Summary
Our past three speakers will discuss and answer questions about operations practices from their respective industries. Facilitated by Lou Rosenfeld.
Key Insights
-
•
Lifelong learning is essential for effective leadership and organizational survival, as stagnation leads to failure.
-
•
Design thinking should extend beyond practitioners to encompass creative leadership across business and operations.
-
•
Safe conflict is a critical signal of trust and healthy team dynamics, contrasting with suppressed conflict mistaken for harmony.
-
•
DevOps and design ops face similar challenges around evolving practices, requiring flexible, context-driven approaches rather than replication of models.
-
•
Etsy’s postmortem process reframes IT failures as creative opportunities to learn and improve without blame.
-
•
Strategic friction, common in game design, can foster transformational user experiences unlike traditional UX’s focus on frictionless usability.
-
•
Integrated, cross-disciplinary teams (designers, engineers, strategists) deliver better solutions than siloed approaches.
-
•
Organizations should view themselves as evolving organisms, balancing respect for their history with adaptation to future needs.
-
•
Motivating tech teams often involves reducing daily misery by automating repetitive tasks and converting unplanned into planned work.
-
•
Design organizations should teach collaborators ‘how to fish’ to create independence and fluid collaboration rather than hoarding design knowledge.
Notable Quotes
"You can’t lead without being a lifelong learner because when your company stops learning, it dies."
"The Etsy postmortem is not about blame, it’s about open-ended discovery and learning to do better next time."
"If you don’t have any conflict, that means you have no trust."
"Please don’t implement the Spotify model. It works for them, it won’t work for you."
"We have to move beyond linear solutions. Complex systems require us to explore our way through problems."
"The greatest sin of the designer is to say I have the answers and no one else is allowed to have them."
"Our job as design teams is to teach others what we do, not to feel insecure about sharing."
"Strategic friction is about where you apply friction deliberately to create insight and transformation."
"A lot of DevOps is about empathy — doing our piece but thinking about the larger connection."
"In government, the motivation is reduction of misery: why are we up at 3 AM fixing something avoidable?"
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Taking responsibility for our behaviors starts with an apology and continues with regular feedback and action."
Darian DavisLessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
January 8, 2024
"Government isn’t always trusted, so we worked with local partners to connect with underserved communities."
Aaron Stienstra Lashanda HodgeLeveraging Civic Design to Advance Equity and Rebuild Trust in the US Federal Government
December 8, 2021
"You’re really there to learn because the person with assistive technology is the expert of their setup."
Kavana RameshMeaningful inclusion: Practicing accessibility research with confidence
September 24, 2024
"Working with AI is a lot less like working with another human and more like working with some weird force of nature."
Helen ArmstrongAugment the Human. Interrogate the System.
June 7, 2023
"Math models don’t just provide numerical precision, they can be inspirational for thinking about UX spread."
Scott PlewesWhy Isn't Your UX Approach Going Viral?: A Mathematical Model
March 28, 2023
"The New European Bauhaus combines aesthetics, inclusivity, and climate-neutral ambitions to transform built environments by 2050."
Christian BasonExpand—Rethinking Design for Public Challenges
September 14, 2022
"An agent is a model using tools in a loop, making plans, reasoning, and calling tools until it’s done."
Peter Van DijckBuilding impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 3: Understand AI architectures: RAG, Agents, Oh My!
July 30, 2025
"Everything is designed, much of it poorly, so it’s incumbent on us to redesign capitalism and systems more inclusively."
Soma Ghosh Savina Hawkins Dave Hoffer Rob Thomas Victor UdoewaWhat emerging methods are advancing UX research [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
September 28, 2023
"Reliance on foundational basics applies whether you’ve been a researcher for two months or twenty years."
Steve Portigal Susan Simon-Daniels Tamara Hale Randolph Duke IIWar Stories LIVE! Q&A-Discussion
March 30, 2020
