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SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
Did you know that the SUS creates biases in your research, affecting one in five people? That’s right! People with disabilities, especially those who use assistive technology, are not considered by most of the questions in the SUS. As a designer, this could lead to you making design decisions that don’t take into account 20 percent of the visitors to your website. When the SUS was invented, the author encouraged people to change it to suit different needs. In this talk, Samuel Proulx from Fable will discuss how Fable adapted the SUS to work for assistive technology users. Drawing from over five thousand hours of research and testing involving assistive technology users, we created the Accessible Usability Scale (AUS). This presentation will include trends in AUS responses since it was released in December of 2020.
Theme 1: Establishing and Growing DesignOps
Getting started with Design Operations can be a daunting task. Considerations include what to call it, who should do the work, how to get funding, and what does success look like. We’ll begin by sharing examples and practical advice on how to establish DesignOps as a function and a role, and share practical advice and outcomes from those who have succeeded. We’ll be inspired by teams of one to teams that serve hundreds of thousands of customers, and you’ll gain practical insights and knowledge that you can apply in your own practice.
C’mon Get Happy
Team happiness is an important and oft-mentioned DesignOps metric, but we need to reframe how we think about it. No human* can “”make”” their team happy, and it’s folly to measure ourselves by that impossible standard. But what we _can_ do is create opportunities for our teams—opportunities to get weird, share freely, give feedback, encourage each other, and create their own team culture. And they get to choose whether and how they take advantage of those opportunities.
Advice for DesignOps Employee #1
You have heard of DesignOps. You know how it can benefit your team. Your designers are tired of chasing requirements and dealing with tooling. But you have no idea where to start with establishing the practice in your organization. This session will help you evaluate what parts of DesignOps you need to implement, and how you can start to introduce the concept to your team.
How the Adidas Design Ops Team Supports Every Phase of the Design Lifecycle
Learn all about design operations at Adidas. In this Q&A we will be joined by two design operations managers who will share how they support the design lifecycle as well as team engagement. They will share Miro boards to give you a peek inside the team, from workshops to birthday cards. This Q&A will be hosted by Shipra Kayan, a design leader at Miro who has over a decade of experience building distributed design teams.
Organizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape
Defining a design system that’s adaptable, modular and more importantly, future proof, is a monumental task. With several years of contributing to their design system and software suite, Mitchell Bernstein, AI Design Lead, will go through IBM’s experience on this topic, sharing key takeaways about their evolving Carbon Design System. Mitchell will also dive into details on how to adapt any design system to complex, AI-powered software with the help of Sketch.
5 Reasons to Bring your Recruiting in House
Participant recruitment is often regarded as the most difficult part of any design project. Oftentimes companies rely on recruiting agencies to handle finding participants. While there are some advantages to this approach, and cases where outsourcing is the best option, nowadays bringing research in-house can be simple, flexible, cost-effective, and fast. During this session we’ll be diving into the top 5 benefits of bringing your recruitment efforts in house.
The DesignOps Starter Kit
Starting DesignOps at an org feels exciting and daunting at the same time. People who’ve given you the green light are as excited as you – so there’s a bit of pressure to make this work well! In this talk, Michelle will provide a “starter kit” of 10 tips for beginning a DesignOps program—the 10 foundational things she’s learned from establishing DesignOps at her org. Michelle includes how to prepare the program, manage expectations, ensure your success, and keep things sustainable for the long term.
Designing Accessible Research Workflows
What makes us human in human centered design? How can we optimize our workflows to respect our participants? Phil will talk through his experiences of creating inclusive research workflows which respect participants rights and agency and how they’ve managed to operationalize and scale them for hundreds of researchers around the world.
Scaling Design Capability: How Involved Should You Be?
Most design operation professionals will have to make a choice: to work solely as an organization’s internal consultancy or play an additional role in scaling design capabilities throughout an organization. If teams focus on the former, how will they get better projects and collaborators from their organization? If teams settle on the latter, how will they navigate scaling their design capabilities?
Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
Join the Verizon CX Design Ops team for an interactive session about uncovering your super powers, recognizing your kryptonite and flexing your skills to power a growing, global team.
How to Design Your Design Operating Model
All organizations have a design operating model. But not all organizations are intentional about creating it. It gets established by accident. Design gets fitted around other priorities of business or technology. As a result, organizations struggle to create valuable experiences for customers. This is why organizations need to design their design operating model.
Inclusive Design is DesignOps
Inclusive Design is a process, it is how we design. Adopting inclusive design means changing how we work, in our projects and in our everyday work habits. In the beginning it might be accidental, while at its best it is intentional and has operational support. Learn how we are making progress in our journey towards Inclusive Design at Intel. From the public goal that all user experience teams will be adopting inclusive design, to the real talk and challenges that happen within a team where everyone agrees with the goal, but they don’t know how to start.
Designing For Screen Readers: Understanding the Mental Models and Techniques of Real Users
Starting out with a ten-minute live demo from an expert screen reader user, Samuel Proulx will introduce you to not only how they work, but the thought processes behind using the Internet with a screen reader. What are some of the most important things to take into account when attempting to construct a mental model of a screen reader user? How do these effect the way you think about designing websites and apps? How can designers learn to move beyond thinking visually, to create designs that work for everyone? After this introduction, the floor will open to your questions! If you have burning questions about how people who are blind use the Internet, or what design patterns work best and why or why not, this is your chance! Ask any question at all in an open, safe learning environment.
Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
Join the Verizon CX Design Ops team for an interactive session about uncovering your super powers, recognizing your kryptonite and flexing your skills to power a growing, global team.
How we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
Shipra Kayan, the former head of insights at Upwork, will present the origin story of Upwork’s hugely successful and long-running VoC program. From the moment that triggered the formation of a VoC initiative, the ups, and downs of experimenting with its operating model, to why this program is still going strong 7 years after it was launched. She will field questions like “Who owns the VoC?”, “What is its purpose?”, and “Will we just create another presentation that won’t have any real impact?”
Theme 2: Successful Outcomes for DesignOps Teams
Once leadership buy-in has been secured, the team staffed, and initial wins are confidently put on the board, the art and science of honing an ever better DesignOps team kicks in. DesignOps leaders must hold fast to effective norms as the team scales, persuade peers and partners with increasing finesse, and, of course, continue to deliver remarkable outcomes. On Day 2 of DesignOps Summit, join us as we learn from the hard-won wisdom of maturing DesignOps teams, including: tools of the trade, scaling strategies, deploying standards and systems, staffing models, and more.
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Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration
We believe cross-functional team collaboration delivers value faster for users and organizations. However, it’s not always obvious what exactly cross-functional collaboration actually looks like. What practices are necessary to the team’s success? How do you measure team performance? As a developer and a designer, we have direct experience working together and leading teams on truly cross-functional product design and delivery. In our talk, we’ll provide specific examples of what that kind of collaboration can look like, while sharing some of the values and principles that have motivated us.
When Design Ops Comes in H.O.T. : A Tale of a Transformed Design Org
TIn their first 60 days at Zendesk, Briana and Christina, a 2 person design ops team, conducted a Program Manager Audit looking at these 3 key areas: People, Process, and Portfolio. 90 days later, Product Design has transformed from a siloed, disjointed team into a well-organized, collaborative environment with a unified tool strategy, inclusive team spaces and more focus on design craft. In this talk you will learn how to not only conduct a thorough and data-centric Program Manager Audit, but how to come in H.O.T. (Humble, Orchestrated, and Timely.)
5 Reasons to Bring your Recruiting in House
Participant recruitment is often regarded as the most difficult part of any design project. Oftentimes companies rely on recruiting agencies to handle finding participants. While there are some advantages to this approach, and cases where outsourcing is the best option, nowadays bringing research in-house can be simple, flexible, cost-effective, and fast. During this session we’ll be diving into the top 5 benefits of bringing your recruitment efforts in house.
Design Systems To-Go: Introducing a Starter Design System, and Indigo.Design Overview
A Design system is not only about standardizing the UI or accelerating design. In the big picture, it can streamline collaboration between design and development. With this goal in mind, an effective Design system is available to both designers and developers in a format that is native to each discipline. However, getting to this point takes time. But what if we can skip ahead with a starter Design system containing both design and coded components that are ready for use? Join our activity sessions to see how you can transform your pixel-perfect designs into pixel-perfect code for modern web applications with Indigo.Design. We will also revisit the typical developer handoff by introducing a re-imagined workflow that minimizes rework. In the end, this approach can free up our focus to run Design-Ops better and deliver value sooner. 👉 Part 1 (Thursday): Introducing a starter Design system, and Indigo.Design overview Part 2 (Friday): Reimagining developer handoff, and introducing App builder Part 3 (Friday): Indigo.Design overview and exploring the developer workflow
How DesignOps can Drive Inclusive Career Ladders for All
DesignOps takes the lead to author our internal career matrix, so we can objectively and uniformly refresh each discipline, and establish org-wide skills echoed throughout each role. DesignOps at Salesforce is also included within these Career Competencies, allowing for our team to hold more consistent career discussions, and unifying promotions by leveraging the same language when discussing each DesignOps employee. Plus, since DesignOps is seen as a fairly “new” discipline, having it paired alongside more “well-known” disciplines (Designer, UX Engineer), elevates the understanding of our role and skills, and provides a baseline paired alongside our peer’s disciplines. There’s great power in language, and the words we choose to use makes an impact. Making conscious efforts on our word choices and communications with one another can affect change at both the individual level as well as team-wide.
