Summary
What's today's theme all about, and what does it mean for DesignOps professionals? Theme leader Dave Malouf will provide you the background you'll need for how today's sessions came to be and what they'll cover. He'll also gently provoke you with questions to consider throughout the day.
Key Insights
-
•
Resilience in design operations is about moving beyond challenges, not just reacting to them.
-
•
Scaling from an individual to a full design organization mirrors biological progression from cells to ecosystems.
-
•
A design group becomes an organization when it operates as a business unit with independent budgeting and income responsibilities.
-
•
Finding the natural, least resistant paths aligns personal, team, and business goals and increases efficiency.
-
•
Frictionless paths reduce energy depletion and shift focus from resilience to optimization.
-
•
Identifying who is missing from your network helps create better, more inclusive strategies.
-
•
Blind spots in organizational visibility can cause teams to ignore critical perspectives or needs.
-
•
Feedback loops are essential to sensing emerging patterns rather than following only pre-carved paths.
-
•
The transition from team to organization involves changing perceptions about roles, responsibilities, and scale.
-
•
Sensing and responding to emergent patterns develops long-term resilience at the organizational ecosystem level.
Notable Quotes
"Resiliency is not necessarily how we react to challenges, but how we move beyond them."
"Design operations is about being that resilient force on behalf of everyone else in your organization."
"When your design organization becomes its own business unit, that’s when you truly scale."
"I like to think about individuals as cells, teams as organs, and organizations as organisms in an ecosystem."
"How can we find the natural paths that connect myself, my team’s intention, and my business’s intention?"
"If we do things with the least amount of friction, resiliency isn’t the problem anymore, efficiency is."
"Who is missing from our efforts to make our paths more frictionless?"
"Where are our blind spots that cause us to forget or ignore important parts of our journey?"
"Do we have the feedback loops to feel our way through paths of emergence rather than pre-carved routes?"
"How ready are you to sense and respond to the patterns of emergence in your organization?"
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"No assistive technology user uses default settings; we spend years customizing everything to work for us."
Sam ProulxSUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
December 9, 2021
"Most of our designers are contractors; they have limited voice because they’re bound by contracts."
Michael LandEstablishing Design Operations in Government
February 18, 2021
"We moved from Evernote to spreadsheets, to a giant affinity board in Mirror, then to UserVoice, and finally to idiomatic software with AI."
Shipra KayanHow we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
September 30, 2021
"Your career is a design project. It’s the only one you own, so own it like you would a product."
Ian SwinsonDesigning and Driving UX Careers
June 8, 2016
"The persona of a goalkeeper is helping to triage and prioritize strategy and work for the executive."
Isaac HeyveldExpand DesignOps Leadership as a Chief of Staff
September 8, 2022
"Self-service was a model with the most unknowns but possibly the biggest rewards."
Amy EvansHow to Create Change
September 25, 2024
"Telepathy as mind reading means proactively building a talent pipeline and improving recruitment processes."
Kate Koch Prateek KalliFlex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
September 30, 2021
"Change only happens in the present moment, not the past or future."
Dave GrayLiminal Thinking: Sense-making for systems in large organizations
May 14, 2015
"We wanted a living network of knowledge so yesterday’s insight connects to today’s evidence and tomorrow’s learning."
Matt DuignanAtomizing Research: Trend or Trap
March 30, 2020
