UX design pioneers and Adaptive Path co-founders Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett discuss the evolving challenges and opportunities for design leaders.
59: Design Isn’t Dead, But It’s Seen Better Days (ft. John Gleason)
Jun 06, 2025
Show Notes
Help Jesse and Peter better serve you by sharing a bit more about who you are, what you’re into, and what you’d like to hear from us in this listener survey which should just a few minutes to complete. Thank you!
Summary: Peter and Jesse are joined by design and business consultant John Gleason. Coming up through P&G’s famous design initiative, we get his perspective on design beyond digital products, such as consumer packaged goods, we explore some significant parallels across industries and design domains with important lessons on the pitfalls that lead to diminishing influence for design leaders, and share what they should advocate in order to break the downward spiral.
Help UX and Get a Chance to receive $100! Peter is conducting a global UX and Design Organizational Health survey to better understand the state of our practice and industry. 5 respondents will receive either a $100 gift card or 1 hr of consulting/coaching with Peter. It takes about 10 minutes to complete. Thank you!
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: On today’s show, is design dead? That’s the question strategy consultant John Gleason asked at a recent design conference panel. The ensuing discussion struck some familiar notes for digital product design leaders, but John Gleason doesn’t come from digital product design. Today, we’ll get his perspective on design beyond digital products, such as consumer packaged goods, the stuff you find on the shelves in grocery and drugstore. We’ll explore some significant parallels across industries and design domains with important lessons on the pitfalls that lead to diminishing influence for design leaders, what they should advocate for, and how to break the downward spiral.
Peter: Hi John. Thank you for joining us.
John: Delighted to be here, Peter. Thank you.
Peter: So you and I met on the internet, specifically LinkedIn, around a discussion that was happening based on an article written in Fast Company that was explaining what this journalist had witnessed at a panel of design leaders that you helped moderate. And the title of the article had the provocative statement: Is Design Dead? So that’s how I’d like to start this conversation with you. Maybe we’re starting at the end, and then this can be a very brief conversation…
John: What if I said the answer is yes, end of story?
Peter: Then, then, then we wrap up the podcast.
Jesse: Thanks everybody for listening. You can find us at findingourway.design.
Peter: But seriously, I do want to ask, it is meant to be a provocative, obviously there were discussions happening on that panel and in that room that led to this question. So when you’re faced with a question is design dead, how do you respond?
John: Well, we respond by creating a conference to talk about it. So my conference partners and I, David Butler, who was the first head of design at Coca-Cola and Fred Richards, who’s a long time ECD, CCO -type person in the brand design space at big agencies. The three of us came together just simply to talk about the industry itself.
And as we compared notes, I have started to see that design is in decline, particularly in the consumer facing space, probably starting eight or nine years ago, kind of as evidenced by shrinking budgets and shrinking organizations and diminishing the reporting structure of design into leadership in those companies.
And a lot of the people that I’ve talked to kind of chalk it up to, oh, well that’s the economy. Oh, we’re gonna cut budgets, it’s belt tightening, it’s these things. But I’ve had the chance to peek inside more than a hundred big corporations and a couple thousand design agencies. And so I see patterns that emerged.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: And that led to the provocation of “Is design dead?” And I think we inherently knew that the answer was no, but I don’t think the rest of the room…so we had about a hundred people design leaders from various companies, mostly consumer facing corporations, but we had telecom, we had financial services, we had healthcare, we had core tech there in the room represented as well.
I don’t think most of the people in the room saw the patterns because they only see what’s happening in their company, or the one or two companies they may have been a part of. And so there was certainly evidence, as we started to unfold some of the things, people were, “Oh, just thought that was belt tightening. I just thought that was seasonal. I just thought that was post pandemic economy.” That started the conversation.
Jesse: So tell us a little bit about these design teams that you were studying and what was the change that you noticed over time? What was happening with these teams?
