All roads lead to DesignOps

When I started working as a designer, I thought my job was Designing The Thing. You know, doing the research, understanding the users, crafting just the right combo of visuals and organization and interactions. And when for whatever reason The Thing falls flat or fails or doesn’t fit user needs, asking “why,” identifying the mistakes, and doing it better next time.

But therein lies the catch. “Why.”

Within the first year of my first job out of school, I found myself designing education for developers. The next year I was working on a pattern library. Then building usability testing tools, then organizing a group collaboration space, then designing an asset management system for the icon library, then leading a strategic UX initiative, then managing a team, then designing new hire onboarding, then plotting job growth paths. All because I kept letting “why” lead me to the next project.

“Why” is how you find out that what you thought was the problem wasn’t the real problem after all. “Why” takes you deep into the dark, labyrinthine guts of processes, organizations, and culture. “Why” is how you realize that a project’s success or failure never really hinges on an individual’s work, or even a group’s work, but rather the complex environment of systems in which the project was conceived, designed, built, tested, marketed, shipped, implemented, and used.

A lot has been written about DesignOps and design management recently, and rightly so. As companies develop more mature design practice, and as designers are given the latitude to aggressively and persistently ask “why,” designers are rapidly realizing that many domains beyond just the Design of The Thing need their help.

Being a designer in this day and age means recognizing the enormous complexity of the world in which we live, the multitude of factors that affect our users and the companies we work for. It means understanding the ethical implications of our work. The importance of educating and force-multiplying. There is so much work to be done out there, so many poorly designed things and systems that are contributing to human unhappiness, frustration, and suffering. There simply aren’t enough of us to do it all ourselves.

The only way to really make a substantial difference is to help create an environment in which everyone can make good design decisions, and that means being an advocate, educator, manager, and communicator as much as it means doing capital-D “Design.”

I’m excited to see designers start to penetrate the upper ranks of major organizations, not just because I think they’ll bring improved aesthetic sensibilities to products or marginally improve ease of use, but instead because I know designers are especially talented at fixing processes. And I think that’s what we need most right now.