Bring your DesignOps Story to Life! The Definitive DesignOps Book Jam
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
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Design operations practice can be grouped into three key buckets: people, process, and platform.
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Design ops roles involve three core actions: operationalizing, orchestrating, and optimizing workflows and teams.
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Measuring the value of design ops includes both quantitative metrics (delivery dates, business use cases) and qualitative factors (urgency, impact, complexity).
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A significant challenge in design ops is distinguishing the role from design leadership and management to clarify responsibilities and handoffs.
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Competencies in design ops span eight areas including design proficiency, trusted partnerships, program management, leadership, communication, business acumen, and culture.
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Organizational maturity affects how design ops scales; mismatches between design team growth and design ops capacity create challenges.
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In resource-constrained environments, spreadsheets often remain the most effective tool for design ops planning and measurement.
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The design ops community benefits greatly from sharing stories, frameworks, and real-world examples to build a richer, inclusive body of knowledge.
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Design ops often acts as a bridge, driving clarity, confidence, and connections within and across teams and functions.
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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
"There’s this friction of being a servant leader in a leadership position."
Meredith Black Elyse HornbacherBuilding Community and Common Trends to Look for in 2021
December 17, 2020
"How might we has become like a church—untouchable and sanctimonious instead of a flexible tool."
Tricia WangThe most popular design thinking strategy is BS
January 27, 2022
"We’re trying to build a design operations role that balances top-down governance with bottom-up community building."
Michael LandEstablishing Design Operations in Government
February 18, 2021
"These tools aren’t about adding bureaucracy but enabling teams to perform at their best under pressure."
Bassel Deeb Will OsbornDo More With Less: Equip and Lead Design Orgs Through Adversity
October 2, 2023
"The people working on difficult projects acted more like faceless individual contributors than a real team."
Tanya SnookDesigning the team experience: Building culture through onboarding
November 4, 2021
"Creating a plan first, then building the prototype, helps catch issues early and aligns stakeholders."
Allan LowsonRehashing the Double Diamond: Collaborating across functions with AI-assisted prototyping
June 9, 2026
"The obsession with precise carbon calculations is less helpful than focusing on relative impact to guide improvements."
James ChudleyDecarbonising User Journeys: How minimising enables us to do more with less
February 19, 2025
"Facilitating a shared understanding among everyone on product takes a lot of time."
Scott Jensen Sarah Delaney Carmen LiuShort Take #2: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
December 6, 2022
"We hire these people full time to be designers, and they were only spending about three hours per day actually designing."
Brennan HartichCommunicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function
November 7, 2018
