RadliffDesign

— ROLE

Head of Design Operations

— DATE

2022 – Present

I am currently managing operations with product management, improving the design maturity of a 20 person design team. In this effort I also oversee design systems and measuring efficiency across our design org. My main goal is to empower the managers on our team to improve domain expertise and design quality across their respective teams. Within the scope of operations I help hire the right people and provide models, frameworks, and tools so our experience design team can provide clear, measurable impact for our e-commerce business.

Goals

• Leading the design team in rallying around and delivering on OKRs within our customer-centric roadmap and vision.

• Improve workflows and create frameworks that will help the team deliver solutions that respond to research and insights.

• Create and communicate design strategies that sustain deep customer relationships for the business.

• Manage the team’s resources and access to data that supports each designer’s and squad’s objectives.

• Establish strong rapport with cross-functional teams in order to cultivate a collaborative environment – understanding what works well and friction points

• Create a clear path for the design org to understand the why, what, and how for short and long-term product improvements.

Click Zoro Customer Journey Map image to explore details.

Customers

Understanding the customer was the first step in setting the team up for success. Creating an updated customer journey map helped the team understand how customers think, feels, and pain points in the overall experience. This was created in collaboration with the User Experience Research team.

Vision

Setting the stage around the type of impact Design Operations can have was an important first step. This included defining the purpose of Design Operations and how teams across the organization might engage, as well as what the future of DesignOps might look like.

Process

Having a process for how operations might achieve it’s outcomes, short and long term, was one of the first steps when coming on board to the team. I led workshops to understand and navigate the stages of the operations process, as I sought out familiar design thinking models to employ.

Mapping Operations

I used the design operations canvas to determine the recipe for success when it came to communication with the Experience Design team and other cross-functional teams.

Supporting our product experience group.

Ops Hub

The XD Hub was created to house many of the resources for Design Operations and other important team resources. This repository housed frameworks and methodologies, research aids, onboarding support, and impact dashboards reporting the teams ability to deliver outcomes in an efficient way.

Research

I worked with our User Experience Research team to create a streamlined evaluative research guide. This enabled our design team members to pursue pre- and post-launch research as a way to gather data to iterate designs.

Frameworks

The Experience Design Team was looking for more structure in the way they operated with product teams. I created a repository of resources that included problem framing, understanding pointing with teams, and other resources.

Workflow

The team needed to understand the layers of our process and how it functioned within the product management methodology. I worked to distill the concept into an illustration that showcased the source of information, the steps in the flow, milestones of progress, and the tactical artifacts required to execute on the work. Underpinning this framework resided the well-known double-diamond, which was familiar to product management.

Team

Measuring how the team operates is an important aspect of ensuring they meet expectations and efficient delivery of outcomes for the product org. We measure both the individual and the team together. OKRs help us track the team’s ability to meet goals, the leveling matrix allows us to measure individual performance, the team skill map helps identify team knowledge, and the scoring rubric enables us to be pragmatic in our assessments across the team, attempting to remove bias.

Team Effectiveness

I created a mechanism to evaluate our teams across 8 different dimensions. This was done to gather both qualitative and quantitative data regarding their overall effectiveness as a team. Each dimension asked questions related to their ability to execute work, engage with other teams, and their drive to solve problems. The dimensions as as follows:

• Purpose & Goals

• Roles

• Team Processes

• Inter-Group Relations

• Team Relationships

• Problem Solving

• Passion & Commitment

• Skills & Learning

Training Plan

Team maturity plays an important role in delivering high-quality work. Training is an important strategy to improve team maturity. Each year I create a robust training series as a way to offer team members learning opportunities that align with various development plans across the team.

• Mobile & Responsive Design

• Grids & Layout

• Accessibility

• Problem Solving Tactics

• Understanding Task Flows

• Architecting Information

• Being Data informed

• Back-end & Front-end Development

Measuring Impact

Monitoring the teams ability to output work was an important factor in knowing if there is friction in our processes or other elements that might be impacting our throughput.

• Top of Funnel

• Bottom of Funnel

• Design System

• Design Ticket Velocity

• Roadmap Alignment

• Status Reports

Another aspect of my role is leading the Design System team in a ground-up rebuild of the design system branded as Dispatch. This new system is designed to be deployed across out Top of Funnel and Bottom of Funnel product triads. The design team members within these product teams are provided with a component library, guidelines, and other patterns to be used to build Zoro.com.

RadliffDesign