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Inayaili León

Design Program Manager, GitHub

Inayaili stands in front of the London skyling on a clear day.

About Inayaili León

Inayaili León is a Design Program Manager at GitHub, where she works on GitHub’s Primer design system, design operations, and more!

Previously, she worked as a Senior Designer at Microsoft, and she led the team creating Canonical’s Vanilla design system.

She writes for well-known online publications and on her own blog, and speaks at international conferences. She’s the co-author of Pro CSS for High Traffic Websites (Apress, 2011), and author of Moving to Responsive Web Design (Apress, 2016).

She’s Panamanian Portuguese, born in the USSR, and lives in London.

DesignOps: designing the API of design teams

DesignOps is the glue that keeps a design org together, and the connective tissue that links design to other disciplines across the company, and beyond. Even if your company doesn’t have a formal DesignOps team, this work is likely being done by someone.

At GitHub, we’re thinking about our DesignOps practice as the API that connects designers to designers, and design to the wider company. Just like when designing APIs, we’ve tried things that didn’t work quite well, and have had to ship several breaking changes as we move towards a more stable release.

In this talk, you will learn:

  • How to identify opportunities for DesignOps to be executed more intentionally
  • How to see DesignOps as an opportunity to connect not just designers, but design to other disciplines, and design to the community
  • Some things we’ve tried at GitHub that didn’t work so well — and some that did

Inayaili spoke on day three, June 30th

Day three focused on growing. Scale product design with design systems.