Creating Sustainable DesignOps Rituals to Improve Team Health

Situation

DocuSign’s Product Experience team was growing rapidly, but lacked consistent, human-centered operational frameworks to maintain alignment, morale, and healthy team dynamics. We wanted to uncover what wasn’t working in the company and where our design teams weren’t effective in a space that was psychologically safe for the designers to speak openly and freely.

Task

Design and implement repeatable rituals that would foster psychological safety, improve transparency, and connect distributed, cross-functional teams more effectively.

Action

I introduced three key rituals:

• Team Health Checks to assess team morale, workload, and blockers

• Update Parties informal check ins to asynchronously share progress and reduce meeting overload. This was a way to create psychological safety by creating a safe casual space for people to hop into a zoom and give updates as to what they were working on.

• Practitioner Pairing to connect ICs across domains for collaborative feedback and mentoring

These were co-designed with team leads, tested in small cohorts, and iterated for broader rollout. I provided templates, facilitation guides, and a feedback loop to improve adoption.

Result

These rituals increased engagement and transparency across PX. Health Check insights were used in quarterly planning, reducing burnout and improving resourcing. Update Parties reduced sync meetings by 25%, and pairing sessions built cross-pillar trust and knowledge sharing.