 In this video, you'll learn how you as a service design professional can significantly increase the impact design has on your organization by collaborating with the Design Ops folks. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hello, I am Haiti and this is the service design show episode 182. Hi, my name is Marc Fontaine and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are the hidden and invisible things that make the difference between success and failure, all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet. Our guest in this episode is Haiti Aitana. Haiti is the head of Design Ops at Hannah's and Maritz and the co-lead at the Design Ops assembly Sweden. It's not a secret that most organizations are not set up to work in a design driven way. If you work in such an environment, you probably feel the pain and frustration every single day. It's hard to deliver your best work when the supporting structures are not in place. Well, if you've been following the show for a while, you'll know that Design Ops is a field that I'm really excited about. And apparently, I'm not the only one as Design Ops is being adopted by more and more leading organizations around the world. The Design Ops community has taken on the downing task of putting the systems, tools and processes in place, which allow design to impact the organization in a transformative way. And that's even not all. Design Ops tries to make sure that designers feel at home that their contributions are recognized and that they feel that there is a future for them inside their organization. So we as a service design community can benefit a lot from the hard work done by our Design Ops friends. But here's the kicker. According to Heidi, Design Ops needs service design as much as we need them. Heidi says that in essence, Design Ops is service design. Sounds intriguing, right? If you want all the details, make sure you stick around till the end of this episode, because we'll be exploring how you can use service design to design an organization where design can actually thrive. When is the right time to set up a dedicated Design Ops role and how you get buy-in from senior management to invest in all of this? I hope this got you excited about what's coming up because now it's time to jump into the conversation with Heidi. Welcome to the show, Heidi. Thank you, Mark. Awesome to have you on. Yeah, yeah. Awesome to have you on, like I always say. But it is so interesting to hear different perspectives on service design and anything that's sort of vaguely related to it. And today we're going to be on the fringes of service design with the topic of Design Ops. But before we dive into that, Heidi, you have a very interesting role. At least I consider it to be a very interesting role. For the people who haven't looked you up or linked in yet, could you share a little bit about what you do these days? Yes, absolutely. So I'm leading design operations at H&M. I've been there two years now. I started as a team of one and now scaled it up. So my team takes care of anything around the design organization that makes our designers and researchers thrive at their jobs, basically. Yeah, concentrate on the design part and so on. Making designers thrive at their job, that sounds like a very interesting and fascinating job to have. We'll dive into that much deeper later on. Heidi, as a tradition, we have the lightning round, five questions to get to know you even better as a person next to the professional. You don't know which questions are coming, but the goal is to answer them as quickly and as briefly as possible. Just the first thing that comes to your mind. Are you ready? I'm ready. What is your secret superpower? Enthusiasm. It takes the magical places. Okay. Your favorite holiday destination, what would that be? I would have to take Chile as a country because it's so long that it has anything. So once I'm there, I can choose anything between beach desert or glaciers. Oh, Chile, noted. What is always in your fridge? I have small kids, so milk? Yeah, I recognize that. What's the movie that you could watch for the rest of your life on replay? The musical. Alrighty. And fifth and final question. Do you recall the moment that you first heard about service design? Not sure about the moment or how it happened, but the first moment would probably be in my actual very first job when I was asked to do or go into the library and try to do this and this and this and then note it down as a customer journey. I was like, okay, so search around customer journeys and came across the word service design. Yeah, a lot of people have a similar experience. Cool. Well, that was an easy lightning round. Thank you, Haiti. Good to know that you're going to move to Chile one day. The topic of today is, as you mentioned, design ops is service design. That's very interesting and fascinating. So I have so many questions about that. But first, I would love to understand a bit more about your journey. How did you get into design ops? So could you give us a brief overview of how did you get into your current role? Trying to hold it brief, but this is a longer story. So originally, going way back, I graduated as master of arts in graphic design. But my very, very first job was in like a cross functional pop-up studio where we had different kinds of designers. We had like a graphic designer, an interaction designer, an interior designer, design project lead, architect, I can't even remember all of, but everyone had like some sort of a design background. And I guess that was my very first introduction to involving people and having multiple perspectives and what a difference it makes when you start looking into a broad solution within design. Like, as from a graphic design perspective, we could make signage that help people in a store find ecological products. But then you got in all the other design