Design
Management Made Easy

For over 25 years I’ve helped companies large and small with their design challenges. I know that effective help requires an intimate knowledge of your situation. From UX design and research, designer recruitment and management, Reach out now to get confidential help on your current design challenges.

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Why Do We Need DesignOps?

Because Design Is Broken

The Agile Manifesto would not have been necessary if Design had not first crippled Engineering. The toxic idea of the “creative individual” built walls inside organizations, instead of collaboration. Corporate culture driven by market pressures and a lack of opportunity drives designers to solve problems fast instead of good. Only some of the risk-mitigation techniques taught in Design Thinking and UX curriculums is practiced at most companies. And even when it is, it is often done poorly with expected results. DesignOps takes the applicable components of Agile and DevOps and modifies them to work for Design, not against it.

As a design manager serving Fortune 500 companies, I have worked in all flavors of engineering project management. Unfortunately you can’t just slap a process from one department onto another. But that is exactly what has happened. Around the globe, designers are suffering in the promised utopia of Agile. At the same time, companies are constantly seeking to improve innovation, a core deliverable of Design. The minimum viable product approach is great for prototyping and start-ups, but does not help with brand trust. And the “best guess and test” processes promoted by Agile work great for feature refinement, but are not the best tool for understanding users.

I have found the root cause of this issue. Design wants to work in exactly the opposite direction as engineering.

Engineering

Engineering reduces project risk by starting with the fewest number of variables for any feature. As new functionality is developed new, unforeseen possibilities present themselves. This is the source of most engineering innovation.

Design

Design reduces project risk by starting with the largest number of variables that can be explored, evaluated and eliminated. Learning about people, their wants and needs, is the source of most design innovation.

Agile Transformed The Corporate Environment

*Continuous delivery is the key benefit of Agile*

We need to acknowledge the massive benefits Agile and Lean has brought to product development plus the benefits of engineering project management processes. Before Agile, engineering development was suffering from a lack of process in product design. With the widespread adoption of Agile, and now DevOps, companies are experiencing new levels of feature development output.

Agile allowed Engineering to create forward momentum for companies needing to deliver new products and services for their customers. Due to this forward momentum, everyone just followed the lead of Engineering. And because most organization had huge feature-request backlogs; they knew what they needed to deliver and development teams just needed to get busy producing those products and features. Design was relegated to little more than an Art Department, producing screens, UI elements and mock-ups to support the pace of Engineering. Design adapted by taking what was part of a Computer Science degree, human computer interaction (HCI) and making human centered design the focus of Design Thinking and User Experience Design. Today the field of UX is both deep and wide. The initial required reading for any student of UX is over 800 pages long, and this just touches on the myriad of specialized areas of study necessary for a UX Designer today! And if we add the skills a design needs into the future, the list gets even longer.

Perhaps because Design was previously part of the problem, no one consulted Design on the Agile Manifesto. Instead engineers pushed forward, moving fast and breaking stuff, while dragging the rest of the product development team along with them. Ask anyone on a product development team what they think of Agile, and everyone, (except the designer) will say they love it! Many project managers wonder why this is; is it just entitled designers not being willing to change? I held my breath for the past decade going along on this ride. But time after time I’ve seen new UX design graduates and seasoned designers struggle with Agile flavored processes. At some point we have to step back and ask ourselves, “why is design struggling to deliver in this new Agile world?”

Yesterday’s
UI Designer Skills

Design Thinking
Semiotics
Graphic UI Design
Typography
Iconography
Photography
Illustration
Visual Creation Software
Content Design
Brand & Identity
Color Theory
Pop Culture/ Trends
Layout & Hierarchy
Visual Storytelling
Design Systems/ Libraries
Mock-ups/ Prototypes

Today’s
UX Designer Skills

Design Thinking
Linguistics
Wireframing & Mock-ups
Mockup Creation Software
Interaction Design & Patterns
Information Architecture
User Research
Usability Testing
Basic Psychology
Basic Computer Science
Basic Marketing
Persona & Journey Maps
Design Systems/ Libraries
UI Trends
Basic HTML, CSS, JS
Project Management

Tomorrow’s
CX Designer Skills

Design Thinking
Behavioral Psychology
IOT Design/ Systems Design
Ai Interface Design
Conversational Design
Haptic & Touch Design
Audio Design
Kinetics Design
AR/ VR/ Immersive Design
Screenless Interface Design
Customer Experience
Research Analytics
Public Speaking/ Presenting
Documentation Software
New & Emerging Technologies
DesignOps

Should Engineering Run Design?

The short answer is, “no.” When Engineering runs Design it turns into a highly reactive environment, where the best a designer can do is produce design artifacts on demand; all the risk mitigation techniques that are part of the UX process are neglected or slapped on as an afterthought. When Design runs Engineering products often look great but can suffer from considerable technical debt when form is prioritized over function. Design should not run Engineering just as Engineering should not run Design. However, they must run in tandem.

Design is not art

Design is the synthesis of engineering. Throw out your dated impression of Design as poster makers. Visual Design is but one skill-set among many that are important in creating effective products. [Look for reference outside] I find it more helpful to see Product Designers akin to Architects. But for now we are stuck with the word “design” that associates us more with fashion and decoration than it does with research and planning. If you want to get the most out of your design investment, it is important for your entire organization to see Design for what it is.

When is Design needed?

Design is needed when the costs of engineering the wrong solution are too costly. There is a common logical fallacy I come across these days; Design is expensive, Engineering is cheap. The reality is that both are expensive. But it is difficult for many organizations to honestly acknowledge the cost of unwanted solutions. It’s easier to just shelf them and imagine a future where that solution will be needed. And someday your team’s shelved solutions may be wanted by your customers. Unfortunately technology on a shelf does not age well; your systems, and your tools will have evolved, meaning your shelved solution will need to be rebuilt before it can serve your users. Unwanted solutions waste company resources in time and money, and perhaps worse, erode customer trust in your brand. As a customer, we gravitate to those brands that take time to know us and serve us with features we need. Brands that just throw feature after feature at us, without really understanding who we are and what we want, create opportunities for their competition to meet our needs.

Design Thinking puts people at the center of every product decision. By adopting processes from other specializations Design is able to constantly evolve and continue to serve the customers of tomorrow.

Thankfully design managers from around the globe have come together with a solution. First coined by Dave Malouf, DesignOps takes the best practices of Agile and DevOps, combining those with best practices for design management.

Design
Operations

DesignOps is the alignment of people, processes and platforms, giving designers the space to do their job; design.

The requirements on a modern designer are unprecedented. There is no single degree that can fully prepare a designer for the challenges they face in the workplace. More than ever design requires cross-disciplinary input and collaboration. In fact, you will see highly effective designers with all variety of educational backgrounds. Combine this with the need for Design to work harmoniously with multiple departments, and the opportunities for misalignment far outnumber the possibilities for effective collaboration.

DesignOps looks for opportunities to improve individual knowledge, tools and methods of working. DesignOps is an operational framework that is customized to fit the specific needs of your business.

DesignOps maximizes individual performance and growth through employee skills assessments followed by standardized education modules. DesignOps utilizes industry verified processes to administer interdisciplinary collaboration, alignment and output. DesignOps identifies platforms and tools for communication, production, evaluation and training.

DesignOps Components

People

Roles and responsibilities
Skills assessments
Learning and growth

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Design Management Made Easy