Zalihata Ahamada
Design Ops Leader and Service DesignerZalihata Ahamada Lafeuille is a Design Ops leader and service designer who helps organisations build UX strategies and turn them into concrete, everyday practices.
After more than 20 years leading transformation programmes at Orange Business, she went on to establish Design Ops practices at PayFit, Glovo and BPCE Solutions Informatiques.
Now an independent consultant and educator, she works with multidisciplinary teams to structure their design practice, measure impact and navigate change.
Guided by an inclusive view of work, she focuses on aligning people, processes and products so teams can deliver clear, useful and sustainable solutions.
Making UX Strategy Work
Many organisations now have a UX strategy. Far fewer manage to turn it into shared priorities, clear ownership and everyday habits. Between shifting goals, parallel roadmaps and scattered tools, UX ambitions often get lost between vision and execution.
In this masterclass, we’ll explore how Design Ops can make UX strategy real by aligning people, processes and tools. Drawing on real examples from scale-ups (PayFit, Glovo) and large organisations in banking and tech (Orange Business, BPCE Solutions Informatiques), Zalihata will share practical methods, simple frameworks and honest stories about what helped teams move from “strategy decks” to concrete ways of working.
What you’ll learn
- Where UX strategy typically breaks down inside organisations
- How to map your ecosystem: stakeholders, roadmaps and existing metrics
- How to connect UX objectives to a small set of focused Design Ops initiatives
- How to use early signals/metrics to show progress without heavy analytics
- Practical ideas to use roadmaps, rituals and documentation to build alignment
Format
A mix of method sharing, real-world examples and guided reflection, with collaborative activities.
Who it’s for
Design and UX leaders, Design Ops practitioners (official or unofficial), product managers and experienced designers who are trying to make UX strategy work in complex organisations, with or without formal authority.
Inclusive Collaboration Against Algorithmic Bubbles
Collaboration and inclusion are on everyone’s roadmap, but in practice many decisions are still shaped by a narrow set of voices, amplified by algorithms and AI that keep feeding us more of what we already think.
In this talk, we will explore how inclusive collaboration can help teams widen their perspective, manage disagreement more constructively and reduce blind spots in their work.
Drawing on her experience in scale-ups and large organisations, Zalihata will share concrete ways to treat users, teams and partner functions as one ecosystem, and to use AI as a support for contribution and reflection rather than a bias multiplier.
Main topics to be covered:
- How organisational dynamics, social circles, algorithms and AI contribute to narrowing which voices shape decisions.
- What it means to think in terms of an ecosystem: users, teams and partner functions rather than separate camps.
- Where AI fits in inclusive collaboration: support for contribution (drafting, rephrasing, translation) and for spotting patterns and biases in decisions.
- The conditions that make respectful, fruitful conflict possible, and how this improves collective decisions.
Key takeaways for participants:
- A clearer awareness of the systems and “bubbles” they are part of, a simple lens to spot when decisions are made from too narrow a circle, and a better understanding of what that implies in terms of risk, missed opportunities and business impact.
- Practical ideas to create respectful, fruitful conflict that helps teams think better together instead of avoiding tensions or personalising them.
- Concrete examples of how to use AI in ways that lower the barrier for quieter or marginalised voices to contribute, and help reveal patterns and blind spots in decisions without pretending to be “the truth”.