Design Systems Are Human Stuff That Has to Happen. And That’s the Hard Work
#39: An interview with Stuart Wainstock, DesignOps and Design Systems Lead at PUMA
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This article records my conversation with Stuart Wainstock, Global Lead of Design Operations & Design Systems E-commerce at PUMA. We chatted during the WaysConf conference in September 2024. Stuart and I discussed how he transforms PUMA, a 76-year-old wholesale organization, through design, manages the design system, what’s under the term DesignOps, and how GenAI will change the e-commerce industry. Happy reading!
Design Systems Are Human Stuff That Has to Happen. And That’s the Hard Work
Arkadiusz Radek: Can you share with our readers a little about your background? What did you do before joining PUMA?
Stuart Wainstock: I’m kind of a weirdo. In my past life, I was an elementary school teacher. I taught at a kindergarten in Hollywood for four years and then at another in Seoul for about a year and a half. When my contract in Korea ended, I got back to the States, and the school semester already started. So, that’s where the pivot into the world of design started.
Was transitioning into a designer from an elementary school teacher challenging for you?
I've always spent time in that space, whether for self-interest or small side projects. When I returned to the US, I had no teaching opportunities. I started a small freelancing gig on the side where I was focused on service design and user experience. And then, as I spent the last 10 to 15 years in the digital product space, I've had a very general sort of horizontal view of what's happening on the digital side.
Do you have a formal design education? Did you go to an art or design school?
I did my undergraduate degree in elementary education and theater and went back to university to earn a master’s in digital product design and marketing. So that gave me a little bit of institutional credibility, but I was already doing a lot of actual product design work even before that happened. However, this helped me gain the confidence to go into conversations. My master’s wasn’t really about UX and then product design. From the beginning, it was more like a general design. The program itself focused more on the role of a design generalist who spends time in many different areas of product design. So, me and my career: I’ve been a front-end developer, a graphic designer, a product manager, and a product designer. Thanks to my time wearing different hats, I’ve got this horizontal view of what it takes to build digital products. This helps now in the leadership capacity.
Speaking of wearing the hat of a front-end developer. For designers who can code, do you see this kind of skill when you know where the technical boundaries are as a blocker of the creative flow or rather something positive?
I wouldn’t say it blocks the creativity. Looking at my own experience, it’s a good thing to have this kind of skill. Translating the different worlds and understanding the technical implementation helps bridge the world of engineering and product design.
According to your LinkedIn profile, your job title is Global Lead Design Operations & Design Systems E-commerce. Can you tell us more about what’s behind such a title? What do you actually do at PUMA?
You probably fell asleep after reading my title (laughs). So, I joined PUMA in January 2022 as a UI Specialist, focusing on the user interface side of things. But as you start peeling back the onion a bit, you see that Product Design as a discipline is much larger than just UI Design. In the industry, we usually provide the title of UX/UI Designer, which creates a lot of ambiguity about what this person is actually doing. What are they thinking about? What kind of challenges do they face? What business value they’re trying to add? So, the long title of mine means a lot of thinking around people who work on the operations side of things. I think of things like how we set up designers for success? What infrastructure is needed for them to be successful in their making journey? It’s a nice complement to the operations, which sometimes can be like, “Here are the ways of working.” In reality, it expands further than product design. It moves into the world of product engineering. If you are thinking of building the front end of a website, you need these LEGO pieces. So, my job is to be a support agent able to enable others to do their best work.
That’s a super inspiring perspective on design operations. Can you shed light on the design team at PUMA? What’s the structure? How big is this team, and what roles does it constitute? I can imagine you have a bunch of UX and Product Designers on board. Who else’s there?
That’s really interesting because we are a physical product company at PUMA. First, we make shoes, apparel, and spikes for track runners and athletes. On the digital side of things, it’s relatively growing in terms of maturity. We don’t necessarily have a large formalized team doing it. Our team is a group of specialists building out some of the functions of those roles and then starting to grow those capabilities in-house. We work with a team of UX and UI Designers in separate roles.
Our UX Designers think in the under-the-iceberg way of building things, so not just quick prototypes but rather conceptual wireframes. They think of the shapes and containers that we can put in the content to be able to compose a consumer journey or customer experience.