Design Ops Metrics
This session will detail how we are capturing metrics on product development and resource allocation. We will discuss how we are capturing people’s time on task to get us to a standard set of recipes that we can use when planning and budgeting for new products. We will discuss how we captured and identified tasks that could be handled by a 3rd party offshore vendor to free up our in-house designer who needs to be focused on strategic and innovative work.
Scaling Design Capability: How Involved Should You Be?
Most design operation professionals will have to make a choice: to work solely as an organization’s internal consultancy or play an additional role in scaling design capabilities throughout an organization. If teams focus on the former, how will they get better projects and collaborators from their organization? If teams settle on the latter, how will they navigate scaling their design capabilities?
In this interactive workshop, we’ll discuss how teams can attract better internal projects and how to transfer essential capabilities, with a particular focus on co-creating and measuring successful outcomes.
Join Andrew Webster, Vice President of Transformation at ExperiencePoint, to learn:
What tools can help facilitate your team’s journey
How to start implementing scaling strategies
What successful outcomes look like
Empowering Gaming at Scale: How Xbox Builds Powerful, Automated, and Distributed Design Systems with Sketch
An essential part of creating a Design System is to make distribution and content flow sustainable. When the task is bringing the joy and community of gaming to everyone on the planet, the challenge gets massive! How can DesignOps and Automation become a facilitator for this challenge? Join Senior Software Engineer & Designer Luca Rager from Xbox as he takes us through their innovative take on design systems. Luca will illustrate how Sketch’s flexibility and modern DesignOps automation has allowed Xbox to package, theme and easily distribute component libraries. Furthermore, how their system bridges the gap between the Xbox Design System team and the wider product teams at Xbox.
Capturing Deep Insights
This session is focused on developing an understanding of how knowledge repositories can lead to deep insights in businesses large and small. It will explore the problem space and present strategies for overcoming those problems. Some example problems knowledge repositories can solve are: missing out on valuable information that can be useful across the company due to silos; repeating research that has been conducted already and inconsistency in research reporting.
Design Staffing Models
Determining a staffing model for the success of your design teams is one of the key elements for driving success. By reviewing the differences between dedicated and agency (or flexible) staffing models, Alicia Mooty will walk the group through a case study of applying these types of models in her work at Adobe.
Culture as the Root of Brand Promise
The best path to achieving a sustainable competitive advantage in a dynamic marketplace is through the development of an innovative and winning corporate culture. In this talk, Susan will define the essence of organizational culture in practical terms, and share a model for building the infrastructure to build and support your culture. Most notably, Susan will focus on the interplay between your culture and your customer experience, and demonstrate why the most consistent and authentic customer experiences are rooted in positive and uplifting work environments where employees are thriving. Susan will share strategies and best practices for leveraging emotion as a differentiator in both the employee experience (driving recruiting, engagement, and retention), and customer experience (building loyalty & capturing market share), allowing you to derive a competitive advantage from your most valuable resource: your people.
Can Data and Ethics Live Together?
Putting together a product as designers is a challenge on its own. But what happens when you take ethics, privacy, and data into account? What is the extent of the slippery slope about asking for and storing data? It’s understandable the key stakeholders need to keep an eye on the KPIs and factor data in when evaluating designs. However, should any ethical dilemmas be considered when gathering such data? Join Matteo Gratton, Design Advocate from Sketch, as he draws more attention to these important topics with real cases.
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https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2021/sessions/can-data-and-ethics-live-together/
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Prototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
In this interactive session, Sam Proulx, accessibility evangelist at Fable, will draw from experience as a person with a disability, and from Fable’s thousands of hours of research experience, to answer all of your questions about conducting prototype reviews with people with disabilities. What design systems work best? What disabilities can participate in prototype reviews out of the box, and what types of disabilities might need special adaptations? What information should a prototype contain, to get the best feedback and engagement from people with disabilities? How can you and your organization learn to better shift left, and involve people with disabilities as early as possible in the design process, and why should you? We’ll also have plenty of time for your own questions! If you’ve been wanting to conduct prototype reviews that involve people with disabilities, but weren’t quite sure where to begin, don’t miss this session!
Theme 3: The Future of DesignOps
The Design Operations field has reached a new level of maturity. We’ve moved from defining and advocating for the role’s existence to pushing the boundaries of all that the domain might include. On Day 3 of Design Ops summit, join us as we consider where and how the practice will grow next. Career journey frameworks, future pathing, sub-specialities, analogous organizational roles – we’ll consider all of this, and more, as we explore and define the future of Design Operations, together.
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State of DesignOps: Learnings from the 2021 Global Report
DesignOps has been maturing in recent years and the adaptation of the practice has increased. With data from over 200 companies from all over the world, we are taking a deep dive into how DesignOps professionals are structuring their roles and/or teams in different companies. We are learning all about their impact, tools, and practices, as well as how are they adapting to the new normal, and how they are tackling social issues.
How Tess Dixon Facilitates Team Engagement and Collaboration at Condé Nast Using Miro
Tess has been building design teams with a relentless focus on team culture. Join us for a fast paced Q&A where she will share stories and actual Miro boards that she has used to facilitate team engagement at Condé Nast. We will dig deeper into her re-framing of “team happiness”, and what she has learned from her tactics and experiments to cultivate this. If you attended her talk on Wednesday, this is a chance to ask your follow up questions in an intimate setting. This Q&A will be hosted by Shipra Kayan, a design leader at Miro who has over a decade of experience building distributed design teams.
Design Systems To-Go: Reimagining Developer Handoff, and Introducing App Builder
A Design system is not only about standardizing the UI or accelerating design. In the big picture, it can streamline collaboration between design and development. With this goal in mind, an effective Design system is available to both designers and developers in a format that is native to each discipline. However, getting to this point takes time. But what if we can skip ahead with a starter Design system containing both design and coded components that are ready for use? Join our activity sessions to see how you can transform your pixel-perfect designs into pixel-perfect code for modern web applications with Indigo.Design. We will also revisit the typical developer handoff by introducing a re-imagined workflow that minimizes rework. In the end, this approach can free up our focus to run Design-Ops better and deliver value sooner.
DesignOps and Content Strategy: Envisioning the Future Together
Whether you have an established DesignOps team, or you’re just getting started, learn how creating a structure where content strategists operate can go a long way in supporting the strength and longevity of your practice. Learn about the components of the content strategy practice blueprint, how to measure content strategy maturity and understanding within your organization, and determine the best way to incorporate the discipline of content strategy into your future state goals. Friday, October 1, 2021 | 10:45am - 11:15am PT
Maturity Models: A Core Tool for Creating a DesignOps Strategy
We will see how we developed a design maturity model, adapting models from invision, McKinsey and papers measuring design impact from IBM to our particular context, in order to discover the main growth opportunities we had in our design practice and how we used outcomes/OKRs to define a detailed strategy for the designOps team.
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https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2021/sessions/defining-designops-strategy-using-maturity-models/
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Navigating the UX Tools Landscape
Research has to come together somewhere, happen somewhere, live somewhere, and—in order for it to have an impact on product—it has to be effectively shared somewhere. There are more user research tools than ever, and choosing among them can be overwhelming. That’s why the team at User Interviews created the UXR Tools Map, along with a searchable database of over 200 user research tools. We’ll talk about the process behind creating the map, plus share insights and examples of how to create the best stack for your team, regardless of budget.
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https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2021/sessions/navigating-the-ux-tools-landscape/
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Design Systems To-Go: Indigo.Design Overview and Exploring the Developer Workflow
A Design system is not only about standardizing the UI or accelerating design. In the big picture, it can streamline collaboration between design and development. With this goal in mind, an effective Design system is available to both designers and developers in a format that is native to each discipline. However, getting to this point takes time. But what if we can skip ahead with a starter Design system containing both design and coded components that are ready for use? Join our activity sessions to see how you can transform your pixel-perfect designs into pixel-perfect code for modern web applications with Indigo.Design. We will also revisit the typical developer handoff by introducing a re-imagined workflow that minimizes rework. In the end, this approach can free up our focus to run Design-Ops better and deliver value sooner.
Have we Reached Our Peak? Spotting the Next Mountain For DesignOps to Climb
Does building your DesignOps practice feel like a steep (but rewarding) climb? Maybe you’ve set your sights on a mountaintop, reached that peak, looked around and wondered, “Cool! But where do we go from here?” This session is for established DesignOps teams starting out on their journey to reach greater heights. How do you spot your next growth opportunity? What roles will get you there? What services can DesignOps offer to adjacent design functions at your company? How can other Ops practices, like BizOps or DevOps, help chart a path to your next peak? Most importantly, we’ll examine how to scale up when you’re always operating sideways, and how adopting a beginners’ mindset (and an explorer’s heart) will help you seek the right opportunities to grow your discipline.
