Design Better

Latest Episodes:

Making remote teams work Mar 23, 2020

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/stephen-gates-jennifer-aldrich

In this bonus episode, we chat about balancing personal and professional demands in a remote environment, especially during these challenging times. Join special guests Jennifer Aldrich, Senior Manager of Design Community Partnerships, and Stephen Gates, Head Design Evangelist, at InVision, as we discuss best practices for remote communication and how to build trust within your remote teams. We hope this episode helps you and your teams as you transition to remote work during this time of change in the face of our current health crisis. You’ll learn:

How to set expectations for remote communication
Tips for creating boundaries between work and life
Establishing documentation and processes for team collaboration
The value of soft skills in remote leadership
Benefits of working from home in building trust and connection for teams

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Jehad Affoneh: VMWare’s head of design on being a business leader, not a design leader Mar 17, 2020

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/jehad-affoneh

In this episode, we speak with VMWare’s Head of Design Jehad Affoneh about how he measures the business impact of design, and aligns design goals with engineering goals. We learn why he thinks it’s important to lead with context, and how he goes about ensuring that the diverse voices on his team are heard.

You’ll hear:

How OKRs can align goals across design and engineering
Lessons from running an internal conference for designers and executives
Tactics for ensuring diverse voices on your team are heard

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Joanna Peña-Bickley: Amazon Alexa's design leader on collaboration and diverse teams Mar 09, 2020

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/joanna-pena-bickley

Joanna Peña-Bickley has had an amazing arc to her design leadership career: from Chief Creative Officer at Matter Worldwide and IBM, to her current role as Head of Research and Design for Alexa Devices at Amazon, Joanna has always sought to design things that are “useful, usable, and magical.”

In this interview, we talk with Joanna about working cross functionally with both software and hardware teams, and what she’s learned about building a more connected workflow. We also get Joanna’s take on speaking design in the language of business, and how she works to bring more diversity into leadership at the companies where she's worked.

Takeaways:

How Joanna approaches building high-functioning teams.
What the opportunities and challenges are when designing for invisible interfaces.
How to create partnerships that will make your team successful.

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Natalya Shelburne: How designers and developers work together at The New York Times Mar 02, 2020

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/natalya-shelburne

Natalya Shelburne, Tech Lead for Design Engineering at The New York Times, sits at a fascinating crossroad of design and development. She leads a team of front-end developers and brings her own experience as a designer and art director to her current role.

We chat with Natalya about her move from design to front-end dev, and some of the fears she faced along the way. We also talk about her approach to bridging design and dev, and what she brings from her prior career as a teacher into product design.

Takeaways:

Ways to approach the unnecessary dichotomy between designers and engineers
Why respect is key to developing good cross-functional partnerships
How to overcome fear of moving into a technical role as a designer

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Kristin Wisnewski: More women in tech leadership roles Feb 24, 2020

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/kristin-wisnewski

In the tech world, it's rare these days to spend more than a few years at one company. So we were curious to learn more about Kristin Wisnewski after hearing she’d been at IBM for 18 years. In her words, she “basically grew up at IBM,” and made a rapid transition from an individual contributor role to a leadership position in 2016, where she now leads an award-winning design team.

We got to know the story of that career transformation, and what it took to get there. We also spoke with Kristin about clearing roadblocks for better work, and how to bring women into more leadership roles at technology companies.

Takeaways:

How to remain authentic to yourself as a leader
The keys to peak team performance
The way DesignOps works at IBM

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Nancy Douyon: Ethical and inclusive design Feb 17, 2020

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/nancy-douyon

Nancy Douyon has a remarkable story that lead her into a career in technology. From her childhood in Haiti, to moving to Boston and taking part in an MIT program as a kid, to running away from home and then teaching as a teenager, and on to design roles at Google and Uber, Nancy’s unconventional path gives her a unique perspective on how to approach product design for an audience that includes everyone.

We chat with Nancy about her initial reluctance to enter a technical field despite her talent, how she thinks about making sure research represents a diverse set of users, and understanding global perspectives in product design.

