DesignOps in Wonderland
Summary
Experience the fantastical world of navigating rabbit holes, unlocking doors with hidden keys, and racing against the clock as Carla Casariego and Sarah Spencer take you through their adventures in creating and sustaining an agile DesignOps org at Express Scripts.
Key Insights
-
•
Adopting an Agile mindset gradually helps small experience teams evolve and gain organizational trust.
-
•
Establishing 'full kit teams' that include product owners, engineers, and designers improves product outcomes.
-
•
Saying no strategically is essential to protect team capacity and focus on high-value work.
-
•
User-centered design was initially new to the organization and needed to be proven through small wins.
-
•
Aligning design sprint cycles with engineering sprints creates a common language and better collaboration.
-
•
Centralizing operational functions (governance, tools, contracting) within design ops frees design teams to focus on creativity.
-
•
Creating transparent, collaborative intake and backlog prioritization processes builds credibility among stakeholders.
-
•
Balancing organizational timelines ('Wonderland time') with design needs requires incremental process improvements.
-
•
Proactive lead time planning allows design teams to adhere to user-centered design within Agile delivery constraints.
-
•
Continuous learning from internal partners and external design ops communities fuels meaningful evolution.
Notable Quotes
"A tea party of one can really be very lonely, so we decided to seek out some friends to make our tea party more fun."
"We really had to go into it with an adaptable mindset and know when to drink the potion or eat the cake to grow or shrink."
"When we started, user-centered design was a relatively new concept to the organization."
"The term full kit team was coined because you needed the full set of people to produce exceptional experiences."
"Say no — that was really hard, but when you say no, you’re saying yes to the right things."
"Design sprint 76 just kicked off yesterday, and the calendar lives on to align as best we can with software engineering."
"A lot of things we said yes to didn’t necessarily have value to the member or the company — we had to challenge that."
"We created a collaborative intake where we work together to understand what’s the most important thing."
"Our journey into Wonderland has been wild, wonderful, and requires constant reflection and looking outward for inspiration."
"Being small and not embedded into every team means we constantly have to remind partners of the space design needs to create exceptional experiences."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"If a dialog pops up but the keyboard focus isn’t moved into it, a screen reader user might not know it’s there."
Sam ProulxEverything You Ever Wanted to Know About Screen Readers
June 11, 2021
"You can access the digital swag bag by scanning the QR code or visiting fld.me/cd2022 for cool sponsor offers."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
November 17, 2022
"Layoffs are a collective trauma – it’s okay to acknowledge the emotions and grief you feel."
Corey Nelson Amy SanteeLayoffs
November 15, 2022
"The problem with the bike rental app wasn’t UX design; it was the enterprise’s inability to distribute bikes to meet user demand."
Milan GuentherA Shared Language for Co-Creating Ambitious Endeavours
June 6, 2023
"Stakeholders aren’t ready to write their own briefs or manage recruitment, so it ended up being a hybrid model initially."
Erin May Roberta Dombrowski Laura Oxenfeld Brooke HintonDistributed, Democratized, Decentralized: Finding a Research Model to Support Your Org
March 10, 2022
"Simulation or personas can never replace testing with real users to build empathy and get accurate results."
Sam ProulxUnderstanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
June 6, 2023
"It often feels like research becomes beholden to exact quotes rather than the richer story that context provides, what I call the tyranny of transcripts."
Mujtaba HameedThe new horizon of ethnography: using AI to unlock the full potential of in-person research
March 11, 2026
"The internet as the self-regulating market is a failed experiment."
Ilana LipsettAnticipating Risk, Regulating Tech: A Playbook for Ethical Technology Governance
December 10, 2021
"When we design for the edges, we get the middle for free."
Samuel ProulxFrom Standards to Innovation: Why Inclusive Design Wins
September 10, 2025
