The DesignOps Summit 2021 Master Resource List is Here!
These resources come from multiple sources: some were cited by DesignOps Summit 2021 speakers during their presentations, and others were mentioned by the conference’s attendees during each presentation. We hope this list will give you a strong sense of who and what influenced the state of Design Operations in 2021.
You can view the master list of resources here.
Meet George Abraham, Senior Product Manager, at Infragistics
We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit conference–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked George 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 Infragistics Inc., and what makes their products and services special to enterprise professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring this year’s DesignOps Summit?
George Abraham:
Design ops should matter to any company that is serious about delivering great experiences. However, a vast majority of organizations consider design as a downstream activity (when narrowly defined around pixels). The reality is that design happens anytime one has to balance constraints and requirements.
However, for design to have an impact, it’s imperative to have a framework and resources in place to orchestrate the process. That is the value of having Design-Ops. And this conference is about sharing what worked and what did not so as to better prepare the community at large. And take solace in the fact that the maturity level of Design Ops may vary widely from one org to another. This conference should help you make a better case for Design ops in your org.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about enterprise design?
George Abraham:
The SasS products we create at Infragistics inc. are design-led. However, running a design process within an agile delivery model introduces a lot of risks. It’s not that we don’t know what needs to be done and when. But to stay in the delivery race, we end up cutting corners so often that it becomes a bad habit. This introduces product risk, and worse, professional risk. Design Ops makes our processes predictable and people visible. This is very similar to developers not wanting to ship code without testing. But design ops is not just about agile delivery– integrating with Research ops, and conducting design workshops adds a whole another layer of complexity to orchestrate. Now, this is an exciting problem to solve. And it’s not going to happen overnight, even with executive buy-in.
Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you/your product bring to the practice and our community?
George Abraham:
Indigo.Design is offering a way for organizations to run design ops better. And more specifically, making the design-development workflow more efficient. We do this with a starter design system that includes both a toolkit for designers and a toolkit for developers. And the secret sauce is a bridge tool that we call Indigo.Design App builder that connects the two toolkits.
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
George Abraham:
View Infragistics Inc.’s sponsor page for their scheduled sponsor activity sessions and more.
Meet Shipra Kayan, Designer Advocate, at Miro
We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit 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. Shipra describes what it’s like to work at Miro, and what makes their products and services special to enterprise professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring this year’s DesignOps Summit?
Shipra Kayan:
We here at Miro want to empower teams to create the next big thing. Our mission and values are deeply aligned with those of the design ops community. This is a community of people who empower designers to do the best work of their lives. We want to support this community, as well as learn from it to ensure that Miro is the best tool for design team alignment and to build team culture.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about enterprise design?
Shipra Kayan:
The value of design operations manifests most clearly with teams that haven’t built the design operations muscle yet. At its best, the design operations team creates an environment where designers can do their best work.
What excites me is the incredible amount of leverage you can have as a design ops practitioner. Even if you don’t directly manage anyone, you have the ability to impact the happiness and productivity of a dozen PED squads.
Rosenfeld Media: What is the professional experience like for designers and DesignOps people at your company?
Shipra Kayan:
We are building up the design operations muscle here at Miro, and looking for founding members of our design ops team to guide us through hypergrowth. Our design team is multi-faceted, fun, and highly collaborative. We have been growing exponentially as a globally distributed team, and are building out a centralized product excellence team reporting directly to the CPO that designs and owns our team rituals, practices, and tools across AMPED (Analytics, Marketing, Product, Eng, Design).
Rosenfeld Media: What is your culture like, who would new employees work with, and who are the champions?
Shipra Kayan:
Our culture at Miro is highly collaborative, we get to know our team-mates personally, we care deeply about each other. At the same time, we are growing rapidly and our processes are evolving with us. Most teams work in tight-knit small groups so that they can move fast, with checkpoints to connect across silos.
You will work closely with our head of design and report to our head of product engineering excellence to advocate for and build out the design process. This team reports directly to the CPO, and operations is considered core to our success.
