DesignOps Global Conference 2022

Profile: Karen Baker is the Community lead for UX Research at Facebook, where she manages internal culture initiatives for a global team of 600+ researchers across 10+ locations. Karen believes that strong communities are created by design – and enabled through process. At Facebook she is responsible for building and scaling programs that strengthen the cohesion, culture, and impact of a rapidly growing team. An expert in facilitating collaboration at scale, she blends creativity with process to ensure that 600+ diverse individuals operate as one. 

Prior to joining Facebook, Karen spent a decade building communities both online and in-person. She was the second community hire at Codecademy, where she developed systems that allowed the platform to scale from 3MM to 5MM users. She has built and scaled an ambassador communities for The Feast Worldwide, a global dinner series for good; for a national network of STEM teaching non-profits; and for design agency Smart Design. Her work designing community programs has taken her to NASA Johnson Space Center, the White House Office of Science and Technology, and onstage with President Bill Clinton. Karen holds a B.A. in Rhetoric and Chinese Language from the University of California, Berkeley.

Presentation Title: Lessons Learned Scaling UX Research Community

Outline: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” — Peter Drucker, ten years ago the UX Research team at Facebook fitted into one conference room. Today, the team is over 600 researchers strong, working across product teams and apps. As an organization, how do you design your employee experience with the same intention as your customer experience? As an Operations team, how do you design systems that deliver not only individual outputs, but also a collective culture? This talk will share some of the lessons Karen has learned from supporting one of the largest UX Research teams in the world, and how you can apply them in your own context. Combined with her background in community management, she will share practices for getting a team to be more than the sum of its parts: aligned, informed, and marching in the same direction. In this talk, she will cover approaches to creating trust and intimacy at scale; building a shared narrative across a diverse team; and systematically ensuring that all team members have what they need to succeed.

Company Website: https://www.facebook.com