Summary
Traditional approaches to maintaining consistency break down when confronted by the complexity of digital business. While DesignOps and related approaches such as DevOps can enhance speed and responsiveness, they risk generating their own kinds of silos, blockages, and breakdowns. This talk will present an agile governance model that scales without becoming brittle, slow, or invasive. It will describe principles and practices teams across-the design-operations spectrum can use to balance agility, coherency, and resilience.
Key Insights
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Design ops and DevOps respond to the same fundamental shift from industrial product-making to digital service delivery.
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Modern service systems behave like complex adaptive systems, not traditional machine systems.
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Emergence means global system behavior arises unpredictably from local interactions, complicating design and control.
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Small changes in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes, challenging pre-production testing.
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Continuous flow and feedback, core to DevOps, are critical to enabling adaptability and learning in design ops.
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Breaking systems and organizations into smaller, autonomous yet mutually servicing teams improves safety and agility.
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Service should be the unifying principle that integrates multiple teams and functions without creating brittleness.
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Governance must evolve from centralized enforcement to a distributed, adaptive, self-correcting mechanism.
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User-centered design in security and operations improves both usability and technical outcomes.
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Design should be an ongoing, co-creative process that continuously evolves services to meet real user needs.
Notable Quotes
"I thought design ops was about bringing together design and IT operations, but it turned out I was wrong, and that’s okay."
"Digital is infusing the physical and breaking down familiar boundaries between parts of our lives and organizations."
"You can’t separate front end from back end or inside from outside in these complex service systems."
"Change is not a weakness or poor planning but something we can harness to our advantage."
"If a flock of birds encounters a tall building, it splits and glues itself back together. An airplane would break."
"Service is about facilitating desirable outcomes, not just about what systems or tools you build."
"We need governance that acts like a Maxwell governor – a self-correcting, flexible steering mechanism."
"Security often fails because we forget people are involved, not just technical flaws."
"Design starts to become operations, as continual innovation on each other's behalf becomes routine."
"When software is service, functionality and operability become one inseparable delivery experience."
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