"IBM has been publicly disclosing their reductions in environmental impacts since 1990."

"Keeping the lights on work is never exciting, but it’s essential to prevent complaints and keep systems running."

"Good designers can shift scale fluidly between the big picture and craft-level details."

"Build your story around what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what you want to do."

"I imagine a world where when you buy something, you can know and thank its source, understanding true costs transparently."

"The social model means we have the power to take away barriers; people with disabilities can be independent."

"The unintended consequence was that the carbon footprint of that journey was reduced by about 80%."

"Very similar interfaces can conceal extremely different AI prompts, which shape the outputs."

"Version vaults act like a safety net to encourage more exploration by tracking all your generated versions."

"Failure is when effort did not produce the desired result, not an identity."

"We often forget to care about ourselves and our teams when we’re doing research or clinical work."

"Radically adaptive interfaces react in the moment and follow the user’s lead like improvisation."

"The first and last parts of research projects—the brief and the synthesis—should be 80 to 90% collaborative."

"Charlie is like the worst coworker you’ve ever had: well intentioned but painful to interact with."

"The Twitter algorithm favored lighter skin tones when cropping images, reflecting racial bias in tech."

"AI’s growing energy demands make green software more important, not less."

"If we don’t decide the best way to use AI, the technology will decide for us."

"Demographics don’t cause how people think; inner thinking is shaped by past experiences and personal rules."

"Fast is not a virtue in itself; we should move slower and act with intention to go in the right direction."

"It is uncommon to encounter service design working at the technical level, but this is precisely where it can have exponential impact."

"Embedding promotoras from the Latina community helped patients access resources and set visit goals."

"We always begin our research from the future to the future: start with the community’s envisioned future to guide design."

"Systems change happens through the mundane—what bus I take, how I negotiate pronouns at home, these small acts matter."

"You can design the best service in the world but still be part of a terrible system."

"What is done at one agency often becomes the playbook for success at others."

"Captions were once thought of as assistive tech for the few, now many use them regularly."

"We do not take cost of living, inflation, or taxes into account, so it’s your homework to contextualize the salary data."

"Service design is still so new in Silicon Valley product environments that no one really knows what maturity looks like."

"It is impossible to survive by pushing against the current all the time; patient opportunism is key."

"When you design for the edges, you get the middle for free."

"Language matters, so does money, and how you connect to business determines your funding."

"One-to-one video calls help you build personal connections and find peers passionate about the same topics."

"By bringing the dots closer, we empower teams to find their own solutions and build lasting capacity."

"We moved from designing each application type one at a time to creating a platform for planning experts to build new types themselves."

"Gina was closing the dots and shifting perspective from a designer closer to the business."

"Safety is the first number one priority in healthcare service design."

"Foundational IA and metadata infrastructure are the meat and potatoes supporting scalable AI-driven experiences."

"The true enabler of successful innovation is not technology but the human beings involved."

"Key Experience Indicators gave us rigor to bring into engineering conversations to make design less vague or fluffy."

"Zoning out and having a sense of wonder and play in research opens up new ways to rethink how we approach problems."

"Community is critical; solo practitioners must seek or create it to thrive and avoid isolation."

"The shame-based notification model in Duolingo can trigger trauma for some users."

"A one week design sprint is a rollercoaster of emotion and pressure for everybody."

"Design ops isn’t just a support role, it is a strategic partner. - Rachel Poman"

"Change is mysterious. We’re stepping into the unknown and need latitude to fail and learn along the way."

"It’s our job to normalize capacity so people aren’t sprinting to the finish line repeatedly."

"The best people in a community experience it as 90% awesome when the reality is 10%."

"Lauren Cantor is an outstanding house librarian who curates notes and resources for the conference."

"Are you called upon just to fight fires or are you involved from the start to define problems and scope approaches?"

"We innovate every day on how we work together, how we get work done, and how we create impact."

"Any of us being alive on this planet together right now is a statistical miracle."

