designops presentation

A Field Guide to DesignOps

DesignOps is a mindset that frees designers to focus on problem-solving. The approach allows staff to optimize processes and ensure that design is an integral part of organizational strategy.

By Micah Bowers

Micah helps businesses craft meaningful connections through branding, illustration, and design.

DesignOps is a mindset that frees designers to focus on problem-solving rather than administrative duties like managing workflows and libraries. The DesignOps mindset informs design-centric roles that facilitate creative excellence. DesignOps staff orchestrate processes and toolsets, develop design team culture, and ensure that design is an integral part of organizational strategy.

The term “DesignOps” is a takeoff of DevOps , a collaborative approach to software development and systems administration that prioritizes speed, efficiency, and automation. Like DevOps, DesignOps emphasizes efficiency. Its primary focus is to ensure that designers are free to concentrate on craft, thereby allowing design to have greater organizational impact.

Unfortunately, many designers are pulled into administrative duties like maintaining design systems or communicating design workflows to other departments. The role of DesignOps staff is multifaceted:

• Empower designers to produce at a high-level by coordinating design team processes and toolsets
• Foster interdepartmental relationships by raising awareness of design team goals and methods
• Enable design to scale without sacrificing productivity or design team dynamics

What exactly is the DesignOps mindset? How can organizations begin their DesignOps journeys? And, once established, how can DesignOps teams reach greater levels of maturity?

DesignOps Is a Mindset

In an ideal world:

• Design teams wouldn’t exist in isolation
• Mundane tasks wouldn’t burden designers
• Engineering (and other departments) would be eager to collaborate

But in reality, large organizations are complex entities full of moving parts, maddening bureaucracy, and mixed agendas.

DesignOps confronts complexity with structure and flexibility. It’s not a standardized formula or a rigid set of rules and tools. It’s a mindset. Granted, DesignOps staff establish practices and processes, but only after addressing organization-specific questions like, “How can we…”

• Grow and evolve our design team over time?
• Attract and retain highly skilled design talent?
• Create design processes and systems that balance efficiency with quality?
• Measure and improve design output at regular intervals?
• Build lasting cooperation between design and other departments?
• Ensure design is an essential aspect of company strategy?

At big organizations, such questions are especially pressing. To stay organized and on target, many companies rely on strict internal governance. The intention is order, but more often than not, the outcome is stagnation, or anti-innovation, a digital-age deathblow.

8 Tips for DesignOps Solo Staff

Enthusiasm for design is greater than ever, yet many leaders don’t know how to implement design holistically within their companies. Nor do they understand how to scale design teams skillfully. Design gets budget, but it doesn’t function to its full potential because designers are pulled in multiple directions or excluded from decision-making.

At this stage, one of two things happens. Someone decides to champion DesignOps and its corresponding duties, or someone recognizes the need for a design facilitator and makes a hire. Either way, a DesignOps team-of-one is born.

This is a critical juncture. How can a single person in a vast organization orchestrate the people, processes, toolsets, and impact initiatives that make design successful?

1. Build and Nurture Relationships Above All Else

Solo staff can’t prosper without knowing the people, problems, and goals in their organizations. If there’s no relationship, there’s no trust.

2. Document Conversations and Meetings, and Prioritize the Takeaways

Any role with “Ops” in the title will be bombarded with requests, many of which will have nothing to do with design. Document everything and consider affinity mapping to help identify recurring needs and ideas.

3. Establish a DesignOps Backlog and Rank Entries for Relevance

Solo staff can only do so much. Some ideas (even good ones) will need to wait for a later date but shouldn’t disappear altogether.

4. Align With Company Goals and Strategies

Areas of alignment might not be apparent, and there may be goals and strategies in need of adjustment to better include design. But whenever possible, design (and therefore DesignOps) should strive to be in unison with company objectives and processes.

5. Learn About Strategies for Implementing Change Within Organizations

There are proven models to introduce change within organizations. Each has its strengths, drawbacks, and philosophical views. For instance, Lewin’s Change Model posits that organizational shifts occur in three stages:

• Unfreeze : Prepare the company for the changes to come.
• Change: Help the company embrace new attitudes and actions.
• Freeze: Formalize and document the updated principles and processes that govern the company.

6. Communicate the Value of Design at Every Turn

Don’t assume that people appreciate the value of design. Explanations, presentations, and conversations devoid of clear value propositions tied to business goals are wasted opportunities.

7. Avoid Taking on Too Much Responsibility

Under commit, over-deliver. Don’t be overeager to say yes to every request and new initiative, and weigh the risk before jumping into long-standing company conflicts.

8. Remain Patient and Positive, and Anticipate Gradual Change

DesignOps solo staff shouldn’t expect to change company culture overnight. Celebrate small victories and don’t dwell on the inevitable setbacks. Organizational inertia is difficult to redirect. It’s not impossible, but it does take time.

DesignOps Mile Markers

There’s no single way to grow DesignOps within an organization. It’s best to think of DesignOps development as an iterative process rather than a linear one. The needs of designers and organizations aren’t fixed. They’re dynamic.

That said, there are some key mile markers on the path between no DesignOps presence and a well-oiled DesignOps team.

Stage 1: Save Time With Systems

Once there’s support for DesignOps within a company, it’s not always necessary to establish a new role. It may be beneficial to formulate a DesignOps vision to guide its implementation.

During this transitional phase, many companies begin systematizing design. Often, this looks like a design leader partnering with a dedicated design-team member to create visual guidelines and component libraries. Systematizing saves time by equipping designers with reusable assets and repeatable logic to solve recurring design problems.

Stage 2: Assemble a Collaboration Force

Systemization is essential, but it’s only one aspect of DesignOps. Even robust design systems can be siloed. It’s time to collaborate and gain support from stakeholders outside of design.

A DesignOps task force, sometimes called a “ tiger team ,” is a cross-functional group composed of leaders from departments like design, engineering, and marketing. Members meet semi-regularly to open lines of interdisciplinary communication and work towards shared, design-related goals.

Task forces are useful because they combine the problem-solving abilities of people from diverse professional backgrounds.

Stage 3: Find a DesignOps Diplomat

For DesignOps to flourish, companies eventually need to hire someone whose sole aim is empowering design and promoting the DesignOps mindset. This person works with the design team to understand their challenges and introduce processes and resources that improve productivity.

Whoever holds the role must exhibit diplomacy to ensure ongoing cohesion between design and other departments.

Stage 4: Hire Staff To Bolster Operations and Culture

With a dedicated DesignOps hire established, additional staff is needed to support the growing DesignOps workload. Here, approaches differ. Some companies enlist an operations manager to coordinate design staffing, budgetary, and resource needs.

Other companies may appoint someone to cultivate a design-team culture that attracts and retains high-caliber talent. This person oversees the customs (onboarding, performance reviews, advancement paths) that give design staff a sense of purpose and motivation.

Stage 5: Manage Interdepartmental Workflows

There isn’t a “final” stage of DesignOps maturity . The DesignOps mindset requires ongoing vigilance to ensure that design team needs and company objectives are met. However, there may come a time when it’s beneficial to employ a person who manages the workflow between design and other departments, particularly engineering. The intention is to maintain cohesion between design and other functions as they move towards common goals.

DesignOps Energizes Problem Solving

While many companies value and invest heavily in design, non-designers in leadership may not know how to scale design or incorporate it into broader initiatives. Without DesignOps or similar facilitative roles, design teams in large organizations risk being overwhelmed by distractions and detached from other departments. Processes dovetail, toolsets grow unwieldy, and the resulting confusion causes product inconsistencies that yield internal strife and user pain points.

