Summary
Culture is the glue that holds everything together. When our work lives are disrupted and norms shift, your culture can be at risk. Let’s discuss the role that Design Ops plays in designing and upholding company culture. We'll look at ways to turn your beliefs into behaviors that reinforce healthy creative culture, even in uncertain times.
Key Insights
-
•
Process is rigid and necessary for task completion, while practices are flexible guardrails enabling collaboration and creativity.
-
•
Shifting from HQ-centered to distributed work requires redesigning existing processes and practices to support remote teams.
-
•
IKEA’s flat-pack model provides a useful metaphor distinguishing process (instruction manual) from practice (team roles and collaboration).
-
•
Time and energy are the most precious resources for creative teams and must be actively protected to maintain performance.
-
•
Team curfews and core collaboration hours help protect rest and enable flexible work schedules for diverse needs like caregiving.
-
•
Asynchronous communication increases transparency but requires careful balance to avoid trust erosion from misunderstandings.
-
•
Regular well-being check-ins via simple tools like Slack emojis can reveal workload capacity and enable timely support.
-
•
Leadership modeling vulnerability and openness fosters psychological safety and encourages honest team communication.
-
•
Measuring impact over activity reduces presenteeism and focuses teams on meaningful outcomes instead of attendance.
-
•
Practices that center humane, purposeful, equitable, and inclusive beliefs transform how teams build products and culture.
Notable Quotes
"Process is a scary word. Smart people do not like to be told what to do."
"In this field, conflict arises when people are not on the same page."
"Process is rigid, it helps you complete a task; practices are flexible and empower creative problem solving."
"Flatpacking products allows IKEA to innovate in a unified way and create predictable customer experiences."
"Protecting time and energy is about putting guardrails in place to defend mindset and well-being."
"We set core collaboration hours so people can work synchronously and also have flexible nonlinear days."
"An emoji in Slack can tell you so much about how someone is doing that you can’t get in remote meetings."
"Asynchronous communication breaks down with misunderstandings; sometimes a five-minute meeting is better."
"Culture is how you act on your beliefs, and practices empower us to act on humane and inclusive values."
"If you prioritize relationships and genuine care, you create a space to communicate openly and build trust."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Each species lost is a thread untethered from the web of life that supports us all."
Alex Hurworth Bonnie John Fahd Arshad Antoine MarinDesigning a Contact Tracing App for Universal Access
October 23, 2020
"Building connections early in their career could create even more opportunities further along their career path."
Laine Riley Prokay Lisa GordonCarving a Path for Early Career DesignOps Practitioners
September 9, 2022
"You won’t know what success looks like until you put something out there and see how it works in practice."
Eniola OluwoleLessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site
October 24, 2019
"Rather than aiming for the chief strategy officer directly, build relationships with junior strategists who are more accessible."
Nathan ShedroffDouble Your Mileage: Use Your Research Strategically
March 31, 2020
"Voice control on mobile goes beyond digital assistants and can fully control the device for users who cannot use touch."
Sam ProulxMobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World
November 17, 2022
"At LinkedIn, rapid research uncovered trends across products that helped reduce duplicate work."
Feleesha SterlingBuilding a Rapid Research Program (Videoconference)
May 18, 2023
"You have the power, like Navy Seals of user research, to influence the biggest issues of our time, one interaction at a time."
Neil BarrieWidening the Aperture: The Case for Taking a Broader Lens to the Dialogue between Products and Culture
March 25, 2024
"Most organizations know they need to evaluate impact, but very few have effective ways to do it."
John DevanneyThe Design Management Office
November 6, 2017
"You need to understand stakeholders’ fears, motivations, and incentives to change hearts and minds."
Katy MogalBut Do Your Insights Scale?
March 12, 2021
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can organizations use thinking styles to better support caregivers with varying cognitive approaches?
How do inner thinking, emotional reactions, and personal rules contribute to defining thinking styles?
How does early involvement of service design help prevent large scale technical failures in healthcare systems?