State of DesignOps: Learnings from the 2021 Global Report

Hello everyone! My name is Angelos Arnis and for the past years of my professional experience, I have been involved with Design Operations in one way or another. A lot of you likely share the same experience with me. Earlier in your career, you did the job but did not call it something specific. Many times you did that out of necessity. Your title was -something designer- but you spent your time trying to figure out how you could have made the onboarding experience of your new colleagues better. Or how could you create a style guide so that your work would not start from scratch every time…

Fast forward to now, Design Operations is an established profession. We are in the de-facto DesignOps conference that talks about it successfully for 5 years… And yet still many parts of this profession, at least to me, remain a bit mysterious. And I’m not the only one, judging from the discussions we have on a daily basis in communities like DesignOps Assembly. People long to understand more about DesignOps, and more people now than ever, look to break into this profession. So to start with, I realized that it was very important to get a baseline of where we are now. I created this report because hopefully 5 years from now we will look back and see how much we have progressed. This study reached more than 200 companies around the globe. Now we have data from 211 participants. On top of that, I conducted 7 qualitative interviews to aid the data with more deep knowledge on certain subjects.

Here’s what we are going to talk about in the next 20 minutes or so. We are going to take a deep dive into the professionals, and their background. Then we will zoom out for a birds-eye-view to see how the role is interacting with others. Then we will establish an understanding of the most important activities and the tools that enable that work. And lastly, we will look at the horizon and what lies ahead.

Let’s start with getting to know the DesignOps professional as portrayed in the study. As I mentioned earlier, 211 professionals from all over the world took part in the survey. More than half of the them live in the U.S. (53% actually), with the second biggest audience being Europe (21%). Countries like India, Brazil, & Australia accounted for the 13% of the demographic of the survey.

More than half of the participants identified as white, with the next segments being Hispanic or Latinx, or Asian.

So what do we actually learn about the DesignOps professional?

In his 95 best-selling book Emotional Intelligence, science journalist Daniel Goleman defines Emotional Intelligence as the array of skills and characteristics that drive leadership performance. Emotional Intelligence is typically associated with empathy because it involves an individual, connecting their personal experiences with those of others. There is a lot of talk about empathy in the design world. With the DesignOps role we see empathy turning inwards, towards our own people, designers first, and in extension to all our other stakeholders. This particular interpersonal skill does not come easy. It takes practice. It is eye-opening to observe that the age of most professionals participating in this study is rather mature. Almost half of them are between 35 to 44 years old. Almost half of them are women. 60% of them have professional experience between 10 to 20 years. And this is not a shocking pattern right? DesignOps people need to be seasoned for this role. They’ve had to experience and see things, things that you will not learn right out of college, a boot camp, or online design courses. Interestingly only 31% of the participants have pursued a design degree, which is also something we see in the design industry in general. Many people do not come from traditional design backgrounds, but from different walks of life.

When it comes to their actual experience though, DesignOps people are embedded deeply into design throughout their professional experience. Most of the participants of the research come from either design craft or design management. On top of that, their role is rather senior with most of the participants having reported that they were either a manager, a director, or a lead. Interviewees expressed that it is vital for a career progression to exist for these roles, and companies should hire people who can grow within.

If a company would want to hire for such a role, they would look for a person with high emotional intelligence, a good team player, a person with a calm and collected persona. A person with strong organizational skills, and strong advocacy for design.

Understanding of dynamics and politics inside a company. Ability to create partnerships in the company. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, empathy towards designers and cross-functional partners.

If we think about Goleman’s definition of Emotional Intelligence again, it basically breaks down in 4 domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. These domains have 12 competencies nested under them. We mentioned and will mention many of them throughout the talk. And we already identified empathy being a big one. You want your DesignOps professional to excel in a few of these areas AT LEAST. This is not only good knowledge to have for when hiring but also when growing seasoned professionals. And I am pretty sure that this is NOT the only profession that Emotional Intelligence is needed.

DesignOps is a challenging role so I am glad to report that most people take work-life balance seriously. The majority of the participants work for 40 hours or less per week. The picture also becomes interesting if you add location to the data. It seems that in Europe it is more likely to work for 40 hours or less rather than in the US where it is equally likely for people to work for even 50 hours per week.

