FBTB on YouTube · Open on YouTube
Design leadership · Expert · Lesson 90 of 99 · 36 min video, then about 2 hours of practice
Design operations: making the design team run well
After this you can diagnose where a design team loses time and quality (intake, tooling, rituals, onboarding) and design an operational fix with a measure attached.
Why it matters
DesignOps is the practice of improving how design work gets done: how requests come in, how work is prioritised and staffed, which rituals exist and whether they work, tools and file hygiene, onboarding, and the budget and headcount questions behind them. In small teams there is no DesignOps role, so the most senior designers do it. Focus on finding the one operational problem that costs the team most and fixing it measurably. Trap: process for its own sake. Every ritual you add costs everyone's time every week; remove one before you add one.
How to use this resource
A conference talk by a design-org author on how team design leads into DesignOps: the reasoning behind why the practice exists and what it covers. The most substantial free talk on the subject.