Look, Think, Act: The Futures-Smart Design Organization
Feel like foresight is best left to economists and business strategists? Think again. Fight your imposter syndrome to harness the power of futures-thinking in your design organization to imagine and pursue preferable futures in how you work, what you produce and even in your personal life. You do not have to stop the world to look, think and act – make the futures mindset a natural habit and make small actions today turn into a better world tomorrow.
DesignOps Fundamentals: Tangible Benefits, Measurable Outcomes
As a transformational discipline, DesignOps can deeply change how design organizations operate. But to fully unlock its potential, DesignOps requires a structured and systemic approach that’s been customized for each unique organization. This workshop will take you on a journey from developing a custom DesignOps strategy or practice to ensuring its delivery and ongoing assessment. You’ll learn clear methods and techniques to assess the needs of your design team, prioritize initiatives, sequence projects, and measure impact. And you’ll walk away with an approach that enables you to better understand your design teams’ health and performance, and business and engagement models. You’ll learn how to Define a credible result driven DesignOps roadmap Prioritize and sequence strategic initiatives Identify the metrics and KPI of your DesignOps practice Quantify the impact of your practice on several dimensions Demonstrate the business impact of Design and DesignOps Who should attend Designers and design managers eager to learn how to establish DesignOps within their organizations. DesignOps practitioners looking to increase their impact and to grow or expand the scope and size of their practice. Pre-requisites You should have a basic understanding of design processes. This workshop sets the foundation and vision for a DesignOps practice, so it will require no specific skills.
Make Design Systems People Want to Use
ou spent days, weeks, or even months putting together a library of common components that other teams could use. You sent it around to a few other teams to try out. And then… crickets. No reply. No one used it. It takes a specific process and mindset to make a design system that actually gets used. SuperFriendly founder and CEO Dan Mall will walk you through the difference between component libraries and true design systems, new workflows for tighter collaboration between designers and engineers, how to measure success, and a lot more.
Day 1: True Design Systems
Day 2: Pilots — The Best Way to Start and Scale a Design System
Day 3: Process & Workflow with Design Systems
Day 4: Measuring Success with Design Systems

Creating, Supporting, and Enabling Hybrid and Remote Teams
What is the biggest challenge that we are facing right now with working in a remote or hybrid model? In theory we should be able to work from anywhere, be efficient and feel connected, however that is not always the case. Whether you’ve been in a company that has always been hybrid, remote or in office, more teams are facing the challenge on how to scale and retain top talent in a hybrid and remote model. Let’s face it, remote and hybrid roles don’t work for all – but it’s reality and we need to figure out frameworks/models that empower teams to find new ways of working. Some companies have started trying to figure this out, but they get stuck. Others have been struggling to start at all. We have an opportunity to articulate and redefine how we work, how we grow and how we connect to each other in these diverse working environments. Teams can choose to work better together but they need the right rituals, tools and environment to do so. Teams need & want more alignment, and a feeling that they belong. People are tired of waiting for companies to figure it out for them – we’ll take this into our hands and work through it together in this workshop.
Implementing a ResearchOps Function in your Organization
Want to get your organization going with research operations, but don’t know where to start? Every organization is different, with a diverse set of challenges, opportunities, needs and drivers—so you’ll need to develop an approach tailored for your unique setting. Brigette Metzler and Benson Low, co-chair and director of the ResearchOps Community respectively, will help make sense of where and how ResearchOps fits in your organization. They’ll take you through the Pace Layers Matrix—a model that helps you to identify where you are, where you’re headed, and how to get there. It’ll help you make the most of the skills you already have, and prioritize your ResearchOps hires as you scale the impact of user research in your organization. You’ll learn how to: Assess your current state of research, and the operations needed to carry out that research using the Pace Layers/8 Pillars matrix Prioritize your operations functions to be ready for the research practice you want to be able to have in the future Create a strategy for the coming 6 months Manage “constructive turbulence” (how different research demands can work for you or against you) within your organizational and personal context Have an approach to communicating your strategy to your organization
Stepping Into the Void: Establishing a Design Ops Team from Scratch
Design Ops teams take their shape based on the needs of the organization that they support. Listen to this open discussion between Design Ops leaders who have established and grown their teams from scratch. Hear about how they decide what to do first, second, third… and how do they decide on what to not do, even though it may be needed and how do they still manage to champion the things that they value most along the way.
Opener: The Other L Word
We can’t talk about DesignOps without talking about workplace loneliness. This L word doesn’t just affect those who are working as a team of one. Thousands of designers and DesignOps pros in full teams around the nation are silently suffering from loneliness. This chronic workplace loneliness has a negative impact on individuals, teams, productivity, and company success. Lonely workers are twice as likely to quit their jobs and around 60 percent of Americans report feeling lonely on a regular basis. When people suffer, so does the bottom line. At the average national voluntary turnover rate of 25 percent, a company of 100 people with an average salary of $50,000 will spend between $625,000 and $2.5 million dollars on staff replacement costs in one year. Well-connected teams that have a high amount of belonging and inclusion experience greater productivity, improved decision-making, lower expenses and a more efficient and happy workforce. In this talk, Sr. UX Designer and Connection Coach Kat Vellos will share insights from her book We Should Get Together and highlights why its lessons matter for DesignOps more than ever before.
Overview
We live—and work—in difficult, punishing times, and designers need more support than ever before. That’s why resilience is our theme for DesignOps 2020; we’ll explore design operations’ role in helping individual designers, design teams, and entire organizations adapt, survive, and thrive.
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Theme 1: The Resilient DesignOps Team of One
As DesignOps is new, many solo DesignOps practitioners and operations-minded designers are functioning as DesignOps Teams of One. How might these lone operators sustain and scale DesignOps practices, deepen relationships with design teams and organizations, and change culture… all without burning out?
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Theme 1: Introduction and Provocation
What’s today’s theme all about, and what does it mean for DesignOps professionals? Theme leader Alana Washington will provide you the background you’ll need for how today’s sessions came to be and what they’ll cover. She’ll also gently provoke you with questions to consider throughout the day.
Leveling-Up: A Single-Player’s Guide to the DesignOps Team-of-One
Design operations is not for the faint of heart. In many ways, design operations for the team-of-one is a choose-your-own-adventure game; it’s essential to choose your own path in this new discipline. In this session, you will learn about the challenges encountered, and lessons learned from the perspective of a single-player design operations manager at EA, one of the largest gaming companies in the world. You’ll walk away from this talk with a strategy guide on how to navigate design operations in your organization, and the methods and best practices you can use to be a resilient team-of-one.
Practice What You Preach
Culture is the glue that holds everything together. When our work lives are disrupted and norms shift, your culture can be at risk. Let’s discuss the role that Design Ops plays in designing and upholding company culture. We’ll look at ways to turn your beliefs into behaviors that reinforce healthy creative culture, even in uncertain times.
Collaborative Wireframing for Creating Team Alignment and Shipping Better Products
Join our interactive session to learn how to: Create simple wireframes even if you don’t have any design experience to get quick feedback from your team Share your initial proposals with stakeholders without getting caught up in details Organize workshops to wireframe together and get the best ideas from your team in real-time We will go over best practices of collaborative wireframing and wireframe together in real-time.
How to Use Wireframes to Improve Team Communication and Participation
Wireframes are not merely design artifacts, they are also effective communication tools. Learn how wireframes can be used in multiple ways throughout the product design process, to ensure that user goals are clear, the design phase is thorough, yet efficient, and developer handoff is predictable and collaborative. Watch the session recording
Introduction to Handrail’s Research Management Platform
Join us for an overview of how our platform helps enterprise research, design, and product teams succeed with research at scale. Watch the session recording
Not Black Enough to be White
Of South Africa’s total population, 92% are people of color. In Design however, it’s less than 9%. As a Cape Colored Designer, this made having an identity that my fellow designers could relate to extremely difficult as I am neither Black nor White. In order to navigate a post-apartheid country, I had to realize that belonging nowhere could mean that I, in fact, could belong everywhere. This talk is about the “Cultural Edge Effect” of my heritage and how that has helped me build Enterprise Design teams and attract and build the diverse design skills of South Africa’s future.
How to Build and Scale Team Safety
Without a culture of safety, people literally can’t think. We can’t collaborate, create, or innovate. That is because as human beings, we are biologically hardwired to belong to a tribe that can protect us from outside threats. Unfortunately, most of us don’t feel a sense of safety in our work tribes. When our work relationships don’t feel safe, we armor up and spend precious energy protecting ourselves from each other instead of learning, collaborating, and well just … working. In this workshop, DesignOps professionals will get practical tools to build and scale the safety of their teams.
Best Practice Design Workflows with Zeplin
Learn how WebMD and Gett are using Zeplin to streamline design operations & build optimized design workflows. Note: This session is first come, first serve for the first 100 participants to join the Zoom.
