Rosenverse

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
Emily Eagle
Can't Rewind: Radio and Retail
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Jackie Ho
Lead Effectively While Preserving Team Autonomy with Growth Boards
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Smitha Papolu
Theme 3 Discussion
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Dean Broadley
Not Black Enough to be White
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Bringing together market and user research
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Mansi Gupta
Women-Centric Research: What, Why, How
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Brendan Jarvis
Framing Tomorrow by Questioning Today
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Natalie Dunbar
DesignOps and Content Strategy: Envisioning the Future Together
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Suzan Bednarz
AccessibilityOps for All
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Audrey Crane
Shadow Design–Where Else is Design Happening in Your Organization?
2023 • Enterprise Community
Beth Chappell
Leading through ambiguity: Supporting a design team relearning their craft
2026 • Designing with AI 2026
Conference
Frances Yllana
The Big Question about Impact: A Panel Discussion
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Aiyana Bodi
Three Key Climate Initiatives and How You Can Help
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Jim Kalbach
Jazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Sylvie Abookire
A Civic Designer's Guide to Mindful Conflict Navigation
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Amanda Kaleta-Kott
The Joys and Dilemmas of Conducting UX Research with Older Adults
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold

More Videos

Bria Alexander

"It’s about us, the design ops practitioners, and what we need today to be better at our jobs."

Bria Alexander

Theme Two Intro

October 3, 2023

Ariba Jahan

"We co-designed our environment and expectations around what we needed as a team during these times."

Ariba Jahan

Team Resiliency Through a Pandemic

January 8, 2024

Cornelius Rachieru

"On lower layers, research spaces are limited and focused, while at higher layers, problem spaces are ambiguous and require holistic approaches."

Cornelius Rachieru

Handling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design

June 9, 2021

Megan Clegg

"We are evolving our design system to incorporate accessibility guidelines consistently as a foundational practice."

Megan Clegg Michael Haggerty-Villa Alexis Morin

Space for Everyone: Reframing Accessibility Through a Wider Lens

June 10, 2021

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Starting a new job with no map felt lost; so I built a new map as my BYO orientation."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Cartography for Design Communities

September 10, 2025

Kara Kane

"High-level leadership changes in government often result in shifts in organizational moods and priorities."

Kara Kane

Theme One Intro

November 16, 2022

Natalia Radywyl

"Sovereignty was never ceded."

Natalia Radywyl

Co-Designing New Power in Australia's Public Sector

November 16, 2022

Nancy Douyon

"Google’s photo algorithm mistakenly tagged Black people as gorillas, which was called out by Jackie Elsene."

Nancy Douyon

We'll Figure That Out in the Next Launch: Enterprise Tech's Nobility Complex

June 15, 2018

Peter Van Dijck

"We invented the ‘prompt deep dive’ technique to spend lots of time on one prompt to deeply understand it."

Peter Van Dijck

Building the Rosenbot

June 4, 2024