The Job of Design Ops
Factors that shape a Design Operations practice
It’s the business of design! It’s about helping designers to do their best work. It’s all the project management stuff! It’s the people who know everything and do everything for our team. You’ll hear Design Operations described in various ways with nuance depending on the context of industry, organization, and maturity of a given design practice. Frog defines it as a human-centered approach to building stronger design teams that support the orchestration of individuals, processes, and tools to amplify creativity and impact at scale.
Perhaps it’s more simple than that. In my experience, Design Operations is a strategic and operational function that helps companies get the best possible value out of their design teams. (Note: When I say Design, that may include interaction design, visual design, production, motion, strategy, research, writing, prototyping, all of the functions that make up a design team. Design is shorthand for the creative function within a company.)
So, let’s talk about it. In this post, I’ll share thoughts on core skills, responsibilities, and stages of building a Design Operations practice. I admit that very few of these thoughts are new or original; I’ve developed this perspective through trial and error mixed with lessons learned from some amazing pioneers in the space. Now let me wring out all the little charts and lists and links from my brain in hope that this post is a nice, useful summary for those interested in the subject of Design Operations.
Big picture
When and why to invest in Design Operations
As Design continues to mature and drive big important initiatives within companies across industries, there’s a new-age balancing act between time designers spend designing and the heavy load of cross-functional work necessary to ship quality products in complex, matrixed environments. Calendars are overloaded. Teams are global and hybrid. Business oriented tasks are abundant. Designers are limited on time, energy, and resources to do the very thing they were hired to do. Frankly, it can be tedious and not very inspiring to be a designer these days. In big orgs, especially orgs that make software, the work-about-work has become a heavy tax on the creative process.
That’s where Design Operations comes in. As a strategic and operational function, Design Ops spans product delivery, process design, people programs, and cross-functional partnerships at every stage and scale of Design. Ultimately, Design Ops sets the conditions to deliver best in class user experiences, products, and services. It’s about ensuring your design practice is aligned and properly leveraged against your strategic plan (It’s strategic because it should lead to smarter, better ways of creating value for your company and customers. It’s operational because it takes routine, functional, sometimes mundane work to get those strategic initiatives up and running.) Design Operations done well will take the pain out of the creative process, and establish a predictable run of business, so that designers can focus on design again.
My advice: Invest in Design Operations when you want to do more, go faster, or get better at design. This can mean that Design Ops is your first hire or it can happen once you have all of your technical players in seat and they need more help. But do yourself a favor and do it before it gets hard, confusing, or onerous to deliver design work that matters at your company. Do it when you’re ready to grow. Do it when you want a better seat at the table. Do it when you want to have a fun time designing nice things for your customers.
Skills are the secret sauce
Core skills and competencies of Design Operations
The scale of a company, complexity of a product, or setup of an organization will determine the need for Design Ops. However small or large, simple or complex the list of things to do may be, the following skills show up in nearly every Design Ops practice. This can work for all size teams, from a one-man-band to a big central org. For example, a new team might index high on execution while a new program within an established org may lean more heavily into stakeholder management — both orgs need both skills at varrying degrees. Every person and team will spike in different areas, but the mix should map to the what the business needs to achieve maximum design value. (The skills outlined below are a mashup of my experience with heavy reference to how the Design Ops practices at Square, Dropbox, and Twitter were set up.)
The supercritical non-negotiable skills of a Design Ops practice:
Execution - Get shit done. The Design Ops function sets the strategic and operational direction of a Design team and then delivers results through tactical execution. It’s important that Design Ops has ambitions and goals that are complimentary but distinct from overall design goals, often separating the what from the how.
Operational Excellence - Set the pace, keep the beat. Design Ops ensures the right balance of quality, velocity, innovation, and output across work streams. Strong planning, documentation, measurement, and socialization skills are key. Must love gantt charts and project briefs.
Team Health - Keep the pulse. Design Ops connects the dots across the org, supporting change management, team health and growth. We drive work that promotes learning, community building, and inclusion. This may start with informal programs supporting onboarding and scale to a full-blown learning & development portfolios of subprograms. This work is all about attracting, engaging, and retaining talent.
