The Future of DesignOps
Summary
While Design Operations (DesignOps) is only a few years old as a practice, it is evolving rapidly. As we finish our 4th year at The Summit, we've seen so much change in our community of practice in this short time. So, we want to end this year's Summit with a look beyond. If we are to be resilient what are we being resilient towards. Jon Fukuda (Limina), Dominique Ward (Atlassian), and Adrienne Allnutt (LinkedIn) will share their perspectives on where DesignOps is going and why. Moderated by Dave Malouf (Northwestern Mutual). We will be fielding questions from attendees, too.
Key Insights
-
•
Design operations must manage design orgs like businesses, focusing on profitability defined as positive impact on humans and environment.
-
•
Seven failure points—value delivery, cost control, right talent, connectivity, systems, employee experience, leadership—are critical risks design ops must mitigate.
-
•
Design ops roles primarily manage business operations and infrastructure while design practice managers focus on strategy and innovation.
-
•
Adopting a service design mindset enables design ops to handle complex, multi-level systems with evolving feedback loops for long-term resilience.
-
•
Scaling design ops is not about growth in size but about deeply understanding nested units (individuals, teams, orgs) and optimizing them holistically.
-
•
Effective integration of numerous tools across workflows is essential to reduce context switching and tool fatigue in design operations.
-
•
Clear role definitions, shared business language, and translation between design and business priorities improve alignment and strategic decision-making.
-
•
Pre-mortem exercises and experience visions are effective methods for anticipating obstacles and shaping future design operations outcomes.
-
•
Creativity in design ops requires a balance of structure and freedom, analogous to music learning and jazz improvisation.
-
•
Despite AI advances, the human-centric, empathetic nature of design ops work ensures the role remains indispensable.
Notable Quotes
"Design organizations customers are their partner organizations, like engineering, product management, marketing, and the executive suite."
"Without real business world experience, most leaders struggle with the overwhelming amount of demands placed on them."
"Design ops needs to shift from reactive to proactive, envisioning a future state vision and moving from disaster recovery to continuous resilience."
"We need to create evolving system loops that incorporate feedback and allow our units of one to learn and adapt."
"Scaling is not just about more but about providing solutions at scale using nested units like Russian dolls."
"Streamlining and integrating our tools is vital to reduce fatigue and maximize team effectiveness."
"Creativity and structure go hand in hand, like learning notes and then improvising jazz in music."
"Design ops must run as a business, setting KPIs, managing budgets, and delivering measurable value."
"Minimum lovable product is a better focus than minimum viable product in design ops to deliver meaningful impact early."
"AI won't replace design ops roles because we are building for real human needs requiring empathy and human creativity."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"We calculated nearly 10,000 hours saved in one year from redesigning compliance training, equating to three million dollars in opportunity cost."
Julie BaherCulture Change—My Journey
May 14, 2015
"Mobile screens have forced designers to create simplified interfaces without reducing features."
Sam ProulxMobile Accessibility and You
June 9, 2022
"One in five people say they deal with feelings of disconnection and loneliness in the workplace."
Kat VellosOpener: The Other L Word
January 8, 2024
"We evaluate the work and not the amount of hours."
Ana FerreiraDesigning Distributed: Leading Doist’s Fully Remote Design Team in Six Countries
January 8, 2024
"Brand is not just what you say, it’s what you do — your product and design live and breathe the brand."
Jemma AhmedBringing together market and user research
October 17, 2019
"If you are building a product for someone, there's always context loss when problem identification and solutioning are done by different teams."
Prayag Narula Abhinav KrishnaDialing for Research: How to Reach the Unreachable
March 10, 2022
"Screenshot Thursday in Slack became one of the most engaging and anticipated rituals on the team."
Maggie DieringerCutting through the Noise
September 24, 2020
"It’s a great time to be a designer to make data-driven design decisions that impact beyond just pixels."
William Newton Jenny ChangHow to Lead With Data, and Without Data
June 7, 2023
"Researchers were obsessed with scientific rigor while designers used balance, feelings, or intuition as their rigor."
Yoel SumitroActions and Reflections: Bridging the Skills Gap among Researchers
March 9, 2022
