My guest today is Adam Fry Pierce who is the Chief of Staff at Google where he manages strategic programs for Google's UX leadership. Interview Video: https://youtu.be/Gj7zbrM0NFE In this episode, we discuss the following: - Adam Fry Pierce bio - Career transition from event management to Design Ops - Downside of being a gifted people reader - Horror story - not being able to read people/situations - What is Design Operations (Design Ops)? - What does a Design Ops professional do? - More job opportunities in practice operations vs people operations - Is design experience required to break into Design Ops? - Top 3 skills to be a successful design ops professional - Career progression in Design Ops - Salary/compensation on Design Ops - Job security in Design Ops - How to break into Design Ops - Questions to ask during Design Ops job interviews - Future proofing yourself as a designer - End state for Design Ops leaders - How to get in touch with Adam Fry Pierce - How Adam Fry Pierce joined the core team at DesignOps Assembly For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show
Adam Fry-Pierce is a career long community builder and design operator. He is currently the Chief of Staff at Google where he manages strategic programs for Google's UX leadership. Previously he was leading DesignOps at DocuSign, and involved in Design Education programs at InVision. Adam has a non-linear career and has had multiple businesses over the years: a conference company, a designops agency, a media company, and even a restaurant. He's also an active partner in one of the largest designops communities (if not the largest) in the world: The DesignOps Assembly.
INTERVIEW VIDEO:
https://youtu.be/Gj7zbrM0NFE
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Namaste and welcome. I am Jayneil Dalal and you are listening to the design MBA which is a real-life MBA program for designers. You will learn how to launch a side hustle and level up your design careers from the interviews rock star designers.
Jayneil Dalal: Thank you to everyone who is listening or watching this episode because today's amazing guest is Adam Fry Pierce. So, who is Adam? Adam is a career-long community builder and design operator. He is currently the chief of staff at Google where he manages strategic programs for Google's UX leadership. Adam has a non-linear career and has had multiple businesses over the years – a conference company, a design ops agency, a media company, and even a restaurant. He is also an active partner of one of the largest design ops communities, if not the largest in the world, the Design Ops Assembly.
Adam, thank you so much and welcome to the show.
Adam Fry Pierce: Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Jayneil: I know, dude. Dude, I cannot tell you like I’m … I was actually … so, the whole … I’ve been traveling for the past one month. I started with Mexico. Then I went to Detroit, then went to San Francisco, then Austin, then Tennessee and then I’m back in Dallas. And yesterday night, I was “I think I’m so tired, I hope I recover in time to make it to this interview.” So, I’m so glad just to be here fully recovered.
Adam: You made it. You made very strange travel …
Jayneil: I know. Part of it was business. Part of it was just fun. So, we're just super excited to just be here and … and I know this is something I wanted for a while and I know we had scheduling conflicts. So, I’m just super happy that we're finally here. And for everyone who's wondering, one thing I’ll say is be persistent, be persistent. Magical things will happen.
Adam: Yeah, we found each other. Yeah, we got here.
Jayneil: So, dude, you have been working in areas that deal with talking to people, managing events and stuff. Talk to me about this. You've been doing this for a while.
Adam: Yeah. I mean are you talking about design ops in general or kind of my story or where do you want me to start?
Jayneil: Like even your story, even before design ops, you were running your conference, you were running a media company. I’m assuming that has a lot to do with putting up events and organizing things for people or meeting people in general or talking to them.
Adam: Yeah. You mentioned events twice there. So, I’m curious are you correlating events into design ops or why are you hitting on events? What are you trying to learn there?
Jayneil: Well, I guess, the thing I’m kind of curious about is, to me, it seems like when I look at your career, even before design ops to design ops, to me, when I look at your trajectory, I look at the events yeah.
Adam: Yeah.
Jayneil: It's like you were doing design ops even before it was a thing.
Adam: Sure.
Jayneil: That's just the vibe I’m getting.
Adam: Yeah. So, my career started in events. Even before I went to college, I was organizing concerts and stuff for me and my buddies. I don't know why. It's just … it's probably … it probably comes from I really like being around people. I’m probably an ambivert but that wasn't always the case. I was like a hardcore extrovert for a long time. So, if I could go out hang out with my buddies, that's great. If I can hang out with my buddies’ buddies, even better. So, yeah, I found myself organizing events when I was really young. I grew up playing some music, if you can see from the background, and started playing concerts and stuff, just neighborhood stuff. And it kind of started there. And so, when I got to college, it's the same thing like “How do I find my people?” And I just went to the center place in the university that was organizing all the major events and I started volunteering when I was a freshman, eventually became the major concert concerts programmer for the university. And that led to a whole lot of other stuff. So, I probably kept going back to events because it was a thing that I knew could help bring people together. It’s like there was always these moments, whether it's a company or community thing, but everyone typically gets together at these things and we call those events and I really thought that that was really cool to actually organize those things. So, yeah, that's carried forward all the way to now where I’m still organizing stuff with the Design Ops Assembly and stuff at Google. Yeah, this is just kind of my go-to.
Jayneil: And this is really mind-blowing. You're saying that you've been always fascinated by doing things that involve people. And to me, it means that if you're dealing so much with people, would it be fair to say that one needs to have a high amount of emotional intelligence? So, were you always emotionally intelligent, I would say, or is that something you just picked up along the way?
Adam: Yeah.
Jayneil: Because I’ve struggled with it a lot.
