Design Operations
How I Built a High-Impact Design Operations team that Increased Efficiency, Cross-Team Collaboration, and ROI for the digital product organisation.
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The Challenge
As we scaled the product transformation across digital, we saw that bigger teams & scope led to mis-alignment, friction and a lack of peer-support across product x design x tech functions.
My challenge was to build a design-ops pillar with the goal of making sure design teams operated with efficiency, consistency, and strategic alignment across a fast-paced, complex organization.
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My Role
Launching DesignOps required a business-first approach to secure executive buy-in and align teams across design, product, and engineering. My key responsibilities:
Building the Business Case – Proved ROI by demonstrating cost savings and increased design impact.
Securing Stakeholder Buy-In – Partnered with leadership to embed DesignOps into business objectives.
Aligning Brand & Business Units – Ensured DesignOps met the needs of both product and marketing teams.
Establishing Operational Structures – Defined governance, funding, and team models for scalable growth.
Embedding DesignOps into Strategy – Positioned operational excellence as a core pillar of Adidas’ digital transformation.
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The Results
✅ 40% faster design-to-development handovers, accelerating product launches.
✅ 80% adoption of the design system, improving digital consistency.
✅ Improved alignment, reducing revisions and increasing speed-to-market.
✅ Secured long-term investment in DesignOps as a foundational function.
✅ Boosted designer productivity by removing operational roadblocks.
✅ Created a scalable framework for global expansion.
Design System
We started by developing a centralised Design System, ensuring front-end consistency, efficiency, and scalability across digital experiences. This includes:
Component Libraries – Standardized UI elements that enhance speed and maintainability.
Guidelines & Documentation – Clear design principles, accessibility standards, and best practices.
Tokenization & Theming – Centralized variables for colors, typography, and UI behaviors.
Cross-Team Governance – Collaboration between product, engineering, and design to evolve the system while maintaining coherence.
Workflow & tooling
We brought product owners, UX & Ui designers, developers to identify pain-points in their workflow. From there we were able to co-create new processes, rituals and tools, allowing teams to focus on creativity and impact rather than operational friction. This pillar covers:
Project Intake & Prioritization – Streamlined request processes to align design work with business objectives.
Tooling & Automation – Leveraging Figma, Jira, Notion, and AI-powered solutions to reduce manual overhead.
Handover & Collaboration – Improving designer-developer workflows to enhance speed and accuracy.
Design Review & QA – Ensuring quality through structured critique sessions and validation processes
Business Operations & Strategy
As we began to scale it was important to make track our progress and ensure we were maximising our ROI for the team. As a result I created the business ops pillar, which is accountable for the budget & tracking of the team. key activities included:
Budget & Resource Planning – Forecasting needs for hiring, tooling, and external partnerships.
Vendor Management - Developing a pool of external partners & freelancers.
Impact Measurement – Defining KPIs such as time-to-market, conversion impact, and design ROI.
Stakeholder Alignment – Ensuring executive buy-in and integrating design into broader company goals.
Scaling & Governance – Establishing frameworks to support design team growth and evolution.
User Research & Insights
Providing a data-driven approach that ensures design decisions are informed by real user needs and business insights. This includes:
User Research – Running qualitative and quantitative research to uncover pain points and opportunities.
Data-Driven Decision Making – Integrating analytics and A/B testing to validate design impact.
Feedback Loops – Establishing mechanisms for ongoing learning from users, internal teams, and market trends.
Competitive Benchmarking – Tracking industry trends to keep design practices cutting-edge.
Culture & Community
A strong design culture fosters engagement, creativity, and long-term retention of top talent. This pillar includes:
Team Growth & Learning – Upskilling through mentorship, workshops, and training programs.
Cross-Functional Collaboration – Creating bridges between design, product, and engineering teams.
Community & Knowledge Sharing – Hosting design critiques, showcases, and documentation hubs.
Diversity & Inclusion – Ensuring diverse perspectives are represented in design work and team structures.
