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
"We need everyone to roll up their sleeves and be a part of the creative process to spark innovation and even delight."
Uday GajendarThe Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX
May 13, 2015
"Our job as innovation managers is to build the playgrounds where people play—designing the built environment to complement policy and sustain future generations."
Liz EbengoThe Burden on Children: The Cost of Insufficient Post-Conflict Services and Pathways Forward
December 4, 2024
"By summer, there had been zero cases of COVID on farms employing temporary foreign workers in BC."
Gordon Ross12 Months of COVID-19 Design and Digital Response with the British Columbia Government
December 8, 2021
"Policy is ideally driven by values, while UX in the private sector is driven by delight and profit."
Alexandra SchmidtWhy Ethics Can't Save Tech
November 18, 2022
"Linear notes are fixed hierarchically and chronologically, making it hard to find patterns across ideas."
Jorge ArangoExploding the Notebook: How to Unlock the Power of Linked Notes (2nd of 3 seminars)
April 19, 2024
"Sentient Scenes doesn’t just talk about the scene, it becomes the scene, adapting continuously to user input."
Josh Clark Veronika KindredSentient Scenes and Radically Adaptive Experiences
June 11, 2025
"You have to give respect to get respect. Being the first to show respect isn't always easy, but you can always try."
John Maeda Alison RandAbout Design Organizations
May 13, 2019
"We do experiments not to make things work but to learn something new."
Dan WardFailure Friday #1 with Dan Ward
February 7, 2025
"The future will be struggle; we need to face that forward, not deny it."
Devon PowersImagining Better Futures
March 9, 2022
