Rosenverse
Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops

Gold
Monday, January 8, 2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Share the love for this talk
Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops
Speakers: John Calhoun and Rachel Posman
Link:

Summary

What happens to your DesignOps team when your Design organization hits scale? Juggling the growth of your product, your people, and your processes is a demanding challenge, and strains the jack-of-all-trades skillset of even the most seasoned DesignOps practitioner. Our solution? Evolve DesignOps into two discrete tracks: Team Ops and Product Ops. We’ll look at how these tracks emerged, how they operate in practice, where they intersect (and where they differ), and the lessons learned from our “conscious uncoupling” of design team ops and product design ops responsibilities.

Key Insights

  • Splitting design ops into two tracks—team ops and product ops—allows balancing broad organizational support with deep product-focused delivery.

  • Team ops focuses on scaling culture, community, learning, and tools for the entire UX org, while product ops focuses on project delivery and team-specific needs.

  • Design ops teams often fail to scale in sync with their growing design organizations, creating an inflection point requiring new operating models.

  • Design ops practitioners swinging wildly between org-wide and product-level priorities causes partner frustration and operational inefficiency.

  • Assigning clear ownership, such as a dedicated onboarding owner, improves new hire experiences and reduces manager and employee stress.

  • Silos and lone-wolf syndrome among design ops can arise from ambiguous roles and uneven workload distribution.

  • Clear career ladders with specialization options help retain DPMs by providing growth paths beyond being generalist problem solvers.

  • Effective collaboration between team ops and product ops creates a feedback loop for continuous improvement and scaling of best practices.

  • An evolving design ops model demands patience and intentional change management, treating role transitions as carefully as new hires.

  • Cross-company benchmarking is limited, but Salesforce’s design ops coin model inspires others to consider multiple tracks beyond design and research ops.

Notable Quotes

"Imagine your current design ops team is like a coin and every time you flip it, it comes up heads, but coins have two sides."

"Team ops goes wide to support 300-plus UX designers globally; product ops goes deep supporting 40-plus product design teams."

"Our design ops team was a step behind the growth of our design team, solving the wrong problems at the wrong scale."

"Design ops is always swinging wildly between priorities, making partners wonder why invest if you’re always going this way or that."

"If nobody owns the onboarding experience, it likely won’t get done or get the energy it deserves."

"DPM loneliness and siloing happen because of wearing too many hats and inheriting mismatched responsibilities."

"A design ops career ladder can look like a step stool unless you create multiple tracks for growth and specialization."

"With our new operating model, partners are more confident funding UX ops because of increased clarity and focus."

"As your design practice matures, your design ops team will reach inflection points, and it’s okay to flip the coin and explore the other side."

"Be human first when creating new roles; treat them with the same care as hiring new team members."

Ask the Rosenbot
Patrick Boehler
The service shift: transforming media organizations to create real value through design
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Luz Bratcher
This Is a Talk for Tired People
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Coffee with Lou: Should You Write a (UX) Book?
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Megan Blocker
Positioning insight: Structuring teams, roles and careers for a changing research landscape
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Sean McKay
Whole Product Thinking: Expanding beyond problem and solution space thinking
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Anat Fintzi
Delivering at Scale: Making Traction with Resistant Partners
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Terry Buckman
Wargaming (An Introduction)
2023 • Enterprise Community
Patrizia Bertini
The (r)evolution of designOps: It’s Time to Think (really) BIG
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Emily DiLeo
Stronger Together: Lessons Learned from UX Research Ops
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Bob Baxley
Theme 4: Intro
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Patrick Commarford
Design Staffing for Impact
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Everything You Need to Know about the Civic Design 2022 Call for Presentations
2022 • Civic Design Community
Tricia Wang
From Users to Shapers of AI: The Future of Research
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Welcome / Housekeeping
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Tara Tressel
Investigating qualitative depth of AI-moderated interviews
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Megan Blocker
Panel: Excellence in Impact
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold

More Videos

Surya Vanka

"When groups started swarming on problems, they exhibited autonomy, creativity, experimentation, and hidden leadership."

Surya Vanka

Unleashing Swarm Creativity to Solve Enterprise Challenges

June 10, 2021

Patrick Boehler

"We had precise metrics built on false assumptions, so we had to shift to more contextualized signals."

Patrick Boehler Madison Karas

The service shift: transforming media organizations to create real value through design

November 19, 2025

Andreas Huebner

"Our user base is really fun and complex, with different preferences that require nuanced automation approaches."

Andreas Huebner Amy Takata Craig Brookes

What Is It Like To Be Part of The UX Team at Compass?

March 11, 2021

Patrizia Bertini

"Solving one task in the design process can generate issues or benefits in different teams."

Patrizia Bertini Alexandra Mengoni León

Pushing DesignOps’ Influence into New Global Markets

September 9, 2022

Phil Gilbert

"Our design language gives broad ditches on either side of the road with some nuance, but no rigid libraries at first."

Phil Gilbert

A Consistent Culture of Design

May 14, 2015

Yulya Besplemennova

"You need a lot of annoying handholding with the AI: reminding it of how many people you have or simple things."

Yulya Besplemennova

[Demo] Stress-testing GenAI in user research synthesis

June 4, 2024

Sarah Rink

"Remote is a design constraint, but what else can we do with it to improve practice?"

Sarah Rink

Remote User Research: Dos and Don'ts from the Virtual Field

June 11, 2020

Mujtaba Hameed

"We used AI tools like NotebookLM and Gemini primarily to shortcut getting up to speed and managing transcripts, without focusing on specific tools themselves."

Mujtaba Hameed

The new horizon of ethnography: using AI to unlock the full potential of in-person research

March 11, 2026

Sheryl Cababa

"If you’re working at scale, many problems that seem like 'clock' problems actually have 'cloud' elements."

Sheryl Cababa

Living in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset

June 6, 2023