Takeaways:
Approach hiring by looking at someone’s story
Tips for making user research more representative
How to tackle ethical product design

Quick episode summary:

2:03 Roundtable discussion
35:39 Interview with Nancy Douyon

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Season 4 Preview Episode Feb 12, 2020

Show notes

https://www.designbetterpodcast.com

Next week we'll be launching our fourth season of the Design Better Podcast by InVision. Listen now for a special preview of the new season and get ready for new episodes coming to you weekly starting February 18th. In this new season we’re taking a closer look at how teams can work better together for greater impact across design, engineering, business, and product.

We speak with Joanna Peña-Bickley about bringing more diversity into leadership, the head of cloud engineering at Atlassian, Steve Deasy, about psychological safety and the keys to high velocity teams, and Kristin Wisnewski of IBM discusses how to inspire teams to go farther and empower managers to build trust and vulnerability. Jehad Affoneh from VMWare shares his philosophy on how empathy for his colleagues and assuming good intention helps him create the best experiences possible for customers. And Marty Cagan from Silicon Valley Product Group shares his behind-the-scenes lessons on the differences between product teams and feature teams, and why product management is often misunderstood.

Hear from the people shaping design and engineering transformation at The New York Times, Uber, Amazon, Pinterest, IBM, and even NASA. And you'll learn more about how to communicate the business impact of design at your company and how teams are leveling up their design maturity for even greater influence at work.

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Rewind: David Kelley, Founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school, on Creative Confidence and Aligning Teams Feb 04, 2020

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/david-kelley-creative-confidence

To celebrate 1 million listens to the Design Better Podcast, we're rewinding to our episode with David Kelley, Founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school, in honor of David just receiving the Edison Award for Innovation. And we're sending a special thanks to YOU for listening and helping us reach this 1 million milestone. We're tremendously grateful to you, your friends, and colleagues for tuning in and joining the journey with us.

David Kelley doesn’t like to claim to have come up with the term design thinking, even though most people would say he did. But regardless of who coined it, as founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school he has been one of the most influential proponents of design thinking, and human-centered design in general.

When it comes to bringing together engineering, product, and design teams early in the design process, and aligning those teams towards a common goal, design thinking has few equals, and should be part of the toolkit for every product driven company.

In this episode, Eli and Aarron speak with David about what it takes to bring designers and engineers together, how our workspace influences our work, and how we can encourage creative confidence in our companies.

Enjoy the chat and cheers to 1 million listens to the Design Better Podcast. Thank you so much for listening.

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Stephen Gates: Hiring and retaining the best design talent Dec 19, 2019

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/stephen-gates

InVision is starting a new series of quarterly reports on design trends. The first in the series, a Design Trends Report on Talent, was created to help you learn proactive new ways to recruit, develop, and retain creative talent.

In this bonus episode, we chat with Stephen Gates, Head Design Evangelist at InVision, about some of the things he learned while researching and producing the report as its co-author, and how the report can best be used by design leaders looking to hire, and individual contributors looking to get hired.

Also, we’re trying out something new: a roundtable discussion about some current topics in the design world. Aarron and Eli chat with some of their colleagues from InVision (in this episode, Design Specialist Emily Campbell and Stephen Gates). So get ready for our first roundtable, to be followed by an exploration of the Design Trends Report on Talent, with co-author Stephen Gates.

Articles discussed in the roundtable:

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Lessons from Season 3 Nov 08, 2019

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/season3recap

The third season of the Design Better Podcast recently wrapped up, where we explored the connected workflow: how designers can work more effectively and efficiently with their engineering and product counterparts to create incredible customer experiences.

We interviewed guests ranging from Julie Zhuo, VP of Product Design at Facebook and author of The Making of a Manager, to Diego Rodriguez, Chief Product and Design Officer at Intuit.

In this episode, Aarron and Eli share what they learned from some of the brightest minds in digital product design.

Here are a few of the top takeaways:

Learn how Google’s Abigail Hart Gray approaches measuring the value of design.
Hear how Lori Kaplan from Atlassian explains “designing across the seams” to create a unified customer experience.
Listen to Benjamin Evans discuss how practicing inclusivity can create a framework for inviting roles outside design into the design process.

So while we’re hard at work producing Season 4 of the podcast, enjoy this look back at some of the best moments in Season 3.

And for more free articles, videos, books, and stories to level up your design practice, visit https://www.designbetter.com.

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