Design Better

Latest Episodes:

Megan Quinn: A venture capitalist's views on how to scale a team May 29, 2018

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/megan-quinn

Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be part of fast-growing, design-led companies like Slack or Medium? Every team has challenges with scaling—and it turns out those challenges share many common traits when you peek behind the curtain. In this episode, Spark Capital’s Megan Quinn talks about the common hurdles she sees across companies as they scale. She also discusses her own experiences going from the engineering-driven culture at Google to the design-driven culture at Square, and more. “At the end of the day, design is not how something looks or feels. Design is the abstraction of the technology to the end experience for the consumer.” –Megan Quinn Listen as Eli and Aarron chat with Megan about scaling with purpose and overcoming widespread hurdles—like how to incorporate the “why” into your product roadmap along with the “what” and “when.” If you enjoy this episode, head over to iTunes to leave a review so other members of the design community can hear Megan’s perspective too.

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Meriah Garrett: Secrets to leading big design teams May 15, 2018

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/meriah-garrett

When companies start scaling design, the emphasis is sometimes on getting more shipped—but what if the first deliverable was a balanced team instead of a new feature?

USAA’s Chief Design Officer Meriah Garrett has a unique approach to creating balanced design teams. In this new episode, she also discusses her role in the C-suite and how being mission-driven affects product development across multiple offices.

“We have this power to synthesize the world into something that feels actionable, and that is both a burden and a gift...Your job is not to just put your headphones on and make a beautiful object. Your job is to listen to the world around you and drive a new perspective on it.” –Meriah Garrett

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TS Balaji: Thinking and acting like a business leader Apr 30, 2018

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/ts-balaji

Design leaders spend a lot of energy trying to get a seat at the table. It’s an ongoing process—and it’s tough to keep design involved over time. What questions should be asked along the way, and what business language can design leaders use?

In this episode, LogMeIn’s Vice President Product Design & Customer Experience TS Balaji talks about helping big corporations use design to be competitive in new ways. He covers everything from maturity models and setting up team playbooks to how LogMeIn measures the business impact of design.

Listen as Eli and Aarron chat with TS about design’s place in business—and hear why a multidisciplinary background could be the ultimate career boon, even if it does require a bit of statistics.

TS Balaji's Bio

TS is a user experience and product development executive, currently leading product design, internationalization, and insights and analytics functions for LogMeIn.

As a former designer turned strategist, TS specializes in identifying new technologies, spotting trends, introducing business models, and combining all of the above with design to advocate for customers. Prior to his current role, TS established and led digital experience practices at Cox Communications and Sprint.

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Diana Mounter: Building efficient design systems at Github Apr 16, 2018

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/diana-mounter

Design systems give product designers and developers reusable, interchangeable components to make the design process efficient and repeatable. They’re a critical part of scaling—so why build everything from scratch when you can plug in pre-built elements?

In this episode, GitHub’s Design Systems Manager Diana Mounter talks about navigating the path from style guide contributor to full-time design systems manager. She covers everything from getting buy-in beyond the design team to deciding whether or not to make a system open source.

Listen as Eli and Aarron chat with Diana about refining and growing GitHub’s design system, Primer—and learn how a little-known vegetable became part of her personal brand.

Diana's bio

Diana Mounter is a designer based in Brooklyn, NY. She specializes in design systems and has a background in user-centered design.

Diana currently leads the Design Systems team at GitHub, where she helps manage their design system, Primer. In her spare time, she organizes the NYC Design Systems Coalition, writes, and speaks about design, code, and working with people.

Diana is also a co-author of the DesignBetter.Co Design Systems Handbook

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Meredith Black: building DesignOps dream teams Apr 01, 2018

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/meredith-black

A lot of companies are investing more in design. As they do, the organization scales. As it scales, it has to operationalize, become more efficient, and plug into the rest of the company—but what makes all that possible?

In this episode, Pinterest’s Head of Design Operations Meredith Black talks about the emerging practice of DesignOps, and how she introduced it to Pinterest more than three years ago. Meredith covers everything from when it’s time to start building a DesignOps team to advice for getting started. She even reveals where she finds most of her best hires.

Listen as Eli and Aarron chat with Meredith about starting and growing a DesignOps practice—and how she nearly joined the FBI before finding herself in a different kind of “ops” career.

Meredith's bio

Meredith Black is the Head of Design Operations at Pinterest, where she's pioneered the Design Program Management organization and grown it to 11 design program managers in almost four years. Within Product Design, she’s also responsible for operations, recruiting, resourcing and risk management.

Prior to Pinterest, Meredith worked at design firms Hot Studio (acquired by Facebook) and IDEO. Her love for design runs deep. Real deep.

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Lynsey Thornton: Inside Shopify’s growth, re-organization, and design system Mar 18, 2018

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/lynsey-thornton

Over the last 10 years, Shopify has grown from a scrappy 5-person startup to a team of more than 3,000 across five locations. Scaling a company that fast takes a lot of talented people—and Lynsey Thornton is one of them.

As Shopify’s VP of UX and Core Product, Lynsey takes on an array of challenging tasks. In the first episode of the season, she talks about everything from building a leadership pipeline to governance of the famed design system Polaris. Her advice and first-hand experiences also highlight major technology pain points—like implementing customer-centric business models and helping individual contributors successfully transition to leadership.

Listen as Eli and Aarron talk about scaling design at Shopify with Lynsey—and don’t miss her biggest piece of advice for finding great org design inspiration.

