Summary
While Design Operations (DesignOps) is only a few years old as a practice, it is evolving rapidly. As we finish our 4th year at The Summit, we've seen so much change in our community of practice in this short time. So, we want to end this year's Summit with a look beyond. If we are to be resilient what are we being resilient towards. Jon Fukuda (Limina), Dominique Ward (Atlassian), and Adrienne Allnutt (LinkedIn) will share their perspectives on where DesignOps is going and why. Moderated by Dave Malouf (Northwestern Mutual). We will be fielding questions from attendees, too.
Key Insights
-
•
Design operations must manage design orgs like businesses, focusing on profitability defined as positive impact on humans and environment.
-
•
Seven failure points—value delivery, cost control, right talent, connectivity, systems, employee experience, leadership—are critical risks design ops must mitigate.
-
•
Design ops roles primarily manage business operations and infrastructure while design practice managers focus on strategy and innovation.
-
•
Adopting a service design mindset enables design ops to handle complex, multi-level systems with evolving feedback loops for long-term resilience.
-
•
Scaling design ops is not about growth in size but about deeply understanding nested units (individuals, teams, orgs) and optimizing them holistically.
-
•
Effective integration of numerous tools across workflows is essential to reduce context switching and tool fatigue in design operations.
-
•
Clear role definitions, shared business language, and translation between design and business priorities improve alignment and strategic decision-making.
-
•
Pre-mortem exercises and experience visions are effective methods for anticipating obstacles and shaping future design operations outcomes.
-
•
Creativity in design ops requires a balance of structure and freedom, analogous to music learning and jazz improvisation.
-
•
Despite AI advances, the human-centric, empathetic nature of design ops work ensures the role remains indispensable.
Notable Quotes
"Design organizations customers are their partner organizations, like engineering, product management, marketing, and the executive suite."
"Without real business world experience, most leaders struggle with the overwhelming amount of demands placed on them."
"Design ops needs to shift from reactive to proactive, envisioning a future state vision and moving from disaster recovery to continuous resilience."
"We need to create evolving system loops that incorporate feedback and allow our units of one to learn and adapt."
"Scaling is not just about more but about providing solutions at scale using nested units like Russian dolls."
"Streamlining and integrating our tools is vital to reduce fatigue and maximize team effectiveness."
"Creativity and structure go hand in hand, like learning notes and then improvising jazz in music."
"Design ops must run as a business, setting KPIs, managing budgets, and delivering measurable value."
"Minimum lovable product is a better focus than minimum viable product in design ops to deliver meaningful impact early."
"AI won't replace design ops roles because we are building for real human needs requiring empathy and human creativity."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Making issues visible, sharing models, and iterating versions of workflows helps uncover blockages and solutions."
Mark InterranteCollaboration Flows in Product Development
June 9, 2017
"People generally want to help and tell what they genuinely believe; they’re just terrible at accurate recall."
Sam Ladner Megan Blocker Tanvi Dhond Katie Hansen Ricardo MartinsMethodologies: Beyond the interview [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
September 4, 2024
"Building design communities in legacy companies means bringing other disciplines into the fold."
Lada GorlenkoTheme 3: Introduction
June 10, 2021
"A viable service is one that not only functions well but can also develop, grow, and flourish."
Laura Smith Tom GaylerEmbedding Service Design and Agile Practice within UK Planning Teams to Create Services that Last
December 3, 2024
"Knowing your positionality and having native speakers and culturally sensitive methods is vital for authentic data gathering."
Liz EbengoThe Burden on Children: The Cost of Insufficient Post-Conflict Services and Pathways Forward
December 4, 2024
"Healthy debate is key, and we should be biased toward a successful outcome, not our own ideas."
Product and Design at Bloomberg: A 15-year Evolution
December 6, 2022
"When you magnify prototypes, they may look blurry, but that’s something to fix in the final website design."
Sam ProulxPrototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
December 8, 2021
"Improv helps me be high energy and engaged in meetings, which others sometimes notice as 'winging it' fluidly."
Cheryl PlatzMerging Improv with Design
March 7, 2019
"If people have to file requests and learn SQL just to get simple data, you have a culture problem."
David ConradThe Feeling of Data
September 14, 2023