Design operations is increasingly about navigating a moving target. AI-infused tooling is upending established models, and the pace of change is forcing teams to rethink everything from handoffs to team dynamics to what quality even means.

As systems fracture and new patterns emerge, Ops leaders are stepping into roles that feel more like architects than managers—shaping the blueprint for how design and engineering build together in real time.

One of those leaders is Aletheia DeLivre, Senior Program Manager of Design Engineering Collaboration & Strategy at Microsoft, and a featured speaker at the upcoming DesignOps Summit. In this conversation, she and Lou unpack how AI is disrupting workflows, accelerating timelines, and reshaping power dynamics between disciplines.

0:12 - Introduction of Aletheia and non-linear journey

4:27 - AI forces design ops to reimagine itself

6:50 - AI is rewiring design-dev collaboration

9:23 - AI delivers speed, humans deliver craft

13:51 - The ninth virtual Design Ops Summit - September 10-11

15:35 - Design Ops as system architecture and conduction

19:10 - Design Ops as ethical pathfinders

25:11 - Aletheia’s gift for listeners

The Design Conductors by Rachel Posman and John Calhoun https://www.thedesignconductors.com/ 

The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Fei-Fei Li https://www.amazon.com/Worlds-See-Curiosity-Exploration-Discovery-ebook/dp/B0BPQSLVL6 

Design Ops Summit - September 10-11, 2025 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designops-summit/ 

“There’s a quality-time ratio. I think this is where humans still have an edge – the refinement of the craft.” 

“AI is great to get us from idea to prototype, but we still see a lot of gaps.” 

“Once you refine it into production-level code, I think that’s where there’s still something missing in terms of  the level of craft, the adherence to your principles, your design system componentry, and pattern reusage.”

“We are both the conductors and the architects.” 

“ The power and potential of AI is so high that it behooves us as humanity to develop AI in a way that doesn't replace humans but enhances them.” 

What does it take to transform a century-old tech giant into a design-led organization? Doug Powell—executive coach, former IBM design leader, and featured closing speaker at this year’s Design Ops Summit—joins Lou for a wide-ranging conversation on scaling design, building community, and leading through unpredictable change.

Doug shares hard-earned lessons from IBM’s ambitious and trailblazing design transformation from the mid-twenty-teens: how centralization jump-started progress, why decentralization required careful timing, and what metrics ultimately proved design’s business value. Along the way, he offers thoughtful advice for today’s design leaders and ops pros who are navigating evolving roles and growing complexity.

Whether you’re leading a design team or supporting one behind the scenes, Doug’s insights are a must-hear for anyone shaping the future of design operations.

0:15 - Meet Doug Powell

5:23 - Reflections on IBM

7:40 - Lessons from scaling design at IBM

11:50 - Timing design org transitions

19:20 - Lessons from early chaos

22:10 - Design Ops Summit 2025

23:05 - Metrics that matter most

27:57 - Tailoring metrics to context

30:36 - Diagnose before you measure

33:08 - Doug’s gift for listeners

“DesignOps: Start with the Right Questions” by Doug Powell

https://dougpowelldesignleadership.substack.com/p/designops-start-with-the-right-questions 

A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardem https://www.amazon.com/Different-Kind-Power-Memoir/dp/0593728696 

“ In order for this to thrive, the business needs to take ownership of and responsibility for the designers, their headcount, and also their output.”

“ I don't think I fully appreciated how important that bond, that connection, that cultural energy would be until we got into this program by a couple of years.”

“ They're really committed to this company and this culture that we've built at a level that I frankly didn't expect.”

“ There are a dozen or more different diagnostic questions that we should be asking to determine what are the right set of metrics that we should be applying.”

What do video games and world-building have in common? Everything. Lou reconnects with Cheryl Platz—author, designer, and creative director—to explore the evolving world of video game development. Cheryl shares what drew her back to the gaming industry after years in enterprise UX and voice design, and how her new book, The Game Development Strategy Guide, distills insights across disciplines to help teams build modern games that truly thrive.

The conversation ranges from the power of cross-functional collaboration to the benefits UX skills bring to game development to the monetization models shaping today’s games. Cheryl reflects on the challenges facing the industry—massive layoffs, misaligned incentives, and a lack of shared understanding—and how a more human-centered, sustainable approach could be a game changer. Whether you're a UX professional, game developer, or just curious about what makes great video games tick, this episode offers a sharp, wide-angle view of where the field is headed.

