Rosenverse
"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors

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.

"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors

Gold
Wednesday, September 25, 2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024

This video is featured in the Rosenfeld Authors Answer Your Questions playlist.

Share the love for this talk
"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors
Speakers: Rachel Posman and John Calhoun
Link:

Summary

Join us for an engaging Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, the authors of the upcoming book The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations. This book acts as a comprehensive guide to DesignOps that will teach you how to successfully advocate for, build out, scale up, and ultimately operate design organizations. Rachel and John will share insights from their extensive experience in the field and answer questions in this interactive session. Together, let's explore how effective design operations can drive impactful outcomes and empower teams to achieve success. Walk away having gained valuable perspectives on the evolving landscape of design operations and the critical role it plays in delivering exceptional design solutions. Bring your questions about design operations and don't miss this chance to connect directly with the authors of this must-read DesignOps book!

Key Insights

  • Making design ops work visible to leadership is critical to securing investment and recognition.

  • Saying no is the most powerful skill for design ops practitioners to focus effort on meaningful work.

  • The conductor metaphor captures design ops as a leader orchestrating harmony, not a player doing design.

  • Design ops professionals arise from varied backgrounds: design, program management, business, or specialist domains.

  • Design ops competencies evolve by career stage; not all skills are required immediately.

  • The heroes framework categorizes impact metrics into health, effectiveness, readiness, outcomes, ecosystems, and sentiment.

  • Design ops and product ops share many functions and skillsets but serve different organizational areas.

  • Collaboration between design and product leadership, potentially rebranded as user success leadership, is an ideal future state.

  • AI will transform design ops by becoming part of tooling, collaboration, review, and even end-user roles.

  • Design ops roles are commonly individual contributor positions, though some may evolve into embedded or managerial roles.

Notable Quotes

"Designers deserve support and infrastructure so they can really excel in their work."

"How are executives going to invest in you if you don’t show the work? If they can’t see it, they won’t invest."

"The most powerful word in the design ops vocabulary is no."

"It’s okay to be bossy because we need leaders who are opinionated and thoughtful and have a point of view."

"Design ops isn’t just a support role; it is a strategic partner involved in decision making."

"Only one of the four common design ops backgrounds is design; others include program management and business skills."

"The heroes framework helps show the specific contribution design ops makes through measurable impact categories."

"Design ops and product ops are way more alike than dissimilar; they differ mainly in the orgs they serve."

"Why pick sides between product and design ops leadership? Why not both as user success leadership?"

"AI is not just a tool; it will be a worker, a reviewer, or even an end user in design processes."

Ask the Rosenbot
Louis Rosenfeld
Day 1 Welcome
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Maria Rosala
Research Repositories
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Harry Max
Failure Friday #5: Lessons from a SaaS Design Failure
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Dan Saffer
Why AI projects fail (and what we can do about it)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
World Usability Day Panel Discussion
2022 • DesignOps Community
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Josh Clark
Sentient Design, AI, and the Radically Adaptive Experience (1st of 3 seminars)
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Sheri Byrne-Haber
The Importance of Accessible Design Systems
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Do you want to work on climate? (Climate UX Discussion Series)
2023 • Climate UX Interest Group
Wendy Johansson
Be a Product Boss!
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Elana Chapman
Getting started with accessibility research
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Jen Briselli
Learning Is The Engine: Designing & Adapting in a World We Can’t Predict
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Nicole Aleong
Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Maggie Dieringer
Cutting through the Noise
2020 • DesignOps Community
Alan Williams
Designing essential financial services for those in need
2022 • Civic Design Community

More Videos

Jerome “Axle” Brown

"Caring for people emotionally during insight sessions directly impacts their productivity and willingness to engage."

Jerome “Axle” Brown

How to Use Self-Directed Learning to Ensure Your Research Insights are Heard and Acted Upon

March 11, 2021

Phil Gilbert

"Our design language gives broad ditches on either side of the road with some nuance, but no rigid libraries at first."

Phil Gilbert

A Consistent Culture of Design

May 14, 2015

Kate Towsey

"If research is going to slow down the product process, most companies will end up releasing those products without doing the research."

Kate Towsey Basel Fakhoury Oren Friedman Graham Gardner

Participant Recruitment and Management Tools

March 12, 2026

Sohit Karol

"These playlists have some element of machines recommending music in addition to editors behind the scenes."

Sohit Karol

Designing Delightful Listening Experiences: Mixed Methods Research in the Age of Machine Learning

March 31, 2020

Christopher Taylor Edwards

"Developers were hungry for the bigger picture, but the only information available to them was a set of user stories."

Christopher Taylor Edwards Valerie Roske

Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration

September 30, 2021

Sheryl Cababa

"We have to be deliberate about the long-term change we are creating and consider unintended consequences more explicitly."

Sheryl Cababa

Expanding Your Design Lens with Systems Thinking

February 23, 2023

Francesca Barrientos, PhD

"It’s not just about doing the craft of design but also figuring out how design fits into the organization."

Francesca Barrientos, PhD

You Need Your Own Definition of Design Maturity

June 8, 2022

Allison Sanders

"Onboarding isn’t a one-time activity, it’s an ongoing event that helps people connect and find their place."

Allison Sanders

Operating with Purpose

January 8, 2024

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"This was the first time the director saw the team doing something together."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Prototype" vs "Prototype"--Breaking Down and Rebuilding Our Understanding of What We Do

October 24, 2019