Design Ops & Design Systems

Design Ops

As a fast paced lean startup that values a wholistic design approach, we had responsibilities across all lines of the business. Our design team was at times overwhelmed by the demand and design requests. We started looking at how we could increase our resources satisfaction but maintain good quality UX with all/most customer touchpoints as well as internal support. Another opportunity identified was cost reduction on the whole company when processes are streamlined.

Problem: our understaffed team aims to provide wholistic design services to all organization functions but would also like to provide room for growth and learning new things.

Identified pain points:

• Unjustified extra cost on the company that could have been avoided with better structure
• Overworked resources
• Unsatisfied resources
• Subpar design work, potential risk on branding
• No design approval process – anyone could publish anything, at any time, across any department
• No work filter – Overbooking on time

Working across all of the major teams I was able to gather feedback, garner support, and finalize a workflow that worked for all teams (Operations, Customer success, Marketing, Product, Legal, Engineering) by standardizing our process with all the teams that tapped into the Design team, we were able to start sifting through the pain points. Implementing meeting days at a ratio of 2:5 insured all of the team’s kickoffs and handoffs were on a regular schedule and meetings between were by choice of the designers. This freed up designers to have more creative blocks improving design, helping them feel less overwhelmed, and more satisfied with their work.

We saw an uptick in productivity as well as healthier conversations around their work presented.

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Design System & templates;

I have designed and developed multiple design systems that can scale with the engineering teams. It is imperative to have a collection of reusable components, patterns, and guidelines that can be used to create consistent and cohesive designs across products and platforms. These comprehensive guidebooks include a range of elements, such as typography, color palettes, iconography, layout grids, and more. The goal of these systems is to maintain consistency and efficiency in the design process, while also ensuring that the end user has a seamless experience with the product or suite of products. Design systems are often used by large organizations with multiple teams and products to ensure that all designs are consistent and aligned with the company’s brand and values. However, I have found having a solid design system at smaller organizations increases the workflow and delivery experience.

Same strategies were adapted to cover the whole design function under the organization , reusable templates of legal documents, keynotes, release notes, promotional print elements, guideline pamphlets were produced in multiple formats to serve all company functions.

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