perspectives. And it became a much wider and a systematic approach. And this really shaped me as a professional. So from the very first, early on, I didn't go into the nitty gritty of graphic design, but more on an experience level of things and how can you elevate design projects to be more holistic, I guess. And from there on, I've worked very broadly with different identities, branding, product, licensing, games. And then I moved, I'm from Finland originally, and then I moved to Sweden when I switched from sort of physical product design into the UX world and digital services. And it's only then I sort of actually had, at some point, a title of being a service designer, but it's I identify as a person that has always had this mindset. And the more I did hands on work or something, the more I realized that this is my identity as a designer. And then I sort of worked in different contexts and got into innovation and innovation management and also run product development in a startup. But products design ops is quite new as a discipline or as a like, as a framed job, so to say, it's things that people have always done. But I kind of followed the conversation from when it started emerging, let's say probably 2018, something like that. And then I, I don't know, 2014, 2015, after I have moved to Sweden. And then I had, it was a very good moment in my life when I didn't want to continue a journey in a startup to search for something. And then I saw that H&M is looking for a specific role in design ops. And I read it and I read it many times and I thought, do I, is this something that I'm like, I have competence for? And to be honest, in the very first early on, I was thinking, this is very new to me. Like, is it, is it something that I will sort of venture on? But now, like, you know, having been in this role for some time, I feel that it, it actually wasn't that new. It was just a new context for the skill set that I already had. And that's kind of why I'm here. It's like, I think design ops is service design. Hmm. Thank you. Super interesting. So I realized that not everybody might be familiar with the term design ops. We've had some episodes with interesting guests who talked about this topic, but I know not everybody listens to every episode. And I'm sure that there are a million definitions of design ops out there. But I'm just curious, what is your perspective on what design ops is? What a good question. But we in, in my team at H&M, we say that we are, our team creates a home for the designers and researchers, the design community at H&M. And what we mean with that is a home. We don't mean that you are a family and you need to sort of, you know, commit in the way. I don't really like that analogy that you think that your workplace is a home because it's different rules. But with the home, what we mean with operations is when you are at home, you feel that you know how things work. You know how, where you go to get something. You know how you can change things because you feel confident and you trust the environment and other people you are, you feel psychologically safe. And operations basically takes care of that thing. So it's turning the design inwards for the design community, not anymore for the customer. But how do we enable designers to be able to deliver the best possible work for the customers while thriving at their jobs? And do designers need to have that specifically? Because I don't recall that there is something as HR ops or CEO ops. Why is there a design ops? Good question. My answer to this is that design is underrepresented almost in all of the organizations and when digital product development has bloomed. So all of the organizations have like a ratio of one designer to two to 10 engineers or something. So you're always like an underdog in the discussions. And still in many organizations design feels as, you know, as like polishing a ground, like coming and helping in to support something in the business. It's not really considered a core business capability. But that's what it is. That's what design thinking and all of this is aiming for. So to help this group of people that are already underrepresented design ops is like people who have 100% dedicated their time to help in that to make the design maturity grow to evangelize what the designers are there for because they are dividing their attention between doing design, evangelizing design. Yeah, maybe it's because design, like most organizations aren't set up to be a design driven organization. They are much more set up to be a management oriented and driven organization. So maybe that explains something. The other question that I have here is so your perspective is design ops is service design, service design, especially design ops, if they are the same, why do we have two different names? I know they're not the same. But okay, maybe I should rephrase myself, but the skill set is transferable. But what makes it the same is that you use the design methodology. You use empathy, you use co-creation, prototyping, experimentation, just like in service design. But your sort of core target group is internal, that makes a big difference. So you're not sort of looking at the big consumer or customer group, you're looking at the internal stakeholders, which basically are your colleagues or your peers or your, you know, above, below, across whatever. This changes the dynamic. But the skill set that you are using in a design ops practice is very similar. It's about driving engagement, understanding people. It's somehow fundamentally about change. It's a service design often, or I worked in the innovation field, but it's you want to transform something. You have like an idea of what is the two states of where we want to go. And both service design and operations are the hands on part on how do we actually get there. It's very actionable. You want to find these