Discussion: What Operations can teach DesignOps
Summary
Our past three speakers will discuss and answer questions about operations practices from their respective industries. Facilitated by Lou Rosenfeld.
Key Insights
-
•
Lifelong learning is essential for effective leadership and organizational survival, as stagnation leads to failure.
-
•
Design thinking should extend beyond practitioners to encompass creative leadership across business and operations.
-
•
Safe conflict is a critical signal of trust and healthy team dynamics, contrasting with suppressed conflict mistaken for harmony.
-
•
DevOps and design ops face similar challenges around evolving practices, requiring flexible, context-driven approaches rather than replication of models.
-
•
Etsy’s postmortem process reframes IT failures as creative opportunities to learn and improve without blame.
-
•
Strategic friction, common in game design, can foster transformational user experiences unlike traditional UX’s focus on frictionless usability.
-
•
Integrated, cross-disciplinary teams (designers, engineers, strategists) deliver better solutions than siloed approaches.
-
•
Organizations should view themselves as evolving organisms, balancing respect for their history with adaptation to future needs.
-
•
Motivating tech teams often involves reducing daily misery by automating repetitive tasks and converting unplanned into planned work.
-
•
Design organizations should teach collaborators ‘how to fish’ to create independence and fluid collaboration rather than hoarding design knowledge.
Notable Quotes
"You can’t lead without being a lifelong learner because when your company stops learning, it dies."
"The Etsy postmortem is not about blame, it’s about open-ended discovery and learning to do better next time."
"If you don’t have any conflict, that means you have no trust."
"Please don’t implement the Spotify model. It works for them, it won’t work for you."
"We have to move beyond linear solutions. Complex systems require us to explore our way through problems."
"The greatest sin of the designer is to say I have the answers and no one else is allowed to have them."
"Our job as design teams is to teach others what we do, not to feel insecure about sharing."
"Strategic friction is about where you apply friction deliberately to create insight and transformation."
"A lot of DevOps is about empathy — doing our piece but thinking about the larger connection."
"In government, the motivation is reduction of misery: why are we up at 3 AM fixing something avoidable?"
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"You can’t fail 90 times out of 10 without laughing at yourself to keep going."
Erin WeigelUX Lessons from running more than 1,200 A/B Tests
July 10, 2024
"Safe money has solid returns, so fiscally responsible companies demand higher returns from new investments especially with inflation."
Mike OrenWhy Pharmaceutical's Research Model Should Replace Design Thinking
March 28, 2023
"UX researchers should learn Python or R and how to leverage AI APIs to process unstructured data."
Lija Hogan Milan Mijatovic Sam Proulx Louis RosenfeldThree Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research
March 15, 2024
"Charlie is like the most annoying coworker who constantly surfaces problems but never offers solutions to Alice."
Heidi TrostWhen AI Becomes the User’s Point Person—and Point of Failure
August 7, 2025
"If you just throw new hires into cubeville, most of them would probably quit."
Adam CutlerPeople + Places + Practices = Outcomes
June 8, 2016
"It’s good practice to offer one-on-one interactions with older adults due to their learning preferences."
Rittika BasuAge and Interfaces: Equipping Older Adults with Technological Tools
February 23, 2023
"By designing products through the lens of edge cases like disabilities first, they often become better products for everyone."
Saara Kamppari-MillerDesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility
May 26, 2022
"Every talk you hear today couldn’t get more personal to our community."
Bria AlexanderTheme Two Intro
October 3, 2023
"Preparation is critical to set up new practitioners for success, including equipment, access, expectations, and introductions."
Laine Riley Prokay Lisa GordonCarving a Path for Early Career DesignOps Practitioners
September 9, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What hidden costs should be accounted for beyond license fees when budgeting for research tools?
What is the evolving role of researchers of one in organizations practicing democratized research?
How have changes in communication technologies historically affected collective knowledge building, and what might AI's role be?