Conference Program

Measuring DesignOps value is surprisingly complicated. Many practitioners would agree with the sentiment that measuring their impact feels aspirational at best, and theoretical at worst. Anecdotal evidence and praise from partners (“I don’t know what we’d do without you!”) is nice, but doesn’t add up to proof that DesignOps is a worthy return on investment.

In this talk, we’ll share two novel approaches to measuring DesignOps success from our upcoming book, The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations. These methods–the “Jobs to Be Done” and “HEROES” frameworks–can be used to uncover and define measures of value that more accurately capture the impact DesignOps (and design) has on a business and its stakeholders. We will also share some tested rubrics that DesignOps can use to prioritize and implement these new measures.

In this session, we’ll explore how a small UI design firm (30 headcount) developed a data-driven DesignOps practice. I’ll demonstrate how we use automation and robust data pipelines to excel in managing and delivering large volumes of work. This talk also shows how we transform Figma’s comment feature into a powerful tool that integrates seamlessly with Trello, enabling our team to achieve high efficiency and precision, and to track everything in real-time without the usual administrative and logistical challenges.

Automation and Custom Tooling:
We leverage automation to ensure every process, from capturing to moving work, is streamlined and efficient. This approach helps us tackle the scalability of thousands of work cards without overwhelming our team.

Data-Driven with a Soul:
This talk addresses concerns around micromanagement and surveillance, illustrating how our methods support consistent delivery (with 95% confidence) without sacrificing the human aspect of our work.

Practicing meaningful inclusion in your research and design work requires learning from a wide range of users, including people with disabilities. Still, applying your existing UX principles and methodologies towards accessibility research can feel daunting for practitioners who rarely get to work with assistive technology users and people with disabilities.

Join Kavana Ramesh, a UX Researcher at Fable with hundreds of hours of accessibility research, as she shares a reflective framework for how to build confidence in your team.

Design Ops and Research Ops teams are essential to design and research, providing strategic perspective as they solve problems and remove blockers. In this session, we review the shared functions of these two teams, focusing on Knowledge Management. We will talk about the rise and fall of research repositories in the ReOps space, outline the lessons learned, and present a way forward: a knowledge management system for both Design and Research – created and managed by Ops.

Traditionally, UX Designers struggle to show the impact of the work that they do. This negatively impacts the influence that they have on product delivery, often relegating them to being ’doers’ and not being involved in strategic initiatives. The end result – product delivery is inefficient with rework taking up a large slice of time that could be used to drive innovation to generate more value.

In this session, we’ll outline how a simple UX Measurement framework can help change the tide of the conversation, giving the UXer a lift up into more strategic conversations, getting involved earlier in product delivery.

What’s the most important question regarding today’s theme of impact that we, as a community, need to address? We’ve asked you, you’ve spoken—and now we’ll tackle it with the aid of Frances and some of today’s speakers.

Join Great Question CEO Ned Dwyer, Emily Stewart from TravelPerk, and James Wallis from Brex as they explore the evolving relationship between DesignOps and ResearchOps. Ned will moderate a discussion covering best practices, common challenges, key differences, and what these two disciplines can learn from one another. This session will offer valuable insights for professionals navigating the intersection of design and research, helping them better integrate these processes within their organizations.

As Design Operations leaders, we are constantly playing a game of breadth verses depth. It can be easy to get caught diving deep into fire drills or one-off problems, and never having time to scale your efficient operations to the greater team.

In this talk, Cassandra will guide you through the process of defining and deploying an operational strategy. With this strategy, you will scale the impact of design operations without increasing the size of your program management team. She’ll provide tips on how to get buy in from your key stakeholders to ensure their investment and guarantee their adoption of your strategy as their own. With this practical toolset, you can define your operational vision, empower yourself and your partners to deploy it, and finally get yourself the bandwidth you’ve needed to be more strategic.

Keeping large content repositories organized is an ongoing challenge. There’s always new stuff coming in, and taxonomies evolve over time. Resource-strapped teams seldom have opportunities to re-categorize older content.

It’s a task well-suited for generative AI. Large language models have powerful capabilities that can help teams keep content organized at scale. Using LLMs in this capacity can lead to better user experiences and free team members to focus on more valuable efforts.

This presentation explores two approaches for using LLMs to organize content at scale: 1) re-categorizing content using existing categories and 2) developing new categories from existing content. Both will be shown as proofs of concept alongside feasible next steps.

How can you recognize and harness all forms of leadership within a team operating in a fast-paced environment? This talk will explore the strategies to identify and leverage both visible and invisible leadership in teams formed quickly to deliver high-impact work. Using the example of the Photoshop AI team, which developed the Generative Fill feature just months after being assembled, Briana will discuss how to cultivate a culture that elevates all contributors. Learn how to foster and sustain an environment where every form of leadership is valued, leading to extraordinary transformations in your organization.

