Rosenverse
Group Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps

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.

Group Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps

Gold
Tuesday, November 7, 2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Share the love for this talk
Group Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps
Speakers: Dave Gray
Link:

Summary

We’ll identify the big challenges that DesignOps people face—and begin working on addressing them together in this collaborative activity. We’ll work together in small teams to design the ultimate Design Operations organization, capture learnings, and share them with each other. Facilitated by Dave Gray and the XPLANE team.

Key Insights

  • The Design Ops Canvas is inspired by Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas and includes embedded facilitation to guide structured conversations.

  • Critical categories for design ops include culture, people, practices, constraints, governance, and structure, but iteration is necessary to refine and add missing elements.

  • Balancing governance with creative freedom is a major challenge; Dave Kronin observes overly rigid design systems early on can stifle creativity.

  • Pair exercises between people unfamiliar with each other's organizations surface fresh insights and encourage cross-pollination of ideas.

  • Culture and communication gaps often manifest in scattered tool usage and meeting overload, as exemplified by Lynn from USC.

  • Executive air cover—a senior leader providing protection and support—is crucial to overcoming organizational resistance and enabling design ops success.

  • Measuring design ops success requires tracking how well the organization supports UX efforts, not just contractor performance, as Catherine highlights.

  • The canvas serves as a low-friction tool to synthesize complex organizational information in one visible place for ongoing alignment.

  • People and relationships lie at the heart of design ops maturity; tools facilitate but cannot replace human connections and collaboration.

  • Using the canvas repeatedly can anchor conversations, preventing repetitive meetings and helping teams track decisions and progress.

Notable Quotes

"You don’t have to sit through two hours a day; we’ll spend about 15 minutes on setup then you’ll pair up and do the exercise."

"Kristen wrote the book Design of Orgs for Design Orgs and her experience partly informed this canvas."

"One of the biggest challenges is balancing freedom for creative work with necessary consistency and governance, as Dave Kronin pointed out."

"If you’re having more conversation about what the actual question means than answering it, that’s a problem with the canvas we need to fix."

"The tool is designed so you can just sit down, read the questions, and get started even if you don’t have much background knowledge."

"We’re all in this together and figuring it out — making it up as we go along."

"Our communications is all over the map — email, Slack, Hangouts, face-to-face, GitHub — it surfaced some gaps we didn’t fully appreciate before."

"Executive air cover is having someone in a senior role who protects and supports the design team from other business pressures."

"Tools are a blessing and a curse; they’re not people and they can’t replace the relationships you need to get the work right."

"If you have a feeling you’re having the same conversation over and over, a canvas like this can ratchet the conversation forward."

Ask the Rosenbot
Meredith Black
Scaling Design Culture
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Joanna Vodopivec
One Research Team for All - Influence Without Authority
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Cornelius Rachieru
Handling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Chris Geison
What is Research Strategy?: A Panel of Research Leaders Discuss this Emergent Question
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Theresa Slate
Why Changing Hearts & Minds Doesn’t Work When Promoting DE&I Efforts, but Checklists Do
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Josh Clark
Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Amy Gawronski Zuccaro
Advice for DesignOps Employee #1
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Dana Chisnell
The Sensemaking Business
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Peter Van Dijck
Building new AI skills: Creating outsized UX value with evals
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Gold
Harry Max
Failure Friday #5: Lessons from a SaaS Design Failure
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Courtney Kaplan
Taking it to the next level: Career paths in DesignOps
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Gordon Ross
12 Months of COVID-19 Design and Digital Response with the British Columbia Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Noreen Whysel
Short Take #4: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Shelby Switzer
Making Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Abby Covert
Panel: Collaboration Tools
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Kavana Ramesh
Meaningful inclusion: Practicing accessibility research with confidence
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold

More Videos

Gabriela Barneva

"Inclusive products reduce friction across customer support and operations by improving consistency across channels."

Gabriela Barneva

Operationalizing Inclusive Design in Service Design

November 20, 2025

Bria Alexander

"Today's theme around researchers thriving in the organization is led by Steve Portico."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

January 8, 2024

Russell Blair

"The jester mode throws something in your face, maybe wrong or uncomfortable, but at least it moves the conversation forward."

Russell Blair Milan Guenther

Killing the blank page

June 5, 2024

James Rampton

"Don’t forget cars are fun—get behind the wheel and enjoy a road trip once in a while; UX is meant to enhance that experience."

James Rampton

The Basics of Automotive UX & Why Phones Are a Part of That Future

July 25, 2024

Christian Madsbjerg

"I wasted five years being blind to the rhythm of the place before we moved billions of dollars addressing major issues."

Christian Madsbjerg

Influencing Strategy

March 31, 2020

Bryce Benton

"We don’t just want to hand over the data as a black box; we want to provide contextual information to preserve knowledge."

Bryce Benton

[Demo] AI-powered UX enhancement: Aligning GitHub documentation with USWDS at Austin Public Library

June 4, 2024

Indi Young

"We live in a solution culture that glorifies people who create solutions but not those who create knowledge."

Indi Young

Paying Better Attention to the Problem with Indi Young

December 12, 2019

Chris Hammond

"We want to reduce resources required to deliver the experience and create a better experience that also serves diverse needs and challenges."

Chris Hammond

Embedding sustainability into enterprise design and development: A journey towards "sustainability consciousness"

April 2, 2025

Bria Alexander

"No need to take notes — our scribe David Nicholson is capturing detailed session notes and insights for you."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

September 9, 2022