One of my life goals is to optimize and improve the world around me. I love puzzles and solving complex problems, not only by providing solutions but finding the best one for a given context and scenario. But more importantly, I want to make people’s lives better.
DesignOps suits me well because it focuses on empowering people to achieve their goals, optimizing processes and workflows, improving collaboration, and establishing best practices and tools.
I like to prioritize four different areas in my design work, besides the broad scope and different approaches.
Community
The most important aspect to take care of since the whole concept behind it is to improve how people work and collaborate together. And it is not only around the project team but all stakeholders involved at any step of a project or initiative.
Learning and sharing are parallel aspects equally important for people´s growth and can help build relationships and increase empathy and understanding.
A community only takes shape when people trust and support each other.
Development
In order for people to have an experience with a product or service, it must be delivered. Achieving this requires a balance of requirements, resources, and time. However, to make sure to keep the process as smooth and stress-free as possible, it is important to ensure clear communication channels, well-defined workflows and processes, proper tools availability, and clear and reachable goals and planning. Without these key components, the delivery of a product or service can be challenging.
Building bridges or breaking silos are not enough and proper means to enable collaboration and communication are essential for it to work. Providing good ways for all the stakeholders to get to know each other avoids further stress and frustrations. Everybody must be aligned on how, what, why and when.
Quality
High-quality products and services that are competitive and outstand the competition are only possible if starting from the right insight data.
Challenging every assumption to build and refine the best hypothesis with continuous data collection and unbiased analysis ensures a more assertive connection to the real user and their needs.
Knowing who the product and service are, and how to provide a great experience is ROI guaranteed, and increase people’s brand loyalty.
Scale
Scaling is not about increasing the size but making it fit like a bespoke suit, considering that there is no one-size-fits-all, every company and team need to find out what works best for their capabilities.
It is about increasing efficiency and consistency while keeping a good pace of development opening up space to add improvements to either increase the quality or enable growth.
Having the right metrics is essential to measure the health and improve when needed, and the ability to scale up.