Bob Baxley
SVP, Design & Experience at ThoughtSpot
Sara Asche Anderson
Senior Director, Customer Experience Design & Research, Best Buy
Sharon Bautista
Staff User Experience Researcher, Mozilla
Frank Duran
Design Director, USAA
Jamie Kaspszak
Sr. Manager, Experience Strategy & Capability Development, Best Buy
Abbey Smalley
Former Head of Design Programs, Amazon
Sylas Souza
Director of Product Design, Merchandising & Design Systems, Target
Summary
Join today’s speakers for Q&A and discussion of the day’s topics.
Key Insights
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Target and Best Buy focus design system efforts primarily internally before considering public open-sourcing due to support and maturity concerns.
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Organizational transformation via design is a long-term journey requiring agility and frequent reevaluation rather than fixed multi-year plans.
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Design intrinsically involves change management within complex organizational systems, making understanding organizational learning critical for impactful UX.
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Showing quick, tangible value such as time savings promotes adoption and engagement with design systems across teams.
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Teams with low UX maturity often reflect wider product development maturity issues rather than just lack of UX understanding.
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Design champions should seek leaders who not only verbally support design but allocate time and resources to discovery and design activities.
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Research communication benefits from multiple formats—written reports, lightning talks, podcasts—to accommodate diverse learning styles and contexts.
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Pausing traditional KPIs (like NPS scores) can help shift organizational behavior toward customer-obsessed cultural transformation rather than chasing numerical targets.
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Collaborative partnerships between design, research, and business teams are essential for embedding design thinking and advancing organizational change.
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Organizations should balance creating custom design systems with leveraging existing platforms to avoid unnecessary delays and inefficiencies.
Notable Quotes
"We are currently focusing on internal design systems and growing them before we open to the public because that requires additional support."
"We've got a lot of work to do before we’re ready to unify our design systems and release them outside our walls."
"Design always means change; your designs don’t exist in a vacuum, they live in organizational systems."
"It’s more dangerous to do nothing than to do something that’s not super perfect to start."
"The journey metaphor is better than a sprint or marathon because transformation is ongoing without a defined finish line."
"Design is open source—everybody participates, but we need to facilitate and make good on that promise."
"If you know what a team will get for free, they are more motivated to engage in the design process."
"Low UX maturity is often a symptom of broader product development maturity challenges."
"We recommended pausing the focus on NPS scores to encourage coaching behaviors that drive long-term customer relationships."
"Socializing research should take more time than the study itself to ensure adoption and impact."
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