Make Your Teamwork Resilient
At MURAL, we are determined to help people continue making meaningful connections even when they cannot meet in person. We have teammates around the world who need to collaborate, so we know the frustration and challenges that can arise with remote work. Join remote collaboration expert Emilia Åström for a session on: • Tools you need to build a strong digital workspace • Different ways to work together when you cannot be in the office • Best practices for remote work teams • Establishing and building trust with teammates and managers • Methods to make remote collaboration productive Everyone who registers will receive our comprehensive guide to building a Remote Work Resiliency Plan to use with their teams. Watch the session recording
Simplifying the Designer-Developer Communication
The line between design and development is getting less clear every day. Despite that, at UXPin we think that there’s still room to improve the communication between both. A common challenge that we face is the drift created when designers hand over to engineers. The intent of DesignOps is to improve the process that many teams have in place to eliminate these kinds of issues. To us, DesignOps should accelerate the design to the deployment lifecycle and tackle this issue by improving the communication between designers and developers. View the session recording
The Science of Creativity for DesignOps
For the past 20 years, Dr Karl K. Jeffries has been fascinated by the study of creativity. In this presentation, he shares some of what he has learnt about creativity and how it applies to DesignOps professionals. Whether you consider yourself creative or not, the science of creativity has much to offer professional design practice in all its many forms. As a critical 21st-century skill, having an informed understanding of creativity is crucial to navigating the next five years. In this presentation, Dr Jeffries begins to explore a few insights to ignite your interest in creativity for DesignOps.
Getting in Flow with Your Team
A design process is only as good as the people who run it, no matter how “efficient” the process claims to be. This talk will cover the circumstances of a case study and the strategies that took place to establish and maintain momentum on a product that didn’t have a direction. With the collaboration of a team in “flow,” the work seemed (sometimes unbelievably) natural, enabling and empowering everybody not only to trust each other, but also to trust themselves in their own decision making and their own exploration of their craft and strengths with mutual trust and respect.
Showing the Value of DesignOps by Not Having a DesignOps Team
BBVA began 2019 with a full scale re-org based on agile principles, for the design team in Mexico that re-org included dismantling the 3 years old designOps team because it was considered redundant and a simple admin job that other teams could do. Regretfully it ended in a complete disaster and a steep decline in the quality of the design team with the following project problems and complaints of executives and stakeholders regarding the user experience. This was only stopped by rebuilding a more resilient and integral designOps team, revisiting shortcomings and failures of the Head of design and the team’s effort to rebuild itself.
Opening Reception Sponsored by Bloomberg LP and Rosenfeld Media
Get ready to party hearty with our Platinum Premier sponsor, Bloomberg LP, Rosenfeld Media, and DesignOps Summit 2020 attendees. Start by leaving your stress in the rear-view mirror (we’ll have a mindfulness expert on hand), watch a mentalist read attendees’ minds (if you believe), view a fantastic UX video based on the play, Hamilton (it’s election time after all), and prepare for plenty of speed-networking with your design operations peers. Lots of reasons to join the fun at our Opening Reception!
Introduction to MURAL
Our 30-minute live demo gives you basic, hands-on guidance to using MURAL effectively. We cover a range of topics from the basics of adding content onto the canvas to common use cases, depending on the audience.
Stepping Into the Void: Being a Member of the Design Ops Team
Most Design Ops practitioners are skilled at dealing with ambiguity at the project level, but doing this within a newly established org takes dealing with ambiguity to the next level. This panel discussion will feature members of the Verizon Design Ops team where they will discuss being a part of a team in the early stages of forming, and how COVID-19 has helped and hindered their work.
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https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2020/sessions/verizon-stepping-into-the-void-being-a-member-of-the-design-ops-team/
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Opener: Past, Present, and Future—Closing the Racial Divide in Design Teams
The 2019 design census states that 3% of the design industry are African American/Black designers while 71% are White/Caucasian. Anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley wrote “Race in the American mind was and is a statement about profound and unbridgeable differences…It conveys the meaning of social distance that cannot be transcended.” Racism is divisive and destructive. DesignOps practitioners often find themselves facilitating difficult conversations, pointing out disparities, and creating safe environments for teams to do their best work. So, how do we as practitioners remain resilient when faced with the complexities of racism within our organizations? The goal of this talk is to provide a protocol in which design leaders can engage uncomfortable conversations to help teams become more inclusive. We will explore an often overlooked yet valuable source to ensure the future effectiveness of our design practice, black youth.
Theme 2: The Resilient DesignOps Team
As organizations shift, grow, and react to outside influences, DesignOps teams need to adapt and pivot too. How might your team maintain its resilience in the face of constant change? And what metrics will help keep your team’s work consistent and sustainable?
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Theme 2: Introduction and Provocation
What’s today’s theme all about, and what does it mean for DesignOps professionals? Theme leader Kristin Skinner will provide you the background you’ll need for how today’s sessions came to be and what they’ll cover. She’ll also gently provoke you with questions to consider throughout the day.
Creating Consistency Through Constant Change
The hustle of “Uber 1.0” (moving fast and breaking things) is still remnant in parts of Uber’s culture today. As a DesignOps team of two to start, Maggie had to break through many barriers to help quickly and effectively implement a new practice. Within one year, the team grew to 14 Design Program Managers working across 6 global, distributed design studios. How does a team scale and find their voice amidst many cultural challenges, negative news cycles, and multiple rounds of layoffs? This talk will explore how DesignOps can remain a constant pillar of reliability when the structures around a Design team are constantly evolving
Design Staffing for Impact
The IBM CIO portfolio is comprised of thousands of tools and services. Given the organization’s obsession with the IBMer experience and their desire to positively impact IBMer productivity, it is extremely important that they allocate their scarce Design & Research talent to the projects that have the greatest impact on IBMers’ work experience. To this end, they have refined their staffing processes and developed a new metric, The Design Staffing Score, that allows them to measure the degree to which their staffing approach aligns with project priority. Patrick will describe their refined approach to staffing, how progress is measured, and the tangible benefits they’ve realized.
How DesignOps Helped Enable Wall Street to Work Remotely
COVID-19 forced nearly the entire global financial community to work remotely. Screen real estate was dramatically reduced, as traders transitioned from multiple 4K monitors on a trading floor to a single laptop screen in their home office. The design solution—adapt the Bloomberg Terminal experience to fewer smaller screens—was straightforward. Executing that solution required UX-led collaboration, organization, and cross-functional commitment from product, engineering, and sales, all in a very short period of time.
Best Practices to Manage Design & Research Stakeholders
Join us to learn about the invisible work of getting to know your stakeholders, building advocates of your work and maximizing your influence within and outside your organization.
How to Use Wireframes to Improve Team Communication and Participation
Wireframes are not merely design artifacts, they are also effective communication tools. Learn how wireframes can be used in multiple ways throughout the product design process, to ensure that user goals are clear, the design phase is thorough, yet efficient, and developer handoff is predictable and collaborative.
DesignOps + KPIs = Measure your Impact!
DesignOps is all about scaling up design teams while creating organizational efficiencies yet it is not always evident how impact and gained efficiencies can be quantified and measured. There’s a certain confusion around what are the inefficiencies and there is no established process to determine those metrics. This session is not about providing a list of metrics to be replicated. It’s about providing a tested approach on how to identify, quantify, and measure inefficiencies and how to define measurable and realistic targets. This approach can be applied and replicated in any context to support the DesignOps community to gain additional credibility and to ensure DesignOps professionals are able to demonstrate the value of their work to the business with objective data points and quantifiable gains.
How to Maximize the Impact of Content Design
Most content design leaders stretch their teams to cover many products at once, or sometimes 5-10 or more. This unintentionally causes the team to constantly switch context, drive less product impact, lag in their career development, earn less pay, and ultimately burn out and leave, only to repeat the cycle elsewhere. This as normal… but it shouldn’t be. I’ll show you how we redesigned content design to increase people’s focus and depth of work, multiply their product and business impact, and even accelerate their growth and compensation… all by working on just one product at a time.
Best Practice Design Workflows with Zeplin
Learn how WebMD and Gett are using Zeplin to streamline design operations & build optimized design workflows.
Make Your Remote Workshops More Inclusive with frog Design
In this workshop, Linda Quarles, Director, Strategy and Organization Design from frog Design will walk you through the four principles of remote workshop facilitation: asynchronous participation; breaking the ice; choice and spontaneity; and honesty and feelings. Learn how to set up a Miro board, navigate through creating breakout groups, and align on decisions.
How Your Distributed Teams Can Collaborate to Analyze Data from User Research
Join us for a look at how the Handrail research management platform helps enterprise teams collaborate efficiently and effectively – even when you’re remote or working across time zones.
Team Resiliency Through a Pandemic
Leading a team during the pandemic may seem impossible given it’s likely the most stressful time of your team’s lives. Recently, I lead our team through a design sprint where we explored improving unemployment benefit access in the middle of the pandemic, which required us to shift how we work. In this talk, I’ll share how we reimagined collaboration, communication, and processes to reduce the stress load while maintaining forward momentum. Together as leaders, we’ll explore how to ethically lead our teams while keeping their resiliency in mind and bring these learnings into the post COVID work life.
Designing Distributed: Leading Doist’s Fully Remote Design Team in Six Countries
How to collaborate without borders — workflows and tools to successfully execute high quality designs (Dropbox, Sketch, Figma, etc)
Management techniques for remote leaders and how to establish trust and goals.
Best practices for team alignment, particularly when you’re not in the same office or time zone.