things of where can we make a where can we make a difference? And how can we make a difference? And then that you actually have methods, frameworks to make that happen, like, you know, co-creation, facilitation, and so on. All of these are like my main assets in ops. And why it's, there is very many different kinds of design ops functions in different organizations. It really depends on what the organization is and what is their needs, what is their maturity and also who has hired for the design ops role and what was their vision originally. There are people who come from business operations. There are people with like heavy operational program management background. But more and more, according to like a state of design ops report, it's now over 50% that come from a design background. So our designers. So I don't know, with my example, I kind of want to encourage people with the service design background and mindset to think of that kind of a transfer of career, if you want to think of it like that. Because the way I see that operations can, it can turn a whole organization around. Because if you think, strategy often is somewhere in a deck. But how does it change things? It's through the operations. If you understand both strategy and operations and can tie these together, which is ultimately what all service designers are trying to do, you will, you can make a difference on many fields. And for operations, I have now, for myself, I've coined it as the future of work. So being able through one competence, through the design competence, to change how we work is that change that operations does. And the change, like it can be the future of whatever, the future of packaging, the future of kitchens, the future of something that service designers that are looking outwards often work with and are working with that kind of a change. So there's the, how I see the similarity. Super interesting. And I totally get that you are basically applying the service design, mindset, methodology, approach, tools and methods onto the organization. And in this case, maybe even more specifically onto the facilitating, enabling designers within an organization to do their best work, but it probably also then extends to other functions and just the way people collaborate. I'm really interested if we make this a bit more, even a bit more tangible, can you give some examples of challenges or projects that you and your team have worked on on how is this changing the way of working within H&M? Yes. Things that aren't confidential. Yeah. Many. We have started with very fundamental blocks. So maybe I will take the first example. We built the very first career framework that was designed specific for our community. And how, like, how I see this as a service design project is that I handled it exactly as it would have been a service design project. So what you basically need is a framework, and then you need the content to fill the framework. So then the two, like, it was a very holistic approach to, like, we had six different roles within design that all needed their own path and levels and then requirements and, like, what lenses are we using? So I did a lot of industry research and what others have done and what has worked well, what is the most simplified version, what is the most granular version on different frameworks. Then I had, then we come into the one sort of basic, sorry, the service design rule of always including people and making it about co-creation. So I call this the co-creation bonanza because at that time we were, like, 120 people and I somehow managed to include the majority of these people in creating the content. But if we start with the framework, so it was a selected group of people where I made, like, I think it's Mark Stickdorn who talks about the first shitty draft. So the first shitty draft of a framework, like, this is what we could have, these are the level, we have two near, key, senior and so on. We look through these lenses and these are, you know, like how you could start putting in some requirements. And then I gathered feedback and iterated a couple of times and then we landed with, like, three lenses of the craft. So what is it that you actually do? Your mindset, how you do it, the behaviors that you put into your work. And then the third one, your presence. So within your context and what is sort of the reach and influence of your role. And then we had the steps from junior to principal. And then for each of those steps, each of these lenses, a description of what is like, what is expected for this level for craft mindset and presence. And then we had, like, a set of core skills that is forever. Like, we had a product designer, service designer, UI designer, UX researchers, UX writers and so on. And so then I took each competence on its own and we crafted the, like, first, first shitty draft in that area that the framework was also done. But the first sort of content, which was more like trigger material for the people to react to. And then as they had done that individually, then we hold like a gathered workshop together where we talked about it. Like, what is, what is the, should we say it in this way? And what is like, if we, in principle level, for example, say that we, it's about your presence in the industry, what do we mean with that? Is that feasible? And the biggest group of was product designers, of course, that was like 80 some people. And there we did it asynchronously. In my row and others, we did more on a team's workshop setup. And how it started changing the behavior and ways of working. It was because people were involved, they were more engaged, and they felt that they had some sort of ownership of the, the framework. So they felt that this is, it's more mine, and I can contribute it going forward with. And then the second part was that it, we started rolling it out to the management layer. So people