Why Social Justice Frameworks are Necessary for Successful DEI/JEDI Initiatives

As a DesignOps professional, your work holds power—the power to reinforce systemic marginalization, or the power to dismantle it. Spencer Stultz will focus on the intersection of Operations and equity, and explore the power dynamics and cultural norms that can impede true organizational change. In this session, you will:

• Learn about ways that Design Operations can (unintentionally) enforce harmful dominant cultural standards
• Explore alternative approaches to Operations that center equity—by examining community-oriented social justice principles that can address institutional failures and foster change
• Gather tools to enable and empower you to dismantle harmful systems and processes within your own practice

Navigating the Rapid Shifts in Tech’s Turbulent Terrain

Balancing Power, People, and Progress in an AI-driven World

In this talk, I aim to explore the nexus of power concentration within big tech, AI-driven automation, and the ramifications on the tech job market, with a specific focus on design operations and adjacent roles. By examining the underlying dynamics behind power, the recent tech layoffs, and the rapid AI takeover of many aspects of our professional and personal life, I seek to understand the broader impact to the tech industry and the evolution of the profession of Design Operations. This discourse serves as a call for mechanisms to create the pathways for rapid learning and unlearning, and keep pushing designers to reinvent themselves.

A Shared Language for Co-Creating Ambitious Endeavours

As designers we want to reach people’s experiences, make their lives better, and ultimately contribute to a better condition of humanity and our planet. But something is getting in our way. Instead of delivering breakthrough experiences we are relegated to feeding bits into downstream implementation and operations. The enterprises we work for make us chase arbitrary, short sighted goals, and chase after the next release. Meanwhile, the key business decisions that determine the outcomes of our efforts have already been made.

Enterprises are made of individuals forming great teams, applying a diverse set of skills, knowledge and experiences to ambitious projects. In order to bring this enormous potential to fruition, we need one thing: a shared understanding, appreciating each other’s viewpoints and backgrounds, tracing and translating decisions for greater impact on the whole.

Milan will introduce you to EDGY – a language designed to achieve just that, relying on your core skills as experience designers and information architects: understanding enterprises as systems embedded in a wider ecosystem and navigating their multifaceted nature. You’ll take away an approach for co-creating their future working with elements, dynamics and dependencies, and radically increase your impact on the outcomes they produce for people.

Expand DesignOps Leadership as a Chief of Staff

Today’s design organizations continuously face increased scope, complex deliverables, challenging people dynamics, and pressure to hit business goals. For this reason, it’s important to reevaluate how DesignOps leadership is supported so that they can be as efficient and effective as possible. An emerging solution to this challenge is the Chief of Staff role — DesignOps practitioners skilled in values-driven leadership at scale, ruthless prioritization, and building trusted partnerships, who can serve as an advisor, proxy, and operational leader to the heads of large design teams. Here’s what Isaac has learned while defining this new leadership path in DesignOps at Salesforce.

Takeaways:

• How to lead your team as the scope of your responsibility widens
• How to build trusted operational partnerships
• How to navigate complex situations on your team as you scale up

Sheryl Cababa on Systems Thinking for Designers

Sheryl is the author of the soon-to-be-released Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers.

With a background in journalism and political science, and having worked at or with Adaptive Path, Substantial, Frog, Ikea, Microsoft, and the Gates Foundation, Sheryl has an interest in the big picture of systems thinking and how it applies to designers.

Working on projects of enormous scale that could directly or indirectly affect thousands or millions of people can put researchers and designers in a state of paralysis as they realize the potential consequences of their work. Systems thinking can help move us out of that state of paralysis and into one of thought, collaboration, and action.

Sheryl explains how systems thinking fills the gaps that design thinking alone can leave behind.
• Expand your scope from the user to anyone who could be affected by the product.
• Don’t just ask how the product will be used. Asked why the product is needed at all.
• Expand your thinking. Think broadly about who the stakeholders are and the various contexts that could be impacted by your design.
• Imagine different solutions that you might not be able to execute, solutions that might require a policy change or a different business model.

