Building DesignOps: developing the four pillars

In part 1, I talked about how we identified our most pressing challenges while scaling Design and established the 4 pillars of our DesignOps practice.

• Process and tools
• Spotlight
• People and culture
• Design strategy

After establishing our DesignOps pillars, we conducted an ideation workshop with our key stakeholders to find solutions to address our immediate needs under each of the pillars.

Pillar 1: Process and tools

We wanted our team to have full visibility of their work within and beyond Design, to facilitate early feedback and alignment — without having to set up myriads of alignment meetings. We re-evaluated our toolset and existing design cadences and came up with 4 initiatives to optimise our process and toolset for higher visibility and easy collaboration.

Weekly warm-up
We established ‘Design PPP’ (aka progress, plans and problems) — a 30 mins weekly cadence for the design team. This is our warm-up session to connect, align and kick off the week together. We spend around 5 mins greeting and sharing our weekend stories. We then take a couple of minutes each to reflect on the previous week’s work, current week’s plans and any problems. We also acknowledge our peers’ support and thank them. These highlights are compiled on a Confluence page which is open to everyone. Anyone in the company can find out what ‘Design is doing’ by just visiting our Design PPP page.

Lesson: By spending only 30 mins together every week, we’ve been able to kill several unnecessary individual check-ins and alignment meetings and avoid gaps in communication.

Design buddies program
We created a ‘Design buddies’ program to allow designers to just jam out solutions together in small groups. In this program, based on common areas of work, designers become buddies for a month and run discoveries and solve problems together. They’re often rotated on a monthly or quarterly basis, depending on their projects and interests. This program has brought our team together, closer in ways we didn’t imagine. By building collaboration right into our process, we have saved hundreds of hours on duplicate effort and planning and organising alignment meetings. Other benefits of our ‘Design buddies’ program have been cross-pollination of skills and building of greater trust on peers.

Lesson: We let our ‘Design buddies’ program evolve organically. Today, it looks different from what we created. Some designers use our original version while others have tailored it to suit their specific needs. The lesson here is to not guard any DesignOps programs once you build them, but allow your users to shape them according to their preferences. Sometimes, they might even own it entirely and that’s cool. 😊

Moving to Figma
Our team used 4 different tools for the end-to-end design process — Sketch, Invision, Abstract and Zeplin. This toolset cost us USD 17,000 annually. At scale, this was not only going to be quite expensive but was also ineffective for collaboration and visibility.

We needed to change that.

Figma was the answer as a single tool for the end-to-end design process. However, not all designers were comfortable switching to an entirely new tool. There was a certain learning curve involved. I worked on getting the team buy-in first, by identifying Figma champions in the team. While they worked on convincing the team, I managed tool evaluation, vendor negotiations/comms and buy-in from the leadership.

We broke our ‘Figma move’ down to several small milestones and picked a driver for each. Next, we set up calendar reminders, a weekly project check-in, a Slack channel ‘Figmates’ and a Confluence page for live updates. A little project management can go a long way.

We migrated ALL our design files and the design system library to Figma in a record time of 2 months — and never looked back. Figma has allowed our designers to easily work cross-discipline and collaborate on one file which is powerful. The real magic happened when our PMs and engineers were able to pitch in with design solutions using Figma. As a part of this migration, we also designed a new ‘file and layer naming format’ that makes our design work easy to navigate and find. Now, the Figma project organisation playbook is a part of our onboarding guide for new team members.

Lesson: While it’s been a real game changer for us, our move to Figma wasn’t entirely a smooth sail. There were many roadblocks and low points in the project. What really worked for us was having smaller milestones to celebrate and our awesome Figma champions who kept everyone motivated and unblocked, throughout the journey.

Design and editorial guidelines

When you have a small team, it’s much easier to design with consistency. Not so much when you scale. We had a very basic form of design principles and a components library. We grew so fast that we didn’t get time to invest in building our design standards before we were a real big team. This meant a series of inconsistent design solutions and a steadily growing design debt.

That quarter our design system team doubled down on building our design standards and maturing the design language. They started with an audit to identify the most inconsistent design patterns and created a workshop format to define and document design guidelines and drive alignment with designers. This was then coupled with ‘design system office hours’ — a consultation for designers aimed at alignment and preventing duplicate effort. They also created a very cool ‘new component decision making tree’ but that’s a story for another post.

Our design guidelines combined with a monthly audit practice, and consultation office hours have now become a solid framework to empower our designers create consistent and cohesive designs, at scale.

