"Don’t be an other means don’t try to force people to stop what they’re doing but build on what’s already working."

"Scaling research impact is not just about systems but also about scaling the value of your work across the organization."

"Trying to figure this stuff out inside your day job is nearly impossible; we need spaces for slower thinking."

"Build your story around what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what you want to do."

"Warm design is less about solving problems and more about ongoing respectful conversation."

"Small accessibility improvements often benefit everyone, not just people using assistive tech."

"It’s time to bring information architecture back as a key part of sustainable digital design."

"If you haven’t planned for evaluation, you end up eyeballing the results, which absolutely does not work."

"We keep asking these nondeterministic systems deterministic questions."

"I may have failed, but I am not a failure."

"Transparency builds trust; hiding details erodes it—for example, a link promising to take you somewhere but doesn’t."

"Agents work on their own; you delegate tasks and they plan, execute, and decide when they’re done."

"Tags on stickies create human-driven categorization that AI clustering can then build on."

"The user is the weakest link is an unhelpful mindset; understanding dynamics helps design better security UX."

"Many smartwatch designs assume male hands as default, excluding smaller wrists and diverse body types."

"There are obvious allies, and there are quiet allies passionate but not fully living it yet."

"We must not let the LLM fly the plane; use it as the face of your system but rely on smarter systems for facts."

"You can’t understand cognition by saying someone is a grumbler who yells in traffic and also yells at gate attendants—it’s about the frame."

"You get better results from asking one person a useful question than asking 10,000 people a silly question."

"Mapping the data journey through technical infrastructure is like mapping a user journey—be curious and ask questions."

"The COP became the beating heart of our project."

"We always begin our research from the future to the future: start with the community’s envisioned future to guide design."

"Design labs risk reinforcing the dominance of professional design, overshadowing diverse ways people shape systems."

"Emergence is a moral judgment—you have to ask if what’s emerging is good or harmful."

"Contracting officers face severe consequences for deviating from policy, including life in prison, increasing operational risk."

"The average user doesn’t exist."

"The average salary in the Netherlands might be quite high compared to Europe or the US, but you have to dig deeper to see if seniority is skewing the data."

"I hope service design can make these cycles feel less chaotic and more productive by introducing healthy collaboration patterns."

"You need to understand where the momentum is in your organization and choose to go with the main current or hang out in eddies."

"Disability isn’t a problem with a person; it’s something that happens when we fail to enable them."

"Organizations have a finite pot of money and many more initiatives than resources."

"One-to-one video calls help you build personal connections and find peers passionate about the same topics."

"Creating and holding space is about carving out intentional time and structure for teams to reflect and explore new ideas."

"The shift in the role of planning experts allowed planners to drive the process that enables change."

"We come in like water—hanging out, listening, figuring out where the blood flow is in the environment."

"We are perceived as those providing high risk to the business."

"Foundational IA and metadata infrastructure are the meat and potatoes supporting scalable AI-driven experiences."

"Conflict signals that something new is trying to emerge."

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

"The impact of our work depends on how well we understand and influence the way insights unfold into real outcomes."

"Value comes not from your deliverables but from orchestrating the team’s talents to get work done faster."

"Power framed as possibility opens up what happens when researchers share resources with participants."

"If data comes from different areas of the organization, they want to learn more and meaningfully participate."

"Product ops and design ops are way more alike than dissimilar; they just serve different orgs. - Rachel Poman"

"Async communications helped reduce unnecessary meetings and emails, maximizing free capacity."

"It’s our job to normalize capacity so people aren’t sprinting to the finish line repeatedly."

"Use different words. If somebody has a terrible experience of work labeled a certain way, it’s really hard to use that label without bringing those experiences back."

"We are back and we are right on time. Eight o'clock on the dot."

"If you spend so much time tracking, you’re actually not doing the work—that’s too much overhead."

"We are pioneers, setting standards and shaping the future of design and design operations."

"We don’t have to let this get on top of us. We can choose what it means to be a design ops person."

"Innovation isn’t just a buzzword in design ops; it’s at the core of how we shape the future of the design practice."