Adam: I think reading people and EQ, it's something that I was born with a natural strength for. I have plenty other weaknesses. There's not a whole lot of things that are naturally strong to me. I’ve had to develop a lot of my skills over the years but that one, meeting people, I would say, for a while was both a superpower and a kryptonite. I probably cared too much about what people thought, whether it's about me or about other people. And so, it was a super power and a total weakness but yeah, over time, I’ve learned how to harness it a little bit. It's still something that I’m still trying to figure out how to get better at. I would say that carries through to something which is something I’ve had a hard time doing for a long time is saying no because I’m also kind of a bit of a people pleaser. So, those two things, I think, are really closely correlated, right, is having to understand when I should be saying no versus saying yes and also just naturally kind of being in tune with what people are feeling even if their words maybe contradict that. .
Jayneil: I come from the opposite of spectrum. Last year, this main year, my active focus is just getting better at being more emotionally intelligent. I’ll tell you a short story, just a quick fun fact. So, I was at this event and the head of design is coming in and I’m at this hotel where the whole thing is happening, right? And this head of design walks in and I’m so excited that “Hey, I this is an opportunity.” In my head, it's like an opportunity to just chat with this person and build a connection and the whole nine yards that I talked to this person and they're talking to me and I’m just trying to continue the conversation and this friend of mine next to me literally drags me away, I’m saying, like physically drags me away and then he's like “Dude, did you see that person's face? They're exhausted. They had their bag next to them, which means they came from the airport and they want to check into the room and relax and you're trying to strike up this conversation. And I get what you're doing.” So, that's why I asked you that question because … I’m getting better at it but definitely if I’d met you in person earlier in the year or last year, I would have definitely struggled with like if you had said to me, and I’m passing, that “Hey, Jayneil, I probably got to run in a bit,” I just would have kind of ignored it, not in a bad way but it's just I would have been so obsessed about trying to build a relationship with you that I’d forget everything else.
Adam:Yeah, I think a lot of us naturally have blinders on, right, when we want to do a thing in the world. I mean, humans just aren't rational actors, right? We've been put in a point, get out the thing that we're anticipating, there's so much stuff going on in the background, how many open tabs that they've got going on at any given time, let alone that they're even looking at the one that I’m looking at, right? We all just have stuff that's on our mind all times. So, yeah, just trying to kind of take off the blinders before we start our conversations generally helped.
Jayneil: I feel like … and this is my guess again. I’m not in design ops. So, I’m probably leaning more on you. This is where I’m trying to get your expertise on this. To me, it seems like if someone wants to pursue a career in design ops, having moderate to a little bit above average amount of people reading skills or emotional intelligence would be important. And the reason I say that is because when I look at design ops, it's also design but it's designed for enabling other designers. So, for example, if you're a traditional designer, that's more about “Let me create that app. Let me create this amazing visual.” It's more about the actual design work but when I think about design ops, to me, it's “How can we design something that enables other designers at scale, whether that's a process, whether that's an event you're talking about.” What is your take on that?
Adam: Yeah. Unpack the question a bit more. So, you're asking … are you asking kind of at the core of design ops or … what's the question?
Jayneil: So, to me … so, it's just two-part. One is, to me, I feel design ops is more about designing that enables people. Would it be fair to say that instead of designing apps and stuff, it's more “How can I design something that enables other designers?”
Adam: Yeah, I think … we'll stop there. So, what design ops to me is, is everything that requires design to work at scale or maybe not even at scale but design to work in a business, right, since that's where most of us are in design. If I’m a team of one, it probably doesn't matter as much about codifying my design language or my design process because really however you get from idea to the thing that users are going to use and that's going to help the business, really doesn't matter, right? The efficiencies in there that if I’m again a team of one, if I’m freelancing, things I can generally do to up my billable rates because I’m spending way less time to get to it as long as I’m not charging hourly but as teams grow and as more people get into that ecosystem of like how does a product get made here, how do we design, the necessity for systems for codified language, all of these things require design to work well at scale. One, that gets to be harder because there's more people, there's more systems, there's more tools, there's more stuff, right? So, all of these components have to agree with each other is more important. And then, because generally we're dealing with people, everyone has different working styles too. So, it's not just about finding an efficient way of doing things. It's about finding the efficient way that works for a particular company within that particular context of time, right? So, it's not like we can build up the systems for like “How do we design here?” and then it's done and it's a playbook and it's minted and it's published for everyone to self-service forever. The reality is organizations change over time and how we end up designing is, yes, can be looked at kind of on these large waypoints, let's say, like every year we kind of figure out how we should standardize our design operations within a company but there's also a continuous way of looking at that as well, right? So, getting really close to the system is just part of it. That's kind of what we've been hampering on is “What's the actual act of designing?” We call that practice operations. There's a whole separate side of design operations, all about like organizations, people support, how do we recruit, know what the actual employee cycle here. There's all these different components of what this means. And, again, at a small team, some of the stuff just happen in the background and it doesn't really require a whole lot of active attention to it unless it's mission critical, unless it's really slowing you down but all of these things matter the larger that you get. And so, that's why you see in a small agency you might have a few producers doing design operations work and at a place like Google, you'll have hundreds of people who are doing this stuff because there's just … there's full-time jobs for certain components of design operations such as like …
Jayneil: What might those functions be, just to get an idea? Let's say if I’m a design ops professional at a Fortune 500 company, what are some of the tasks that you could describe that or design ops person would do, doesn't matter the seniority level, just to kind of get an idea?
