Design Program Management & Studio Operations
Hope Turner
Building the infrastructure that lets design organizations do their best work.
Design Program Management & Studio Operations
Building the infrastructure that lets design organizations do their best work.
Most design operations leaders come from project management or production. I came from design.
I was doing motion graphics and interactive design before the discipline had a name, before the tools made it easy, before anyone called it UX. That foundation is what makes me a different kind of design operations leader: I don't manage design from the outside. I understand it from the inside. It also means I design with all users in mind — human-centered design isn't a methodology to me, it's a commitment to making experiences that work for everyone, not just the majority case.
Many of my early peers moved on to other fields as the industry shifted and the tools changed. I stayed, not out of inertia, but out of genuine excitement about where this field was going. Every wave brought new challenges and new ways to do the work better: the web, mobile, design systems, AI. I've grown through all of them, and I'm still growing.
My career spans thirty years and three distinct acts. I started in entertainment and advertising, creating broadcast motion graphics for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and Atlanta Braves, designing Coca-Cola Brasil television campaigns through McCann-Erikson Rio, and building interactive experiences for Turner Classic Movies and WWF. I was making things for the web before most people knew what it was.
From there I moved into large-scale digital properties including Superbowl.com, USOpen.com, Wimbledon.com, and Grammys.com, then enterprise software at IBM, AI-powered Watson products, and UX work at Apple. Along the way I built research programs, led accessibility initiatives, and designed systems that had to work for millions of users across dozens of contexts.
For the past several years I've been at USCIS, where I came in as the first-ever Design System Program Manager and built the function from scratch. That work, the component library, the governance frameworks, the design culture, now extends to DHS headquarters and multiple federal agencies.
The through-line across all of it is the same question: how do you build the systems and culture that let creative people do their best work at scale? AI is the next wave, and I'm as excited about it as I was about every wave that came before.
Based in Austin, Texas, with plans to relocate to the greater Los Angeles area.
First person to hold this role. Built the design operations infrastructure for a 100+ designer organization from the ground up.
I led the agency's full transition to Figma, managing procurement, IT and security approvals, SSO implementation, and onboarding for 100+ designers. I then built the USCIS Figma Component Library: a 508-compliant system of reusable components that serves as the agency's single source of truth, now adopted by DHS headquarters and shared across multiple federal agencies.
I established the Design System Working Group as the structured review forum that keeps core design and production teams aligned. I launched Figma Fridays, a cross-team design critique, and a Solo Crit program for designers working independently as a team of one on their products. Figma itself resolved our designer-developer handoff challenges, replacing a standing working group with embedded tooling that keeps both disciplines in sync. Most recently I led USCIS's first-ever USWDS compliance audit cycle across all public-facing products, providing actionable remediation guidance across the full portfolio.
By special request of the CTO, I am currently leading the agency's first-ever end-to-end journey mapping initiative. The incoming CIO requested documentation of the full applicant lifecycle across benefit types. I completed the I-130 (family petition) flow and am now building the N-400 (naturalization) experience on that foundation. The effort has grown into full service blueprints capturing both the external applicant experience and the internal USCIS systems and staff that support it, giving leadership a holistic view of how applicants navigate the system that has never existed before.
Projects across every screen, format, and scale — from broadcast to brand systems.