Whether you’re looking to expand your network, meet your next client or connect with collaborators, this is your opportunity to make it happen.

You’ll experience Cozy Juicy Real, a simple, effective board game that’s been played in 71 countries. It’s proven to create stronger team bonds at the world’s most successful organizations – including Google, Adobe and the UN.

“You will connect. Cozy Juicy Real is the best way to foster connection online.”

– Marcia Goddard, Chief Culture Officer, The Contentment Foundation

👍 Cozy Juicy Real Team Building

🏆 Top-Rated Experience

In this provocative talk, Brendan encourages us to stop worrying about the future, recognize that we have what it takes to overcome any challenge, and work together to create a future that our field is worthy of.

He shares three stories to illustrate these points, taking inspiration from science fiction, Japanese samurai, and the enduring impression of his late Grandfather.

If you want to worry less about your career, see situations more clearly, and discover the most important question for DesignOps professionals to ask themselves today – don’t miss this presentation.

Every designer has a story about a terrible experience with developers, or product managers, or the business.

Unfortunately the reverse is equally true.

We’ll explore these problems through the lens of Sturgeon’s Law — usually stated as “ninety percent of everything is crap”. And “everything” includes Design!

We’ll see how people inside and outside of a discipline can have radically different experiences of its competencies. Then we’ll work through options to help break down those misconceptions — so we can create happier, more empathic, organisations.

Changing orgs and structures seem to be happening all the time. How does DesignOps respond to the need to change how we work?

In a case study of change management at Cigna / Evernorth Health, Amy Evans will walk through a use case of a new self-service operating model. From the beginning, Amy will share how they started change discussions, brainstormed on new models and launched a pilot process. She will also dive a little deeper into tactics that helped the team succeed in innovating the way the teams worked together.

How do you evaluate designers fairly and effectively while providing a clear path toward career advancement? This is a question our organization has grappled with throughout our eight years as a company. Design can often be left up to gut reasoning by leadership and designers may not have a clear understanding of what their role means and how they may grow as designers.

We’ve developed iterations of different tools and processes over the years to address these concerns and to evolve with our shifting needs as a growing company. All of which has led us to a robust tool that we’ve been using over the past two years which can serve as a model for how organizations can deploy qualitative career advancement.

The session will cover our journey to this point and showcase the tools and processes we’ve deployed to make evaluation and career advancement systematic within a design organization along with surprising benefits and lessons we’ve learned along the way.

What’s the most important question regarding today’s theme of innovation that we, as a community, need to address? We’ve asked you, you’ve spoken—and now we’ll tackle it with the aid of Jon and some of today’s speakers.

Join us for an engaging Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, the authors of the upcoming book The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations. This book acts as a comprehensive guide to DesignOps that will teach you how to successfully advocate for, build out, scale up, and ultimately operate design organizations. Rachel and John will share insights from their extensive experience in the field and answer questions in this interactive session. Together, let’s explore how effective design operations can drive impactful outcomes and empower teams to achieve success. Walk away having gained valuable perspectives on the evolving landscape of design operations and the critical role it plays in delivering exceptional design solutions. Bring your questions about design operations and don’t miss this chance to connect directly with the authors of this must-read DesignOps book!

As we delve into the exciting and ever-evolving world of DesignOps, where innovation meets responsibility. In this talk, we’ll explore how DesignOps is redefining collaboration and impact at the intersection of people, frameworks, tooling, and governance. As we push the boundaries of what’s possible, especially with AI, we’ll also examine our critical role in ensuring that these advancements enhance, rather than diminish, the human touch in our work. Discover how, as both pioneers and stewards, we can lead with curiosity, govern with integrity, and shape the future of design in transformative ways.

Design Sprints have undeniable utility but have a bit of baggage in 2024. AI has its reputation at stake, as the first wave didn’t quite go as expected. As Designers, we have tools, methods, culture, and urgency to consider. Attendees to this talk will walk away with helpful context on AI’s past, present, and future, relevant examples of use, and pragmatic tips for practitioners.

In this panel session, three seasoned DesignOps practitioners will rise to the challenge of creating a shared vocabulary for discussing impact and maturity—while avoiding the use of DesignOps buzzwords.

Panelists, who have each grown and matured DesignOps as a function within their organization (past or present), will represent a mix of DesignOps archetypes outlined in the 2023 DesignOps Benchmarking report (agency, startup, scale-up, enterprise).

The discussion will cover defining, measuring, and communicating DesignOps impact as a way to drive DesignOps maturity. The moderator will draw from some of the key findings from the 2023 DesignOps Benchmarking Report to frame the topics.