Adam: So, what I to do is I like to take design ops as kind of it's … it's a large umbrella. Underneath it, I think that there's two sides of it - practice operations and org operations. Practice operations has to do with the actual work of design, how can we optimize the efficiency and efficacy of that craft, right? And for a long time, to your earlier point, there's been a lot of tension on the actual craft of design, let's say, like the pixel level of designing but as far as how do we codify our language and how do we make sure that PMs know how to work with us, engineers and how to work with us, that our design process is embedded in the larger product development, work all at the right exact times, all that stuff. That's kind of on practice ops as it has to do with the actual way that we are designing products within an organization. Within that is typically things design program management or in an agency, this is called design production, right? And that's kind of where the entire craft started. It’s like you have a design producer in a squad or a product team and they're really just making sure that everyone's hitting their goals on time and their … at the design function of that squad. So, that's kind of a very specific sample on the practice op side of around some of the day-to-day. Now, you're probably opening up … they're managing all the tickets, they're making sure that everything is written the right way and that the hose is not kinked up anywhere. And if it is, they are typically … typically, if the hose is kinked up, it's like a people problem, right? So, that producer will actually go talk to the people to make sure that it can get unkinked. If it's a system thing, they can deal with that too.
Jayneil: And I’ve worked with a design producer like that. They would basically set up all the meetings, what do you call, the ceremonies with the engineers, with the product managers, everything, basically such that only thing I needed to worry about was just going on my Figma and doing my designs.
Adam: Yeah, exactly.
Jayneil: Everything else like the communication, everything else that was related to that communication ceremonies, giving out updates, getting new timelines, getting meetings set up, everything was just handled by the senior design producer that we had and all I could just focus on at that point thankfully was just doing the design.
Adam: Yeah, you hit probably a more simple point which is a better place to go to, honestly. I think it was 2019-2020 Workday famously came out with a state of the industry report and they had … something like 60% of a designer's time was spent doing non-design tasks. There's tons of reports out there like this. So, pick your one but it should … the whole point is designers are doing a lot of non-design activities because it's just the necessity – booking meetings, changing stuff around … if we have a specialist to work on those things on the operations of design, then the designer can actually worry about doing their function, the thing that they've been training their entire life to do really, really well. So, it's just the entire idea of specialty. I think the nerd word for it is Taylorism just to take a scientific approach and get them into business. So, now we have a specialist to do that stuff so that it doesn't just totally burn out our designer. And that's only on the practice ops side. The same idea goes on the org ops side. So, to give you more specifics on that side, it's things that generally lean more towards leadership support, so chief of staff … I would actually bucket over an org ops which is like how are we supporting leadership … there's people and culture components as well. We talked about hiring, firing, onboarding, what's our employee experience program. Typically, that's owned by HR to find that it's actually better if a design ops person is informing that because designers are a little unique as to how we're recruited and retained at a company. And then how does the entire organization come together to stay informed? Is that a newsletter? Do we do AMAs, fireside panel events, the internal events for what creates our ability to create our culture together. That's also … it should be led by somebody. And right now, they're real hot conversation like “Should that be the design ops’ job or is that the leader’s job?” To be honest, it doesn't really matter who's doing it as long as somebody is very specifically tagged with driving responsibility.
Jayneil: The way I look at it when I look at the two sides, the practice side of things in design ops and then the org side of things, if I may, to me, it seems like if someone's looking to transition into design ops, they would probably start out first in a more Junior role on the practice side of things and then maybe the people in the org side. Leadership would be someone way more seasoned like you. Would that be a fair statement?
Adam: Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. I think there's just more entry points or lateral transition points over into production for a lot of reasons. One is there's reason why most of the practice started on that side, right? That is the low-hanging fruit for business needs because building products is incredibly hard and the squad model is theoretically … there's book written about it, there's all sorts of pictures and blogs about it but it's still very difficult to create like a really well-balanced product team or a really high effective squad. So, that makes a lot of … there's typically a business case for a producer. It's a little harder to make a business case on things that are just harder to track, let alone tag attribution to my energy points as an employee and things how satisfied are designers here. That's a really big problem that there's probably never a silver bullet answer to solve for but to your point, it probably takes a little bit more experience. It helps if there's somebody that has a little bit more cycles that they've seen the ups and downs of an economy and they've kind of seen … they've been into company working and just seen what does expansion look like, what does contraction look like and how do we get a good place to work in all those different environments. So, I wouldn't say that like more experience equals a better org ops leader but it probably helps to lean on more context so that you can make more informed decisions. So, yeah, that's probably why we just see more entry level roles on the design production side, on the practice ops side versus people operations, junior or something like that.
Jayneil: So, I’m trying to think about like someone's listening to this or someone's watching this and they're like “You know what? I think I’m kind of curious about this design ops. I wonder if I should pursue a career in it.” And then I’m just going to throw a bunch of questions. They're not a rapid fire but just kind of try to put myself in their shoes and think about what questions they might have.
Adam: Sure.
Jayneil: So, the first question would be “Do I have to be previously a designer like a practicing designer or have done some design to even consider a career in design ops?”
Adam: No. I was not a product designer. There's a lot of design ops folks that … I think, to your earlier point that you were starting to tease out, there's a lot of people that come from events. I’m one of them. I had a … I wouldn't call it a failed time but a really short time designing in a producer role. I was just a very slow designer. Our direction was okay, it wasn't great, but yeah, I can argue that I came from design but I really didn't. I came from systems and org and events previously to that. So, there's a ton of folks that I know just me as well who didn't come from design. There's also … I would say that half of the industry come from that side and they just like … the different challenge of designing in a design org is really cool, right? To be able to come in and solve all the pain points that they have felt as designer … so, I think that motivates for a lot of good reasons designers that maybe just looking for something new but for everyone who's kind of like me, design's also been that one of those functions I’ve always looked at and I’m like “Damn! Those are the cool kids.” It's just like … very interesting people here and they all seem pretty human. In my previous life, I came from suits and ties and a little bit of kind of wearing a mask into work and some of that exists in corporate America, right? Everywhere … corporate wherever … but it's less so here. And it's much more of just humans identifying as humans and identifying as they generally like making things that people use and design is a great craft for that. So, no, I think you get a lot of different shapes and sizes of backgrounds of who becomes a design operator. To no surprise, knowing about the craft of design is a huge advantage. So, of course, you're going to see more of those people kind of get through one of those first filters which is finding a place for them to actually do a good value exchange between their skills and the discipline but then there's other people me … I think of Taylor Oliver who's head of design ops at Instacart, very outspoken. She is not a designer and she found design ops because she likes the people, she loves the industry and she wants to be able to help.
