Case Study: Improving Design Ops for Knowledge Management & Team Collaboration
Background
Project
Design Ops
Tools: Figma, DevOps, Sharepoint, MS Suite, Atlassian, Jira, Confluence
Role
Lead
Year
2021 – 2025
When I joined The Myers-Briggs Company, I quickly observed that while we had strong ideas and active projects, our internal systems for documentation and collaboration were disjointed. Product specs, meeting notes, and research lived across disconnected personal OneDrives, undocumented email threads, and team members’ hard drives. There was no shared taxonomy, no clear handoff process, and no visibility into project history or decisions once meetings ended. This made onboarding new teammates difficult, slowed cross-functional collaboration, and created unnecessary barriers to alignment.
Impact
- Reduced time to market for features
- Increased stakeholder alignment
- Sped up collaboration and feedback
- Improved knowledge management, organizing data and reducing siloed information
- Applied Agile principles to improve iterative design
The Opportunity
Establish a centralized, transparent, and intuitive documentation system that saves time during dev handoff by embedding documentation throughout the design process, serves as a single source of truth, and Supports better cross-functional collaboration.
I saw the chance to bring design operations principles into play to create a system that was not just organized, but intentional, scalable, and user-centered. My goal was to establish shared processes, accessible documentation, and a clear source of truth that would enhance how we worked as a product and design team. I also aimed to better integrate Agile practices into the product design team.
Current pain points:
- No shared, centralized location for meeting notes, design specs, or project documentation
- Difficult to access historical decisions or rationale behind design choices
- Limited transparency across product, design, and engineering stakeholders
- Inefficient dev handoff due to lack of organized, living documentation
First Iteration with Microsoft Teams and OneNote
I began by creating a dedicated Microsoft Team for the product group, which included a shared OneNote notebook with automated permissions. This ensured that everyone had access by default, eliminating the need to request access or track down missing files. Inside the OneNote, I organized recurring meeting notes, project spaces, and introduced templates for common needs such as kickoff prompts and design handoff guides.
This alone reduced confusion and allowed for more seamless collaboration between designers, product managers, and engineers. This system quickly gained traction across the team and became our go to source of knowledge.
To better associate projects with their Figma files I also created a cover component which created a standardized Figma cover that showed the project title, associated product, and color coded status indicator, all of which allowed insights at a glance and made it easier to find files.
The limited functionality within OneNote became a pain point for us internally, as our documentation grew we found the need to group project specs by their status (backlog, in design, implemented, and iced), and we found documents growing large and hard to browse.
Migration to Confluence and Jira (Atlassian)
The real evolution came when the company migrated to Atlassian. I led the setup of our new Confluence workspace with a design ops lens, applying information architecture principles to plan and structure the space for clarity and longevity. I worked closely with teammates to card sort our content needs, prioritized usability, and developed templates for key rituals like sprint planning, research readouts, and final design specs. I also wove in automation and AI tools to summarize meeting transcripts, surface unresolved questions, and link relevant documentation across projects—helping the team maintain momentum and trace decision-making over time.
As part of our transition to Atlassian, we also gained access to Jira, which opened the door for more structured and transparent intake and tracking of internal requests. In partnership with the Director of Product, we set up a new intake system that allowed coworkers across departments to easily submit ideas, feature requests, or research needs directly into our product workflow. This not only improved visibility into what was being asked for but also ensured that no idea was lost in an inbox or informal chat. Stakeholders could now follow the status of their requests in real time, reducing the need for repeated follow-ups and creating a sense of shared ownership in our product roadmap.
We began having biweekly planning and feedback sessions where cross-functional groups could align to review the backlog, prioritize the next sprint, and review completed tasks. This addition further reinforced our design ops foundation by bringing more clarity, accountability, and cross-functional collaboration into how we prioritized and delivered work.
Our new Confluence hub became the operational heartbeat of the team. It served as a centralized platform where anyone could find what they needed without chasing down files or people. It made onboarding new team members smoother, enabled clearer developer handoff, and helped leadership quickly understand project history and rationale. With shared templates and defined documentation touchpoints, we elevated the consistency and quality of our design process across the board.
Scaling the System
C-Suite support of this project allowed us to have a kickoff call to introduce our new Atlassian Systems and how the product process worked with these new capabilities.
Over time, I became a go-to resource for design operations across the company. I facilitated workshops to help teams outside of product adopt our practices, coached peers on how to apply UX principles to internal documentation, and collaborated with other design and engineering leads to improve cross-functional efficiency. My work helped ensure that design ops wasn’t just an afterthought- it was a foundational part of how we worked together.
Outcome & Impact
This initiative wasn’t just about organizing notes—it was about enabling a culture of transparency, continuous improvement, and user-centered thinking within our own team.
This initiative reaffirmed my belief that great design doesn’t stop at the screen. Designing the systems behind the scenes- the knowledge flows, the processes, the tools- can have just as much impact on product quality and team success. By treating our documentation and operations with the same care as our interfaces, I helped create a more transparent, resilient, and collaborative product organization.
✅ Improved Collaboration: Team members could easily find, edit, and contribute to shared documentation—no more blockers due to access or missing links.
✅ Faster Dev Handoff: Specs were developed organically throughout the design process, cutting prep time and enabling quicker feedback loops.
✅ Stronger Stakeholder Alignment: Centralized, clearly structured docs made it easy to track decisions and reference rationale.
✅ Knowledge Preservation: Onboarding new team members became significantly smoother with living documents that captured the “why” behind our work.
✅ Scalable DesignOps Practice: I became a go-to resource for others across the organization, conducting training sessions on documentation best practices, UX writing, and IA principles.