When Design Ops Comes in H.O.T. : A Tale of a Transformed Design Org
Summary
TIn their first 60 days at Zendesk, Briana and Christina, a 2 person design ops team, conducted a Program Manager Audit looking at these 3 key areas: People, Process, and Portfolio. 90 days later, Product Design has transformed from a siloed, disjointed team into a well-organized, collaborative environment with a unified tool strategy, inclusive team spaces and more focus on design craft. In this talk you will learn how to not only conduct a thorough and data-centric Program Manager Audit, but how to come in H.O.T. (Humble, Orchestrated, and Timely.)
Key Insights
-
•
New design ops members conducted a comprehensive people, practice, and portfolio audit within their first 30 days to identify improvement areas.
-
•
Ops-focused discussion guides differ from typical UX research guides by addressing distinct needs across leadership and design teams.
-
•
Effective ops work requires honest, transparent, and encouraging conversations to gather actionable feedback.
-
•
The effectiveness scale with seven criteria (audience, purpose, documentation, cadence, effectiveness, participation, culture) helps objectively evaluate meetings and rituals.
-
•
UX Weekly initially suffered from low strategic value, low engagement, and unsustainable slide-heavy formats, causing decline over time.
-
•
Grounding recommendations in real user feedback and data increases leadership buy-in and ensures relevant changes.
-
•
Project charters are vital for accountability, impact communication, and timely execution of ops initiatives.
-
•
Tailoring discussion guides and recommendations to different audience levels (VPs to individual designers) enhances relevance.
-
•
Maintaining cultural elements like greetings and community connection strengthens team engagement during meetings.
-
•
Ops roles serve as linchpins balancing competing priorities and synthesizing diverse inputs into cohesive strategies.
Notable Quotes
"When design ops comes in hot, it means honest, orchestrated, and timely."
"We had 80 designers attending UX Weekly and trying to get through 64 slides in one hour. It wasn’t sustainable."
"Dogs and spam started filling the slides. That was a sign this meeting wasn’t working anymore."
"An ops-focused discussion guide helps us gather feedback from leadership and designers so our recommendations meet their needs."
"Our effectiveness scale measured audience, purpose, documentation, cadence, effectiveness, participation, and culture to rate meetings."
"We unapologetically move forward when high-level stakeholders miss deadlines, but also collect feedback via surveys."
"The project charter is our best friend for accountability, impact, and timelines."
"You need to be laser-focused as ops people—we get asked to do too many things otherwise."
"We shifted UX Weekly to Product Design Biweekly, giving the team more time to engage meaningfully."
"Ops folks are the linchpin connecting leadership and designers, orchestrating all the instruments."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Decision making here is basically forge trading — people argue and withhold support until they get what they want."
Carl TurnerYou Can Do This: Understand and Solve Organizational Problems to Jumpstart a Dead Project
March 28, 2023
"If there’s a performance gap, don’t sit on it; it doesn’t age well and hurts the team, employee, and business."
Karen PascoeDeveloping Experience Teams and Talent in the Enterprise
June 8, 2016
"Support software used to be really shitty and expensive, and Zendesk set out to fix that by making it beautifully simple."
Jilanna WilsonDistributed Design Operations Management
October 23, 2019
"Throwing a potluck sounds easy until you realize you don’t have a group that magically reads each other’s minds, resulting in a random table of snack foods."
Shawna Hein Kevin HoffmanCreate a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
November 17, 2022
"You need to find your own mattress—a grounding purpose or phrase—that you can rely on when progress feels hopeless."
Barb SpantonDoing Work That Matters: A Look Beyond The Idealistic Notion of 'Doing Meaningful Work'
June 10, 2022
"As the delivery driver, I connected the dots, got people briefs, and sometimes said no to lofty leadership requests."
Briana ThomasThe Quiet Force: Uncovering Hidden Leadership in High-Impact Design Teams
September 24, 2024
"Creating and holding space is like putting bumpers up in bowling so people know they won’t fail if they engage."
Gina MendoliaTherapists, Coaches, and Grandmas: Techniques for Service Design in Complex Systems
December 3, 2024
"Now everyone’s an edge case, so research needs to focus on those edge cases, not just the average user."
Lija Hogan Milan Mijatovic Sam Proulx Louis RosenfeldThree Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research
March 15, 2024
"A design ops career ladder can look like a step stool unless you create multiple tracks for growth and specialization."
John Calhoun Rachel PosmanTwo Sides of the DesignOps Coin: Teams Ops and Product Ops
January 8, 2024
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can play be integrated seamlessly into traditional workshops to avoid seeming frivolous?
How do pragmatic pluralism and competing paradigms affect maternal health care delivery?
How does including metadata like methodology, market, and date improve the quality of research repository search results?