March 10, 2022
"AI moderation, in short, is a large language model that runs a moderated interview session without a human researcher present."
Tara TresselInvestigating qualitative depth of AI-moderated interviews
March 10, 2026
"Code is definitely considered the source of truth; we're working hard to make Figma an extension of that."
Charles Lee Jennie YipBuilding a New Home for the Atlassian Design System
October 22, 2020
"Technology can revolutionize how we think about education."
Kristin SkinnerFive Years of DesignOps
September 29, 2021
"We can all become experts at stuff if we work hard enough – sometimes you have to fake it till you make it."
Megan BlockerGetting to the “So What?”: How Management Consulting Practices Can Transform Your Approach to Research
March 26, 2024
"Putting all programs together on easily comparable terms makes the system material and conceivable."
Shanti Mathew Natalie Sims Natalia RadywylCivic Design at Scale: Introducing the Public Policy Layer Cake
December 9, 2021
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How should I choose communication channels and message formats to effectively share research insights?
How effective are AI-generated follow-up questions in usability testing compared to human moderators?
What are the challenges and opportunities posed by democratization of user research within organizations?