Scaling Design Capability: How Involved Should You Be?
Summary
Most design operation professionals will have to make a choice: to work solely as an organization’s internal consultancy or play an additional role in scaling design capabilities throughout an organization. If teams focus on the former, how will they get better projects and collaborators from their organization? If teams settle on the latter, how will they navigate scaling their design capabilities? In this interactive workshop, we’ll discuss how teams can attract better internal projects and how to transfer essential capabilities, with a particular focus on co-creating and measuring successful outcomes. Join Andrew Webster, Vice President of Transformation at ExperiencePoint, to learn: What tools can help facilitate your team’s journey How to start implementing scaling strategies What successful outcomes look like
Key Insights
-
•
Scaling design capability means enabling non-designers to use essential design tools, not turning everyone into designers.
-
•
Jean Liedtka’s research shows great ROI in taking people from novice to intermediate design fluency, but limited returns beyond that.
-
•
Design ops is essential for establishing vision, infrastructure, and cross-team collaboration in scaling design.
-
•
Balancing skill development and adapting organizational conditions is critical; skills alone without supportive environment lead to frustration.
-
•
Building design capability leads to better internal clients and higher-value projects, reducing low-impact workload on design teams.
-
•
Behavioral KPIs reflecting changes in language and user-centered practices are uniquely measurable by design teams and crucial for tracking progress.
-
•
Design capability scaling behaves like a social movement and requires emotional resonance and strategic starting points with high dissatisfaction.
-
•
Starting scaling efforts in areas where stakeholders feel dissatisfaction and potential impact is high increases chances of success.
-
•
Using tools like Mural for team chartering and visioning supports collaborative alignment across distributed teams.
-
•
Measuring intermediate outcomes and leading indicators helps sustain executive support by showing progress before lagging business outcomes appear.
Notable Quotes
"Everyone can borrow from some essential design tools and sensibilities to do their work better, but not everyone needs to be a designer."
"From novice to intermediate design fluency offers enormous returns, but going from intermediate to expert is a massive investment with negligible return."
"A changed person in an unchanged environment is worse off than if you’d never inspired them in the first place."
"We subscribe to the F Buckminster Fuller quote: If you want to change someone’s way of thinking, don’t talk about thinking, give them a tool."
"Design capability scaling behaves like a social movement with a narrow path to success, requiring both skill-building and environmental adaptation."
"If people already love their process, you’re fighting their emotional state — start where dissatisfaction exists."
"The CEO expects value in four months, but cultural transformation to show returns might take years — short-term wins matter."
"Design is never the thing that connects people — purpose, like serving users better, connects them."
"Leading indicators include behavioral impacts like asking user-centered questions and gathering user feedback early and often."
"Trying to convince with more data when the 'emergency brake' is on won’t work — emotional barriers must be addressed first."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Hugh Dubberly argues we should stop describing design as problem solving and instead see it as engaged conversation."
Daniel GloydDesigning From the Inside Out: How Method Acting Can Inspire Design Research
February 12, 2026
"We fight fiercely for clients, but we’re honest about government limits and project scope to build trust."
Deirdre Hirschtritt Cesar Paredes Marie PerrotResearch is Only as Good as the Relationships You Build
November 17, 2022
"Understaffing is consistent in design ops no matter where in the world you are."
Benjamin RealMaturity Models: A Core Tool for Creating a DesignOps Strategy
October 1, 2021
"It’s really important to understand your own mental bandwidth and not take on too much even if the project excites you."
Max Gadney Andrea Petrucci Joshua Stehr Hannah WickesAssessing UX jobs for impact in climate
August 14, 2024
"From fast-paced tech worlds, you will appreciate the patience and perseverance it takes to move an old champion."
Lada GorlenkoTheme 1: Intro
January 8, 2024
"C-FRE stands for curiosity, freedom, reframing, exploration, and engagement—the soft qualities we tend to overlook in play."
Feyikemi AkinwolemiwaPlay to innovate: How curiosity and experimentation transform UX
March 11, 2026
"Lauren Cantor keeps all those links and other resources so we don’t have to be googling while listening."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
March 29, 2023
"DeepFakes can look too realistic and might introduce new privacy risks if donor faces come from real people."
Llewyn Paine[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
June 5, 2024
"Language matters—make your OKRs user-centric and customer-focused to avoid them feeling like overhead."
Bria Alexander Benson Low Natalya Pemberton Stephanie GoldthorpeOKRs—Helpful or Harmful?
January 20, 2022
