When I joined Sun Life in late 2021, Jessica Matson and I were tasked with establishing and proving the value of a Design Operations practice in Canada. With the guiding principle of “Advancing Design Maturity," we were given autonomy to identify and solve issues facing the XD org, and the executive backing to do so.

So, where to begin?

Reactive operations: Repair and Stabilize

Over the past several years prior to my joining, there was steady growth in the number of design practitioners at Sun Life. However, this growth hadn't brought with it the creation of a formal Design Operations practice. To enable us to scale further, we had to focus on the tools, processes, and structures needed to make designers more effective. The things that worked for our team when we were small were not effective for us anymore.

For an organization the size of Sun Life, this kind of effort requires multiple hands, and great partnerships and collaboration to deliver tangible results. This manifested through my Design Operations Lead, Jessica Matson, as well as an outstanding relationship with my peer on the Global Team, Daniel Chan, and his Design Operations Manager, Linh Tran.

We refer to the initial state of Design Ops as being reactive. When we started, there were issues that had been ongoing for a considerable period. So, the work we prioritized was to:

• Solve long standing pain points that were reflected in our employee engagement scores.
• Deliver an immediate return on investment for the organization by achieving cost savings and improving efficiencies.
• Bring Sun Life up to the standard of modern, design-focused organizations.

In terms of direction, we didn't have to look very hard to identify an initial list of jobs to get started on. In the reactive phase, the issues make themselves known to practitioners, design leadership and our partner groups.

Our focus was on solving for the immediate need of onboarding 30+ practitioners into an organization that had already experienced significant growth in recent years. We set to work to make sure our new resources got up to speed and contributing as seamlessly as possible. The focus during our reactive phase was:

Onboarding

With the expected influx of new practitioners, we prioritized optimizing our onboarding process to ensure new hires felt welcomed and were able to get up and running on day one. Hiring managers were provided with a checklist to follow and guidance around timings to follow up with us if certain actions hadn't taken place in the days leading up to a new employees start date. Net result: the average time to get a new hire onto the network was reduced from 8 days to 4 hours.

Hardware/software

Even as design started to rapidly expand, the hardware and software we used was still being treated as “non-standard" and had not been evaluated against factors like market trends, scalability, or cost. We began by evaluating the current offerings and set to work renegotiating all aspects of hardware/software. We were able to offer equivalent or improved hardware/software packages for dramatically less than we had been paying.

Eliminating/streamlining processes that didn't make sense at scale

We noticed several impediments in our processes that evolved from the rapid growth of our XD practice. One example was a centralized quality review and approvals process that wasn't geared for scale. When the team was smaller, it had adopted an informal “approvals" process run through a single designer. With an increased volume of work, the time-to-complete went up while the overall quality of the feedback decreased. We removed this process and replaced it with one better in line with the size of the org. Autonomy was given to Team Leads for what they shipped from a quality perspective. At an organizational level, we implemented an experience quality metric to track our progress. Net result: the average time to move from completed and tested design to development was lowered by a full 6 working days, per squad, per feature. From an experience measurement perspective, there was an uptick in the impact metrics we track.

Implementing a unified Design System

The most impactful project we took on during the reactive phase was the creation of a unified design system for Sun Life. When we started, there were several disparate style guides floating around in various stages of completion, created to target specific projects or regions. By utilizing existing guides and external examples, we audited, designed, and tested best in-class examples of components and templates. This lead to the creation of a centralized documentation set and a shared React NPM library of components all teams could use (and contribute back to via a federated model). By the end of our reactive phase, we had onboarded several teams to the beta and prepared for broad adoption.

We received consistent feedback throughout this process, allowing us to validate our assumptions and build a backlog of additional issues to address once we moved into the proactive phase. In terms of execution, this was just like any other UX project, but with the focus pointed inward to our internal team. We leveraged our diverse background in mixed methods research and problem-solving, with a splash of business acumen throughout.

Proactive operations: Optimize and Refine

Once we addressed and understood the most obvious issues, our focus shifted towards digging deeper to understand the more complex issues impacting our team. We ran an intensive deep dive, meeting with dozens of practitioners around the UX org to compile a list of things they would like to see improved.

We collected feedback related to topics like meetings and meeting structure, training and mentoring, content publishing, design handover, and overall ways of working. In total, we were able to identify over 40 opportunities that we added to our backlog.

A few highlights from moving into our proactive stage:

Ways of working

We proposed and implemented a few changes to our ways of working. These included suggestions like reducing meetings, balancing workloads, and freeing up time for focused work and training opportunities. For example, we set a target of reducing meetings by 10% through the end of 2024. Through working directly with project teams, we can confirm we are well on our way to achieving this goal.

Process enhancement through tooling and automation

We identified opportunities to streamline our release process by automating several repetitive tasks. These enhancements focused on automating design and content formatting outputs to meet requirements of publication reviews, saving us over 10,000 hours of manual effort across the broader team annually.

Technology Proof of Concepts (PoC's) for design system adoption

Building a design system is one thing but rolling it out to an entire organization with minimal disruptions to ongoing projects and release cycles is a much bigger challenge. To encourage prospective teams, we completed several PoC's to demonstrate the technical viability of our solution. Once adoption starts, we provide comprehensive support to keep things going as smooth as possible. Net Result: a dramatic uptick in our adoption rates as we drastically reduced the barrier to entry from an engineering perspective.

Net Result: a dramatic uptick in our adoption rates as we drastically reduced the barrier to entry from an engineering perspective.

The reactive and proactive stages of design also bring with them some key differences in their impacts. The reactive stage is characterized by changes that are noticed and felt immediately (major changes to design tools, hardware, etc.), while the proactive phase is characterized by small nudges, carefully timed for maximum impact. From a metrics perspective, we experienced far greater ROI for Ops initiatives during the proactive stage while the disruption to the team was minimized.

Looking Forward

Through the initiatives we've implemented to date, our metrics show vast improvements from a cost and efficiency standpoint. However, what's most important is our team's sentiments when it comes to being a designer at Sun Life.

“Looking at where we are now, the Design Operations team has improved efficiencies of our day-to-day workflow exponentially. They migrated our teams to Figma which optimized file storage and sharing, created a design system that makes designing and collaborating with developers seamless, and are extremely helpful when we need UI experts to jump in and expedite strategic prototypes. I can't imagine going back to a Sun Life without this team."

-Alex Mills, Sr UX Lead

As we continue to evolve into an industry-leading design practice, the benefits we deliver will not only be felt internally, but also externally demonstrate to our clients what our investment in XD can deliver.