Jayneil: So, you don't have to be a Figma expert like the most advanced Figma designer.
Adam: No, no, not at all. Plenty of people don't understand the tools here. Again, it's going to be an advantage to all these things, right? But, yeah, you don't need to come from design.
Jayneil: In terms of personalities, for example, I have some friends who are accountants, and then when you want to go in that field, you have to be very laser focused, you got to love numbers, you got to be getting into Excel sheets. Those are things that are required if you want to be an accountant. That's what I’ve … got the vibe when I talked to my accountant friends. So, if someone's considering a career in design ops, what are some personalities or some traits that you would say they should think about if they have that or not because if they have that, it would just make their life in this field much more easier.
Adam: Yeah, I’d say it comes down to three critical skills that if you don't have them to consider developing them or take a free course online and just see if it's interesting to you. One of them is systems thinking. Everything that you're going to be … the problem spaces you're going to be thrown at are very rarely on an individual level. Yes, sometimes there's just some therapists that comes with the job. We'll talk about that in a second but most the time, for you to actually say “I have a hypothesis on an area of the business that we can improve. And you measure your XYZ. If we do X, it's going to cost Y and we're going to get Z” which everything boils down to that and that's really ultimately where you're reporting your radars on, has to do something like that. systems thinking is typically going to be the thing that is required to do all that stuff well. Number two is going to be how much do you like working with people. This is not … you can't just get in a closed-up room and do your job well. A lot of this job has to do with actually supporting the craft itself, which means getting to know people at a pretty … I wouldn't say like … you just have to get to know them fairly well, right?
Jayneil: Like talking to them, getting feedback from them.
Adam: Yes, these are your users. So, you have to understand them front to back. You have to understand them from a quantitative standpoint meaning like to be able to understand the data on things like surveys, whether that's GLINT surveys or satisfaction surveys but there's that side of it but there's also the quality side. It's just spending time with these folks.
Jayneil: So, you have to be a decent listener somewhat like hearing what they're saying.
Adam: Yeah, yeah. I’d say it's just like don't necessarily love people but if you don't like people, this probably isn't the job for you, right? You have to at least be neutral. So, systems thinking …
Jayneil: You can't go in your silo just to design thing. That's why you're saying that because you can't just suddenly go into your silo and just work on your artifact and not talk to people and just come out.
Adam: Correct, yes. Systems thinking, general … I don't know what you want to call it … just people, you have to generally like people. And the third is, not to use a design term, but the idea of design thinking, just the general double diamond of divergence and convergence, helps you just relate more with your people of who you're servicing but also, that way of problem solving is just going to … it's going to help you here quite in terms of figuring out how to size your thinking. So, if I find, let's say, in one of those two buckets, either systems problem that I can go solve for or a really large people problem that I have to solve for and applying the design thinking approach into anything in there is going to be huge advantage for me. Even using that language that's buried within design thinking frameworks to present the problems and then get buy-in on those problems and then just kind of formulate my entire approach, it's going to help. Having those three things, I think, are a great starting point and you don't need to … you don't necessarily need to be a great systems thinker to start but doing some study in there would help. You don't have to be a certified design thinker to start but going to take IBM's free course right now is not a bad place to start. Knowing people, you kind of just listen to your gut if this is for you or not, even just when I say those words. That's more of a binary gate.
Jayneil: Yeah. So, I totally get the part about you got to somewhat enjoy working with people, listening to them, getting feedback from them but in the first and third part you talked about systems thinking, design thinking. I’m going to try to just use layman terms and just for a second … I may be inaccurate. I might be just bouncing off of but just bear with me. Would it be fair to say this person has to somewhat love processes, creating processes and thinking about “How this process that I can create can help remove the roadblocks for designers?” Would that be a very vague way of putting it in some way like living structure and processes and stuff?
Adam: The word ‘love’ kind of scares me a little bit because I know some phenomenal program managers and design operators who are … they will say right away like “I hate process.” It's the P word. They're allergic to it. So, there are really successful … I know this might be a little confusing. Let me throw out a few other words and then the point is, is that you can triangulate as a professional on some of these things and probably find a niche to do really well and it might have nothing to do with process. So, here's some of the skills. And I just pulled … I’m looking over the screen. We teach these courses in the design ops assembly called Printing Labs. This is a crowd-sourced bucket of tags that all of our students have used to describe … some of them are established leaders by the way, some are emerging and some are new to the field but here are some of the top texts. (inaudible) thinking, strategic thinking, design thinking, service design, persuasion, communication, facilitation, project management, program management, systems thinking and collaboration. Those are the big tags that everyone goes to. So, on the practice ops side of things or on the org ops side, there's always processes that can be improved. So, to answer your question, yeah, there is a total flavor of professionals within design ops who, if you love process, there are so many problems that you're going to be able to solve for at companies. If you don't like process though, you can probably still have a huge impact on a team because there are other things that can help you codify a language that have nothing to do with process or intake or efficiency stuff. Those are broadly going to be around efficacy, right, how well is something being done. Sometimes that can be a processor-led thing and sometimes it's not.