John: So a, few things that I’ve had the chance to see. I’ve tracked about 200, almost 250 companies since about 2016, 2017.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: And it’s things like, what agencies do they work with? Have they built in-house teams? What’s the reporting structure of the organizations? And some of the patterns that I’ve seen, Jesse, are 39% of those companies, so 95 companies of the 243, have cut the top one or two levels of their design function…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
John: … or they’ve downgraded the title to some lower title in the company, or they’ve downgraded the boss, the reporting title of the boss of those organizations. Conversely, only 6%, only 15 of those companies have done the opposite, have elevated design with a higher title or a higher reporting status in the company. 9% of them, 22 companies have eliminated more than half of their entire design function in a single year.
Jesse: Wow.
John: 84% of them, this one shouldn’t be a surprise to people. 84% of the design leaders or the heads of design reports to a specific function in the company…
Jesse: hmm
John: Marketing, innovation product. To me, the troubling part of that is 75% of them don’t report to the head of that function.
Jesse: hmm.
John: They report to somebody lower in that functional hierarchy, which again, to me, signals a deemphasis of design, as a more of a service organization than a beacon for the future. Almost half, 47% of these companies, the head of design is at a senior director or lower.
Jesse: Hmm.
John: They’re not even in the executive community inside of those companies, nor do they have a career opportunity to grow beyond that director, senior director, some are even senior manager.
Jesse: That’s as far as the design ladder reaches in those organizations.
John: Right, right. Yeah.
Jesse: So I find myself curious about the mandates of these teams and what these teams are being asked to deliver, and whether those mandates are shrinking as the teams scale down and move downstream as you’re describing in these very large organizations.
So what kind of design are we talking about here?
John: They certainly are diminishing in the scope of influence inside of those companies. So many of them, the design organization in a lot of consumer goods companies is really a packaging function.
And it ends up being a decoration function for packaging.
Jesse: Okay.
John: In some cases, they might be able to influence a better consumer experience, but, in many cases, especially in the, present economic circumstance, it’s cost cut, diminished, streamlined.
Jesse: Right. We’re basically talking about boxes and bottles on retail shelves.
John: Yeah. Yeah. And, there are some where design sits in an R and D or innovation organization…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
John: … where design influences, again, the structural component of packaging.
Occasionally they’ll influence the juice and the powders and the things that are inside the boxes and bottles. But mostly more powerful R and D organization says, Hey, design, we’ve got that. We’ll take care of that.
Jesse: Right.
John: And they tend to be looking at very narrow components inside the company. The other interesting thing, particularly as it relates to a more digital component, is many of these companies have assigned a chief digital officer in charge of the digital transformation and digital pathway for those big companies, building their own design teams, largely UX, UI and some development, although development tends to be outsourced and offshored. And they’re not connected to the other design capabilities inside the company.
Jesse: Right. Yeah.
John: And in fact they sometimes compete. I did some consulting work for a couple of companies where there was somewhat of a bitter, antagonistic relationship between the head of design and the head of digital.
Jesse: Yeah. Well this is, I laugh because this is a regular pattern that we saw in our consulting work going back 20 years. That if the digital product design team was more closely aligned with digital than with design, sometimes that created a conflict and that created friction internally in terms of how things got done.
I’m curious about the evolution that you’ve seen in these mandates. So in what ways have these design teams had to refocus their efforts as they’ve scaled down?
John: I spent 20 years at Procter and Gamble. I was a part of the very earliest portions of P and G’s journey to elevate design.
Jesse: Hmm.
John: When I joined the design function, there were 60 people in the design function at P and G. When I left, about five years later, there were 350. It was all around strategic design, leadership, the head of design, Claudia Kotchka at the time, and the CEO AG Lafley had a vision for design. So, why I believe design is in decline is most of the design responsibilities that I see today are nowhere close to what I experienced at P and G.
Peter: Hmm.
Jesse: Hmm
John: That’s the decline part, but you know, there are one or two work generations that have come in and out of the workforce since the early two thousands. I’m often brought into corporate organizations either by the head of design who wants to try to figure out how to articulate up to the C-suite about how design is more important, how it should be invited earlier, how it should be organized and not just touching an artifact, you know, a package or a website or a banner or something, but influence the entire enterprise.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: The C-suite often has no clue what design would do with the rest of the enterprise other than the thing that they had been doing…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
John: … in the company. And so there’s often that disconnect.
