Don’t make a DesignOops.

Often in technology companies first time managers get promoted into leadership roles because they are strong individual contributors. Unfortunately these promotions rarely come with at most minimal manager training. And given many of these organizations have never had a formal design team before, any operational frameworks they have in place are likely tailored to engineering not design, leaving new design managers to their own devices.

In their search for best practices and frameworks, these newly minted design managers will unfortunately, and inevitability, come across a recent plethora of articles evangelizing the need for a Design Ops manager in addition to the Design Manager role.

Design Operations

NielsenNorman Groups’ Design Ops 101 breaks out 27 different operational areas (see below) that design organizations need to track. This is a pretty comprehensive and well articulated set of best practices that can help establish and run a team.

From NielsenNorman DesignOps 101:

How we work together

Organize

Organizational Structure

Team Composition

Role Definition

Collaborate

Rituals and Meetings

Environment

Communities of Practice

Humanize

Hiring and Onboarding

Career Development

People Operations

How we get work done

Standardize

Guiding Principles

Design Process

Consistent toolsets

Harmonize

Design Systems

Research Hubs

Asset Management

Prioritize

Balancing workflow

Estimation

Allocation

How our work creates impact

Measure

Design Standards

Design Metrics

Defining Good and Done

Socialize

Success stories

Reward and Recognition

Value Definition

Enable

Skills training

Playbooks

Education

It is worth noting that many of these areas are not unique to design, and may already be in place in your organization. For example Human Resources will likely play a key role in areas such as organizational structure, people operations, career development, rewards and recognition, and even facilities. Program Management will also likely have established processes, rituals and meetings that the design may need to update, modify or participate in.

From my experience it takes 2-3 years for a design team to achieve a stable operational model that checks all the boxes from the list above. It will take that long to really establish design as part of the culture, to really solidify design’s role in the development process, and to demonstrate the impact design is having on the bottom line.

Design Ops is a not a career

There are many people who are championing the idea that DesignOps is a separate from Design Management, that DesignOps is a new profession with different skillsets and mindsets. Indeed, these people have created are workshops, on-line training, annual conferences here, here, and here, there are even custom DesignOps tools. All of this is focused on making money justifying DesignOps as not just a valid but vital and something every company needs to make happen to ensure they maximize their investment in design. Horseshit.

However, this begs the question: If DesignOps is a profession, what is the delineation between Design Management and Design Ops?

The popular descriptions of DesignOps seem to be carefully worded to allow the reader to come to their own conclusion:

"Design Ops refers to the orchestration and optimization of people, processes,
and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact at scale.”  
Kate Kaplan, Nielsen Norman Group. 

As a design team grows it may be necessary to add people to take on the responsibility for some of the team’s internal operations—the design system, scheduling design reviews, coordinating interviews, or skills training and development programs, etc. However, until the team is reaches a larger size (300+), and/or is highly distributed (working in 5+ time zones), the first level managers or the directors should be able to divide and conquer all the team’s operational tasks. Even once you have a larger organization the first level Design Managers should still be responsible for all the stages of hiring & on-boarding, identifying areas for skills development, mentoring and professional development. And ensuring the quality of their team’s deliverables. They can rely on design ops to coordinate the team’s shared resources, processes, tools, knowledge bases, capture learnings, and of course the design system. The individuals who manage teams, or who manage managers, need to have fully accountability for building their teams, developing their teams’ competencies and leadership skills. They need to empowering their teams and inspire them to do what they do best—design.

“In 2-5 years, we’ll see Design Management evolve back to the core […] of creative direction,
design innovation, storytelling, and development of their designers. Other Design Management
responsibilities will shift to Design Operations.”
Adrienne Allnutt, Dir DesignOPs, ServiceNow (2020)

But it is clear from these types of comments that people championing Design Ops as a parallel track to Design Management have a clear objective to demote the Design Manager to a marginal role, while they take over the team.

Thankfully this has not happened.

Setting aside the “evolve back” paradox, I personally think relegating Design Management to “creative direction” is dangerously naive and self-serving.

