DesignOps you ask? 

Isn’t that just a fancy word for updating our figma licenses?  

Well we consider ourselves to be slightly more than that. (...and have proven through data and achievements that we are !) Here is the story of what it means for us to serve a design team of 150 talented people. What it means for us to be the central nervous system of Design at Gojek. What it means for us to serve, while also advancing our craft…

How it all started

Back in early 2019 our design team had just scaled from a few dozens to 80+ people. And suddenly things were starting to break. We were hiring a lot of people and we realized that we desperately needed processes for that. And once people came on board, they started asking questions on professional growth. We had a career framework of course, but we realized that we were actually not able to scale it to the ever growing demands of the team and the evolving industry standards. We suddenly also had a lot of different teams, and questions emerged on how we can actually ensure consistency in the way we design products that touch millions of users every day.  

Like many other companies, who hit these milestones we realized: We needed DesignOps.  

We hired a head of DesignOps and recruited from our senior team members to build our first dedicated DesignOps team. Based on the problems we faced we structured our team around three main themes. People, Process and Tools. 

People

Like many other companies starting to invest in DesignOps the first thing to fix was our hiring. We needed better and more scalable guidelines, better funnels, more interview panelists and better career frameworks. 

Process

Operating in 20+ teams and supporting 10+ products we had to find ways to scale how we work. Nothing kills the creative flow like super instructive and prescriptive processes, so we had to find better ways to enable better outcomes

Tools

With our organization's growth so grew the need for consistency in our tools. Migrating a team of 150+ people from sketch to figma including an ever growing Design System is no easy task, so dedicated attention and operational support was needed.  

This was our first iteration, and we have gone through many more since then.  

Sidenote: Why is there no Design System in this list?
While there are still many designOps professionals focusing on design systems, we actually have a specialized team looking after that. We serve over 20 products and consistency and coherence in a SuperApp needs to be more than just a chapter of operations.

Where we are today.

The way we started was purely based on the most pressing needs we had. Though we wanted to get ahead of the wave and develop a strategy for DesignOps at Gojek to be more forward thinking and proactive. We did go through various iterations of what DesignOps really means. And I am sure even today, if one asks 10 different people about DesignOps they are likely to get 20 different answers. Here is what it means for us. 

Strategy

Strategy for us means the elevation of design maturity in the organization. How to embed more customer centricity into the company's DNA? How do we enable designers to contribute more towards the larger Strategy, The vision, The North Stars, the Roadmaps? How do we give designers more access to the problem space, so they can become transformational partners to product and business? 

People

The people focus area includes everything from staffing, headcount planning, hiring, onboarding, up-skilling, career development frameworks and mentorship programs. The bigger the design team, the more critical this area is. The demand for designers has never been higher irrespective of macro-economic trends, plus designers today are chasing meaning over money. So that means that having good answers to simple questions like whether or not a person can see their career goal being met at the company does not only affect their productivity or engagement - it will affect their retention. That is why paying close attention to our people is key. 

Practice

Practice for me means the elevation of our craft. How do we scale our processes and principles across all our teams? How do we operationalise behavior that leads to positive outcomes while avoiding behavior that doesn't? How do we enable knowledge transfer between team to level up all to a high maturity level? One key learning has been to understand processes as a chain of outcomes rather than a chain of steps. Only through understanding and quantifying outcomes can processes be scaled successfully across teams that operate in a different size, maturity and complexity.

Culture

Culture is all about the human fabric in the team. It includes values, rituals, community engagement and the overall human condition of the team. Being happy and fulfilled at work is critically important if we want our team to be effective. Diversity, equity and inclusion are key indicators of the effectiveness of a team  

While having the focus on the above four main themes, here are two of the focus areas from the last years that made us much more effective.

Data driven DesignOps

Being able to quantify our work and the value that we add to the organization has been one of our strongest leverage. We established multiple metrics like a happiness Index, Growth Index, DEI reporting, process and team maturity model and many more that allow us to take meaningful action based on quantitative and qualitative insights. Our indexes allow us to understand the magnitude of a problem as well as the reasons behind it, and we use this information to develop specific action plans with each team and their managers.  

