Summary
Building a Design Ops team means having a long-term vision and thinking about future growth from the very beginning. DesignOps team members can become key problem solvers bringing value to your company—or can hit professional dead end without leveraging their true strengths. As a new discipline, how you plan to build strong culture and meaningful growth paths will provide ongoing value to your company. Courtney Kaplan will talk about how you can define opportunities for your team, find the right challenges for talent, and provide support in creating an impactful discipline.
Key Insights
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Facebook's ads design program management grew from 2 to over 300 people in five years, showing the rapid scaling potential of design ops.
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Design program managers (DPMs) work in three main areas: operations, programs (onboarding and education), and direct partnership with product teams.
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Building a design ops team progresses through four phases: triaging (prioritizing issues), discovering (hiring and understanding strengths), emerging (solving complex problems), and strategizing (becoming a leadership partner).
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Early DPM hires set the tone and vision for the entire design ops discipline, making initial hiring decisions critical.
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It is essential to balance workload and growth; junior coordinators risk burnout from tactical overload without development opportunities.
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Creating a strong community within the DPM team reduces loneliness and promotes mentorship and peer support.
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DPMs often discover important systemic problems that others don’t see, underlining the value of frontline insights.
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Successful concepts, like Facebook’s product-specific onboarding camps, can be packaged and scaled across multiple teams.
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Steady socialization of the design ops team's successes with leadership builds ongoing support and opens new opportunities.
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The design ops role uniquely integrates design thinking, empathy, relationship building, and project execution to address rapid change.
Notable Quotes
"I was much more interested in talking to clients, understanding the scope, and translating that into what our designers would build out."
"We grew from a team of two to 50 designers in four months, then to 300 within five years just on the ads side."
"Start with making a big list of all the things that are breaking and bucket them; that helps decide what skills you're looking for first."
"The first hires really establish the tone of the rest of the design ops discipline moving forward."
"DPMs land quickly, start killing it, and suddenly get overwhelmed by requests like moths to a flame."
"Being a good manager means helping drive clarity, protecting your team, and understanding what’s special about each person."
"My team was lonely; they felt like lone wolves being the only one of their kind on their teams."
"DPMs think everyone knows what they know, but no one else does. Framing the problem clearly is key."
"We created an onboarding camp that helped new product team members get up to speed quickly, and then replicated that across groups."
"Design ops has a magical combination of design thinking, empathy, framing problems, and delivering results."
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