0:14 - Meet Cheryl

4:00 - The intersection of UX and game development

9:12 - Communicating design value to non-designers

13:17 - What sets top game studios apart: vision, community, and embracing ambiguity

17:01 - How UX helps games stand out in crowded genres

21:38 - 5 Reasons you need the Rosenverse

24:01 - What sustainability really means in live-service games

30:54 - Cheryl’s gift for the audience

The Game Development Strategy Guide by Cheryl Platz https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/game-development-strategy-guide/ 

Blue Prince https://www.blueprincegame.com/ 

“This book is about us trying to define the industry we want to see because the industry we have is no longer working.”

“Capitalism isn’t engineered to like hard things.” 

“ Players want that authenticity. They want to know that they're supporting actual creators and not just something that was randomly generated by AI.” 

“I cannot overstate how important self-expression is in live service games.”

Recording 

Passcode: n5VOS0+Q

Design operations isn’t just about process—it’s about shaping better products, teams, and organizations from the inside out. José Coronado joins Lou to unpack why DesignOps deserves to be treated as a true design discipline. Drawing on his experience leading global teams at JPMorgan Chase, Target, and beyond, José shares strategies for embedding operational roles into business units, measuring impact, and scaling design without sacrificing quality.

They explore how enterprise UX has evolved since the iPhone, why service design is the right lens for thinking about internal operations, and what it takes to foster effective cross-functional collaboration. The conversation offers a preview of José’s upcoming panel at the 2025 DesignOps Summit—and plenty of practical insights for DesignOps professionals at any stage of their journey.

0:10 - Meet Jose 

1:51 - From physical design to digital discovery

3:29 - The complexity (and opportunity) of enterprise UX

7:44 - Why DesignOps IS design

9:16 - Why service design is a good lens for DesignOps

11:57 - The many paths into DesignOps—and who it’s really for

15:37 - Can DesignOps shed its cost center label?

18:04 - The ninth Design Ops Summit – September 10-11, 2025

19:15 - All the Ops: specialization vs. integration

23:49 - Elevating horizontal practices and professional development

28:42 - What holds DesignOps back?

31:18 - Jose’s gift for listeners

Design Ops Summit - September 10-11, 2025 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designops-summit/

Tom Scott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomscottt/

Silke Bochat: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bochat/

Lena Kull: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lena-kul/

“If you can be successful in a complex environment like financial services, a top 10 bank in the world, you can basically take your skills anywhere to any problem.” 

“Design operations is design, full stop.”

“Design operations enables the organization to increase the impact or the efficiency of the processes and the products and services that we put out in the marketplace.”

What happens when you combine righteous anger with unwavering hope? You get George Aye—and the “Angry Hour.”

In this lively episode, Lou Rosenfeld chats with George Aye, co-founder of Greater Good Studio, about his mission to create spaces for “pissed off optimists”—people who see the world’s injustices and refuse to give up on making things better. George shares the philosophy behind Angry Hour, a growing series of meetups uniting professionals from diverse fields around shared frustration and hope. He explains how these gatherings channel collective energy into meaningful connections, local nonprofit support, and even bigger plans like the upcoming Livid Conference—a national gathering for changemakers who are angry enough to care and optimistic enough to act.

If you’re searching for solidarity in uncertain times—or simply wondering how to turn anger into action—this conversation offers insight, inspiration, and a glimpse into a movement fueled by equal parts rage and resolve.

0:13 - Meet George. He explains why Chicago is the perfect spot for his agency, which only does work for nonprofits

2:46 - The origins of “pissed off optimist”

6:02 - Angry Hours and the universality of pissed off optimists

14:17 - The sustaining factors of the Pissed-Off Optimist movement

18:05 - Five reasons to use the Rosenverse

21:06 - What to expect from an Angry Hours

23:58 - The nonprofit organizations Angry Hours partners with and where George sees things going in the future 

30:15 - How to connect and contribute

31:57 - George’s gift for listeners

Greater Good Studio in Chicago https://greatergoodstudio.com/ Sign up for their newsletter!

Connect with George on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgeaye/

George and Greater Good Studios on Medium https://medium.com/greater-good-studio 

Poverty by America  by Matthew Desmond https://www.amazon.com/Poverty-America-Matthew-Desmond/dp/0593239911 

“ When we say the ‘pissed off optimist,’ we always are trying to see how we can balance the  hope and sense of healing or repair or just general faith in humanity that we can still do something about this.”

“ I think we need to recognize how broken things are and not lose faith.”

“ Yes, things are nuts right now, but we need each other if we're gonna get through it.”

