First Sessions Confirmed
We are busy developing an exciting agenda for Design Operations London 2026 so keep your eyes peeled for details.
If you are interested in speaking at the event, please contact Victoria Rose at VictoriaR@henrystewart.co.uk
In the meantime, check out the first confirmed sessions below...
Guerilla DesignOps: Patterns for Practices That Don’t Repeat
In most creative agencies, nothing ever looks the same twice. Projects vary wildly, directions shift, and teams must adapt at speed, yet traditional DesignOps frameworks rarely survive in this chaos. Guerilla DesignOps is about thriving in that mess.
Drawing on field research in a high-variance studio, Sandy presents a model built on flexibility, micro-systems, and distributed leadership. Instead of rigid processes, success comes from small, intentional moves: lightweight, adaptable interventions you can deploy fast, remix freely, and discard without friction.
Team health becomes the backbone of operational stability. Curiosity, psychological safety, and diverse experience create resilience when the work itself cannot. A part-time, distributed “Ops Guild” keeps operational overhead low while fostering insight-sharing, capability growth, and anti-fragility.
Discover patterns for navigating rapid changes, maintaining decision hygiene, reducing operational load on designers, and supporting agencies that have scaled design faster than their business infrastructure.
This isn’t about polished frameworks. It’s about DesignOps in the messy middle: emergent, practical, and human-focused. Where adaptability isn’t a feature, it’s the reason DesignOps exists.
Sandy Stuchfield, Lead Associate, Hollaway Studio
From Playbooks to Pilots: Scaling DesignOps in an AI-Accelerated World
AI is moving faster than traditional operational models can handle. Design teams are expected to move quickly, adopt new tools, and centralise systems - making static playbooks obsolete. What they need instead is the ability to adapt without losing the essence of design.
Sara presents a practical blueprint for Adaptive DesignOps: shifting from playbook-driven operations to a pilot-driven system that learns, flexes, and scales with technological and organisational change.
Drawing on experience across multiple Amazon organisations and FinTech - including AI-assisted workflow pilots, modernising design lifecycles, building centralised workload taxonomies, and running AI experimentation cohorts - Sara shares mechanisms that make adaptability rigorous and scalable.
The Builder–Operator Role
Why DesignOps leaders must both design the system and operate it, shaping workflows and refining mechanisms in real time.
Enabled by:
- Centralised Scaffolding: Shared checkpoints, intake taxonomies, and guardrails that support local experimentation without breaking the system.
- Pilot-Driven Operations: Lightweight pilots for testing workflow changes, rituals, and AI tools before scaling.
Adaptability as a Capability
Resilient organisations aren’t the most compliant - they’re the ones that can evolve quickly without losing clarity, intent, or design’s bar-raising purpose.
Enabled by:
- Learning Velocity: Short-cycle experiments, AI-assisted synthesis, cohort testing, and inspection points that turn ambiguity into insight.
- Operational Sensing: Capacity signals, workflow friction, sentiment pulses, and usage patterns that surface misalignment early.
You’ll leave with an actionable model for adopting AI safely, scaling responsibly, and protecting design’s strategic advantage - human judgment and intent.
Sara Yates, Sr. Design Operations Leader, Amazon
Designing the Work After the Design: The New Discipline of Operations Design
DesignOps has long focused on enabling design teams, but the most complex, strategic work happens after a product or service is designed. Davide introduces Operations Design, a discipline that connects ProductOps, Operations Strategy, DesignOps, and Service Design into an integrated system for how work truly gets done end-to-end.
Through real client examples, Davide shows how designing operational services, support models, governance structures, triage flows, and continuous improvement loops uncovers major opportunities for clarity, efficiency, and innovation. When operations are treated as a design problem, they shift from execution to a strategic engine that powers product evolution and organisational decision-making.
The session also explores how an AI platform, featuring intelligent clustering, adaptive workflows, automated prioritisation, and context-aware insights, can become embedded into the operating fabric of the organisation.
The result: faster service delivery, reduced friction, scalable processes, and continuous improvement grounded in data.
Walk away with practical frameworks and a clear vision for designing AI-enabled operational ecosystems that adapt, scale, and generate value long after the design is complete.
Davide Macchi, Gen AI Program Lead & Business Transformation Lead, Reply
DesignOps as a Catalyst for Organisational Adaptability
In organisations that move fast, DesignOps helps teams stay grounded, aligned, and ready to adapt. Smart positioning and intentional communication can shift design from a delivery function to a true strategic partner.
At BCP, this means creating visibility spaces where stakeholders and designers think, plan, and co-create together. The result? Stakeholders aren’t just hearing about the value of design, they’re advocating for it.
Alexandra will share practical examples of how DesignOps supports designers in high-impact moments, and how curated events and thought-leadership have expanded the team’s influence across the organisation.
Adaptability in DesignOps isn’t just process work. It’s trust work, language work, and bridge-building. It’s designing the conditions for great design to thrive, even in uncertainty.
Alexandra Mengoni León, Design Operations Manager, Banco de Crédito del Peru (BCP)
