Summary
Your DesignOps journey is a story of ups and downs, lessons learned, and victories won. Join new and veteran DPMs alike in shaping the forthcoming Rosenfeld book, The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations. Authors Rachel Posman and John Calhoun will guide you through an interactive session to collect the burning questions, inspiring successes, and real-world examples of how DesignOps is practiced in real life by our amazing community, including: Getting into DesignOps The skills and competencies of a DPM DesignOps in the context of your team and organization The tools in your DesignOps toolkit DesignOps case studies you most want to see Join us on this journey and make your mark on the future of DesignOps!
Key Insights
-
•
Design operations practice can be grouped into three key buckets: people, process, and platform.
-
•
Design ops roles involve three core actions: operationalizing, orchestrating, and optimizing workflows and teams.
-
•
Measuring the value of design ops includes both quantitative metrics (delivery dates, business use cases) and qualitative factors (urgency, impact, complexity).
-
•
A significant challenge in design ops is distinguishing the role from design leadership and management to clarify responsibilities and handoffs.
-
•
Competencies in design ops span eight areas including design proficiency, trusted partnerships, program management, leadership, communication, business acumen, and culture.
-
•
Organizational maturity affects how design ops scales; mismatches between design team growth and design ops capacity create challenges.
-
•
In resource-constrained environments, spreadsheets often remain the most effective tool for design ops planning and measurement.
-
•
The design ops community benefits greatly from sharing stories, frameworks, and real-world examples to build a richer, inclusive body of knowledge.
-
•
Design ops often acts as a bridge, driving clarity, confidence, and connections within and across teams and functions.
-
•
Building a design ops team from zero to many requires clear charters, pillars, and operating models that align with organizational needs.
Notable Quotes
"There is not a book currently that is dedicated to design ops. We want this to be the definitive handbook."
"We see design ops as focusing on people, process, and platform — what we act on."
"We operationalize, orchestrate, and optimize as design ops practitioners."
"Measuring the value of design ops is a meaty topic we will dig into deeply."
"Distinguishing design ops from design leadership and management is a big, messy space we want to bring clarity to."
"Often, the best tool for everything in design ops is a spreadsheet."
"How you manage vision in your ops team, especially when it’s new or lacking, is key for ongoing success."
"People want to see competencies for individual contributors versus managers and how those evolve at different career levels."
"Scaling design ops means going from zero to one, or one to many, carefully growing your team charter and operating model."
"We want many voices and perspectives represented in this community and in the book — no contribution is too small."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Low vision users often invert colors and use magnification levels as high as 400 percent to reduce eye strain."
Sam ProulxSUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
December 9, 2021
"In government, the org chart really matters – it influences who talks to whom and who gets to interface."
Michael LandEstablishing Design Operations in Government
February 18, 2021
"We moved from Evernote to spreadsheets, to a giant affinity board in Mirror, then to UserVoice, and finally to idiomatic software with AI."
Shipra KayanHow we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
September 30, 2021
"People care about titles way too much. I had a guy whose business card said star-bellied sneak—love that."
Ian SwinsonDesigning and Driving UX Careers
June 8, 2016
"The chief of staff serves as a bridge between the design program managers, executive assistants, and other ux and product chiefs of staff."
Isaac HeyveldExpand DesignOps Leadership as a Chief of Staff
September 8, 2022
"We categorized all our work into may-do, must-do, and desire-to-do buckets to better allocate our efforts."
Amy EvansHow to Create Change
September 25, 2024
"Design ops is undergoing a transformation into a CX focused team with a refined mission to drive efficiency and customer experience excellence."
Kate Koch Prateek KalliFlex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
September 30, 2021
"It’s impossible to be angry with a warm cup of tea in your hand."
Dave GrayLiminal Thinking: Sense-making for systems in large organizations
May 14, 2015
"What if the atomic unit of research wasn’t the reports, but it was the insight within those reports?"
Matt DuignanAtomizing Research: Trend or Trap
March 30, 2020
