Red Hat Design Program Office: helping our Design teams do their best work
The Red Hat Design Program Office (DPO) is a cross-company initiative aimed at connecting our distributed design practice and fostering an environment where our design teams can do their best work. Our mission is to support successful roles in design and support how design offerings deliver value for Red Hat.
Design has become a critical component of any successful business. However, managing design practices across a large, global company like Red Hat can be challenging. As our distributed design teams grow, the contributions across Red Hat for building a unified, connected customer experience are growing in complexity across many environments.
As a member of Red Hat’s design community and serving in my role of leading Red Hat’s Digital UX team, we are faced with a range of issues:
- How do the distributed design teams across Red Hat business units work together toward building a unified experience for our customers?
- What are the skillsets, core branches of knowledge, and career paths that comprise the design profession at Red Hat?
- How do we measure the impact of design and design team investment?
- What is the future of design at Red Hat and how can we support it?
The Red Hat DPO was founded in 2022 to address these questions. We want to ensure we are working in the most efficient and effective way so that we can create consistently great outcomes across concurrent customer experience work delivered by adjacent design teams. It also fosters a culture of collaboration and continuous learning, which are key to driving innovation and excellence in design.
We are focused on 3 key areas to ensure the success of our design teams:
Shared design systems
A shared Red Hat Design Language that records fundamental design decisions and guidelines to ensure that our design systems (visual brand elements, product and web UI kits, front-end pattern libraries, and accessibility guidelines) are unified and scalable across multiple channels, projects, and teams
A shared user journey framework
Increased relevance and connectivity in our collective user experience work by coupling user insights and multi-channel service design with a shared definition of the customer lifecycle and overarching Red Hat user journey
A unified point of view and shared voice for Design at Red Hat
To build a sustainable culture of design, we are connecting our diverse community of Red Hat design professionals via practice area surveys, newsletters, toolkits, and opportunities to shape our direction in cross-company working groups.
These initial 3 focus areas are foundational in building a unified experience for Red Hat’s customers and end users. They ensure that our design teams are equipped with the right tools and guided by clear standards. This enables our teams to create solutions that are not only functional and reliable, but also intuitive and enjoyable to use.
Learn more at design.redhat.com
