What This Means
Design Ops isn't about making designers more efficient — it's about removing the operational friction that prevents them from doing high-value work. I build process frameworks that reduce costs, streamline workflows, and ensure your design function scales without burning out talent.
How I Approach It
- Audit existing workflows to identify bottlenecks, redundancies, and low-value activities
- Design process frameworks that reduce handoff friction between design, product, and engineering
- Implement resource allocation models that match capacity with demand, preventing overcommitment
- Establish tooling standards and workflows that reduce context-switching and improve collaboration
- Build operational dashboards that surface capacity, velocity, and output metrics for leadership visibility
When You Need This
- Your design team is constantly overcommitted but output doesn't match effort
- Designers spend more time on process overhead than actual design work
- You're scaling the team but efficiency is declining, not improving
- Cross-functional handoffs are slow, unclear, or require constant rework
- Leadership lacks visibility into design capacity, timelines, or output quality
Challenges Expected
- Resistance from teams comfortable with existing workflows, even when those workflows are demonstrably inefficient
- Misalignment between design, product, and engineering on what "done" means at each handoff point
- Tooling fragmentation where teams have adopted different tools organically, creating integration gaps
- Lack of baseline metrics, making it difficult to measure improvement without first establishing what "current state" actually looks like
- Stakeholder expectations that operational change delivers immediate results, when sustainable process improvement requires iterative adoption
- Balancing standardisation with the flexibility designers need to do creative work without feeling constrained by process
Expected Outcomes
- Streamlined workflows that reduce time spent on low-value activities
- Clear resource allocation models that prevent overcommitment and burnout
- Improved cross-functional collaboration through standardised processes and handoffs
- Operational visibility into design capacity, velocity, and quality metrics
- A scalable design function that maintains quality as the team grows
What I Bring To This
At Johnson Controls, I restructured design operations for a 39-person global team delivering the OpenBlue platform. I developed strategic alignment processes that cut operational costs by 85%, improved handover quality between design and engineering, and eliminated 40% of non-valuable work through research-led prioritisation. The team went from being a service function to a recognised strategic partner embedded in product roadmap planning.
At SwissRe, I restructured workflows across a 14-member EMEA design team, embedding UX strategy directly into business objective planning. I drove adoption of systematic usability testing protocols that decreased user-reported bugs by 50% and support tickets by 30%, while implementing structured review gates that caught defects before they reached production.
I founded DesignOps Aligned to bring this operational discipline to organisations that need it. I also hold PRINCE2 Agile and PMI-ACP certifications, grounding design operations work in formal programme management methodology rather than ad hoc process improvement.