The design profession has been pushing for decades to be leveled up in businesses to be on par with engineering, marketing, sales, and human resources. Taking accountability for solving complex problems, humanizing corporate priorities, and using our unique skills for insight, synthesis and creative problem solving to deliver meaningful innovations to address sustainability, social issues, etc. Creative Direction throws Design Management under the bus. Managers become Leaders by showing they can deliver business value and have an aptitude for increasing ROI. Leaders become Executives by demonstrating their capabilities to operationalize their functional area at scale—that may or may not require their staffing a position to focus on internal team operations—processes and tools. If anything the design profession needs to support more of their leaders becoming executives rather than sow confusion.

“Recently, several responsibilities of design managers, particularly those that focus on improving the
organization of design work, have been re-assigned to DesignOps specialists.”
Peter Boersma, former DesignOps Manager at Miro (2023)

From a recent talk, Peter Boersma goes into more detail about responsibilities should be take over by DesignOps, freeing the Design Manager to presumably pursue other things, which he doesn’t go cover in his talk.

• Defining & agreeing on design processes

• Keeping track of the status of work

• Training team members

• UI Platform

• Design Process Review

• Design Manager Checkins

• Team Performance Reviews / Metrics

• Employee on-boarding

• Evangelize design

• Growing a team culture

• Organizing all-hands team meeting, off-sites, etc.

• Evaluating and selecting tools

• Release Management

• OKR’s & metrics

• Career Ladder

• Employee Retention

• Project Management / Tracking

• Reward & Recognition program

Looking over this list, and putting on my non-designer executive hat for a minute, I can’t help but imagine the conversation—albeit a short one, that I would have with a design manager who used that pitch with me to justify creating a DesignOps Manager position...

This is the questions I would ask to try and understand the thinking behind DesignOps role.

• “We already have a development process? We have a whole human-centered SDLC; what process are you talking about? (In my mind I would be asking myself: why does design need their own process? We’re one team!)

• You manage the design team, why do you need to delegate performance reviews and professional development to someone else? I do your performance reviews—I do them for all my directs, why can’t you do them for your team? Its part of the job.

  • You do know how do performance reviews, yes? Have you talked with HR?

• Why wouldn’t you be accountable for employee retention? (Meanwhile in my mind… Why are they a manager if they don’t want to manage?)

  • Why haven’t you already defined a career ladder for your team? We hired you because you’re an expert in design. (Shit did I hire a design manager who can’t manage?)

  • Has Human Resources agreed to let someone who is not a people manger do performance reviews? Has legal? (Can I bring in someone to write my report’s performance reviews? Is that legal?)

• Why do you want to create another set of project managers separate from the project management team that is responsible delivering our products to customers? (Design is a core part of how we build products, customer value, I am not splitting them off from product development)

  • Release Management? That’s not your responsibility. (What is going through their head?… )

• Help me understand how will this NOT slow things down? Create unnecessary confusion, and/or add layers of disintermediation and bureaucracy?

  • All these new people and extra steps will drop our velocity and risk creating confusion. (Maybe I am missing something, or they aren’t explaining it right… but this seems very poorly considered…)

• I am still confused:

  • When things go south, who do I go to? The Design Manager? the DesignOps Manager? Design Project Manager? Program Management? All of the above? (OK, why can’t they see this conversation is over?)

  • What I am asking who gives me status updates? The product’s project manager? or the design project manager? (Meanwhile I am thinking I will just ask the engineering manager—engineers don’t have a need to solve problems that don’t exist.)

• I hired you to be accountable for ensuring we ship highest level of quality. Now you’re telling me I need to hire someone else to review the work? (Fuck, I did hire the wrong person… Maybe we can hire one of these DesignOps person and fire this clown…)

  • Is DesignOps like QA for design?

  • Does this replace user research? (Wonder if I can save some money if I flip some headcount… Mental note; ask HR if DesignOps people cheaper than User Research…)

And if I was in a really grumpy mood, I would just listen to their pitch and cut to the chase:

• This is the most passive aggressive resignation I have ever received; I mean I am assuming its resignation, am I wrong? Sounds like you’re in over your head, so just tell me and I will start looking for your replacement.

Conclusion

To be clear, I am not against design ops (little d, little o), in fact I am very strong advocate for putting a well thought-out operational framework in place to help accelerate and align the design team. I am just not seeing the value of hiring two people to do one job. Don’t make a design oops.