Let’s take a look at the playing field of DesignOps by taking a 360 view of the companies, teams, and people that DesignOps professionals interact with.

The majority of the respondents seem to be working in tech, financial services, or design. Most of them work in enterprise and this is not surprising because DesignOps usually comes with scaling design teams. There’s a sweet spot where DesignOps becomes relevant. DesignOps people seem to get hired to companies after teams grow to 30 or 40 designers strong. Also, another interesting data point is that startups (particularly Post Series C) are getting into DesignOps at a quicker pace. There’s more willingness to start a new role at a startup and less bureaucracy to jumpstart it in the HR system. Most DesignOps people or teams are embedded into the design team itself and in some cases, some are more centralized.

Most responders work within a product organization, however other creative organizations such as Design Studio, Brand, and Marketing are gaining momentum and starting to implement Design operations.

According to the results, most DesignOps people report to senior leadership unless they have established DesignOps leadership in particular. Professionals are focusing mostly on supporting product organizations. When it comes to similar work streams DesignOps is partnering a lot with operations on research, product, team, and creative sides.

Now I feel that this is the MOST IMPORTANT POINT of this talk. So if you want to take away only one thing, then this could be it. There is an increase in demand in Design Operations. Design Leadership needs it now more than ever. People are living all over the world, teams are remote & distributed, and there’s no central hub. Prior to the pandemic, professionals worked in the office. Now people are working from their homes, or anywhere else really, and as a result design leaders feel the pain and they turn to DesignOps for help.

To contrast the demand, supply seems to come short. In most companies, DesignOps teams are either a team of one or less than 10 people. The impact of these bite-sized teams is strong, but there was no discernible ratio we could take away from. The only constant pattern is that in most cases 1 DesignOps person can work for a handful of designers to even 200 designers. In teams of one, the job can be quite challenging at times. You might be doing many things adequately, but not flawlessly because there’s only one of you

Through the interviews conducted, people explained that in a DesignOps team of one you have to choose your battles. You gotta be able to focus on whatever the highest ROI is. How to solve for efficiency on the most important initiatives. The real challenge is to identify whether your team needs someone who can manage projects or someone who can help with organization and structure. Could it be both? Then you gotta figure out how to prioritize. For teams that have more people on the practice, then you can split focus between the product level and the team level. Experts also mentioned that it is important to evaluate what a company needs to understand about design so that design can fit to the needs of the company better. On top of that the teams need to create the right environment for designers to do their best work. Setting up the rules and measures, so the work can meet the needs of customers as well as keep a bar for high quality

So what are DesignOps people doing and what kind of tools are they using to enable such work? To understand where to begin, I took a diagram created by Rachel Posman at Salesforce (I believe she was a speaker last year). So Rachel wrote this amazing resource called “a pocket guide to design operations.” Among other important things, she outlines the breadth of focus areas for DesignOps practitioners with 6 areas that split into their respective domains.

According to the data, on Communications DesignOps is involved in internal & leadership communications, as well as status & team updates. On systems & processes, the practice is involved with design system management & processes. On Team Growth & Learning, DesignOps is involved with knowledge sharing, onboarding, & skill-building. DesignOps is involved in areas like community & culture where teams often focus on team health and recognition of their peers. On partnerships the practice is involved in recruiting and HR. On products & programs, DesignOps is involved on planning, prioritization, and tracking. Lastly, on guidelines and governance, the practice focuses on best practices and templates.

Tools is a topic that people can talk and fight for days. However, when it comes to teams with DesignOps professionals we have some clear indications on what are the preferred tools of the trade for their teams.

When it comes to design, Figma seems to be the primary tool for the majority of participants’ teams. Most of the teams are using Miro for virtual collaboration, and Atlassian tools seem to lead the way when it comes to documentation and task management. On document creation teams are using Google Docs, and Microsoft Suite. Slack takes the lead on communications & Google drive takes the lead for file storage.

Leaders are leaning on DesignOps professionals to provide contracts and tools. With remote-first policies it also becomes a bigger part of the role. Experts mentioned in the interviews that they are reaching to peers in communities (such as DesignOps Assembly), or Twitter when evaluating tools. That, coupled with getting demos and trials, it seems that the biggest hindering factor to adopt good tooling is company policies, security and budget.

