Day 3–Today’s Design Ops and Programs Landscape & Career Paths
— Want to set intentions on what to focus on
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Clarity on landscape of DesignOps as it exists today versus what it should look like
— Reason is that this would be valuable for job seekers and looking to grow career and winining in the unique market of 2023
— Couple of inputs for this study
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100+ open roles in 2023, and analyzed them for similarities
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50+ DesignOps community member input
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4+ frameworks that existed to go into what is being shared
— Wanted baseline data to be consistent
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US and full-time roles chosen
— No specific guidelines to direct management of others and not different for design disciplines
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Common themes were “10 or more”
— Review of items
— So what does the current role landscape look like?
— Will start with topic of what’s in a name
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After looking at 100+ roles, what’s in title is not much
— More like Madlibs where every title and role can be swapped by something else
— DesignOps role titles don’t equal same scope, level, or tasks between companies
— Broad net needed to find titles we are looking for
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Need to look through job criteria listed as perfect fit, as the perfect job might be in a weird job title
— Top tools looked at
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Prototyping
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Project Management
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Research and Collaboration
— Experience these things, get into resume and LinkedIn
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Build knowledge through these tools
— Desired past experience and don’t equal 100%
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Lot of DesignOps seems to sit in one of two camps with DesignOps and other camp says project management is more important
— 28% DesignOps, 30% design, 40% project management, 14% product building experience, 10% prior comms expderience
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Not clear what is best skillset to have
— Think good team is mix of previous experiences to complement each other with perspectives and skills
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As building out team at scale, diversity will make team stronger
— First thing to note is that roles in field don’t have specialty and little bit of everything
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Speciality areas are design systems and research followed by gwoth, community and culture
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Culture and Community from more scaled teams built out
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Focused on key metric or business need
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— Common experience is 5+ in open roles
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10+ years
— There is a gap: No current open roles are looking for entry-level roles
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Exclusive to people joining field
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Experience request is interesting
— The jobs were US focused with most salary ranges between $140,000-270,000 of those listed
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Couple asterisk on these stats:
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Don’t state job desciption and salary range as well
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HCOL will pay more, and large companies will pay more
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Average can outline what you should be expecting
— Return to work policy is a hot topic
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59% on-site
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13% hybrid
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28% remote
— Remote roles will have key callouts for specific states
— Top locations for jobs were California, New York, Texas
— I also pulled out career ladder from market today
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Design Operations Lead
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Senior Lead
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Individual Contributor and People Manager
— Inconsistency of managers today and key terms to look for
— Came with hypothesis for DOPs and DPM roles is that program is being used two ways
— 1) Managing larger portfolio of products
— 2) Managing a program as opposed to a product
— Career ladder is not very different, but if you pick apart descriptions, hiring managers want operational role and program management access
— Majority of DOps are team and leveling of 1
— True market hiring today can look more like slide above and not hiring for the roles above
— So why aren’t there more of these roles?
— First, we have designers doing shape of work themselves,
- This is not just in DesignOps, but big tech and design are impacted
— This is also the first economic downturn that many DesignOps professionals have expereinced and it can be discouraging
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People in DOPs today didn’t have Great Recession experience, and only grasping the current downturn
— 34% of DOPs practicioners hadn’t entered the workforce until after Great Recession ended
— Second, the DesignOps space is still misunderstood
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Some companies building out functionality scale at strategic focus and delivery focus
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Others meanwhile, are focused on tactical delivery
— Third, DesignOps is in direct correlation to scale and level of UX maturity
— There was a NNG study where UX professionals ranked how mature their function was
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DesignOps at scale exists are more mature plane and helps evolve UX maturity
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Need foundation of value before DesignOps roles build out
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UX maturity improves and growth of roles as well
— So how do skills & capabilities map to current role and leveling expectations?
— Pulled all information into key core capabilities
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Process, practice, people
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As communication and resource type tools
— Pulled into Google Sheet shared with all of you, along with demonstrated behaviors
— Can use this Google Sheets by noting down capabilities and delivering independently and career tracker for design track before and field is truly still built uneven
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Since not built equally and rate self on each of categories
— Utilize this can build on this to make true career path for company and can add this for general market for where you are at
— Can write in evidence based examples that explains your impact and self-grade and bring manager in to monitor material
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Eye-opening as to what capabilities are and shape to market and more specific info with manager
— The sheet will be shared, but here is QR code for you to take a photo of at your leisure
— Input went into following
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2-3 case studies as baselines and if have 3-4 studies, it’s even better, personalize ones that fit best
— Structure stories using the STAR method and used it there
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Situation task action and result and how to perform outcomes
— Highlight core capabilities to understand work done before
— To answer the question above, you will need a portfolio
— Not final design output at end of day, but did lot of things that translated as artifact as Excel spreadsheet or project tracking tools and could be visual
— Can be aligned and implementing a kind of process and how it was articulated
— Another example is managing metrics and how brought to light
— Example of documentation from design system
— So a few messages to close out
— Sr. Leader friends, to help fill gaps in DesignOps careers
— Need entry level roles to keep growing field with newcomers
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Consistent titling and naming conventions and career ladder titles
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Realistic expectations years of experience
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Location flexibility where possible
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Silver lining of Covid, which opened this space up
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— To those struggling out there,
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There are practicioners than current roles
— But can look at Career Tracker sheet and think of gaps to fill and how to present info on LinkedIn and pivot to desired previous experience spaces to level yourself up in the market
— Thanks to those who sat down with me personally and fun study
