Principal Design Operations Manager
This is a remote role, however, there will be meetings in the Sacramento area several times a year. Candidates are expected to work business hours, Monday-Friday Pacific time zone. All candidates must be based in and work from the US.
Join DHCS’s Behavioral Health Transformation: Where Purpose Meets Innovation
Location: Remote/Hybrid
Department: Department of Healthcare Services (DHCS)
Commitment: Full-Time Consultant (W2 employee of Speridian or 1099/IC for Speridian)
California’s Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) is transforming how behavioral health care is delivered across the state. The Behavioral Health Transformation (BHT) project represents a historic investment in systems change. Our work enables counties, providers, and state staff to deliver more coordinated, equitable, and outcomes-driven behavioral health services for all Californians. BHT is a once-in-a-generation effort to transform behavioral health service delivery for California’s most vulnerable populations. We are building a team of mission-driven, systems-minded professionals who can steward this transformation.
We’re seeking a Principal Design Operations Manager to serve as the design process and systems architect behind a high-performing product organization. In this role, you will focus on diagnosing human-centered design discipline problems in productizing and operationalizing HCD insights and tools. In partnership with the HCD Discipline Coach (and others) ensures proper change management occurs to establish org-wide understanding of BHT and institutional knowledge retention.
You’ll be responsible for operationalizing insights across capabilities, support research strategy, planning, and execution, and implementing scalable solutions that support both HCD excellence and cross-functional cohesion.
Success in this role means helping BHT build mechanisms for operationalizing shared understanding of insights, and ensuring the inform product strategies through focusing on what matters, reducing the drag of misalignment and ambiguity, and strengthening the connective tissue between product, policy, program, and delivery.
What You'll Do
Establish mechanisms to productize and operationalize HCD insights
Architect and evolve scalable, cross-functional design operations systems that embed human-centered design (HCD) across the product lifecycle
Identify and diagnose gaps in design execution, workflow, and collaboration that hinder the application of HCD insights and tools
Operationalize design research, insights, and methods into repeatable processes, toolkits, and frameworks for product teams
Partner closely with UX, product, engineering, and leadership to enable consistent design quality and integration of HCD principles
Define and measure operational success metrics for design maturity, team productivity, and impact
Champion change management and cultural shifts required to integrate design more deeply into product development processes
Collaborate across disciplines to ensure that design systems, tooling, and documentation infrastructure support efficient workflows and strong user outcomes
You’ll Thrive in This Role If You...
Are a systems thinker who knows how to build structure without bureaucracy
Have the judgment to know when a standard adds value — and when it doesn’t
Can lead through influence, bringing consistency without controlling decision-making
Are energized by solving problems that live at the intersection of strategy, process, and delivery
Required Qualifications
10+ years in product design operations, product design, or systems leadership roles in complex organizations
Experience implementing product operating models, frameworks, and team-wide delivery practices
Strong track record of cross-functional collaboration, especially with program, policy, and project functions
Demonstrated success diagnosing organizational friction and designing effective, scalable solutions
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, especially for executive and non-technical audiences
Preferred
Experience in public sector, or highly regulated private industries such as healthcare, finance, etc.
Understanding of behavioral health policy, service delivery systems, or public funding models
Speridian is an Equal Opportunity Employer