How can DesignOps shift from managing tasks to delivering real business value? What are the levels of influence, metrics, and factors that can support DesignOps’ maturity within the organisation?
Understanding the roles and responsibilities of DesignOps through different styles of management and Levels of influence.
As design Operations as a discipline evolves and matures, there is a shift in the perception and expectations.
Today it would be reductive to think about DesignOps as a discipline focused on design execution and outputs.
In fact today, as J. Coronado says, DesignOps is becoming a business strategy function (here) where DesignOps plays a crucial role in influencing companies and driving real impact.
DesignOps is shifting from an output-based focus to an outcome-driven role, emphasizing tangible business impact through strategic synergies and cross-functional collaboration.
This shift from focusing on outputs to outcomes is essential for positioning the role effectively. This change enables DesignOps to drive innovation and achieve business results through efficiencies and strategic management. This shift also means that DesignOps is not about delivering artefacts like pixels or buttons. Instead, it’s focused on business results, improving efficiencies, enhancing team satisfaction, creating savings, and developing effective cross-functional engagement models.
To achieve this vision is important to recognise DesignOps’ sphere of influence and identify the stages, influencers, tasks and metrics that shape the discipline’s perception and maturity across the organisation.
The premise: the relationship between Design and DesignOps
As DesignOpe emerged, new dynamics are happening in the Design leadership and management domains. As discussed, Design and DesignOps, are closely linked and complementary disciplines. While Design is externally focused, aiming to define product and experience strategies that drive innovation and maintain a competitive edge, DesignOps has an internal focus, building the essential infrastructure and processes to support these strategies and prevent operational inefficiencies.
A successful collaboration between Design and DesignOps leaders is key. Their alignment ensures that the external and internal efforts complement each other, effectively managing relationships, processes, and operational models to maximise overall success.
Nothing compromises DesignOps’ ability to influence and scale teams and impact than a misalignment between Design and DesignOps.
This misalignment often leads to failures and is characterised by recurrent issues:
Lack of a DesignOps Vision and Strategy: DesignOps may lack a clearly articulated strategy with a quantifiable definition of success metrics.Reactive DeignOps approach: DesignOps may become a tactical, reactive role, focused on solving immediate problems rather than driving transformational initiatives.Poor Communication: Ineffective communication with the design leadership can damage DesignOps’ credibility and create conflicting narratives that lead to inefficiencies.
Although a successful collaboration between Design and DesignOps leaders is essential, this partnership alone is not sufficient and a lot of the responsibility of the DesignOps practice relies on the DesignOps leader’s ability to drive engagement, influence in different directions, and drive tangible business results. And a successful DesignOps practice operates at multiple levels, managing relationships in various directions (more on managing directions here):
Downward: Oversee daily tactical operations for the design team, covering all disciplines like User research, Product Design, Service Design, Content Design, Localisation, UI, and Visual Design.Laterally: Coordinate cross-functional engagement and streamline operations across different teams.Upward: Drive transformational initiatives that deliver significant business benefits and enable flexibility and innovation through ambidexterity.
This multi-level approach ensures that DesignOps effectively supports both tactical and strategic objectives.
Managing downward: Focusing on the Design team
The initial focus of a DesignOps practitioner is to ensure the design team operates efficiently and effectively, delivering the design strategy smoothly.
This is DesignOps’ tactical dimension, where DesignOps ensures that the Design team has the necessary skills, expertise, tools, templates, and resources to work effectively and execute the Design strategy seamlessly.
While the overall operational strategy is set by the DesignOps leader, Design Program Managers (DPMs) handle daily tasks. They manage licenses and contracts, oversee third-party vendors, review planning and resource allocations, monitor spending, coordinate rituals, and track team progress.
At this stage, DesignOps focuses on creating the operational foundation for the design team. This involves establishing best practices f to ensure efficiency and effectiveness.
At this stage, the key team metrics and Design KPIs to monitor include:
Team Happiness: Metrics like eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score), job satisfaction scores, and team satisfaction scores.Productivity scores: metrics that focus on improvements in output due to better processes and tools.Predictability variance: Measures how accurately project timelines and outcomes align with initial estimates.Effectiveness: Metrics like the return on investment (ROI) for tools.
This is often the starting point for every DesignOps team.
At this stage, typically handled by a team of one, the focus is on setting up essential processes and tools.
It reflects early awareness and foundational maturity in the role and although basic, this stage is crucial because it lays the groundwork for more advanced DesignOps practices.
