Day 3 Session Notes–The Big Question about Innovation: A Panel Discussion

Moderator

  • Jon Fukuda (JF)

Speakers

  • Amy Evans (AE)
  • Ignacio Martinez (IM)
  • Joe Meersman (JM)

Discussion

  1. Thank you all, and Joe give intro to yourself

JM: Several decades of experience delivering as designer and presentation and leveraging AI for optimizations and improvements in design process

  1. JF: The talks we’ve heard today are kind of not stabbing at need to change everything , and paying attention to nuances that happen to move things forward, with people as ultimate variable.
  2. JF: DesignOperations are both innovators and stewards. How do we foster culture of innovation while keeping core values of design intact?

AE: Each team to talk about core value, and agrees upon them. Agreeing at team level will get in same mindset and not taking shortcuts

  • People often want to solve everything underneath the sun, and most other things require being put in a parking lot
  • Plethora of problems to solve at all companies— so focus on idea to move forward
    • Tension between knowing business and customer and being realistic for business to see value
  1. Tension between designer’s desire to care for customer experience, versus business pushing a feature factory. How does that tension play out, and how do you manage it, while respecting business integrity?

IM: Lot of tempo and rhythm where processes and tools need to be in sync with org’s internal rhythms

  • As designers have tools to figure out and with whatever new innovations come out, and see how innovations fit with internal rhythm of the organization
    • Figure out what needs to change for innovation to have proper impact
  • Rhythm and tempo from org to leadership to end-users and need alignment
  1. AI is big disruptor at product level and use case for work, and how do we see AI reshaping future of DesignOps?JM: Benefits and risks. Taking step back to original question, can field that and AI
  2. Stewardship and innovationOperations as whether individuals in org as a whole below, at, or above capacity, and having view of organism level and key drivers there
    1. Finding next best steps based on content communication
  3. Ops figures out conditions and where to use new tools and methods
  4. AI won’t transform all things all at once
    1. Discrete pilot and delivery of business value and how tool can be leveraged
    2. Outsize impact in certain areas, and normalizing in day-to-day process, can have transformation but some thing that will happen over time

IM: Still in hype cycle and exact value to bring

  • Industrial designers using GenAI for coming up with concepts and 3-D printing the rest
  • Rote-tasks for filling out a powerpoint template
  • Verdict still out on what it will be, and ultimate value to see

AE: Smaller organizations might play with tool more frequently, while large orgs are very worried about customer data being scrutinized

  • Where will content generated by AI be stored and will require human touch
  • Treat GenAI as tool for ideas, but won’t replace real output of person at this point

JM: Tool can provide approximations as opposed to precise answers and achieve goals faster

  • Tool can’t be responsible for business decision, as tool can’t be held accountable
    • Without someone to pull the metaphorical air bake, AI will go do disastorous things on its own
  • Tech will reflect bias, and can be incredibly dangerous
    • Instance of putting together an agenda is averaged response based on available information— good tool for leaving blank page
  1. People concerned on keeping integrity of how we treat each other, while operationalizing to drive efficiency. How do you ensure innovation and DesignOps remains empathetic?

IM: Goes back to people using tool an being impacted by it

  • Metrics can actually capture how people are feeling and what empathy brings and constantly having ears out there
  • Workshops with studio to articulate pain-points and how career growth evaluated
    • Sanity checking artifacts with people in studio to see if they made sense
  • Career managers to keep in contact with mentees—human connection and best suited to be facilitators there

JM: Performance management is such a human task, and making data humane with soul, is a very existential challenge

  • As designers effective translators who choose path of operations and business ownership and translate out what we do at pixel level to business so business can make comparisons
    • Most of us learn by case study
  • Learn semantics what organization uses, and tie back to unit of outcome

AE: Having worked at various companies, relationships with people will drive your success

  • Connect with people on a human level on things that aren’t work
    • Relationship will get farther than it would otherwise
  • Know person and getting them to succeed
    • Even hard-charging person is the same, and little things about person matter
  1. Operating models should not be happening in silos, that has to care for end-to-end and continuity. What are most common obstacles DesignOps face when trying to innovate, and how to overcome?

AE: When you get into a workshop there are so many perspectives, that as facilitators, need to drive conversation towards next step

  • People who don’t work well or communicate together, will cause problems

Say workshop doesn’t succeed in terms of output, and find innovation to work together and getting people to work on single thing, and that is first step to innovating together

  • Make point and people form different areas to work together and work on that first
  1. How do you deal with lack of innovation chemistry in team, and manage competing perspectives?

IM: Thing we struggle with most and keep in mind is North Star of problem we are trying to solve, and bring people aligned with project

  • Problem to solve from the beginning and facilitate for perspectives and opinions and having own methods and mediating that
  • Beholden to users or customers and different concepts

JM: Talk about competing priorities, but not competing agendas

  • We are beholden to certain goals regardless of company size
  • Are we supporting what we committed to as development, design, PM to get out to door to end-users and customers
    • Focus too much, can’t be scalable or sustainable
  • As ops people need to make sure people aren’t sprinting time and time again
  • Something that helps was baselining of tooling— as so many tools available
    • If design and engineering, and PM using different tools, people will talk over each other
    • Same tools and shared vocabulary and common goals