This video is featured in the Knowledge Management playlist.
Summary
Knowledge management (KM) and KM best practices are not discussed as critical skills for DesignOps team members. DesignOps' responsibilities should include the management of tacit and codified UX knowledge. Everyone talks about design systems and insight repositories. Still, those tools only cover a portion of the UX knowledge a DesignOps team needs to create, manage and make available to the organization. DesignOps teams are responsible for creating, managing, and disseminating processes, tools, and artifacts to support the teams involved in delivering design value and impact at scale.
Key Insights
-
•
Explicit knowledge accounts for only about 20% of an organization's institutional knowledge; tacit knowledge makes up the remaining 80%.
-
•
Tacit knowledge sharing is heavily reliant on trust, self-efficacy, IT support, and the knowledge’s degree of tacitness.
-
•
Knowledge managers, contributors, and champions are distinct but essential roles for a successful KM system in design ops.
-
•
Transforming knowledge artifacts into consumable, context-rich knowledge assets increases their usability and impact.
-
•
Effective KM requires addressing both explicit knowledge (documents, systems) and tacit knowledge (experiences, behaviors).
-
•
Activating learning outcomes starts early in the KM process and involves aligning information, skills, motivation, habits, environment, and communication.
-
•
A culture of learning and knowledge stewardship is foundational to sustaining KM efforts within organizations.
-
•
Using existing tools preferred by users lowers barriers to knowledge sharing and ensures higher adoption.
-
•
Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) approaches, like starting with a UX glossary or a community of practice, help teams begin KM without overwhelming resources.
-
•
Tacit knowledge management suffers when organizations fail to assign stewardship roles like gardeners or knowledge tenders to nurture communities.
Notable Quotes
"Most of institutional knowledge is tacit, meaning it’s understood or implied without being stated."
"The more you know, the more you have the ability to make informed decisions and better control events."
"Knowledge management solutions must focus on both the explicit knowledge that can be documented and the tacit knowledge that resides in people’s experiences."
"Trust is a major enabler for tacit knowledge sharing because people must feel safe to be vulnerable and share their knowledge."
"Self-efficacy boosts motivation to share knowledge by increasing confidence in one’s ability to perform that sharing."
"If knowledge is difficult to find or hard to use, then all the great information doesn’t really help anyone."
"Activation isn’t just at the end of the journey; it must be embedded throughout the knowledge management process."
"Building trust should absolutely be a core value for design ops teams aiming to steward knowledge effectively."
"Organizations often forget to assign gardener roles to communities, which causes tacit knowledge sharing efforts to fizzle out quickly."
"Start small by delivering the minimum amount of useful information, like a UX glossary or a single community of practice."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Our definition of UX research connects the dots and helps fellow peeps make smart, strategic decisions by collecting insights directly from users."
Molly FargotsteinMultipurpose Communication & UX Research Marketing
September 12, 2019
"Great design happens because of great designing — design is a verb, not just a noun."
Dave MaloufClosing Keynote: Amplify. Not Optimize.
October 24, 2019
"I think of AI models as amanuenses, like super secretaries aiding scholars in the early modern period."
Jorge ArangoAI as Thought Partner: How to Use LLMs to Transform Your Notes (3rd of 3 seminars)
May 3, 2024
"The future was already here. It’s just not evenly distributed."
Daniel J. RosenbergDesigning with and for Artificial Intelligence
August 11, 2022
"We’ve been taught to build fast and break things, and we often play accessibility on the back burner."
Alexis LucioScaling Accessibility Through Design Systems
June 9, 2022
"We created a Slack bot that automatically created tickets from UX bug reports to help design managers discover issues faster and track recovery time."
Peter BoersmaHow to Define and Maintain a DesignOps Roadmap
October 3, 2023
"The mandala metaphor reminds us not to be emotionally attached to deliverables; sometimes you build to throw away."
Ben Reason Aline Horta Majid Iqbal Fabiano LeoniMaking the system visible: The fastest path to better decisions
November 20, 2025
"AI in design can act as a creative companion, helping explore ideas and analyze past research more efficiently."
Peter Van Dijck Louis RosenfeldCoffee with Lou #4: Taking a Peek Under the Rosenbot's Hood
June 14, 2024
"AI-driven results are often 30 to 50 percent hallucinogenic—meaning not real—so we need to be cautious about overreliance."
Taylor KlassmanShaping the Next Era of UX Research: Collaborative Forum
March 11, 2025
