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
"Give a why of why you’ve made this design decision. It helps your team understand and reduces defensiveness."
Jessamyn EdwardsSurviving Your UX Career in Enterprise Design
December 2, 2021
"I walked into the building and it just felt surreal. It didn’t feel right in my body to be there anymore."
Mary-Lynne WilliamsExit Interview #4: From Product Design Leadership to Sound Healing
January 14, 2026
"Icons are not just decoration, they convey information and must meet WCAG color and size guidelines to be usable."
Sheri Byrne-HaberThe Importance of Accessible Design Systems
January 8, 2024
"COVID was kind of the mean person to push us into the pool—we had to sink or swim with remote research."
Marjorie Stainback Molly Fargotstein Stephanie MarshWhat Research Ops Professionals Have Learned from COVID-19
July 16, 2020
"Hiring specs for federal designers don’t exist as we expect—jobs are often classified as public affairs or other unrelated titles."
Michael LandEstablishing Design Operations in Government
February 18, 2021
"Black box decision making is a hallmark problem—information goes in, something comes out, but we have no clue why."
Joel BranchHumanizing AI: Filling the Gaps with Multi-faceted Research
March 11, 2021
"Those first hires establish the tone of the entire design ops discipline moving forward."
Courtney KaplanTaking it to the next level: Career paths in DesignOps
November 8, 2018
"Dedicated staffing gives designers deep vertical mastery but limits horizontal experience."
Alicia MootyDesign Staffing Models
September 30, 2021
"The insight and research community had such a hunger to keep growing and evolving to better amplify the voices of the people we seek to understand."
Jemma AhmedTheme 2 Intro
March 10, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can service design accommodate unpredictable human behavior in complex adaptive systems?
What tools or formats work best to align diverse teams with different digital literacy levels on a market launch process?
How can one service designer drive AI integration in an organization lacking a design team?