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
"Compensation in cash or something as close to cash as possible is the best way to go, but sometimes collective donations work better."
Sarah FathallahLessening the Research Burden on Vulnerable Communities
March 30, 2020
"A centralized model for design systems can be problematic because it distances the team from end users."
Dan DonaldDesign Systems as a Vehicle for Systemic Change
June 1, 2023
"Stakeholder engagement combined with broadcasting research outcomes often marks the turning point from credibility to strategic influence."
Dave HoraAdvice for Establishing Research
December 8, 2022
"Most people care about climate and are willing to make lifestyle changes, but they don't know how to get involved."
Mike Brzozowski Laura Palotie Steve Isley Nancy TsangUX in everyday products: Empowering climate conscious choices
July 17, 2024
"There’s a tension in repositories having to serve immediate product decisions and more durable, strategic knowledge."
Brigette Metzler Dana ChrisfieldResearch Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community
August 27, 2020
"Our behavior is implicit messaging; we need both explicit and implicit signals to support resilience on teams."
Bria Alexander Laura Gatewood Corey Long Daniel Orbach Laine Prokay Deanna SmithThe Big Question about Resilience: A panel discussion
September 23, 2024
"One of the best parts is seeing people from Ops, recruiting, marketing and product interacting together in Slack."
Roy Opata OlendeHow Zapier Uses ‘All Hands Research’ to Increase Exposure to Users
August 6, 2020
"It pains me to say, one of the tools they were using was MS Paint."
Elena Naids Liza McRuerThe Power of Difficult Conversations: A Case Study on How We Introduced Design Ops in the Federal Government Space
October 2, 2023
"You have to socialize service design within organizations considering their dominant logic — whether engineering, clinical, or commercial."
Lavrans Løvlie Ben ReasonAsk me anything – Authors of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
November 19, 2025