Lesson: Design is subjective and design alignment is the hardest nut to crack. Those debates between designers could really last for over 2 hours. No kidding. So be patient, have empathy and lean on your design principles and universal best practices to settle arguments. Our ground rule is ‘Prioritise consistency (after UX) over beauty’. If we have two solutions, the one more consistent with our design language will be selected, over the one more beautiful.

Pillar 2: Spotlight

We want to put design and user experience at the core of the business. This is only possible if design is widely accessible and visible in the company. We go to extra lengths to achieve that. Apart from sending out regular newsletter updates to our design language, we established a monthly Design Showcase event — open for the entire company.

This is the spotlight moment for our design team. They share research, discoveries, uncooked designs, prototypes and data/user insights behind their design decisions. The raw and interactive nature of this showcase makes it truly unique and something that everyone looks forward to attending.

We advertise it like a real event, with posters, email and Slack reminders. It’s been a great success. It opened the doors of our design world to the entire org, and brought visibility and appreciation to our work — which does wonders to our team’s morale.

Lesson: For a long time, we couldn’t have an in-person showcase, due to social distancing and WFH. We’ve recently created a virtual version of it which is still a great opportunity to showcase our team’s work. The way this event evangelised design in talabat, nothing else has. Never stop showcasing your team’s work. Out of sight, out of mind.

Pillar 3: People and culture

This pillar is all about creating the best working environment for our team and ensuring they’re set up for success. We initiated two programs to achieve this goal — ‘Delight for new hires’ and ‘Design social’.

Delight for new hires
We hired and onboarded most of our team members remotely from different time zones, due to the current global pandemic. Our ‘Onboarding buddy’ program was a great success. However, there still was room for improvement. It took a new colleague at least a month to get up to speed with the structure and workings of the Design Chapter. We needed to fix that. We made a few additions to our onboarding program:

• We created an onboarding checklist specifically for Design
• We have a ‘meet n greet’ Zoom call on the first day of joining
• Added a weekly DesignOps check-in with all new joiners in their first month. Our team ensures that they have access to the resources and people they need to get their work done. And they are feeling comfortable. We positioned DesignOps as their ‘go to person’ if they face any problems or questions, in their first 4 weeks. It just makes them feel empowered and a part of the team.
• We also created a Design Chapter onboarding guide explaining in detail how we’re structured, design cadences, squads, Slack channels, contacts for peers and so on. This guide has helped all our new team members to get up and running, in no time.

These changes to our onboarding program have been such a point of delight for the new joiners that we got a 100% satisfaction rate while onboarding with DesignOps.

Lesson: We looked into optimising our onboarding experience a bit late. If I were to go back and redo DesignOps, onboarding would be the first I’d focus on. First impressions really do matter.

Design social

Covid made it difficult for us to just go out together and have fun as a team. We realised that we needed a remote version of our team bonding outings. Our awesome team came up with a brilliant idea of a Zoom party. We would pick a host from the team to host a Zoom party, every 2 weeks. It was up to the host to decide what we’d do. Folks came up with all sorts of fun activities, from Kahoot quizzes, to online games, to watching recordings of our fav design events, or simply having lunch together while we chatted about a certain topic.

Our Design social has now organically evolved back into team outings. We’re often hanging out together (in small groups due to Covid restrictions) for outdoor activities or drinks and lunches.

Lesson: As a team scales, social activities and team bonding could become the least important in front of other challenges. Never de-prioritise ‘fun’ for your team. The cost of doing so is high. It takes a toll on a team’s morale and weakens trust on peers. Create lots of opportunities for your team to connect, bond and have fun together.

Pillar 4: Design strategy

The main objective of this pillar is to partner with fellow design leaders and drive design maturity together. We recently created a design and research maturity model for talabat and established key signals to monitor growth. This is still work in progress and I’d write in detail about this in another post.

The impact and future

The impact of DesignOps in talabat has been phenomenal in terms of switching gears from ‘always reactive’ to ‘thoughtfully proactive’ mode of scaling Design. Design is playing a key role in many parts of the business to drive and lead initiatives.

We want to focus on the future. Imagine our product 2 years from now and visualise what kind of team and culture would take us there. Then work backwards and actually design that team and culture — strategically, operationally. This means looking at things like competency strengths, career growth, finding and attracting the right talent, and building an environment where people succeed.

This means scaling DesignOps from being a single role to a dedicated team. We’re looking for a talented Design Program Manager to manage and lead design initiatives and comms. If that’s you, don’t wait. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Hopefully, my learnings have shed some light on building DesignOps from ground up. If you wanna exchange ideas or just chat about Design, DesignOps and design culture, let’s connect.