DesignOps AI Workflow Hub

DesignOps teams sit at the seam of design, engineering, and product — fielding intake, triaging requests, and translating fuzzy asks into actionable briefs. Most of that work happens in scattered docs, threads, and tickets, with no shared system of record.

The result: high-leverage operators spend their day formatting requests instead of unblocking teams.

DesignOps leads, design managers, and program managers at growth-stage product companies — the people accountable for throughput and quality across multi-team design organizations.

I didn't have to look far for the problem. Leading a 20-person Center of Excellence and collaborating with over 70 technology partners across B2B, B2E, and B2C products as Director of Digital Experience — I lived the operational gaps that DesignOps tools haven't solved. Intake requests came in through Slack threads. Project briefs were written from scratch every time, by whoever had the bandwidth. Design system requests piled up in email with no visible queue and no clear owner. The coordination overhead was real, and it came directly out of design time.

That insight shaped the MVP decision. Rather than build a sprawling tool that tried to solve everything, I prototyped the smallest useful slice: a structured intake form that an AI could expand into a complete, ready-to-use project brief.

The rest of the feature set grew from the same discipline: identify the highest-friction moment, find the smallest AI intervention that meaningfully reduces it, and build only that until it earns the right to be more.

• Smart intake form with role-based routing.
• AI brief generator that drafts goals, scope, and success metrics.
• Design system request queue with status and ownership.
• Lightweight dashboard for leads to see throughput at a glance.
• Audited with Google Lighthouse — 95 Accessibility score, 100 Best Practices and SEO across all pages. Contrast ratio and ARIA label issues identified and fixed to meet WCAG AA standards.

AI is used at one specific moment: turning a structured intake into a first-draft brief. It's not a chatbot, not a generator of generic copy — it replaces the 30 minutes a DesignOps lead spends formatting each request, while keeping a human in the loop for final approval.

When I started building, I wanted to pressure-test whether my experience was universal or specific to enterprise. So I'm gathering feedback to iterate from DesignOps practitioners across industries to understand next steps.

• Slack integration for intake without leaving the channel.
• Roadmap view tying requests to quarterly priorities.
• Templates per request type (research, design, system).

The right AI placement isn't where it's most impressive — it's where it removes the most boring work. Operators don't want a magic assistant; they want their day back.