WORKSHOP

Moving upstream: systems design for business operations

Sophia Prater has spent 15 years applying systems design to the UX of software, working inside dozens of Big Important Companies. And what she’s found over and over again is that so much of the confusion that winds up within software isn't really a UX problem. It’s a by-product of confusion in the business structure itself: What’s an initiative versus a goal? How do either of those connect to tasks? Oh, and what makes something a project... versus a channel?! What do we actually call this thing? 

These broken, unclear business systems produce broken, unclear product systems—and today, they’re also getting in the way of implementing AI systems for the business. But there is real opportunity in this fog of undefined concepts—for people who already know how to design a system. 

That's what this workshop will show you how to do. You'll learn a simple method for designing strong systems—and how to apply that method not just to a product, but upstream to the business itself. This thinking can open all kinds of new doors in your career—from shifting into an operations role inside an enterprise corporation to helping your local yoga studio owners spend more time on the mat and less time in spreadsheets. You'll walk away with the fundamentals of a massive new career opportunity for systems thinkers.

You’ll learn how to: 

• Identify important-but-abstract business objects, the concepts that run the backend of a business

• Map the connections between those objects to form a system model

• Document those objects in a tool like Notion or Airtable

• Hook that documentation into an AI business brain