The DesignOps mindset recognizes the need for harmony between processes, toolsets, and the people who use them. Companies will differ in approach and needn’t be dogmatic about implementation. Diverse structures can be successful so long as they embrace the core conviction of DesignOps: designers need time to do what they do best—solve problems.

Let us know what you think! Please leave your thoughts, comments, and feedback below.

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

• The Power of Structure: A Guide to Design System Models
• Evolving UX: Experimental Product Design with a CXO
• Accessible Design vs. Inclusive Design (With Infographic)
• The Past Is Still Present: An Overview of Timeless Design
• How to Conduct a Remote Design Sprint

Understanding the basics

What is designops.

DesignOps is a mindset that seeks to free designers and design teams from administrative tasks, like file management, so that they can focus on creative problem-solving. DesignOps staff orchestrate design processes and tools and work to ensure that design aligns with organizational goals.

How do you manage a design team?

There are several models for structuring and managing design teams, but design leadership is the most crucial factor for success. Effective design leads don’t merely hand out instructions to their team members; they must develop junior staff, uphold design quality, and advocate the value of design internally.

How do you scale a design team?

Scaling a design team isn’t as easy as hiring more designers. If there’s no plan for addressing team structure, processes, tools, and culture, adding staff causes design teams to become slow and inefficient. DesignOps orchestrates these concerns and ensures they align with company goals and strategies.

What does a design system consist of?

Nearly all design system models house a combination of style guidelines and interface components. Since design systems are the single source of truth for digital products, many contain code examples for development teams. It’s important to host design systems in a shared location that diverse departments can access.

What is operational design in business?

Much like DesignOps, operations design focuses on standardizing business processes, toolsets, and initiatives. The goal is to help diverse departments move towards common goals using shared methods and terminology. Similarly, DesignOps seeks to integrate design into every aspect of organizational thinking.

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Micah Bowers

Vancouver, WA, United States

Member since January 3, 2016

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What is DesignOps? The essentials of DesignOps

As the product design industry matures, new roles and processes emerge to streamline the work and improve the quality of designs produced.

One of the newest additions to the product design world is the inception of design operations — DesignOps for short.

Let’s take a closer look at what DesignOps is and how designers can benefit from it.

What is DesignOps?

DesignOps is a set of practices and principles that aims to streamline the effectiveness of design teams. The ultimate goal is to build an environment in which designers can strive.

DesignOps ranges from workflow optimization to maintaining design systems to hiring and training design team members.

Although DesignOps is more about what we do as an organization, more mature companies often have dedicated roles that focus entirely on improving design operations. We’ll take a closer look at these later.

Key areas of DesignOps

There’s no textbook definition of what DesignOps is and isn’t, although we can usually distinguish four primary areas of focus, that is:

Workflows and processes

• Infrastructure management
• Design system maintenance

Talent management

DesignOps is all about having a straightforward, efficient, and scalable process of how ideas go from concept to production. This helps establish common standards and improve the overall predictability of the design process.

It’s also about cultivating a culture of collaboration within the organization. The bigger the design team gets, the more structured approach is needed to keep everyone aligned. DesignOps focuses on finding the gaps in collaboration and alignment and fixing them as soon as possible.

Design infrastructure

Part of DesignOps is regularly reviewing if the team has the right tools to do their job. It includes both cornerstone activities such as:

• Defining the software teams should use
• Optimizing the usage of these tools
• Securing budget for licenses

as well as more business-as-usual activities such as managing accesses, naming conventions, and so on.

Design system management

There’s hardly a better way to simplify designers’ lives than having a well-thought-through, documented, and up-to-date design system .

All processes around design system management — defining goals, establishing design principles, creating components, documenting guidelines, and promoting design system adoption — is also part of design operations.

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Lastly, let’s not forget about people.

The three most crucial jobs of DesignOps when it comes to managing talent include:

• Hiring and defining job descriptions: Ensuring you hire the right people is the best thing you can do for your design team
• Developing career paths: Designers must feel there’s room for career growth in the organization and be supported in it
• Allocating designers to teams: Although often neglected, ensuring that the right people work on the right projects can greatly improve morale and efficiency

DesignOps in design organization

Now that we understand what DesignOps is all about let’s see how it works in practice. I’d distinguish four levels of DesignOps maturity in an organization:

Level 1: DesignOps as a practice

Level 2: designops as a role, level 3: designops as a team, level 4: designops as a department.

Every organization does a DesignOps, whether you acknowledge it or not. Even a one-person team needs to figure out their workflow, get the right tools, and establish a decent UI style guide .

The most important thing is to start acknowledging DesignOps, consciously decide who in the team should be responsible in which area, and review the health of design operations practices regularly.

The bigger the organization gets, the more beneficial it is to have a dedicated DesignOps specialist:

This way, you not only ensure that all areas of DesignOps are taken care of, but you can also offload some operational responsibilities from other team members and let them focus more on their desired niche. Win-win.

Rule of thumb : Consider a dedicated specialist when your organization has more than ten designers.

As the organization grows, you might notice that one person is not enough to handle all design-related processes. After all, sometimes you need a few designers to take care of the design system alone!:

Rule of thumb : Consider building a dedicated team when your organization has over thirty designers.

A huge organization employing hundreds of designers might need an entire department to efficiently fulfill all DesignOps needs:

That can include having a dedicated HR Business Partner, recruiters, and L&D specialists. This split of responsibilities often helps heads of the areas narrow down their focus instead of trying to manage everything.

Rule of thumb : Consider a dedicated department if you have more than a hundred designers onboard.

Every organization is different

Keep in mind that the levels of maturity described above are purely anecdotal and represent setups I worked in.

Each organization is different. Some are more centralized, whereas others might have more atomic teams with a dedicated DesignOps person in each team. I also saw organizations with hundreds of designers that still didn’t have a single DesignOps person, and it somehow worked.

The story’s moral is to acknowledge the need for DesignOps within the organization, but structure this in whatever way fits your context best.

Benefits of DesignOps

Whether as a practice or as a dedicated department, DesignOps is incredibly beneficial for the whole organization. The main benefits include:

Improved efficiency

Consistency and scalability, better collaboration, empowered design teams.

By streamlining processes, optimizing workflows, and choosing the best tools for the jobs, DesignOps reduces redundant work and uncertainty from design teams, allowing them to work at the peak of their productivity.

If you can’t meet your deadlines, instead of hiring more people, consider fixing your processes.

Standardized processes, design systems, and best practices help ensure consistency across products and features delivered by the team. It also leads to improved scalability and can help you avoid many troubles that come with a rapidly growing headcount.

Collaboration sometimes has to be forced. Here, I said it. We often expect people to “just talk to each other,” but the bigger the organization, the harder it becomes to stay aligned.

DesignOps ensures that collaboration actually happens by setting up the right processes and practices and facilitating the collaborative design process. It ensures that both other designers, as well as other stakeholders, are always aligned. If misalignment happens, the design operation model is usually updated to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

By hiring the right people, taking care of their development, and giving them the support, resources, and infrastructure they need to succeed, you are on a great track to build a truly empowered design organization.

Ultimately, taking care of design operations usually leads to higher job satisfaction, leading to better employee retention and overall productivity.

DesignOps, at its heart, is about building an environment in which designers can strive.

DesignOps is a part of every design team’s life, whether you acknowledge it or not. On a high level, everything related to:

• Optimizing design workflows and processes
• Maintaining design infrastructure
• Managing design systems
• Hiring and developing designers

can be qualified as design operations.

