Conference Program

Our 30-minute live demo gives you basic, hands-on guidance to using MURAL effectively. We cover a range of topics from the basics of adding content onto the canvas to common use cases, depending on the audience.

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Most Design Ops practitioners are skilled at dealing with ambiguity at the project level, but doing this within a newly established org takes dealing with ambiguity to the next level. This panel discussion will feature members of the Verizon Design Ops team where they will discuss being a part of a team in the early stages of forming, and how COVID-19 has helped and hindered their work.

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The 2019 design census states that 3% of the design industry are African American/Black designers while 71% are White/Caucasian. Anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley wrote “Race in the American mind was and is a statement about profound and unbridgeable differences…It conveys the meaning of social distance that cannot be transcended.” Racism is divisive and destructive. DesignOps practitioners often find themselves facilitating difficult conversations, pointing out disparities, and creating safe environments for teams to do their best work. So, how do we as practitioners remain resilient when faced with the complexities of racism within our organizations? The goal of this talk is to provide a protocol in which design leaders can engage uncomfortable conversations to help teams become more inclusive. We will explore an often overlooked yet valuable source to ensure the future effectiveness of our design practice, black youth.

Listen to Vincent on the Rosenfeld Review podcast.

What’s today’s theme all about, and what does it mean for DesignOps professionals? Theme leader Kristin Skinner will provide you the background you’ll need for how today’s sessions came to be and what they’ll cover. She’ll also gently provoke you with questions to consider throughout the day.

The hustle of “Uber 1.0” (moving fast and breaking things) is still remnant in parts of Uber’s culture today. As a DesignOps team of two to start, Maggie had to break through many barriers to help quickly and effectively implement a new practice. Within one year, the team grew to 14 Design Program Managers working across 6 global, distributed design studios. How does a team scale and find their voice amidst many cultural challenges, negative news cycles, and multiple rounds of layoffs? This talk will explore how DesignOps can remain a constant pillar of reliability when the structures around a Design team are constantly evolving.

The IBM CIO portfolio is comprised of thousands of tools and services. Given the organization’s obsession with the IBMer experience and their desire to positively impact IBMer productivity, it is extremely important that they allocate their scarce Design & Research talent to the projects that have the greatest impact on IBMers’ work experience. To this end, they have refined their staffing processes and developed a new metric, The Design Staffing Score, that allows them to measure the degree to which their staffing approach aligns with project priority. Patrick will describe their refined approach to staffing, how progress is measured, and the tangible benefits they’ve realized.

COVID-19 forced nearly the entire global financial community to work remotely. Screen real estate was dramatically reduced, as traders transitioned from multiple 4K monitors on a trading floor to a single laptop screen in their home office. The design solution—adapt the Bloomberg Terminal experience to fewer smaller screens—was straightforward. Executing that solution required UX-led collaboration, organization, and cross-functional commitment from product, engineering, and sales, all in a very short period of time.

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Join us to learn about the invisible work of getting to know your stakeholders, building advocates of your work and maximizing your influence within and outside your organization.

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Wireframes are not merely design artifacts, they are also effective communication tools. Learn how wireframes can be used in multiple ways throughout the product design process, to ensure that user goals are clear, the design phase is thorough, yet efficient, and developer handoff is predictable and collaborative.

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DesignOps is all about scaling up design teams while creating organizational efficiencies yet it is not always evident how impact and gained efficiencies can be quantified and measured. There’s a certain confusion around what are the inefficiencies and there is no established process to determine those metrics. This session is not about providing a list of metrics to be replicated. It’s about providing a tested approach on how to identify, quantify, and measure inefficiencies and how to define measurable and realistic targets. This approach can be applied and replicated in any context to support the DesignOps community to gain additional credibility and to ensure DesignOps professionals are able to demonstrate the value of their work to the business with objective data points and quantifiable gains.

Learn how WebMD and Gett are using Zeplin to streamline design operations & build optimized design workflows.

In this workshop, Linda Quarles, Director, Strategy and Organization Design from frog Design will walk you through the four principles of remote workshop facilitation: asynchronous participation; breaking the ice; choice and spontaneity; and honesty and feelings. Learn how to set up a Miro board, navigate through creating breakout groups, and align on decisions.

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Join us for a look at how the Handrail research management platform helps enterprise teams collaborate efficiently and effectively – even when you’re remote or working across time zones.

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Leading a team during the pandemic may seem impossible given it’s likely the most stressful time of your team’s lives. Recently, I lead our team through a design sprint where we explored improving unemployment benefit access in the middle of the pandemic, which required us to shift how we work. In this talk, I’ll share how we reimagined collaboration, communication, and processes to reduce the stress load while maintaining forward momentum. Together as leaders, we’ll explore how to ethically lead our teams while keeping their resiliency in mind and bring these learnings into the post COVID work life.

You’ll come away knowing

1. How to collaborate without borders — workflows and tools to successfully execute high quality designs (Dropbox, Sketch, Figma, etc)
2. Management techniques for remote leaders and how to establish trust and goals.
3. Best practices for team alignment, particularly when you’re not in the same office or time zone.
4. What work-life balance means to Ana, particularly now that WFH is the global norm.

Our teams are living through unprecedented times. With the weight of everything unfolding around us, it’s easy to feel that our work is inconsequential. However, DesignOps teams have more power to influence change than we realize. In this session, we’ll discuss how the small decisions we make every day impact our teams, our companies and our communities. We’ll take a look at how our operations can empower teams to operate with a greater sense of purpose.

