You Can Help Carve a Path for DesignOps Newcomers
Discover which project types support skill development.
By Laine Riley Prokay and Lisa Gordon
The DesignOps field is still growing, which means opportunities abound. Let’s talk about how you can help skill up industry newcomers. It starts with getting them involved in basic projects at your company that operationalize, optimize and scale design. As lead design program managers at Salesforce, we’re here to share how we’ve done this in our combined 20 years of experience.
For many, the existing career path to DesignOps begins in an adjacent field. This might be project management, design, marketing, advertising, Scrum teams, production and more. We took these paths ourselves. It makes sense, given the core competencies of DesignOps include program management and a firm grasp of the design process. While entering the field with experience is beneficial, it can also result in a top-heavy org structure. We weren’t entirely surprised to learn that junior roles comprised only 1 percent of DesignOps professionals who responded to the 2021 State of DesignOps survey.
However, there’s an opportunity for emerging talent to lean directly into the field. Established managers can leverage this untapped market. Their fresh viewpoints also help the larger team consider challenges in a new light.
Senior team members can work with their junior colleagues and gain more experience teaching, training and spreading awareness of DesignOps. Even the process of candidate sourcing becomes a vehicle to promote our work. We partner with YearUp (an external nonprofit) and Futureforce (our internal summer-internship team) to recruit interns.
When you’re managing an employee, contractor, or intern looking for opportunities to learn about DesignOps, consider assigning projects that include these three criteria:
Fulfills a business need
The best experience offers a chance to make a direct impact on company business. For example, recent DesignOps intern Marianna Flores conducted survey research on global all-hands meetings. Her findings resulted in the addition of more regional representation, which increased attendance and inclusivity. She also influenced other parts of the business, including attending design reviews to ensure customer feedback was incorporated into actual product design.
Develops their DesignOps craft
Design clarity, confidence and partnership are common objectives in our field. We even operationalize design practices and foster design-team culture. Knowledge sharing is a key tactic to mastering this given its impact on community/culture and learning/growth. To achieve this, another summer intern Lyssa Tompong distributed learning materials organization-wide related to a certification goal. She also created a very necessary directory of org Slack channels, which allowed the hundreds of design team members to connect instantly.
Grow their transferable professional skills
The ops part of DesignOps centers on the professional art of seamlessly completing tasks with finesse. Both interns leaned into this essential corporate skill. They may have been new to meeting facilitation, note taking and outreach — but they built these muscles successfully over time. Public speaking and presentation were additional unexpected skills developed through this process. They now have more confidence and expanded relationships. With this, they’ve developed their personal brands and ability to self-evangelize.
Read more about our interns’ perspective from the post What It’s Like to Be a Design Intern at Salesforce?
As a thought starter, some projects come to mind as excellent starting blocks. These may include design-wide town hall coordination, relevant resource gathering or orchestration of internal workflow research.
If you’re training a new practitioner, begin looking for projects like these that allow them to fulfill business needs, develop their DesignOps craft and grow their transferable professional skills.
Learn more about DesignOps from the post A Pocket Guide to Design Operations.
Editor: Kate Hughes
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