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
Katie Hansen
Experimental research: techniques for deep, psychology-driven insights
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Cheryl Platz
Collaborative Creativity through Improv
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
GenAI for UXers: A Rosenbot Demo and Discussion
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Alex Hurworth
Designing a Contact Tracing App for Universal Access
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Jen van der Meer
Service design performs value
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Nicole Bergstrom
AccessibilityOps: Moving beyond “nice to have”
2024 • DesignOps Community
Alla Weinberg
Cross-Functional Relationship Design
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Yalenka Mariën
Designing for Digital Inclusion in the Belgian Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Anupama Dhareshwar
From blueprint to bot: Designing resilient AI-powered services
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Kayla Farrell
What It's Like To Be a User Researcher at Compass
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Prayag Narula
Dialing for Research: How to Reach the Unreachable
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Paul Pangaro, PhD
Systems Disciplines: Table Stakes for 21st Century Organizations
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Ellie Krysl
Planned Right. Managed Right. Designed Right.
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Maggie Dieringer
Creating Consistency Through Constant Change
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Ricardo Martins
Unlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Ariel Kennan
Civic Design in 2022
2022 • Civic Design Community

More Videos

Xenia Adjoubei

"Data sovereignty is about who owns your data, which country’s laws apply, and how vulnerable groups are fairly protected."

Xenia Adjoubei Sean Bruce

Empowering Communities Through the Researcher in Residence Program

March 29, 2023

Tamara Kartoziia

"When we first started expanding, our internal process felt like being stuck in a massive traffic jam."

Tamara Kartoziia

Think global, adapt local: how service design accelerated B2B market entry by 6 months

November 20, 2025

Jay Bustamante

"AI learns from the world, sometimes from untrusted sources, so it needs continual ethical iteration."

Jay Bustamante

Navigating the Ethical Frontier: DesignOps Strategies for Responsible AI Innovation

October 2, 2023

Nicole Aleong

"There are over 7 billion futures of right now."

Nicole Aleong

Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology

March 26, 2024

Nick Lewis

"Creative constraints can actually bring out the most creative solutions."

Nick Lewis

Designing and building low-carbon websites independently

November 18, 2025

Vicky Teinaki

"It comes down to confidence and comfort to articulate why something has value and whether it’s working or not."

Vicky Teinaki Michele Marut Tim Parmee

Short Take #3: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers

December 6, 2022

Laura Weiss

"The presence of conflict is often an indication that something new is trying to emerge."

Laura Weiss

Turn Down the Heat: 3 Ways to Handle Conflict in the Moment

November 20, 2024

Joerg Beringer

"The tool enables designers and product managers to generate high-quality context and user requirements without dependency on user access or research skills."

Joerg Beringer Thomas Geis

Scaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes

June 10, 2025

Shelby Switzer

"Facilitation is part setting the stage and part performing on it."

Shelby Switzer

Making Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World

December 10, 2021