Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

What DesignOps Can Learn From DevOps

Gold
Monday, November 6, 2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Share the love for this talk
What DesignOps Can Learn From DevOps
Speakers: Jeff Sussna
Link:

Summary

Traditional approaches to maintaining consistency break down when confronted by the complexity of digital business. While DesignOps and related approaches such as DevOps can enhance speed and responsiveness, they risk generating their own kinds of silos, blockages, and breakdowns. This talk will present an agile governance model that scales without becoming brittle, slow, or invasive. It will describe principles and practices teams across-the design-operations spectrum can use to balance agility, coherency, and resilience.

Key Insights

  • DesignOps and DevOps respond to the same systemic shift from industrial product focus to post-industrial service focus.

  • Modern service systems are complex, interconnected ecosystems, not simple, separable components.

  • Emergence means global behavior arises from local interactions without explicit central control.

  • Complex systems are inherently unpredictable and sensitive to small changes, complicating testing outside production.

  • Governance should shift from central enforcement to enabling continuous alignment and self-correction across teams.

  • Breaking work into small, manageable, independently deployable units supports safe, continuous change and scalability.

  • Service providers within organizations should treat each other as customers to maintain coherence without brittleness.

  • User experience extends far beyond interfaces to the entire service ecosystem including backend operations.

  • Continuous learning and iterative service design replace the industrial model of final, fixed solutions.

  • Security and governance fail when user-centered design is ignored, impairing technical goals and usability.

Notable Quotes

"I thought design ops was about bringing together design and IT operations, but I was wrong and that’s okay."

"The digital is infusing the physical and breaking down familiar boundaries between parts of our lives and systems."

"You can’t separate the front end from the back end and you can’t separate the inside from the outside."

"Emergence means global structure has no explicit rules, it emerges from local interactions between components."

"At a certain level, the only way to know how your system will work is when people use it for real."

"The very thing that got us into trouble—the complexity of small pieces—is exactly our way out of it."

"Your company is a service provider; your HR, IT, design, and security teams are all service providers."

"Governance needs to become a self-correcting, flexible, and adaptable mechanism rather than centralized enforcement."

"How you make service is part of what you make; functionality and operability become one inseparable experience."

"Far too often security fails because we forget people are involved."

Ask the Rosenbot
Indi Young
Thinking styles: Mend hidden cracks in your market
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Lavrans Løvlie
Ask me anything – Authors of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Dave Gray
Liminal Thinking: Sense-making for systems in large organizations
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Mujtaba Hameed
Frameworks for Excellence: Using Visual Thinking and Communication to Elevate Your Research
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Sam Proulx
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Doug Powell
DesignOps and the Next Frontier: Leading Through Unpredictable Change
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Sarah Fathallah
Lessening the Research Burden on Vulnerable Communities
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Kavana Ramesh
Meaningful inclusion: Practicing accessibility research with confidence
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Opening Remarks
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Sarah Coyle
Design and Analytics with Sarah Coyle
2020 • DesignOps Community
Dr. Jamika D. Burge
Bridge Building across Research Disciplines
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Husani Oakley
Theme Three Intro
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Mansi Gupta
Drawing from Feminist Practice to Make Inclusive Design Operational
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Erin Weigel
Failure Friday #6: 90% of Everything I Do is Either Broken or Pointless
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Iulia Cornigeanu
QuantQual Book Club: Small Data
2024 • QuantQual Interest Group
Billy Carlson
Pro-level UI Tips for Beginners
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold

More Videos

Bob Baxley

"If you told me about a conference like this 30 years ago, you could have gotten all the participants in the backseat of a minivan."

Bob Baxley

Theme 4: Intro

January 8, 2024

Kurt McCulloch

"When you boil down all the research into actions someone might take, the thing that made our research valuable in the first place, understanding context, was all gone."

Kurt McCulloch

Faster alone, further together: Rebuilding collaboration in the age of AI research

March 10, 2026

Irina Tikhonova

"Websites and digital spaces should be government, not just provide information about government."

Irina Tikhonova Kari Dietrich

Small Wins, Big Impact: Leveraging and Elevating User Engagement

December 9, 2021

Renee Bouwens

"I think the world we’re in is definitely not antagonistic to research, there’s a huge opportunity right now."

Renee Bouwens

Landing Product Impact: Aligning Research as a Foundational Driver for Delivering the World’s Best Products

December 15, 2023

Nalini P. Kotamraju

"Sharing is hustle — holding brown bags, office hours, town halls, and surveys to get feedback."

Nalini P. Kotamraju

An Organizational Story: Salesforce Lightning Design System

June 9, 2016

Changying (Z) Zheng

"AI helped me produce nearly 80 posts in a year; without AI, that pace would be impossible."

Changying (Z) Zheng

Practical DesignOps: From Ideas to Tools That Teams Actually Use

September 25, 2025

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

"Design by means letting the people we serve lead the process and ourselves to drop our egos and let go."

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Victor Udoewa Jennifer Strickland

Everything You Need to Know about the Civic Design 2022 Call for Presentations

May 17, 2022

Roberta Dombrowski

"Begin every research project with the end in mind by framing what impact you hope to drive."

Roberta Dombrowski Sam Duong Woloszynski

Making Research a Team Sport

March 11, 2022

Megan Blocker

"Good research can be the best thing for the diagnosis of the problem in a strategy."

Megan Blocker Mujtaba Hameed Victor Udoewa

Panel: Excellence in Impact

March 25, 2024