When Design Ops Comes in H.O.T. : A Tale of a Transformed Design Org
Summary
TIn their first 60 days at Zendesk, Briana and Christina, a 2 person design ops team, conducted a Program Manager Audit looking at these 3 key areas: People, Process, and Portfolio. 90 days later, Product Design has transformed from a siloed, disjointed team into a well-organized, collaborative environment with a unified tool strategy, inclusive team spaces and more focus on design craft. In this talk you will learn how to not only conduct a thorough and data-centric Program Manager Audit, but how to come in H.O.T. (Humble, Orchestrated, and Timely.)
Key Insights
-
•
New design ops members conducted a comprehensive people, practice, and portfolio audit within their first 30 days to identify improvement areas.
-
•
Ops-focused discussion guides differ from typical UX research guides by addressing distinct needs across leadership and design teams.
-
•
Effective ops work requires honest, transparent, and encouraging conversations to gather actionable feedback.
-
•
The effectiveness scale with seven criteria (audience, purpose, documentation, cadence, effectiveness, participation, culture) helps objectively evaluate meetings and rituals.
-
•
UX Weekly initially suffered from low strategic value, low engagement, and unsustainable slide-heavy formats, causing decline over time.
-
•
Grounding recommendations in real user feedback and data increases leadership buy-in and ensures relevant changes.
-
•
Project charters are vital for accountability, impact communication, and timely execution of ops initiatives.
-
•
Tailoring discussion guides and recommendations to different audience levels (VPs to individual designers) enhances relevance.
-
•
Maintaining cultural elements like greetings and community connection strengthens team engagement during meetings.
-
•
Ops roles serve as linchpins balancing competing priorities and synthesizing diverse inputs into cohesive strategies.
Notable Quotes
"When design ops comes in hot, it means honest, orchestrated, and timely."
"We had 80 designers attending UX Weekly and trying to get through 64 slides in one hour. It wasn’t sustainable."
"Dogs and spam started filling the slides. That was a sign this meeting wasn’t working anymore."
"An ops-focused discussion guide helps us gather feedback from leadership and designers so our recommendations meet their needs."
"Our effectiveness scale measured audience, purpose, documentation, cadence, effectiveness, participation, and culture to rate meetings."
"We unapologetically move forward when high-level stakeholders miss deadlines, but also collect feedback via surveys."
"The project charter is our best friend for accountability, impact, and timelines."
"You need to be laser-focused as ops people—we get asked to do too many things otherwise."
"We shifted UX Weekly to Product Design Biweekly, giving the team more time to engage meaningfully."
"Ops folks are the linchpin connecting leadership and designers, orchestrating all the instruments."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"The hardest part was losing my identity of being someone who works in tech after so many years."
Rachel GarbExit Interview #7: Facing a blank slate in retirement when constraints are all you’ve ever known
August 5, 2026
"One hour of conversations between this engineer and customers was more impactful than weeks of debate."
Kit Unger Lada GorlenkoTheme 3 Intro
June 10, 2022
"Threat actors probably know your system better than you do and are looking for any entry points to exploit."
Heidi TrostWhen AI Becomes the User’s Point Person—and Point of Failure
August 7, 2025
"Being a manager is really hard, and just because you’re a great individual contributor doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it."
Kayla Farrell Chelsey Glasson Sean Fitzell Jared LeClercWhat It's Like To Be a User Researcher at Compass
March 12, 2021
"You can’t separate emotion from work; telling people not to get feelings involved is like saying don’t use your left leg."
Miles OrkinCreativity and Culture
November 8, 2018
"Where I work, we don’t have a centralized research function; we pilot tools locally and then share them more broadly, showing strategy can start anywhere."
Chris GeisonWhat is Research Strategy?
March 11, 2021
"We’ve seen self-service tool usage grow from hundreds to millions of veterans served monthly after launching a unified VA platform."
Shawna Hein Kevin HoffmanCreate a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
November 17, 2022
"What if you didn’t know there were important questions you should be asking in your data?"
Ian JohnsonLatent Scope: Finding structure in unstructured data
June 11, 2025
"Executives only like things in threes, but if you do a three by three, you can get away with nine boxes—that's the max executive information processing."
John CutlerThe Alignment Trap
November 29, 2023
