Bring your DesignOps Story to Life! The Definitive DesignOps Book Jam
Summary
Your DesignOps journey is a story of ups and downs, lessons learned, and victories won. Join new and veteran DPMs alike in shaping the forthcoming Rosenfeld book, The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations. Authors Rachel Posman and John Calhoun will guide you through an interactive session to collect the burning questions, inspiring successes, and real-world examples of how DesignOps is practiced in real life by our amazing community, including: Getting into DesignOps The skills and competencies of a DPM DesignOps in the context of your team and organization The tools in your DesignOps toolkit DesignOps case studies you most want to see Join us on this journey and make your mark on the future of DesignOps!
Key Insights
-
•
Design operations practice can be grouped into three key buckets: people, process, and platform.
-
•
Design ops roles involve three core actions: operationalizing, orchestrating, and optimizing workflows and teams.
-
•
Measuring the value of design ops includes both quantitative metrics (delivery dates, business use cases) and qualitative factors (urgency, impact, complexity).
-
•
A significant challenge in design ops is distinguishing the role from design leadership and management to clarify responsibilities and handoffs.
-
•
Competencies in design ops span eight areas including design proficiency, trusted partnerships, program management, leadership, communication, business acumen, and culture.
-
•
Organizational maturity affects how design ops scales; mismatches between design team growth and design ops capacity create challenges.
-
•
In resource-constrained environments, spreadsheets often remain the most effective tool for design ops planning and measurement.
-
•
The design ops community benefits greatly from sharing stories, frameworks, and real-world examples to build a richer, inclusive body of knowledge.
-
•
Design ops often acts as a bridge, driving clarity, confidence, and connections within and across teams and functions.
-
•
Building a design ops team from zero to many requires clear charters, pillars, and operating models that align with organizational needs.
Notable Quotes
"There is not a book currently that is dedicated to design ops. We want this to be the definitive handbook."
"We see design ops as focusing on people, process, and platform — what we act on."
"We operationalize, orchestrate, and optimize as design ops practitioners."
"Measuring the value of design ops is a meaty topic we will dig into deeply."
"Distinguishing design ops from design leadership and management is a big, messy space we want to bring clarity to."
"Often, the best tool for everything in design ops is a spreadsheet."
"How you manage vision in your ops team, especially when it’s new or lacking, is key for ongoing success."
"People want to see competencies for individual contributors versus managers and how those evolve at different career levels."
"Scaling design ops means going from zero to one, or one to many, carefully growing your team charter and operating model."
"We want many voices and perspectives represented in this community and in the book — no contribution is too small."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Good design needs better PR and the government has to be actively involved in the process."
Sofía Delsordo Kassim VeraPublic Policy for Jalisco's Designers to Make Design Matter
December 8, 2021
"We are like three legs of a chair: product, engineer, and UX all contribute to stability."
Product and Design at Bloomberg: A 15-year Evolution
December 6, 2022
"We don’t have dedicated user researchers, but designers and PMs conduct most research here."
Liza Pemstein Jane DavisScaling Research Via an Ops First Model at Clever
March 27, 2023
"The US digital service ecosystem has grown remarkably, showing we’re not alone in this journey."
Kara KaneTheme One Intro
November 16, 2022
"Prioritization work is a political process, and politics are hard to do in technology."
Mark Interrante Harry MaxAI for Prioritization (3rd of 3 seminars)
July 11, 2024
"The four Cs—consistency, convenience, confidence, and customizability—are not just good for accessibility, they make a great experience for everyone."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
October 3, 2023
"Most product managers are wide, most UX and engineers are deep — that’s just the nature of the roles."
Rich MironovHow Can Product Managers and UXers Help Each Other (and Why are Product Folks so Annoying Sometimes)?
December 6, 2022
"The more ideas you make, the quality of your ideas also goes up."
Juhan SoninDesign Now! The Agenda for Action
September 4, 2025
"The trust gap stems from being repeatedly failed by a system, not innate risk aversion or imposter syndrome."
Mansi GuptaDrawing from Feminist Practice to Make Inclusive Design Operational
September 9, 2022