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Summary
A career path to DesignOps can come from various walks of professional life. There isn’t a straight line from design practitioner to design ops manager. During this session we spoke with Peter Merholz, co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs, to explore what skills, backgrounds, and mindsets make for strong DesignOps managers. And what exceptions there might be to the rule.
Key Insights
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Design ops emerged from solving organizational challenges that block good design work from succeeding, not as a pre-planned discipline.
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Salesforce, led by Rachel Posman, and ExxonMobil, influenced by Lona Moore's career architecture work, are exemplars in advanced design operations and career path frameworks.
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Career growth in design teams is shifting from linear ladders to trellis or lattice models that allow multidirectional and cross-disciplinary movements.
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Most design professionals change managers frequently, making explicit career architectures critical for continuous growth beyond manager dependency.
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Capabilities, rather than roles, should be the atomic unit for career architectures to enable flexibility and fluid role definition in design ops.
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Distinct paths for senior individual contributors are still evolving, requiring clear definitions of roles like principal or architect to demonstrate leverage without direct reports.
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Design ops outcomes focus on making designers more effective, happier, and better at their craft through practices like program management and learning & development.
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Organizational structures that strongly separate people management from creative or functional leadership often create frustration and limit designers' growth options.
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Working closely with HR is essential to embed dual-track career ladders and sustain design ops and IC growth paths within broader corporate systems.
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Sharing knowledge openly in the design ops community accelerates collective progress, as the discipline is still nascent and evolving rapidly.
Notable Quotes
"Design ops kind of formed itself around me as I was trying to solve a set of problems that executives have."
"If the organization that was delivering the design wasn’t set up to do it well, the design wouldn’t see the light of day."
"People want to grow in a bushy way, not just linearly up a ladder."
"We need to make career architectures explicit because people change managers a lot, and you can’t rely on managers alone for growth."
"Capabilities are the atomic unit of career architecture, not roles."
"Design ops drives three outcomes: making designers more effective, happier, and better."
"Separating people management from functional management without overlap creates a brick wall that’s really uncommon and problematic."
"Salesforce is tackling challenges at scale often before other organizations get to them, and they openly share their learnings."
"There’s no consistent labeling framework or taxonomy yet for senior design IC roles, which causes confusion."
"You want to empower employees to drive their own growth rather than relying solely on their managers."
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