Designing the Designer’s Journey: Scaling Teams, Culture, and Growth Through DesignOps

DesignOps isn’t just about scaling teams—it’s about scaling experiences too. This talk explores how we designed an intentional, end-to-end designer journey that helped our design org grow fast without sacrificing culture, clarity, or connection.

Over the past few years, we faced the intense challenge of adapting to aggressive, continuous scaling. As our design org at Commencis grew rapidly—from a humble team to over 70 Designers and Researchers—it became clear that headcount and tooling alone weren’t enough. So I collaborated with lots of stakeholders to produce our process diagrams, templates, artifacts for our design org, as well as frameworks, guidelines, and rituals. And right now, we have a sane leadership, nearly happy team members, and again nearly well-organized processes and documentation.

You’ll hear real-life examples—from co-created processes to meaningful rituals and systems that helped us scale fast and stay human. This talk is for DesignOps leaders, team builders, and anyone designing for sustainable org growth in a remote-first world.