Business Skills - Remember, we’re in the business of design. We have to understand what’s happening within the business and industry to inform the strategy and approach of the work at hand. Taylor Oliva says that “In DesignOps, it's important to tackle the business ops side of the house early on because ultimately, your design org is a business unit within the broader company. Once those business building blocks are in place, you can start to expand focus to establish and iterate on programs for craft, culture, and community.” For better or worse, Design Ops often holds the purse strings of the Design team.
Stakeholder Management - We broker relationships. Often seen as fixers, Design Ops fosters collaborative relationships across functions. It’s about removing barriers to execution and decision making. We make sure all contributors and stakeholders are clear on their roles and responsibilities in getting the work done. Love a good RACI! From engineering to product to legal to facilities, and many other teams in between, there’s a wide range of relationships worth fostering in support of getting things done (Shout out to every lawyer who has expedited a contract for me!)
Strategic Thinking - Gotta make it count. This is all about having the ability to set direction and drive priorities in alignment with our partners and cross-functional stakeholders. Big picture, it’s about setting design up to have impact at the highest levels, from setting the vision to delivering high quality products to your customers.
Functional Knowledge - Be the subject matter experts in project and program management. We have to be able to define business need, strategic and tactical approach, and resources needed to make progress against the plan. Many folks in our field get their PMP certification to strengthen this particular skill set.
Communication - Clarity is a gift. We have to communicate clearly at the right altitudes for different audiences, often in complex situations. We should speak the language of both design and that of our cross-functional partners, playing an important role in keeping everyone in harmony and on the same page.
While this all may read like a syllabus for an MBA program, just add “in Design” after each of these skills to tie it back to the critical mission of advancing the value of Design.
Hot take: As a baseline, Design Ops should be responsible for product delivery. If you can’t ship the product, you may not want to focus on scaling the team or enhancing your crafty prototyping skills just yet. (I only recently came around to this opinion. You win, Collin.)
However, the industry is growing, and big companies call for specializations within Design Ops such as biz ops, research ops, learning and development, community building, etc. Teams can go from having one producer to a fleet of program managers to a fully mature and specialized Design Ops function. Each stage of developing a Design Ops practice comes with a wide set of skills, tools, and shared methodologies that can deepen and expand the capacity and impact of the Design and Design Ops functions.
Put into practice
Shaping a Design Ops team
Ok, so the syllabus of skills sounds good. But how do you right-size the Design Ops team or practice to address to the challenges at hand? As mentioned, the capabilities of a Design Ops team and the skills of a Design Ops practitioner are often shaped and fit to the business need. Analogous to the maturity of a company, team, or product — As the work gets more complicated to deliver, the more advanced Design Operations practice is required. (Check out this helpful video on understanding design maturity.)
Rumor has it that 1:6 is an ideal Designer to Design Ops ratio, though the average may be closer to 1:10+. For a more official perspective on the matter, read Org Design for Design Orgs and the 2022 State of Design Ops report.
Big companies have it all laid out in a linear fashion with numerical rungs on a job ladder. Usually as levels increase, so does responsibility, scope, and complexity of the problem space and skills required. This can also be true for small companies and independent practitioners, though there isn’t as much of a need to define the specific levels of the job profile. Generally speaking, the skill and career levels look something like this:
L2: Entry level – You can execute with direct supervision. This might be a coordinator or associate project manager position.
L3: Developing skill – You can execute with some supervision. Roles may include project manager or junior producer roles.
L4: Career level – You are independent and can execute on programs and projects. Titles may range from project manager to producer to program manager depending on the scope.
L5: Senior – You are a subject matter expert in program management. This should be program manager on a complex program or senior program manager on work that is more straightforward.
L6: Staff – You’re a subject matter expert in program management who is skilled in navigating ambiguity and influencing partners. You may have to decide between management as a senior design operations manager or a staff level program manager.
L7: Senior Staff – You are now a strategic partner who owns multiple programs and manages high stakes business objectives. You are likely managing a large portfolio of programs and directing the work of others, regardless of your manager or IC title. If you are a manager, you’ll manage the team directly. If you are choose to be an IC, you will manage the work that the team produces.
L8: Director – You drive strategy and vision across product areas and teams. It’s rare to see Principal level ICs, though some exist! A director of Design Operations likely oversees the function, comprised of various portfolios and programs, within a large design organization.