Jesse: right
John: One of the things that I often see, first of all, there is no school largely for design leaders to step in and talk business.
Jesse: Right.
John: Very, very few programs. IIT does a nice job. SCAD is beginning to do things like that by building a business innovation component. But largely it’s teaching the tools of the industry. So when somebody lands in one of these important jobs, they speak the language that they know, whatever it is: UX, UI, digital, color theory, communication theory, whatever those things are. And the thing that I have seen is, when they are under duress, when the business pressures start to pile up, most design leaders recess back into becoming uber project managers for the design activities, rather than leaning into the organizational component of influencing structure in humans and leadership.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: If it gets to that, it begins to spiral. And within two years, that person is often gone because they’re micromanaging their team, and they’re trying to deliver great outputs, but not really influencing…
Jesse: Right.
John: …where design can influence. Design has a superpower of seeing things that other people can’t see, but often can’t articulate that in the context of the business language.
Jesse: It almost suggests that, there’s, like, this gravitational force that pulls leaders down toward this sort of operational value proposition, as opposed to a more strategic value proposition for design as a function, for themselves as leaders, that takes active, ongoing energy to resist for leaders, yeah?
John: One of the things I observed at P and G was when design was added as this new strategic capability for the company at the request of the CEO AG Lafley, the other functions felt like they had to defend themselves against design taking the fun stuff away from them. And part of it was, it isn’t trying to take things away. There was a component of let’s make sure the right people are with the right skills, are working on the right things at the right time. The influence of design was intended to try to make everything else better.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: The ability to step back and really advocate for the user, in our case, the consumer. You know, P&G was pretty well known for consumer research and brand management and marketing, a lot of other things. So the idea that design could step in and knew better than these things that have been in place for 50 or a hundred years, some people kind of took it personally.
I earn a lot of enemies in the design space when I say this. I say if a company really wants to elevate design in a truly strategic way for the entire enterprise, it’s my opinion, the first head of design probably should not be somebody with a portfolio.
Jesse: Hmm. Who should they be instead?
John: It should be somebody that might have come out of the business, might have been a marketer, might have been an innovator, might have been a strategist, but has a high IQ for design because those people know how to have the battles with other people with more stripes.
They know how to, play the political game. They know how to influence. And I’m gonna be horrendously unfair and I’m probably gonna get a lot of mail from your listeners. Designers index introvert.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: Yeah. You’re not gonna get any pushback on that.
John: Which means I don’t want conflict. I’m gonna run away from conflict and I’m not gonna address it.
Whereas Claudia was an accountant by education and a marketer by training. And she had no fear walking into people that had more stripes than her to say, you’re not doing it right. I mean, she threatened a few business unit presidents to say, I’m taking your whole design team because you haven’t treated them well. You don’t respect them, and they all wanna quit, so I’m gonna take them.
And of course, you can’t do that. And, you know, then the tete-a-tete occurred, and those are extreme examples, but part of this is, unless a business leader, whatever function you’re in, and I’ll highlight design in particular, unless you’re willing to fall on the sword for some things…
Jesse: mm.
John: … then, you can expect that the pressures of the business environment and the politics has the risk of crumbling your status in the enterprise.
Peter: A couple of thoughts. The first, it’s interesting to hear you say that about that idea of your first head of design not necessarily being someone who came up through the practice. It sounds like Claudia was like that. Jesse and I have had that experience, him more directly than I, with the head of design at Capital One, which was the company that acquired Adaptive Path, was Scott Zimmer, who… his background was in brand and marketing.
But he was design mature. He understood the opportunity that design delivered, and this was, you know, over a decade ago, better than almost any design executive I ever met, he knew how to communicate up. He knew how to get senior leadership excited about what designers could do in a way that designers often struggle articulating their own value.
So I’ve seen that. I wanna go back though to the design in decline conversation. ‘Cause in order to decline it had to have risen…
John: yep.
Peter: …before then. And you explain the P and G story where a very savvy CEO invests in this function, makes it strategic.
