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What Is Design Operations? with Philip Rowe artwork

Time Limit podcast • 47 episodes

What Is Design Operations? with Philip Rowe

Philip Rowe, a UX program manager at Google, introduces design operations to Brett Harned: program management focused on design teams, sitting between product, engineering and UX. He describes how design sprints and release schedules fit together, the three-legged stool of product teams, what skills the role needs, how he keeps creative teams feeling supported, and how quarterly OKRs help him say no.

Key takeaways

  • Design ops is program management for design teams; PM skills matter more than deep design expertise, but you need comfort with creative work and ambiguity.
  • Product, engineering and UX must work as a three-legged stool, with cross-functional design sprints to diverge and converge on buildable solutions.
  • The design process is fitted into engineering's release schedule, a mostly waterfall frame with agile iteration inside it.
  • Keep tracking simple, celebrate wins, and reduce unknowns before design reviews so creative people can focus on the work.
  • Agree quarterly OKRs with leadership so new requests can be judged against agreed priorities.

About this episode

“Design Operations is tactical, it’s strategic design thinking, it's project management, but it's really this lens on combining business and design thinking to one role.”

A new role has been emerging in the tech and product space, and it’s one that looks a whole lot like project or program management but focuses on design. It’s called Design Operations, and it’s picking up a lot of steam, so you may have seen it rolled out in your organization or others. We wanted to dig in on the topic to explore what is design operations, what does someone in design operations do, and how does design operation help projects and teams?

That’s a lot of questions! Thankfully, Philip Rowe, a UX Program Manager at Google, joined us on the show to explain it all. With a experience working as a project manager and a UX designer, Philip is perfectly positioned to discuss the topic. He and Brett cover a lot of ground in the interview, including:

  • What is design operations?
  • How design operations works at Google
  • How teams interact with design operations folks
  • The skills needed to take on a design operations role
  • Design Thinking and other design-focused processes
  • Cultivating a healthy team culture
  • OKRs and how they’re used at Google

Resources mention in the interview: