It has been proven that a strong internal design team gives your organization a competitive advantage. To deliver great human experiences, product, design, and engineering teams, among many others, need to get design right. With its growth, design teams are currently search for new ways to streamline design, while aligning workflows and objectives.

Design Operations teams, often referred to as DesignOps teams, are one of the more recent changes in company structure as a reaction to these challenges. Some designers limit the DesignOps function to something as concrete as building a design system, while others see DesignOps as a true liaison for all things design process, culture, systems, training and development, and collaboration. In this session, we'll work through what DesignOps means.

It is no longer enough for designers to “just” design. In today's fast-paced and highly competitive environment, designers also expected to be project managers, creative leaders, and effective cross-functional collaborators while still delivering best-in-class design work on increasingly tight turn-around schedules. DesignOps provides a solution to help alleviate challenges and streamline processes as design grows at scale.

Whether your organization is large or small, DesignOps can wear many different hats so that your designers no longer have to. But the questions still remain: What are those different hats, and where exactly should DesignOps sit within the organization?

Fouad Jallouli

Service Design Lead
Kind Heart Ventures

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From communication building, guidelines, partnerships to culture building, team growth, and tools, systems, and processes, the potential responsibilities and considerations within DesignOps are extensive. But based upon the maturity, scale, and unique needs of a design team, those roles can morph into either an expansive set of priorities, or may be more niche based on skillset.

This session will delve into the different archetypes needed to fill a successful DesignOps role (or roles) depending on team size and bandwidth, tapping into the most important aspects to consider when hiring and building out a DesignOps team, and what that career path might look like.

As a design team, it is crucial to invest meaningful time and resources into educating and enabling a more human-centered organizational culture that understands and values the impact of good design. However, creating a culture of design requires continuous education around a more innovative, collaborative, and fail-forward mindset. Style guides and design systems are great first steps, but true adoption across all stakeholders is critical to establishing a lasting design culture.

DesignOps can act as a perfect liaison and go-between for design across different cross-functional teams and stakeholders. Join this session to discuss the importance of DesignOps' potential as it relates to building a lasting design culture.