Where Does DesignOps Belong?
I am asked often where does DesignOps land in a design organization?
To answer this is both easy but has some subtleties. The subtleties are mostly about scaling DesignOps over time. Most of the time the activities of operationalizing a design organization resides within the leadership of the design team. In fact, THE leader of the design organization of a team of 10 or smaller usually takes on the full burden of the operational aspects of the design practice.
Over time as the itches of operations become larger and larger, people on the team will almost always start to step up and begin to volunteer to lead the pieces that they are most interested in. This is a great opportunity for your team to step up and demonstrate leadership and maybe discover new muscles they didn’t know they had in regards to business design, organizational thinking, and operational management.
As the team grows further, you might decide to hire a first dedicated operational person. This person may be dedicated to a core area of operations like delivery (producer, project mngr, or program mngr), or ResearchOps. (I’ll put the research side of the puzzle on hold for a moment.)
Whether this first person (or people) end up leading DesignOps outright or not will be determined by their affinity towards…
