Rosenverse
DesignOps Community Sensing Session

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

DesignOps Community Sensing Session

Thursday, May 13, 2021 • DesignOps Community
Share the love for this talk
DesignOps Community Sensing Session
Speakers: Bud Caddell , Kristin Skinner and Alana Washington
Link:

Summary

Join us to explore the future of the DesignOps role, as well as the joys and challenges folks are facing in that role.

Key Insights

  • •

    Design operations struggles less with ideas and more with organizational culture and ways of working that hinder idea adoption.

  • •

    Many design ops practitioners feel isolated as 'teams of one,' facing challenges defining their role and gaining recognition.

  • •

    Leadership support is a crucial variable influencing design ops success, with some having strong champions and others lacking basic resources.

  • •

    Scaling design ops functions risks losing the humanity and startup agility that early-stage teams enjoy.

  • •

    Internal organizational operations directly influence customer experiences externally, creating a feedback loop of impact.

  • •

    Community events and cohorts foster solidarity and shared learning invaluable to those navigating ambiguous roles.

  • •

    The COVID-19 pandemic has driven shifts in work practices, emphasizing remote efficiency but also risking increased bureaucracy.

  • •

    There is tension between adopting bureaucratic scaling systems and maintaining human connection within growing design ops teams.

  • •

    Iterative development in design ops means many contributions build foundations for future success even if not immediately visible.

  • •

    Active curation of conference content grounded in real participant feedback ensures relevance and practical usefulness for the community.

Notable Quotes

"Organizations weren’t suffering from a lack of ideas, they were suffering from ways of working and culture that didn’t allow good ideas to get heard."

"I see design ops as deeply linked to how internal operations influence what our customers experience."

"The biggest challenge I see is scaling without losing our humanity."

"There’s still folks who are entering saying I’m a team of one, no one knows what I do."

"Having a 'dope' leader who champions design ops changes everything."

"Sometimes you’re just laying the foundational bricks so an idea or process can get off the ground."

"We want to prevent our community from the dehumanizing impulses often brought on by bureaucratic scaling."

"This conference is a polished snapshot of conversations already happening at scale in the community."

"We’re seeing a bifurcated experience between teams ready for virtual work and those struggling with it."

"Evangelizing and doing design ops day-to-day is a tough balance when resources are slim."

Ask the Rosenbot
Greg Petroff
Design is the Differentiator: Bringing New Design Innovations to a Very Antiquated and Very Large Industry
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Christian Rohrer
Research Operations at Scale
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Yalenka Mariën
Designing for Digital Inclusion in the Belgian Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Greg Petroff
Software as Material—A Redux
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Mariah Hay
BUILD: Discussion
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Ben Davies
Expert Panel: The Principles of Research Repository Design
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Pippa Lomas
Paving the Path for Neurodiversity in Design
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Alexandra Schmidt
Why Ethics Can't Save Tech
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Anne Mamaghani
How Your Organization's Generative Workshops Are Probably Going Wrong and How to Get Them Right
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Noz Urbina
Rapid AI-powered UX (RAUX): A framework for empowering human designers
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Deanna Mitchell
Designing with culture: Unlocking impactful insights for Product and UX
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Rikki Teeters
Concept to code: Transforming ideas into functional products with Kiro
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Gold
Crystal Philcox
The Many Faces of Operations
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Bas Raijmakers, PhD (RCA)
What Design Research can Learn from Documentary Filmmaking
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Sheryl Cababa
Expanding your Design Lens with Systems Thinking
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Caitlyn Hampton
Compass 101: Growing Your Career In A Startup World
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold

More Videos

Tony Turner

"A taxonomy system is basically a way to tag different findings and reports so you can find relationships later."

Tony Turner

Capturing Deep Insights

September 30, 2021

Frances Yllana

"Design research should be involved in setting early policy vision, not just in delivering on it later."

Frances Yllana Ann Buechner Jess Jones Betsy Ramaccia

D.E.A.R.R. Diaries (Discipline, Experience, Architecture, Reflection + Revolution)

November 16, 2022

Anna Poznyakov

"Maybe the person who is the loudest in the room isn’t the one you should manage closely as a stakeholder."

Anna Poznyakov Richa Prajapati

Get The Most Out Of Stakeholder Collaboration—and Maximize Your Research Impact

March 12, 2021

Sarah Williams

"We’re piloting surveys that ask customers how honest, simple, or reliable their experience was, then turn that into a score."

Sarah Williams

A Framework for CX Transformation

June 11, 2021

"Providing context to designers leads to much better design outcomes."

Product and Design at Bloomberg: A 15-year Evolution

December 6, 2022

David Cronin

"If we could make something really easy for developers, we would drive adoption and continually improve user experiences."

David Cronin

The GE Design System and Thoughts about Craft at Scale

May 13, 2015

Liwei Dai

"By identifying the triggers that lead customers to ask questions, I helped data scientists figure out what training data to explore."

Liwei Dai

The Heart and Brain of the AI Research

March 31, 2020

Peter Van Dijck

"We’re not teaching the model anything; we’re improving our prompts and context."

Peter Van Dijck

Hands-on AI #1: Let’s write your first AI eval

October 8, 2025

Jon Fukuda

"Aligning on a north star problem gets everyone excited and aligned from the beginning."

Jon Fukuda Amy Evans Ignacio Martinez Joe Meersman

The Big Question about Innovation: A Panel Discussion

September 25, 2024

Latest Books All books