On the other hand, our UI Designers don’t just put a coat of paint on the front end for the consumer but really think about the interactions of the user interface. They blend interaction design with visual design.
Both roles, UX and UI Designers, work closely together to ensure that UX from a technical perspective is in the right space and also how to visually create the product’s identity.
How big is the design team?
It’s a mix of product designers and product managers. We are close to 15. Not a very large team. Luckily, the designers-to-PMs ratio is pretty balanced. However, I think design is still a little underrepresented, but it might be because of a maturing organization where we are continuing to build out a case for the business value of having more of these roles.
DesignOps is a quite familiar function in large organizations like Meta, Google, or Atlassian. Do you think the DesignOps makes sense in smaller teams like yours, too?
Yeah, absolutely. If you think of a great iceberg sitting in the middle of the ocean, you see only the tip above the surface of the water. But under there are all of the things that need to happen to make sure that what's above the water is visible. It’s the operation space. It’s the glue filling the gaps to be able to make sure that these things are connected.
Do you think someone without prior experience in design can work in the role of DesignOps?
I don’t see a reason why not. This role requires a mix of skill sets. For me, at least, it's ultimately about putting humans first. But I think that it would be more natural for someone who is a designer. The understanding of the skills you get as a designer starts to paint the picture of what you would need on the Ops base. The critical thinking, the holistic understanding of what a consumer needs, the curiosity, the questioning. But also having the structure to be able to build out frames, build out new screens and things like that, I think all are easily transferable or applied into the Ops space.
Do you manage people?
Yes.
What management style do you practice?
Some managers are just task-givers. So here is a task: go and do it, go and execute. And for some organizations, that works. But I think the view I have on where product design fits into things is really a strategic partner for product engineers or your product manager. So, a product manager might ultimately be accountable for their portfolio or part of the customer journey. They need brilliant and talented product designers to be able to collaborate with.
I completely agree. Let’s change the gears and talk a little about design systems. Since your title indicates that you are responsible for one at PUMA, can you tell me how it is structured? Some organizations have dedicated teams that do only design systems. What does it look like at PUMA?
When we stood up to our internal design system, a dedicated core team was developing it. And it was a zero-to-one lift product. So, there wasn't necessarily a formalized design system in any way. There were lots of fragments of it coming around the business. But then, as we were building and securing a budget for it, we were able to sit down and create a centralized team. That team was two product engineers and two product designers at a system level, and then myself, in the role of a product manager or lead. I was the voice of the business as well as our customers.
A lot of companies try to build a design system, and I guess at larger organizations, it makes lots of sense to have one because it serves different projects and different teams, enables them, and then gives them the right tools. But do you think it makes sense for small organizations to invest the money to build one? A few years back, there was a lot of hope in the design systems, like they were supposed to be our saviors. Was the promise delivered?
I think the promise of it as a silver bullet to save your organization isn't the right promise. Because, again, at the end of the day, it's really about the human side of things and the cultural and behavioral changes that have to happen to allow the system to act as an accelerator. So, if you drop in 100K and build out a system, but nobody's interested in using it, or you haven't had the change management opportunities to bring that through, then you've got a beautiful UI kit, but you haven't changed in the process or worked to be able to get that actually integrated into an actual product.
How difficult was it to secure the funding for the design system at PUMA?
There’s a really useful technique that I borrowed from Dan Mall. You look into your design system with the lens of a pilot of a TV show. If you're trying to make a new TV show, you don't immediately secure a budget for 100 million euros and say, “We're going to build out the entire series, and it's going to be 20 episodes.” Instead, you make a pilot that’s just good enough to say, “Here's an exciting concept that we continue to develop further,” and that's how we approached it.
What was a pilot for you?
A set of basic components, but also ways of working. So it's more than just a UI. It's more than the React library. It's how we were changing the behaviors of the makers who were doing the work. But also all of the unsexy documentation and the under-the-iceberg work that has to happen, like building out relationships in that space to say, yes, there might only be five components delivered, but it started to create entryways into new ways of working.
I love this approach. It’s very mature. Also, the reference to the iceberg and its tip, which we usually use, is super accurate. Not everyone knows you must do those unsexy bits like documentation or change behavior.