By consciously taking care of those processes, you can significantly improve your team’s efficiency, motivation, and collaboration. It also helps ensure consistency and scalability within the whole organization.

Although it’s perfectly fine to make taking care of the design process part of every designer or design manager, as the company matures, it might be worth considering getting a dedicated role, or even a whole team or department. It ensures that DesignOps doesn’t fall the priority list as the team is chasing their deadlines and other commitments.

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What is DesignOps?

Insights from Top DesignOps Leaders

Robin Klein Schiphorst

former DesignOps at frog

Author of this ebook's chapter on DesignOps' Impact. Expert who worked with companies like frog, Laerdal, Schibsted in multi-brand Design Systems and building inclusive work cultures.

Rachel Posman

Director, UX Operations at Salesforce

Design Operations leader that is passionate about understanding people and designing and building human-centered organizations, experiences, products and services.

Amber Jabeen

Sr. Manager, DesignOps at Delivery Hero MENA – Talabat

Design leader with a background in UX design, design program management, design systems, and design operations.

Theresa Neil

Founder and Creative Director of Guidea

Recognized as a Top Designer in Technology by Business Insider, O’Reilly Author, and a founder of a 25-person UX design consultancy serving clients including Adobe, Bloomberg, eBay, and many more.

Roxann Adams

DesignOps Manager, CIO Design at IBM

Design leader with 30+ years of experience at IBM. Leads a team of five DesignOps professionals to reduce the friction and pain points of the IBM CIO 
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Marc W. Wisniewski

Design Producer & STSM CIO Design at IBM

Transformative Design Leader passionate about Design Operations, Digital Strategy, Creative Direction, User-Centered Design, Design Thinking, Engineering, Product Management, and Agile and Lean methods.

Learn more about roles and responsibilities of DesignOps specialists and how this discipline can resolve many design and business challenges.

The Importance of DesignOps

See how DesignOps solve some issues, how to collaborate with your team better and scale your design. Learn more about the needs of your team.

Impact of DesignOps

Chapter written by Robin Klein Schiphorst – a DesignOps coach, where he explains how the discipline empowers designers and leaves you more time on what’s important.

How DesignOps works

All about how to work together in the DesignOps mindset, harmonize, prioritize, and measure a team's performance and capacity.

How to get started with DesignOps in Your Company

Learn about implementing DesignOps in your team and organization. See what your roadmap and strategy should look like.

DesignOps Tools

Discover tools that will help you optimize the performance of both design and product development teams. See which are good for project management and team-building.

Scale your design operations

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Design teams are growing fast, and so are the operational systems that manage them. We’re living in a design-first world, and that means that graphic design matters more than ever. Of course, that also means that graphic designers are busier than ever. 

But a new scale requires a new structure—it doesn’t make sense to bog designers down with work that distracts from actual design. That’s what designers are best at, after all. Smart companies are recognizing this problem, empowering their designers and allowing them to work more effectively. 

How? DesignOps.

What is DesignOps?

DesignOps is the umbrella term for creating effective workflows that help teams build digital products. It’s the operational management of designers and the optimization of design processes in order to maximize the value of design. Meredith Black, a DesignOps pioneer, has a more basic definition: “I like to say that DesignOps is everything but actual design,” she quips.  

Usually, the organizations that implement DesignOps are large tech companies, but they don’t have to be. DesignOps is loosely based on the successful model of DevOps—the agile, iterative practice that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to enable continuous product deployment.

“Keep designers focused on the work, and let DesignOps help with the rest,” says Black, who is a former DesignOps lead at Pinterest and currently serves as a consultant in the space. “Whether that’s strategy, taking notes, coordinating with cross-functional teams, helping ensure a successful launch of a project, building a learning and development program, or just being there to listen to a designer’s needs.” 

Once you start trying to describe how DesignOps actually works , though, a simple definition becomes harder to pin down. This is partly because it’s a somewhat new discipline—although agencies always had account and project managers, organizations only started trying to create DesignOps roles in the early 2010s. But also, DesignOps is meant to be everything . It connects across teams, across processes, across products; it is a set of practices and a role, as well as a mindset.

The Nielsen Norman Group organizes their “DesignOps menu”—in other words, what people in DesignOps roles do—into three broad categories: “How we work together,” “How we get our work done,” and “How our work creates impact.” And within those umbrella categories, the topics that DesignOps can touch upon get more refined. Black explains that the reason for such a large “menu” of options is that it all comes down to what a company needs. 

“Currently, lots of people think it’s a one-size-fits-all role,” Black says, “When really the role is going to vary based on the company’s needs. One company might need someone to run actual projects, project timelines, budgets, and take notes—while another company might need DesignOps folks to run larger programs focused on onboarding, learning and development, or supporting at an executive level, and really being a chief-of-staff to the head of design.”

This is partially why every company seems to take a slightly different approach. IBM has a primer to show ideas and org charts for how to scale DesignOps teams. Atlassian shared their workflows to incorporate design understanding and feedback in an agile-like process. So did Getty Images , Airbnb , Pinterest , and Salesforce . While they’re all slightly different, they all share the three-tiered approach that NN Group laid out: There’s the work done on the product, the work done on the team, and then an awareness of the culture of design.

The tripartite structure is also by design. As Dave Malouf, a DesignOps leader at Northwestern Mutual, explained in the 2019 DesignOps Handbook that he co-wrote with Black, Collin Whitehead (DropBox), Kate Battles (FitBit), and Gregg Bernstein, you can trace the DesignOps menu back to DevOps, Lean Startup, and two-track agile. 

As Malouf writes in the handbook, the historical difficulties of designers working with developers is that “developers and product managers measured success by whether a product shipped on time, and not whether the design satisfied user needs.” Tri-track systems solved these problems by adding a “discovery” track, a way to learn from mistakes and test experiments, and an “understanding” track, which considers the efficacy of the product and the efficiency of the team—“whether it’s the “the ‘right’ thing based on user needs and team insights.”

How to actually make it work

Black remembers what it was like at the beginning. Seemingly simultaneously, designers across the industry grappled with the same issues of how to efficiently scale teams—and the solution of DesignOps seemed to catch on and spread. She was working at the agency Hot Studio on their Facebook account: “When I was interacting with Facebook execs, they realized they needed a role similar to the one I had,” she said. Courtney Kaplan, Black’s boss at the time, built the entire DesignOps team from the ground up at Facebook—when Black went on to do the same thing at Pinterest, she considered Kaplan as a mentor. “There were very few of us in the industry who had this unique role and we were all figuring out how to roll something like this out on a larger scale,” Black said.

And according to the numbers, everyone is still figuring it out. In June 2020, the UX researchers of NN Group surveyed 557 design and UX practitioners and organizations to learn more about their DesignOps efforts. The survey went out to organizations and professionals across industries, and the questions were centrally focused on the presence and efficacy of DesignOps across the organization. The researchers found that on average, design professionals ticked off just 7.5 of the 34 total items at their organization, about 22%:

How we work together: 18% (2.2 items of 12) How we get our work done: 20% (2.2 items of 11) How our work creates impact: 30% (3.2 items of 11)

The numbers were low, no matter the question. This might be explained by the fact that only 8% of 557 respondents reported working at organizations within which someone had a dedicated DesignOps role.

So, how can design teams adopt DesignOps? By following Black’s example, and starting slow. 

“Honestly, I think the role right now is just so new,” Black says. “It’s a very ‘hot’ role and companies all around the world are hiring DesignOps folks and trying to figure out what ‘DesignOps’ really is.” 

