Imagine working at a large company where there is no single design organization. Instead, it feels like an archipelago of design islands. Some large islands with an organization of designers and researchers. Others are smaller islands of just one team. And even, UX teams of one floating on rafts in between. Without a map, those islands are only aware of their immediate surroundings.

How can we bring the company wide design community of practice together if we don’t even know where to find each other?

This was my experience when I did my first design community mapping project. In this talk, I’ll share how we ended up crowdsourcing our design community map, and how it became an invaluable resource for the internal design community of practice. I’ll compare the differences for visualizing and thinking about organizations with a traditional org chart compared to a community map. Further, I’ll share how I brought my cartography skills with me to a new company, where I felt lost without a map, and why this map is my most important DesignOps tool.