Matt Gottschalk and Ben Franck are DesignOps Managers at Centrica, a global energy and services provider, with over 25 million customers, serving both consumers and businesses. They are operationally responsible for how user experience design is practised across Centrica, ensuring that users are at the heart of all initiatives. Having both come from maker backgrounds, Ben and Matt will share how they used their design thinking experiences to help define, shape and evolve the DesignOps function across Centrica.
Having previously worked as a User Experience Designer at a number of large organisations, Matt has seamlessly moved into the world of DesignOps having gained a strong understanding and empathy for the designer experience and what it takes to create great design work. His passion for building relationships and collaborating with stakeholders and his own teams have helped shape his own strategical and tactical goals of Design Operations.
Ben has both agency and in-house background, both in the travel industry and B2B Technology. His passion for user centred design started right at the beginning of his career working as a designer, sitting meters away from the call centre agents giving him prime access to customer insights. He has been championing users since then.
Ben and Matt will share the journey they have been on since setting up their DesignOps function at the beginning of this year. They will discuss the types of problems that come with managing and supporting a de-centralised design team of 40+ User Experience designers, how they defined the role and how having a design operations function enabled them to streamline processes and drive efficiency and consistency.