When Black started at Pinterest, she was the first producer they ever had. She had left Facebook to join the Pinterest team because she wanted to work someplace smaller, to help them grow. At the time, Pinterest was only 400 people—and Black was working with a team of 10 designers. (Yes, that small—and DesignOps can work with teams that are even smaller.)

And because she was working someplace that didn’t have a DesignOps structure, she had to start by taking on one project at a time, and figure out the right organizational workflow as she went along.

But, as Black stresses, the strength of DesignOps producers is that they aren’t outside of the design process—they are embedded within it, and are supporting designers, first and foremost. “The people in this role are not admins, they are not note-takers,” Black says. “They have a passion for design and while they may not be designing themselves, they sure can articulate what works and what doesn’t, and that can be incredibly helpful.”

How else can DesignOps help?

Part of taking things off of designers’ plates also means clearing the air. 2020 was a tumultuous year—and because more people are working from home than ever before, a lot of the boundaries that used to exist between work and life are no longer there. More and more companies are looking to management to help mitigate the ways that our daily lives interact with our work lives. 

Ahead of the DesignOps Summit of 2020, the UX designer Kat Vellos went on the Rosenfeld Review Podcast to talk about her research on the epidemic of loneliness in the design industry. Vellos argued that managers, especially those in DesignOps, needed to start breaking taboos and making themselves responsible for the workplace loneliness of their employees. “A sense of belonging really needs to come from the management level,” Vellos said. “Whether they care about it from the heart level or the wallet, it needs to be a priority.”

The designer Vincent Brathwaite also visited the podcast ahead of his talk at the Summit to talk about the specific function that DesignOps can perform to help close the racial divide on design teams. Brathwaite believes that difficult conversations about race can be started and ultimately made more productive by generating new design-based protocols around having them. 

For Brathwaite, encouraging teams to have difficult conversations can be achieved by setting new social norms around openness, and defining terms and language. “One of the things we have to do as design leaders is be open to having conversations and being wrong,” Brathwaite said. “Setting the stage and creating the protocol where [someone can say], ‘Hey I may not know all the terms, but I’m open to correcting myself or to using the right ones.’ Really it just boils down to being willing to exchange with another human being.”

These small shifts, Brathwaite explained, have the potential to bridge racials divides and also set new norms across teams. “My hope is that designers and design leaders can become more curious about the way that our industry is set up,” Brathwaite said.

At its core, DesignOps is about curiosity and openness about how the industry can change — and that producers can help lead changes to the design process. As Black explains, the best people suited for DesignOps are the ones that are “open and curious” to whatever it is that a company really needs. 

“I think that people who take on this role are very much the unsung heroes,” Black says. “One of the best quotes I ever heard from a product manager was, ‘I don’t know exactly what you do, but I would be lost without you.’”

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Designops handbook: now on designbetter.co, aarron walter,   •   jun 12, 2018.

T he world of digital product design gets more complex by the day. As companies invest in scaling design, new disciplines and teams become part of the existing company fabric—making operational gaps inevitable.

DesignOps Handbook , a new resource in the DesignBetter.Co library, is a guide to understanding how DesignOps will enable your team to scale design.

DesignOps is relatively new—so new that this is the first book to be released on the subject. Early pioneers have built high-functioning teams at some of the best companies in the world, and they’ve generously contributed chapters to the DesignOps Handbook to help you shape your own DesignOps practice:

“Design as a practice requires a singular focus on the operations that maintain the best interests of design and an organization’s business.” –Dave Malouf

“When you have a team responsible for process, it lets every other team focus on their respective crafts.” –Collin Whitehead

“DesignOps doesn’t just help the design team—it benefits all parts of the product organization.” –Meredith Black

“When working in DesignOps, your team is on the front lines, helping everyone do outstanding work amid the chaos and rapid change.”–Kate Battles

Edited by Vox Senior User Researcher Gregg Bernstein , DesignOps Handbook also includes embedded video and audio clips from design experts at Pinterest, Oracle, and LinkedIn, with more being added in coming weeks. This material, paired with the content from expert contributors, can help you and your team fill operational gaps of your own.

Read the DesignOps Handbook

Check it out!

by Aarron Walter

As the VP of Design Education at InVision, Aarron Walter draws upon 15 years of experience running product teams and teaching design to help companies enact design best practices. Aarron founded the UX practice at MailChimp and helped grow the product from a few thousand users to more than 10 million. His design guidance has helped the White House, the US Department of State, and dozens of major corporations, startups and venture capitalist firms. He is the author of the best selling book Designing for Emotion from A Book Apart. You'll find @aarron on Twitter sharing thoughts on design. Learn more at http://aarronwalter.com .

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DesignOps Handbook Summary: Building a Design-Led Culture

1. What is DesignOps?

DesignOps is all the operations that support high-quality crafts, methods, and processes, including tools, infrastructure, workflow, people, and governance.

Design is valuable because of serendipity, a culture of interruption, deconstructive creativity, and human understanding. However, designers are often sidelined in favor of developers. DesignOps aims to amplify design’s value by providing the operations that support high-quality crafts, methods, and processes.

Why is DesignOps Important Now?

DesignOps is essential for modern organizations because of scale, people, expectations, and inclusion. Companies are growing and expanding, design teams are supporting more parts of an organization, and the tools used for design are becoming more complex. Great designers are a rare commodity, and recruiting them is difficult. Expectations for better design outcomes are sky-high, and diversity and inclusion take work.

How DesignOps Works

DesignOps practice focuses on three overlapping areas: business operations, people operations, and workflow operations. Business operations facilitate design through budgetary and political capital, people operations support design teams through rituals and defined expectations, and workflow operations provide systems that support project intake and management.

2. DesignOps Scenarios and Models

Companies that understand the value of design invest in the role of DesignOps to maximize design’s value and impact.

DesignOps is now becoming more common place, with DesignOps teams helping to forecast work, manage resourcing, drive the day-to-day project flows, oversee budgets, support team health, and basically facilitate anything that allows creative teams to focus on what they do best.

What matters most is not to fight just for the creative team but to build a process that protects the integrity of the creative team’s work.

When Is It Time for DesignOps?

The craft of a DesignOps team boils down to process. When you have a team responsible for process, it lets every other team focus on their respective crafts.

It can be hard to gauge when to ramp up a DesignOps function, but these are some scenarios where it might be time:

• Craft specialization: it’s no longer feasible for roles to blur
• Operating a design team at scale: it’s no longer possible to keep everyone in sync
• Safe harbor: designers need protection from the grind and thrash of creative development

A. Craft Specialization

In the early stages of a design team, designers and other team members wear many hats. The roles and responsibilities are blurred in a persistent “all hands on deck” approach to every problem. For small teams, this is often the fastest way to work together—the workflows, stakeholders, coordination, and communication are all easy enough to keep in check, and everyone is in sync.

As organizations mature and grow, specialization becomes increasingly important. As a business scales, the processes that were once effective might no longer fit the changing org. Design teams may find that as they scale, they require specialist roles beyond the UX designer—like design researchers, UX writers, brand designers, illustrators, and motion designers. This is when a DesignOps role can help to make sure that the right people give the right feedback at the right time, with each specialist aligned to the same

💡 The job of the DesignOps team is to protect the time and headspace of everyone within the design organization—the designers, writers, researchers, and so on—which allows everyone to focus on their respective craft.

Specialization also introduces a financial upside to an organization by ensuring that people are doing the work they were hired to do, rather than taking on work outside of their core competency.

B. Operating a Design Team at Scale

Organizational growth means more teams and individuals—from product management, customer support, marketing, sales, etc.— lean on the design team. Keeping these teams and their requests in sync often becomes a responsibility unto itself beyond the actual work of design.

