Just as UX is a broad field, full of opportunities for different types of expertise and specialization (e.g., qualitative research, quantitative methods, visual design, content strategy), DesignOps is an expansive concept with many potential focus areas. (We’ve previously shared a framework for visualizing those potential focus areas and the comprehensive landscape of DesignOps components.)
The structure of effective DesignOps practices varies, and it should be based on the specific DesignOps focus areas that an organization determines are most useful and necessary for delivering consistent, quality design and maintaining the health and happiness of their design-team members.
Because DesignOps teams and practices can and should look different from organization to organization, it stands to reason that the answer to the question “Who does DesignOps?” will vary across different types of companies.
This article provides descriptions of common DesignOps roles and their typical responsibilities, as well as different example approaches and partnerships for people who carry out and contribute to DesignOps efforts.
DesignOps Roles
While some teams may not need to hire full-time, dedicated DesignOps roles in order to incorporate DesignOps strategies into their processes, many teams do benefit from having a specific person or group of people tasked with ensuring that the design team is operationally supported so that designers can focus on designing. These dedicated DesignOps roles can relieve the team’s workload and optimize the design process.
Some common dedicated, DesignOps-specific roles and titles include:
DesignOps Lead or Specialist
The DesignOps lead is a dedicated DesignOps generalist who identifies and prioritizes pain points and opportunities for better efficiency, effectiveness, collaboration, and alignment across many teams and individuals. The DesignOps lead usually has a design background, which is useful, because they have likely experienced the pain of many of the challenges they will be working to solve. A primary component of their job is to connect with and listen to design team members in order to understand where gaps and hurdles exist in the design process and design, implement, and iterate upon solutions. A DesignOps lead is commonly a DesignOps-team-of-one, meaning they are responsible for a wide breadth of focus areas.
The day-to-day responsibilities of a DesignOps lead might include:
- Identifying and prioritizing opportunities across the design organization to become more collaborative, unified, efficient, and effective
- Collaborating with designers and design leadership to prioritize opportunities and gain buy-in for identified initiatives
- Partnering with executive-level leadership to scope, kick off, and socialize operational initiatives
- Designing and optimizing scalable processes across distributed design teams
- Building and delivering training and educational content on best practices, tools, and methods
- Documenting frameworks and best practices to ensure consistent quality across distributed teams
- Developing, benchmarking, analyzing, and tracking key design metrics
- Maintaining a backlog and roadmap of operational initiatives
- Conducting ongoing internal research to understand evolving design-team challenges, as well as awareness and efficacy of implemented efforts
As DesignOps teams grow and long-term focus areas become clear, this role might begin to specialize. There may eventually be several DesignOps leads or specialists focusing on areas like workflow operations, communications, tool curation, or anything else. The role likely reports to the head of the design team initially, until the DesignOps function scales to become its own team.
Producer
The producer is concerned with project-level DesignOps support. They work alongside the design team to manage design delivery, guiding and driving day-to-day design work and processes. Typically, the producer is dedicated to one team or functional area of the organization to enable the close alignment necessary to improve the quality and impact of design work.
Responsibilities of a producer might include:
- Acting as a liaison or bridge across design, development, and product management (or other crossfunctional team roles)
- Providing cross-team visibility into projects and workflows
- Defining and gathering business and design requirements
- Leading and facilitating retrospectives, reviews, or other critical team meetings
- Creating and managing design scorecards or other tracking systems to measure improvement over time
- Planning and tracking design timelines and scopes
- Documenting and optimizing design-team activities and processes across project timelines
- Identifying and removing workflow bottlenecks and barriers
- Developing design standards or guidelines
While producers are crossfunctional members of individual teams (or at least work closely with a team during the project lifecycle), there should be structures in place to enable collaboration and touchpoints among producers so that they can learn from each other, take advantage of other teams’ effective ideas, and develop reasonable consistencies in approaches across teams.
