Lily's DesignOps Playbook
A sampling of skills that embody a lifetime of passion and focus.
STEP 1 - RESEARCH, TEST & VALIDATE
Informing and validating business vision with solid practices.
Implementing lean research methodologies to inform all key phases of product development and their associated objectives.
A good research strategy helps you achieve goals with a focus on what matters most, driving measurable contributions that are aligned with meaningful and functional objectives. This section discusses how defining experience outcome (XO) metrics and aligning them to business goals (such as OKRs, Sales, Conversions, etc.), can inform all key phases of product development and their associated objectives.
Whether automated or manual, strategies should harness the ‘power of data’ to inform key decisions
Research and testing provide wonderful inputs—giving the business the ability to ground solutions with real viability. Lily has proven experience in collecting, measuring, and reporting on relevant measurements (such as experience outcomes (XO), NPS, customer loyalty, retention and revenue, and employee engagement).
She has also developed strategies for the automated collection and reporting of relevant testing outcomes that inform key product owners and contributors, related product strategies, and c-level stakeholders.
From service blueprints to usability testing—developing efficient, productive and cost-effective research is critical to success.
Choosing the right approach to testing is key to finding comprehensive answers. This requires knowledge of developing and structuring methods that productively feed the business value, while streamlining speed and cost.
Getting out of the “Deliverables” Business
Yes, documentation is critical, but in a Lean approach, it doesn’t have to lead. Instead, rhythmically measuring-and-learning cycles can guide pivots, while minimal but sufficient documentation can keep the artifacts from holding inertia that makes change harder.
STEP 2 - DESIGN, BUILD & REFINE
Design best practices that increase productivity & customer satisfaction.
Implementing lean research methodologies to inform all key phases of product development and their associated objectives.
Lily has extensive experience in developing successful reusable component libraries to ensure brand standards and usability best practices are adhered to, as well as streamline costs and times in the design to development to optimization pipeline.
She’s also developed methods to increase overall customer perception by extending the brand beyond logos and images—deeper into the software and hardware’s design and function.
System infrastructures built to drive a customer’s journey are just as critical to delivering best-in-class experiences as the interactions surfaced to users in the front-end.
Moving beyond the UI, Lily has vast knowledge of how deeper parts of the stack play a role in shaping the customer/user experience. She can speak to the impacts of how and when data is surfaced, the use of business semantics and nomenclature, and how the structure of a product’s architecture can make/break the UX.
Design teams feel increased pressure to simultaneously improve user experiences while gaining better integration with engineering teams—regardless of their development methodologies.
Lily has developed a myriad of approaches to successfully integrating design teams into the development pipeline, while maintaining the flexibility and creative control needed by the design culture.
She’s also conducted company-wide workshops, working with teams to optimize the design-to-development process. Focusing always on integrating design throughout the entire lifecycle—ensuring accountability, while reducing bottlenecks, drags, and other issues that impact design and tech debts.
From service blueprints to usability testing—developing efficient, productive and cost-effective research is critical to success.
Lily has proven knowledge in developing strategies that merge the physical with the digital to provide a full spectrum of high-quality, transformative experiences that engage customers and users in meaningful ways.
This includes going beyond basic, foundational principles for delivering solutions that meet and exceed user expectations, including streamlined reusability, scalability, and sustainability.
Internationalization / Globalization / Localization – Enable the use of our products to a worldwide market through globalization, by translating or adapting our software product into different languages or for a specific country or region.
Responsive Design – Provide users with an optimal viewing experience—ease of reading and navigation with a minimum amount of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices.
Accessibility – Create powerful products that are exciting, engaging, and accessible to all users despite any permanent or temporary limitations
STEP 3 -SHAPE, LEAD & GROW
Empowering design teams to reach new heights.
Defining and showcasing innovative Product Design impacts, alignments, and services.
Whether it’s establishing a high performance design culture, reducing churn and time-to-market drags, creating tight integration within SAFE/Agile/Lean development methods, or defining and establishing product/performance benchmarks & goals, showing how design drives business value is a critical component of the discipline’s success.
An important component of leadership is having a true understanding of what it takes to get the job done, while staying updated on the challenges to the discipline we practice.
This affects everything, from grounding expectations in reality to being proactive to potential shifts that affect each discipline to setting the proper goals that encourage growth for the entire team—and each team member.
Whether it’s performing the duties of a UX practitioner, an interactive designer, front-end developer, content strategist, or the UX researcher—Lily has working knowledge of the work that each team member does.
Culture is important to the success of a team.
Whether it’s distributed, centralized, or decentralized—whatever structure your organization calls for, Lily is well versed in creating a positive, motivated environment that balances the needed for guidance and structure while encouraging autonomy and creativity.
Most importantly, Lily understands that she is their champion, balancing the workload while encouraging communication and autonomy with other teams.
Relying on a single-point (a manager) to own and solve every problem is an inefficient approach.
Successful design teams empower employees to own task prioritization, information sharing, and even creating a consistent structure for performance feedback that motivates team members to own their contribution to the company’s revenue and productivity.
Also, providing mentorship that aligns with their need for growth, balancing creative freedom with business demands, creating cohesion that leverages the strengths and skills each individual offers, and ensuring that credit is [happily] given where credit is due—are just some of the tactics Lily uses.
Part of a leader’s responsibility is to ensure that design teams are visible, valued, and that they have consistent work that adds to the success of the team and the business.
Lily has developed methods to showcase design performance. From insights into customer satisfaction trends to DesignOps pipeline stats and beyond, this vital information is critical to showing the design team’s impact to the bottom line. She makes a point to show:
1) Establishing and proving product value: what’s happening and what’s being said.
2) Establishing and proving business value: what’s being done, when, and how are the solutions empowering the business?
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Learn more about Lily's DesignOps methods & strategies.
A sampling of leadership tactics from Lily’s DesignOps playbook—methodologies and strategies that help design teams ship better experiences, as well as give a better structure on hiring talent and building a better culture.