DesignOps Community

At the heart of any organization, people are the driving force. And people are exhausted, depleted, languishing, detached, and burned

  When asked, I’m sure many people would point to something visual about design systems. In reality, most of the

April 27, 1pm PT/4pm ET – Register to attend. Why and how are creative agency leaders and traditional graphic designers

November 10, 3-4pm ET – Register to attend. The World Usability Day Organization has aligned with UN Global Sustainability Development

Date: October 27, 2022 Time: 1pm PT – 2pm PT, 4pm ET – 5pm ET Register in advance via Zoom This month

Congratulations and lots of gratitude to Patrizia Bertini and Alexandra Mengoni-Leon (of the DesignOps community and Summit) who have developed

Register to attend via Zoom August 25, 2-3pm ET. Register to attend via Zoom. A career path to DesignOps can

Thursday, July 28, 4-5pm ET. Register to attend via Zoom. Ask any DesignOps practitioner to name their “go-to” tool and

June 16, 4pm ET Click here to register via Zoom. When it comes to DesignOps, it’s a widely-accepted adage that

May 26, 4-5pm ET Register in advance via Zoom A lot of folks talk about accessibility and inclusive design, but

Register to attend via Zoom on Thursday, April 28, 2022, 4pm – 5pm ET In this follow-up to our February call, “DesignOps

Click here to register in advance for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

Join here for access to the recording. You’ll receive a welcome email with a Dropbox link to our call archive.

These resources come from multiple sources: some were cited by DesignOps Summit 2021 speakers during their presentations, and others were

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

DesignOps Summit 2022 A Rosenfeld Media Virtual Conference September 8-9 For people who lead design operations and their teams

From different societal norms to language barriers, her story can inform your own ways of collaboration with new people and cultures, whether abroad or just within your own team. 

Join here for access. You’ll receive a welcome email as well as a reminder email before each call. Calls and access

What happens to your DesignOps team when your Design organization hits scale? Juggling the growth of your product, your people, and your processes is a demanding challenge, and strains the jack-of-all-trades skillset of even the most seasoned DesignOps practitioner.

  Allan Chochinov, Founding Chair of the MFA in Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts

Community members are invited to a special social event at this year’s DesignOps Summit, Thursday, October 22, 2020 | 3:45pm

If you’re an interaction designer, you’ll want to listen as Cheryl dramatically expands our understanding of one of interaction design’s final frontiers.

Bad news cycles, an old friend asking why you work somewhere, endless meetings, shifting priorities, peers with louder voices – there is a lot of noise to break through to stay focused on your day to day work. Join us as we talk with Maggie Dieringer, Sr Design Program Manager, about how she’s helped the Design Operations function grow and find their voice through the noise at Uber.

Steve Chaparro will share his thoughts on design ops as culture design and how his firm, Culture Design Studio, helps creative teams and companies thrive by aligning their brand, culture and environment. He will also share the finding of his recent Creative Leadership Survey.

Alana serves as a Senior Design Program Manager at Uber Freight. She’s also part of the DesignOps Summit 2020 curation team.

Sarah Coyle has over 20 years of experience in project management, business analysis, requirements management, strategy analysis, and analytics. Currently, Sarah is working to build and strengthen an information-driven culture within USAA’s Chief Design Office (CDO). She is enjoying learning about design thinking and figuring out how the world of analytics and design come together in what she calls human-centered information.

Top designers are often thrust into leadership roles, and it’s easy to forget that these two roles do not require the same skillset. In this episode, design managers and Liftoff! co-authors Chris Avore and Russ Unger discuss the mistakes and lessons they—and MANY others—have made in their new book, four years in the works. Liftoff! is a guide for new leaders looking for guidance about managing design teams effectively, and established managers who want to level up their expertise.

So much of the work around DE&I is intentionality. Recruiting should be happening at all levels at all times, at times latent and at times active. This is the work of an entire organization but as design leaders we can mandate this in our code of ethics. In the conversation we will talk about the ways to be and remain persistent and committed to building diverse internal communities.

Michelle Morrison is a seasoned design operator who loves people-centered problems. She started her Design Ops career at Square.

Many years in the works, Figure It Out is coming out in May 2020! In this episode, authors Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast discuss the complex world of information (think incomprehensible tax policies to confusing medical explanations) we are faced with, and the ways in which information can be transformed into better presentations, better meetings, better software, and better decisions. Stephen also shares a personal anecdote about part of the inspiration for the book.

We’re all still figuring out DesignOps and ResearchOps; let’s do it together! Please help us learn more about what you need to develop and improve your organization’s DesignOps and ResearchOps efforts by filling out our survey. Your responses will shape the program for the 2020 DesignOps Summit conference. And we’ll share what we’ve learned with you via the DesignOps community newsletter and site. As added incentive, you’ll be entered to win one of three $100 gift certificates for Rosenfeld Media books.

