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.

5 Antifragile Strategies for a DesignOps 2.0
Gold
Monday, September 23, 2024 • DesignOps 2024
Share the love for this talk
5 Antifragile Strategies for a DesignOps 2.0
Speakers: Silke Bochat
Link:

Summary

The term "anti-fragile" comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder." It describes systems, organizations, or entities that not only withstand shocks, volatility, and stressors but benefit and grow stronger from them. The current state of design is undoubtedly challenging and will continue to be volatile We need strategies that move us out of defense mode, beyond resilience & mere product delivery, and position us as indispensable during times of transformation. In this talk, we explore five anti-fragile strategies for DesignOps 2.0, that will inspire you: New Work Models & Hiring Strategies, Ops beyond Design, Interconnectivity, Rise of the Chief of Staff, and (Anticipatory) Destination Teams.

Key Insights

  • Economic fragility is leading companies to prioritize short-term efficiency over long-term innovation, impacting design maturity negatively.

  • Design ops traditionally focuses on stability and control but must embrace anti-fragility by allowing more experimentation and ambiguity.

  • Hiring managers must stay directly involved in recruitment to reduce bias and increase team diversity, especially including senior and complementary thinkers.

  • New work models like job sharing, lateral moves, and spreading design roles outside traditional design help build resilience in teams.

  • Design ops skills can be applied beyond design, such as in HR and enterprise functions, amplifying design’s strategic impact.

  • Mapping decision-making gates and understanding hidden pre-decisions is critical to influence outcomes and avoid filtering out valuable design ideas.

  • A chief of staff can play multiple tactical roles to support design leadership: operational troubleshooter, pipeline quarterback, and strategic change agent.

  • Planning with a destination mindset helps teams anticipate future roles and organizational setups, moving from short-term problem-solving to strategic foresight.

  • Using futures thinking and speculative design enables teams to identify emerging roles, test hypotheses, and prepare for shifts in skill needs.

  • Design roles should be diversified and continually evolved to remain relevant in fragile economic environments and changing organizational priorities.

Notable Quotes

"Please don’t delegate the hiring to HR; hiring managers must set clear criteria and get involved."

"The economy is fragile, and companies shift from innovative leadership to risk-averse, cash-flow sensitive behavior."

"Design ops is actually all about fragility; we do stability, but can we have more experimentation and comfort with ambiguity?"

"Job shares can allow two people to share one role, often used when people return from parental leave."

"Designers moving into product management and vice versa fosters empathy and collaboration across functions."

"Hidden pre-decisions by junior people often filter out valuable design ideas before leadership even sees them."

"The chief of staff role can act as the whip, the quarterback, or the forward, each with different focus areas supporting design leaders."

"Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable—we don’t know our future, but doing nothing is not an option."

"Destination thinking means envisioning your team’s role in three years and planning backward to build relevant capabilities."

"You need to prove new roles and skills without asking for permission, then move the team in that direction if successful."

Ask the Rosenbot
Ana Ferreira
Designing Distributed: Leading Doist’s Fully Remote Design Team in Six Countries
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Etienne Fang
Power of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform (Videoconference)
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Iain McMaster
Design and Product: from Frenemy to Harmony
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Ned Dwyer
The Future of DesignOps is Tool Consolidation
2024 • DesignOps 2024
Gold
Uday Gajendar
From AI to Zeitgeist: Theory as the design antidote to AI hype
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Craig Villamor
Design Systems for Ethical Design (Videoconference)
2023 • Enterprise Community
Michelle Bejian Lotia
Rolling Out a Repository: How Zapier Centralizes Insights from Across their Organization
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Ovetta Sampson
Research in the Automated Future
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
AI: Passionate defenses and reasoned critique [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Benjamin Real
Showing the Value of DesignOps by Not Having a DesignOps Team
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Shazia Ali
Communication: Innovative techniques for making your voice heard [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Kate Kalcevich
Designing inclusively with AI
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Theresa Neil
Just Build Me a Dashboard! (Videoconference)
2019 • Enterprise Community
Dan Willis
Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Nalini P. Kotamraju
An Organizational Story: Salesforce Lightning Design System
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Sam Proulx
Understanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold

More Videos

Jemma Ahmed

"If you miss any one of access, accuracy, insight generation, and engagement, it’s not truly democratization."

Jemma Ahmed Steve Carrod Chris Geison Dr. Shadi Janansefat Christopher Nash

Democratization: Working with it, not against it [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

July 24, 2024

Nina Jurcic

"You need sponsorship from senior leadership but also buy-in from all corners of the company to succeed."

Nina Jurcic

The Design System Rollercoaster: From Enabler and Bottleneck to Catalyst for Change

October 3, 2023

Nathan Curtis

"If your organization is healthy, the haters pretty quickly get marginalized when everyone else is excited about the design system."

Nathan Curtis Nalini P. Kotamraju Jack Moffett Dawn Ressel

Discussion

June 9, 2016

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Measurements are always a conversation; they should not be a covenant imposed on you, especially when you’re trying something new."

Saara Kamppari-Miller Nicole Bergstrom Shashi Jain

Key Metrics: Comparing Three Letter Acronym Metrics That Include the Word “Key”

November 13, 2024

Malini Rao

"The sum of parts is not always the whole — we lost sight of the mental model in our employee record feature."

Malini Rao

Lessons Learned from a 4-year Product Re-platforming Journey

June 9, 2021

Mackenzie Cockram

"85% of people were leaving after just looking at one page on the old site—that was a huge problem."

Mackenzie Cockram Sara Branco Cunha Ian Franklin

Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Research from Discovery to Live

December 16, 2022

Bria Alexander

"Sponsor sessions are not sales pitches but truly high-quality content that you won’t want to miss."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

June 9, 2021

Jackie Ho

"If the investment isn’t paying out, we actually recommend that you divert that investment to another area."

Jackie Ho

Lead Effectively While Preserving Team Autonomy with Growth Boards

January 8, 2024

Dan Hill

"Private cars are parked 95% of the time, making them highly inefficient in urban environments."

Dan Hill

Designing for the infrastructures of everyday life

June 4, 2024