L9: Senior Director – You own large high stakes programs with scaled and long-term strategy. Director level responsibilities but bigger, more complex, or higher stakes work is involved.
L10: VP - You’re the boss. You define the practice for the company and industry. (I’ll celebrate the day when I see a Vice President of Design Operations listed on Linkedin!)
So how do you know what level to hire for? It all goes back to the problems you want to solve and your investment strategy for Design Operations. If you just need someone to manage design onboarding, that may only require a low-level investment that can be fulfilled by a mid-career program manager — someone who can work independently to drive and deliver results. If you’re looking to maximize various capabilities and capacity levers of a massive Design org, you likely need to build a Design Operations team with a talent mix that fits the short and long term goals of your Design practice.
Projects, programs, and portfolio
Capabilities mapped to responsibilities
We’ve talked about skills, scope, and complexity. Now let’s put it all together to look at it in practice. But first, let’s define some terminology (Thanks Merriam-Webster!):
Project - An individual or collaborative enterprise that is planned to achieve a particular aim.
Program - A set of related measures or activities with a particular long-term aim. In this case, a set of projects over time.
Portfolio - A range of products or services offered by an organization, especially when considered as a business asset. In this case, a set of long-running programs.
Practice - The actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to theories relating to it. Simply put, it’s the skills, tools, and approach that make up a function like Design or Design Ops.
So portfolios are groups of programs and projects that define the scope of work and job to be done by Design Ops. And the practice of Design Ops is the specialized skills unique to the function. Entry level Design Ops professionals may be able to take on individual projects, where more senior leaders in the space may be responsible for high stakes portfolios of work or entire Design Ops practices.
To help illustrate what a Design Ops portfolio might cover, the table below lists programs across product delivery, process, people programs, and partnership themes. Often leaders will build their Design Ops portfolio to address existing challenges or problems within the team. Others will look ahead and invest in a mix of programs to help their team proactively grow and scale. And while there is specialization, keep in mind that the core skills are transferable across most problem spaces within Design Ops.
This chart is not exhaustive.
Measure what matters
Measures of success for Design Operations programs
If successful, the projects and programs within your portfolio should lead to change against a set of targets. The point of monitoring progress is to identify opportunities to optimize the resources you have to get the results you want (I’ll write more about resource management another time!) Consider the following measures as operational performance indicators:
Output - speed, efficiency, visibility, quality e.g., completion rate, throughput
Cost - human or $ savings or profit increase
Engagement - sentiment in Pulse or other surveys
Development - growth metrics
Attraction - traffic, reach, delivering candidates to top of funnel
Retention - retention of talent & attrition
Adoption - adoption of product or practice
Extensibility - complexity, maturity of program
Awareness - socializing work to build awareness and engagement across the org
Team Health - Pulse, general sentiment, regrettable attrition
Let’s try a few examples of how one might apply these measures to understand the impact of their program or project:
Not clear on the impact or the strategic potential of your Design team? Have your Design Ops folks stand up an annual planning process with clear objectives, key results, and performance indicators to help you track and understand impact over time. Progress to plan will be your initial signal, predictability over time will be your lagging indicator of success.
Need to increase your velocity and time to market? Lean into program managers focused on the product development lifecycle. They’ll look at time to output and quality as the key indicators of progress.
Introducing a new product incubator to the org? Hire the partnership people with strong communication skills. You’ll want someone who can build partnerships across the organization as you establish a new line of business and function that may operate out of sync from the standard business rhythms. You have to win hearts and minds! Therefore, development and awareness will be important signals to keep an eye on.
Doubling your team in size? Trying to retain your most talented designers? Invest in people programs like community building (to increase your pipeline), learning and development (to engage and retain your best people), or Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs (to ensure you’re doing it right!) Attraction, retention, engagement, and attrition will be important people signals.
Perhaps the recipe for your Design Ops strategy could look something like this:
Your portfolio of work = (Business need x Skills required) / Change desired over time
Long post short, I hope this overview gives you a sense for the talent, abilities, and potential of Design Operations and the concepts outlined in this post will help you right-size your strategic and operational plan to make the most with your design team.
Questions? Thoughts? Join me on the Design Ops community slack to discuss. Subscribe to keep this party going.
🤠MM