Group Activity: A Deep Dive Into Value and Outcomes

Kristin Skinner
Co-author, Org Design for Design Organizations

Kamdyn Moore
Senior Design Program Manager

From the DesignOps Summit website:
DesignOps as a practice is still relatively new—but the activities have been around long enough that we’re increasingly challenged to justify and quantify what we do. Accordingly, we need to address not just what is DesignOps, but how do we prove its value? What outcomes can we genuinely promise? And how do we know we are successful? In this group exercise, we’ll identify techniques, tactics, and tools for proving (and even measuring) value, and describing the outcomes that matter most.

In a recent Rosenfeld Media survey and call, the curation team learned that we’ve moved past ‘what is design ops?’ – now we’re into toolkits and sharing broadly applicable takeaways.

They asked ‘how is your organization measuring the value of DesignOps and.or Research/Ops’? 62% either weren’t sure, or hadn’t quite figured it out yet. There are 600+ of us in the room; we want to leverage the collective wisdom in the room to progress our thinking on this topic.

The most common barriers reported:

• Limited time or resources
• Involving the right people or teams
• Lack of proven value

Value is about the importance, the worth, or the usefulness of something. What value can we genuinely promise? And why is measuring value so difficult? The most common reasons:

• Every organization has unique constraints
• You are bound by where your organization is on the DesignOps journey; oftentimes your organization is not where it should be, or where you want it to be
• Conflict between what we need to measure versus what we’re able to measure; what behaviors are being exhbiited, and how to get people on board
• Misconceptions about measurement
• There is no industry standard within DesignOps

Leah Buley, Christian Mohr, and others are doing great work in this space.

Here are some best practices for measuring design:

• Measures are focuse don whta customers care about
• Measures are wrapped arond the product design process
• Measurement techniques mixed methods and domains
• Measurement follows a framework, not a fixed set of metrics
• Measurement spans journeys and dimensions of an experience

The Google Heart Framework:

The Facebook Framework:

These are pretty widely known and you can start using them today. Abby Covert helped them analyze and compile a potential framework that we want to use as a starting point for today’s discussion:

As you grow to 80, 90, 100 peple, you need to be thinking about people (happier designers), practice (better designers), and platform (more effective teams).

Kristin and Kamdyne want to inform and stress-test this framework with the support from the audience, using menti.com.

Here is our second poll, regarding what types of measures people think would be the most beneficial:

The audience then broke into groups to explore the three themes of the framework – happier designers, better designers, and more effective teams.

The outcomes of what was collected today will be synthesized and shared in Slack, and on an upcoming DesignOps community call.