Design Ops Handbook

Six chapters on running a design organisation. How work arrives, who it goes to, how it gets into the system, how what you learn is kept, how it is reviewed, and what is worth reporting.

Chapter 01
Design Request Intake & Governance
How design support is requested, evaluated, prioritized and assigned. This framework replaces ad-hoc requests with a transparent pipeline that protects designer focus and maps capacity to the work that matters most.
6 sections
Chapter 02
Team Topology & Staffing Models
How the design org is shaped, who reports where, and how many designers you actually need. This chapter argues for one answer: a small central core that owns the system and the craft bar, with designers embedded in the squads that ship.
6 sections
Chapter 03
Design System Contribution
How work gets into the library, and what it has to clear on the way. A system only the systems team can change becomes a bottleneck and then a graveyard. A system anyone can change without a bar becomes a junk drawer. This is the path between those.
6 sections
Chapter 04
Research & Insight Operations
Research rarely fails because the study was bad. It fails because six months later nobody can find what it said. Insight ops exists so that what you learn compounds instead of evaporating.
6 sections
Chapter 05
Rituals, Critique & Reviews
Most design orgs have too many meetings and not enough feedback. That is not a contradiction. It happens because three different things all get called critique, and running them as one makes all three worse.
6 sections
Chapter 06
Metrics & Reporting
Design metrics fail when they are built to prove that design was worth it. They work when they answer a question leadership was already asking. This chapter is about the difference.
6 sections