Jayneil: And I love how you phrase it. You're saying that … and I think I’m going to start using this more. You said that you don't have to love it, let's not use the L-word, but you have to be neutral about it. So, if someone really just, I’m going to use a strong word, hate process or even setting up a process or … I’ve met people like that that are just, oh my God! They will run away 100 miles if you say that you got to set up some kind of framework process and they just hate it. I guess and that's something to think about like can they get to a neutral point where they still can somewhat work with it or set it up.
Adam:I’ve worked with plenty of design leaders, by the way, who are like “Don't ever say the P-word here.” It's just … it's one of those things, it’s like “Okay, I won't say process. I’ll say workflow. We're talking about the same thing.” There is … even if it's non-linear, we start a thing and then we end it. I would call that process. There are waypoints we're getting through. So, to that point, kind of a secondary related to all this, we mentioned a whole lot of the critical skills, change management is probably the most invisible but important dimension to be good at this job because everything you do, not just like laying down the hammer, like a new playbook or a process. That's the easy part. The harder part is getting people to adopt it.
Jayneil: Oh my God!
Adam: And so, that's everything to this job. And I would argue that's probably the same thing for a design leader more broadly but for design operators, it's less about like documenting their current state so much as saying “We have all agreed that there is a to-be state that we're trying to get to. And I’ve figured out, I’ve kind of stabilized where we are now, built all these systems, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but we all want to make a better place. So, what's my specific function in making that happen?”
Jayneil: And to get people to adopt this new way of working or making this change, as I said, the change management, it again involves working with people, listening to them, if they're not implementing or doing this change, kind of figuring out, talking to them why, what's going on, what can be better.
Adam: Yeah.
Jayneil: I see your point.
Adam: Yeah. I’d say that's been my trick, right? Because I’ve … again, I felt like an outsider for a really long time and in many respects I still do but my secret weapon, because … just a little bit natural to me is just to find friends in wherever I’m trying to go to, someone who's already there, and getting them to share their story, their successes, their tactics. So, I’ll often lean on people that are smarter than me or better than me or maybe they emulate a model success or a place that we're trying to get to and I’ll just try and invite them in to just share some of the of their stories to how they got there. And then a lot of people will be able to find like a real-world example or they'll be able to hook into that experience a lot better than I will be able to help them in some abstract fuzzy place of like “Yeah, we want to get to this.” Even if we have really clear objective and key result … initiatives, having a story, something that people can relate to is way more powerful, in my opinion. I’ve seen a lot more people resonate with their colleague's stories than they have and some flag on top of a mountain that a leader throws down.
Jayneil: Something I’m curious about … no, that's just amazing. I’m just kind of thinking about now that for designers usually the path is you have a junior designer and a senior designer, then you can either choose to stay on the craft and you kind of go the individual contributor route or you go into management. So, it's kind of like from there either you become a manager or a staff designer, then do principal from manager to director. So, those are like your standard designer career path. And I’m kind of wondering what does that career path or trajectory look like for someone just starting out or thinking of transitioning to design ops? What would that career path be for them?
Adam: Yeah. So, let's take latter since that's kind of how you're framing it. There's probably seven or maybe eight different levels on the IC path. You can go anywhere from let's say junior producer which you're probably going to be starting off in actual practice operations. So, that's your entry level role. There's not a ton of them out there for org ops side. Sometimes there are and they might be framed as like junior specialists but then there's the actual, let's call it, L2 would be kind of that true producer roles. L3 would then be a more senior role where you take on not just central team’s production velocity and maybe efficiencies and efficacies but you're starting to work on like multiple teams. That'd be a step up. Maybe you're … or you're producing a much more strategically important team that's more complex in nature. Tons of examples out there. Just think of any huge product. I can't talk about Google on here. So, let's take Bing like Bing Search. That's a very complicated product. And I imagine it has a lot of different producers on there. The next layer up would …
Jayneil: Who even uses Bing?
Adam: Next layer up would probably be more like portfolio support and that's where you're probably like the top end of actual IC work. And then where you probably bounce from there is going to be managing other design program managers, other design producers. There's really only two more, maybe three more rungs as to … depends on how you slice it. Then you kind of go into practice leadership. So, how am I actually managing the entire operations muscle? That's kind of where it ends usually. Sometimes, though, there's another elevated version of this. I’ll give a very specific example. Zillow, they've got a VP of design operations. Super rare. I think there's got to be less than 10 of these in the world right now but at that level, something has changed which is not only are you working on these two things that I’ve talked about a lot, efficiencies, efficacies, you're starting to work on like a third bucket for what ops can do for the entire practice, which is how can we through an operational lens become a strategic partner to all the other design teams. If you can do that well, your ops practice is actually going to be quite a bit more mature than all the other ops practices out there but you're probably a lot more defensible because at that layer, you're actually … you're finding a way to stand out compared to let's say the top companies that are compensating top 10% of comp bands around the world. Let's say you're at a company that maybe is only offering 70%. So, that was in the 90%. You're down to 70. You're saying “As a design ops team, we are actually doing things that are allowing us to recruit employees with a shorter time to hire, retain more employees to keep them there longer.” It's a big question like “What's the value proposition? Why are people staying there?” Compensation matters. It's not everything and a company would start to realize that the ops team was actually making it happen. Great examples are things flexible tooling strategies. Designers love their tools. Some people attribute a poor tool stack is the reason why they leave a company. More often than not it's actually cross-functional partnerships. So, cross-functional partnerships is an amazing thread that we should probably save for a whole another show or for somebody else who can speak to it more confidently. The reason why I bring up cross-functional partnerships is design operations is typically … not typically, but when it's done well, they have a full-on strategy to really make that cross-functional partnership a value proposition, a strength for a team versus top frustration, which we know from a lot of state of reports, industry benchmarking reports that cross-functional partnerships is really difficult. So, if you can get up to that L7 that VP level of a design ops leader, you're probably not just crushing it on efficiencies, on efficacies but you're also starting to kind of figure out what the cutting edge of the practice is so that you can make the design team just a better place to work. Very few people have figured out how to do that. That's kind of why I think that design ops is kind of the darling child of the design industry right now is because more people are starting to not only figure this out, tell the story really, really loudly. The reason I’m even able to reference Zillow is because they're committed to not only up-leveling their design organization through design ops specifically but to tell that story on their blogs, at conferences and stuff like that.
