The Bigger Picture: A Panel Discussion
Summary
The DesignOps Summit 2019 ambitiously tackles three huge, over-arching themes: Proving value and measuring outcomes Partnering outside design Change management These are indeed huge and over-arching. But, with the help of four crack DesignOps and ResearchOps leaders, the audience’s questions, and Lou Rosenfeld’s moderation, we’ll pull lit off—and we’ll even have some valuable take-aways by the end of the session.
Key Insights
-
•
Acting like a designer using familiar tools and processes is key for design ops professionals to gain trust within design teams, as Rachel Posman explains with journey mapping at Uber Eats.
-
•
Crystal Leon highlights the importance of creating shared language tied to company values, such as expanding 'data-driven' to include qualitative insights, to demonstrate design value across organizations.
-
•
Gneets Singh advises defining value specifically by understanding the audience and prioritizing influence and adoption metrics over hard-dollar impact, acknowledging design’s indirect contribution.
-
•
Jose Coronado shares the need to balance quantitative and qualitative metrics, adapting vocabulary (e.g., using 'satisfaction' in place of 'delight') to align with partner sensitivities in conservative environments.
-
•
Measuring impact is a journey requiring persistent, multi-channel communication and contextualization across distributed, global teams, with repetition key to embedding understanding.
-
•
Partnership success emerges from starting small, picking one advocate inside another team to build relationships and replicate collaborative wins, as suggested by Gneets and Rachel.
-
•
Breaking design research workshops into smaller, repeated activities helps non-designers incrementally engage, build empathy, and appreciate design processes, according to Crystal.
-
•
Role proliferation in design teams (product designers, service designers, content strategists) can cause confusion outside the team; clear communication of value per partner perspective is critical, as Jose notes.
-
•
Teams that collaboratively co-create design principles with leadership see greater adoption and normalization of design thinking language across the organization, as Jose illustrates.
-
•
Empowering and leveraging 'loud, trusted' influencers on teams can dramatically accelerate change management and process adoption, as Rachel observes from her experience.
Notable Quotes
"One of the easiest ways to gain trust is really to talk and think and act like a designer or a researcher if I’m joining a research team."
"We are still designers, we’re systems designers, we’re organizational designers, even if we’re not making things."
"I talk about being data driven and expanding the definition of data to include both quantitative data and qualitative data."
"Nobody’s going to ask to show you the $10,000 impact from a single design, but you can show the needle movement was there."
"People in our environment had an allergic reaction to happiness or delight, so we used sentiment or satisfaction instead."
"Put feelings into the data by talking to sales and after sales, understanding customer experience before and after product launches."
"Start small to make a big impact by building one advocate relationship and then replicating the success."
"Breaking up design research training into short exercises over time helps get people out of the building and engaged."
"We set up a design-led workshop with all leaders to craft what design-driven meant for our organization, leading to it becoming everyday language."
"Find the loudest respected person on the team and get their buy-in; they can fast track weeks of work in getting everyone else on board."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Our work helps create space to zoom out and have conversations about the future vision."
Rebecca GimenezWork in Progress: Service Design at Airbnb
December 3, 2024
"The pandemic track was the I told you so moment for those of us designing remote tools since 2006."
Lada GorlenkoTheme 2 Intro
June 9, 2022
"Researchers are often nervous about their research being used in the wrong way, so trust and communication matter."
Brigette Metzler Dana ChrisfieldResearch Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community
August 27, 2020
"Ignore the people who hate you, embrace those who love you, and focus on the fence sitters."
Discussion
June 9, 2017
"Healthcare.gov was a blow, but it opened the door to new ways to work in government technology."
Sarah Brooks Jennifer PahlkaFireside chat with Sarah Brooks and Jen Pahlka
October 21, 2021
"Being transparent and walking stakeholders through our process creates moments for reflection and keeps the whole team aligned."
Lisa Spitz Nikki BrandBuilding Trust Through Equitable Research Practices
November 18, 2022
"EMRs and EHRs have terrible user experience and are ripe for design innovation, similar to FinTech years ago."
Theresa NeilDesigning for Wellness: Specializing in Healthcare
May 22, 2024
"We have to show clients the hundreds of sketches and iterations behind the AI-generated outputs."
Maverick Chan Claire LinFrom Doodle to Demo: AI as Our Storytelling Partner
October 23, 2025
"If there isn’t safety and connection, you get a culture of transaction and silence that kills innovation."
Alla WeinbergDesign Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It
September 8, 2022
