Meet Karl Madsen, Creative Director at Optimal Workshop

April 27, 2021

We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s Design at Scale conference–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked all of them some questions that get to the heart of why they’re passionate about enterprise design and design operations, what it’s like to work at Optimal Workshop, and what makes their products and services special to enterprise professionals.

Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring this year’s Design at Scale?

Karl Madsen: Optimal Workshop is a proud sponsor of the Design at Scale conference. Rosenfeld Media has a well-established history of providing valuable conferences for our industry and for those who are looking to scale their UX and design operations. We get to share and learn about new insights whilst engaging with enterprise professionals from across the globe.

Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about enterprise design?

Karl Madsen: At Optimal Workshop we get excited about the challenges and rewards that come with evolving design processes to be as inclusive as possible, with the aim of reducing the likelihood of a project dead-ending or not delivering the impact it ultimately intended. Producing an informed insight and proposing a solution is oftentimes where only half the effort is required. The other half is clear communication and collaboration processes to involve busy stakeholders and contributors throughout a project in the right ways and times.

Rosenfeld Media: What is the professional experience like for designers and DesignOps people at your company?

Karl Madsen: Designers at Optimal Workshop are supported by a range of experiences and networks to help grow as design professionals. Although a designer’s primary discipline is design, they’re typically also involved with at least one other core discipline of the business, playing a part-time role in the rituals and responsibilities of faculties such as Development, Marketing, Research, and Brand. Practice coaches provide designers with personal support, reflection, and goal setting that allows them to step outside of the business as a usual bubble. They can also leverage personal development funds to connect with external mentors, online learning, books, and international conferences, oftentimes presenting their learnings to the wider team.

Rosenfeld Media: What is your culture like, who would new employees work with, and who are the champions?

Karl Madsen: We work with a relatively flat structure at Optimal Workshop. Our designers make up the ‘Design Faculty’ and are spread across multidisciplinary squads with varying focuses for the overall business. Each designer contributes to championing different areas of design at a strategic level depending on their squad’s core focus. The designer’s role is just as much about promoting a design-led approach to problem solving, as it is executing it. This helps create an open-door culture of design contribution at Optimal Workshop. From co-designs and feedback sessions to illustrating icons, it’s not uncommon to see people without ‘designer’ in their title take part, facilitate and produce the outputs of these activities.

Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you/your product bring to the practice and our community?

Karl Madsen: Optimal Workshop helps our enterprise community by offering multiple UX research methodologies in one easy platform to run fast and affordable user research remotely and at scale. Alongside our in-app custom recruitment, easy-to-understand analysis, and intuitive study and account structures we make running, understanding, and sharing research not just easy, but also fun. Our customer support, demos, and other educational resources are aimed at growing our customers’ user research ability, with the intention of supporting every organisation we work with to become UX research champions.

Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?

Karl Madsen: Our primary office is based halfway around the world in Aotearoa, New Zealand, home of the flat white, Hobbiton and a generally relaxed attitude towards everything.

Visit Optimal Workshop’s sponsor page for their scheduled sponsor activity sessions and more.