Community Driven DesignOps

As the team evolves, DesignOps also evolves our focus. Instead of being a driver for initiatives, we focus on facilitating and enabling our designers to get involved. By being community driven, we distribute decision making power to where the information is. (thank you Simon Sinek). We also have the privilege to have quality insights coming in because we get it straight from the source. Other than that, it can boost implementation and adoption because we have built-in adoption ambassadors.Some of our achievementsHiringProcess and Design MaturityHappiness and MoraleGrowthDiversity, Equity and InclusionProcess OptimizationHeadcount planning

Some of our achievements

Hiring

Reduced Turnaround time for all open roles while increasing candidate satisfaction. We were able to elevate the percentage of non-male newly hired employees to over 50% in 2021.

Process and Design Maturity

Measuring and improving process adoption including but not limited to outcomes such as customer centricity, design strategy, rituals, touch-points and many more. This allows us to specifically quantify impact with regard to process optimization and leverage data across teams to help every unit level up irrespective of their level of maturity.

Happiness and Morale

Our design team has its own happiness index. Since our company's engagement reporting felt not very actionable we established an index that would allow us to develop very specific action plans for all design leaders, managers and their teams that is based on quantitative and qualitative data. The index covers engagement, productivity, fulfillment and many other key drivers that are associated with happiness and morale in the team. The index has been trending continuously upwards and well above industry as well as company averages.

Growth

Similarly to happiness we also have an index about the professional growth at the company. The majority of key drivers are trending upwards and are stable well above industry and company average. Professional growth opportunities are one the key contributors to employee retention so we are paying very close attention to this. We have also launched an in house mentorship program that allows us to upskill and develop talent very cost effectively. The usefulness and engagement with this program is at +95%.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Diverse teams create better results. So we are paying close attention to the human fabric in the team. The Gojek Design team's DEI report was the first of its kind in the company to look at diversity with nuance. It allows us to run specific and targeted programs to increase the diversity in our team and ensure that we provide a safe place to work at completely irrespective of one's background.

Process Optimization

While processes can not guarantee better outcomes they can be a powerful tool when operationalizing behavior that leads to positive outcomes. Understanding what works well in well established and mature teams and scaling the learnings across the entire organization is one of the ways we can achieve impact. We constantly launch and re-invent playbooks across the entire product development life cycle such as, onboarding, Rituals, Experimentation, Feedback, Retrospectives, Workshops, Promotions, Mentorship, Personal Development and many more. These playbooks over the years have been plucked up and adapted by many other teams within the organization, substantiating the impact our work has had beyond the design function.

Headcount Planning

Budgets are always tough, and planning can be tedious and time consuming, especially for senior personnel. We have developed planning tools and dashboards based on established ratios that allow us to complete headcount planning for the entire design function in under 24 hours.

Whats Next For Gojek DesignOps

Lateral Expansion

As a central team serving 150 designers we are always slightly disconnected to the actual on ground reality. In order to be effective on the ground we have started embedding DesignOps managers in the most important design teams. That way the managers can actually have individual relationships with individual team members on the ground while helping the design leadership to “run” these teams. 

Community

Gojek's DesignOps team is invested in community contributions. We are active partners and help leading the APAC chapter of the DesignOps Assembly. We continuously publish, speak and engage to ensure that DesignOps as a craft is developed further in the region as well as internationally. 

Vertical Expansion

Gojek is one of three business verticals. Our sister companies Goto Financials and Tokopedia have Design teams of similar size. Since our companies became one in 2021 we have been supporting the development of DesignOps practices across our OpCos ensuring that the design organizations are running as smoothly as possible. 

Some of our Key Takeaways 

Data is everything

Even as a DesignOps specialist, quantification is probably the most powerful leverage to get anything done. Numbers are however not everything and qualitative insights have been a game changer for us allowing for real insights that lead to real action. 

Distribute decision making power to where the information is

The more community driven our programs are, the more chance of success they have. Nobody likes to be instructed. Co-creating solutions that actually matter to a person's life however is a different story… 

The Mission of a DesignOps team

It has helped enormously to understand what we need to do. And even more perhaps what we can and should say no to. or how we establish our boundaries of what we do and what we are not doing

Management is not Leadership,

though a team needs both. DesignOps is more than managing a team. We have been coaches and friends and therapists and mediators and counselors and many more things to our team. These aspects really matter, even if we find it hard to quantify. They are critically important