We plan to return to our hubs 3 days a week, and are looking for team members in Amsterdam or Berlin who will thrive as part of these local, collaborative communities.
Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you/your product bring to the practice and our community?
Shipra Kayan:
Miro is a virtual whiteboard with an unlimited canvas and tons of integrations. It is used and loved by design teams across hundreds of companies. Miro is versatile, so while designers and researchers use Miro for their jobs, here are some ways in which we see design operations use Miro:
1. Onboarding: Many teams create a Miro board as the starting point to onboard their new team members. It provides an unlimited visual canvas to add pictures of the team, link off to various resources and tools, and is easy to keep up to date.
2. Meetings, Retrospectives & Team Building: Miro can be used in creative ways to facilitate meetings. From sketching exercises, to weekly visual standups, many design ops leaders rely on Miro to ensure that the design team stays connected and aligned across silos with team rituals. Here is one of my favorite templates: https://miro.com/miroverse/love-bomb/
3. Planning: Miro is used for the “whiteboard” collaborative part of planning before a project plan becomes formalized in JIRA or Asana. We also see small teams use Miro as a starting point for the week, with lightweight kanban planning boards for more casual for day to day planning than JIRA.
4. Documenting processes: Just like the onboarding guide, most teams have their design process mapped out in a Miro board. Traditional Wikis can seem rigid and can be hard to update – so Miro is a great way to draw out your unique processes, comment on them, and keep the map up to date.
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
Shipra Kayan:
I have built and managed hybrid design and research teams for over a decade, and have consistently advocated for design & research ops early in any team’s evolution. As a design leader, I know I wouldn’t be successful without excellent operations.
We are here to learn as much as to share what we are seeing as emerging best practices for design ops. Reach out to me on Slack if you want to see or share examples of what teams are doing on Miro, I can’t wait to connect with this community.
View Miro’s sponsor page for their scheduled sponsor activity sessions and more.
Meet Medet Gündüz, Community Manager, at Sketch
We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked Medet some questions that get to the heart of why they’re passionate about DesignOps, what it’s like to work at Sketch, and what makes their products and services special to DesignOps professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring this year’s DesignOps Summit?
Medet Gündüz: We wanted to team up with DesignOps because we have common goals around inspiring and empowering designers. DesignOps provides a space where talented designers get together to discuss all things design with the goal of taking the industry forward. At Sketch, we take pride in doing the same. Indeed design has come a long way and Sketch has been there for the ride, empowering designers and taking design forward. This is ever our goal and so we’re excited to partner with DesignOps on this.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about design operations?
Medet Gündüz: The design industry has matured, and design teams have grown in size to allow them to tackle the multitude of demands placed on designers today. Design has to scale across different platforms, but always remain consistent and recognizable. These are huge challenges and we strive to give teams the necessary tools to meet these head-on. With Libraries and Workspaces, we’ve invested in having a shared source of truth, while pushing collaboration forward with real-time collaborative editing. All so that teams — including our own — can work better together. This is our great passion and we couldn’t be more excited.
Rosenfeld Media: What is the professional experience like for designers and DesignOps people at your company?
Medet Gündüz: It’s our mission to help people create their best work and design better products. To achieve this, we believe in the importance of open minded designers and creativity. We value people that can make a change and bring fresh ideas to the table so we can work together to make them a reality.
At the same time, we of course recognize the importance of having standards and design systems — and following them. Especially as teams grow. A close integration between design and development is key for both a fast turnaround and consistency. That’s why we’re always investing in tools — both features in Sketch itself and tooling around it — to help this run as smoothly as possible.
Rosenfeld Media: What is your culture like, who would new employees work with, and who are the champions?
Medet Gündüz: Sketch has a culture that evolves around freedom and trust. Being a remote-first (and remote-only) company means we place a lot of value on these two main pillars. Everyone here can make decisions and get things done in a way that makes sense to them. You find yourself in a team where your ideas matter and you get the unique perspective of designing for designers. They’re a notoriously picky audience, and we love them for it!
Our industry is always evolving, and it’s up to us to make an impact where it counts. So we work hard to stay flexible, adapt and always be ready for change.
