People
Building a great organization always begins with hiring. Unicorns are rare, so building a team that can complement each others’ skills is essential.
The manager or team lead is a player-coach – they need to be involved in the day to day activities and play their own role to help the team fulfill their goals. They provide inspiration, mentor less experienced designers, and keep the good ones honest so they fulfill their potential.
More traditional HR functions are part of design operations, like salary discussions, personal coaching, goal setting, and performance appraisals.
Process
In most design teams, putting a process in place allows the team to operate efficiently and predictably. You have a process whether you acknowledge it or not! For best results, designers, developers, and product managers work in small squads using agile processes to manage the backlog of work. We use design thinking methods to align on user outcomes before coding begins. Design sprints (2 weeks) can run in parallel to development iterations so that we can iterate on the experience, conduct peer reviews, gain user feedback, and test assumptions before arriving at a confident solution.
Culture
A skilled leader can create a culture of excellence that gets the best out of people. You must lead by example to set the bar high and keep it there. You have to show that you will support the right design decisions, driven by deep user research and analysis of the problem space. The user must be at the center of everything you do. Diversity of thought must be celebrated and encouraged. There will be disagreements, but respectful discussion and decision-making based on the best available data helps the team align and keep moving. An attitude of always learning, experimenting, trying new things, and failing fast will unleash the creativity that is in all of us, in order to arrive at the best outcome.
Happy designers = happy experiences!
Design Thinking in Operations
We use design thinking methods before getting into the actual delivery of the software. This ensures that we have defined and aligned the team on the goals, the user needs, and outcomes before taking the time to create specifications and code.
I have a whole section on this site dedicated to design thinking.