Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

A Closer Look at Team Ops and Product Ops (Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin)

Thursday, November 19, 2020 • DesignOps Community
Share the love for this talk
A Closer Look at Team Ops and Product Ops (Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin)
Speakers: Rachel Posman and John Calhoun
Link:

Summary

What happens to your DesignOps team when your Design organization hits scale? Juggling the growth of your product, your people, and your processes is a demanding challenge, and strains the jack-of-all-trades skillset of even the most seasoned DesignOps practitioner. This continues the conversation we started at the DesignOps Summit about how we scaled and reshaped our UXOps team at Salesforce into two discrete tracks and we dive deeper into four themes: UX Product & UX Team Ops Design & DesignOps Team Maturity Design Ops Role Clarity and Career Ladders The Future of DesignOps

Key Insights

  • Unconventional career paths such as ballet and game design can lead into design operations, bringing diverse perspectives.

  • The design maturity model helps determine when to hire dedicated design operations roles, typically around 14-20 designers.

  • Design Ops teams face challenges balancing broad responsibilities like onboarding, delivery, culture, and tooling at scale.

  • Splitting design Ops into Team Ops (culture, systems, community) and Product Ops (delivery, strategic partnerships) improves clarity and impact.

  • Measuring and proving the value of design Ops requires defining clear, discrete, and measurable service offerings aligned to products and teams.

  • COVID-19 accelerated global collaboration and forced design Ops teams to adopt experimental communication methods and virtual socialization.

  • Maintaining team connections remotely involves virtual coffee chats, stand-ups with fun elements, weekend updates, and design crit-style feedback meetings.

  • The future of design Ops may blur roles with PMs and TPMs, focusing more on empowering teams and less on rigid titles.

  • Design Ops is evolving from supporting design teams only to influencing broader organizational processes and cultures.

  • Intentional, targeted communication and roadshow efforts are vital to re-educate the organization about changes in Ops structures and roles.

Notable Quotes

"My path into design Ops was winding—I started as a professional ballet dancer before falling in love with academia and design."

"Around 14 to 20 designers is usually the tipping point where having a dedicated design ops person starts to make sense."

"If adding a design program manager gives each designer back even one hour a day, you might make your entire team more efficient."

"We realized we were solving problems of a design practice when our organization had actually scaled to an organizational level."

"Trying to do all things well can mean doing all things kind of not so great—specialization became necessary."

"We created separate tracks so people can self-organize, leverage the right skills, and grow their careers in focused ways."

"Our team Ops Charter is about amplifying and celebrating the work and impact of design and design Ops."

"COVID has maybe made us a better global team by forcing us to figure out how to work across time zones and communication preferences."

"Employee experience and customer experience are inextricably tied—operationalizing design Ops impacts both."

"Design Ops might not just support design anymore—our work is requested by non-designers and solving broader business problems."

Ask the Rosenbot
Deanna Smith
Leading Change with Confidence: Strategies for Optimizing Your Process
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Sarah Fathallah
A Typology of Participation in Participatory Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Alison Rand
Scaling Impact with Service Design
2021 • DesignOps Community
Peter Van Dijck
Hands on AI #3: Claude Code for UX people
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Dave Malouf
Panel: Design Systems and Documentation
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Benjamin Wiedmaier
Redefining Toolkits: Unbundling to Create a Perfect Match
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Sam Proulx
Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Matt Webb
Context Window: Five Futures for AI
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Raven Veal
Dark Metrics: Illuminating the Negative Impact of Digital Health Design
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Monty Hammontree
The Future of UX Research
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Jemma Ahmed
Research at an inflection point: Adapting to a new era of collaboration, equity, and innovation
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Darian Davis
Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Meghan Bausone
Systems Thinking and Design Innovation: Working with Leverage Points in Rural Maternal Health Systems
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
James Chudley
Decarbonising User Journeys: How minimising enables us to do more with less
2025 • Climate UX Interest Group
Carol Massa
Designing Health: Integrating Service Design, Technology, and Strategy to Transform Patient and Clinician Experiences
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Maish Nichani
Sparking a Service Excellence Mindset at a Government Agency
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold

More Videos

Taylor Jennings

"Setting up a repository as a team of one or two is actually the prime time to establish processes like that."

Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex Knoll

Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research

March 9, 2022

Nicole Aleong

"Not everyone has the same capacity to aspire to a future; this is critical when working with marginalized communities."

Nicole Aleong

Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology

March 26, 2024

Jeff Gothelf

"These are all attempts by large companies to figure out new ways to deliver their products or services or to create new businesses outside of what they’re currently working on."

Jeff Gothelf

Innovation Studios: the Engines of Enterprise Experimentation

May 14, 2015

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Accessibility ownership should never fall on just one person but be understood and shared across entire product teams."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

DesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility

May 26, 2022

Tess Dixon

"Having questions about team happiness broken into person, team and product helps clear up confusion in large organizations."

Tess Dixon

C'mon Get Happy

September 29, 2021

Liam Thurston

"Soft skills often are a multiplier on your hard skills—they’re just as valuable, if not more so."

Liam Thurston

Why Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It

June 10, 2022

Ian Swinson

"Leadership doesn’t only mean managing; it can be mentoring, product leadership, or technical influence."

Ian Swinson

Designing and Driving UX Careers

June 8, 2016

Leisa Reichelt

"At Atlassian, many confident non-researchers were already doing lots of research, which was an opportunity and a challenge."

Leisa Reichelt

Opening Keynote: Operating in Context

November 7, 2018

Rachael Greene

"Over-enforced design system adoption bred resentment and low morale, despite good adoption metrics."

Rachael Greene Alison Davis

Building a Design Ops Practice that Really Works (Most of the Time)

October 2, 2025