Jayneil: Wow! So, let's talk about some numbers. So, for example … I’m based in Dallas, Texas. And I’m just throwing out rough ballparks. I mean, the actual number might vary but if there's a junior designer just breaking in, I think they can expect somewhere around $70,000 starting salary. If they become a bit senior, you're looking a 100,000 or more. And then it kind of goes up from there. So, if someone's just breaking into let's say the practice side of design ops, probably more likely entry point for most individuals, what salary numbers can they even expect, just rough ballpark, very rough, rough high?
Adam: Yeah, kind of tough because it really depends on where they are in the world. I would say more than anything it depends on where you are in the world and the company size that you're at. Those are …
Jayneil: Let's say a Fortune 500 company in the US, a big company, 100, 200 designers probably most likely.
Adam: Okay. Yeah, let's place it up in like three different levels in this hypothetical. Let's take San Francisco. 100 people. That means you probably have … let's give a very specific example. If there's 100 design operators and you're operating on your typical ratios of 1 to 20 … I have a team of five … three of them might be producers, one of them might be managing the producers and then one of them might be a chief of staff, head of design ops. Let's take those producers for a second. They're probably going to be oscillating somewhere between 110 and 160 depending on … because they might not all be at the exact level … 110 to 160. Let's say it's somewhere in there. For a manager of them, probably like 160 to 190. And then the head of design ops, low 200s. The larger the practice, the more levels that you get and there's probably more maturity and pay parity between the design ops function and product ops or TPMs.
Jayneil: Are you saying the base pay?
Adam: Base, yes. Yeah. Well, now I’m talking kind of total take-home comp.
Jayneil: Okay. I was just making sure.
Adam: I will say I know that there are a non-insignificant amount of design operators who are making in the high sixes, if not breaking a mill. I know this because I’ve seen these surveys
Jayneil: Wait.
Adam: Yes.
Jayneil: Breaking a mill.
Adam: It is not … this is …
Jayneil: This is not an error. Oh my God!
Adam: This can be a very well-paid industry.
Jayneil: Wow!
Adam: I had seen those numbers about a year ago and that's really what changed my perspective. It's also all over the place. You can also get really specific. For one that's listening, go to the state of design ops report. I think it's designed … if you just Google “state of design ops report”, it has the exact salary breakdowns that are in there. It's mostly between the United States and Europe but that 110 to 160 number, a lot of folks in the west agree and can identify with those numbers. I think very few people understand what the top-end outliers are and they're there and they are pretty substantial. I know for sure that there's at least 10 teams that have leaders that are making more than half a million every year and I think that this is also a very … I think it's a much bigger number than we realize because the people that are answering these surveys are typically not the folks from any of the top paying comps. I’ve seen the back-end numbers of them and I’m surprised by the companies that are reporting those numbers, if that makes sense, because I’m like “Oh, where is …” I don't even want to say them on here but we know …
Jayneil: Yes.
Adam: The ones that are always referenced is top of the market and those were not the ones that were reporting those numbers. So …
Jayneil: Yes.
Adam: Maybe there are dozens of teams of design ops leaders that I just don't know about that are bringing home crazy money but seeing that gave me a lot of hope because I’ve come from typically smaller teams, my own businesses. I was surprised by it. I was shocked by it, honestly.
Jayneil: What about job opportunity and just security? And what I mean by that is as a designer, I know that there's so many designer roles out there … I’m just talking about individual contributor roles. There's probably staff designer, senior designer somewhere and I know that “Okay, if something were to happen, touchwood it doesn't, I can always go for an interview and get a job.” So, given that the number of design ops folks at a company might be lesser than the actual number of designers, how do you view the job security perspective or the amount of jobs out there?
Adam: Yeah, it's a great question. And I don't have a crystal ball. So, it's kind of tough to say how secure the industry is a decade from now. This also might be like … it might be some transient, if that makes sense. The entire industry is transitioning and we don't know which jobs are going to be fete out by tech … by better technology in the future. So, let's take over the next five years, I would say high confidence for a few reasons. One, no design is generally just by … and demand is still growing and we can see that from almost every aspect. We hear it from HR that they can't find enough good talent out there. We hear from design leaders who say “We can't find enough good designers out there.” We also look at maturity reports that are out there whether it's the New Design Frontier, it's a little outdated, but McKenzie … we look at all these maturity reports and we do see teams are ever so slightly attracting from the low levels of maturity to mid maturity and we still see that a small minority of teams are of high maturity. Why does that matter? The entire correlation of maturity, all that really means is business value, meaning if I’m a company and I’m investing into this muscle of design, and I’ll get to design ops in a second but this is really important, I know what I’m getting out of it, right? What we've seen everywhere is that companies continue to invest more into this practice because it's yielding better business results. As long as that trend continues, there's going to be another truth which is almost … none of these design leaders went to school, got their MBAs, that they understand operations at scale. So, they're going to hire specialists to do those roles. Probably for the next decade, this is going to be a high in-demand role. The caveat to that is that there's probably not a whole lot of junior roles. We don't see a ton of them now. I’m not sure if we're going to see a ton of them in the future. I have my reasons and it's all speculation. So, there's probably no point talking about it but what we do know is that there are not a whole lot of junior design ops roles out there. Why? It's because most …
Jayneil: It’s the hardest one to break in.
