Summary
This session is aimed at how design ops can innovate in and drive standardization across large design teams, enabling craft, quality UX and velocity in productization. By attending this session you will learn: Is standardization right for your team? How to approach standardization based on the needs or profile of your design team How to drive influence and create systems that are strong, extensible and will stick creating real impact for your team.
Key Insights
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Standardization at scale hinges on balancing quality, scope, velocity, and craft.
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The Cheesecake Factory exemplifies effective standardization by delivering consistent quality across many locations and menu items made from scratch.
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Biases in standards can have serious real-world consequences, like soap dispensers detecting light skin more reliably or crash test dummies representing only average males.
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Inclusive design operations can democratize innovation by creating structures, like Facebook’s Design Architects cohort, that elevate junior and diverse designers.
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Creating engagement models ranging from light office hours to embedded collaboration enables scalable transfer of expertise and craft.
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No-code development platforms and integrations significantly reduce operational overhead by connecting disparate tools and creating a single source of truth.
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Automated tool integrations, such as Slack and Figma, create dynamic team signals that improve collaboration and awareness.
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Human-centered design Ops involves empathizing deeply with users—in this case, designers—to identify universal pain points before operationalizing solutions.
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Reducing cognitive load by minimizing unnecessary decisions for teams improves focus and efficiency.
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Building communities within design teams fosters connection and prevents isolation, balancing the human aspect alongside automation.
Notable Quotes
"Standardization lives deep in my heart partially because of the teams I've worked on and also because I've had so many domains under the umbrellas of my teams over time."
"The Cheesecake Factory has cracked the code across what I am deeming the tenets of standardization at scale: quality, scope, velocity, and craft."
"These automatic soap dispensers were designed based on a bias by standard to recognize lighter skin better than darker skin."
"Women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured and 17% more likely to die in a car accident because crash test dummies are based on average males."
"Innovation can come from anywhere levels aside, so we needed a mechanism to scale the Design Architects' influence to the broader team."
"The most unexpected outcome was that we created a community of designers within the community design team."
"If you're still manually checking multiple tools for updates and updating other tools, you're only cheating yourself and your team."
"Design Ops is not the junk drawer; the more you manually take on does not equal impact on your team. Let the robots win this one."
"Human-centered design Ops is about what can I solve for that is universal to each human on my team that becomes deeply personal and impactful."
"Community building within your team is what keeps the distinctions between humans and robots, and there's no better way to do that."
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