Cubyts 1.0: A Design Ops Platform

The goal is to enable design teams to work freely, manage, and operate in their preferred manner, while integrating closely with other teams and contributing seamlessly to product development. Another objective is to provide visibility into the operations of the design team for the rest of the organization.

A platform customized for scaling design teams, allowing them to run projects, and manage aspects of design operations (bandwidth, documentation, quality, and more).

Design teams operate in either a decentralized manner, where designers work in scrum teams alongside project managers and developers, or in a centralized manner, where all design requirements are forwarded to a Design Head who then allocates tasks to different designers.

There are three types of roles in design teams:

Designers often resist time tracking and are generally unresponsive to filling out timesheets.

Design Leaders struggle to communicate the impact of their design team to upper management, as design tasks are not directly tied to customer success metrics.

Design Managers lack visibility into what designers are working on, making it difficult to justify timelines.

Immature design teams often struggle to choose the right process for various projects and to establish documented standards and guidelines for the team to follow.

Although designers dislike documenting their work, they need documentation when starting something new.

Tracking key decisions in design processes can be very challenging.

Empower design teams to manage design projects flexibly through various phases and activities. Assign members and deadlines to activities, include references, tasks, and acceptance criteria, and consolidate all activity documents in a single location for easy collaboration.

Ensure alignment with counterparts throughout the product lifecycle by integrating and syncing with Jira.

Allow design managers to ensure optimum team health by managing workload.

Assign effort to members in different activities and projects and manage utilization across projects. Assign tasks based on a member’s availability in a time period and get notified when a member has too many responsibilities .

Ensure allocated effort is on track using automated timesheets. These automatically log member's efforts to quickly generate project or individual timesheets.

Consolidate all design files, such as Figma files, PRDs, and prototypes, by project to maintain a single source of truth. Any file - be it Figma, confluence, Google drive, or video - added to an activity in a project will be placed into preconfigured project folders. This allows users to view, collaborate on, and organize documents in a single location. Users can also further organize by creating additional folders and tagging.

Powerful vector search feature is included to search by content within the documents.

Workspace reports provide Design Managers with insights into their team's performance and operations. These reports allow tracking of ongoing work, project health, and individual performance, while providing data about the design repository. This includes information on design types, tool usage, and strategy effectiveness, enabling informed decision-making and strategic adjustments to boost team productivity and creativity.

For teams with less design maturity, cold start was a problem. That along with having a single place to store templatized resources such as design processes based on the type of project or best practices for common activities. Users were able to quickly set up projects and activities with pre filled content, as well as save custom standards for future reference.

Many users expressed that they didn't want to use an additional tool to report their work due to tool fatigue. As a response, we developed a plugin for the Cubyts app that integrates with Figma, allowing designers to send updates directly. This enables designers to view assignments, update statuses, manage documents, tasks, and more without leaving Figma.

Cubyts was a platform that required significant effort to build. It underwent numerous iterations before it evolved into a seamless product, earning positive feedback from the design community and being adopted by over 50 teams. However, it failed to generate the necessary revenue. Upon reflection, I attribute this to the following factors:

We chose an unclear problem. Design teams face many challenges, but we failed to identify one clear, universal issue. Instead, we attempted to address numerous vague problems, leading to many iterations and unresolved gaps.

We tried to cater to both product companies and agencies, causing a wide range of features that were only relevant to specific teams.

Our focus was primarily on Design Managers, neglecting the needs of designers and Design Leaders. While our tool helped track execution, it demanded excessive effort from designers and didn't provide the necessary reports/intelligence for leaders.

Only a few design teams operate on a large scale and are tightly integrated with the rest of the product team. Introducing a tool that separated them from the product workflow was not well-received, despite the appeal of having their own space.

Design leaders, who are not the decision-makers for purchases, reported to product leaders. This made it difficult for them to advocate for our product. We learned that in SaaS, it's crucial to deliver substantial impact to those who make the purchasing decisions.