managers, how should we do repetitive one-on-ones? How should we do quarterly reviews? How should we take this framework into actual discussions on one-on-one, which are, you know, not that framework into a structure. But I, as a designer, I can use it in this way to reflect that I think that I want to grow towards this direction. Is it the IC path or is it the management path? It was like, it, it changed the way designers could articulate where they are, where they want to go, and they had more tangible vocabulary, terminology, and an actual framework to refer to. And for managers to have more tangible and actually evaluating that from their perspective that, yes, okay, I see, I see that, that you, what do you mean with that? But maybe I can have like a broader view. So what this expected of a senior in this context means in practice, because the framework is very general, means this. So managers can give actual examples that bring the framework to life. So I think it, it made, I think it made the biggest change that it did. It made interest in career and your own development much bigger, because it gave words to things. I think we've talked the past two years that this has existed, or one and a half, we talked about career and development much more than before. So wow, super interesting topic. And like, it's designing on a meta level, like you're designing for design. And you're using a design approach to get to an artifact that is useful to mature the design practice within an organization. Discussing career frameworks has been on the show as well. And it seems so important. And it's fascinating. And obvious to see that you, when you design, when you want to create a design, a framework, career framework for designers that you should do it in a design driven approach, like that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned already something about, it depends who's hiring and like what was the vision for bringing in design ops. So for instance, in this, in your case, creating something like a career framework, it takes time from the organization. There has to be someone who owns it. There has to be a need. There has to be, I guess, a perceived return on investment. Who is driving design ops? Where is the need from the organization coming from? Am I making sense? Yes. Or let us see how when I answer, if I answer the correct question. I think from our case, or what I hear the main sort of driver is the design managers layer that hear the needs from the designers all the time and don't maybe really have the tools and the time. So they want, they discuss and we have a very, I joined quite late. So we already had like multiple different ways of working in an organization. So it comes to a point that design managers need to sync a lot and, you know, agree on who's going to work with that, who's going to work with that, which are maybe holistic needs, like onboarding or off-boarding or design reviews or something. But then their needs in their context change and they might not have time and the frustration sort of escalates. And then they are pushing the need that we need, you know, allocated people who look into this. And then the second need is, of course, also for the actual design, head of design or whoever is running the department, that depending on where the organization is, but to be able for them to more strategically concentrate on where to take it, how do we, how do we want to go and where do we want to be? So they have also a need to take parts of the operational part of their work to someone else that they can collaborate better. And now I had, I'm thinking of another thing in my head, but it's just kind of the idea slipped. So let me ask you an in-between question and your idea will get back. In what I'm hearing you say is that the need for design ops emerged from the fact that you already had a pretty big design community and there were challenges and needs arising from the fact that it was just growing in shared volume. There were pain points started to emerge, needs started to emerge with which weren't being addressed by the existing organization and then sort of it was becoming clear that you need something that floats above the design community and helps them to facilitate them in doing their work. So it emerged from the existing design community within H&M, correct? Is that a good assumption? Yes, yes, correct. And to make things more smooth and effective, I think I came in when we were like, we had boosted the community from 14 people to 120, it was a lot. So then when people work in so different contexts, you have very senior people coming in and then you have more junior people coming in and they all sort of shape in their context because we work, you know, a designer in a product team with a lot of other competencies. They make their own set of ways of working for design. They evangelize design in their context in a different way. They talk about, just to give a very, very concrete example, the design process. It's the double diamond in somewhere, it's like some other process somewhere, some say discovery, some say pre-study, some say research and what they mean with that is completely different things. And then in other contexts, designers are asked to do, you know, the change of the button color. And in some other contexts, they are, you know, they do consumer research. So to align these more that the actual organization can work more effectively. And then also that the leaders in this organization can lead to a similar direction and say that this is design and this is not design in our context. This is sort of when ops. Yeah, well, you're creating standards and things that you can agree upon as an organization, as a community, as a practice, which is, which becomes more important when you want to scale the impact of design and just the volume of the amount of design work that's being