“Being able to make sure that we continue to have places for hope and reality together, to me, is something I believe we can sustain.”

What do you do when a successful tech career leaves you feeling like an empty shell? For Francois Burra, the answer was to look inward and transform his life—and help transform an industry.

Lou Rosenfeld talks with Francois, a UX designer turned digital decarbonization consultant, about how a personal crisis led him to channel his “infinite energy” into tackling the tech industry’s overlooked climate impact. Francois shares how he co-founded Climate Product Leaders and co-authored Sustainable by Design: A Playbook for Product Managers—a free, practical guide brimming with best practices and real-world case studies for weaving sustainability into everyday product and design work.

They explore how sustainability intersects with design, product management, and hot topics like AI, highlighting how even small steps can create meaningful change. Francois also offers candid reflections on career pivots, mental health, and finding purpose-driven work that feeds both your soul and the planet.

0:00 - Meet Francois

1:21 - Francois’ climate change journey

5:19 - On depression and finding your “inner fire”

7:56 - “Infinite energy” – how to find it and where to put it?

9:34 - Climate Product Leaders – What it is and how 

13:05 - Why you need the Rosenverse

15:19 - What you’ll find in the Playbook

18:55 - Developments that happened in the two years between the first and second versions of the book

21:21 - Case studies

23:41 - Francois’ gift for listeners

Sustainable by Design: A Playbook for Product Managers by Francois Burra. Get the free playbook at ClimateProductLeaders.org 

Green IO Podcast https://podcast.greenio.tech/ 

“I decided that my mission now would be to help my industry, the tech industry, become greener because it’s twice more emissions than the aviation industry.”

“First, take care of yourself. And second, try to understand where is your inner fire and what is this infinite energy that resides in you that you can leverage.”

“Don’t be afraid to be courageous and follow your gut.”

Matt Webb doesn’t just talk about emerging technologies—he builds with them, lives with them, and prototypes the futures they might bring. In this episode, Lou Rosenfeld talks with Webb—designer, technologist, and featured speaker at the upcoming Designing with AI 2025 conference—about how GenAI represents a kind of temporal leap: a sudden arrival of capabilities that feel like they should've taken another decade to develop.

Matt shares how he explores "weak signals"—small, often personal experiments or observations that hint at larger shifts to come. From building an early website with GPT-3 to creating an app that tracks the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Matt explains how play, laziness, and curiosity drive his invention process. He also touches on how GenAI changes our relationship to search, learning, and even design itself—pushing us into a world where conversations with information replace traditional retrieval methods. The discussion spans adaptive design, epistemic journeys, and the potential for everyone to become a maker of tools, apps, and meaning.

0:21 - Meet Matt

4:13 - When AI is ubiquitous 

5:39 - How Matt got ahead of the curve

9:22 - Faster and cheaper

11:40 - Conversing vs searching

17:31 - Why you need the Rosenverse

19:50 - What you can expect from Matt at the Designing with AI Conference – exploring weak signals

25:39 - Exploring the weak signal of mini-apps

28:27 - Matt’s gift for listeners

Designing with AI 2025 - June 10-11 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/ 

Simonwillison.net  https://simonwillison.net/

The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino  https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Cosmicomics-Italo-Calvino/dp/0544577876

“ Find things that are happening with just a small number of people and go, ‘Oh, that's interesting. Let's do that in a bigger way.’”

“ All the properties are inherent here. We just need to kind of un-bottle our imaginations to see what's already in front of our faces.”

“ The epistemic journey piece trumps the accuracy piece.”

What happens when a cognitive psychologist turned UX researcher brings a critical eye to AI? Dr. Llewyn Paine shares her unique perspective at the intersection of emerging technology and user research. With experience spanning neuromarketing, 3D television, and mixed reality, Llewyn has seen the hype cycles come and go—and learned to spot the gap between promise and practical value.

Llewyn and Lou explore the parallels between now-defunct technologies and today’s AI surge, noting how often new tools are overmarketed before their implications are truly understood. Llewyn urges researchers to engage with AI not as passive users but as experimenters: to test, retest, document, and analyze like scientists. Her recent workshop revealed how even identical prompts to the same model can yield wildly different results—an important reminder that AI is non-deterministic and context-sensitive.

Llewyn also shares a behind-the-scenes look at curating the Designing with AI 2025 conference, built around both the realities of today and the creative possibilities of tomorrow. She reminds us that critical thinking, experimentation, and thoughtful documentation are the UX research community’s superpowers in this unpredictable AI era.