Program Manager
Program managers are tasked with program- or organization-level DesignOps initiatives. They work to optimize the design team’s overall approach by managing and improving global design or UX processes, programs, and toolsets. In contrast to a producer, who is concerned with project-level quality, the program manager is responsible for identifying opportunities to drive team-wide excellence.
Day-to-day, a program manager might be:
- Driving goal setting and team-wide OKRs
- Tracking design-team progress against high-level business goals
- Prioritizing ideas and initiatives to support the design team
- Developing and documenting repeatable design best practices
- Designing scalable operational frameworks, systems, and processes
- Encouraging knowledge sharing and collaboration across individual teams
- Monitoring overall team health and efficacy
- Documenting and sharing design methodologies and activities
- Driving alignment and collaboration across design teams and crossfunctional partners
- Leading and executing specific initiatives related to design team’s success and maturity
Depending on team size and maturity, program managers may be tasked with a breadth of initiatives or they may be quite specialized. A specialized program manager might have expertise in and ownership over a very specific part of DesignOps, working alongside other program managers who own different programs. Example focus areas might include:
- Culture and community
- Meetings and collaboration
- Hiring and onboarding
- Employee experience
- Learning and skills development
- Workflow optimization
- Tools and licensing
- External education and socialization
- Anything else determined a valuable focus area
DesignOps Skills
Regardless of title, all DesignOps roles tend to benefit from being:
- Well-versed in UX and passionate about user advocacy
- Comfortable moving between detail-oriented and big-picture thinking
- Able to drive collaboration among teams and stakeholders
- Skilled at building buy-in and fostering support for creating new activities or processes and for improving the current ones
- Able to track and measure efforts to ensure continued investment in DesignOps initiatives
- A good listener who can build trust with others and enable the communication loop necessary to understand team challenges and feedback
- Proactive and able to take problem-solving initiative
- Somewhat fast-paced so they can quickly provide evidence of DesignOps successes
- Strong in written and verbal communication and able to document and share processes and activities in an engaging way
DesignOps Partners
Many teams benefit tremendously from dedicated DesignOps roles, but others may not have the team size, structure, or workload necessary to make such roles feasible. In many organizations, there are additional roles that contribute to DesignOps in place of or alongside DesignOps-specific roles:
Design Managers
Design managers oversee workflow and manage people in a team. Design managers often take on ops-related tasks as part of the job. While there is a lot of overlap between design management and DesignOps, leaving all things DesignOps to design management creates overload and burnout. But even with DesignOps-specific roles in place, managers will likely always have operational responsibilities, such as guiding design processes, tracking and measuring impact, and identifying opportunities for career growth and skills development among team members.
Design Leads
Design leads are typically nonmanaging members of the design team who are responsible for overseeing the quality of design work on a team, while continuing to act as individual contributors to the design work. In addition to their design contributions, they may be optimizing processes, identifying tools, and documenting approaches to elevate the quality of work across their team.
ResearchOps Leads
ResearchOps practitioners are responsible for owning the operational aspects of user research, such as sourcing and screening participants, overseeing the research-request pipeline, maintaining a research repository, and managing research tools, spaces, and equipment. This role is concerned with elevating the research practice and increasing the impact and uptake of user research at an organization.
Other Ops Groups
Many large-scale organizations have additional operational functions across the company who can be valuable DesignOps partners. These include DevOps, PeopleOps, and MarketingOps. If these groups exist, DesignOps should collaborate with them to align processes and connect areas of expertise.
DesignOps Roles and Partnerships in Practice
Who does DesignOps at an organization — and to what extent — depends on several factors, including overall UX maturity, team size, organizational structure, plans and goals for growth, individual interest and desire, and complexity and volume of design work. Here are 3 hypothetical examples of DesignOps coverage to illustrate the variation in potential structures:
Example #1: Small, Centralized Design Team
In organizations without dedicated DesignOps roles, operational design work is still getting done somewhere, somehow, by someone or (some ones) throughout the organization. Some smaller, closely aligned teams may not have the communication or collaboration challenges of larger, distributed teams or they may not have enough complexity in tools and processes to necessitate full-time management of those aspects of their work.
