Meet Optimal Workshop’s Brand Marketing Manager and Product Designer Alannah Rosa and Karl Madsen

We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s Enterprise Experience conference–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked all of them some questions that get at the heart of why they’re passionate about enterprise design and design operations, what it’s like to work with them, and what makes their products and services special to enterprise professionals.

Alannah Rosa, Brand Marketing Manger and and Karl Madsen, Product Designer at Optimal Workshop

Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring Enterprise Experience 2020?

A: Rosenfeld Media has a well-established history of providing valuable conferences for our community. We get to share and learn about new insights whilst engaging with UX, Design, and Research professionals from across the globe.

Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about enterprise design?

A: We get excited about the challenges and rewards that come with evolving design processes to be as inclusive as possible, with the aim of reducing the likelihood of a project dead-ending or not delivering the impact it ultimately intended. Producing an informed insight and proposing a solution is oftentimes where only half the effort is required. The other half is clear communication and collaboration processes to involve busy stakeholders and contributors throughout a project in the right ways and times.

Rosenfeld Media: What is the professional experience like for designers and DesignOps people at your company?

A: Designers at Optimal Workshop are supported by a range of experiences and networks to help grow as a design professional. Although a designer’s primary discipline is design, they’re typically also involved with at least one other core discipline of the business, playing a part-time role in the rituals and responsibilities of faculties such as Development, Marketing, Research, and Brand. Practice coaches provide designers with personal support, reflection, and goal setting that allows them to step outside of the business as usual bubble. They can also leverage personal development funds to connect with external mentors, online learning, books, and international conferences, oftentimes presenting back their learnings to the wider team.

Rosenfeld Media: What is your culture like, who would new employees work with, and who are the champions?

A: We work with a relatively flat structure at Optimal Workshop. Our designers make up the ‘Design Faculty’ and are spread across multidisciplinary squads with varying focuses for the overall business. Each designer contributes to championing different areas of design at a strategic level depending on their squad’s core focus. The designer’s role is just as much about promoting a design-led approach to problem-solving as it is executing it. This helps create an open-door culture of design contribution at Optimal Workshop. From co-designs and feedback sessions to illustrating icons, it’s not uncommon to see people without ‘designer’ in their title take part, facilitate and produce the outputs of these activities.

Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you/your product bring to the practice and our community?

A: Optimal Workshop helps our enterprise community by offering multiple UX research methodologies in one easy platform to run fast and affordable user research remotely and at scale. Alongside our in-app custom recruitment, easy to understand analysis and intuitive study and account structures we make running, understanding, and sharing research not just easy, but also fun. Our customer support, demos, and other educational resources are aimed at growing our customers’ user research ability, with the intention of supporting every organization we work with to become UX research champions.

Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you? 

A: We’re based in the coolest little capital in the world—Wellington, New Zealand. Home to the flat white, Hobbiton, and an ever-growing research and design sector.