How I Became an Inclusive DesignOps Program Manager at Intel

There is no single pathway to a DesignOps career. Mine certainly did not follow a straight line, but I’m thrilled by the path I ended up on.

Pivot to DesignOps

I’ve been a designer in tech for about 14 years. Approximately three years ago I learned about DesignOps, and realized it was the direction I wanted to move in my career. Having this new term helped me reframe and reevaluate some of the “extra” team oriented work I always seemed to be getting myself engaged in. Figuring out new tools. Defining space needs for a studio. Making team templates. Documenting and improving processes.

Over the years I worked with my managers to make DesignOps be officially recognized as part of my job, even if only 10 or 20 percent of my time. And I got lots of recognition for the activities I lead for our teams. Things were looking good, until…

Career Roadblock

Unfortunately, I hit a roadblock trying to make the switch from part-time to full-time DesignOps. I was following the traditional DesignOps advice of starting small, focusing on our team’s specific challenges and not trying to “boil the ocean” by thinking about DesignOps needs across the company. However, the Design Director simply could not justify bumping me up to a full-time role for DesignOps.

I felt stuck.

Side Quest: Inclusive Design

While I was disheartened by my DesignOps roadblock, I had a side quest that I wanted to keep working on: I was a champion for Inclusive Design.

At first Inclusive Design and DesignOps were completely compartmentalized in my mind. DesignOps was the career path I wanted, and Inclusive Design was more like an interest area that I felt was important.

It was a slow realization that Inclusive Design and DesignOps are interrelated. Just making a designer aware about Inclusive Design and accessibility isn’t enough to get them to start practicing. They need support. As a team or a culture change, it needs to be an intentional practice transformation.

Through my Inclusive Design championing I had become an ally with Darryl Adams. Darryl was working on accessible computing innovation, and is now the Director of Accessibilty at Intel.

Working with Darryl and my design director, we proposed a goal around Inclusive Design adoption to include in Intel’s RISE 2030 plans. This goal was published in the 2021 Corporate Social Responsibility report. Included in the goal was the need for design and research operational support.

Later in the fall of 2021, I made the case for why Inclusive Design is DesignOps at the DesignOps Summit. Creating the presentation helped me organize and clarify my thoughts about the relationship between Inclusive Design and DesignOps. Inadvertently, it also became my pitch deck for what comes next.

But first, I had to stumble a bit more. I was encouraged by a mentor to apply for a program manager role in the Corporate Responsibility Office. It would get me closer to working on corporate RISE goals, even though it wasn’t an exact match with my career plans. While I did not get that job, the leap of faith in applying and interviewing opened up a new opportunity. Darryl Adams had been promoted to a Director of Accessibility within the Corporate Responsibility Office, and was hiring.

Brand New Role: Inclusive DesignOps

I proposed a new DesignOps role to Darryl Adams. Instead of focusing on all the DesignOps needs for a team or an org, I would be a DesignOps Program Manager with a mission. An Inclusive DesignOps mission. I would be focused on helping all UX teams at Intel adopt Inclusive Design and Research practices, and build the ops needed to support those practices.

It is a win-win situation. I help accelerate the accessibility office mission by bringing accessibility to the beginning of the product lifecycle when researchers and designers are involved. And the mission of the accessibility office helps spearhead operationalizing design practices in teams that otherwise would not invest in DesignOps.

A Different Kind of Ocean

The narrow focus on making progress in accessibility and Inclusive Design practices is my new “don’t boil the ocean” of DesignOps. I have a much wider group of people who I support, but a much smaller DesignOps menu of things I am actively working on. Compare this to a DesignOps lead with a smaller team or organization of people to support with more menu items to address. At Intel, we’re in the early days of this mixed horizontal and vertical model of DesignOps to make progress on practice transformation while also scaling our design teams.

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Inclusive DesignOps Program Manager

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