David Malouf, design ops leader shared his expertise on understanding, measuring, and managing the health of design teams. The talk was focussed on design but the principles could be applied to any creative, marketing, development or consulting contexts, if not others.

The event held on May 15, was hosted by the Design Ops meetup crew and like many other meetups in these COVID lock-down times was held online. I’m sure I’ll return to these notes many times so I’ve taken the time to share the presentation and the Q&A in some detail here.

The measures were both quantitative and qualitative. Dave Malouf described that some vital signs of team performance are clear and can be measured, instrumented, and quantified. Other signs are qualitative – looking at things that are observable and having things that can be compared against.

An interesting discussion followed, expertly facilitated by the hosts considering it was all online. Dave expanded on what he is doing with his relatively new team outlining that they are creating their own vital signs and measuring engagement via pulse surveys. This has included setting heuristic standards based on principles. I was particularly interested in this as while I’ve answered employee engagement survey questions about company values I’ve never thought to quantify what teams I’ve led thought of the culture in relation to principles we have agreed to.

Understanding of roles and confusing titles was another issue spoken about, which has impacted hiring through to promotion and giving feedback to people. This is being addressed by rebuilding the ladder and creating a new measurement based on that.

Engagement is so often tied to meaningful work. A solution to understanding the type of work being performed was to measure the proportion of time spent on value-adding strategic work versus time spent on operational tasks.

Other questions and answers were:

Audience Question: How do you tackle the challenges of remote asynchronous work versus real-time work?
Dave Malouf: What’s missing from distributed teams (and any team more than 100 designers is distributed) is passive transparency and being able to see externalised work.

Audience Question: How do you coach your team?
DM: Take interest in the individual goals of people, where they want to be in 5 years, and then figure out how to get them there. Dave added to this that he is “real” with people, work structures are pyramids and their goal might not be reached at that workplace. He asks them to find a job description that makes them hungry -which is used as a tool to identify gaps to fill.

Audience Question: How do you balance collaboration when you are dealing with an overly competitive coworker?
DM: Manages toxic personalities by using principles and values to help people make decisions — some of those decisions are around who does what when? Who speaks when? Competitive people often see themselves as hardworking, ambitious, confident not competitive. You need to step up and gain visibility of how to do that for the better

Also, recognise the nature of the situation — is it competitiveness? Refreshingly Dave Malouf recognised the privilege and “culture of patriarchy” and learning to recognise behaviour that wasn’t uninclusive – and calling each other out.

Audience Question: How can you ask for constructive feedback from clients?
DM: Often clients come back with recommendations not constructive feedback. Use retros during the project.

So many of the issues were all too familiar and it was energising and heartening for me that care for people and culture was the topic. This — if not anything else, proves the value of thinking about design ops and design leadership as disciplines in their own right.