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.

Panel Discussion: Communicating the Value of DesignOps

Gold
Wednesday, November 7, 2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Share the love for this talk
Link:

Summary

In the discussion, Brennan from Target explains his design ops team’s composition, emphasizing the current presence of himself in a chief-of-staff-like role and design program managers handling high-level initiatives like onboarding and product releases. He elaborates on the emerging role of producers focused on pixel-perfect design execution and operational efficiency. Chris and Mark contrast this with smaller teams lacking producers but employing roles like scrum designers and design architects. Brennan shares his experience implementing the maker schedule in a bureaucratic environment, emphasizing the necessity of executive buy-in from VPs and COOs to mandate protected design time. Ashley Jaron raises the question of fostering and measuring a user-first mindset, with panelists highlighting the complexity, often relying on countless small initiatives rather than clear metrics. Stories like having leadership admins answer customer calls reveal impactful cultural change methods. Chris discusses their success creating a quality scorecard based on heuristics, built iteratively over nine agile sprints to translate soft design concepts into data-driven metrics, though Mark notes some organizations like CERN may resist such approaches due to their scientific culture. Brennan clarifies that most surveyed designers are not production-focused but engage in defining product features, user advocacy, and balancing design with product roles. The panel reflects on storytelling strategies to communicate design ops value, such as linking design issues to business outcomes (e.g., referral revenue) during company-wide meetings. They differentiate design ops from general operations, stressing the need for empathy and understanding of design work akin to how TPMs understand engineering. Regarding the future of design, the panel views AI and tooling as augmenting rather than replacing designers, embracing an experimental mindset with new tools. Finally, Chris defines design strategy as a team-driven broader role that goes beyond ops to include corporate planning and strategic design sprints at multiple organizational layers. Overall, the talk surfaces nuanced challenges and successes in building and promoting design ops in diverse organizational contexts.

Key Insights

  • Brennan’s design ops team currently has a chief-of-staff role and design program managers, with plans to incorporate producers managing day-to-day design production.

  • Producers likely manage detailed task execution in tools like JIRA, while program managers oversee higher-level, long-term initiatives.

  • Implementing the maker schedule requires executive support, especially in bureaucratic organizations, as grassroots efforts alone are insufficient.

  • Measuring a user-first mindset is a complex 'wicked problem' with no single metric; success comes from numerous small cultural shifts.

  • Engaging leadership directly with customer experiences, such as having admins take support calls, can powerfully shift organizational empathy for users.

  • Chris’s quality scorecard was developed iteratively over nine sprints, translating qualitative design heuristics into a quantifiable metric used by PMs.

  • Certain scientific or research-driven cultures may resist adopting design measurement tools due to skepticism about methodology and relevance.

  • Most designers studied spend limited time on production design; their core work involves product definition, user advocacy, and early-stage research.

  • Design ops storytelling succeeds by aligning design impact with key business metrics like referral revenue and attrition in company-wide forums.

  • Design ops requires domain understanding akin to technical program managers, blending operational skills with deep empathy for design work.

Notable Quotes

"I feel like I play more of a chief of staff type role than just head of design operations."

"A producer is probably in JIRA day-to-day, running tasks, creating tickets and epics, while a program manager tracks board-level timelines."

"We had to push up the ladder to VP and COO level to get the maker schedule endorsed and mandated."

"Every one of us is probably the lubricant in a system—you only notice us when things go bad."

"We took all the leadership admins to a call center for a week to make them feel what customers go through."

"We made up the quality scorecard, translating fuzzier heuristics into a hard number for our data-driven company."

"Science cultures like CERN have a huge headwind against adopting design measurement tools because of skepticism."

"Designers often have to step up and play the product manager role to define features and evangelize for users."

"We built a linear aggression model showing direct correlation between design problems and business metrics like referral revenue."

"A design program manager needs to understand at least what interaction, visual, and motion design mean—much like TPMs know engineering."

Ask the Rosenbot
Nicole Wright
Democratizing Research at HoneyBook
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Dr. Jamika D. Burge
Advancing the Inclusion of Womxn in Research Practices
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Tala Tayebi
Voice and influence in an age of noise
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Jennifer Kong
Journeying toward AI-assisted documentation in healthcare
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Coffee with Lou
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Trisha Terhar
Empathizing with the Empowered: Non-Researcher Responses to Democratization
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Tony Turner
Capturing Deep Insights
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Stephanie Wade
Building and Sustaining Design in Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Meredith Black
Scaling Design Culture
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Bilan Hashi
The Tension Between Story Collecting and Story Telling in Research
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Sam Ladner
Methodologies: Beyond the interview [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Sam Proulx
SUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Christian Rohrer
Research Operations at Scale
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Dantley Davis
Leadership & Diversity—A Fireside Chat with Dantley Davis
2020 • Enterprise Community
Ruzanna Rozman
Getting in Flow with Your Team
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Frances Yllana
DesignOps Exposed: What do our peers really think of us?
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold

More Videos

John Cutler

"The estuary is highly resilient but also very sensitive to industrial waste—creative collaboration areas in organizations are similar."

John Cutler

Oxbows, Rivers, and Estuaries: How to navigate the currents of change (without burning out)

December 3, 2024

Darian Davis

"Taking responsibility for our behaviors starts with an apology and continues with regular feedback and action."

Darian Davis

Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship

January 8, 2024

Dave Gray

"Our communications is all over the map — email, Slack, Hangouts, face-to-face, GitHub — it surfaced some gaps we didn’t fully appreciate before."

Dave Gray

Group Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps

November 7, 2017

John Cutler

"If you are a glue person expecting to be indispensable, you are more dispensable than you think. But if you’re a catalyst moving information and translating to action, that’s more valuable now."

John Cutler

The Alignment Trap

November 29, 2023

Abby Covert

"When was the last time that you felt stuck? The one where you feel a sense of being stuck trying to understand something."

Abby Covert

Stuck? Diagrams Help

October 27, 2022

Mark Interrante

"Side-pav proposals answer what’s going on, why it matters now, what you propose, what action to take, and what benefit comes from it."

Mark Interrante

Collaboration Flows in Product Development

June 9, 2017

Devon Powers

"The future will be struggle; we need to face that forward, not deny it."

Devon Powers

Imagining Better Futures

March 9, 2022

Prayag Narula

"The best teams I know are a quarter ahead of the product roadmap, seeking out impactful strategic research projects themselves."

Prayag Narula

How to Empower Your Designers to Do Good Research – And Why You Want To

June 10, 2022

Peter Van Dijck

"Cloud code wasn’t programmed to do this; it’s a very lightweight system where the model does most of the work."

Peter Van Dijck

Hands on AI #3: Claude Code for UX people

October 22, 2025