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’s design ops team evolved into a CX ops team to better align with the company’s transformation into an experience-focused organization.
-
•
Centralizing and streamlining incoming project requests significantly improved the team’s ability to prioritize and onboard work quickly.
-
•
Using ‘superpower’ metaphors helped the team frame operational capabilities like speed, telepathy, and flight in a relatable and engaging way.
-
•
Teleportation as a superpower represents the team’s use of integrated data tools for real-time org design and headcount planning.
-
•
Telepathy relates to proactive recruitment and resource planning processes that anticipate talent needs before they arise.
-
•
Adopting new tools and building operational playbooks (‘super gadgets’) accelerates team productivity and scalability.
-
•
Flight symbolizes adaptability and the ability to pivot quickly in response to change, crucial in a large, evolving organization.
-
•
Super intelligence is embodied by the team’s role as a knowledge hub, sharing information to empower stakeholders and avoid communication gaps.
-
•
Super strength highlights the importance of resilience, strategic partnerships, customer obsession, and endurance in sustaining impact.
-
•
The team acknowledges ‘kryptonite’ challenges like burnout and miscommunication, emphasizing the need for clear communication and collaborative culture.
Notable Quotes
"We’re powering a 300 plus organization of designers, researchers, program managers, and strategists."
"Design ops is undergoing a transformation into a CX focused team with a refined mission to drive efficiency and customer experience excellence."
"Super speed means enabling rapid onboarding by centralizing and streamlining a previously disparate process."
"Teleportation lets us move throughout the organization by building tools that gather disparate data for real-time decision making."
"Telepathy as mind reading means proactively building a talent pipeline and improving recruitment processes."
"Flight is about adaptability – being ready to switch gears and pivot quickly in a global and changing environment."
"Super intelligence is the power to gather and share knowledge consistently to ensure no gaps in communication."
"Super strength is the resilience and endurance to partner and drive strategic impact backed by customer obsession."
"You should take risks, and if you fail, you need to fail fast and pivot immediately."
"We are stronger when we work together towards a unified goal – that’s our super healing power."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"If you really care about success, you define it first and hire against performance, not just experience."
Russ UngerOnboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought
November 7, 2017
"Researchers might be the last people in organizations accountable for understanding humans."
Tricia WangFrom Users to Shapers of AI: The Future of Research
March 25, 2024
"Participants want to take ownership of their stories and demand participatory, non-extractive, trauma-informed research methods."
Jemma Ahmed Megan Blocker Eduardo OrtizRedefining the research toolkit: Expanding methodologies for a changing world
March 12, 2025
"Operations is a verb. You’ve always been operating — the role just invites you to do it better."
Kate Towsey Jake BurghardtResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt
October 16, 2025
"Design thinking is the scientific method for the 21st century."
Phil GilbertA Consistent Culture of Design
May 14, 2015
"Relational research builds relationships and the knowledge automatically flows."
Victor UdoewaResearch in the Pluriverse
March 29, 2023
"Do what you can, where you are, with what you have — that’s how you show you can deliver."
Ted Booth Sam Ladner Fredrik Matheson Russ UngerDiscussion
June 8, 2016
"I got my PhD so I could get a seat at the table."
Kristen Honey"Let’s Talk About Data and Crisis”: Public Digital Service Delivery = Open Data + Human Centered Design
November 18, 2021
"Design ops is servant leadership — if everything goes well, no one notices, but if it goes poorly, we are the first to be blamed."
Maggie DieringerCutting through the Noise
September 24, 2020