What work-life balance means to Ana, particularly now that WFH is the global norm.
Operating with Purpose
Our teams are living through unprecedented times. With the weight of everything unfolding around us, it’s easy to feel that our work is inconsequential. However, DesignOps teams have more power to influence change than we realize. In this session, we’ll discuss how the small decisions we make every day impact our teams, our companies and our communities. We’ll take a look at how our operations can empower teams to operate with a greater sense of purpose.
The DesignOps Social Hour
Itching to meet your DesignOps fellow travelers? We’ve got you covered with an hour of speed-networking and other social activities. And we can’t think of better people to get us socializing than Alison Rand, Rosenfeld Media’s DesignOps Community curator, and Meredith Black, co-founder of the DesignOps Assembly.
Introduction to MURAL
Our 30-minute live demo gives you basic, hands-on guidance to using MURAL effectively. We cover a range of topics from the basics of adding content onto the canvas to common use cases, depending on the audience.
Designing a Contact Tracing App for Universal Access
New York State recently released COVID Alert NY, a mobile contact tracing app that will alert the user if they come into close contact with someone else who later tests positive for the virus. Hear the designers of the app talk about their experience collaborating remotely across three time zones on this high stakes project. What processes and tools were helpful when designing an app that needed to explain a complex concept to the state’s 19.4 million residents in a way that would be universally understood, accessible, and available in 13 languages?
Opener: Chief of Staff–An unexpected journey
“There’s something about the title or the idea of the chief of staff that seems to be in the zeitgeist.” — Chris Whipple, “The Gatekeepers”
The role of Chief of Staff is trending across all industries, but for some the journey is unorthodox and may require good timing and a strong pitch to create the role. Add to the adventure that no two Chief of Staff roles are likely to be the same.
Lisa will share her journey from UX to Design Ops to Chief of Staff, including some of the methods that she uses to make her way: be the beacon, spread the light, and support your team, even in times of high anxiety.
Theme 3: The Resilient DesignOps Organization
When your design organization has scaled up to hundreds of people, it’s no longer a design practice. It’s a design business. And it needs to address big, messy issues—like accessibility, governance, and creating and proving business value—at scale. How might your DesignOps organization navigate these thorny issues while continuing to grow and operate sustainably?
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Theme 3: Introduction and Provocation
What’s today’s theme all about, and what does it mean for DesignOps professionals? Theme leader Dave Malouf will provide you the background you’ll need for how today’s sessions came to be and what they’ll cover. He’ll also gently provoke you with questions to consider throughout the day.
AccessibilityOps for All
The Cigna Digital Design Operations stood up a new Digital Accessibility and AccessbilityOps team. Digital accessibility as a general term is the inclusive practice of ensuring that digital products (websites, apps, PDFs, etc.) can be used by everyone — including those with a disability or physical impairment — while retaining functionality and usability. Our team ran into many roadblocks including establishing processes, team structure, organizational support, and human resource issues, including onboarding a new team member who was blind. This case study showcases the steps, challenges, and lessons learned standing up a Digital Accessibility Ops team at a Fortune 100 Health Insurance company.
From Insights to Action: Driving Business Values through DesignOps
Business leaders now recognize the Business Value of Design, but how about the importance of Design in driving our Business Values? DesignOps plays an essential role in defining how individuals, teams, and organizations think and operate. Now comes the next chapter – operationalizing our values. As system designers who establish new processes, scale best practices, connect teams, and facilitate alignment, how might we utilize our DesignOps superpowers to unlock greater business value for our stakeholders, customers, and communities? Together, we’ll examine how Design Ops is leading the way to put business values like collaboration, equity, and innovation into practice.
How to Use Wireframes to Improve Team Communication and Participation
Wireframes are not merely design artifacts, they are also effective communication tools. Learn how wireframes can be used in multiple ways throughout the product design process, to ensure that user goals are clear, the design phase is thorough, yet efficient, and developer handoff is predictable and collaborative.
Automatization for Large Enterprise Teams
Personal story of how we not only improved the way of how designers worked with the other team members and external stakeholders but also found the ways to automate the routine work. The goal of the story is to motivate other people to build custom scripts, plugins, extensions, and products. Also, we’ll cover how open source projects can help to increase brand awareness to attract the best talents in the world. Actionable insights to boost up the automation process. Farid will share some insights on how to analyze and find the weak spots in the design teams’ processes. Then he will provide an action plan on how to automate different aspects of the work as well as simplify the onboarding process for the newcomers.
The Importance of Accessible Design Systems
A design system is a set of repeatable components and standards guiding the use of those components. Standards can come in the form of documentation, videos, blogs, discussion channels, meetups and office hours just to name a few. A design system may be built internally within an organization, or there are hundreds of open source design systems that can be downloaded and used. However, only a small percentage of those open source design systems are set up such that they can be successfully implemented in a manner that results in software that is accessible to people with disabilities who use assistive technology to interact with technology. This talk will discuss the importance of accessible design systems and a high level overview of the ten best known open source design systems.
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https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2020/sessions/the-importance-of-accessible-design-systems/
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Virtual Meeting Facilitation Essentials
Nearly everyone has become a better virtual meeting facilitator in 2020, but not necessarily by choice or design. We have teammates around the world who need to collaborate, so we know the frustration and challenges that can arise.
Join this session to learn effective strategies and practical tactics for designing and facilitating any virtual meeting including:
Preparation rituals to establish
Designing for engagement
Effective warmups, even for short meetings
Reusable templates for notes capture
You’ll be guided by Lindsey Eatough, Associate Director of Enterprise Transformation at MURAL, who has spent 2020 working with teams to increase effective collaboration and Lee Duncan, Enterprise Design Sprint Leader at IBM and MURAL member.
Silver Linings: What DesignOps Learned in the Shift to WFH
In mid-March, Bloomberg’s UX team went from a 100% in-office design group to a 100% at-home design group. Challenges quickly surfaced, but once the day-to-day was running and overall anxiety had diminished, teams started to see the silver linings in shifting a multi-office, multi-country design team accustomed to an open office plan to working remotely.
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https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2020/sessions/bloomberg-silver-linings-what-designops-learned-in-the-shift-to-wfh/
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Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops
What happens to your DesignOps team when your Design organization hits scale? Juggling the growth of your product, your people, and your processes is a demanding challenge, and strains the jack-of-all-trades skillset of even the most seasoned DesignOps practitioner. Our solution? Evolve DesignOps into two discrete tracks: Team Ops and Product Ops. We’ll look at how these tracks emerged, how they operate in practice, where they intersect (and where they differ), and the lessons learned from our “conscious uncoupling” of design team ops and product design ops responsibilities.
The Future of DesignOps
While Design Operations (DesignOps) is only a few years old as a practice, it is evolving rapidly. As we finish our 4th year at The Summit, we’ve seen so much change in our community of practice in this short time. So, we want to end this year’s Summit with a look beyond. If we are to be resilient what are we being resilient towards. Jon Fukuda (Limina), Dominique Ward (Atlassian), and Adrienne Allnutt (LinkedIn) will share their perspectives on where DesignOps is going and why. Moderated by Dave Malouf (Northwestern Mutual). We will be fielding questions from attendees, too.
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https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2020/sessions/future-of-designops/
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Design Systems and DesignOps
ou might already be familiar with the “components” part of design systems, but what comes next? How are design systems best used by team members other than designers and engineers like product managers and content creators? What’s the best way to get them used by as many people as is appropriate? Who shouldn’t use a design system? What should success metrics look like? SuperFriendly founder and CEO Dan Mall will walk you through common design system pitfalls, how to avoid and escape them, and all the other intermediate-level stuff that everyone’s asking to help you see how they apply to your specific organization.
Audience: DesignOps folks and design managers that want a deeper understanding of design systems better in order to better support their teams
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​Key Takeaways:
Understanding optimal workflows for creating, using, and maintaining design systems
Defining specific and actionable success metrics—ways to know if a design system is helping or hurting your teams
Strengthening your arguments for the appropriate level of resourcing and budget an organization should be devoting to a design system
Scaling DesignOps: Activating Your Organization
Enabling DesignOps at scale brings the promise of effective transformation for design teams—their capabilities, performance, and business outcomes. But what does it take to operationalize this within your own organization? Workshop participants will explore and assess how they might scale essential areas of DesignOps to better support and build sustainable design teams within their own organizations. Jenny Price and Kristine Berry, two IBM DesignOps leaders, will lead participants through a series of IBM Design Thinking exercises that will ultimately result in a customized roadmap that participants can bring back to their organizations. During this hands-on, team-based workshop, attendees will have the opportunity to assess and ideate on their organization’s approach to scaling DesignOps by: Exploring strategies for advancing DesignOps across your organization Engaging with other DesignOps leaders who are interested in solving for pain-points Selecting concepts that will be the most useful for your organization Developing a 30-60-90 day roadmap specifically for your organization to explore further iteration Learning more about DesignOps resources, methodologies, and applications
DesignOps Summit 2019 Program
According to our user research, you want practical information (tools, techniques, and take-aways that you can bring back to the office), and you’re motivated by these three themes:
Proving Value, Measuring Outcomes
Partnering Outside Design
Change Management
The DesignOps Summit’s two-day main program (October 23-24) was designed with those needs in mind. And our six day-long workshops (October 25) delved even more deeply into the topics you’ll need to develop modern Design and Research Operations.
