Scaling Design Operations
A large-scale enterprise team, growing fast, with design work that took a week to reach engineering. Establishing DesignOps practices — not more headcount — closed the gap.
The problem
Union Pacific's product team was scaling fast, but the handoff between design and engineering hadn't scaled with it. Designs sat in review longer than they needed to. Engineers waited on specs that weren't quite ready. Leadership had limited visibility into where design work actually stood at any given moment — not because the work wasn't happening, but because there was no shared operating model for it.
This wasn't a design-quality problem. It was an operations problem — and it needed a designer who could think in systems, not just screens.
Starting with discovery workshops
Before proposing a new process, I ran discovery workshops with designers, engineers, and stakeholders to map how work actually moved today — where it stalled, where duplicate effort crept in, and where decisions were being re-litigated because nobody had a clear source of truth.
The alignment sessions surfaced a pattern familiar from every design system I've built: the tooling wasn't the real gap. The shared understanding of process, ownership, and readiness was.
Building the operating model
What changed
- Clear definition-of-ready criteria before a design entered handoff
- Documented component states and specs living in one Figma library with tokens
- A standard review cadence instead of ad-hoc, one-off requests
- Shared handoff checklist adopted by every design–engineering pair
Why it worked
- Rules were co-designed with engineering, not imposed on them
- Governance lived with the system, so it stayed current as products evolved
- Leadership got a visible, shared view of design status without extra meetings
- The model was documented once and reused across teams
"Leadership in DesignOps isn't about controlling the process — it's about making the invisible parts of design work visible enough for everyone to trust it."
Leading the change, not just designing it
This work meant leading, not just contributing: facilitating alignment across design and engineering leadership, governing the enterprise Figma library with tokens that the new process depended on, and holding the operating model accountable as the team scaled — the same discipline behind design systems I've built at Citibanamex and Cisco, applied to how the work itself gets done.