The Death and Rebirth of Design Ops

Will this critical function persist in the age of AI?

While on mat leave (yes, I had a very sweet baby!) I’ve had the gift of time to think. For the first time in my career, I’ve been able to sit and ponder without having to log in to back to back work calls to move organizational mountains each day. I’m coming off of a three year trail blazing run working on AI in Search at Google (dream projects, dream team!) Right as the work is shifting to a scale I never thought possible, I’ve stepped back to take a break and raise a baby.

And while I thought I would be in a haze of motherhood, instead I’ve had the great pleasure and capacity to think about the future. In between burping the baby and nap time, I’ve wrestled with the existential thought we all have to face: Will I still have a job when I return to work? If AI can generate interfaces, prototypes, research summaries, and even production-ready code, what happens to Design Operations?

It’s some heavy contemplation, though it rests on an understatement of what Design Ops actually does.

Craft & Function

Design Operations was never just about producing design outputs. Our function exists to shape the conditions that allow good design to happen inside complex organizations. And as long as organizations remain complex human systems, Design Ops will continue to matter. The rise of AI is already making that work more important, not less.

AI is changing what is difficult about design work. It’s helping us reduce noise and dial up signal. It calls for the death of all tedious tasks! For most of the last decade, scaling design inside tech companies meant solving for bandwidth. Teams were constrained by implementation speed, tooling fragmentation, and the mechanics of moving work from idea to artifact. Ambitions were capped by skill and time. A significant amount of operational effort went into helping teams move faster through those bottlenecks. It’s been my bread and butter to make beautiful useful things fast.

AI is lowering many of those barriers. Designers can explore directions more quickly. Researchers can synthesize information more efficiently. Engineers can prototype earlier in the lifecycle. Entire categories of exploratory work that once required significant time investment can now happen in hours or minutes.

Execution is getting cheaper, but alignment is getting more expensive.

As teams gain the ability to generate more possibilities more quickly, they also create more decisions that need to be made. More prototypes exist at once. More directions compete for attention of time-poor execs. More experiments are in motion simultaneously across organizations. And the question shifts from how do we make this? to which of these things actually matters?

This is where Design Operations has always lived, in making methods out of madness.

Design Ops is thought to be about tooling, documentation, or process structure. Those things are visible, so they become shorthand for the work. But they are not the purpose of the work. At its core Design Operations supports shared understanding and systems of behaviors that result in culture. It helps organizations coordinate decisions, maintain momentum across functions, and translate strategy into execution without losing clarity along the way. In that sense, Design Ops is less about managing artifacts and more about managing belief and behavior systems that people can operate within.

Attitude adjustment

One of the reasons moments like this feel uneven across organizations is that teams don’t all respond to change in the same way. Culture shapes this.

When I talk about culture, I’m not talking about values statements or posters on the wall. Culture is a system of shared beliefs that shows up in group behavior. It shapes what people think is safe to try, what they think will be rewarded, and what they think will quietly disappear if they don’t spend time on it. In that sense, culture becomes the catalyst for how teams embrace change.

Two organizations can be given the same tools and the same opportunity, and they will move very differently depending on what their culture tells them is possible.

Some teams immediately begin experimenting. Others wait for permission. Others assume someone else owns the change. None of those responses are random. They’re signals about how the organization works.

Design Ops doesn’t own culture. But it works very close to the systems where culture becomes visible: decision-making structures, learning loops, experimentation pathways, and the ways teams coordinate with each other. Because of that proximity, Design Ops often becomes one of the functions that helps organizations move when the environment shifts. The teams that win will be the ones that can embrace a new future together.

A new trajectory

Another reason I remain optimistic about the future of Design Operations in the age of AI is that the function has always been centered on people working together. Design Ops helps groups do things they can’t do individually. We unlock the creative potential of entire organizations.

We support shared understanding across teams and help work move between functions. Our job is to create visibility where there would otherwise be fragmentation. And we help organizations decide how to move forward together when there are multiple possible directions. A major focus of my work in Search was about decision making and how to help teams ship quickly while meeting Google’s quality bar (as the quality bar shifted with AI). It was helping teams decide which ones mattered and how to move forward together once they did.

None of that disappears when AI enters the workflow.

AI changes how quickly work can be explored and produced. It changes how teams prototype. It changes how research can be synthesized. It changes how early ideas become tangible. And we suddenly have new range!

But it doesn’t replace the need for coordination between people. The need to hold space for how people feel, how we think together, and to challenge ourselves to stretch beyond our comfort zone to do work that truly matters. As long as Design Ops stays focused on what groups can achieve together, not just what individuals can produce faster, we remain essential infrastructure for design organizations.

Rhi Bell, the final design boss in Search, likes to say “Velocity is not just speed. It is speed in the right direction.” AI creates new demands for velocity, and Design Ops can help ensure their teams are on the right trajectory as you accelerate into the new frontier.

Put into practice

Assuming Design Operations continues to matter in the age of AI, the next question is what the work actually looks like from here.

Moments like this change how organizations learn, decide, and move together. That means Design Ops practitioners have an opportunity and a responsibility to help teams adapt in ways that are thoughtful, coordinated, and durable.

As execution becomes easier, organizations require rigor for understanding what work is happening across teams and why. Design Ops can help create visibility into experimentation, connect learning across projects, and support the pathways that turn exploration into direction. This is the work of designing systems that help organizations think together. Figure out the rhythms and mechanisms that bring clarity to your teams.

Change management becomes equally important. AI adoption is not just about introducing new tools. It’s about helping teams adjust how they work, what they expect from each other, and how they make decisions in environments that are moving faster than before. Design Ops practitioners are often the people closest to those transitions, supporting teams change with intention.

Stakeholder management also becomes more central in this moment. As the number of possible directions increases, so does the need for shared understanding across product, engineering, research, and design. Helping leaders stay oriented to what’s changing, what’s emerging, and what matters most is one of the ways Design Ops supports velocity in the right direction.

What you say shapes how you think, so communication strategy matters too. When organizations are experimenting quickly, learning can become fragmented. Design Ops helps tease out meaning. It helps teams understand what others are trying, what is working, and where new patterns are beginning to stabilize. That shared visibility makes coordinated movement possible. It’s the signal to noise ratio!

And finally, Design Ops plays an important role in shaping the behavior systems that enable culture to shift. Culture itself isn’t owned by any single function. But the structures that support experimentation, cooperation, and shared learning are very much shaped through Design Ops. When teams can see what’s happening, understand how decisions get made, and feel supported in trying new approaches, they are more able to move toward the future together.

The organizations that benefit most from AI won’t just be the ones with access to the best models. It will be the ones that can adapt their ways of working together. Design Ops helps make that adaptation possible, and hopefully painless.

So my strong recommendation to all program managers out there: Please learn as much as you can about these new tools. Try vibe coding! Learn how to write skill docs. Figure out how design systems hook into your LLM of choice… but also strengthen the human-centered skills this function specializes in. Your skill development is critical to the organizations that you support and your future within them.

Design Ops practitioners will win if they can help their teams embrace AI and guide them towards a new future where their potential is limited only by the number of tokens they can afford, the expansiveness of their imagination, and their ability to convince talented groups of people to work together to make beautiful useful things well.

Until then, I will enjoy the rest of my maternity leave thinking about the future… for myself, for my new baby, and for the frontier ahead.