Managing Laterally: Focusing on the cross-functional partners
Design is inherently a cross-functional discipline that needs to build and maintain strong relationships with key partners, like Product, Engineering, and Marketing. To make collaboration easier and more effective, Design Operations needs to define and implement engagement models that simplify collaboration and communication between all teams involved to help integrate different perspectives, improving the known issues and preventing new ones from emerging.
At this level, DesignOps operates at a Functional leadership level to manage cross-functional interactions and streamline team collaborations. The DesignOps leader plays a key role in overseeing how changes in one team’s operations impact other teams and processes.
At this level, DesignOps needs to apply a systemic approach (more here). This means having a broad understanding of different functions and establishing strong connections with cross-functional partners.
Managing laterally involves extending influence to key stakeholders who support Design and its strategy both directly and indirectly, such as Finance, Procurement, HR, Legal, IT, and Security.
The strength of these relationships impacts directly DesignOps’ ability to effectively execute the Design strategy.
At this level, the DesignOps leader owns and orchestrates relationships and engagement models, building the foundation for a broader business impact. Key metrics and success at this stage include:
Stakeholder CSAT: Evaluates the effectiveness of interactions with stakeholders / functional leaders from relevant departments like Product, Engineering, and Marketing.Operational Efficiency: Effectiveness of streamlined processes and request management.Cross-functional CSAT: measures the satisfaction from cross-functional teams regarding design collaboration.Cross-functional CES: Measures the ease of interaction between design and other teams
This stage represents a more mature and growing phase where DesignOps operates at a functional leader level to ensure that all the cross-functional operational models are effective and enable a seamless execution.
At this level, a small team of DPMs typically handles the day-to-day tasks, allowing the Design leader to focus on the overall vision and building key relationships.
Upward managing: Influencing and transforming the business
Success for DesignOps is achieved when an operational strategy not only empowers functional leadership but also impacts the entire organisation, drawing C-executives’ attention to drive a deeper transformation.
DesignOps reaches its highest maturity when it successfully defines and gains support for a company-wide transformational program. This proves that DesignOps is more than a design-related discipline; it’s a design-thinking-led approach to enterprise agility.
A systemic and strategic approach to DesignOps it is possible and it can transform and innovate the entire organisation, not just Design or Product teams.
At this stage, strong DesignOps leadership or a dedicated team is essential. Influencing executives requires crafting a compelling story and understanding the business vision, strategy, and goals to identify the right opportunities.
What does this mean in practice? Here’s a practical example:
Starting in June 2025, companies operating in Europe need to comply with the European Accessibility Act (EAA). In a SaaS company, the DesignOps leader steps in, recognising both the significant impact of this regulation and the crucial role that design plays in ensuring digital products are accessible and compliant.
The DesignOps leader assesses the benefits and risks and then develops an 18-month cross-functional program. This program aligns design, product, engineering, sales, and marketing teams to create accessible assets and experiences across all touchpoints and products.
To ensure success, the program must be communicated and supported by top executives.
The DesignOps leader is instrumental in demonstrating the program’s business impact, securing executive buy-in, and acquiring the necessary resources and support.
This example highlights how DesignOps can drive significant transformation and innovation within an organisation beyond the Design and the Product organisations: by applying design thinking to focus on user-centered solutions and systems thinking to coordinate various teams and processes (more here and here), Design Operation can redesign the company’s operational model and approach to product inclusion.
At this stage the metrics are business metrics focusing on value streams tangible impact:
C-Executive Engagement Rate: Percentage of C-level executives who actively participate in DesignOps meetings or initiatives.Incremental Revenue: Additional revenue generated as a direct result of DesignOps initiatives or product improvementsROI from Design Improvements: Measure of the return generated from investments in design improvements.Cost Savings from Design Improvements: Reduction in costs due to more efficient design and development processes.
This is the most advanced stage, where DesignOps evolves from a team into a well-established practice with members specialising in various roles and areas. At this level, DesignOps has proven its influence and become a fully mature, strategic discipline.
Conclusions
These three dimensions of influence — downward, upward, and lateral management — are essential and interconnected in how DesignOps evolves and matures within an organisation.
The effectiveness of DesignOps in demonstrating its value determines its progression from a tactical role (downward management) to a strategic and transformational leadership position.
This evolution enables DesignOps to support the organisation in achieving greater agility, which is especially crucial during volatile periods when operational models need to be continuously adapted to meet market demands and internal capacities.
Understanding the steps, sphere of influence, and direction can help practitioners to define their journey and career progression in new ways, focusing on their impact and the value they generate for the organisation, because ultimately, as J. Fukuda says:
We’ll know we’ve succeeded when we can stop making territorial claims over skill-area-specific ops and share an aligned continuous design and continuous integration operations framework.
The 3 dimensions of DesignOps: from tasks to transformational impact was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
