Design operations beyond design: a recipe to consider
On toxic polarization, applying a tech industry role to a nonprofit, and the art of making stew.
This article is the second in a series that defines what I do as a consultant across art and tech. The first article you can read for free here on community strategy.
Toxic polarization may, in fact, be the United States’ downfall. Even when 86% of Americans believe we can actually improve our trust in one another, many of us find ourselves across binaries that suggest a second civil war.
Personally, I would love to avoid that outcome. One way can be (re-)tooling those willing to talk to someone they disagree with through facilitated dialogue. I’m talking about learning to ask questions of clarification as opposed to persuasion; monitoring knee-jerk nonverbal communication; decolonizing nonviolent communication; deep canvassing; crafting community agreements; and tactics that hold folks accountable to those agreements. Some of these tools are taught and offered to communities in five states (and counting) at Share Our America, an initiative from the organization that founded GivingTuesday.
After only two years, Share Our America has helped BIPOC students in Pennsylvania—and the law enforcement on their campus—redefine safety. It’s also built direct connections between previously incarcerated individuals and urban developers in Memphis, trained faith leaders to celebrate difference in a small town in Western Nebraska, and held space for LGBTQ+ organizers in Chattanooga to feel heard, align, and take action in their community.
Over the past year and a half, my consultancy DSCS has used an emerging field in tech called design operations (sometimes called design program management) to help scale their work to new states, new people, and new challenges. This included leading a full rebrand, quadrupling the team, rebuilding program tools, and advising on a four-year strategic plan to take the initiative from nearly a thousand today to 80,000 by 2027.
In this article, I’ll talk about what that field and work looks like, how it can be applied beyond tech and designers, and why it’s essential for nonprofits to implement in their own way. Turns out, it’s a lot like making stew.
Don Thy Apron
Several tech industry experts have their own takes, lenses, and data on what design ops is and means. To me, the recipe’s pretty straightforward:
1 part people management—supporting the designers and sometimes managers (product, program, or project) that visually craft a company’s product.
1 part platform management—refining and simplifying the systems and tools these people need to efficiently get their work done.
1 part storytelling management—the comms it takes to measure success, elevate wins, prove impact, forge allies, and unlock resources that all make the work easier to do.
Tech companies may weigh these three ingredients differently based on their own priorities, blind spots, team size, maturity of design system, and particularities of their product. It’s why design ops at Meta looks very different than design ops at Figma or Capital One. (Rosenfeld and DAO are a great resources if you want to lean more).
Permutations of design operations exist, too, all in varying degrees of “newness” to the tech world, from creative operations to research operations. And yet—here comes the hot take!—a lot of this industry is applicable beyond just design teams. In fact, design operations is applicable at nonprofits, artist studios, incubators, the publication industry, and many more. It may not even need to serve designers at all.
Sacrebleu! How could you!
Yes, I know. I’ve already raised eyebrows on the Design Ops Assembly Slack for this take. Can you really do design ops without a design team?
The question is fair: I come from Kickstarter, the art world, and a small staffed consultancy. I don’t come from Big Banks or Big Tech, where design teams have complex, nuanced, and unique problems that require solutions tailored just to designers.
And yet for many organizations like Share Our America—a small staff tackling a large problem—design ops works really well. In fact, I believe any org looking to scale their work should use design ops to frame up what they need to do and when they need to do it. It’s honestly just like making stew. Stew has just three core components: a broth, some ingredients, and the tools to cook and serve it in. What you put in it, how you cook it, and the flavor and texture can all be wildly different, but the same core components guide what you need to do and when you need to do it.
Proof in the Pudding—erm, Stew
Let’s go back to solving toxic polarization for a sec, shall we?
Share Our America hired my consultancy in late 2022, and for the past year and a half, we’ve worked on a few things:
Clean up, if not design from scratch, their program management systems
Audit program materials from one-pagers to pitch decks to website case studies to talk proposals—then re-write all of them
Lead a rebrand that builds geographic flexibility into the initiative’s name
Help stand up two new teams: the Field team and the Communications and Marketing team
You can see a lot of this work on the website now, as the rebrand debuted at the end of February 2024. Some people, you can imagine, have a hard time right now with the word “America,” so giving gathering leaders the flexibility to pick the geography that makes sense for them was essential. It’s built-in agency, ownership, and comfort for a initiative about bridging differences across racial, party, economic, and more divides.
Notice I used “design” up in my responsibilities as a verb. That’s intentional. I like to think of the “design” in “design operations” or “design program management” as a verb and not a noun or adjective. This way, my work applies to more than just designers, or a design system, or a rebrand. It applies to how people, platforms, and storytelling are designed, then actively designing them to be more efficient and inclusive.
This is the contentious issue at hand: whether design operations is strictly meant for design teams in the tech world or for anyone with a system that needs designing. Is it still stew if I’m using the same three components—people (ingredients), platforms (serving tools), storytelling (broth)—at a social impact nonprofit with no full time designers on staff? Let’s apply my recipe to the work:
1 part people management (ingredients)—I supported the part-time designers and the full-time managers to craft the “product” of Share Our America, which lives as a website, materials, and visual brand.
1 part platform management (cooking and serving tools)—I refined and simplified the systems and tools they needed to efficiently get their work done from a new Hubspot to a cleaned up Notion system library and Canva templates.
1 part storytelling management (broth)—I showed up as a stakeholder for the brand, the design of the brand, and the communication it will take to convince funders, partners, collaborators, and more to join the initiative and reduce toxic polarization.
From my perspective, this meant I used the framework of design operations at a social impact nonprofit.
If you disagree—and think design ops is only for designers—you’re artificially limiting your capacity to find work and advocates. And when design leaders in tech are witnessing layoffs day after day, now’s not really the time for the role to sell their work short. (It reminds me of my argument against specialization).
Coda: a ladle of leadership goes a long way
Thinking about solving problems through a design operations lens—who is tasked to design a solution to a problem, what tools they need to solve it, and how we can advocate for them—has opened my work up to clients from the arts to nonprofits to social impact. Organizers on the ground could use design leader’s expertise to make their work efficient, not just sufficient. Cash-strapped nonprofits need AI-generated workflow updates, collectives need best-in-class DEI protocols, and organizers in disability, environmental, and politics need resources to spin up strong brands and compelling websites.
The world’s on fire, and many of its solutions are unevenly distributed. Share Our America, for example, isn’t really reinventing the wheel that facilitates dialogue—it’s reinventing who gets access to the wheel.
The people and organizations working to build a more inclusive, progressive world could use a ladle of what tech’s been stewing (such as design operations), adapt them to their context, and unlock their ability to work faster and stronger. Design leaders—and tech workers in general—just need to look above the horizon.
If you have your own stew recipe, I’m collecting them for a *potential* cookbook in the future. Share ‘em with me! And if you’ve got a different take here, especially in regards to how design operations can be applied outside of design, I’m all ears.