Opening Keynote: Process and Ambiguity
Operations teams obsess about making the complex simple. We love smart defaults, systems, and process and are always looking for ways to help teams work better. As we focus on common operational deliverables, it’s easy to underinvest in the messy human challenges that are impossible to avoid as we scale user experience practices and teams. How might we be consistent and rigorous, while still leaving room for flexibility and divergent thinking? How might we be impact focused, while also accepting that not everything of value can be measured? How might we embrace process and ambiguity? This talk will explore the daunting task of showing up as efficient operational machines while also leaning into the creative, unpredictable, and human realities of our roles, and why it’s important for us to be able to do both.
Theme 1: Proving Value, Measuring Outcomes
Providing value, measuring outcomes
Measuring What Matters
Research and analytics are the eyes and ears of DesignOps. Validating whether strategies are effective or ineffective allows course correction and adaptation. Identifying problems that require action is essential for facilitating collaboration and ensuring that team members are engaged. Prioritizing user needs is the heart of user experience and Agile development. None of this can be done well without an effective research program. We’ll share how we scale research efforts to collect feedback from thousands of users per month and track the impact of dozens of projects involving 120+ designers.
Real Talk: Proving Value through a Scrappy Playbook
Most DesignOps practices, whether new or established, tackle a handful of common areas: hiring, workflows & process, culture & morale, among others. While you can find plenty of tools and best practices for these areas on- and offline, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Every company, team, toolset, and timeline is different, and the road to solutions is often, if not always, messy. Based on my experiences co-building DesignOps and Design Management practices at Pandora and Capital One, this talk will pull back the curtain on common problems we’ve been asked to solve and the scrappy, yet effective ways we’ve delivered early solutions, value, and measurable outcomes.
Measuring the Designer Experience
DesignOps teams are increasingly being leveraged to solve ambiguous organizational problems like career development, culture or belonging—they’re cornerstones for any successful team. Creating a measurable strategy for these problems is complex, and it can be hard to prove the value of dedicating full-time resources to maintain this work in the long-run. Based on our learnings at Pinterest, I’ll share tactical approaches you can take to craft programming for this problem space, define what ideal states look like and how you can measure and prove value.
Group Activity: A Deep Dive Into Value and Outcomes
DesignOps as a practice is still relatively new—but the activities have been around long enough that we’re increasingly challenged to justify and quantify what we do. Accordingly, we need to address not just what is DesignOps, but how do we prove its value? What outcomes can we genuinely promise? And how do we know we are successful? In this group exercise, we’ll identify techniques, tactics, and tools for proving (and even measuring) value, and describing the outcomes that matter most.
A Design Ops Girl in a Dev Ops World
DevOps has spent a decade focused on tooling that allows developers to code, deploy, monitor, and optimize quickly and efficiently. Along the way, many within that community forget that the people within that community and the developers that they serve are, first and foremost, people. Hear what happens when a Design Ops professional finds herself embedded in a DevOps team, helps them see each other as people, and applies a bit of design thinking, tools and techniques to help them learn the skills necessary as the people they serve move from the information age to the conceptual age.
Distributed Design Operations Management
Long distance relationships are hard – and managing Design Operations for a global team is no exception. Even with the best collaboration tools (and occasional late night phone calls), teams can struggle with isolation and lack of motivation. But there is a way to avoid bad break ups and international team malaise, and Jilanna Wilson knows how. She keeps the love light burning for a team that is spread across 5 continents and 8 time zones. In this session you will hear practical suggestions for topics that are challenging many DesignOps leaders, such as how to manage your team’s critical meetings, maintain consistent onboarding and documentation practices, select effective collaboration tools, and achieve a healthy team culture in a distributed environment.
The Bigger Picture: A Panel Discussion
This year’s conference ambitiously tackles three huge, over-arching themes: Proving value and measuring outcomes Partnering outside design Change management These are indeed huge and over-arching. But, with the help of four crack DesignOps and ResearchOps leaders, the audience’s questions, and Lou Rosenfeld’s moderation, we’ll pull lit off—and we’ll even have some valuable take-aways by the end of the session.
Theme 2: Partnering Outside Design
Partnering Outside Design
Debunking the Myths of Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
Trying to plan and collaborate across different teams whilst creating a cohesive culture can sometimes feel like a pipe dream. This is especially true as we start to work with more distributed teams and as we add more and more specialised functions to the mix, such as Design, Research, Content Strategy, Product Management, Engineering, Data Science…oh my! There are also a few common myths which are just not true in today’s modern team environment. Come along for a few laughs as we explore a few popular myths, debunk them and arm you with a few practical tips and ideas to help you build world-class products.
DesignOps in Wonderland
Experience the fantastical world of navigating rabbit holes, unlocking doors with hidden keys, and racing against the clock as Carla Casariego and Sarah Spencer take you through their adventures in creating and sustaining an agile DesignOps org at Express Scripts.
Lessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World’s Largest Travel Site
Launching a design operations practice is always a challenge, but when you’re the world’s largest travel site, with 490 million monthly visitors and content in 70+ languages, the complexity can seem insurmountable. In this session, Eniola Oluwole will share TripAdvisor’s journey from groups of disconnected design teams with very little process, multiple style guides and no standard toolset, to an integrated organization with a thriving design operations practice. Attendees will learn how to communicate the value of a design ops practice, evaluate design management tools, engage their team in the process and identify the right time to hire dedicated support.
Transforming Strategic Research Capacity through Democratization
What do you do when you have 8x more designers than user researchers in an organization? Learn how we empowered designers to conduct local-level evaluative research, gave researchers more time to work on global, strategic research, and transformed our user research delivery practice. We will share what key ingredients made our transformation possible and what pitfalls to avoid when bringing research democratization to your own organization.
“Prototype” vs “Prototype”—Breaking Down and Rebuilding Our Understanding of What We Do
Re-orgs are inevitable, where the first pain point people encounter is terminology clash. It may feel trite to discuss labels when there are bigger issues to tackle, except that words matter. Words represent processes, methodologies, philosophies, and our values. In this talk I’ll share our story of two multi-disciplinary design teams merging into one. Our pain points, and the exercises we used to break down barriers and create a new team framework for talking with each other about what we really do. Learn how to lead your team from affinity diagram to building a bespoke skills wheel self-assessment.
Theme 3: Change Management
Change Management
Setting the Table for Dynamic Change
Change is the rule, not the exception, and it’s the catalyst for innovation and growth. Design as a discipline is rooted in the process of iteration and change. However, scaling design requires a certain level of preparation in the system for it to be understood, absorbed, and implemented. This process manifests itself in and through Design Operations. In this session, Alison and Jacqui will lead the audience through some interactive exercises to better understand change and outline how DesignOps can help their design orgs navigate ambiguity.
Design is Not the Frosting on the Scaled Agile Layer Cake
For many in Design and UX, news that your company or organization is adopting the Scaled Agile Framework can feel like the beginning of the end for fully integrating design and design teams in the software development lifecycle. But it doesn’t have to be this way. I will talk about how Design and Business Agility built a deep and cross-functional partnership at USAA to bake a human-centered approach into the Scaled Agile layer cake resulting in: SAFe Coaches who advocate for design, a Lean Business Case that uncouples business and user outcomes, and a shared definition of value that aligns whole teams on the best outcomes.
Leading Through Change
Change can be difficult no matter which stage of design maturity your company is experiencing. Chances are, you will be in a position of leading through change at some point in your organization’s evolution. This could be a smaller change such as migration to a new process or something bigger such as a large scale transformation effort, as I have been. During this session, I will share some of my own learnings that apply no matter the stage, scale, or change you are championing.
Learning Over Outcomes
As organizations scale, we risk over-engineering the way design teams work. This can mean creating brittle systems and discouraging true innovation. In this talk, we’ll explore learning-centered approaches as a way to embrace change and foster long-term success — and how we can find inspiration from our childhood roots.
Closing Keynote: Amplify. Not Optimize.
We currently describe, frame, and promote Design Operations as being all about efficiency. While we might not ever say the term “ROI” out loud, we certainly sell DesignOps as means for optimizing our organizations’ investments in their design and research teams and infrastructure. But if DesignOps is going to truly be the game-changer it can and should be, we need a better framing. We need a new framework, one that emphasizes the topline—the creation of value—over bottomline fixation on resource optimization. We need a framework that accounts for supporting the projects, people, and practice of design over the groupings of pixels and management of components. This new framing is at the root of DesignOps framework that Dave Malouf will share in his closing keynote.
Workshop: Creating Career Ladders for DesignOps
This workshop will provide you with the tools to create custom profiles for you or your team. It doesn’t matter if you are a design team of 5 or 500, this workshop will allow us to align on career path/leveling, create parity in the industry, and make the craft more concrete, defensible, and a true design capability.
