Beyond the keynote: step out of the audience and into the workshop

The Zalando DesignOps blueprint for claiming your seat, by translating inspiration into skills

As DesignOps, we need to help create hands-on, high-impact learning environments for our design communities.

It’s the usual drill at the beginning of a new year — we set intentions for our personal and professional growth. For product designers, this journey often begins with a familiar path: attending conferences, bookmarking talks and mentally logging compelling arguments for change.

From my experience in DesignOps, I know that inspiration alone won’t close the gap between ambition and execution. Skills like code-driven prototyping or speaking the language of commercial strategy are critical for the design industry. But designers can’t passively absorb these capabilities — they need to be actively developed. And that’s where DesignOps needs to step in, to help create the low-stakes, high-impact learning environment where this can happen.

Dodging the passive learning trap

In a discipline as iterative as design, relying solely on lectures and keynote addresses can leave us with a mountain of notes and takeaways that don’t have much practical application. The skills that truly drive influence — strategic thinking, business literacy, cross-disciplinary building — require designers to step out of the audience and into the workshop.

High-quality, focused and hands-on learning experiences are rare. Knowing that, when the Design Matters team reached out with the wonderful suggestion of hosting a masterclass series in our Zalando office, our DesignOps team immediately confirmed. It was a unique opportunity to provide the kind of intensive, practical learning our design community needed to tackle two major areas of professional evolution.

Hands-on learning during the Design Matters Masterclass in our Zalando office.

We designed the Design Matters Masterclass as a one-day immersion focusing entirely on actionable skills and real practice. Together with Design Matters, our DesignOps team hosted over 60 designers across two parallel tracks, with intensive collaboration in small, focused groups.

The format worked, according to participants like Kim Does, Principal Product Designer: “I liked the tables with smaller groups — it was a good chance to talk with people, [and] it was good when they made us switch groups.”

Members of the Zalando Design community putting their new skills into practice.

The success of this approach hinges on the balance between theory, live demonstrations and immediate individual or group practice. For instance, in our AI-focused sessions, specific whiteboard templates allowed everyone to “get their hands dirty” — as Göksu Kaçaroğlu, Principal Product Designer described it — immediately rather than just watching a demo. A conversational approach where participants build on a speaker’s points through group discussion also made learning feel like a “real class,” Göksu said, adding: “The conversations among the masterclass participants, stimulated by the hosts, were very insightful and made the learning experience feel more practical.”

Prioritising the practical

We structured the Design Matters Masterclass around two parallel tracks, truly focused on doing and claiming strategic influence.

The first track, ‘Designer, Claim Your Future Seat’, concentrated on essential leadership and commercial accountability.

In his workshop, Will Shaw offered a framework to connect creative work directly to business goals like revenue and cost control. Next, Ram Yoga equipped designers with the math and quantification tools to ground their impact. The final session, led by Alex Simon, helped designers step into an innovation mindset and turn future trends and emerging technologies into practical, tangible ideas.

The second track, ‘Designer, Activate Your Future Skills’, tackled the immediate, hybrid reality of AI, automation and cross-disciplinary work.

One hands-on session with Oyindamola Akinleye and Felipe Santana focused on how to build with AI to automate repetitive tasks. Another workshop with Will Shaw on integrating AI into the designer’s toolkit while also designing for AI as a new distribution channel rounded out this track. The final session, led by Jean-Baptiste Kaloya, used the Design Leadership Archetypes framework to identify and amplify strategic style.

The Design Matters Masterclass focused on practical skills and building strategic influence.

For me and the rest of our DesignOps team, it was key to have this dual focus on strategic influence and technical mastery to get participants curious and give them immediate skills to take back to their work.

The results: renewed energy to keep going and growing

Even though hands-on learning takes more focus and engagement, it’s also more generative. Madeline Rogier, Senior Product Designer, said that this approach made her want to go deeper: “The last workshop about design archetypes stood out for me the most. It got me curious and I even went home afterwards to continue learning more. I felt energized after the event, which doesn’t always happen after a long conference event.” Not only that, but the interactive format fostered deep, organic connection, she said: “The event made it easy to meet and talk to people, I even connected with several new people on LinkedIn.”

Patricia Evangelista, Senior Product Designer, pointed out that the workshops “taught us a lot of skills regarding ‘business first’ when it comes to justifying my work, and the materials will be super useful for articulating ideas with a solid business rationale.”

Zalando Senior Product Designer Patricia Evangelista was among the community members at the Design Matters Masterclass.

For Kim, the masterclass was also a confidence boost for the future: “Fresh ideas? Partially, also some confirmation that I’m not too bad at what I do, but also a nice spark of things I could be doing.” This moment of confirmation for a designer — that their talent is solid and they know how to identify their next growth frontier — is a cornerstone of professional development. It validates how much experience they already have, while motivating them to keep experimenting and innovating. This is exactly the kind of individual and community growth that DesignOps can — and should! — help to cultivate.

Practical tips for taking your team beyond the keynote

Based on my experience and the feedback from participants, here’s how DesignOps can make internal learning more impactful for our communities:

• Mix and match: Networking shouldn’t be forced. Create organic opportunities for designers to work with non-designers and peers from different contexts or countries. This diversity allows participants to see how others interpret and apply the same tools differently.
• Prioritise business know-how: There’s a massive appetite for designers to level up their business focus. Provide resources on how to talk metrics, justify designs with numbers and speak the language of product leadership. Materials like printed resource sheets on important business metrics are often more valuable than a high-level talk.
• Manage energy levels: Hands-on learning takes effort. Structure the day so that heavy, technical content (like AI building) is scheduled when energy is high, and balance that out with conversational sessions or lighter, creative workshops.
• Make it flexible: Finding the right size and fit applies to learning, too. In the future, we aim to offer more ‘choose your own adventure’ schedules where participants can combine individual classes from different tracks.
• Create solid, shareable assets : If you can’t record the sessions for team upskilling ‘watch parties’, make sure to share the slide decks and frameworks (like prompting templates or context-building guides) as widely as possible.

As DesignOps, we’re building the infrastructure for our community to succeed. Passive consumption might check the ‘professional development’ box in the short term, but it doesn’t enable our designers to reach their highest potential. Engaging, hands-on learning helps turn abstract inspiration into core competencies — and that’s what shapes designers into future-proof leaders.