This is when it becomes critical to better manage communications and coordination across all teams and projects.

As organizations build out these processes they become the “fine motor skills” that ensure consistent quality at scale. DesignOps is uniquely adept at defining, socializing, and maintaining these type of workflows.

C. Protecting Design Teams from Burnout

Creative teams are uniquely vulnerable to the subjective nature of their work. On any given project, they might receive bad feedback, late feedback, conflicting feedback, and even feedback from unknown parties with no apparent involvement in a project. After jumping through the burning hoops of a long creative approval process, a team will see their good ideas arbitrarily go down in flames. This creates a stressful environment with few safe places to explore and ideate, and little to no empathy or support for the creative process.

What’s more, scale, pace, and complexity can add up to an environment where creative teams feel like they are always reacting, and never exploring and refining ideas. When this happens, it’s understandable that a designer might just throw up their hands and say, “Just tell me what to do.” This happens all too often at companies that invest in amazing design talent, only to relegate them to software operators rather than thinking of them as partners in solving business problems. It also means that these great creatives are going to look elsewhere for a creative outlet—hopefully on a side project, but likely at another company.

DesignOps is not a solution for every issue, but it can mitigate the workflow problems that impact a teams’ health — starting with planning. If a team knows when to expect feedback from specific people—whether from the CEO or other stakeholders—they can tailor the presentation of their work to reflect how it addresses things like revenue goals (this design will increase conversions), product goals (this redesign will make features more discoverable), etc. What’s more, a design producer can set expectations and explain to stakeholders what type of feedback is needed at each particular stage in the design process.

Business Thinking for Designers: the Potential of Business Savvy Designers

For example, at Dropbox, producers create what they call “blue boxes” at the top of each document they present for creative reviews. These are check boxes that clearly state—before any work gets presented—what feedback they are looking for and from whom. They also call out what types of feedback won’t be helpful. This approach is a great reminder at each review of roles and responsibilities; while they want everyone to be heard, they also clarify who is the ultimate decision maker for different aspects of the creative output.

Beyond managing stakeholder feedback, DesignOps can prepare the team for upcoming projects and even expose the creative team to the decision-making process early, elevating them more to project partners than executors. This advanced forecasting allows creative teams to get involved with those requesting projects — like product or marketing — and work collaboratively to define the problem.

DesignOps Models

The specific flavor of DesignOps you put in place can vary. In general, two DesignOps strategies surface, each of which overlaps with the other:

• Operations support : the DesignOps role sets standards and refines processes for the entire design team.
• Project support : the DesignOps role embeds into each specific project workflow to drive and improve the creative process in partnership with design leadership.

A. The Operations Support Model

In a DesignOps support model, the ops function builds systems that impact the work at a high-level. Here the ops function tends to be smaller—sometimes just one person— with a broad focus that allows for spotting areas in need of triage. These areas include design tooling and systems, communications, recruiting, team development, and budgeting.

The DesignOps role might:

• Dictate meeting cadence, thinking strategically about when 1:1 meetings, team meetings, and leadership meetings should fit in any given week.
• Set recruiting standards, plan new hire onboarding, and set a curriculum for the ongoing education and development of the team.
• Support the team by managing the budget, especially when your team relies on freelance talent, vendors, and agencies.

B. The Project Support Model

In the project support model, a design producer or program manager attends not just to the high-level systems but to individual projects, driving the day-to-day creative workflow.

The DesignOps team owns the creative schedule and milestones and ensures that creative teams have what they need to develop their best work on time. This project support might include documenting tasks and follow-up items, wrangling project specifications, and handling asset management.

3. Putting DesignOps into Play

Large organizations are realizing that one way to quickly scale teams is by acquiring design firms. One thing all of these design firms had in common was a staff who knew how to work with creatives and clients, and who could manage projects efficiently.

Jasmine Friedl, formerly a product designer at Facebook, is now the director of design at Udacity. Here’s how she recalls the integration of the role of DesignOps at Facebook:

“The role of design program managers was crucial understanding how understand how designers were more than just pixel-pushers: setting expectations, getting the right people with the right skills on the right projects, scope phases, and managing those expectations to delivery. This became a big part of the ads organization, and later the design organization as a whole, where design program managers facilitated, organized, prioritized, and wrangled people, events, and initiatives on everything from product to culture.” — Jasmine Friedl, UDACITY

Getting buy-in for DesignOps

When introducing DesignOps into your organization, you’ll want to prepare an explanation of the role and how it benefits your organization.

“What we’ve learned over time is that when our [designers] are spending more than 50% of their time doing operational work, that’s a problem.” — Adrienne Allnutt, LinkedIn

DesignOps makes teams run more effectively by letting designers focus on design while leaving everything else to the operations team.

💡 Many organizations expect their designers to wear many hats—project manager, cross-functional partner, creative leader, and logistical coordinator. However, these additional roles reduce the time your designer can devote to your product and users.

While it may take some convincing to hire for this role, the ROI will appear quickly. Teams will be better organized, leadership will gain a better understanding of what makes their teams tick, and cross-functional teams will have more visibility into—and a better understanding of—the design process. This creates better organizational awareness of design, and mitigates misconceptions that “designers design in a black hole” or that design projects take too long.

What is Your Company’s Design Maturity Level?

Some tips for designops buy-in:, a. do the research.

Talk to your heads of design, product, and engineering (and any senior leadership within your org you have access to) to assess opportunities available in the current product teams. Here are some possible conversation starters:

• Do you have visibility into what the design team is working on?
• Do you know if the team is working well cross-functionally with product and engineering colleagues?
• Does the team have clear and actionable goals they are driving toward, and are they meeting them?
• Are there regular design critiques or feedback sessions?
• Are the product manager, engineer, and designer aligned with what’s shipping?
• Is the team meeting deadlines?

B. Propose a plan

Propose a set of essential tasks that DesignOps could help contribute to. For example, DesignOps can help a product manager operationalize a roadmap, make sure that the team has proper kick-offs on projects, and ensure a design QA is scheduled prior to a major product launch.

C. Recommend the role

Recommend to your leadership team that you would like to hire someone into this DesignOps role to tackle the opportunities surfaced in your research—someone who will develop a long-term plan to scale operations on the team.

D. Keep leadership involved

Invite your stakeholders to interviews, and keep them involved throughout the interview process.

E. Spread the good news

Update your stakeholders on successes and the impact this hire is making in this role.

Staffing for DesignOps

There are some universal qualities and skills to look for in a DesignOps candidate:

• You want someone who can build cross- functional relationships while representing design, and who understands the design process. These relationships will necessitate understanding the product development process and product engineering principles.
• The role calls for excellent project, time, budget, and resource management, and an understanding of different project management ideologies (like waterfall and agile, among others)
• Finally, this role calls for calm in ambiguous and changing environments

One size doesn’t fit all. It’s okay to take the qualities above and get creative, as long as the qualities and experiences perfectly aligned with your team’s needs.

A yearlong plan for integrating DesignOps

On day one, welcome your new hire onto the team,

B. Week one

Allow your new DesignOps hire to build relationships within and beyond the design team. Set up 1:1 meetings with the right people for your new hire, and encourage them to learn how design works in your org, what designers need help with, and what opportunities there are for this new hire to help.

C. Month one

Now that your hire has made it through week one intact, for the next couple weeks, they can start exploring how to make the design team operationally efficient.