Workshop: ResearchOps 101–How to Get ResearchOps Off the Ground
ResearchOps 101–How to Get ResearchOps Off the Ground
Workshop: Understand and Change Your Work Culture Through Meetings
This workshop will provide a framework to diagnose the gap between the culture you aspire to create and the way design teams and their stakeholders actually behave at work. Using multiple meeting touch-points that can be orchestrated through design operations, you’ll identify the best opportunities to support better design through more intentional meetings that reflect a desired cultural state.
Workshop: Operating Design Systems: Curating a Product, Serving Products
Operating Design Systems: Curating a Product, Serving Products
Workshop: Design Your Design Organization
Design Your Design Organization
Workshop: Design Operations and Program Management
Design Operations and Program Management
Program Overview
The DesignOps Summit program covered four distinct themes:
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Communicating the Value of DesignOps
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Integrating DesignOps and ResearchOps into the organization
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Growing People and Teams
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Methodologies and Work Environments
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Our speakers lead design operations and research operations at companies like MailChimp, Twitter, Shopify and Facebook.
Our program committee
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is led by
Abby Covert
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Dave Malouf
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Lou Rosenfeld
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and
Kristin Skinner
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Opening Keynote: Operating in Context
You know that thing where you start a new job and suddenly realize that all those great rules of thumb you thought were almost universally true are either impossible or ineffective in your new organization. Welcome to Leisa’s life. In this talk Leisa will share her experience of completely resetting her idea of best practice, implementing a strategy that is the opposite of what everyone expected, and why so few people do what they think is right. You’ll also get bonus thoughts on how to best set up your research team for maximize effectiveness.
Theme 1: Communicating the Value of DesignOps
How might we define DesignOps for the purpose of selling the idea and communicating its value organization-wide? How might DesignOps and ResearchOps have a measurable impact?
Communicating and Establishing DesignOps as a New Function
When introducing DesignOps as a new function to an organization, the first few months are critical as you set the stage for how the organization familiarizes itself with your new team. In this session, Brennan will cover how DesignOps can partner with other functions, how to pick the right programs to tackle first, and how to measure a new team’s success. He will showcase tools that are useful to help establish your team’s newly formed brand within your organization.
Stretching the Definition of DesignOps with Product Development
When is DesignOps about more than building tools and systems that improve the effectiveness of R&D? For athenahealth, our DesignOps team has housed two cross-product teams—by organizational necessity at first—that have become critical early adopters of the instruments and programs their DesignOps colleagues have developed.
Ops without Designers
Science orgs typically lack designers and for good reason; there is no product. The focus is on data. The currency is discovery. Why spend money on a designer when we need to buy a new microscope? So how do we create a better experience through design for science? In this talk, Mark will outline his approach to operationalizing design in science orgs, first in CERN and now at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.
Panel Discussion: Communicating the Value of DesignOps
Communicating the Value of DesignOps
Theme 2: Integrating DesignOps
What does it take to integrate DesignOps into your organization? How about ResearchOps? How do you merge strategies, align goals, integrate processes, and connect people to ensure that design and research can be effective and truly scale?
Operationalizing DesignOps
Today’s problems are often yesterday’s solutions—quick fix solutions often perpetuate the problem or circumvent them completely. How can we identify the right opportunities for DesignOps & ensure the processes or programs that emerge are successful? We’ll take a system-dynamics approach to map out the process, flows, and operational models of an organization. By combining this strategy and building technology that focuses on automation, orchestration, and measurement, we can achieve the speed, scale, and quality goals of any organization.
Flow and Superfluidity for Design Orgs
As DesignOps leaders, we face the challenge of establishing industry practices, organizations, and roles new to our businesses and to design. At MailChimp, we’ve outlined a strategic roadmap and metrics to communicate and execute our vision. Jacqui Frey shows how MailChimp stepped outside of design and drew from patterns in nature and human behavior to envision DesignOps programs, frameworks, systems, and metrics to scale their design organization.
Designing Systems at Scale
To be alive in the twenty-first century is to rely on countless complex systems that profoundly affect our lives, where small mistakes can turn into massive inefficiencies and failures. These failures seem to stem from very different problems, but their underlying causes turn out to be surprisingly similar. This talk will cover about the common threads of these failures, how they can be detected and ultimately prevented using various research disciplines – from market research to anthropology to data science. We need to get good at designing and building for systems to tackle multi-dimensional problems at the intersection of people and technology.
Filling the Void
When we talk about DesignOps, the focus is frequently on scaling existing design systems and supporting established design teams. But the U.S. Digital Service’s Dan Willis will tell a different kind of story about a federal agency that used DesignOps practices to address a multi-million-dollar business problem. With years of system-centric development, the agency had accidentally opened a giant void between the functionality of their enterprise software and the people who depended on that functionality to do their jobs. This talk will explore how to introduce and maintain design operations even where none have existed before.
Panel Discussion: Integrating DesignOps
Integrating DesignOps
Collaborative Creativity through Improv
Improvisational theater performers create an environment where creativity is maximized within an environment of listening and nonjudgemental collaboration. Take a peek behind the curtain as two professional improvisors (and technologists!) demonstrate some of the key principles they apply not just onstage, but their day jobs at software companies as well. All this while laughing your way through the end of the day!
Theme 3: Growing People and Teams
What types of organizational structures support DesignOps and ResearchOps? What do teams go through as they grow? How do they deal with recruiting, hiring, onboarding, cultivating culture, outlining career paths, mapping out guiding design principles, and learning and development?
Shaping design, designers and teams
Jason will share the latest of his work over the past decade developing visual frameworks for design teams, leaders and designers to map their skills and define their future professional development. Through his role as a team leader, and with workshops he runs with the community and his clients, he has seen how valuable it is for designers to self-reflect on who they are, and project the areas in which they feel like they should develop. Whether that’s within, or beyond the context of the organization in which they work.
Understanding Experiences: When you have to do more than work
All of us work as part of something bigger, and we have a set of processes that allow us to make sense of our day-to-day work and its value context. What happens when you need to quickly grow and change, how to you understand those processes? How do you grow your understanding, internally, to improve your teams? First things first, you have to understand the processes and experiences that are going on right now. That takes research. So, let’s get meta.
Creating the Blueprint: Growing and Building Design Teams
Building a team is like building a tribe. Jennifer will focus on the complexities, celebrations and challenges of building a design team and what she has learned through the course of her career.
Taking it to the next level: Career paths in DesignOps
Building a Design Ops team means having a long-term vision and thinking about future growth from the very beginning. DesignOps team members can become key problem solvers bringing value to your company—or can hit professional dead end without leveraging their true strengths. As a new discipline, how you plan to build strong culture and meaningful growth paths will provide ongoing value to your company. Courtney Kaplan will talk about how you can define opportunities for your team, find the right challenges for talent, and provide support in creating an impactful discipline.
Panel Discussion: Growing People and Teams
Growing People and Teams
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Creativity and Culture
By focusing on key operational concerns like methodology, tooling, design systems, org models, and business rationale, DesignOps helps evolving design orgs succeed at their core purpose: Making the Experience. But there’s an important and sometimes overlooked flip-side to that operational coin: The Experience of Making. How do you keep teams inspired, engaged, and intrinsically motivated to deliver meaningful, resonant, innovative work? Miles Orkin, UX Vision and Culture lead for Google Cloud, will describe (and maybe even demonstrate) some key ingredients for cultivating culture.
Theme 4: Methodologies and Work Environments
How might we implement DesignOps and ResearchOps in an agile environment or team? A distributed team? A small design organization? A massive organization?
A Selectively Scrappy Approach to ResearchOps
Megan Blocker will talk about how to decide where to invest your precious time and attention for maximum impact. In other words, where is it most important for your team to get serious about ResearchOps, and where is it okay to stay scrappy? How can you grow sustainably by picking and choosing your battles? It all depends on your goals, your context, and your priorities. We’ll talk about a framework for making those decisions, and about how applying it worked for our growing team.
Continuous Design: One eye on the horizon and the other on the next wave
How do you create the conditions for delivering a great customer experience on a rapidly changing platform? In 2016, Norway’s national railway company began building a new technology platform. As designers, we yearned to address the customer’s actual needs and desires, not just a fresh look and technical upgrade. But with no process, principles, tools, or internal design resources, where do you start?
Turning Research Ripples into Waves
Growing organizational research capacity requires both bottom-up and top-down changes that can be daunting to tackle. Hana Nagel will examine the challenge of scaling research ops through the lens of social change theory, showing how service design and systems thinking can be used to create a strategy to increase research’s impact on product. By building collaboration, connection and community, you can bring enough people together to turn research ripples into waves.
Panel Discussion: Methodologies and Work Environments
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Closing Keynote: Design at Scale
More than 50 years ago, Thomas Watson Jr., the second President of IBM declared, “Good design is good business”. Today, the global company continues to operate on the belief that human experiences drive business. Doug Powell, Distinguished Designer at IBM, will expose what it means to practice design at the global tech company, exploring the inner workings of the largest UX design operation in the world. He will also elaborate on a new Forrester Research study examining the value of design and the design thinking practice at IBM.
