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
"Setting up a repository as a team of one or two is actually the prime time to establish processes like that."
Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex KnollRepository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research
March 9, 2022
"Flying out to meet users and then flying home to design somewhere else is not sustainable or effective."
Amy Brana StuartRest in Peace Fly-in-fly-out Design
June 9, 2022
"Users have no choice but to use the software we build, so adoption metrics are often not useful."
Alexandra SchmidtEnterprise UX Playbook
December 1, 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
"Slowing down research creates equitable spaces where minority and marginalized voices can be meaningfully included."
Megan Blocker Amy Bucher Katie Hansen Ricardo Martins Nidhi Singh RathoreDay 2 Theme Panel
March 12, 2025
"Organic decision making doesn’t always work for high stakes efforts because design ops initiatives are often horizontal and require alignment."
Michelle ChinThe DesignOps Starter Kit
September 29, 2021
"Failure is easy, recovery is hard, but it’s necessary and part of the process."
Maria GiudiceEmpowering change: Reigniting purpose, passion and impact in research
March 13, 2025
"Levels can mean really different things at different companies, so ask a lot of questions about expectations for each level."
Catt Small Micah Bennett Brian Carr Jessica HarlleeWhat's Next for ICs: Exploring Staff and Principal Designer Roles
February 22, 2024
"Design Ops professionals have the skills to lead these big initiatives like inclusion."
Saara Kamppari-MillerTheme Three Intro
September 9, 2022