Where Does DesignOps Belong?
I am asked often where does DesignOps land in a design organization?
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 leadership and management. Whoever ends up leading the operations of the design practice should report to top leader of the design organization. If there is a a split between marketing designers and product designers, then this will complicate things, but there should be a single DesignOps team and this team, so whichever is the team with the most operational need should own the practice, but ideally the design teams should be unified under a single leader.
As Design Operations scales it will break out into different groups:
Delivery
Culture & People
BusinessOps
Platforms & Tools
The head of this group will eventually become the “Chief-of-Staff” to the head of the design organization.
Then the question is where does ResearchOps reside. In my mind it is the same thing, but reports to the head of Research. Research though either reports to the head of product or the head of design depending on philosophies and scope of “research” (i.e. does it also include market research and data analytics, or is it only user research). Whichever this is the head of ResearchOps and the head of DesignOps need to be close partners with each other regardless of structure.