It's more than just pulling the Ant Design System down from Figma and saying, “This is our new UI.” Instead, the human stuff has to happen, and that's the hard work.
You might be familiar with a similar concept to your under-the-iceberg reference that Artiom Dashinsky is pushing in our industry. It’s the same thing, but kind of inverted. In his book, The Effective Product Designer, Dashinsky discusses a pyramid of product designer skills. He points out that the current discussion in the design community places the most weight on Figma and UI Design. Do you agree that we don’t discuss collaboration, change management, influence, and leadership enough?
That’s an interesting point. Prior to Figma, it was Sketch. Prior to Sketch, it was Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. There will be another Figma. As a designer, you’ll be able to learn a new tool no matter what.
I vividly remember when Adobe announced that they were gonna acquire Figma. Twitter, LinkedIn, and the design community fell apart, and people's hearts were broken, asking, “How dare you, Figma, sell out to the bad guys?” But the truth is that the sooner we disconnect our identity from the tool we use into the people and the process of the product side of things, the sooner we become more impactful as designers.
I wish that more people thought like you do. Too many designers, especially the ones who just broke into the field, believe that if they learn Figma, they can call themselves designers immediately. That's everything. There's nothing else waiting for them.
It's all up to the individual humans. What are their aspirations? This is not to knock Fiverr or the people who make a living there. But, to have a greater impact, you must understand that it requires more than just learning the tool.
Let’s talk about the product. You already mentioned that the product at PUMA is physical since it sells clothes, shoes, and accessories for athletes. What about digital products? Is it only e-commerce where people go and buy running shoes?
As we mature, the definition of product continues to evolve. So, internally, I refer to our design system as a product. It must be maintained, loved, financed, and integrated like a new pair of running spikes for a track athlete. All that funding and thinking still needs to go into it, so it must still be crafted.
Our web shops are also products that run on a tech stack. All those individual products, internally, must be maintained and connected to the different pieces. If you go to Singapore, you're logging into a Singapore webshop. If you're here in Poland, you log into a Polish instance of that. Hub teams own them, but they need to be localized and maintained.
We also have in-store physical kiosks running our application.
How would you summarize your last three years at PUMA? How different is the organization today compared to the day you joined it? Do you see any significant differences in the e-commerce industry as a whole happening in this period?
If you step back, the e-commerce space as a whole, regardless of PUMA, Nike, or Adidas, is quite mature. You have established UX patterns and consumer journeys. People go from the product landing page or the product description page to the cart and then to the checkout. These are established journeys, no matter what you're selling. I think evolution or continued change revolves around integrating new technologies into the space for the betterment of the consumer. For example, the GenAI is the buzz now, so how do we leverage something like Gemini to make sure it's an easier consumer experience for a person coming to buy a pair of shoes? So, imagine you can say, “I'm trying to buy my daughter a new pair of football boots,” rather than going through the entire navigation tree.
Have you already implemented a feature like that at PUMA?
We haven't implemented it, but you see it popping up. Zalando does really interesting work in that space. There are other organizations exploring new technologies and rapidly integrating them into their products or running A/B tests to see how these either fail fast or succeed quickly and then start to iterate on top of them.
Since we already touched on AI, do you use it at work?
Not nearly as much as I should. I use it for internal communication, understanding the financial side of things, or doing some crunching automation. A good example would be when I was planning an offsite for the team. I was able to leverage GenAI to say, “We’re looking to organize a four-day offsite. Here’s the budget we’re working with. These are the outcomes we want to achieve from this event. What are the recommendations within Central Europe?”
That’s a nice example of the operations/management use case. Do you know if designers within your team use GenAI for craft?
I would assume there's exploration in that area and encourage our team to explore that space. The industry will continue to evolve, and maybe today, you don't need to be a deep expert in prompting and how AI can influence the user interface, but you should be curious and understand where we can start to push some of the boundaries of it.
Stuart Wainstock
Stuart Wainstock is a design leader at PUMA in the digital consumer experience space. He is passionate about DesignOps and Design Systems. Stuart has over a decade of experience defining processes and building design teams. He is currently the Global Lead for Design Operations and Design Systems at PUMA.