Summary
In this panel, Meredith, Bria, and Tim explore their current passions and key trends around design operations. Meredith highlights her new podcast Reconsidering and the growing interest in re-evaluating careers and values, tying it to broader personal and professional shifts. Bria shares her experience transitioning from sales enablement into design ops, underscoring the importance of transferable skills and the freedom to shape the emerging design ops field. Tim discusses the rise of purpose-built communities and the need to extend corporate experience models beyond traditional settings. Together, they address challenges caused by multiple ops teams within organizations, potential chaos from overlapping roles, and underutilization of design ops skills. They emphasize the strong human-centered nature of design ops, contrasting it with automation, while acknowledging the need to balance efficiency with culture and people management. The panel also underscores the importance of advocating for design within broader product orgs and foresees that future design ops practitioners will benefit from deep business acumen including finance and organizational strategy. They conclude by reflecting on how staffing levels affect automation and overall effectiveness within design operations, leaving open the future evolution of the discipline.
Key Insights
-
•
Design ops practitioners benefit from diverse transferable skills beyond UX, including sales, finance, and branding.
-
•
There is a growing risk of multiple ops teams (design, product, research, HR) causing organizational chaos and diluting ops value.
-
•
Design ops currently require a scrappy, hands-on approach but will evolve toward specialization and clearer role definitions.
-
•
Human-centeredness is a core differentiator of design ops compared to pure automation or process management.
-
•
Future design ops roles will demand stronger business and organizational strategy competencies, including P&L understanding.
-
•
Advocacy and self-promotion are vital for design ops practitioners since their work often goes unnoticed when successful.
-
•
Automation in design ops should be guided by human-centered guardrails to balance efficiency without sacrificing team culture.
-
•
Design ops is positioned to help redesign how businesses operate, beyond just optimizing design within org structures.
-
•
The rapidly evolving field offers opportunities for practitioners to shape and define their roles and industry best practices.
-
•
Staffing adequacy greatly impacts design ops’ ability to support organizations effectively and to innovate beyond automation.
Notable Quotes
"The one thing I’m really excited about is re-evaluating what people want to do for work and how personal values inspire career shifts – Meredith."
"I’m a really passionate tools person. Transferable skills can be used in such a creative, UX-first way – Bria."
"I couldn’t imagine a product team having design ops, product ops, and research ops all at once without chaos – Meredith."
"Design ops people have a hard time advocating because we’re behind the scenes. If things mess up, everyone knows it’s us but if it goes well, we get no recognition – Meredith."
"Design ops is not all about automation; if it got too automated, we’d lose the human aspect – Meredith."
"There’s an opportunity to inject human centrality into product ops by balancing business value and customer experience – Meredith."
"Our industry is so new that we can make design ops whatever we want it to be – Bria."
"Future design ops folks will need skills in organizational strategy and understanding how to redesign the business – Tim."
"Automation frees up time so we can do more for the org, but it must have guardrails centering on people, not just business – Tim."
"We make organizations run better than they could without us, that’s the biggest part of design ops – Meredith."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Concept validation lets us objectively decide which features to build based on perceived usefulness and intent to use."
Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone
June 15, 2018
"You can mine metadata from your platform to spot emerging patterns and commoditize new components."
Simon WardleyMaps and Topographical Intelligence (Videoconference)
January 31, 2019
"There’s a gap between intentions and impact; humility is needed to close it."
Sandra CamachoCreating More Bias-Proof Designs
January 22, 2025
"We’re all capable of creating and perpetuating toxic work relationships."
Darian DavisLessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
January 8, 2024
"Stakeholder communication is crucial to professional strategy because without it, we run the risk of activity without impact."
Fisayo Osilaja[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist
June 4, 2024
"Empowering maker culture invites everyone to be part of a collective endeavor far beyond any individual."
Uday GajendarThe Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX
May 13, 2015
"What’s so difficult about designing a login? On the surface, it’s simple, but the real challenge was cultural alignment across business units."
Davis Neable Guy SegalHow to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team
June 10, 2021
"We stopped talking about patterns and consistency and started talking about scalability and speed to connect with stakeholders."
Eniola OluwoleLessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site
October 24, 2019
"We believe tracking design metrics aligned to business goals is important to demonstrate design’s impact."
Aurobinda Pradhan Shashank DeshpandeIntroduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts
September 9, 2022