D. Year one

What follows are a few initiatives for your new hire to focus on based on the needs of your organization. Covering all of the recommended areas will take at least 6–12 months to implement, and will most likely take the work of more than one person. Throughout this first year, make sure you’re tracking the performance of this role and communicating it—this will allow colleagues across your organization to see the value of the role, and will allow you to build a case for even more DesignOps hires.

💡 DesignOps doesn’t just help the design team—it benefits all parts of the product organization.

A menu of DesignOps initiatives

A. resourcing.

Align your headcount to your roadmap by thinking about resourcing: who should be doing what and when?

• Develop a template or guide to help identify the strengths of each designer on your team and how they can best contribute to different types of projects
• Audit whether the design team is set up for success—are designers on projects that suit their skills and strengths?
• Meet with design leadership each week to ensure that company priorities are being suitably staffed

B. Program Management

Begin to shape the design process by instituting communication and collaboration protocols.

• Create a short (30 minutes should be enough), weekly visual status review with your design leadership team.
• Carve out weekly dedicated studio time for designers to catch up with other designers.
• Schedule weekly design critiques for each design team.
• Deliver weekly status updates to and beyond your team.
• Establish credibility and become the source of truth for your team.

C. Team Onboarding

If you’re putting DesignOps in play, you’re likely increasing headcount. Demystify the onboarding process for everyone by creating documentation and protocols.

• Develop an onboarding doc for new designers and design team members. Make this a team effort—this doc should include everything you and your colleagues wish you knew when you first started. Think about things like file saving and naming protocols, master calendars, email aliases—even where to grab a bite to eat.
• Pair up new designers for training and meeting other members of the organization
• For a larger organization, consider scheduling design-specific onboarding in addition to company onboarding.

D. Team Morale & Education

A design team requires inspiration, collaboration, and continuing education. Establish how you can facilitate both individual and group growth.

• Plan team offsites to get your designers together at least once per quarter as a team. The important part is that everyone gets together and teammates have a chance to bond.
• Provide educational opportunities for the team by hosting experts who can level up everyone’s skills. This could be a class on how to use a complicated bit of software more effectively or a presentation of a case study by a respected peer outside the organization.
• Schedule regular design speakers for lunch brown bags or coffee hours.
• Make time to take your designers on inspirational field trips. If your team is distributed, signal that this is an acceptable use of company time and encourage your designers to find nearby inspiration.
• Hold a monthly all-hands meeting for the design team. Curate this to include a mix of education, presentations of work in progress from designers,

E. Budgeting for Design

To advocate for the design organization, you’ll want to understand how design fits into your organization’s larger financial picture.

• Meet with your finance team to understand how the company operates. You’ll want to know about accounting systems, the fiscal calendar, team budgets, and how headcount is allocated.
• Share this information with your design leadership team—everyone should understand the financial constraints and opportunities.
• Track all design team expenses, and establish approval processes for expense requests.

4. Team Coordination

Design operations teams form for many reasons, and grow and morph in many ways to fit the needs of an organization.

To help the design teams get up and running as quickly and effectively as possible, and integrate the design team processes with those of the greater product development team, you could start by:

• Identifying the critical gaps and weaknesses where design could provide the most value
• Establishing and fostering strong cross-functional partnerships
• Socializing our process proposals to other teams and make our case for change

Listen to all levels

💡 The most effective tool to solving any problem starts with listening. Give yourself and your team an ample amount of time to meet the people who help get the work done.

Don’t stop with the people directly within your particular organization — talk to everyone who contributes to the successful delivery of great design work — design leaders and individual designers; cross-functional partners like engineering, product management, marketing, legal, purchasing, and customer service; and anyone else with a hand in the process. This way, you can gauge where the organization stands and determine the strengths, weaknesses, biggest problems, and biggest opportunities.

Communicate often

Once you have set your priorities and approach, it’s very important to communicate progress often. Be sure to speak to progress, blockers, etc., to make sure your team has what it needs to be successful at least weekly.

💡 Communicating what is needed & expected of your design leadership team is crucial.

Make sure to have ongoing dialogue at the cross-functional leadership level (if necessary). This elevates the DesignOps team within the design org and the company, helps to create awareness of the value of DesignOps, and gives you & your team the chance to present your work to a broad group of stakeholders.

Consider regular team meetings to proactively communicate what everyone is working on. It’s likely that a lot of the ongoing initiatives you discuss in these meetings will be those that were inspired and informed by the designers themselves. This will make the designers feel heard, and feel like they had a hand in making things better.

Ask for feedback

Getting feedback on a project or initiative you’re leading can feel scary and personal, which can give feedback a negative connotation. However, feedback helps us understand what went well (positives!) and where things can improve (opportunities!).

Depending on the scope of the work and the number of people involved, there are many ways to gather feedback: one-on-one discussions, surveys, and retrospectives. Gathering feedback early and often does two important things.

• It allows people to be heard and feel valued.
• It helps inform you and your team about how to make things better going forward.

💡 Make sure to communicate that you’re open to feedback at all times.

If something doesn’t feel right or isn’t going in the right direction, it’s best to know as soon as possible versus down the road when you have missed your opportunity to effect change.

Stay flexible

Change is inevitable, and it affects everything from individual pixels to entire companies. DesignOps teams are at the forefront of managing this chaos and ensuring that design teams can produce outstanding work. They focus on the work, not the processes, and must remain calm and collected in the face of constant change.

On the surface, everything looks smooth, but below the surface, they’re a duck paddling furiously to keep things moving. Transparency is essential, and teams must adopt a “wait and see” approach to cope with things outside their control. You must keep moving forward, no matter what the universe throws at them. Their flexibility and perseverance make them a valuable resource for design teams. They don’t give up, and they help everyone reach the finish line, even when it keeps moving.

While it’s impossible to keep everyone happy all the time, there are steps that DesignOps managers can take to build a solid foundation for their organization. By doing so, they can manage through good times and bad, and hopefully keep their teams happy and healthy most of the time.

A. Share your team mission/vision

Well-written mission, vision, and value statements can unify and inspire design teams. They are great resources to be used within the design organization during onboarding and recruiting, and when designers need guidance to tackle a tricky problem or scenario.

• Vision statement : An ambitious framing of the future that you want to achieve—a North Star toward which your teams should be working
• Mission statement : A breakdown of how you’re going to achieve your vision
• Values statement : A guide for the day-to-day decisions about how you conduct yourself

Not sure where to start when writing your design organization’s statements? Here’s a simple template for starting a mission statement:

• How we work
• The outcomes we aim for

B. Align on roles and responsibilities

When roles and responsibilities are clearly articulated within the organization, individuals know where they stand and how they can progress in their careers. Roles and responsibilities are likely in place if you’re working at a mature company, but for the new company or newly formed design org, these will have to be defined.

C. Define success for your team and your individuals

Most companies have long-term strategic and annual planning, and design organizations should too. DesignOps can facilitate conversations at the design leadership level to ensure success is being defined based on the company’s goals. At Fitbit, they meet quarterly as a design organization to reflect on the previous three to six months, talk through any urgent priorities, and set goals for the coming months. With team goals established, take time to get feedback.

Goals that are shared and agreed upon are goals that can be met.

Many companies have tools that help teams and individuals document their goals. Make sure to agree on these tools—and set the expectation that everyone should use them to ensure you’re working towards the same outcome.

D. Define your culture and prioritize it

Culture is often the unsung hero that keeps design teams happy and healthy, yet too often it’s not prioritized. Building a design culture can be done in many ways and at different scales. Find out what works for you and your organization by having stakeholder conversations with design leadership. Ask them to describe their ideal design culture, and to define what is most important to them. From there, approach it like you would any other design problem: set up desired outcomes and deliverables, set milestones, and create teams to get things done.

