Senior Design Ops Admin, UX Design/ Raleigh, NC
I’m a design operations administrator and I lead the DPO Design Tools team.
I always feel more awake and generally happier after biking into the office. I think the world would be a better place if more people were able to do that and I consider myself really fortunate to have that privilege.
At Red Hat, you really have to be able to defend any big changes you’re trying to make. We’re an agreeable bunch here, but we like to know that if we’re doing something, it’s for a good reason. That can sometimes be really useful because it exposes any shortcomings you might not have thought of on your own.
While I don’t do much design myself anymore, I follow the principles of transparency and communication when I’m documenting new processes or creating resources for the team.
We’ve made tooling changes over the last few years to make it easier to share ideas and information across teams at Red Hat. We still have some work to do on that front, but it’s much easier to collaborate than it was a couple years ago.
It is so easy to fall into thinking that your needs and experiences represent the whole. Designing along with other people who have different backgrounds and priorities isn’t just important, it’s necessary to create robust designs.
The design ops team provides the infrastructure that our design teams require to do their work. This ranges from purchasing and managing design and research software to setting standards for how we use project management tools. Previously this was managed in bits and pieces by multiple different people as side tasks to their regular design jobs, but now we make designers more successful by taking this stuff off their plates.
Open design means that any ideas you come up with are ones that everyone can benefit from and build upon.
