After I became the Design Manager for the entire Developer Division organization, adding Azure DevOps to my responsibilities, my career changed, and I focused on design management.

One of the first thing I did was a 2 days design meetup with the entire team, in order to build together a plan for our new team, around our new priorities, mission and challenges.

We created a new process to promote collaboration with our engineering team and receive design requests. I partnered up with the design manager of our sister team in Hyderabad to have a single communication channel with the leadership team and this proved to be successful and greatly appreciated. This is the email I sent to the division, inviting PMs and engineers to engage with the design team. We offered various level of support: from dedicated designers for strategic projects to office hours consultations for tactical design advices. The office hours also helped PMs and engineers to get to know us, and often time these consultations were the enabler of collaborating on bigger projects.

We unified and created a design dedicated backlog, replacing design tickets in each engineering team backlog, simplifying the process of leveling design work amongst us, including our dotted line design team in Hyderabad. As a team, we discussed and structured our backlog, the stages and their meaning, the rules to follow in moving tasks from one stage to the next.

We documented Azure DevOps design system, which was relatively new and still not broadly adopted, to promote the adoption by the engineering teams and to leverage it in new areas like 1ES and Accessibility. The design system was made available to the public and the site published externally.

We agreed that it was important to make our work more visible to the organization, so that more teams understood the value of collaborating with design.

The email with mockups proved to be very successful and highly visible to the leadership team. Other design teams followed this practice after us.