Shaping and implementing a DesignOps function

@mgottschalk30 @PtitBenDesignOps at Centrica
Shaping and implementing
a DesignOps function
Matt Gottschalk & Ben Franck

Matt Gottschalk
Makers turned Leaders
10+ years design industry
Ben Franck
15+ years design industry
TUI Travel, AXA Insurance,
British Gas, Centrica
lastminute.com, Ogilvy,
British Gas, Centrica

Centrica
Energy and Services company: UK, Ireland & North America
Focus areas:
•Energy Supply
•Home Services
•Connected Homes
•Distributed Energy & Power
•Energy Marketing
•Trading
Over 25 Million customer accounts and £28 Billion annual revenue

Why DesignOps?

2016 2017 2018 2019
7
Digital product teams
10
24
26
Digital transformation
Scaling at speed

So… where did we start?

Yesterday
Where were we?
2016 - 2017
Today Tomorrow
2019 - onwards
Small de-centralised team
of 15 designers in 1 oﬃce

Community
Family feel
Small team of 15 designers distributed
across 7-10 digital product teams
Generalist designers
Focus on broad spectrum designers owning
a product’s digital experience
Easy to run design group
Limited onboarding and recruitment needs
due to size and stability of the team
Yesterday.

Leadership
One Leader
Head of Design operating as sole strategic
and tactical role
Senior Makers
4 senior designers focused on designing
within product teams
Yesterday.

Design maturity
Maturing company
Design has moved from visual ﬁnesse to
identifying and solving customer needs
Making and educating
Innovation is slowed down due to constant
justiﬁcation of design methods
Yesterday.
STEP 1
NON-DESIGN
STEP 2
DESIGN AS
FORM-GIVING
STEP 3
DESIGN AS
PROCESS
STEP 4
DESIGN AS
STRATEGY
Limited reach
Only 1 design leader promoting user centred
design practises outside the digital landscape

Tooling
Methods and templates
Small design team operating with little
governance and ownership
Design tools
No standard tooling resulted in ineﬃciency
and inconsistency
Yesterday.
INCONSISTENT
The absence of a design system
STEP 1
STATIC
A static PDF of your brand guidelines
STEP 2
MANUAL
The pattern library has code snippets
STEP 3
AUTOMATIC
The pattern library is a part of your development process
STEP 4
GOVERNED
The pattern library process is built in to your organisation
STEP 5

Small team
Easy to run
Some innovation
In a nutshell…

So… what changed?

Yesterday
Where we are today…
2016 - 2017
Today Tomorrow
2019 - onwards
Big de-centralised team
of 45 designers based across 5 oﬃces

Group Function Digital Transformation
+ =
Design team covering multiple
brands across diﬀerent locations
Explosive growth transforming
our traditional organisations
Scaling at Speed
Designers
40+

How might we…
Eﬀectively operate a design
team that is now three times
as big as it was 6 months
ago?
Optimise and augment our
existing tools and methods to
allow designers to focus on
creativity and innovation?
Champion collaboration
inside and outside the team
to be as eﬃcient as possible?
Communicate the value of
investment in design across
the company and help to
increase design maturity
and reach within the
organisation?
Challenges.

#DesignOps!

• Hiring
• Supervising
• Training employees
• Monitoring and optimising existing processes
• Analysing system eﬀectiveness
• Creating strategies for improving productivity and eﬃciency
Customer Operations
Does it compare?

“Design Operations focuses
on the health of the practice,
the people, and the projects.”
Kristin Skinner:
Kristin Skinner
Author of Org Design for Design Orgs;
Building and managing in-house teams

“DesignOps is the key to scaling digital product design teams with
more eﬃciency. As companies mature and invest in design, they need
to operationalise workﬂow, hiring, alignment between teams, and
more so designers can focus on design work while someone else
takes care of the rest.”
DesignBetter.Co - The DesignOps Handbook

Shaping DesignOps for Centrica
Capture
List existing activities and
explore opportunities
Sort
Identify and map key
areas of focus
#DesignOps
Label
Deﬁne our DesignOps pillars and
establish strategic and tactical goals

Our 4 DesignOps Pillars
ago?
organisation?

Our 4 DesignOps Pillars
ago?
organisation?
People Design Toolkit Collaboration Design Value

By focusing on these 4 pillars, our DesignOps team
works on setting up and maintaining a forward
thinking and user centred environment for designers
to focus on what really matters:
Crafting innovative solutions for our customers.

Eﬀectively operate a design team that is now
three times as big as it was 6 months ago
People

People
Established relationships with Product
Owners to ensure continued quality of work
What did we do? What is the outcome?
Recruitment - We put product teams needs at
the heart of our designer recruitment

People
Created a digital designer playbook for both
existing team and new joiners
Onboarding - We mapped the joining experience
and gathered insights and identiﬁed opportunities

People
Onboarding - We mapped the joining experience
and gathered insights and identified opportunities
Created a digital designer playbook for both
existing team and new joiners
Engagement - We ran engagement surveys to
assess the impact of Design Operations on our team
Identified successes and refined our DesignOps
roadmap based on designer needs

Optimise and augment our existing tools and
methods to allow designers to focus on
creativity and innovation
Design Toolkit

Design Toolkit
We created service manuals and
standardised our core deliverable templates
Our designers practises are now aligned and
consistent across the whole team

We created a version controlled centralised
Sketch component library
Increased consistency and eﬃciency in the
design process
Design Toolkit

Increased consistency and eﬃciency in the
design process
We setup a dedicated product team to
demonstrate the value of a design system
Designers and developers using and contributing
to a centralised and governed library
Design Toolkit
We created a version controlled centralised
Sketch component library

Champion collaboration inside and outside the
team to be as eﬃcient as possible
Collaboration

Collaboration
We ran a design week, bringing together
designers from across our organisation
Improved collaboration and engagement
within the team

within the team
We setup weekly open design critique
sessions
Increased visibility of work in progress
across the team
Collaboration

We focused on improving the openness and
transparency of the existing team culture
Designers feel safer giving/receiving feedback
enabling more exploration and experimentation
within the team
We setup weekly open design critique
sessions
Increased visibility of work in progress
across the team
Collaboration

Communicate the value of investment in
design across the company and help to
increase design maturity and reach within the
organisation
Design Value

Established relationships with business units
outside of digital
Increased trust and understanding of our
work and capabilities
Design Value

outside of digital
Advocating for the value of design input
earlier in the product lifecycle
Design is moving away from being solely a
delivery function
Design Value

outside of digital
Advocating for the value of design input
earlier in the product lifecycle
Design is moving away from being solely a
delivery function
We demonstrated and presented the impact
of Design Operations
Provide consultancy to other departments
Design Value

Yesterday
What’s next?
Today Tomorrow
2019 - onwards2016 - 2017

Roadmap
Evolve and Optimise Design Career Ladder
Tomorrow.
Research Operations
re+
ops

Kristin Skinner:
Setting up a DesignOps
function has and will continue
to enable our designers to
focus on designing.
Outcome.

Designs better
Stays around
Innovates more
A happy designer…

Thank You.

Shaping and implementing a DesignOps function

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