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.

Stretching the Definition of DesignOps with Product Development

Gold
Wednesday, November 7, 2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Share the love for this talk
Stretching the Definition of DesignOps with Product Development
Speakers: Chris Moses
Link:

Summary

When is DesignOps about more than building tools and systems that improve the effectiveness of R&D? For athenahealth, our DesignOps team has housed two cross-product teams—by organizational necessity at first—that have become critical early adopters of the instruments and programs their DesignOps colleagues have developed.

Key Insights

  • Athena’s software originated from a birthing clinic and evolved over decades, accumulating massive design debt unique to healthcare documentation demands.

  • The end of federal EHR incentives in 2016 shifted buyer focus from payment speed to usability, drastically changing market dynamics at Athena.

  • Agile transformation replaced Athena’s waterfall approach, restructuring teams into feature-based scrum squads with generalist designers supported by centralized specialists.

  • Design ops at Athena was created to reduce friction for embedded generalist designers by providing tools, systems, and specialist support.

  • Design quality audits using Nielsen's heuristics were developed to quantify usability issues across 55 mission-critical clinical workflows for better prioritization.

  • Introducing design quality scores gave senior leadership a shared language to discuss usability and made design debt visible in hard numbers.

  • Scaling design audits required asynchronous review via a custom app, enabling broader participation despite heavy resource demands.

  • Athena’s frequent reorganizations exposed the flaw of using work structure as taxonomy for knowledge management, prompting adoption of a jobs-to-be-done based job map for stable tagging.

  • Design ops at Athena plays an extended role in optimizing product development processes, providing tools at multiple software lifecycle phases.

  • Athena is experimenting with a design ops-hosted cross-product scrum team to lead visionary UX initiatives, testing the boundaries of design ops influence.

Notable Quotes

"I joined the design ops team about six months after it was created, and I'm not the head but part of its leadership."

"We’re an older company by tech standards—older than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Google by one year."

"No doctor wants to use an EHR; we’re often the least bad option in a field full of poor usability."

"The first year federal incentives ended, the market changed completely; buyers started listening to end users more."

"We had 85 UX specialists peppered around and reshaped them into generalist designers supported by design ops to reduce their load."

"We audited 55 mission-critical workflows over nine two-week sprints using Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics."

"Giving senior leadership a shared language for design helped product teams better communicate what needed focus and why."

"We built an app to let reviewers asynchronously capture design audit findings, significantly reducing scheduling friction."

"Using work structure as a taxonomy for knowledge failed due to frequent reorganizations; switching to a jobs-to-be-done taxonomy gave us stability."

"We’re exploring if design ops should host a cross-product scrum team focused on visionary redesigns to have bigger impact."

Ask the Rosenbot
Brad Peters
Short Take #1: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Kyria Stephens
Power to Heal: Civic Design in the Aftermath of Tragedy
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Llewyn Paine
Day 1 Using AI in UX with Impact
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Dominique Ward
The Most Exciting Time for DesignOps is Now
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Hugh Dubberly
Problems with Problems: Reconsidering the Frame of Designing as Problem-Solving
2019 • Enterprise Community
Mansi Gupta
Women-Centric Research: What, Why, How
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Uday Gajendar
Day 2 Welcome
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Dane DeSutter
Beyond the Console: The rise of the Gamer Experience and how gaming will impact UX Research across industries
2024 • QuantQual Interest Group
Allison Sanders
Operating with Purpose
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Brigette Metzler
Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Nidhi Singh Rathore
Embracing participation to unlock deeper truths in commercial research
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Josh Clark
Sentient Scenes and Radically Adaptive Experiences
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Theme Panel
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Jeff Gothelf
Who does what by how much?
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Noah Bond
Redefining truth and inclusivity: Navigating data ownership and ethical research in the age of disinformation
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Victor Udoewa
Radical Participatory Design: Decolonizing Participatory Design Processes
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold

More Videos

Taylor Jennings

"Drag and drop ease, and collaborative affinity diagramming in the tool, were unexpected but very welcome advantages."

Taylor Jennings Joe Nelson Alex Knoll

Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research

March 9, 2022

Nicole Aleong

"Not everyone has the same capacity to aspire to a future; this is critical when working with marginalized communities."

Nicole Aleong

Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology

March 26, 2024

Jeff Gothelf

"Adobe’s Kickbox is a fantastic professional development tool, but it doesn’t drive new lines of business."

Jeff Gothelf

Innovation Studios: the Engines of Enterprise Experimentation

May 14, 2015

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"Meeting designers where they spend their time, like integrating accessibility plugins into Figma, is the most effective way to make progress."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

DesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility

May 26, 2022

Tess Dixon

"There’s a lot of pressure on ops people and managers to make everything perfect all the time for staff."

Tess Dixon

C'mon Get Happy

September 29, 2021

Liam Thurston

"All your team wants to do is win at career Bingo or career Snakes and Ladders, hopefully more ladders."

Liam Thurston

Why Your Design Team Is Quitting, And How To Fix It

June 10, 2022

Ian Swinson

"Why don’t we do what we do for users but apply it to our own careers? Absolutely nutty, right? So we did."

Ian Swinson

Designing and Driving UX Careers

June 8, 2016

Leisa Reichelt

"One researcher per team for at least three days a week was considered an outrageous luxury at GDS in 2013."

Leisa Reichelt

Opening Keynote: Operating in Context

November 7, 2018

Rachael Greene

"UX research is a team sport and our research process is cross-functional and non-negotiable."

Rachael Greene Alison Davis

Building a Design Ops Practice that Really Works (Most of the Time)

October 2, 2025