Diving into DesignOps

Over the last few months I’ve been spending more of my time learning and thinking about how to implement a DesignOps practice across the teams I work with. Large portions of my work with Design Systems already relate to a number of DesignOps ideas and principles: helping teams solve for efficiency, effectiveness, and codifying standards around commonly used patterns so that teams can focus on the hard problems of their individual domain expertise.

DesignOps refers to the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact at scale.

As the teams that I work with continue to grow and the organization itself scales it has become clear that we need to implement and codify some operational standards. How we organize our teams and files within Figma, how we handle design reviews, who is responsible for what, and how we measure the success of our work to name a few.

I am excited to dive in to the topics above and explore solutions with my team and the teams we serve to continue pushing the boundaries on what we can achieve.

I want to give a massive shout out to Elyse Eshel and Meredith Black for founding the DesignOps Assembly as it has been an invaluable resource when looking for how to get started with DesignOps providing a Slack community, the DesignOps Guide & Glossary (DOGG), and even their formal training through the DesignOps Assembly Learning Lab.