The Home Depot · UX Manager / Staff Designer · Design Operations
Design Ops from zero — then 13 to 300
I was hired into a Design Operations role that had never existed at Home Depot: no system, no component library, no house for brand standards, no shared critique, and no coherent tooling strategy. The work was to make a few hundred people able to design together.
The problem
Without operations, every team picked a tool, every file was a one-off, onboarding was tribal, and procurement was a fire drill. During COVID the org had to collaborate in the cloud, with security and budget still in place.
Role
Staff UX / Operations lead, then UX Manager, Design Ops. Accountable for tooling (selection, licensing, training, security reviews, vendor relationships), system management, people operations for UX, and showing that a larger team paid for itself.
What we put in place
- Foundational Enterprise UX process as the group grew from 13 designers to 300+: onboarding, reusable prototype libraries, and a design-critique practice that other departments attended.
- Figma governance through case studies, research, and an explicit strategy. Figma became the sole design tool.
- The largest design-system management-tool pilot the company had run, spanning Enterprise, Online, .com, and Marketing, comparing Knapsack, Zeroheight, and Frontify with OKRs and a results rubric, including through pandemic remote work.
- COVID WFH enablement: usage tracking, software evaluation, documentation, workshops with major design vendors.
- Procurement and security for the design toolset; an internal UX request/issue ticketing flow integrated with Slack.
- Team growth from 2 to 8 direct reports (400%), justified by efficiency and cost-saving evidence for the online organization.
Outcome
Design Ops became a standing function. Two DSM tools were selected for Enterprise and Online based on each org’s needs. The cross-org work led to my promotion to UX Manager of Online UX.