An approach like the above will feel slower – at least initially. If you have impatient supervisors and engineers, gain alignment with them by getting them involved in the process.
• Help them understand the status quo and envision the future.
• Have them go through the exercise of creating visual maps with you.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
• The relationship between design and systems thinking
• How design thinking falls short
• How systems thinking fills in the gaps by expanding your thinking and looking outside your scope of expertise
• Why systems thinking feels slower but is more collaborative and more efficient in the long run
• How to gain alignment with your decision-makers

Quick Reference Guide
[00:00] Introduction
[01:44] Ways to overcome decision paralysis
[04:55] Navigating the complexities of the world through systems thinking
[06:45] The problem with formalized systems thinking
[08:24] Design thinking vs. systems thinking
[13:22] The kinds of interventions that drive successful innovation
[15:42] How long-term thinking helps overcome compliance issues
[17:38] The difference between Cloud Space and Clock Space
[22:10] How designers can tell their superiors to slow down
[25:22] An easy way to gain alignment with your decision-makers
[30:38] Sheryl’s gift to the audience
[32:05] Parting thoughts

You Don’t “Get” Anyone to Do Anything

Any designer who has ever struggled to implement change in an organization has asked questions like those below:

• “How do we get product managers to value user research?”
• “How do we get executives to think in an Agile way?”
• “How do we get UX researchers to prioritize our work?”
• “How do we get our sales team to stop making promises we can’t deliver?”

For product leader and author Matt LeMay, such questions are frustratingly familiar. He hears them from clients and colleagues, alike. Practitioners and leaders–in roles and on teams spanning UX, marketing, product, and more–unfailingly come to him seeking the answer to the question, “How do we get X to do what we want?”.
Matt’s answer is always the same:
“You don’t ‘get’ anyone to do anything.”
“What’s more”, he’ll add, “you’re asking the wrong question”.

Exactly what question should you be asking? All will be revealed when Matt joins us for the opening session of “Design in Product”. Building from the premise, “The path to success in cross-functional product development means embracing ego death and recognizing that you have very little direct control over anyone or anything,” Matt’s presentation will tap into the wealth of knowledge he has gained at such companies as Google, Audible, Mailchimp, and Spotify to illustrate concepts that are as practical as they are unexpected and profound.

Stick around to join the conversation and ask Matt your questions during our post-session Q+A, moderated by Christian Crumlish.

Theme 4: Better Together: Partnering with Others to Transform Enterprise

Organizational transformation is a team sport. The Hero Journeys of transformation are rarely the stories of mavericks and determination; in real life, they are the stories of successful relationships and ‘better together’ leadership. How do we find partners to support our mission and amplify each other’s strength?

Theme 4 brings together four case studies that showcase partnerships across teams, functions, and geographies. They are co-presented by functional leaders who provide different perspectives on how to build relationships and infrastructure to enable cultural change and organization-wide impact.

UX Futures: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Design

Over the last several years, artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated the software world––from “smart reply” functionality in email to auto-completed code in developer tools––but it’s only recently that AI has been implemented into creative processes. As AI-driven functionality becomes more common in the design tooling space, questions arise––what is cool? Inspirational? Useful? And what is creepy? Unhelpful? Where is the line?

Opening Keynote: Org Design for Design Orgs

As the move to establish in-house design teams accelerates, it turns out there’s very little common wisdom on what makes for a successful design organization. Books and presentations tend to focus on process, methods, and tools, leaving a gap of knowledge when it comes to organizational and operational matters. Kristin Skinner, Head of Design Management at Capital One and co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams, will shine a light on the unsung activities of actually running a design team, the operational challenges and considerations, and what works and what doesn’t. Drawing on her experience managing design teams and organizations at Microsoft’s Pioneer Studios, Adaptive Path, and Capital One, Kristin will discuss how what happens “behind the scenes” and how a focus on design management and operations can ultimately affect a design organization’s output, quality, and effectiveness.

Enterprise UX Playbook (Videoconference)

Many of the most successful software development practices — like agile and UX — emerged in the consumer facing private sector. Think Airbnb, Spotify, Uber. But what happens when we try to map those practices onto large enterprises that typically serve internal employees rather than the public? For example, are UX’ers prepared to think about how large systems connect and interact? How about the challenges of HR and roles and responsibilities? Challenges such as these are highly relevant in enterprise spaces, and perhaps even more so in the public sector where systems are often quite old and ways of working have calcified. This talk focuses on “gaps” in Enterprise UX, and how we might seek to close them.