Itching to meet your DesignOps fellow travelers? We’ve got you covered with an hour of speed-networking and other social activities. And we can’t think of better people to get us socializing than Alison Rand, Rosenfeld Media’s DesignOps Community curator, and Meredith Black, co-founder of the DesignOps Assembly.

Our 30-minute live demo gives you basic, hands-on guidance to using MURAL effectively. We cover a range of topics from the basics of adding content onto the canvas to common use cases, depending on the audience.

New York State recently released COVID Alert NY, a mobile contact tracing app that will alert the user if they come into close contact with someone else who later tests positive for the virus. Hear the designers of the app talk about their experience collaborating remotely across three time zones on this high stakes project. What processes and tools were helpful when designing an app that needed to explain a complex concept to the state’s 19.4 million residents in a way that would be universally understood, accessible, and available in 13 languages?

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“There’s something about the title or the idea of the chief of staff that seems to be in the zeitgeist.” — Chris Whipple, “The Gatekeepers”

The role of Chief of Staff is trending across all industries, but for some the journey is unorthodox and may require good timing and a strong pitch to create the role. Add to the adventure that no two Chief of Staff roles are likely to be the same.

Lisa will share her journey from UX to Design Ops to Chief of Staff, including some of the methods that she uses to make her way: be the beacon, spread the light, and support your team, even in times of high anxiety.

What’s today’s theme all about, and what does it mean for DesignOps professionals? Theme leader Dave Malouf will provide you the background you’ll need for how today’s sessions came to be and what they’ll cover. He’ll also gently provoke you with questions to consider throughout the day.

The Cigna Digital Design Operations stood up a new Digital Accessibility and AccessbilityOps team. Digital accessibility as a general term is the inclusive practice of ensuring that digital products (websites, apps, PDFs, etc.) can be used by everyone — including those with a disability or physical impairment — while retaining functionality and usability. Our team ran into many roadblocks including establishing processes, team structure, organizational support, and human resource issues, including onboarding a new team member who was blind. This case study showcases the steps, challenges, and lessons learned standing up a Digital Accessibility Ops team at a Fortune 100 Health Insurance company.

Business leaders now recognize the Business Value of Design, but how about the importance of Design in driving our Business Values? DesignOps plays an essential role in defining how individuals, teams, and organizations think and operate. Now comes the next chapter – operationalizing our values. As system designers who establish new processes, scale best practices, connect teams, and facilitate alignment, how might we utilize our DesignOps superpowers to unlock greater business value for our stakeholders, customers, and communities? Together, we’ll examine how Design Ops is leading the way to put business values like collaboration, equity, and innovation into practice.

Wireframes are not merely design artifacts, they are also effective communication tools. Learn how wireframes can be used in multiple ways throughout the product design process, to ensure that user goals are clear, the design phase is thorough, yet efficient, and developer handoff is predictable and collaborative.

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Personal story of how we not only improved the way of how designers worked with the other team members and external stakeholders but also found the ways to automate the routine work.

The goal of the story is to motivate other people to build custom scripts, plugins, extensions, and products. Also, we’ll cover how open source projects can help to increase brand awareness to attract the best talents in the world. Actionable insights to boost up the automation process.

Farid will share some insights on how to analyze and find the weak spots in the design teams’ processes. Then he will provide an action plan on how to automate different aspects of the work as well as simplify the onboarding process for the newcomers.

A design system is a set of repeatable components and standards guiding the use of those components. Standards can come in the form of documentation, videos, blogs, discussion channels, meetups and office hours just to name a few. A design system may be built internally within an organization, or there are hundreds of open source design systems that can be downloaded and used. However, only a small percentage of those open source design systems are set up such that they can be successfully implemented in a manner that results in software that is accessible to people with disabilities who use assistive technology to interact with technology. This talk will discuss the importance of accessible design systems and a high level overview of the ten best known open source design systems.

Nearly everyone has become a better virtual meeting facilitator in 2020, but not necessarily by choice or design. We have teammates around the world who need to collaborate, so we know the frustration and challenges that can arise.

Join this session to learn effective strategies and practical tactics for designing and facilitating any virtual meeting including:

• Preparation rituals to establish
• Designing for engagement
• Effective warmups, even for short meetings
• Reusable templates for notes capture

You’ll be guided by Lindsey Eatough, Associate Director of Enterprise Transformation at MURAL, who has spent 2020 working with teams to increase effective collaboration and Lee Duncan, Enterprise Design Sprint Leader at IBM and MURAL member.

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In mid-March, Bloomberg’s UX team went from a 100% in-office design group to a 100% at-home design group. Challenges quickly surfaced, but once the day-to-day was running and overall anxiety had diminished, teams started to see the silver linings in shifting a multi-office, multi-country design team accustomed to an open office plan to working remotely.

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What happens to your DesignOps team when your Design organization hits scale? Juggling the growth of your product, your people, and your processes is a demanding challenge, and strains the jack-of-all-trades skillset of even the most seasoned DesignOps practitioner. Our solution? Evolve DesignOps into two discrete tracks: Team Ops and Product Ops. We’ll look at how these tracks emerged, how they operate in practice, where they intersect (and where they differ), and the lessons learned from our “conscious uncoupling” of design team ops and product design ops responsibilities.

While Design Operations (DesignOps) is only a few years old as a practice, it is evolving rapidly. As we finish our 4th year at The Summit, we’ve seen so much change in our community of practice in this short time. So, we want to end this year’s Summit with a look beyond. If we are to be resilient what are we being resilient towards. Jon Fukuda (Limina), Dominique Ward (Atlassian), and Adrienne Allnutt (LinkedIn) will share their perspectives on where DesignOps is going and why. Moderated by Dave Malouf (Northwestern Mutual). We will be fielding questions from attendees, too.