Summary
While Design Operations (DesignOps) is only a few years old as a practice, it is evolving rapidly. As we finish our 4th year at The Summit, we've seen so much change in our community of practice in this short time. So, we want to end this year's Summit with a look beyond. If we are to be resilient what are we being resilient towards. Jon Fukuda (Limina), Dominique Ward (Atlassian), and Adrienne Allnutt (LinkedIn) will share their perspectives on where DesignOps is going and why. Moderated by Dave Malouf (Northwestern Mutual). We will be fielding questions from attendees, too.
Key Insights
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Design ops must run like a business with clear KPIs, budgets, and resource management to avoid common business failures.
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Shifting leadership tasks from design directors to design ops can be challenging but is critical for strategic prioritization.
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Service design thinking is essential for design ops to deliver holistic customer experiences across organizational touchpoints.
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Moving from reactive crisis management to proactive future visioning enables continuous resilience in design operations.
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Design operates as nested systems at multiple levels—from individual designers to teams to organizations—requiring integrated, dynamic feedback loops.
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Integration and streamlining of multiple design and business tools are critical to reduce tool fatigue and improve efficiency.
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Design intelligence arises when different roles have contextual awareness within integrated tools, enabling better collaboration and creativity.
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Creativity flourishes when strong structure and processes provide freedom, much like musical training enables jazz improvisation.
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Designers need to understand business KPIs and goals, while business partners should develop design fluency for shared success.
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Despite automation fears, the human-centric and empathetic nature of design ops roles makes them irreplaceable by AI.
Notable Quotes
"Design organizations are a business within the corporation; design ops must run it like a business to succeed."
"We need more standardization and governance from our design teams to move into a strategic position."
"The future of design ops is service design—holistic, people-centered, coordinating onstage and backstage experiences."
"Instead of growing bigger, we should re-examine scale as optimizing impact without necessarily increasing size."
"Design is a multi-level nested system, like Russian dolls, evolving across designers, teams, and organizations."
"Our strategies need to be as dynamic and responsive as the environment that surrounds us."
"Structure doesn’t mean rigidity; like learning music theory enables jazz improvisation, structure enables creativity."
"Tool fatigue is real; we need to better streamline and integrate our tools to maximize team effectiveness."
"Design intelligence means contextual, robust, accessible, and actionable information within the tools teams use."
"AI can support by surfacing the right information but won’t replace the human creativity and empathy essential to design ops."
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