0:09 - Introduction of Llewyn and her journey as a UX researcher

5:25 - The limits and over-selling of neuro marketing

8:42 - A critique of AI as an analysis tool

11:55 - An experiment with AI

15:45 - A process to add consistency to working and researching with AI tools

17:21 - “Why Johnny Can’t Prompt”

19:09 - Why you should use the Rosenverse

21:24 - The upcoming Designing with AI conference

25:38 - The structure and panels of the conference

28:55 - Llewyn’s gift for listeners

“Why Johnny Can’t Prompt” https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3544548.3581388

AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131

Designing with AI 2025 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/ 

“ I've seen from a lot of my designer colleagues the same ambivalence where there are a lot of things that AI allows us to do really well. But it's also oversold.”

“ If you're creating a new method or running a new kind of analysis, you do it multiple times. You statistically test it. You vary your inputs and your outputs until you are consistently getting predictable results. And I think we should be doing the same thing with AI.”

Tough conversations can feel like real-life horror stories—but they don’t have to. In We Need to Talk: A Survival Guide for Tough Conversations, Joshua Graves offers a practical, psychologically grounded toolkit for navigating conflict with clarity and courage. Drawing on insights from neuroscience, psychology, and his own lived experience, Graves explains why our brains react so strongly to tension and conflict—and what we can do about it. 

Lou and Joshua discuss workplace power dynamics, emotional triggers, and avoidance patterns, showing how even a moment of pause can shift the outcome. Joshua’s advice? Slow down. Breathe. Ask questions that begin with what or how instead of why. And remember, you're allowed to step away and come back—conflict doesn't need to be resolved in the heat of the moment. 

Whether you're facing pay disputes, boundary violations, or breakdowns in trust, Joshua’s goal isn’t to script your response but to equip you with flexible, self-aware tools you can adapt to your own voice.

0:12 - Meet Joshua Graves

2:45 - The background of Joshua’s book, We Need to Talk

7:30 - Helpful rabbit holes when researching and writing We Need to Talk

10:00 - Advice for tough conversations

16:23 - Why you should use the Rosenverse

18:38 - What to do when someone is out of control

22:07 - “Conversations” to have with yourself

25:20 - Joshua’s gift for the audience

We Need to Talk: A Survival Guide for Tough Conversations by Joshua Graves

Lost Horse Labs https://www.losthorse.design 

Rock band - Lord Huron https://www.lordhuron.com/#/ 

“I have this deep curiosity about the patterns that we find ourselves in, why we think the way we do, how we perceive things the way that we do.” 

“Understanding constraints helps you figure out what is outside your control or influence.” 

“Asking questions that start with ‘what’ and ‘how’ are immensely more helpful than asking ‘Why did you do that?’”

“At nearly no point are you obligated to stay in a hard, hot conversation. You can withdraw for a minute.”

Most organizations don't suffer from a lack of research—they suffer from a failure to use it well. Jake Burghardt, author of Stop Wasting Research, joins Lou to explore why so many valuable insights are lost after the study ends—and what we can do about it. Burghardt argues that building a research repository is only the first step; real impact comes from treating research like a renewable resource that feeds decisions over time.

Drawing on his work with the ResearchOps community, Burghardt outlines three root causes of research waste: poor preparation, lack of motivation to use insights, and weak integration into decision-making processes. He introduces practical frameworks, like the concept of an “Insight Summary Hub,” that help organizations surface, prioritize, and apply past research effectively. Whether you're at a startup or a large enterprise, Burghardt emphasizes that moving from isolated studies to collective knowledge-sharing is critical to building true research wealth—and creating a culture where insights drive action.

0:27 - Meet Jake Burghardt

1:16 - The motivation behind writing Stop Wasting Research

6:26 - Who is Jake’s book for?

10:01 - The root causes of research waste

15:01 - Why you should be using the Rosenverse

17:17 - A story from Lou about working with PayPal

20:31 - You’ve got research — now what? 

25:02 - Insight summary hub

27:19 - Dealing with the unknown unknowns

32:29 - Jake’s gift to listeners

Stop Wasting Research: Maximize the Product Impact of Your Organization’s Customer Insights by Jake Burghardt https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/stop-wasting-research/ 

“Common Sense AI Integration” by Alexander Knoll https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ai-integration-condens/ 

“This is not just problems but opportunities for growth.” 

“Research is too often seen as an optional input rather than a driver.”

“There is no one tool to rule them all.” 

“Owner is the most important metadata.”