Rosenverse
Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX

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.

Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX

Gold
Wednesday, September 29, 2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Share the love for this talk
Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
Speakers: Kate Koch and Jean-Claire Fitschen
Link:

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."

Ask the Rosenbot
Abbey Smalley
Today’s Design Ops and Programs Landscape & Career Paths
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
JD Buckley
COMMUNICATE: Discussion
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Courtney Maya George
Scale Your Organization and Grow Your Designers
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Lavrans Løvlie
Ask me anything – Authors of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Nalini P. Kotamraju
An Organizational Story: Salesforce Lightning Design System
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Alëna Iouguina
Designing Systems at Scale
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Sam Yen
Driving Organizational Change Through Design? Do more of this and less of that
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Jerome “Axle” Brown
How to Use Self-Directed Learning to Ensure Your Research Insights are Heard and Acted Upon
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Sheryl Cababa
Day 2 Panel
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Jake Burghardt
Finding More Inroads into Research Impact
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Emily DiLeo
Stronger Together: Lessons Learned from UX Research Ops
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Shazia Ali
Communication: Innovative techniques for making your voice heard [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Jay Bustamante
Navigating the Ethical Frontier: DesignOps Strategies for Responsible AI Innovation
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Joerg Beringer
Scaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Failure Friday #4: Invisible Work: How I Stalled My Career by Not Showing My Work
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Changying (Z) Zheng
Navigating Innovation with Integrity
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold

More Videos

Taiye Akin-Akinyosoye

"Focus groups reveal subconscious behaviors and non-verbal cues that individual interviews might miss."

Taiye Akin-Akinyosoye

Amplifying voices and enhancing user research through group interviews

March 12, 2025

Sarah Rink

"Observers interrupting sessions was a weird behavior we had to manage with clear rules."

Sarah Rink

Remote User Research: Dos and Don'ts from the Virtual Field

June 11, 2020

Caroline Jarrett

"A lot of people think 95% confidence is the only way, but you can adjust confidence levels based on your situation and needs."

Caroline Jarrett Erin Weigel

Have fun with statistics?

December 12, 2024

Phil Hesketh

"Automated testing tools saved us several days of manual testing and helped prioritize work more effectively."

Phil Hesketh

Designing Accessible Research Workflows

September 29, 2021

Zen Ren

"In ID, practitioners try to never use the word understand in project goals because it’s too vague for actionable behaviors."

Zen Ren

Taking Inspiration from Instructional Design for Research

March 10, 2022

Sahibzada Mayed

"Empathy is really just the floor, not the ceiling; it cannot replace someone's actual lived experience."

Sahibzada Mayed

The Politics of Radical Research: A Manifesto

March 27, 2023

Nick Lewis

"Designing sustainable doesn’t mean removing everything fun from the web."

Nick Lewis

Designing and building low-carbon websites independently

November 18, 2025

Soma Ghosh

"Semiotics isn’t just words and pictures; it includes every stimulus in your waking and even perhaps sleeping life."

Soma Ghosh Savina Hawkins Dave Hoffer Rob Thomas Victor Udoewa

What emerging methods are advancing UX research [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

September 28, 2023

Tricia Wang

"Don’t treat personas or segments as reality but as representations that should remain flexible and questioning."

Tricia Wang

Spatial Collapse: Designing for Emergent Culture

January 8, 2024