Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
Summary
Key Insights
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Verizon’s design ops team evolved into a CX ops team to better align with the company’s transformation into an experience-focused organization.
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Centralizing and streamlining incoming project requests significantly improved the team’s ability to prioritize and onboard work quickly.
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Using ‘superpower’ metaphors helped the team frame operational capabilities like speed, telepathy, and flight in a relatable and engaging way.
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Teleportation as a superpower represents the team’s use of integrated data tools for real-time org design and headcount planning.
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Telepathy relates to proactive recruitment and resource planning processes that anticipate talent needs before they arise.
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Adopting new tools and building operational playbooks (‘super gadgets’) accelerates team productivity and scalability.
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Flight symbolizes adaptability and the ability to pivot quickly in response to change, crucial in a large, evolving organization.
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Super intelligence is embodied by the team’s role as a knowledge hub, sharing information to empower stakeholders and avoid communication gaps.
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Super strength highlights the importance of resilience, strategic partnerships, customer obsession, and endurance in sustaining impact.
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The team acknowledges ‘kryptonite’ challenges like burnout and miscommunication, emphasizing the need for clear communication and collaborative culture.
Notable Quotes
"We’re powering a 300 plus organization of designers, researchers, program managers, and strategists."
"Design ops is undergoing a transformation into a CX focused team with a refined mission to drive efficiency and customer experience excellence."
"Super speed means enabling rapid onboarding by centralizing and streamlining a previously disparate process."
"Teleportation lets us move throughout the organization by building tools that gather disparate data for real-time decision making."
"Telepathy as mind reading means proactively building a talent pipeline and improving recruitment processes."
"Flight is about adaptability – being ready to switch gears and pivot quickly in a global and changing environment."
"Super intelligence is the power to gather and share knowledge consistently to ensure no gaps in communication."
"Super strength is the resilience and endurance to partner and drive strategic impact backed by customer obsession."
"You should take risks, and if you fail, you need to fail fast and pivot immediately."
"We are stronger when we work together towards a unified goal – that’s our super healing power."
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