Focus areas of design operations?

It would be great if there is one answer to the question. Different practitioners and experts will give you a different answer. Instead of seeing it as chaos, immature, we should see it as a great strength. As Richard Buchannan said, ” Fields in which definition is now a settled matter tend to be lethargic, dying, or dead field, where inquiry no longer provides challenges to what is accepted as truth.  

In a recent Panel discussion hosted by friends.figma (Moderated by Farid Sabitov), Patrizia Bertini, Dominique Ward, and I had a chat about the focus areas of design operation. 

Patrizia focuses on three pillars: Business Operation, Workflow Operation, and People Operation. It is finding the balance among these three pillars.

Dominique illustrated design operation as a HUB- a central place for practices, how design-org and teams function. DesignOps focuses on cultivating a design culture. Change with time. 

Farid Sabitov illustrated the designOps focus area in three levels: strategic, tactical, and individual, focusing on people and products.

I focus on how DesignOps needs to grow with the maturity of the design practices. I focus on People, Processes, and Tooling. Prioritize designOps focus based on the need of the designer, based on the design org, and align with the need of the business. 

No matter how we divide and connect all the moving parts of what designOps does, there is one common theme— The People. What really differentiate designOps from other operation functions is that: designOps adapts to the design maturity of a company, focuses on the core human needs of the designers, weights people over process, weights outcome over output.

There is no single answer to the question what are the focus areas of designOps. But there is a focus for designOps: to help designers do their best work and advocate the value of design practice.