The Bigger Picture: A Panel Discussion

Key Insights

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  Acting like a designer using familiar tools and processes is key for design ops professionals to gain trust within design teams, as Rachel Posman explains with journey mapping at Uber Eats.

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  Crystal Leon highlights the importance of creating shared language tied to company values, such as expanding 'data-driven' to include qualitative insights, to demonstrate design value across organizations.

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  Gneets Singh advises defining value specifically by understanding the audience and prioritizing influence and adoption metrics over hard-dollar impact, acknowledging design’s indirect contribution.

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  Jose Coronado shares the need to balance quantitative and qualitative metrics, adapting vocabulary (e.g., using 'satisfaction' in place of 'delight') to align with partner sensitivities in conservative environments.

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  Measuring impact is a journey requiring persistent, multi-channel communication and contextualization across distributed, global teams, with repetition key to embedding understanding.

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  Partnership success emerges from starting small, picking one advocate inside another team to build relationships and replicate collaborative wins, as suggested by Gneets and Rachel.

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  Breaking design research workshops into smaller, repeated activities helps non-designers incrementally engage, build empathy, and appreciate design processes, according to Crystal.

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  Role proliferation in design teams (product designers, service designers, content strategists) can cause confusion outside the team; clear communication of value per partner perspective is critical, as Jose notes.

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  Teams that collaboratively co-create design principles with leadership see greater adoption and normalization of design thinking language across the organization, as Jose illustrates.

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  Empowering and leveraging 'loud, trusted' influencers on teams can dramatically accelerate change management and process adoption, as Rachel observes from her experience.

Notable Quotes