DesignOps Global Conference 2022

Presenter Profile: Erica was born Eric in the early 1970’s. Sid and Marty Kroft were on every Saturday morning with random ideas that on the surface seemed nonsensical but on deeper evaluation they made perfect sense, well that is the way Erica saw it. Fantastical worlds with talking flutes & hat people mixed with weekends painting with her grandmother and a dash of ADHD where the fundamental ingredients needed to shape the way Erica would see the world around her and approach future challenges. 

Not one for ever accepting “We do things this way because it’s the way it has always been done”, that mindset has guided Erica down a career path that is uniquely her, full of fun and hair raising problems to solve. Erica has worked in many different domains over the years. In 2018 Erica joined PayPal to lead a small internal design team at PayPal that is responsible for all of the tools and platforms used to build and run PayPal’s business. The daunting task was not for the week of heart, it was just the anxiety induced problem that excited Erica.

Presentation Title: ‘DesignOps 2.0 at PayPal’

Outline: Erica, who runs the small but mighty UX team for PayPal’s internal developer tools, is transforming the organization from an engineering-driven organization to a design-driven one. With a designer-to-developer ratio of 1/311 her team was seriously understaffed, but constraints lead to innovation. Her team addressed these core questions:

• What is User Experience? 

• What is a design driven organization? 

• What does it mean to design at scale? 

Nearly everything a product team deals with impacts UX. Traditional development issues like availability, latency, and even security and data design impact the user’s experience. When viewing the problem through this lens; the entire product team is responsible for the user experience and needs to be accountable for it, not just the UX team. The team found that scaling design is not about throwing more designers at the problem. Scaling design effectively is about operationalizing design, aligning closer with the principals of DevOps. How do we enable product teams to successfully deliver useful and useable products to their customers. This is an evolution that they call DesignOps 2.0 Erica will discuss the philosophy and end-to-end methods her team has developed around DesignOps 2.0 and where they are heading.

Workshop Title : “Packing an Elephant: Scaling Design to an Enterprise Level” Outline: “How do you put an adult elephant into a refrigerator?” This may sound like a silly interview question, but it was the type of challenge the PayPal Developer Platforms and Experience (DPX) team had to solve for in 2019. DPX was asked to build a new web app platform for internal dev tools called the Console with limited resources. The Console platform would support federated development for 100+ product teams while delivering a unified and consistent experience to a small internal army of engineers. With just 3 UX designers. The answer was as wildly simple as putting an elephant into a refrigerator: Re-evaluate and rethink the entire product design and development process. Enter what we call “DesignOps 2.0.” In this workshop, Erica Rider, Anthony Hand, and Stan Carrico will discuss the core principals of their DesignOps2.0 methodology along with the significant gains they have seen in adopting this new model of product design and development. Through exercises and discussion, presenters and participants will engage in conversations on scaling design by rethinking the roles of designers and product teams, gaining executive and team buy in, and leveraging advanced tooling and infrastructure to support new models and ways of working.

Company Website: https://paypal.com/