Courtney Kaplan
Director of Design Program Management, Facebook
About Courtney
Courtney is an early leader in Design Operations at Facebook. With over 20 years of people-centered problem solving, Courtney is passionate about designing and building effective teams. As a former designer, Courtney founded the Design Program Management discipline at Facebook in 2013 to help operationalize the rapidly growing product design teams at Facebook.
Her team grew from 2 to 45, and pioneered how Design Operations was utilized across the company. Supporting a product org that grew tenfold in the past five years, she brought (some) order to chaos, and learned to move quickly, collaborate in a company that serves billions.
Before Facebook, Courtney was a principal of Program Planning and Client Development at Hot Studio, an experience design company in New York and San Francisco working with fortune 500 companies, startups and community organizations.
In her spare time, Courtney is a beekeeper, writer and an avid reader.
The Talk
- Design Ops Teams That Matter
- Thursday 20th Jun 2019
- 12:00 - 12:30
Over the last six years, Courtney took the idea of Design Ops and developed a discipline at Facebook. She built a team of 70 Design Program Managers during a time of unprecedented growth for the company. She will share what she learned along the way including the key phases in structuring a Design Ops team that has continued impact across Facebook.
Design Ops may seem like an interesting solution for your company or your team. We’ll talk about the important questions that design leaders need to consider: Who to hire and when? How to set up your team for success and professional growth? Who should manage them (and why)? What sets a successful Design Ops team apart?
Design Ops matters. Leaders need to know how to grow the talented people that they hire and what creates strong teams in the space. Take your stakeholders from ”Do we need this?” to “What would we do without Design Ops?”