Coordinated collaboration: a Service Design & DesignOps love story
Summary
On paper, UX reviews are a no-brainer. Teams want feedback. Leaders want quality. Experts are willing to help. So why wasn’t it working? What seemed like a simple ask—“let’s offer UX reviews to teams”—quickly exposed a mess of invisible complexity: unclear ownership, inconsistent experiences, too many ad hoc requests, and burned-out senior designers doing unrecognized labor. There was so much willingness to help and share knowledge, but not enough of a system or support to scale. So we decided to design it. This is the case study of how we created an internal UX Review service, not just a process. Co-led by service design and design ops, we mapped the end-to-end journey—from request intake to reviewer matching to documentation and follow-up. We built shared definitions of success. We tackled coordination debt. And we designed for the system, not just the moment so we considered who participates, who decides, who benefits, and who sustains it. The project became a love story between two disciplines (Service Design and DesignOps), between intention and implementation to navigate the ambiguous intersection of what the business needs, what designers say they want, and what actually helps everyone do better work. More than that, it challenged us to apply our design craft to ourselves. What does it mean to design services for designers? How do we balance flexibility and fairness in a knowledge org? And how do we turn a “nice to have” into a performance driver?
Key Insights
-
•
Intentional, structured collaboration outperforms random or ad hoc teamwork in globally distributed UX teams.
-
•
Creating shared language and purpose, such as through a naming workshop, builds strong alignment beyond task-level agreement.
-
•
Forming a dedicated collaboration squad with explicit agreements on logistics, tools, and interpersonal support strengthens team performance.
-
•
Coordinated collaboration includes recognizing distinct but complementary roles, enabling each partner to do their best work while supporting the other.
-
•
Small feedback loops and check-ins sustain momentum and build collaboration muscle memory over time.
-
•
Increasing coordination can triple project impact from 2-3 to 10-11 projects per quarter with less individual effort.
-
•
Service design and design ops partnership drives service innovation and operational sustainability together.
-
•
Collaboration rituals and structured sessions replace reliance on chance hallway conversations, fostering alignment.
-
•
Focusing on learning and adaptive capacity within teams enhances UX knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.
-
•
Looking beyond traditional roles, operational or program managers can fulfill some design ops coordination functions in organizations lacking dedicated roles.
Notable Quotes
"Each of us is a superhero managing our own work and advocating for design best practices in silos."
"Coordinated collaboration is about designing our efforts with purpose to sustain peak performance conditions."
"Naming was nothing about the name; it was about creating alignment and clarity of purpose."
"Once collaboration loops start compounding, they become muscle memory and the structure supports our work."
"You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems."
"Small feedback comments like, 'Hey, how’s that going?' keep the momentum alive in addition to structured meetings."
"Our partnership is like cat and dog—sharing a body but having distinct identities and personalities."
"Increasing coordinated collaboration increased our service capacity by 200%."
"We intentionally created space to talk about career goals, stress, and how to support each other as a team."
"Program managers are the unsung heroes who can back up design ops work in many organizations."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"If we focus on energy management data points instead of just saying sustainable, that wins over more people."
Amy ParnessScaling Sustainability: Complementary strategies that drive long-term success
May 29, 2025
"Design Ops calls for someone who’s able to remain calm in ambiguous and changing environments, which surprisingly fits ADHD traits well."
Jessica NorrisADHD: A DesignOps Superpower
September 9, 2022
"Many hiring managers feel stuck by bureaucracy and policies that haven’t adapted, limiting candidate pools to specific locations."
DesignOps and The Great Talent War of 2021
August 19, 2021
"Remote work is totally different from working from home during a worldwide pandemic."
Ana FerreiraDesigning Distributed: Leading Doist’s Fully Remote Design Team in Six Countries
January 8, 2024
"Both tribes really believe in doing awesome for customers, that’s our common ground."
Steve Portigal Chris Chapo Kelly Goto Christian RohrerDiscussion
May 13, 2015
"I prefer to think of my career as a series of trampolines and your resume as a portfolio of life experiences."
Maria GiudiceEmpowering change: Reigniting purpose, passion and impact in research
March 13, 2025
"We have to step outside research and understand AI, technology, and product processes to put ourselves in the right space."
Megan Blocker Lada Gorlenko Fatimah Richmond Molly StevensWhat UX research maturity looks like and how we get there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
November 9, 2023
"Culture eats strategy for breakfast—integrating cultures is the hardest and most critical part of mergers."
Jorge ArangoMeeting of the Waters: Designing for Successful Inorganic Growth
August 12, 2021
"At the committed stage, executives start asking what design can do for business strategy."
JJ KercherA Roadmap for Maturing Design in the Enterprise
June 15, 2018
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What strategies help designers manage executives who overestimate AI’s ability to replace skilled work?
What role do non-player characters (NPCs) or agents play in intelligent collaborative interfaces?
What skills are essential for designers to communicate effectively with AI to achieve meaningful outputs?