We also put value in taking ownership and responsibility for what we do, working proactively, figuring things out, and asking for forgiveness rather than permission. In a way, everyone is a champion at Sketch.
Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you/your product bring to the practice and our community?
Medet Gündüz: Our co-founders started Sketch back in 2010 because they believed designers deserved better tools — and that focus hasn’t changed. What started back then with building a better editor has evolved into a platform that allows you to put design at the heart of your business. Today, we have a collaborative design environment — which includes automatic distribution for your design system — as well as real-time collaboration and great handoff tools. In other words, Sketch can help your team stay firmly in control of your DesignOps challenges.
View Sketch’s sponsor page for their scheduled sponsor activity sessions and more.
Podcast: State of DesignOps 2021 – Where Careers in Design Lead Today
Angelos Arnis is a strategic designer focusing on delivering experiences with humane principles. For the past 10 years, he has been working with product/service companies and startups, both in early and high growth stages.
Angelos is currently changing the ways of working at Posti Group, Finland’s postal service. He is a co-founder at Joint Frontiers, and a co-host of ‘Human, the designer’. Additionally, he is a community organizer at IxDA Helsinki, as well as an alumnus organizer of Joint Futures, DSCONF, & Junction Hackathon. In his free time, he enjoys making music, and playing computer games.
In this talk, Angelos discusses the State of DesignOps 2021 Global Report, and will be sharing this information during this year’s DesignOps Summit 2021 on September 29 – October 1. Angleos began his journey to better understand how one can position their career in design, which then led to exploring more questions that can present a wider range of answers on the subject.
The quantitative data collected for the report was done in the form of surveys, and Angelos has provided us with valuable insights around the state of design operations. Additionally, he will present relevant qualitative research during this year’s summit program. Some highly-anticipated questions Angelos answers in this podcast include:
- What DesignOps career opportunities are available to professionals in the field?
- What ladder-climbing opportunities currently exist in design?
- How would you describe the positioning of typical design practices?
- What surprises you most about the commonalities you’ve identified?
As of the time of this recording, the State of Design Ops 2021 Global Report has not yet been released. The full scoop will be available during the DesignOps Summit 2021 – don’t miss out!
Meet Basel Fakhoury, CEO and Co-Founder, at User Interviews
We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit 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 User Interviews, and what makes their products and services special to enterprise professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring this year’s DesignOps Summit?
Basel Fakhoury:
We’re thrilled to be returning after a great experience at Advancing Research earlier this year. The quality of the speakers, programming, and attendees is world class.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about enterprise design?
Basel Fakhoury:
Design ops is a fast-growing field. It’s exciting because it’s new, but also I think design ops is the function that can move a company from having a team of talented designers to being a truly design-driven company.
Rosenfeld Media: What is the professional experience like for designers and DesignOps people at your company?
Basel Fakhoury:
Designers are involved with every part of our product process. They work closely with our PMs, researchers, and engineers to help us remove friction from doing user research. In fact, we’re hiring for a Director of Design now!
Rosenfeld Media: What is your culture like, who would new employees work with, and who are the champions?
Basel Fakhoury:
We are fully remote, and always have been (even in the before times).
This is a cornerstone of our culture—we rely on lots of async communication and trust.
We’re also a diverse group of smart people with a lot of empathy for our customers and each other. We’re outcome-oriented but prize a healthy work-life balance and sustainable growth. We try to practice what we preach and bring user insights into our decision-making consistently.
We also quadrupled over in the past 18 months and have raised $16.5M, so we’re growing fast!
Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you/your product bring to the practice and our community?
Basel Fakhoury:
Our Recruit product is a platform for recruiting research participants. It’s a self-serve platform on of top of an audience, tied to a set of automations that helps companies find niche candidates, fast. Our main differentiators are:
1) speed—we usually can fill a study in under 5 hours and
2) our ability to find niche users, including professionals such as SMB owners.
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
Basel Fakhoury:
I love meeting new people and learning new things—so please reach out!
View User Interviews’s sponsor page for their scheduled sponsor activity sessions and more.