done. The question that I had in my mind, and this is always hard to judge and hindsight, but is there like, what's the right moment to start introducing design ops? Ideally, you'd start with design ops and then sort of grow that design practice based on that. But I can imagine that it's, it's a hard sell when people within the organization don't feel the problems of alignment and standardization yet. So what, what do you think is a good moment to bring design ops in? The earlier the better, I would say. Yeah, well. But I have started, I've started to think more that it's, it's not maybe the actual amount of designers that should be the answer here, because that's hard to, it depends of so many other factors. But what I believe in is to start naming design ops early on from the very beginning, anyone is starting to build an internal design community, that these parts of your work are design ops, and then make it more explicit that we have a design ops mindset, everyone in the community or some people in the community allocate a percentage, half of their time for ops related tasks, and that you store them, like what you do in a place that is called something ops. So when you start seeing the need and the people's interest grow, that I don't want to do ops anymore, I just want to design, you know, for end users and end solutions, or I really enjoy seeing the growth in our community with the work I do. Then you start having the individual drivers of where I want to go, and then you connect it to the need. So when you start having more, you see that the amount of ops work that you have labeled, it will increase. So when it goes to like a threshold that this is one person's full-time job, then that person and that interest make it a match and make it official, that now you actually have a role. And this can happen in any time, it can happen in teams that you have 10 designers, but it can also go far with designers that are 50. But if they have a very good chemistry and they work well with each other, and they have established, managed to establish standards together, it doesn't have to be a specific role. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I get it. Then that's super smart. So you're even without designers being officially recognized or having an official role in the organization, you're assigning work to that label. You're already labeling some of your work to design ops, just as you might label your work to research or to strategy or to implementation. You're assigning, I've spent, I don't know, eight hours this week working on making sure that we can actually do our job on designing the organization and just label that and keep track of that as early on as possible. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, giving and giving and that's what we're doing also now, even though we have a dedicated team, our community is so big and complex that we're kind of, we're kind of re, what is the word, like reversing the process that I just described. So we are thinking that we need to implement a design because like when, when you first hire for a big organization, someone who has the responsibility of design ops, when I joined, I was, I was bombarded with different kinds of needs on all levels, like, you know, to solve the product design process to very small things like, how does the printer work somewhere? Well, but anyway, it's like everything in between. So then there can be this moment where people are like, very relieved that we have operational people who are taking care of this. But if it's still a small team, you will always need this design ops mindset. So labeling really helps that what you are actually doing now is helping the design ops team, but you're doing ops in your context. So we're, we're still on that path. Is there a silly question, but is there like an overview of things that fall under their umbrella of design ops? So if I would want to start labeling this, I would like to know, like, is there, does the design ops community have, what is it? I don't know, a list of activities that I could say. Okay. Oh, so this is the signups. Is that, is that list there? Yes and no, there's probably many people have their own, like I said before, design ops can look very different from organization to organization. And some in some other context, design ops could be very, like, administrative, very tactical focused, very here and now. And it's always part of some part of every design ops. But then you also have design ops that is very holistic, very strategic partnering up with strategic leadership to actually change from ground up how the organization works. And this is where we again come to service design. I can talk about it later a bit with actually seeing design as organization rather than team. But yes, to go back to the list. So for example, in our context, we have three pillars in ops, we call them processes and assets, community and culture, and career and growth. So then you take those pillars, and you take the idea of this is something where I turn my, my, my side inwards. So am I doing something for my colleagues, for my peers, in the processes and assets, creating something that others can reuse, or community and culture sharing my knowledge, organizing some sort of events, communicating, but anything that everything that has to do with communication is ops, basically, or career and growth, am I doing some sort of peer learning things, am I mentoring? All of those things fall under the umbrella of ops in our context. Yeah, that's already a very good starting point. Like, you don't, you don't want to make it too complex. And these three things, these three pillars make a lot of sense. If I can add to that, because that is one of the things that I also felt that having been the first design ops person at H&M, how might service design background help? Because I established those pillars and