Design Ops

Organizational Design

The structure of a team is a key element to the success of individuals and organizations. As a leader, I make a point to evaluate the health of my teams and work to improve them with as little disruption and change management as possible. In all my teams, I balance staffing looking at things like skill sets, roles, levels of experience, mentorship opportunities, career growth, and domain knowledge.

At IBM, I created two models to evaluate our team. The first was how diverse our teams were at large and broken down by role. It gave me a better view of how we were prioritizing recruiting, how we were balancing leadership roles, and where we needed to improve diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. The second was a view of the balance or roles within the team, which helped me to identify a need for more entry to mid-level roles to provide career pathing and leadership growth long-term.
At Ascension, I defined a squad model that would scale the design organization and the structure of our portfolio. This model balanced the consistent skills needed in every workstream, like UX, and allowed team members that move between teams, like Service Designers, to attach and detach like molecules to larger organisms.

Hiring, Onboarding & Offboarding

At most organizations there are resources and processes that are established to help new hires to step through the process in an easy and repeatable fashion. Understandably, many of those are not able to bridge the gap from broader company onboarding to specific team onboarding. In all of my leadership roles, I've defined and created resources to help design leaders hire and new hires onboard onto their teams.

At Blackboard I created a full onboarding plan for hiring managers and new hires that included what meetings to be scheduled, and expected calendar of events, a list of team members to meet, and an index of meeting types for reference. As we scaled our team, these resources were refined and allowed us to grow with less effort.
At Praxent, IBM, and Ascension I refined our interviewing structures and processes to improve our ability to interview, reduce the impact to people's schedules, and provide a good hiring experience for candidates.
While there are typically needs to improve repeatable onboarding processes, offboarding is often neglected. At Ascension, I worked with our operations team to define the offboarding process for designers. Along with making sure that all required tasks are done on time, it's important to provide a good experience for people leaving your organization. Along with being a good way to treat others, it can also improve the chances for them to return in the future and/or to become brand ambassadors for your company to their network.

Servant Leadership

As a design leader, it is important to focus on the people before the work. When designers truly feel supported and challenged in their roles, they can do amazing things. All of my work begins with a people-first approach.
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Accessibility

Creating experiences that are usable by any person is not just good business but our duty as designers and human beings. In my role at Ascension I have been spearheading an initiative to create a true practice of accessibility in every aspect of our work from research to engineering.