Imagine a vast, wide open block of time on your work calendar.
Unheard of, right? But stick with the visual anyway: You make it to your desk and settle in with a steaming cup of coffee. Your email is hidden away in a tab somewhere, while your Slack notifications are muted. Your morning meetings wrapped on time and ahead of you lies an entirely free afternoon to focus on the one thing that always seems to slip away from you: design. It feels like opening a present — ripping off the giant bow, wrapping paper fluttering to the floor.
Who knew time could feel like such a generous gift?
The team at Block Renovation, for one. Julia Karlsson-Wilson recalled how the product team’s growth triggered a need for better workflow: “We recognized that to deliver amazing products at the scale we want to, we needed to implement a more thoughtful approach to how we balance maker and meeting time.”
Enter: a DesignOps-inspired work strategy.
Although Block does not yet have a dedicated DesignOps organization, the product design team is applying strategies that encourage flow states, streamline design processes, dedicate time to research and consolidate design reviews — all of which has become especially important in light of transitioning to a heavily virtual work environment.
Built In NYC sat down with the lead product designer to learn how she imagines DesignOps will continue to improve Block’s internal processes, design approaches and interactions with teams across the company. Read on for a look at how Karlsson-Wilson’s outlook on collaboration, design and team goals scale alongside company growth.
What first prompted your team to explore the concept of DesignOps?
As the product team at Block has doubled in the past year, we felt there was a real need to give product designers more time to design. Designers at startups wear many hats, and it’s easy for the day to slip by without much time for design, especially when we’re working on such exciting initiatives.
Allowing more time to let designers get into a flow state not only improves the quality of our features, but it lets designers do what we do best: design!
What does DesignOps look like at your company, and what were the key steps you took to develop and implement this practice?
While Block isn’t yet at the scale where we have a dedicated DesignOps team, we’ve implemented a lot of DesignOps methodologies across all of our processes. The first step we took was making sure designers have enough time to get into a flow state when designing — it’s impossible to thoughtfully design features in 30- or 60-minute increments, so blocking off full afternoons a few times per week has been a game changer.
We’ve also streamlined our product design process to allow for more dedicated research and exploration time, and fewer — but more impactful — touch points with stakeholders. We rely heavily on Slack to share our research findings and have a 24-hour grace period for stakeholders to give additional feedback after design reviews.
Within the product design team, we’ve rethought how we collaborate, especially in a mostly virtual world. We have both team and squad-specific design reviews a couple of times per week, which serves as dedicated critique time. One-off feedback is sometimes necessary, but can quickly spiral into a time suck, so we do our best to stick to the dedicated design review time.
Allowing more time to get into a flow state not only improves the quality of our features, but it lets designers do what we do best: design!”
As your team scales, how are you continuing to leverage and evolve your DesignOps practice?
We’ll continue to invest in improving our internal processes to make sure our designers are spending the majority of their time — at least 70 percent — on designing. We also plan to use DesignOps thinking to streamline how we approach research, roadmap planning, design sprints — and even how we interact with our engineering team.
I’m also interested in the intersection of DesignOps and design culture — how do we continue to foster a tight-knit design team while implementing more processes around things like design reviews? As we continue to work in a semi-remote world, how do we make sure we’re not over-engineering the way we work together? I’m bullish on DesignOps playing a large role in how we solve these problems.
