Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Discussion
Gold
Friday, June 9, 2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Share the love for this talk
Discussion
Speakers: Toby Haug
Link:

Summary

The session includes several UX and product experts, including Ariel, Ross, Mark, and others, sharing rich insights on cross-organizational collaboration and design practices. Ariel details a comprehensive 75-page journey map he developed for a city government project, emphasizing the importance of creating shared documentation and safe spaces for policy conversations. Ross shares his transition from engineering to UX driven by user stories and empathy, while Mark explains how APIs help coordinate requests for design resources across large teams, ensuring that workload is manageable and transparent. The group discusses techniques for empathizing with higher-level stakeholders, including understanding how they’re measured and aligning design goals with their success metrics. They tackle maintaining continuity as teams and members change by recommending thorough handoff documents and horizontal roles overseeing core experiences. Agile challenges are addressed through dual-track agile methodologies and A/B testing, allowing iterative design in short sprints. The importance of including support teams in design feedback loops is highlighted, with suggestions for tagging support tickets for visibility. Ariel also speaks about building an internal community of practice and design kits to encourage civic service design culture. Additionally, small human gestures like sending thank you cards across silos prove effective in fostering empathy. The panel underscores making documentation accessible and integrating technical writers within UX teams. The conversation weaves in practical examples and cultural tactics from companies like Honeywell, HP, and government agencies, all focusing on bridging organizational silos to deliver better user-centered products.

Key Insights

  • A detailed journey map for government services can span 75 pages and serve as a critical shared internal document to build understanding across commissioners, staff, and providers, as Ariel described.

  • Successful collaboration in government requires designers to learn enough policy to engage as trusted peers, creating safe spaces to surface real issues and invite constructive change.

  • Ross transitioned from engineering to UX by discovering inspirational user stories in product feedback that generated empathy and motivation to improve user experience.

  • Mark’s team created lightweight 'APIs' for other teams to request UX resources, including tracking states like accepted, in progress, or rejected, helping manage demand and transparency.

  • Empathizing with stakeholders higher up the org involves understanding how they are measured and what success means for their role, enabling better alignment of design goals.

  • To maintain continuity across feature teams with turnover, special onboarding sessions and 'going away' documents are critical handoff rituals that save time and preserve context.

  • Dual-track agile separates design and product discovery (one track) from development sprints (another), giving designers more runway to iterate and validate ideas.

  • Including support teams in scrums or regular meetings improves visibility of design-related customer issues; tagging support tickets enables focused review of design feedback.

  • Simple gestures like sending physical thank you cards across organizational silos can foster empathy and build cross-team relationships beyond technology.

  • Making documentation and toolkits in plain language, avoiding jargon, broadens access for cross-disciplinary teams and elevates the value of information design within UX.

Notable Quotes

"The consolidated view is really the invitation in to help get people excited and also help them see that we've created documentation that didn't exist previously."

"As a designer and leader in this space, I've had to learn a lot about policy so I can come in and have really deep discussions with policy folks as a peer."

"I started just searching for product name to look for bugs, but then found inspirational stories that helped me build empathy for users."

"We created APIs so people can submit ideas or resource requests in a simple structure, and then track their status from accepted to rejected."

"When I talk to stakeholders, I try to understand how they are measured and what success means for their role in the company."

"When someone swaps out on a feature team, that event needs a special onboarding: briefings and whiteboard sessions to transfer knowledge."

"Dual track agile means you have the dev sprint track and a separate design/product track that leads the dev track by several cycles."

"Invite support people to scrums or monthly engineering reviews so design can get visibility into common customer issues."

"Sending real physical thank you cards across silos surprises people and builds empathy and openness beyond what technology can do."

"We wrote our toolkits in plain English so people understand the tactics without getting lost in jargon—they can learn the jargon later."

Ask the Rosenbot
Mike Oren
Design Research Strategy & Strategic Design Research
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Jess Greco
Claiming your power: Practical tools for amplifying your unique voice
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Erika Flowers
AI-Readiness: Preparing NASA for a Data-Driven, Agile Future
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Sarah Fathallah
A Typology of Participation in Participatory Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Bringing together market and user research
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Ali Jeffery
How DesignOps Helped Enable Wall Street to Work Remotely
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Ebru Namaldi
Designing the Designer’s Journey: Scaling Teams, Culture, and Growth Through DesignOps
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Sam Proulx
Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Peter Levin
Solve a Problem Here, Transform a Strategy There: Research as an Occasion for Expanding Organizational Possibility
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Jim Kalbach
Peace is waged with sticky notes: Mapping Real-World Experiences
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Rachael Greene
Building a Design Ops Practice that Really Works (Most of the Time)
2025 • DesignOps Community
Lija Hogan
Practical Principles of Inclusive Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Dem Gerolemou
Climate technology fundamentals
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Edward Cupps
The Principal Path: Journeying from Management to Individual Contributor
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Laura Gatewood
Beyond Buzzwords: Adding Heart to Effective Slack Communication
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Alexis Lucio
Scaling Accessibility Through Design Systems
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold

More Videos

Jerome “Axle” Brown

"Sometimes the loudest voices dominate, but asynchronous collaboration helps give quieter voices a chance to speak."

Jerome “Axle” Brown

How to Use Self-Directed Learning to Ensure Your Research Insights are Heard and Acted Upon

March 11, 2021

Maria Giudice

"Change really cannot be done by any individual person. Change is a team sport."

Maria Giudice

Remaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience

June 9, 2016

Ilana Lipsett

"Whoever has been and might continue to be the most negatively impacted absolutely needs to be centered and have their voices at the table."

Ilana Lipsett

Anticipating Risk, Regulating Tech: A Playbook for Ethical Technology Governance

December 10, 2021

Jacqui Frey

"We haven’t just invited them, we’ve set the damn table, and sometimes we have to host the damn party."

Jacqui Frey Alison Rand

Setting the Table for Dynamic Change

October 24, 2019

Neil Barrie

"Bumble’s feature of women making the first move was a powerful cultural lift addressing a huge challenge."

Neil Barrie

Widening the Aperture: The Case for Taking a Broader Lens to the Dialogue between Products and Culture

March 25, 2024

Dianne Que

"Our playbook content started showing up in other people’s random decks without us even knowing it."

Dianne Que

Real Talk: Proving Value through a Scrappy Playbook

October 23, 2019

John Paul de Guzman

"We replaced the exhausting time estimation game with data-driven models that give us more reliable results."

John Paul de Guzman

10k Screens Later: How We Became a Data-Driven Design Organization

September 24, 2024

Jorge Arango

"I see these AI tools as augmenting human work, letting us focus on what matters most, not replacing humans."

Jorge Arango

Scale Smart: AI-Powered Content Organization Strategies

September 24, 2024

Janaki Kumar

"Silos are inevitable but as enterprise designers, we find ways to work across them to get our job done."

Janaki Kumar

Innovate with Purpose

June 14, 2018