Summary
Whether your design team is 5 or 5,000, the goal should be the same: retain designers by providing them the resources they need to grow and develop in their career. What do these resources look like for someone new to the industry versus a 20 year veteran? Or when a new technology or platform emerges, like the metaverse? In this session, you will learn the importance of investing in learning, development and belonging programs and how DesignOps is uniquely positioned to prepare designers to work on the next evolution of the internet– the metaverse.
Key Insights
-
•
Design Ops at Meta has been fundamental in creating learning and development programs that support thousands of designers across diverse global teams and disciplines.
-
•
Meta invests heavily in emerging talent through structured internship and graduate programs, with data showing stronger mid-level performance from these hires.
-
•
The concept of a 'simplifier,' inspired by Naomi Glite, involves breaking down complex processes into clear, understandable parts without losing nuance.
-
•
Canonical documentation—single sources of truth—is essential in large organizations to reduce confusion and improve onboarding and program scaling.
-
•
Meta consolidated over 15 disparate mentorship programs into a single, automated platform, drastically reducing manual effort and increasing access by nearly 50%.
-
•
Scaling design talent requires 'building a bench' by hiring people better than yourself and investing early in continuous education and leadership sponsorship.
-
•
Meta's design school connects subject matter experts with instructional designers to systematically deliver high-quality and aligned educational content.
-
•
The metaverse represents a new product space with unknowns; Meta uses an Understand-Identify-Execute framework to build expertise and programs for this emerging domain.
-
•
Key design skills for the metaverse include game design, spatial design, 3D interaction, and proficiency in tools like Unity and Mover.
-
•
Design Program Managers at Meta partner closely with Product Managers and Technical Program Managers in a triad relationship to align strategy, design execution, and engineering support.
Notable Quotes
"No matter what the size of your design team is, the goal should be to retain and empower designers by providing resources for growth."
"My design Ops superpower is the ability to simplify incredibly complex processes, problems, and ideas."
"Canonical everything means creating a single source of truth to avoid overwhelming new team members with countless links."
"Investing in emerging talent is building for the future—our data shows interns perform better by mid-level than external mid-level hires."
"The more content we try to incorporate into onboarding, the more overwhelmed people feel and the less they retain."
"Mentorship programs were inconsistent and manually managed until we centralized them with automation, reducing 56 hours of manual work monthly down to 6."
"Hire people who are better than you—that advice helped me build bandwidth to take on more scope."
"Almost 100% of our design school classes are created and facilitated by subject matter experts who are not primarily educators."
"The metaverse is the next evolution of social connection, and design is central to bringing it to life."
"At Meta, the Product Manager is like the CEO of the product; the DPM owns design delivery to the team; the TPM supports engineering."
Dig deeper—ask the Rosenbot:
More Videos
"People will work harder for people than for a number, so thick data is critical to inspire advocacy and action."
Monty HammontreeThe Future of UX Research (Videoconference)
December 3, 2020
"Uganda is Africa’s largest refugee host nation with over 1.5 million refugees, mostly children, yet this crisis remains underreported."
Liz EbengoThe Burden on Children: The Cost of Insufficient Post-Conflict Services and Pathways Forward
December 4, 2024
"Leave your new feature in the context of how people will see it so it’s easy for stakeholders to understand."
Billy CarlsonTips to Utilize Wireframes to Tell an Effective Product Story
June 6, 2023
"Making bite-sized secondary research accessible allows busy designers to start right away without additional workload."
Saara Kamppari-MillerInclusive Design is DesignOps
September 29, 2021
"Leadership does not mean standing in front of a room. It means mentoring, influencing, and helping others grow."
Ian SwinsonDesigning and Driving UX Careers
June 8, 2016
"Where there’s life, there’s hope — failure teaches us, but resilience and rebuilding are even more meaningful."
Jonathon ColmanHow to Maximize the Impact of Content Design
January 8, 2024
"We need processes that accommodate design instead of designers becoming the hamster in the agile wheel."
Maria SkaadenContinuous Design: One eye on the horizon and the other on the next wave
November 8, 2018
"I copied and pasted that from GitHub back into ChatGPT, and now it's writing markdown formatted documentation for me."
Bryce Benton[Demo] AI-powered UX enhancement: Aligning GitHub documentation with USWDS at Austin Public Library
June 4, 2024
"The average salary in the Netherlands might be quite high compared to Europe or the US, but you have to dig deeper to see if seniority is skewing the data."
Marc FonteijnFirst Insights from the 2025 Service Design Salary(+) Report
December 4, 2024