the scope, but it needed to be exactly like you said, simple enough to communicate, because the entire organization was very new. Like, what is design ops? What are you supposed to be doing? How am I supposed to communicate this so that people actually understand? And in service design, the sort of the mindset of not being stuck with buzzwords so much, but like it, the core of it is always to make people understand so they can act upon something was something that also iterated a couple of times, like what is simple enough for people to understand what's what could be in our scope? Then I had another problem that I was alone and my scope was gigantic. So yeah, you learn things while you do it. Well, continuing on a too big scope, I was curious, like what is the hardest thing in your work? What's the most challenging aspect? People. People are the core of everything, but it's, I mean, I've noticed in everything that we do, the hardest part is always adaptation to get it to something that people use. And that's of course the first level, but that's something that people also love, something that people develop on their themselves and keep iterating, giving feedback on. That is hard. And also taking yourself, I think more designing for designers, you need to take even more yourself out of the process. Like it really, really is continuous iteration in the way that, okay, well, we tried this, but obviously it did not work. And then you just, you know, kill your darlings and try something else. So when you mentioned adoption and people need to own it, what's what do you see as holding people back from adopting these ideas? I mean, rituals and things like how people have, what have they adopted during the years in their design? They're used to doing things in a certain way. They have a sort of grounded behavior in something that has worked in their context very well before. So they are, everyone is likely to repeat similar things. So I think the key is here is like to be able to prove the value of guidelineing or standardization, but also the flexibility. It's like a standard should never be like a nail in the coffin. It needs to be flexible so that it's open for interpretation. It's open for feedback. It's open for iteration, but in a cohesive way. So it's a lot to think when you launch something. If you launch it to lose, you risk that some adopt, some doesn't adopt at all, but then they will develop it into completely different directions, which is not a problem as itself. But then when you as a centralized function try to iterate the second iteration, you will either go one way or the other. So you will lose people who have iterated on themselves to the other direction, or people who feel that they have actually iterated further where you have come. So I think it's, you need to carefully balance standardization and sort of freedom, flexibility within that. And then it comes back to just talking to people, talking to people, involving people, co-creating. I can imagine that depth is like such a hard balance or the thin line to walk because when it's a top down thing, it's really hard to get people to adopt it. And the other challenging thing is you don't want to make it too loose, like you said, because then what's the purpose of trying to find a common language? And it sort of has to emerge from the design community. So you're almost just like as a designer, you're harvesting what's already there and trying to formalize it, make it tangible, and say, is this what we as a design community within H&M agree upon? Like, is this what we're doing? You're almost trying to, again, make what's already there, what's implicitly already there explicit, correct? Correct. Yes. And a lot of the work that my team does is to dig those best practices and the success stories in the organization articulated into a general matter of what actually happened here, label it and aim it and then communicate it. And then after that, it doesn't really stop there, then you have to sort of actually go into the adaptation part, like, how would you roll it out? How would you launch it? Who should you approach? Do you need some sort of supporting material? And I think the change and also the ability for service designers, especially to zoom in and out in ops is super useful because you can have this like big strategic goal of becoming a customer centric organization, for example. But how does change actually happen? It's through the rituals that people are already doing. So if you can connect a story from, for example, how do you name a file? Like, okay, I'm just making up this as I go. But we made a like an H&M design process. This is how it looks like. So if we call discovery, the first phase discovery, how should we like just communicating that won't actually do anything? But where should we implement the label discovery so that people start adopting it? So if you would, for example, start naming files discovery, something, something, it's much more than just labeling the file because if you do it consistently, you will go on like very, very small steps towards the goal of changing the mindset towards the customer centric goal that you have also driven with the whole design leadership. And it's the connection in the stairs that I think also service design as a competence is very skillful in which can be used in the operations field. It's the small details that aren't details, but that make the actual difference on a day-to-day level. That's, and I think it's so easy to overlook and ignore something small as naming of things. While that is the thing that people get exposed to when they open their laptops and look at things. So I totally see how that can be, yeah, how that can make a big change. One other question I had is related to looking at where you are today and looking into the future. What do you feel is needed for design ops to be even more