In such a case, the design manager and any design leads are responsible for managing and implementing the majority of operational tasks, even though they don’t have “DesignOps” in their titles. In this small team, knowledge and process sharing happens organically, as the team’s centralized structures enable consistent communication. The team works with other operational partners to facilitate various aspects. For example, a traditional human resources (HR) role oversees hiring and onboarding for the team; project managers manage project timelines and budgets.
This structure can work well for some small teams, as long as DesignOps responsibilities are acknowledged as part of team members’ workloads and performance and they do not overshadow and outweigh the team’s ability to do actual design and UX work. Also, in order for this structure to be effective, there must be true partnership and cooperation between design-team managers and any other operational partners.
Example #2: Just Getting Started with DesignOps
A formerly small, closely aligned team that scales or becomes distributed will experience operational growing pains. Autonomy in tool selection becomes problematic as team members double or triple. Communication and knowledge sharing slips as the volume of work increases. Team members’ health and satisfaction become difficult to monitor and track.
When a team can no longer effectively communicate or deliver the volume of design work required while simultaneously managing operational aspects of design work, a dedicated DesignOps role can provide guidance and vision.
When the case can be successfully made, someone (typically an existing design-team member) becomes dedicated full time to DesignOps. This person works as a generalist DesignOps lead, proactively identifying design obstacles and challenges, designing solutions, and working with the design team to understand its impact and efficacy. They may begin to take a greater role in formerly distributed aspects of DesignOps, developing design-specific processes for onboarding, documenting workflows, curating tools, and generally focusing wherever is determined to produce the most impact for the design team. The DesignOps lead collaborates closely with design managers to align to business goals, prioritize issues, and gain support for new initiatives.
This partnership can also work well for a small set of individual design teams. Dedicated DesignOps leads for each team (or each set of teams) can align communication and collaboration across the teams, enable knowledge sharing, and provide visibility into otherwise disparate workflows.
Example #3: Large, Distributed Design Team
A big organization with a large, distributed design team has a higher level of DesignOps-related challenges and opportunities.
In this case, individual design teams are carrying out higher volumes of work, focused on their own specific projects, products, or features. To facilitate workflows, producers work alongside design teams to guide delivery and manage scope and timeline. They partner with the research team’s ResearchOps specialist to ensure that user research is considered, included, and executed properly. A team of program managers focus outside of the day-to-day work, optimizing processes for culture, career development, or other programs that optimize the entire design organization’s success. DesignOps leadership regularly collaborates with leadership from other operational partners to keep initiatives in sync and goals aligned. Though design managers still contribute to DesignOps efforts, they are better enabled to focus on overseeing people and workflow within their own team.
This partnership is a true DesignOps practice. Here, there should be support for enabling true leadership roles within the DesignOps function, so that DesignOps can scale and operate on equal footing with other operational partners throughout the organization.
When Does an Organization Need DesignOps?
DesignOps partnerships do not necessarily have to include DesignOps-specific roles to be effective, though they do become necessary for teams beyond certain size and capacity.
So, how does a team know when it’s time for DesignOps-specific roles? There is no one magic metric to determine when the threshold has been reached, but these indicators can be watched to signal that a full-time role is worth the investment:
- Time spent on key activities: Team members spend more time and energy on operational tasks such as documentation and meeting-based communication than on actual design work.
- Workflow estimation: Timelines and budgets are guesses that are often wrong.
- Inefficiencies in the design process: There are identifiable, documentable areas of waste in the design process.
- Size of the design team: The sheer number of designers presents challenges in communication and consistency of work.
- Structure of the design team: Dispersed or distributed teams have little connection and work in silos.
- Pace and volume of work: There is little time between projects to document and share successes or develop best practices.
Track these indicators and iterate on DesignOps efforts over time to ensure that DesignOps is represented and enabled to the level of need required by the amount and type of design work being done in your organization.
