DesignOps Summit 2021- Theme 1: Establishing and Growing Design Ops (Kristin Skinner)

Kristen Skinner is the curator for Day 1 content – Establishing and Growing Design Ops

  • Kristen is a Design Management Executive and a recognized Thought Leader in DesignOps and Design Program Management
  • She has Executive experience that includes senior design management and leadership roles at Chase, Capital One, Adaptive Path, and Microsoft

Co-Author with Peter Merholz of Org Design for Design Orgs

  • About building and managing in house design teams
  • The first book dedicated to the organization management and operations of in-house design teams

Our 5th Annual DesignOps Summit

This is a super exciting time in the brief history of what we’re calling Design Operations, but we recognize that the work that we do is not new

  • This work has been happening in design organizations, software companies, banks, across industries and all around the world for many years
  • For many of us we’ve been doing this work and calling it many different things

Insight and Hindsight around how this community has evolved since 2017

  • It began as somewhat of an intimate, informative, and somewhat informal gathering in Queens, NY at the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI)
    • Louis Rosenfeld – Our fearless leader
    • Abby Covert – Legend in the field of information architecture and making sense of messes
    • Dave Maloof – Working in Design Operations for quite a while (insights and experience)
    • Myself – Kirsten Skinner

First DesignOps Summit – 2017

  • Curated a program that really focused on definition, coming together to think about when we talk about Design Operations, what do we really mean?
    • Is it design program management?
    • Is it production?
    • Is it a strategy?
    • What is it? – That was really the spirit of our first session
  • We had a in person gathering of 200 people
    • It was amazing and we were really thinking about coming together to understand how we got there – really understanding what the career path, the roles, and responsibilities, what are the attributes for someone in this type of tole and how you could be successful
    • We are forming a community of people who I like to call DesignOps curious
  • In 2018 we took the party to Manhattan at FIT
    • The audience tripled in size, from 200 people to 600 people
    • We ended up talking and spending more time as a curation team
      • Thinking about themes
      • Thinking about doing research with the community to understand what you were struggling with
      • What were some of the challenges you were having?
    • Every year we do a call for presentations
      • A blind review where we remove any identifying information from the submissions and go through them as a team (months long process)
      • We ended up finding that there was still quite a bit of need around definition
    • We wanted to emphasize that it’s not just about us
      • We really wanted to understand the value that our teammates would find in having a role like this
        • Where were they struggling?
        • What were design organizations struggling with?
        • What were companies struggling with in general?
      • We went a little bit broader and brought in speakers from different industries, at different levels within their organizations
        • Executives
        • Head of Design
        • Product Leaders
        • Engineering partners and more
  • In 2019 we (same core crew) took the party back over to Brooklyn
    • 600 people in attendance
    • We recognized that we were having the same similar challenges – lack of visibility to the work
      • proving value and coordinating and collaborating across teams.
    • Those 3 key pain points and challenges are still true today, but what we see now is this coordination and focus on not just the efficiency in design teams but also the effectiveness
    • We’re starting to see a shift in the conversations and research more towards impact
      • Less on the actual attribution of the measurement itself, which can be difficult to do in design because it’s a collaborative effort
    • How do we know we’re successful?
    • Are we having an impact on the experience itself?

In 2020 our conference was focused on: Resilience

  • In 2020 Alana Washington joined our Curation Team
    • Alana brought a perspective around organization design and brought together different viewpoints and synthesized it into a perspective
  • First time we went virtual
  • Stayed steady with 600 people joining us from all around the world
  • It was challenging but joyful because it was a place where people could be authentic and really talk about the new challenges we’re facing around collaboration, burnout, nutrition, and the role that DesignOps could play in that
  • A significant shift in terms of the scope of the role and the levels of the organization in which we’re working

In 2021 we brought on Bud Caddell, CEO and Founder of NOBL

  • He is an Organization Design leader and an incredible Thought partner, bringing wisdom and expertise to help round out the perspectives across the curation team

Here we are today, focusing on: Where do we go from here – What’s next?

      • Think about change (3 different modes)
        • Notion of when to push – to really help people get through something
        • Notion of when to pull – when you know that you need to bring people along
        • Notion of when to let it go and let it happen

The trajectory of the next few days

  • 3 themes that were very clear in the research that we did
    • the research is broad, across industries, and global
    • We spend a lot of time going through analyzing and pulling insights – “How can we create a program that really reflects what’s happening out in the community?”
  • 125-130 submissions this year alone for 18 speaking slots
  • What you’ll see over the next 3 days are folks from all different industries, with different levels of experience at different stages

Day 1 – Led by Kristen Skinner about establishing and growing Design Operations

Day 2 – Led by Bud Caddell is about more practical takeaways, what are the toolkits, the methods, the approaches that you can take back to your work right away and what are some successful outcomes

Day 3 – Led by Alana Washington is all about the future of DesignOps – Where do we go from here?

Thank you to everyone involved, behind the scenes, front stage and backstage, and everyone in attendance over the next 3 days.

Welcome and let’s get started!