impactful, influential? What needs to happen? I think we're quite well on the way. I mean, maybe it's an obvious answer, but I would say more design ops practitioners that it has to do with the labeling that we talked about before, that people who are not a design ops something, but when they talk about what they do, they use design ops as terminology. I see, I think in Europe, it feels a bit like, you know, design ops teams of one are popping up like mushrooms in the rain. And there's more and more. And I felt strongly that when I started sharing my journey and how it felt being a team of one, it resonated with many and I got lots of feedback and contacts and wanted to like share more so that people who are already in the field share more of what they're doing and how they see it without maybe being so afraid of the industry because the industry is changing. The design ops is not super defined and every single insight and opinion is very valued and it shapes other people in the industry. And I just, how do you, like, how do you hire? What are the role names? And then when you see that you have used something that someone else uses and then someone else used the thing that you used, we start to create more and more definition. So yeah, I hope that answered. Just getting more people aware that this exists and that this is a career that you also can pursue and that there's interest from organizations to invest in design ops. Yeah. Yeah. And then also, I think, like designers in communities that have had a design ops, if you worked in an organization that has and that doesn't have a design ops, like, if you would reflect what is the difference and how did you feel it? Because it's also like, for example, our design ops function works a lot with community and sort of the feeling of togetherness and that we can share, we are many here. How does that actually influence the employee experience of being a designer in a context? And how does that influence sort of the happiness level of being at work as a designer? And I think that, for example, just looking back at my career, I felt often that it's many times I think many people feel it that it's it's often a fight to other competencies to other you need to prove you need to do this and that it can be exhausting. So if you can lower that even a little, and if you can actually feel the difference, and if you talk about that feeling, then you have design leaders that are sort of listening into the designers that we, I felt so much better when we had this, even if you can't exactly pinpoint what it was that someone did, but sort of the overall feeling of being at work. I think ops can play as crucial role for design. Seems like a great mission to be on and something worth waking up and going to work for. Maybe one final question before you wrap up and you already mentioned something about looking back. When you look back at your career and think maybe about the moment before you got into design ops, what do you wish you had known that somebody had told you about design ops before you got into it that you know today? I think that how immensely gratifying it can be to see the results in an internal community. Like I think for a designer you come to like, do I want to leave the hands-on craft and actually designing or do I want to leave the customer the actual innovative solutions and turn towards the internal community? Like is that worth the same? Is it like a little bit of a smaller impact, smaller scale, smaller like these kind of doubts, but now having been here and like you see results immediately. You get immediate feedback like within a day of something that you've launched and then after a couple of months doing some sort of a survey of like how many people feel more control of their career after a career framework or something like that and seeing the numbers that it has pushed the needle somewhere it comes so fast compared to you know working outwards. I also worked as a consultant with different companies and contributed a lot to a lot of work that I kind of maybe never really got any information of the actual result then after. I feel that the meaning of the work that I do is so great and when I joined I maybe didn't expect it to or had doubts about that but it feels so meaningful and being able to see the results is like the cherry on the cake that keeps me going. Well my conclusion from that is that designers are a very good user group to be working for because that's good to know. Hedy thanks so much I'm sure that we'll be hearing a lot more about design ops in the future. I hope that we will because I do see so much overlap and benefits of integrating these two communities getting them more and more connected so I'm going to ask you for some recommendations of other design ops leaders to get on the show because I think we need to have a good conversation with each other and see how we can strengthen each other. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your thoughts and your journey with us. I found it super helpful and super interesting so yeah thanks again. Thank you so much Mark and thank you for inviting me and keeping design ops on the agenda of service design. We are trail blazers here. Thank you. What's your take on the intersection between design ops and service design? Leave a comment down below and let's continue our conversation over there. If you've made it all the way here and enjoyed the episode please do me a quick favor. Click the like button on this video if you haven't done so already. Not to feed the youtube algorithm but just to let me know if we're on the right track by addressing topics like this. My name is Mark Fontaine and I want to thank you for spending a part of your day with me. It's an absolute pleasure and honor. Please keep making a positive impact on the people around you and I'll look forward to see you very soon in the next video.