Design cannot be successful in a silo; build cross-functional relationships for optimal design outcomes

Relationships are so crucial to successful outcomes for both design and DesignOps. When tackling any design challenge, identify key cross-functional partnerships and stakeholders who can spot the opportunities for design to provide the most value. This helps you ensure that all possible solutions are surfaced by balancing the user experience with business needs and company goals. Identify your cross-functional partners and stakeholders early to make sure they clearly understand the problem and are aligned on the desired outcome.

From there, establish a meeting cadence that will keep everyone looped in. If you’re solving for stronger collaboration in general, consider a bi-weekly meeting cadence to ensure close and frequent communication. Some of the meeting topics can include:

• Aligning on priorities across teams
• Problem solving key/hot issues across programs
• Sharing work that’s in progress
• Process problem-solving

No one likes a lot of meetings, so revisit the meeting cadence often to ensure it’s a good use of everyone’s time. Remember to promote collaboration starting at the top, and don’t be afraid to solve for areas of friction early!

5. ResearchOps

ResearchOps is included here because it’s tightly related to design, and it needs very specific approaches to people, workflow, and business operations.

The mission of research

Research helps gather data from inside and outside the organization to derive actionable insights that drive both strategic and tactical decision making. Research data comes from a variety of sources:

• User research
• Ethnography
• Remote and in-person moderated and unmoderated testing Journaling
• Participatory design
• User activities (purchases, usage, site, and app analytics)
• Market research
• Analyst reports
• Support and sales logs
• Customer interviews

Organizing research activities to discover insights, and making those insights actionable, requires attention to many operational concerns. This is especially true as you scale your research organization and your org as a whole.

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Designops: 5 common team structures.

April 17, 2022 2022-04-17

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DesignOps is vast landscape of opportunity, because there are many elements related to enabling consistent, quality design. What an organization chooses to focus on in a DesignOps practice should reflect the needs and objectives of that organization, and so, too, should the structure of that practice when it comes to DesignOps teams or roles.

This article outlines 5 common types of structures for DesignOps teams. The appropriate structure for a company depends on the overall organizational structure, goals, and level of need for formalized DesignOps programs; therefore, there is no best-in-class structure. These structures should be viewed as potential models suitable for different contexts,  not  as required or progressive steps in a model of DesignOps maturity. Although some organizations may experience natural progression through these structures as they scale, teams do not need to aim for any structure other than the one that provides adequate support and resources.

The 5 common types of DesignOps structures outlined in this article are:

• Scattered: DesignOps efforts are taken on by other roles (e.g., design managers) as part of their day-to-day job responsibilities. Within the organization, “DesignOps” is likely unused as a term and unknown as a formalized concept.
• Solitary: DesignOps is a team of 1. This dedicated DesignOps role identifies and develops programs for the largest painpoints of the design team, often in an initially reactive way.
• Specialized: DesignOps is divided across a few people who manage or oversee specific aspects of DesignOps full time.
• Distributed: DesignOps roles are distributed and dedicated to individual teams throughout the organization, focusing on team-to-team coordination and alignment.
• Elevated: DesignOps scales to become a separate entity, providing centralized resources and programs that affect and benefit the entire design organization.

In This Article:

Type 1: scattered, type 2: solitary, type 3: specialized, type 4: distributed , type 5: elevated.

When DesignOps is scattered , there are lots of people doing DesignOps-related activities, but without an official practice or title. In many organizations, no one may have even heard the term “DesignOps” or understand what it describes. The term “DesignOps” certainly isn’t a part of everyday rhetoric for all organizations and most organizations lack formalized DesignOps roles (i.e., people dedicated full time to DesignOps). (In fact, our research found that only 13% of teams have DesignOps leads or managers .)

But even in organizations that lack a formalized DesignOps practice and roles, there are still people identifying and attempting to solve operational challenges related to the design team and its processes. Likely, even without labeling it as such, there are senior-level designers, leads, and managers doing DesignOps-type of work alongside their other formally recognized job responsibilities.

This scattered structure is likely to be a widespread one due to the low level of DesignOps maturity across organizations. When we surveyed 557 UX professionals about the level of DesignOps maturity at their organizations, only 10% of respondents reported that there was a broad understanding of DesignOps across teams or that the value of DesignOps was established within the company culture.

Scattered Structure in Practice

The absence of formalized DesignOps could indicate a low level of overall UX maturity . Certainly, companies that do not acknowledge the value of UX or support the overall UX practice will also not support a formalized DesignOps practice or hire dedicated DesignOps professionals. In such cases, design leads and managers will often scramble to carve out time and resources to solve operational challenges and enable design work, thus placing additional burden on themselves with no recognition for these efforts.

A scattered DesignOps structure could also be in place at organizations where DesignOps is understood and valued. Teams early in their DesignOps journey — or overall UX journey — may not have resources for a dedicated DesignOps role yet, even if such a role is widely desired. In these situations, teams may decide to include — and hopefully formally recognize — ops-related responsibilities in the job description and responsibilities of existing design roles. For example, design managers might be given authority and resources to create method protocols for their teams. Or, committees of representative designers may take on specific DesignOps challenges, such as creating a design system , documenting the design process , or systematizing UX meetings .

Challenges and Benefits of a Scattered Structure

While individual teams without a unifying DesignOps structure have the benefit of choosing tools and methods autonomously, the biggest issue within a scattered structure is often lack of consistency . When individual teams are not aligned, they may develop wide variations in processes, methods, and tool stacks that make it difficult to collaborate, share insights and templates, or avoid duplicative work.

In a solitary structure, one person has been given the official recognition and bandwidth for full-time dedication to DesignOps. This person often has an open-ended title such as DesignOps lead, DesignOps manager, or head of DesignOps and is charged with being the tip of the DesignOps spear — cutting a path through uncharted territory and leading teams into the DesignOps frontier.

This DesignOps team of one is typically focused on damage control through necessity, making sense of the backlog of operational debt and tackling the most obvious pain points one at a time. This role works across multiple designers or design teams to identify the biggest operational challenges and develop consistencies and standards that will benefit all teams.

Often, this role is divided between 2 primary responsibilities: part design-team liaison, listening to and synthesizing challenges across teams, and part designer, architecting approaches and processes that will ease those pain points and better enable designers.

Solitary Structure in Practice

The solitary structure often chronologically follows a scattered structure, because, eventually, someone in the scattered organization recognizes the inconsistences and inefficiencies across individual designers or teams, can bare them no longer, and raises a rallying cry to address the issues.

For a historically small team (fewer than 10 designers) that quickly scales to double or triple in size, an existing designer may recognize that processes and collaboration are becoming difficult to maintain across the growing team. This person feels the pain firsthand and makes a case to leadership to take on these operational issues, hence creating the first formalized DesignOps role.

Alternatively, if the company has a relatively high level of UX maturity across several teams that are generally well-aligned, leadership might proactively recognize the need for formalized DesignOps and bring in a seasoned DesignOps professional to “stand up” DesignOps in the organization.

Challenges and Benefits of a Solitary Structure

In a solitary structure, DesignOps has been officially recognized. There is at least some level of formal acknowledgement and buy-in for optimizing the design process and allowing at least one person to take on this work full time. However, this person can quickly become overwhelmed by the plethora of operational challenges to solve and the many activities required to do so (e.g., identifying obstacles, roadmapping activities, tracking efforts, gathering feedback, evolving efforts). This burden is exacerbated if the existing designer must prove success of some DesignOps initiatives before being granted full-time focus.

