DesignOps—It’s in Our DNA

In the past decade, many of our clients have invested to make design a core capability, essential to their growth and innovation imperatives. As these design teams have scaled their collaboration inside their organizations, the need for greater operational support to enable their success has emerged. But DesignOps is nothing new for frog. As a global team with hundreds of highly collaborative designers and technologists, frog has DesignOps in our DNA. Our 50-year-history in DesignOps is reflected in our internal culture that has enabled our long and successful track record with hundreds of products and services brought to market.

We define DesignOps as a human-centered approach to the orchestration of design teams, processes and tools to amplify creativity and impact at scale. frog partners to leverage our experience in supporting the establishment, scaling and maturity of internal design capabilities for these organizations. We have served clients across multiple industries with products and services spanning enterprises and consumers—so much so, that many frog alumni have been hired to run DesignOps for successful companies across industries including Salesforce, Fitbit, Uber, InVision, Youtube, AirBnB, USAA and Microsoft.

We see DesignOps as one of the key points in the intersection of digital transformation, design thinking, customer experience and agile product delivery. It’s not just a standardized methodology to adopt—it’s the orchestration of all these parts that helps bring success to organizations of any size.

One nexus of this orchestration is the design language system (DLS), which enables design teams to support better outcomes like large scale consistency, quality and speed across broader organizations. frog has long recognized the value of design systems for DesignOps. In fact, our first design system was created for Apple back in 1984. The Snow White design language helped the organization to establish a bar for Apple product excellence resulting in their legendary fanatical customer base.

Now with software as an enabler to rapidly iterate and scale, our design system experience is as important as ever to delivering products and services that customers love. In the last 20 years, we’ve created over 30 DLSs that have garnered great outcomes for our clients. In 1998, we helped Dell design its massively successful e-commerce site. The design system we established with GE in 2011 to support industrial IOT applications enabled a 100 percent productivity gain and a savings of $30M in development costs in the first year. In 2014, we partnered with Intuit, an early enterprise design investor, to create the Harmony design system, which supported the redesign and cloud enablement of the Quickbooks product ecosystem leading to 30 percent revenue growth and 2X improvement in their NPS score. Recently, Porsche has released the successful Porsche Connect and Porsche Offroad Precision native apps (with more in the works), both supported and enabled by the design system frog helped to establish in 2017. Last year, we helped our venture client Alto go from napkin concept to Pilot launch in 12 months through a combination of tools and ops that streamlined digital and service design and delivery.

frog’s mission is to create products and services that transform businesses at scale. Our DesignOps services have been central to enabling our clients’ success in unlocking the power of design in their organizations. We love what we make, and we love helping our clients bring new products and services to market. But it’s not just about helping clients design for the moment—rather, we design for their long-lasting future. With a considered approach to the people, tools and collaboration involved in any product development, we believe our approach to DesignOps not only helps clients get to market quickly but get to market with the right thing to build customer relationships that last.