Adam: Typically, a lateral jump within a company. We hear a lot of stories where there are no design ops teams but people are doing this with their 20% of their time or companies have all sorts of different programs to allow for innovation. We see a lot of designers will take on problems that pains them to be able to do a job well and that turns into a job later. That's a very common entry point. It's just like doing these activities and then making a job, a business case to actually turn that into job. What I will find is we can … we should stop there because a lot of people don't know how to do that. And if they did, if they found template, for example, maybe the design MBA can create one, it might actually see a bit more of a conversion from side of this work into full-time stuff. People like it and all they're really missing out on is “How do I bring this as a business case?” which we are approached about a lot in the Design Ops Assembly for help on that stuff. So, we do a lot of one-to-one coaching on that specific dimension. I’m curious how much that's out there but that's a lateral way to get in. Another way …
Jayneil: Let me stop right there. So, you're saying that … you're an active partner in Design Ops Assembly and you're saying that at Design Ops Assembly, a lot of folks who are looking to make a lateral move, you coach them and help them get there. How can they find out more information about it? They just can contact you or they just go to the Design Ops Assembly website?
Adam: Yeah, I’d say just get in. We don't have like an official program there's. We're not selling anything. It's just a problem that we know that people are trying to figure out is “How do I turn this into a business case?” and there's not a lot of Medium blogs out there for that. So, I would say just jump into the DOA, DesignOpsAssembly.com, request to join the Slack. Once you're in the Slack, all of the basic channels you get dropped into. They're all great spots to just ask that question and someone generally will help. Back to your other question of …
Jayneil: And it's free to join the community?
Adam: Yeah, yeah, totally free. Just jump on it. I don't know there might be a future when we charge for certain aspect membership. We try to keep this thing open for as long as we can. So, I’d say just jump in. I’ll shorten the answer but I really want to touch how do you actually get in here. You can create … one is create your own … essentially your own job. If you're already at a company and this doesn't exist, go in and pitch this to your leader and you can just figure out very specific aspects of the job. Now, you're going to do design ops for everything, you're going to approach just one very specific problem whether it's production or people ops or whatever. Another one is just go talk to design ops leaders. Literally go into LinkedIn and just search heads of design ops and find some time with them and just … let's say you want to go work for a specific company. Go talk to that design ops leader. Most teams right now are increasing budget and head count. We know this from the last state of design ops report that we just did. Budgets are increasing. Head counts are increasing. Jobs don't always get hosted publicly or at least in an easy to find place. So, I would say just organically go find it. And the third one is just set up keyword searches on Google, for example, and just get notified anytime that a new design operations program manager or design production job gets posted. It could be one of those four or design ops specialist. So, those are my piece of advice, those three roads.
Jayneil: In terms of breaking in. Totally makes sense. What questions … I’m trying to figure out. So, usually, everyone has some sort of factors like, for example, as a designer, when I’m interviewing different companies, one of the things I look for is how involved is that design team in the community or if their head of design is involved in the community. That's just a metric that I look for. I’m not saying that's the way to look for. That's one thing I look for. I ask questions to kind of gauge basically how mature the design practice here. Do they have a head of design there, a VP of design? Just trying to get some ideas. So, what questions would you recommend that folks who are looking to break into the design ops industry kind of ask the companies they're targeting just to kind of gauge how mature the design ops practice is?
Adam: Yeah. I think an easy one is how do you measure design operation success at your company. That answer will tell you so much like “We don't.” Okay, there's opportunity to help” or “We do and we measure by X.” What that does … if they say no, it tells me a whole story about the maturity probably … they might be like a complicated team in a decentralized model doing all these things but they might be a reactive team. What I’m really interested in is a proactive team, so an organization that has figured out what to say yes to and what to say no to. To me, that says that they have a strategy, that they've slowed down and said “The type of team that we want to be, the type of team that we've agreed to be right now, the type of team that we're expanding in to be.” If I can ask that single question of how to measure the success of your organization, it tells me so much stuff. If no, a lot of opportunity, probably like a fairly low maturity. If yes, it also tells me the thing that they're measuring because that's the thing that the business is probably tracking their success on. And if it's something that's not a bandy metric, that's really exciting. If it's several things, if they have a dashboard like “Here's how we're assessing the health of our practice operations by these figures and we're assessing the health of our people operations with these figures,” that's really exciting to me. So, I can jump in and that's probably on the cutting edge of the entire ops practice. Very few teams I think could answer that in a comprehensive way because the things that keep … I’ve been on the inside of organizations where I couldn't say yes because I didn't have a strong relationship with product or I didn't have a strong relationship with data. So, I couldn't pull … if I can say yes and I have these dashboards, that's so exciting because then I’m in a place where I can really jump in and actually push the edges of the field a little bit because I really firmly believe that this is totally early days. Not to be too Amazonian but it does feel like it's day one, maybe day two tops just because the entire craft of design is going to get far more complicated next few years with AI. And I ask this question all the time which is what is the design ops leader’s role when we automate so much or we partner more with machine learning to create things that users want. It's a really cool world to be in. And so, trying to future proof my job to figure out how can I be in a valuable position in that world whether it's 10 years down the line, 25, I want to be part of that discussion. So, I’m trying to figure out what are general buckets that are going to be involved there but back to your main question. Most teams aren't measuring success at all. So, tons of work to be done there.
