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.

The Bigger Picture: A Panel Discussion

Gold
Wednesday, October 23, 2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Share the love for this talk
The Bigger Picture: A Panel Discussion
Speakers: Louis Rosenfeld , Jose Coronado , Rachel Posman , Guneet Singh and Crystal Yan
Link:

Summary

The DesignOps Summit 2019 ambitiously tackles three huge, over-arching themes: Proving value and measuring outcomes Partnering outside design Change management These are indeed huge and over-arching. But, with the help of four crack DesignOps and ResearchOps leaders, the audience’s questions, and Lou Rosenfeld’s moderation, we’ll pull lit off—and we’ll even have some valuable take-aways by the end of the session.

Key Insights

  • Acting like a designer using familiar tools and processes is key for design ops professionals to gain trust within design teams, as Rachel Posman explains with journey mapping at Uber Eats.

  • Crystal Leon highlights the importance of creating shared language tied to company values, such as expanding 'data-driven' to include qualitative insights, to demonstrate design value across organizations.

  • Gneets Singh advises defining value specifically by understanding the audience and prioritizing influence and adoption metrics over hard-dollar impact, acknowledging design’s indirect contribution.

  • Jose Coronado shares the need to balance quantitative and qualitative metrics, adapting vocabulary (e.g., using 'satisfaction' in place of 'delight') to align with partner sensitivities in conservative environments.

  • Measuring impact is a journey requiring persistent, multi-channel communication and contextualization across distributed, global teams, with repetition key to embedding understanding.

  • Partnership success emerges from starting small, picking one advocate inside another team to build relationships and replicate collaborative wins, as suggested by Gneets and Rachel.

  • Breaking design research workshops into smaller, repeated activities helps non-designers incrementally engage, build empathy, and appreciate design processes, according to Crystal.

  • Role proliferation in design teams (product designers, service designers, content strategists) can cause confusion outside the team; clear communication of value per partner perspective is critical, as Jose notes.

  • Teams that collaboratively co-create design principles with leadership see greater adoption and normalization of design thinking language across the organization, as Jose illustrates.

  • Empowering and leveraging 'loud, trusted' influencers on teams can dramatically accelerate change management and process adoption, as Rachel observes from her experience.

Notable Quotes

"One of the easiest ways to gain trust is really to talk and think and act like a designer or a researcher if I’m joining a research team."

"We are still designers, we’re systems designers, we’re organizational designers, even if we’re not making things."

"I talk about being data driven and expanding the definition of data to include both quantitative data and qualitative data."

"Nobody’s going to ask to show you the $10,000 impact from a single design, but you can show the needle movement was there."

"People in our environment had an allergic reaction to happiness or delight, so we used sentiment or satisfaction instead."

"Put feelings into the data by talking to sales and after sales, understanding customer experience before and after product launches."

"Start small to make a big impact by building one advocate relationship and then replicating the success."

"Breaking up design research training into short exercises over time helps get people out of the building and engaged."

"We set up a design-led workshop with all leaders to craft what design-driven meant for our organization, leading to it becoming everyday language."

"Find the loudest respected person on the team and get their buy-in; they can fast track weeks of work in getting everyone else on board."

Ask the Rosenbot
Nova Wehman-Brown
We've Never Done This Before
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
How AI will Change DesignOps Tooling
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Brian Moss
What Does it Mean to be a Resilient Research Team?
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Bas Raijmakers, PhD (RCA)
What Design Research can Learn from Documentary Filmmaking
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Dr. Jamika D. Burge
The Future of Research: Bridging the Gaps
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Megan Blocker
Getting to the “So What?”: How Management Consulting Practices Can Transform Your Approach to Research
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Erika Kincaid
Connecting the Dots: How to Foster Collaboration and Build a Strong Design Review Culture
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Maria Skaaden
Continuous Design: One eye on the horizon and the other on the next wave
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Chloe Amos-Edkins
A Cultural Approach: Research in the Context of Glocalisation
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Lavrans Løvlie
Ask me anything – Authors of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Terry Buckman
Wargaming (An Introduction)
2023 • Enterprise Community
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Ovetta Sampson
Managing the Human Engagement Risks of AI
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Russ Unger
Getting Out from Under Everyone: How to Escape the Paralysis of Getting Started
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Charlotte Vorbeck
Pipeline to Civic Design
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Kyle Godbey
Non-linear service design for complex adaptive systems
2025 • Rosenfeld Community

More Videos

Joanna Vodopivec

"Customer obsession is actually one of our key values, which makes my job as a researcher a little bit easier."

Joanna Vodopivec Prabhas Pokharel

One Research Team for All - Influence Without Authority

March 9, 2022

Louis Rosenfeld

"Onboarding often felt like trial by fire—go to the meeting and hope you understand something."

Louis Rosenfeld Lashanda Hodge Senongo Akpem Chris Hodowanec

Becoming a Civic Designer: Making the Move from Private to Public Sector

November 17, 2022

Bria Alexander

"We talked all about resilience, curated by myself yesterday."

Bria Alexander

Day 3 Welcome

September 25, 2024

Uday Gajendar

"Melissa Burnett is a creator of order out of chaos, leader of leaders."

Uday Gajendar Louis Rosenfeld

Day 2 Welcome

June 5, 2024

Sam Proulx

"More ways to contact support—chat, email, phone—are essential because different disabilities require different options."

Sam Proulx

Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience

June 7, 2023

Russ Unger

"If you really care about success, you define it first and hire against performance, not just experience."

Russ Unger

Onboarding: The Ecosystem, not the Afterthought

November 7, 2017

Catherine Dubut

"No one really knows what to expect anyway, so failure goes largely unnoticed. It's better to be transparent about the mess."

Catherine Dubut

Bridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design

March 18, 2021

Josh Clark

"Traditional software is grounded—accurate and reliable—but lacks radical adaptivity."

Josh Clark Veronika Kindred

Sentient Design: New Postures for AI-Mediated Experiences (2nd of 3 seminars)

January 29, 2025

Dantley Davis

"If you don’t have those challenges, it’s a lot easier to make it in the corporate world."

Dantley Davis

Leadership & Diversity—A Fireside Chat with Dantley Davis

September 17, 2020