DPM
Who is
this for?
People ask me both. Why did you make this? and Who's it for? Honestly, it's the same answer.
Design Program Management is becoming an accepted role on corporate design teams. The discipline is real. The tools haven't caught up. Today, most design lifecycles travel through Jira, Figma, FigJam, Miro, Slack, and email. Six apps that don't talk to each other, every project, every time. Kanban, task creation, onboarding, messaging, collaboration. Patched together because nobody ever built them to integrate.
"PM tools were built for engineering tickets. Designers have been bending their process to fit them ever since."
DPM is the bet that they should be one place. Vertically integrated. Designed for the people doing the work, not their reporting chain. Built first for three shapes of work.
Small product & design teams. Two to five people, often distributed across cities and timezones. Shipping product without inheriting a fifty-person process.
Freelance PMs & designers. Juggling clients and tired of onboarding each one onto a new stack.
Engineers who want a different experience. A PM tool that respects visual thinking and doesn't punish craft for the sake of tickets.
DPM isn't trying to replace your enterprise stack. It won't run a five-hundred-person release train. It stays niche and invite-only on purpose. The moment a tool tries to be everything for everyone, it stops being what small teams actually want to use.
Questions I hear a lot.
Why did you name it DPM?
The discipline is becoming an accepted role on corporate design teams. Some leaders still ask why. Designers and design managers already feel it. Using the discipline name makes it clear what the work is, instead of inheriting language built for someone else's process.
What's broken about current tools?
They were built to track engineering progress, and the user experience always felt that way. Kanban, task creation, onboarding, messaging, collaboration — never really integrated. A design lifecycle today usually means a trip through Jira, Figma, FigJam, Miro, Slack or Teams, and email. Every project. Every time.
Why now? Why you?
When I got laid off, I realized the same problems exist at the micro level. DPM started as a tool for small micro design teams that group from across the world, and it's open to product managers, freelancers, and engineers who want a different experience.
Is this trying to replace Jira or Asana?
No. DPM isn't meant to replace corporate tooling or larger enterprise tools. It's niche, and it stays invite-only on purpose.
What is DPM obsessed with, exactly?
Making work easy to do. Vertically integrating the most requested pain points that exist for both large-scale design teams and, even more so, small-scale micro product and design teams.
And much like Disneyland park, DPM will always be a work in progress. New features as we evolve. It will never be completed.
Wilfredo Valle
Founder & Design Program Manager · Studio Practice