"Innovation isn’t just a buzzword in design ops; it’s at the core of how we shape the future of the design practice."

"People see either all their accomplishments or all their gaps—it’s not a race to fill the pages."

"If you’re made to feel uncomfortable in any way, shape or form, we want to know about it because we care."

"If you’re learning something at the end of Sprint six, it’s really costly to go back and make changes in Sprint one or two."

"We had no recipe, no formula, just vibes, and some mystery box of ingredients."

"Our small but mighty design operations team often gets stuck jumping from fire drill to fire drill."

"Visibility is the most vital thing for UX leaders to be focused on."

"Measuring impact in design ops has always been a little stormy."

"The only way to get a taste for what these AI tools can do is by actually getting stuff done with them."

"We need to build stronger scaffolding or connective tissue—shared taxonomies and relational schemas."

"Assistive technology is like another person in the room during a research session, and you have to understand that presence too."

"All members of senior leadership at Brex participate in continuous discovery at least every month to build customer empathy."

"Get involved hands-on with AI technologies rather than judging based on media narratives."

"Our system is imperfect, but we embrace continuous 1% improvement every day towards being data-driven and design-driven."

"Layoffs rank above divorce among the most stressful life experiences."

"You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can't connect with other people, nothing will come of it."

"Toxic stress is experiencing too much too fast for too long without healing."

"Design ops is actually all about fragility; we do stability, but can we have more experimentation and comfort with ambiguity?"

"Resilience means the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties or toughness."

"It took over a year and 10 teams just to ship four screens—scale is both a tremendous opportunity and a weakness."

"Sharing real user voices alongside insights helps stakeholders connect emotionally and internalize research findings better."

"Bria Alexander is a senior design program manager for diversity, equity, and inclusion, supporting generative AI at Adobe."

"Your breath is the most powerful thing. It moves on its own, but it’s the one thing you can control."

"It’s energy management, not time management – listen to yourself to recharge effectively."

"Using existing platforms or vendors who work with the disability community can be one of the easiest ways to do this at scale."

"Context switching was a huge pain point; mapping out the end-to-end journey brought clarity to where the gaps were."

"Feedback is data; sometimes there are outliers, so it’s important to understand if feedback reflects the majority."

"You can have a fully compliant experience that’s still not usable or even accessible in a meaningful way."

"All design has costs; AI is not unique in this respect."

"Most people in UX are already doing many things the sustainability guidelines call for like accessibility and user research."

"Some people lie, so mixing methods helps triangulate reality beyond what anyone says."

"People love it when you end early and give them back five minutes."

"Follow your curiosity deeply, and that thread can lead you to impactful climate work."

"We need to move from vertical extraction to a much more horizontal, let's build this and understand together model."

"An assistant is helping you do the task with your attention on it, whereas an agent does its work out of your attention."

"Don’t forget cars are fun; if you’re not having fun behind the wheel, you’re not doing it right."

"Randomization is magic — it evenly distributes confounds so the only difference affecting results is your change."

"Holding on too tightly to insights and controlling data flows can make research teams irrelevant."

"Erin was always a couple of steps ahead on the road of design and UX."

"Sustainability is multi-attribute, continuous, temporal, and geographic — it’s not a simple yes or no."

"We distinguish between agents doing internal system tasks and assistants interacting directly with users."

"I replaced Times New Roman with Arial and it ended up being conclusively and wildly positive for conversions."

"Your priorities don’t tell you what to do; your judgment points you in the direction of how to allocate resources and make decisions."

"What is your candle? What’s your low-price, fast-moving consumable good that can prime customers?"

"The content we provide is all curated and high quality, unlike typical intranet or company content that’s often outdated or conflicting."

"Your top priority doesn’t have to be the thing you choose, but it tells you what’s important to you."

"Organizations’ websites often reflect their internal structure — what’s visible externally echoes internal organization."

"I saved the LLM proposed tags to a CSV file so I could preview all changes before applying them."

"Technology is often blamed, but many issues come from uneven training, misunderstandings, and poor configurations."