In this webinar, we’ll identify techniques, tactics, and tools for proving (and even measuring) value, and describing the outcomes that matter most.

Ask any design leader and the word scale is most definitely a part of their job description. In this session, Jacqui Frey, Senior Director of Design Operations at Mailchimp, will share her successes and failures with scaling design through DesignOps.

In this episode, Amy and Lou Rosenfeld discuss the ethics of data collection, self-determination theory, fitness apps, her new book, and more.

Kevin Bethune is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, a “think tank” that delivers design & innovation services using a human-centered approach. 

Michael Metts and Andy Welfle, authors of the new Rosenfeld Media book Writing Is Designing, get meta and discuss writing about UX writing with Lou Rosenfeld. They also stress the importance of looking through the “lens of language,” when solving problems – reworking your existing language to make things clear from the outset, rather than fixing problems by adding more copy later.

December’s #DesignOpsAdvice

November #DesignOpsAdvice

Good question! As these are early days, there is still some ambiguity in general around what role to hire for, never mind what titles should be. We have been having this conversation in one way or another for years. In the past we spoke of project management, program management, producer, etc. and debated nomenclature vs. semantics. And in this nascent discipline, I think the roles (and ambiguity) are analogous.

Theo Bridge, Senior Manager, Design Research at ANZ: “Our business understands the value of establishing a ResearchOps practice. But how do I help our business align on where we should start, prioritize our efforts and protect it from scope creep?”

In this conversation, Bob and Alison will discuss why it’s so hard to hire designers and the criticality of advocacy for the profession in order to attract emerging talent, the myth of the unicorn designer, and in light of all of this why companies are wrong to fight back against the idea of remote design teams.

Many of our most recent episodes have covered Design Operations and Research Operations—topics on many people’s minds of late.

Set the stage for conversations in your organization, think through your needs, plans, and goals, and ask the right questions. Then, use this canvas to capture your ideas and insights in one place.

In order to enable “agile” design teams (and processes) there are ways you can screen the teams you are leading to develop a more effective way of managing the process and impact on the output.

“Even though we provide incentives to participate in our research studies, our desire is to recruit individuals for whom the incentive is a token of gratitude, not their primary reason for participating in the research.” Read more in LexisNexis’s Jeanette
Fuccella’s article.

Charles Eames understood that Ray was an equal partner in their creations, and he was always eager to acknowledge her integral role. “Anything I can do, Ray can do better,” he said

Videoconference recordings are available for free to all members of our DesignOps Community. Not a member? Sign up here. You’ll receive

Less than a year ago, we opened an in-house participant recruitment service at Atlassian, a 3,000+ employees tech company, for anyone who wanted to do research. During that year, the team grew to two people, we learned a lot, and then we scaled it back. In this talk, I will share what our main learnings were, the pitfalls of opening a free-for-all recruitment service, and some of my top participant recruitment tips.

What’s your burning question about Research Operations? Our advice columnist Kate Towsey (Research Operations Manager, Atlassian) can answer—or find someone

What’s your burning question about DesignOperations? Our advice columnist Alison Rand (Senior Director, Head of Design Operations at InVision) can answer—or find someone who can!

One of the benefits of joining our community is our carefully curated Insider Newsletter—here’s a taste of what we shared most recently. Join to receive the next one.

Despite our clear value in informing product and advocating for our customers, UX Research (UXR) tends to have a lot to prove within most companies. Collecting lessons and dodging roadblocks along the way, we tested and evolved different methods set out to evangelize UX Research insights, share findings between teams, define and demystify UX Research and prove value for UXR throughout the company. What does that even look like? Molly will tell you.

In this talk, Kate will share insight into the state of ResearchOps today, talk about current and potential ResearchOps opportunities and challenges, and share what she thinks the future holds for this emerging practice.

In this talk, Wyatt will conduct a deep dive into the Airbnb Global Research Panels, the program he has been developing at Airbnb over the past 2-years.

Organizations often start thinking about implementing operations support when they get to a certain size – when things start breaking or something goes massively wrong, when it becomes an imperative for existence. But there is massive benefit from building a research ops function much earlier on in your team growth. Saskia Liebenberg will explain how she’s implemented research ops at Deliveroo in a team of 10 researchers, and how she’s used the ResearchOps framework to build a strategy that supports the team in their specific context.

In this session, John Maeda and community co-curator Alison Rand will dive into section 2 of the report and discuss Design Org maturity and how that relates to culture, talent, leaders, systems, and operations.

The submission deadline is EOD Monday, May 27. Please note: required fields are marked by an asterisk—and the more information you provide, the better.

