Kicking off our first DOA event
and how to have fun in the process
What is DOA?
No. It’s not Dead on Arrival.
DOA stands for DesignOps Assembly: a global community of like-minded individuals with an interest for Design Operations. DOA started in San Francisco around 2017 and has become the most renowned DesignOps community in the world.
In the summer of 2022, DOA opened a local chapter in Berlin and they needed someone(s) to lead it. And that’s how Nina, Maria and I met.
Don’t we have enough work to do already?
Probably. At the time Maria was working as a full-time Product- and DesignOps specialist at relayr, Nina as Design System Lead at relayr, and I was DesignOps Lead at Yara.
The three of us had all kicked-off Design Operations in our respective organisations. And the DOA community was the go-to place for DesignOps-related knowledge.
Volunteering to lead the Berlin chapter of the DesignOps Assembly…
- Was a good way to give back to the community that helped us in our beginnings (and continues to do so).
- Helped us make a name in the industry. This is what we love to do and we’re already good at (some of) it.
- Made us grow personally and professionally by doing something new that was outside of our comfort zones.
What does it mean to be a DOA chapter lead?
When you become a lead for one of the local chapters you’re committing to at least a year of work. The main responsibility is to organise at least 1 DesignOps-related event per quarter.
So right after we officially became leads, we met for a nice long brunch to get to know each other, and right there the adventure started: We were going to organise the first DOA event in Berlin.
How did we do it?
Out of the three of us, Nina had proper experience organizing kids’ ecology festivals for a few thousand people back in 2016, and Maria used to volunteer for Ladies that UX community thus organized a couple of events herself. Myself.. well… I had only organized my own birthday party once.
These are the steps we followed:
- Align on the goal: First and most important step, we aligned expectations and agreed on what we wanted to achieve with the event.
- Choose the right format: It was up to us. We could organise informal drinks for 10 people in a pub or a full-blown event at the Figma offices. We went for the second option. 😉
- Oh, the logistics: We found a sponsor (Figma) just by asking on LinkedIn. After shaking on it, we mainly sent back-and-forth emails with the Figma folks and arranged a Saturday meeting in order to sort out the food, drinks, space and equipment.
- Prepare the content: We met online a few times to come up with a rough draft, define the agenda and then got to work on slides for the presentation. And naturally, we created our slides in Figma.
- Go crazy on social media: Once the event was published on Eventbrite (this was done by DOA), we bombarded LinkedIn with posts and told all our DesignOps friends. It was quite cool because the tickets were sold out one week prior to the event and people were even asking for more seats.
- Rehearse at least once: On the day of the event, we went to the venue 3 hours before. And thank God we did, because the projector gave us a hard time. We set up the computer, mics and other paraphernalia and practised our presentation.
- Interact with fans: We tried to keep the presentation as interactive as possible with some live polls and all that jazz. But the real fun came after, when we stopped talking with the mic and started talking to the people.
- After the event: Of course, we had to do a bit of cleaning. If Figma puts the space, the drinks and the food, the least we can do is tidy up. The next days, we posted pictures from the event, wrote several thank you messages and shared our presentation publicly.
Trying to organise something similar?
Here’s a little advice for yah:
- Make the most of the different strengths of your team members. Personally, I hate public speaking but I do other things very well, Nina is a natural in all sorts of pitching, storytelling and presenting and Maria isn’t very much into creating presentations and visual work but is experienced in public speaking and event organization. When you’re organising something like this, there’s plenty of work for everyone. Celebrate everyone’s strengths and weaknesses.
- Quality prep takes time, especially if you work full-time alongside. Consider a month to prepare and connect all the dots without being stressed about it, and allow another 3–4 weeks from announcement to event date to spread the news and build attendance.
- Check if your event collides with another event from the community. True story. Our event overlapped with another one from Friends of Figma.
- Make use of Eventbrite and your own network to spread the word. And make sure you add agenda to the event page so people can know what to expect (casual drinks or actual keynote) and your hard work doesn’t go unnoticed.
- Send event reminders a day before to everyone who registered. Especially if the registration was opened a month before because people tend to forget or plans change.
- Make time for a dry run no matter how easy people tell you the equipment is going to be to use. We were there almost 3 hours in advance and the damn projector was not working properly. It’s worth going before the actual day to make sure you know how everything’s going to work.
- Put things in perspective. Things might get difficult, but remember that you’re doing this on a voluntary basis and the main goal is to learn and have fun. The worst thing that can happen is that you mess it all up or no one shows up. Either way, you learn a lesson.
- Trust the process and the hard work because it pays off.
🎉Considering it was our first event, it went really well. So a big thanks to everyone that made it possible: Figma, Mindspace, DOA and of course, our friends. 🎉
PS: Article co-written by Nina Jurcic, Maria Karnaukhova and Inmaculada Ortiz.
PS 2: If you’re into DesignOps, don’t forget to join the community.