Lynsey Thornton's Bio

Originally from Ireland, Lynsey is now the VP of UX and Core Product at Shopify in Vancouver, BC. With a background in design, project management, and business, she focuses on building UX teams and practices in high-growth tech companies.

Prior to leading Shopify’s front-end developers, designers, researchers, and content strategists—along with the team that builds the core product—Lynsey designed gaming and gambling experiences. In addition to UX, her true loves are ethnographic research and developing women in tech.

Follow Lynsey on Twitter @lynseythornton

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Mia Blume: Are you ready to shift from team member to team leader? Oct 29, 2017

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/mia-blume

“Will I lose my creativity? Will I be stuck in meetings all day?” Those are common concerns for any individual contributor transitioning to a managerial role—even experienced product leaders like Mia Blume.

Luckily, Mia’s impressive career spans positions at places like IDEO, Pinterest, and Square, so she’s had plenty of opportunities to see what it takes to make a fundamental impact on culture from beyond her laptop screen.

In this episode, Mia shares what it was like stepping away from daily design work to lead, how she combats imposter syndrome, and how being a designer ultimately made her a more effective manager. Now, with a motto for time management and loads of experience walking other people through that transition, Mia can expertly explain how to navigate the intricacies of being a great leader—which includes everything from managing priorities to being vulnerable on the job.

Mia’s bio

As a former design leader at Pinterest, Square, and IDEO, Mia’s work is informed by her deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities designers face in hyper-growth start-up environments. She is specifically attuned to the challenges of women in tech—and, more importantly, their potential impact on individuals, teams, and organizations when their authentic, empathetic, and intuitive leadership style is unlocked.

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Christian Madsbjerg: How ethnography leads to a deeper understanding of users Oct 15, 2017

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/christian-madsbjerg

In today’s tech-driven economy, it seems like it can be hard to justify the value of a traditional liberal arts education. But given the speed at which AI-driven advancements are taking over traditional jobs—even technical ones—perhaps a better understanding of humans and their cultures is exactly what we need.

Because being product-driven really means people people-driven—and we’re betting few people understand the human experience better than the author of Sensemaking, and co-founder and Senior Partner of ReD Associates, Christian Madsbjerg.

In this episode, Aarron and Eli chat with Christian about using tools from human and social sciences to inform business decisions. Christian’s expertise helps clarify the methods a lot of fast-moving companies botch, like gathering proper ethnographic research, and the hazards of conducting focus groups. Together, they also dig into the pros of a liberal arts education and how it helps foster the crucial skill of critical thinking.

Put on your thinking cap and enjoy this interview with Christian Madsbjerg, and thanks for listening.

Christian Madsbjerg’s bio

For the past 20 years, Christian Madsbjerg has worked as a management consultant—but he writes, speaks, and teaches on the practical application of Human Sciences. So far, his work has been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Madsbjerg’s latest book, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm, was released in the Spring of 2017 by Hachette Book Group. His first book, Moment of Clarity, co-written with Mikkel Rasmussen and published in the Fall of 2014, has been published in 15+ languages. Christian studied philosophy and political science in Copenhagen and London, and has a master’s degree from the University of London.

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Jake Knapp: Lessons from running 150+ design sprints at Google Ventures Oct 01, 2017

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/jake-knapp-design-sprint

If we asked you to name a recent book that’s really changed how product teams address sticky challenges, there’s a good chance Jake Knapp’s Sprint would be at the top of your list. Since publishing and popularizing the process, design sprints have become a tool for teams at organizations as wide ranging as Prudential, the United Nations, and The British Museum.

Given the impact of Sprint, we’re delighted to have Jake on the show to dig into questions we’ve been curious about since reading. In this episode, we run through topics like the relationship between design thinking and the sprint process, how design sprints can work in harmony with an agile development cycle, and when not to use design sprints.

Jake also shares a sneak peek of his next book.

Grab your copy of Sprint and get ready to learn from the guy who literally wrote the book on design sprints.

Jake's Bio

Jake Knapp the New York Times bestselling author of Sprint. He spent ten years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the Design Sprint process and ran it over 150 times with companies like Nest, Slack, 23andMe, and Flatiron Health. Today, teams around the world—from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 500s to schools and governments—are using Design Sprints to solve big problems and test new ideas.

Previously, Jake helped build products like Gmail, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Encarta, and nowadays, he's writing new books and hanging around IDEO as a Visiting Fellow. Jake is currently among the world’s tallest designers.

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Laura Martini: So your boss doesn't believe in design research Sep 17, 2017

Show notes

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/007-laura-martini-getting-to-the-right-finish-line

If there’s anyone we’ve interviewed on the Design Better Podcast so far that really embodies the product-driven concept, it’s Laura Martini. Not only does she have a background in both design and engineering, but she also has a keen product sense with a real understanding the business factors behind good design decisions.

Laura's article on Medium entitled, "So your boss doesn’t believe in design research" caught our attention as it speaks to a common challenge we hear in design teams and offers a smart way to reframe things. https://blog.prototypr.io/so-your-boss-doesn-t-believe-in-user-research-40d8128db08e

Laura has had a really interesting career too—from working as a researcher in John Maeda’s Media Lab at MIT and leading the design team at med-tech startup Counsyl to her current role as a senior interaction designer on Google’s Analytics Platform.

In this episode, Aarron and Eli chat with Laura about how her engineering and design backgrounds complement each other, how a company’s values shape her own work, and how design leaders can help individual contributors grow.

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