The Softer Side of Design Operations

Designers do their best work when they feel safe enough to do it.

Design is emotional work.

We ask designers to put something of themselves into what they make, expose it to critique, defend their thinking without becoming defensive, let go of ideas they love, navigate ambiguity and disagreement, and then come back the next day ready to create again.

It takes a toll.

I believe one of my responsibilities as a design leader is to create an environment where people feel safe enough to take risks, ask questions, disagree, admit when they don't know something, and make mistakes without fear.

That doesn't mean making work comfortable all the time. Great creative teams challenge each other, and tactical conflict makes great work. It means separating the challenge of the work from a person's sense of belonging on the team.

When people feel emotionally safe, they can spend their energy solving hard problems instead of protecting themselves.

I manage the whole person.

My 1:1s have never been limited to project status.

I want to know how someone is doing. Where they're struggling. What they're excited about. Whether they're getting what they need from me and from the team. What they want to become next.

Sometimes the most useful thing I can do as a manager is coach. Sometimes it's listen. Sometimes it's remove an obstacle, clarify an expectation, resolve a conflict, or step between a designer and organizational noise so they can concentrate on their work.

My goal isn't simply to help someone produce better design.

I want the people I manage to leave my team more confident in their abilities, more capable of advocating for their ideas, better able to navigate conflict and critique, and with a greater sense of emotional intelligence than when they arrived.

Safety requires clarity.

Psychological safety isn't the absence of accountability. I think clarity is one of the ways we create it.

People should know what is expected of them, how they're doing, where they need to grow, and what growth looks like.

At JOOR, I created a formal skills matrix and career ladder so designers could see a path forward rather than having advancement depend on an opaque conversation behind a closed door.

I established regular critique and collaborative JAM sessions, so feedback became part of how we worked, rather than something that only happened when something went wrong.

And I believe feedback should move in both directions. If I expect someone to hear difficult feedback from me, I need to be able to hear it from them.

Connection is part of the work.

Teams need structure. They also need humanity.

One of the smallest practices I've used is a voluntary two-word emotional check-in. Two words can tell you a surprising amount about what someone is carrying into a room.

I've also deliberately made room for play. Especially on distributed teams, a game, a laugh, or a few minutes together without an agenda can build relationships that make the harder conversations easier later.

None of this replaces good process.

It makes good process work better because the people inside that process trust one another.

Product leadership at the time had no interest in user research—they told me directly not to do any. I did guerrilla research under the radar anyway. When that person left in 2019, the work no longer had to stay hidden.

My job is to create the conditions.

I've built design practices from the ground up more than once. I've hired teams, created career paths, established critique practices, built design systems, introduced research operations, and developed the workflows that help teams move from opinion to evidence.

But operations aren't only systems, tools, templates, and meetings.

They're also the conditions in which people are being asked to do difficult creative work.

I want the people I lead to have clear expectations and room to experiment. Autonomy and support. Accountability and trust. A voice in the room and someone who will listen to it.

I can't do their best work for them.

I can help create the conditions in which they're able to do it.

What I built

With room to work in the open, I built what JOOR didn't have: a hiring process built around case study assignments, a design system (built twice — the second version fast, because the first did the groundwork), and a career ladder with a real skills matrix behind it.

Usability came next — simpler flows, less time training new clients, and working with product marketing so that communications didn't read like five different departments had written them.

The bigger shift came when I helped bring in a VP of Product Management who wanted the same things I did. Discovery got templated instead of improvised. We finally had the tooling to back it up: Pendo's tracking data and sentiment polls, plus Hotjar recordings, showed us what wasn't working. Maze let us experiment, test assumptions, and test new solutions before we shipped them. That's when Product Trios became real; one team reached an interview cadence where they recruited and spoke with customers every week.

One problem still needed its own project: the release process itself, which had been damaging the customer experience for years. [→ link to "When the Side-Hustle Becomes the Hustle" - coming soon]

By 2024, when I left, JOOR had what it didn't have when I walked in — a design practice, a way to hear from customers, and a way to know whether any of it actually worked.