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
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Design Ops at Meta has been fundamental in creating learning and development programs that support thousands of designers across diverse global teams and disciplines.
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Meta invests heavily in emerging talent through structured internship and graduate programs, with data showing stronger mid-level performance from these hires.
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The concept of a 'simplifier,' inspired by Naomi Glite, involves breaking down complex processes into clear, understandable parts without losing nuance.
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Canonical documentation—single sources of truth—is essential in large organizations to reduce confusion and improve onboarding and program scaling.
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Meta consolidated over 15 disparate mentorship programs into a single, automated platform, drastically reducing manual effort and increasing access by nearly 50%.
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Scaling design talent requires 'building a bench' by hiring people better than yourself and investing early in continuous education and leadership sponsorship.
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Meta's design school connects subject matter experts with instructional designers to systematically deliver high-quality and aligned educational content.
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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.
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Key design skills for the metaverse include game design, spatial design, 3D interaction, and proficiency in tools like Unity and Mover.
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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."
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