2. Solutions
As part of the pain points workshop, the team brainstormed solutions to the highlighted issues. The goal at this stage was to brainstorm as many solutions without thinking about things like viability and effort.
Using the structure of the affinity map above, I then sorted these solutions across the same categories as the pain points. To me, this was the most imperative part of my initiative, and helped me tackle both the problem statements I had highlighted earlier in my work - ensuring I was on track to meet our goals.
Marrying all my work so far, and bringing the pain points workshop to an end, I mapped the pain points against the workflow, to understand the breadth and extent of how DesignOps (or a lack of) might affect the design team.
PRIORITISING MY SOLUTIONS
So I had a pretty clear idea of what we can do to improve and optimise DesignOps within CARSOME, however an essential part of the process was to prioritise these solutions. This was done based on a prioritisation value, which used the Impact Effort Prioritisation Matrix as its basis. This was a tweaked version of a formula derived by my colleague, Kah Yee Chiang. Particularly, there were 4 key values used to determine the score:
1. Internal Team Impact - How much does it impact the consistency, efficiency & quality of the design team?
2. Inter-Team Impact - How much does it impact collaboration between PMs + Engineers & the design team, which in turn directly affects us?
3. Initial Effort Required - How many people + hours will this solution take to set up?
4. Maintenance Effort Required - How many people + hours will this solution take to be updated & functioning?
I then documented 16 of our DesignOps initiatives using Notion. This gave me a clear picture on what to tackle first. Below is the template I used.
BUILDING THE CARSOME ‘WAYS OF WORKING’ DOCUMENT
From the prioritised initiatives list - it was clear that one of the key deliverables that will help us to solve some of the pain points affecting the design team would be building a ‘Ways of Working’ document that would serve as the ultimate source of truth for all things related to the CARSOME Design Team process - for designers, and also for other stakeholders.
This was intended to host all the information & material anyone could need about our end to end process, including internal guidance on all things including file structure, Lokalise (since most designs at CARSOME have to be translated for the Indonesia & Thailand markets), breakpoints, and developer handover to name a few. It was also designed to host ‘Project Material’ that each requirement would use regardless of what it is, including Use Case Templates, File Covers, Translation & Breakpoint Ribbons etc.