One of the most important parts of a DesignOps professional is their organizational skills when it comes to cataloging their work.

Interviewees also stress the fact that it is imperative to document. Meetings and 1:1s take a lot of time on the calendar. However, if people see those as investments, either in relationships with others or your direct team, then is also easy to “measure” the work.

So let’s take a look at the horizon and see what’s ahead of us and what’s next.

There’s a misconception that this role is a lesser paid role than our peers (for example product managers). Through the data of the research, we observe that although teams are in their first few years of establishing DesignOps teams they are investing heavily for it. If you look at the data it seems that in the US the role is generally around 150K per year while in the EU, for example, it is around 70K per year. At a first glimpse, this feels a lot lower however we have to contrast that with the expenses, social welfare, and quality of life of those geographical locations.

That being said there is a long way to go to get DesignOps jumpstarted in a bunch of countries around the globe. We see signs of DesignOps becoming relevant in places like South America and India, however, we still miss sufficient data from Canada, African, or Asian countries for example.

We do observe that this is still a relatively new thing since people are new at the job. Most participants are less than a year to 2 years in their current job. Since the pandemic a lot of people are re-evaluate a lot of things in their lives, there was a recent article online reporting that about 40 percent of tech workers have either already left or plan to quit their current job by 2022, according to a survey. The space of DesignOps potentially becomes a space that we will see a lot of growth in the future, since leaders will keep turning to DesignOps to create the conditions for designers to thrive.

In the last few years, we see a lot more people become conscious of their consumer choices, work ethics, but also becoming more intentional about changing their industries in more equitable places. Considering the gender and race demographics of the respondents of our survey, it is apparent that we still have to do a lot more hard work to turn our profession and workplaces to more inclusive spaces, however, teams recognize that they are making tangible efforts to hire with Diversity Equity & Inclusion initiatives in their teams.

Considering our current situation, arguably still being in a global pandemic, according to the respondents, things did not change dramatically for teams when it comes to people retaining their benefits or hiring new people, however, the most eye-popping fact was when asked about remote work after the pandemic hit, a 90%!! of the respondents report that they have been working exclusively remotely since.

Most people want more out of DesignOps especially when it comes to how companies use the practice to make decisions. Throughout the interviews, there were indications that people identify some sort of inertia when it comes to big companies. It is hard to move from traditional structures to something new especially when there are a lot of power dynamics and politics involved in large organizations, especially when everything has to be measured and summed up into a number. We often miss the stories and the long-term strategy of building bridges and relationships for the short-term actions that will yield certain financial results.

DesignOps is a profession that is maturing as we speak. What do we do with all the information that we have? As I mentioned in the beginning, this report was done to set a baseline and understand the profession better. It was a selfish, if you will, act to learn what other teams are doing, where are they focusing most, what are their challenges, and then apply that knowledge to do my job better. So you can do that too. If you are starting in the profession, you now know how much you should ask for, when they ask you the dreaded salary question. If you are starting the practice within an existing design team, you have a basis of areas you should focus on, and where the impact of DesignOps lie with. If you are a seasoned professional you can check notes with what other leaders and teams are doing, and see if you need to change something in your own work, or simply pat yourself in the back and congratulate your team for doing awesome things!

To summarise what we discussed during this time with me, DesignOps is a role that has a lot of maturity within it. DesignOps teams are Small, even teams of one at many cases, but their impact is big. When it comes to functions of DesignOps, communications, systems & knowledge sharing, are key. The future is remote. The role becomes more relevant than before. However professionals still long for a bigger impact in decision making.

Thank you so much for staying with me through this journey. If you want to grab a copy of the report you can visit DesignOps.Report and download it for free. You can also subscribe to the mailing list that you will find on the website, if you want to be notified when the next report will start for 2022. We wish to reach a bigger audience to have a more holistic view. So you should be part of it. And help us with your insight.

Feel free to reach me in Slack and connect with me on Twitter or Linkedin and let’s keep the discussion going. Have a wonderful program ahead, I leave you in the good hands of Meredith Black and Tim Gilligan discussing the state of DesignOps with Bria! Thank you!