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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Design ops emerged to alleviate friction for scrum designers at Athena.
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Historical focus was on coding over user experience due to waterfall methodologies.
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The halt of federal EHR incentives shifted buyer priorities towards design and usability.
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Audit of workflows revealed significant design debt and areas for UX improvement.
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Creating a shared language around design quality led to better communication with senior leadership.
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Design quality metrics were developed for tracking improvements across workflows.
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Collaborative scoring sessions were effective in prioritizing design initiatives.
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Training for asynchronous reviews allowed for scalability in design audits.
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Job mapping provided a stable taxonomy for knowledge management across teams.
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Cross-product scrum teams can enhance collaboration and increase design focus.
Notable Quotes
"I wanted to point out that I'm feeling a little bit of imposter syndrome being up here talking to you guys."
"We didn't even start out as a software company. We're actually a birthing clinic."
"No doctor wants to use an EHR."
"We have customers ourselves in the organization. We should think of ourselves as a pseudo product team."
"We still have work to do helping teams better understand and leverage the design quality scores."
"It introduced hard numbers into the design discussion and created a shared language."
"What we really want is to have designers empowered to improve product development processes."
"If we use this to describe our company... I would like to think we live in the culture layer or maybe the nature layer."
"We had been using our work structure as the taxonomy to tag knowledge."
"Should we have spent more time communicating across teams?"
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