We received 125 responses to our survey on the state of Design and Research Operations, and what you want to see covered at DesignOps Summit 2019 (October 23-25 in Brooklyn, NY). During our next community videoconference, Abby Covert and her conference co-curators will present initial results and lead a discussion on the zeitgeist of DesignOps and how you can participate in this year’s conference program.

Struggling to manage Design Operations in a distributed environment? ZenDesk’s Jilanna Wilson knows your pain; join her for a discussion that’ll cover a variety of topics that are challenging Design and Research Operations managers.

An archive of past videoconferences is available to all members of our DesignOps Community.

One of the most exciting developments over the past year has been the emergence of the ResearchOps community—especially its organic and distributed effort to define the practice of research operations.

Missed the call? Past recordings are available to all members of our DesignOps Community. Not a member? Sign up at the top of this page. (You’ll also receive invitations to future calls.)

How do you create the conditions for delivering a great customer experience on a rapidly changing platform? In 2016, Norway’s national railway company began building a new technology platform. As designers, we yearned to address the customer’s actual needs and desires, not just a fresh look and technical upgrade. But with no process, principles, tools, or internal design resources, where do you start?

To most designers, DesignOps sounds like a necessary evil. But not to Michael Polivka, Chief of Staff for Experience Design at Autodesk. Michael talks with Lou about how DesignOps actually serves product teams.

Kristin Skinner, Head of Design Management at Capital One, chats with Lou about the core values of DesignOps and how these ideas are shaking up the traditional corporate structure for the better.

Lou and Jeff Sussna discuss the challenge of synthesizing development and operations in a digital world. How do you scale design as part of a responsive digital business when everyone is digital?

Lou sat down with Dave to talk about the emerging framework of DesignOps, and how it’s more than just design combined with operations.

Lou talks with Irene Au, Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, about her work with setting up companies with robust design practices, and why user research is an investment every company should make.

How do you build an enterprise design organization from the top down, and turn design thinking into design doing? Lou

Doug Powell, Distinguished Designer at IBM, will expose what it means to practice design at the global tech company, exploring the inner workings of the largest UX design operation in the world.

By building collaboration, connection and community, you can bring enough people together to turn research ripples into waves.

Courtney Kaplan talks about how you can define opportunities for your team, find the right challenges for talent, and provide support in creating an impactful discipline.

How do you grow your understanding, internally, to improve your teams? First things first, you have to understand the processes and experiences that are going on right now. That takes research. So, let’s get meta.

Jason shares the latest of his work over the past decade developing visual frameworks for design teams, leaders and designers to map their skills and define their future professional development.

Jacqui Frey will show how MailChimp stepped outside of design and drew from patterns in nature and human behavior to envision DesignOps programs, frameworks, systems, and metrics to scale their design organization.

When we talk about DesignOps, the focus is frequently on scaling existing design systems and supporting established design teams. But the U.S. Digital Service’s Dan Willis tells a different kind of story about a federal agency that used DesignOps practices to address a multi-million-dollar business problem.

How might we implement DesignOps and ResearchOps in an agile environment or team? A distributed team? A small design organization? A massive organization?

How do you keep teams inspired, engaged, and intrinsically motivated to deliver meaningful, resonant, innovative work? Miles Orkin, UX Vision and Culture lead for Google Cloud, will describe (and maybe even demonstrate) some key ingredients for cultivating culture.

Building a team is like building a tribe. Jennifer will focus on the complexities, celebrations and challenges of building a design team and what she has learned through the course of her career.

What does it take to integrate DesignOps into your organization? How about ResearchOps? How do you merge strategies, align goals, integrate processes, and connect people to ensure that design and research can be effective and truly scale?

This talk covers the common threads of these failures, how they can be detected and ultimately prevented using various research disciplines – from market research to anthropology to data science. We need to get good at designing and building for systems to tackle multi-dimensional problems at the intersection of people and technology.

Today’s problems are often yesterday’s solutions—quick fix solutions often perpetuate the problem or circumvent them completely. How can we identify the right opportunities for DesignOps & ensure the processes or programs that emerge are successful?

Science orgs typically lack designers and for good reason; there is no product. The focus is on data. The currency is discovery. Why spend money on a designer when we need to buy a new microscope? So how do we create a better experience through design for science?

When is DesignOps about more than building tools and systems that improve the effectiveness of R&D? For athenahealth, the DesignOps team has housed two cross-product teams—by organizational necessity at first—that have become critical early adopters of the instruments and programs their DesignOps colleagues have developed.

How might we define DesignOps for the purpose of selling the idea and communicating its value organization-wide? How might DesignOps and ResearchOps have a measurable impact?

In this session, Brennan covers how DesignOps can partner with other functions, how to pick the right programs to tackle first, and how to measure a new team’s success.

In this talk, Leisa shares her experience of completely resetting her idea of best practice, implementing a strategy that is the opposite of what everyone expected, and why so few people do what they think is right.