DesignOps in Practice: Benefits and Examples

However, let’s first take a few steps back and start at the beginning. Imagine you’re using a weather app, but the colours don’t quite match across different screens, or the weather icons are inconsistent. In most cases, this is a clear sign that your design system is struggling (or that you actually need one).

Once introduced, the design can be laid out, and teams are much more aligned. QA isn't wasting time reporting different types of buttons that should serve the same purpose, developers aren't making up solutions on the fly, and designers aren’t wasting time going back to fix things. It’s a win-win for everyone.

While that paints a clear picture of the purpose of a design system, its implementation can still fall short, resulting in fragmented experiences, duplicated effort, inconsistent interfaces, slower delivery, and ultimately a loss of trust in the system itself. Ultimately, design systems only solve part of the problem. When it comes to organisational clarity and structure (especially as design teams scale across multiple products or business units), you need a dedicated function to align people, processes, and tools:

You need DesignOps.

Design systems vs DesignOps: what’s the difference?

A design system is a framework that documents all visual principles, component libraries, behavioural rules, methodologies, and code used across a product.

DesignOps is broader in scope. While it helps define tools and software that support design, it also includes the processes, guidelines, and meeting structures that define how designers work. In that sense, DesignOps sits alongside practices like DevOps and ResearchOps. While those focus on optimising infrastructure and workflows within their own disciplines, DesignOps focuses on how design teams work together and connect with the wider organisation.

But let’s forget about the theory for a moment and look at what that means in practice. When looking at different levels of design maturity within a company, some companies don’t even have designers. Developers get a briefing from a product owner and build the frontend themselves. Hard to believe in 2026, huh?

At the next level, you have dedicated UX/UI designers, but still no design system. It’s progress, but it’s not maturity yet. As organisations evolve, design systems become a given, earning designers a seat at the table, actively shaping product strategy and influencing how products grow. But there is a trade-off: alongside design, they now find themselves juggling alignment, documentation, governance, cross-team coordination, and, don’t forget: stakeholder management.

One issue companies at this level can run into is that their design system isn’t used as efficiently as it could be. Components might be detached and rebuilt instead of reused, designers might treat the system as a loose reference rather than a shared source of truth, or they might simply be utilising it differently from others.

Ultimately, you lack control over how the design system is used and how designers collaborate around it. It should be seen for what it is: a tool. And like any tool, it only creates value if people know how to use it properly – and this is where DesignOps comes in.

Every company has its own pains, needs, and goals. That’s why a design system can’t be copied and pasted. It has to be built intentionally. This is the point at which we need to start asking the important “how” questions. Depending on a company’s maturity, DesignOps responsibilities may be handled by designers themselves, or a dedicated DesignOps Manager may take on the operational work, protecting the team’s focus while still fully remaining a part of it.

DesignOps in action

One easy example where DesignOps really proves its value is when a new designer joins the team. At COBE, structured onboarding covers research, UX, UI, workflows, tools, and the design system, making it easy for new hires to integrate quickly and apply standards correctly.

A few years ago, this process was far less defined: onboarding took longer, confusion was common, and designers often recreated the same components. Today, clear guidelines drive better alignment, faster ramp-up, and more consistent design outcomes.

It’s similar with client projects. Thanks to DesignOps, we can bring our structured workflows and experience to the project. Even if it’s just one or two designers, they raise awareness of process improvements, design system issues, and better ways of working. Practically, this means every designer works with the same standards and workflows, both internally and on client projects. That consistency in quality directly benefits clients.

Let’s look at two of our projects. In our work with BMW, we fostered a user-centric mindset, highlighting its value through efficient, practical user testing. This means we defined roles, created frameworks, and conducted workshops to establish an optimised feedback system, enabling BMW to conduct its own research. In the end, we had interviews efficiently integrated into our regular workflow, a growing group of user testers, fewer iterations, and more valuable solutions. This is how DesignOps improves adoption.

Here’s another example. For Porsche Holding, which covers an ecosystem of six brands (and growing!), we not only created a component library and token structure, but focused on driving adoption by aligning different product teams and departments, processes, tools, and responsibilities. With all brands working on a single system, designers and developers adapt faster, and new designs are created and rolled out across the entire brand portfolio extremely quickly.

The ultimate benefit of DesignOps

If you research DesignOps online, you’ll probably end up confused because you’ll find different sources talking about various pillars of DesignOps, usually ranging from three to five. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it sounds like a buzzword, but put into practice, it can be much more than that.

A big benefit for designers is a reduced mental load and more space to focus on design work rather than constantly dealing with process questions. That, in turn, allows the real value of design systems to come through: greater efficiency and speed within the design team, as well as higher-quality products overall. They also stay well aligned with development, especially when bringing products to production and maintaining design quality after implementation. 

Simply put, DesignOps brings clear benefits for product teams and, ultimately, the company’s business goals. To make it practical and easy to understand, we can summarise the benefits of DesignOps into four pillars:

1. People, centered around shaping how teams are structured and supported, creating clarity, alignment, and an environment where designers can thrive.
2. Process, framing how design work flows. It guides collaboration across teams, structuring requirements and streamlining workflows for consistency and efficiency.
3. Platforms, defining how design is supported with the right foundations to ensure design consistency, scalability, and long-term quality.
4. Performance, measuring how design delivers impact through outcomes, feedback, and adoption to drive improvement and business value.

Why use DesignOps

If you’re unsure where to start, well, there isn’t a single, fixed definition of where DesignOps begins.

Designers might already be coordinating around a design system, but there may be no dedicated owner or driver for the topic, and even if the design system team is working perfectly, concept and design teams might still be struggling. You can also look at how designers collaborate with developers and product owners, how they use the design system, and what problems they experience when working with it. Identifying those issues and figuring out how to solve them is a key part of DesignOps.

But, once it’s set in place, you’re intentionally working towards design that enables growth, change, and complexity – making your design not just consistent but sustainable and scalable, benefiting the whole company.

To implement DesignOps, your first step should be an audit to understand where your company currently stands. If that is what you need, we're happy to help!