Key Takeaways from DesignOps Summit 2022
The DesignOps Summit 2022 by Rosenfeld is the biggest show for anyone and everyone interested in Design Operations & Management.
For the first time, we were excited to sponsor, present, and participate in the Summit, which attracted more than 500+ professionals from around the world. It was three days of power-packed sessions with a great line-up of speakers and inspirational keynotes.
Many lessons on how to manage, scale, and enhance the efficacy and efficiency of design operations in organizations of every size and shape were learned.
Cubyts is a platform that helps design stakeholders solve the operational challenges of scaling design teams, and what better place than the DesignOps Summit 2022 to meet some of the biggest names in DesignOps today and understand their operational challenges!
In this article, we’ll share our top takeaways from the summit so that you can benefit from them too.
[Credits for all images found below to Rosenfeld DesignOps summit]
Inspirations from the Speakers
Here are some highlights from the conference, which was organized by Bria Alexander, a senior Design Program Manager, Adobe, Jon Fukuda, Co-founder, Limina.co, Saara Kamppari-Miller, Inclusive DesignOps Program Manager, Intel, and Farid Sabitov, DesignOps Consultant, EPAM Continuum
1. The Many Paths Of Design Operations
Speaker Rachel Radway, DesignOps Lead at MGM Resorts International, Katie Bingham, DesignOps Manager at H.E.B and Joe Wiertel, Design Program Manager at Meta talked about how building DesignOps teams that are diverse in terms of skills and backgrounds help in building a solid organization.
They also addressed the key challenges every DesignOps team has to overcome as they start creating their space in the organization.
2. From Zero to Hero
We were also inspired by Jose Coronado, Executive Director and Head of DesignOps, at the @JPMorgan session, From Zero to Hero.
As quoted by Jose in his session, “We were doing design operations before we knew it was design operations.”
He shared his experience building a DesignOps practice from the ground up for a large bank, and many stories about how the team has evolved and created a visible impact in the organization.
3. DesignOps ROI: Cover a Little, Get a Lot
After attending the DesignOps ROI: Cover a Little, Get a Lot session by Gonzalo Goyanes, we were inspired to think about metrics in a new way.
It talked about demonstrating your value to management by translating your work into numbers and milestones, and how to implement a Global DesignOps that permeates your whole company.
4. Standardizing Design at Scale
Speaker Candace Myers, DesignOps Leader at Netflix, talked about the future of standardization at scale, explored how we can connect teams into coherent standards and practices, and shared some practical challenges they face at Netflix while standardizing DesignOps.
Overall, all the speakers at the DesignOps Summit shared great insights. We learned a lot about metrics and DesignOps and were inspired by the way that some companies are using these tools to improve their workflow.
Just to mention a few,
- Jon Fukuda, Co-founder, Limina.co,
- Dominique Ward, Head of Design Ops, Atlassian,
- Isaac Heyveld, UX at Salesforce;
- Saara Kamppari-Miller, DesignOps Program Manager, Intel;
- Laura Schaefer, Director of DesignOps, Loblaw Digital, and many more.
Introduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts
Between laying the foundations for building a DesignOps practice and discussing inclusive design and the future of the industry, it was wonderful to watch the DesignOps community come together to share their experience and insights.
It’s been an inspiring few days, and we’ve had a great experience interacting with more than 100+ designers, design managers, and DesignOps managers about key principles and guidelines of collaborative DesignOps and sharing experiences of setting up design operations using a tech platform.
Learnings & Opportunities:
To briefly hit back on our learnings from 150+ conversations with customers/prospects, we understood the following:
- Cohorts (people showing interest in DOS) – Designers, Design managers, DesignOps managers, Product managers
- Gaps we saw – Team alignment, Design progress visibility, process orientation, integrations, centralized repository, Design RoI
- Friction – Changing habits & disciplining a creative function
Want to learn more about Cubyts? Sit back and listen to our live session where you can find everything we learned, in greater detail.
We would love to continue the conversation. Let’s find 20 minutes to discuss how you can strengthen your DesignOps function within your organization.