"Design is collaborative, making it hard to evaluate a single design output."

"If you don’t put your questions in the associated thread, it’s really easy for our team to miss them."

"UX assets are our business assets. How do we talk about our UX assets as business assets?"

"Michael became our farmer maintaining a steady flow of the team; Dana was our gardener cultivating quality work."

"Ugly is actually better. I’m a champion of ugly decks."

"Visibility is the most vital thing for UX leaders to be focused on."

"Today’s speakers will guide us towards defining, measuring, and growing our impact with the people, processes, practices, and products we steward."

"Graph RAG improves on plain text RAG by using knowledge graphs, adding semantic relationships that boost precision."

"Different roles need different slices of information and types of context from UX knowledge systems."

"Captions were initially designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, but over 50% of Americans also watch content with subtitles."

"The idea is shifting from research ops being just operations to research enablement — supporting people throughout the research journey."

"Every time someone leaves, tacit knowledge walks out the door, and explicit knowledge isn’t always well documented."

"Designers, marketers—they can be talented or clever but it's not enough to be at the edge of greatness; we have to quantify the value we deliver."

"Ghosting candidates damages your company reputation; respect means responding even to rejections."

"Our working memories can only hold three to five item chunks at a time despite the data downpour."

"Stress and fear go hand in hand; if you feel stress daily, you are feeling fear daily as well."

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

"We talk about being resilient in our day jobs and co-creating operating models with our teams even when things get hairy and squirrely."

"It took over a year and 10 teams just to ship four screens—scale is both a tremendous opportunity and a weakness."

"Manual analysis of unmoderated interviews and screen recordings is a huge time sink that limits researchers' focus on high-value work."

"Tomorrow we’re going to have a game/networking event hosted by Cozy Juicy Reel for some fun and face-to-face time."

"Play invites curiosity, and curiosity allows us to imagine and create new worlds."

"Imagine AI as a teammate on every call and email, moderating and helping drive team efficiency."

"Automated tools can find so much at scale and human testing finds issues the tools can't."

"Change management starts from the mutual understanding that we all want quality insights and proximity to customers."

"Pilot and test your ideas before committing whenever possible to avoid unnecessary disruption."

"You can’t have an accessible experience if it’s not usable, and you can’t have a usable experience if it’s not accessible."

"AI creates a virtual worldview where counter-views do not exist, causing life-threatening problems for marginalized groups."

"Every job has to be a climate job, no matter what role you have in a company."

"You don’t need to be an expert in every methodology but should know when to use them and find experts when needed."

"The art of listening is about hearing what’s not being said and moving forward with respect."

"Sometimes it helps to think of your career like an investor, choosing where to put your time and energy."

"Combining insights from UX research and data analytics creates a comprehensive story for users."

"Every time we hand a task over to a system, we slowly lose the ability to do it ourselves. That is de-skilling."

"Design systems in automotive are some of the coolest I’ve seen because they have to align both the marketing and the in-vehicle user experience."

"Most product teams work linearly, but systems thinking captures the real-world complexity of moving forward and sometimes stepping back."

"Holding on too tightly to insights and controlling data flows can make research teams irrelevant."

"Many AI tools are very racist and biased against women and people of color."

"Sustainability is like health — different people have different definitions based on their values."

"Nobody's gonna listen to you people until you start speaking in the language of business."

"Guardrail metrics prevent you from improving conversion at the short term but damaging loyalty or increasing customer service calls."

"The way to fix a bad decision is to make several good ones afterward, because there is no undo button."

"Experimentation is your default, your exception is not to experiment."

"Evaluations need both end users and experts because an answer that makes a user happy can be objectively wrong."

"Prioritization is not just for your own work, it’s for teams and whole organizations."

"Systems thinking is a mindset designers can adopt to understand interconnectedness, causality, and wholeness beyond the narrow scope of their work."

"One of my tags was an acronym called TAOI — the architecture of information — but GPT wouldn’t know what to do with it."

"Moderately good AI can add real value, like voicemail transcription that doesn't have to be perfect to be useful."