Opening Keynote: Org Design for Design Orgs
As the move to establish in-house design teams accelerates, it turns out there’s very little common wisdom on what makes for a successful design organization. Books and presentations tend to focus on process, methods, and tools, leaving a gap of knowledge when it comes to organizational and operational matters. Kristin Skinner, Head of Design Management at Capital One and co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams, will shine a light on the unsung activities of actually running a design team, the operational challenges and considerations, and what works and what doesn’t. Drawing on her experience managing design teams and organizations at Microsoft’s Pioneer Studios, Adaptive Path, and Capital One, Kristin will discuss how what happens “behind the scenes” and how a focus on design management and operations can ultimately affect a design organization’s output, quality, and effectiveness.
The Design Management Office
John and the team at Moment have developed—and continue to evolve—a new framework for effective design management: the Design Management Office (DMO). Their goal is to cultivate this new model and share it with our community to better deliver the value of design more consistently and effectively. John will share insights into the challenges design leaders and managers face as they create, grow, and measure the impact of design teams within large, complex organizations.
Scaling Design Culture
When design teams start to grow within hyper-growth startups, there is often a natural fear that the design culture will change as a result. It doesn’t have to. By encouraging best practices on recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and interviewing for “culture fit” you can benefit from a more diverse and culture rich team. Join Meredith Black for a talk on the vision and values of scaling the design culture at Pinterest while also designing for 175 million users.
PANEL: COLLABORATION TOOLS
We have all heard the old saying “communication is key” but as the landscape of technology widens so do the options we have for communication tools using that technology. To talk about the challenges and opportunities that our organizations face when solving the communication conundrum, we have invited three people working in three different areas where communication is key for organizations with designers: research insights, workflow management and design systems management. Facilitated by Abby Covert.
What DesignOps Can Learn From DevOps
Traditional approaches to maintaining consistency break down when confronted by the complexity of digital business. While DesignOps and related approaches such as DevOps can enhance speed and responsiveness, they risk generating their own kinds of silos, blockages, and breakdowns. This talk will present an agile governance model that scales without becoming brittle, slow, or invasive. It will describe principles and practices teams across-the design-operations spectrum can use to balance agility, coherency, and resilience.
This Game is Never Done: Design Leadership Techniques from the Video Game World
You’ve probably heard a bit about “gamification”: how you can transform obligatory tasks into “fun” motivational ramps using techniques from games. Most of this is wrong! Behavioral science gets us a bit closer, but this session will focus on deep game design techniques that the video game world uses to generate lasting, rather than superficial, motivation. We’ll also dive into creative collaboration techniques used in game development to wrangle talent, the better to create awesome products.
The Many Faces of Operations
To be successful, Operations has to be many things to many people. Operations might need to present a different face to innovators and designers, who might fear Ops as an imposer of constraints, than to a more established group, who are comforted by the presence of strong operations. Similarly, decision-makers, Legal, Procurement, and other silos might require different “faces” from Ops. Crystal Philcox will draw on her experience helping lead operations at the IRS and GSA to show us how Operations can be most effective by adapting to the needs and expectations of an organization’s other major players. She’ll also help us resolve those different “faces” so that they remain aligned and true to the overall goals of an Operations organization.
Discussion: What Operations can teach DesignOps
What Operations can teach DesignOps
Jazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
Great collaboration is the secret sauce of successful development teams. At its core, collaboration comes from the culture of your company and the dynamics of your team. This entertaining session will demonstrate how the dynamics of jazz improvisation serve as a model for better teamwork with live music on stage. The lessons from jazz are particularly important for design, much of which involves collaborating with others: gathering requirements from stakeholders, ideating in project teams, and iterating with developers. Great design requires practitioners to be not only skilled craftsmen equipped with the right tools, but also expert collaborators and facilitators. Jazz gives us a model to help us move in that direction in an modern, agile way. Jim Kalbach will be joined by three special guests.
Panel: Design Systems and Documentation
Designers need to work with developers. One of the core ways they have learned to do this is by taking something from the designer’s playbook—pattern languages—and mapping that against one of the chief learnings from contemporary engineering: componentization. By using design systems and associated object based documentation systems, design leaders have helped to reshape the designer/developer universe and improve operations within the software development lifecycle. Facilitated by Dave Malouf.
Scaling Design through Relationship Maps
Design groups are no longer fringe in large corporations. We’ve grown up, and our numbers have multiplied; which is exactly what we wanted. However, we now face the challenge of integrating—at scale—with our organization’s cultural and operational fabric. Understanding which stakeholders are most needed to support our DesignOps ambitions is a great place to start garnering influence and yielding intended outcomes. Relationship maps are a powerful tool to humanize the process and chart the course.
Research Operations at Scale
Research is an inherent part of design, and operationalizing how insights are generated and used is one of the more challenging aspects of design operations. Overcoming the lack of good tools, taming the complexity of research at scale, and navigating the world of different forms of inquiry are just a few of the obstacles to overcome. That said, we are starting to see a range of benefits from implementing research operations in modern design organizations.
Onboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought
Onboarding new employees to your team is all too often treated as an afterthought, or best case, as an at-the-moment-thought. Employees deserve a well-thought out experience that includes them from the very beginning–from the creation of the position description—to that time after they’ve become integrated into our teams and organizations. We can trace some of these imperfect scenarios all the way back to the creation our performance profiles or position descriptions, and how they were created. When we understand the entire journey from candidate to employee we see the value of treating onboarding as an ending of a particular process instead of a solitary event in time.
Group Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps
We’ll identify the big challenges that DesignOps people face—and begin working on addressing them together in this collaborative activity. We’ll work together in small teams to design the ultimate Design Operations organization, capture learnings, and share them with each other. Facilitated by Dave Gray and the XPLANE team.
Closing Keynote: Getting giants to dance – what can we learn from designing large and complex public infrastructure?
Airports are vital pieces of national infrastructure. They cost billions, and can take decades to design and deliver. We expect them to meet the day to day needs of millions of users, operate totally reliably, survive changing climate conditions, whilst providing a return on investment for their owners and operators. Stephen Pollard from Arup will explore the past present and future of a major airport in London, looking at challenges and successes to understand how best to manage design at the nexus of people, process, technology, and large complex assets.
Workshop: Creating and Maintaining Successful Design Systems
Design systems and style guides provide solid ground for us to stand on as we tackle the increasingly diverse and fast-moving digital landscape. This full-day session will tackle all that goes into making and maintaining successful interface design systems, including:
Selling Design Systems: We all know design systems and pattern libraries are great, but how do you get your clients, bosses, and teammates on board? We’ll make the business cases for design systems, and discuss tactics and tools for selling design systems to clients and stakeholders.
A Pattern-Based Process: Making modular interfaces requires massive shifts in our design and development process. We’ll discuss why front-end development is an essential part of the design process and demonstrate how tools like lo-fi sketches, style tiles, element collages, Pattern Lab, and others facilitate collaboration—and result in successful design systems.
Atomic Design Principles: We’ll cover core principles of modular UI interface design and discuss considerations around atomic design, a methodology for crafting robust, deliberate design systems.
Anatomy of Effective Style Guides: A style guide is the happy home for all a design system’s ingredients. A robust and well-presented style guide can help a design system truly take root at your organization.
Design System Maintenance: Like a fine wine, a design system should increase in value over time. We’ll discuss tactics and techniques to ensure that your pattern library stays in sync, and your design system provides lasting value to your organization.
Workshop: Scaling Design Through the Balanced Team Approach
Once upon a time, we designed websites that were sitting on a limited stack of technology that you could get your head around easily. Nowadays, we design products consisting of increasingly complex, scalable systems. And that means designers face substantial new challenges:
We have to consider multiple channels, APIs, and internal tools
Because engineers usually own the process of architecting these systems, it’s challenging for designers to have an impact
In addition to their product teams, we must collaborate with customer support, marketing or sales in order to be effective
In this workshop, we will teach you how to use a balanced team approach to bridge the gap between design and other teams. We’ll cover:
Techniques for impacting system architecture and backend development so we can design products driven by design and user needs
Processes and tools for incorporating design in an agile product process so we can spread holistic design thinking across the team
Tips for collaborating with customer success and sales teams so we can capture customer insights and enhance visibility
Providing relief for an overstretched design team
Workshop: Scaling Up Your Research Operations the WeWork Way
Organizations who offer products and services often conduct a lot of research with their existing and potential customers. As organizations, offerings, and research all grow several serious problems occur:
Bad memory. The organization becomes bad at connecting the dots between pieces of knowledge and wisdom created and collected through time.
Research silos. Many departments and teams conduct research in the organization yet there is no one way to make sense out of ALL the piles of data being collected.
Reports. The atomic unit of a research insight is almost always long, fluffy reports centered on what was found in a study and are not granular enough to be used in the future. Many studies start with specific goals but end up finding additional important data. Reports fail to convey this data and make it accessible in the future.
Research dictatorship. The only people “allowed” to come up with conclusions after research studies are completed — are researchers. Teams and individuals with product ideas need trained researchers to conduct valid and reliable studies that yield useful knowledge. These researchers are the only ones with access and supposedly memory about past research.
The Polaris system is designed (and has proven) to solve all of these problems. During the workshop you will learn and practice the creation and usage of a system that will help your organization engage more with research, and take better product roadmap decisions. You’ll define the atomic unit of a research insight, understand considerations for creating such system, and get the tools required to build one on your own.
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