Jayneil: My eyes lit up when you said feature proofing my job because that's something I’m always obsessed about having gone through so many layoffs in my career. My short answer to that is side hustles like hedging the bets.
Adam: Yeah, totally.
Jayneil: Because, in general, whether you're a designer or design ops, it doesn't matter. So, that's something that I try to do just to make sure that if something were to go down, there's diversified source of income, there's separate things going on just so that it doesn't impact me that drastically.
Adam: And the cool thing too is that there's tons of side hustles that design ops people can do that is going to make them stronger as design operators. Almost every single business that's out there has an operational component to them. And it's like we talked a lot about efficiencies and efficacies. That's all within the context of designing or design orgs. Those two things happen in businesses everywhere. You can start up a side hustle and try and get better at certain skills that we mentioned, any of those big tags, and just apply to side hustle and you're going to be strong as a result. I know it's worked for me too because I used to be a pretty big generalist and those side hustles helped me find my specialty for sure.
Jayneil: Wow! Dude, I’m getting this epiphany and I want your gut check on it if this is right or wrong but it's almost like if you're in design ops, you're almost kind of learning on the ground how to be a chief operating officer because you're doing a lot of things at once. And that skill could translate to joining a startup or a business where you're kind of just managing a lot of things, something like what a CEO does.
Adam: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I’ve asked this question to a bunch of other design ops leaders like “Where do you want your … what's the end state?” and there's two typical responses … three typical responses. One of them is the fork of like owning their own agency and their own thing. That's great because all these skills are going to help them do that way better whether it's managing team or systems design. The other two are in-house and one of them is the route of the design leader, “I want to become the chief design officer.” Great. This is one way to get there. The other one, more rare and I’m kind of surprised that it's more rare, is it seems more obvious but it's exactly what you just said, it's like “Oh, I want to lead operations for the team. I want to lead product operations. I want to lead other operations.” And they use this as a way to get in deep into skill and to get some seniority and internal respect and then they lateral transfer over.
Jayneil: Wow! Damn!
Adam: It's cool.
Jayneil: I just love the insight bombs you just dropped. How can folks listening or watching this interview right now get in touch with you?
Adam: Yeah, I’m a bit quieter than I used to be but I still throw my thoughts out on Twitter. Sometimes it’s about crypto stuff. Sometimes it’s about ops stuff but, yeah, I’m @AdamFreyPierce on Twitter but the place where I’d love people to go and hang out with us is in the Design Ops Assembly. That's where we do a lot of, obviously, good stuff is we just kind of talk about things design operations. So, that's DesignOpsAssembly.com. It's free to join. Come in there. Join us. There's tons of stuff. If you want to like join any of our education programs, those are out there as well. So, this is something that you really want to learn more language about and partner up with coaches and stuff like that. We've got a good program for that. If you're a bit more self-serviced, the design ops Slack that we have is pretty huge and it's really active. It was really helpful for me before I was a partner. I was just a participant and I was trying to figure out kind this modern chapter that we're in of design ops and I would say it cut my learning maybe by a full year.
Jayneil: How did you do that?
Adam: I just …
Jayneil: How did that happen? So, you were a participant. From participant to becoming an active partner in that side of things, that business, how did that happen? You just volunteered, told them that “Hey, I love what you're doing and I can help out” or …
Adam: Well, yeah, this kind of goes back to something you said earlier, which is another way of future proofing your job with side hustles, right? I’ve always had side hustles. Sometimes they were my main hustle but over the last few years, as I’ve been in this chapter where I’ve really had this in-house focus because that's my day job, I still have had a few things on the side. I hit a point during the pandemic where I had four things going on and it was crushing me. So, I stopped doing pretty much all the ones that didn't have any value to them and I had some extra time and I knew that I was making this much more aggressive path into design operations. I’d done some internal soul searching about what was important to me. And I knew Meredith and Elise. They're the co-founders. And I saw their business and I just had this simple question which is “Hey, are you interested in monetizing so that we can get more funds to make this thing even bigger?” And I’d done other community businesses in the past and that was usually my focus was like trying to figure out partnerships, how to bring money in, something that didn't totally … throw an ad at the community and kind of make it all gross. My belief on sales and business development is if you're ever going to agree to a big new partnership, that actually is a good thing for everybody. So, I took that same philosophy for them. I think that there's plenty of partners out there that can help us make this a stronger community so that we can do things like certificates, creating a central language like books and reports, all these things that we know that support us as practitioners. And I was a little surprised they said “Yeah, go ahead and create the business case for us.” And so, I did that. I actually have a mural file that I walked them through and they said “Yes, totally.” And if you fast forward on that, that was only a year ago. And we're now a revenue generating business and we take all that money and we put it right back into our community mission which is standardizing our practice. So, that's … and we think education is a huge part of it because there are people … there are teams that are hiring design ops professionals and they're using different words for the same exact op - design ops, des ops, d-ops, design operations. There's 50 words to talk about the same thing. And what we're trying to make this easier on everybody.
Jayneil: Adam, just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom.
Adam: Thanks, man. Yeah, I’m not sure how wise it was but it was fun talking. So, thank you for having me.
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