DesignOps Handbook
By Kate Battles, Meredith Black, Dave Malouf, Collin Whitehead, and Gregg Bernstein (editor)
The DesignOps Handbook is a comprehensive guide to operationalizing design at scale, drawing on the firsthand experiences of industry veterans who have built and evolved DesignOps practices at companies like Pinterest, Facebook, Airbnb, and Atlassian. The book explores how organizations can support growing design teams through strategic planning, improved workflows, and effective tooling. Readers will gain insight into how to manage headcount, develop onboarding practices, support cross-functional collaboration, and cultivate a culture of craft and consistency across product teams.
The authors—Kate Battles, Meredith Black, Dave Malouf, and Collin Whitehead—bring deep expertise from roles leading design operations at major tech companies. Their guidance is backed by real-world examples and interviews with design leaders who have successfully implemented DesignOps frameworks. The DesignOps Handbook is an essential resource for anyone seeking to build better design teams and products in complex, fast-moving environments.
Length: 80 pages
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What’s in the DesignOps Handbook
Introducing DesignOps
Dave Malouf explains how DesignOps keep design aligned with the business and give designers more focus.
DesignOps scenerios and models
Collin Whitehead shares signs it’s time to operationalize and covers models to use when assembling a team.
Putting DesignOps into play
Meredith Black guides you through getting buy-in, starting, staffing, and hiring a DesignOps team.
Team coordination
Kate Battles explores how to socialize DesignOps and establish strong cross-functional partnerships.
ResearchOps
Dave Malouf walks through the people, business, and workflow considerations that make up ResearchOps.
Subscribe and get the entire library
When you become a Premium subscriber, not only will you get Principles of Product Design, you’ll also get our entire library of books that cover a range of essential topics and are written by top industry experts.
DesignOps Handbook: Written by DesignOps pioneers, this book is the essential guide to improving your team’s core operations so designers can focus on what they love most—design.
Design Thinking Handbook: informed by the Stanford methodology, this book provides the foundation for innovation and product design exploration.
Designing for Emotion: Learn how to design products that inspire trust, overcome user fears, and create lasting impressions with this classic that’s inspired teams at The White House, Intuit, Google, and more.
Design Systems Handbook: Learn to design, deploy, and drive adoption of a design system in your organization with this book written by experts from Github, Salesforce, Pinterest, Etsy, and Shopify.
Principles of Product Design: There is a proven recipe for making great products, and this book lays it all out with real-world examples of the best design teams.
About the authors
Meredith Black
Meredith Black is a Design Operations Consultant working with companies worldwide on implementing DesignOps within their design organizations.
Prior, Meredith spent five years at Pinterest where she started and grew the DesignOps practice into an internationally renowned team while also being instrumental in growing and building the Design team. She is also the co-founder of the international community, DesignOps Assembly.
Kate Battles
Kate Battles leads DesignOps for Fitbit at Google. Previously, she was a program manager for Frog Design. She has more than 15 years experience in the DesignOps space.
Collin Whitehead
Collin Whitehead is the VP of design at Grammarly. Formerly, he was the Director of Central Design at Dropbox. In this role he leads the Design Systems, Content Design, Brand Studio, Design Operations and Brand Marketing groups.
Dave Malouf
Dave Malouf is a distinguished UX Designer in Design Operations, Chief of Staff at Walmart. He is a specialist in Design Operations with over 25 years experience designing and leading in digital services.
Gregg Bernstein
Gregg Bernstein is a user experience research leader and the author of Research Practice: Perspectives from UX researchers in a changing field. He is a staff UX researcher at Medium.
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