Bigger isn't always better: How small design teams can benefit from systems and Ops
Speaker: Matt Gottschalk

Do you want to set your design team up for success and increase your chances of delivering more value to your company? For small design teams looking to develop and grow within their companies, ensuring you have a focus on the "today" and the "tomorrow" is critical. Not enough focus on today will limit your ability to influence your company to invest further down the line. Whereas only focusing on today, will, in most cases, deliver inconsistent results—and ensure that your teams are not set up for success. This talk will explore how small design teams can use Design Systems and Design Operations to help designers have the right environment for them to deliver impactful results—both for the company today, and tomorrow.


DesignOps at the heart of change: Crafting the invisible, human components of teams
Speaker: Aletheia Délivré

As humans, we tend to be change-averse. Being a principal change instigator, DesignOps—when it’s represented at all in a design org—is often misunderstood, and seen as a necessary evil. But at the heart of every design organization’s desire to grow and mature, is the need to fundamentally change how it operates. It’s the recognition that our design teams are the real WIP. And our growth, at scale, is inextricably linked to building trust, partnerships and allyships. In this session, Aletheia “humanizes” the hidden work of DesignOps by showing how the practice creates an environment where design teams can thrive and drive impact at their company. Through reflective practice, the session will also discuss practical ways to adopt a DesignOps-minded approach in teams (even without a formal DesignOps title).

For large organizations, internal marketing and onboarding strategies are essential to successfully introduce an enterprise design system. The Capital One Enterprise Design System team soft-launched with an interactive onboarding and education playground to demonstrate the system’s visual appeal, advanced tooling, and robust support model. Playfully titled as the design system “flight simulator”, the Figma-based training tool prepared designers to take flight. Join Jana in a discussion about how informative (and fun!) design system training can build your brand. She’ll share tips on simplifying complex design system concepts into digestible learning plans, and show examples of how she and her team brought training to life in a delightful way.