Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
Summary
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.
Key Insights
-
•
Verizon CX Ops transformed from a design ops team to a global CX operations team powering 300+ roles across the enterprise.
-
•
Super speed represents rapid onboarding and resource planning to match the right designers to priority projects quickly.
-
•
Telepathy is a metaphor for proactive and consistent communication, resource capacity planning, and recruitment process improvements.
-
•
Super gadgets include operational tools like Jira, Airtable, and dynamic reporting, critical for scaling CX operations.
-
•
Flight symbolizes adopting multiple frameworks (predictive, agile, hybrid) and flexible working at global scale.
-
•
Super intelligence is embodied by CX Ops acting as a knowledge hub, oversharing communications to avoid gaps.
-
•
Super strength is demonstrated by strong cross-team partnerships and repeatable scalable processes that enhance customer experience quality.
-
•
Capacity planning in uncertain environments relies heavily on design systems, iterative planning, and quarterly forecasts with business partners.
-
•
Defining and tracking anti-patterns helps identify inefficiencies, such as ineffective meetings or communication breakdowns, enabling quick corrective action.
-
•
Crypto nights like burnout, silos, and too many priorities are actively managed through transparency, communication, and team support.
Notable Quotes
"We are super ops — powering 300 plus designers, researchers, and strategists globally."
"One of our superpowers is super speed: moving at the speed of light almost in onboarding and resource planning."
"Telepathy means mind-reading—proactive solutions through expanded resource capacity planning and recruitment."
"Super gadgets are our operational tools that we get really geeky about, like Jira and Airtable."
"Flight means adopting multiple models—predictive, agile, hybrid—to empower design at global scale."
"As the keepers and gatherers of knowledge, we empower others by sharing and sometimes over-sharing communications."
"Our super strength comes from partnerships and scalable, repeatable processes."
"We have crypto nights like people pleasing, perfectionism, silos, and burnout—which we watch out for carefully."
"Capacity planning is always through ever-changing uncertainty, requiring quarterly resource planning and business partnership."
"Defining anti-patterns helps us quickly identify and remedy issues like ineffective meetings or misaligned priorities."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Agile can feel like a cult, but the data helps show it’s working and not just a belief system."
Mackenzie Cockram Sara Branco Cunha Ian FranklinIntegrating Qualitative and Quantitative Research from Discovery to Live
December 16, 2022
"City Hall is often risk-averse, and professionals of color face extra penalties for taking risks in their careers."
Justin Entzminger Terrance Smith Tracy M. Colunga Mai-Ling GarciaRisk and Reward: How to Diversify the Field of Civic Innovators and Designers
November 17, 2022
"Accessibility is not a single project, it’s a journey that requires continuous iteration and improvement."
Sam ProulxAccessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
September 8, 2022
"Transparency is building respect for what your teammates do."
Jennifer KanyamibwaCreating the Blueprint: Growing and Building Design Teams
November 8, 2018
"We talked all about resilience, curated by myself yesterday."
Bria AlexanderDay 3 Welcome
September 25, 2024
"We prepare intensively for the logistics and safety of participants but rarely prepare ourselves for the emotional impacts."
Jane Reid Janice HannawaySelf-care in User Research
April 2, 2020
"A lot of design frameworks funnel thinking narrowly, which feels like baked-in limitations of human-centered design."
Sheryl CababaIntegrating Systems Thinking Into Your Practice as a Designer
October 1, 2025
"The audience tripled in size from 200 to 600 in just one year, and we thought, oh my gosh, we're on to something."
Kristin SkinnerTheme 1 Intro
September 29, 2021
"Generative AI is a souped up mad lib, its job is to fill in the blank."
Ovetta SampsonManaging the Human Engagement Risks of AI
June 10, 2025