Summary
What’s the most important question regarding today’s theme of innovation that we, as a community, need to address? We’ve asked you, you’ve spoken—and now we’ll tackle it with the aid of Jon and some of today’s speakers.
Key Insights
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Defining team core values is essential for alignment and maintaining design integrity during innovation.
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Focusing innovation efforts on solving one specific problem prevents dilution of energy and resources.
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AI’s impact will be significant but gradual, requiring careful integration and human oversight.
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Organizational tempo and rhythm influence how innovations succeed or fail within a company.
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Empathy must remain central in design ops to understand true human needs beyond metrics.
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Cross-functional collaboration hinges on fostering personal relationships and human connection.
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Security protocols in large organizations limit the pace and type of AI adoption.
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Shared tooling and common taxonomies across teams reduce misunderstandings and boost alignment.
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Performance management is a highly human and operationally complex challenge in design ops.
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Workshops that unify different perspectives on a single problem help build communication and collaboration even if the immediate output isn’t perfect.
Notable Quotes
"Each team should talk about their core values, like integrity, accountability, and respect."
"Innovation means solving one single thing and parking the rest in the lot."
"AI will have outsize impacts in certain areas, but transformation will happen over time."
"The technology can reflect bias and can be more dangerous than early Microsoft Tay without human checks."
"Getting to know the person on a human level helps you succeed even with difficult colleagues."
"If you can’t work together, you’re not going to innovate together."
"Finding the north star problem to align on is key to overcoming different perspectives."
"Large companies won’t let AI break the brand they’ve spent billions on."
"We as designers need to translate pixel-level work into business outcomes and language."
"It’s our job to normalize capacity so people aren’t sprinting to the finish line repeatedly."
Or choose a question:
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