Furthermore, this fledgling role is in a precarious position. They may face resistance as they carry out the unsung responsibility of tirelessly advocating for DesignOps, both to stakeholders  and to individual designers who may not embrace change. Listening and rapport-building skills (easier for someone who came from a former design role) are critical, as a DesignOps professional in a solitary structure who attempts to design and impose processes in a silo will be rejected by the system of designers they’re attempting to support.

In a specialized DesignOps structure, there are multiple (but limited) dedicated DesignOps roles, each focused on specific programs or specialized areas of DesignOps. Rather than having a single DesignOps generalist who focuses on identifying and solving DesignOps challenges of all kinds (like in the solitary structure), DesignOps professionals are specialized, meaning that each has a specific, unique focus area corresponding to some facet of the DesignOps landscape .

Individual DesignOps professionals within this structure focus on operational challenges and solutions aligned to their personal areas of expertise and skillsets, but remain tightly aligned with each other, collaborating to ensure that the operational programs put in place to support designers are complementary and coordinated.

DesignOps roles within this structure are created after specialized-need areas become apparent and they often alleviate an overburdened individual role in a solitary structure, allowing each person to focus on areas they are most motivated by and most knowledgeable about. 

Specialized Structure in Practice

As DesignOps gains traction and proves some measurable success over time, it can become too much for a single role to handle. Even if one superhuman were able to expertly manage multiple areas of DesignOps long term, they might not be interested in or even good at all the potential areas of DesignOps that need to be addressed.

If a DesignOps team of one can successfully benchmark and measure the growing success of initial DesignOps efforts, it often creates buy-in for additional DesignOps roles. Here, the DesignOps team expands by bringing in additional dedicated roles — maybe just another person or two to start — who can focus on specific programs or specialized facets of DesignOps that have proven most impactful.

For example, in a small and emerging specialized structure, there could be three DesignOps professionals: one focused on PeopleOps initiatives such as hiring and onboarding, one focused on optimizing design workflow, and one focused on tool curation, licensing, and tool onboarding.

Challenges and Benefits of a Specialized Structure

In a specialized structure, individual DesignOps professionals can concentrate on specific workstreams, providing dedicated focus to areas that have been identified as critical for the long-term success of the design organization. However, without strong alignment among these roles, DesignOps will become fragmented.

Furthermore, this growing DesignOps team must not neglect its responsibility to help others understand its role. The individuals must provide clarity about the differentiated value DesignOps provides compared to other roles. They must also put time and effort into creating partnerships with other ops roles within the organizations (e.g., PeopleOps, MarketingOps, DevOps, BusinessOps, etc.) to ensure everyone is in sync with their efforts, goals, and communications.

In a distributed structure, DesignOps professionals provide dedicated support to individual design teams throughout the organization. These DesignOps roles are a part of the individual team they support and might enable the team through areas such as workflow management, setting design goals, monitoring project trajectory, or roadmapping .

Ideally, these DesignOps roles work together to ensure that the overall strategy and communication is in sync across all those teams. As in any decentralized team structure , there should be established touchpoints (e.g., meetings) that provide dedicated time for the distributed team members to share and collaborate with each other.

Distributed Structure in Practice

This structure is common for design teams that are experiencing high levels of scaling or with widely dispersed teams. As the design team continues to grow in size, it can become difficult for just one (or a limited number of) DesignOps roles to keep up with shifting needs and challenges. DesignOps may need more “feet on the ground” to better monitor and optimize the health of the design organization. In this case, dedicated design producers or design program managers can help drive and remove obstacles from day-to-day design processes.

While a dedicated DesignOps role is typically more generalist in nature, this is not always the case. For example, a rapidly growing team might hire a dedicated DesignOps role to focus explicitly on recruiting and onboarding.

Challenges and Benefits of A Distributed Structure

This approach is flexible and works well at organizations where teams have mixed needs or varying levels of acceptance for DesignOps, because any team can choose to have or not have DesignOps support. Therefore, DesignOps isn’t “forced” on a team that is not ready or does not yet see the need for such a role.

In addition, with dedicated DesignOps support, individual teams’ needs and feedback are more likely to be understood and considered. Dispersed teams are more likely to share knowledge and have consistent processes if the DesignOps roles have a sound structure in place for creating alignment.

However, it can be difficult for the dedicated DesignOps roles to know where to focus: Should they put more effort into supporting individual team projects or into optimizing the global UX programs and processes? At this point, there needs to be strong DesignOps leadership to drive the overall strategy and approach and coordinate this spread team.

In an elevated structure, DesignOps is an organization in and of itself, focused on creating high-level tools and programs that support the entire design organization.

Here, DesignOps and design are distinct teams, but have structures and goals that align with and support each other. This structure occurs when team-to-team alignment optimizes and stabilizes, which frees some DesignOps roles to become more strategic. DesignOps roles in this approach tend to be focused on global initiatives, creating design-wide resources that proactively enable the design team and its processes, and they are more removed from day-to-day design activities and project timelines.

In this structure, DesignOps needs a strong layer of leadership, with roles parallel to leadership roles in other departments in the organization. DesignOps is part of strategic conversations and is viewed as a critical component for delivering best-in-class design and maintaining a healthy team and culture.

Elevated Structure in Practice

Some elevated DesignOps teams remove the burden of creating and maintaining shared systems (e.g., design systems or research repositories) from the workload of individual designers. Such a DesignOps team might even have its own designers and developers, who work on these shared systems full time.

A centralized DesignOps team might be accompanied by a distributed model, where one group of DesignOps roles work across and are dedicated directly to individuals teams, and one group is centralized , focusing on global efforts such as culture building, new hire experience, or career pathways.

Challenges and Benefits of an Elevated Structure

With dedicated team members working full time on centralized tools and programs, these initiatives are given adequate attention to be truly useful and accessible and designers can focus on design work, unhindered by dual responsibilities. However, the DesignOps team must remain diligent about gathering and acting on design-team feedback, or it risks the contempt of teams who feel like irrelevant or useless processes and tools are being forced upon them from the top down.

This approach requires strong leadership to prioritize initiatives and to plan for scaling DesignOps over time. Some role(s) must be thinking about creating programs for things like evaluating progress on DesignOps goals, evolving DesignOps areas of focus as business needs change, and elevating DesignOps leadership and impact to be parallel with those of other departments in the organization.

Recognizing the DesignOps structure used by your organization helps you identify strengths, build on existing successful programs and efforts, and become aware of potential dangers. In addition, it enables you to loosely plan the evolution of the DesignOps structure as it continues to scale in demand and size.

When referencing these structures, take note that:

• This list is not exhaustive. This is a set of common DesignOps structures, but other models not included could support design teams successfully. In addition, it is reasonable and common for hybrids of two or more models to exist.
• These structures are not a maturity model. These DesignOps structures do not necessarily correspond to DesignOps maturity. For some teams, one dedicated DesignOps role (i.e., a solitary structure) is the right level of support. So, not having an elevated structure does not mean you are not mature in your DesignOps practice. Your structure should be based on your organizational needs in the current and near-future state.
• There is no best-in-class structure. There’s no right or wrong here. Different organizations will use different structures depending on their context and needs.

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Welcome to the Friends of Figma DesignOps interest group! We are going to speak about design impact enablers, design accelerators, and knowledge aligners in large organizations. The practices and resources that will help your design organization to grow focus on people and products.

The core topics are around the standardization of design, design growth, design culture, knowledge management, and processes. Focusing on operations inside and outside the design teams helps to increase speed, efficiency, and quality of design deliverables in order to amplify the design’s value and impact at scale.

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