Like AG Lafley clearly had a plan. With Claudia had a kind of lieutenant who could realize that plan. But that’s likely an outlier, Right. Whereas in these other organizations where design was elevated, I’m curious what you see. ‘Cause you know, you’re, coming at us from a consumer packaged goods, maybe more in the advertising, marketing side compared to where Jesse and I live.
But my concern for those design leaders who were elevated is that they had not been set up for success by their leadership. Their leadership didn’t know what they were doing, elevating them into those roles. Say we’ve taken a director or senior director of packaging design, we promoted that person into a VP role that had broader design mandate.
But this person with a packaging design background knows packaging design. They don’t understand design for innovation, design for new product experience, all of those things. Maybe they tried, maybe they didn’t, doesn’t matter.
But at some point, like, because this person hadn’t been set up for success, it would almost be inevitable that there would be a decline, regardless of broader economic conditions. I’m seeing you nod your head.
So I’m curious how this could have been handled better by everybody, you know 10 to 15 years ago instead of like, oh, you have a title with the word design in it, so we’re gonna give you more authority, but we’re not gonna necessarily understand the implications of what it means for you to be an executive. We’re just gonna all of a sudden give you that title. it just feels like, this was bound to happen.
John: You’re exactly right that it is in fact bound to happen because the vast majority of the companies that I’ve worked with and or studied, where the company chose to make a deliberate attempt to elevate design with a higher title, a new person that they perhaps brought from outside. The first observation I’ve made is most of the senior leaders, the C-suite leaders in those companies they don’t think somebody at a VP, SVP, EVP or Chief title needs to have somebody around them to protect them.
Jesse: Mm.
John: No other chief or SVP in the company, you know, they’re navigating the politics themselves. The head of R&D, the head of finance, the head of marketing. The most successful of those, where it was elevated, Proctor is one where AG Lafley was, in essence, the protector for Claudia.
When Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo, she also was the inventor that design was gonna make a difference at PepsiCo. First elevated somebody internally. Didn’t work so well. There was a big packaging fiasco with Tropicana. But, I give her a lot of credit by not walking away from it after that fiasco and she continued to lean into it. Ultimately hired Mauro Porcini.
Peter: Mm.
John: David Butler, when he was brought into Coke, there was an influencer behind him that planted the seed that design could be more strategic. Mark Mathieu, who went on to Unilever, then Samsung but in those organizations there were people that were aligned with and connected to those people to help provide some business interference.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: And in those organizations, they had a longer run and a more strategic run for design.
Where the newly appointed head of design steps in, I’ve seen 10 or 15 of these where they were promised access to the CEO and the CMO but that access turned into, oh, I need to prepare three weeks ahead of time and send the deck one week ahead of time in order to have a meeting with the CEO.
Whereas the example, and again, I’m super spoiled by this AG Lafley role model. Claudia had a design board on which Ivy Ross was on the board at the time. She was at the Gap or Old Navy. She’s now at Google. Tim Brown was on that board. AG never missed a board meeting. So the relationship that design had with the CEO at P and G was a casual one.
Jesse: Right.
John: It wasn’t surrounded by formalities and PowerPoint decks and, you know, six weeks lead time. McKinsey did an amazing study on the business value of design in 2018. DMI did something where they created a design value index with 16 or 18 companies, although I think they cherry picked 16 companies that were performing well so that they could track the commercial value. The UK Design Council did it before DMI and then my own observations, I’ve kind of developed this notion of six attributes of what I call design engaged companies, one of which is advocacy. That the senior most people in the company see that design is a critical component of the company and they support it appropriately. There’s access, there’s meetings, there’s, you know, public recognition you know, titles and all those other things that come with advocacy.
But it’s just not the two humans. It’s just not a CEO and the head of design. it’s advocating that design needs to touch other parts of the company.
Jesse: Mm.
John: You know, when I step into a C-suite conversation, I often say, so, you know, how does design play a role in your company? Oh, you know, packaging or product or innovation. and I often touch on things, well, do you have any design talent looking after employee engagement, trying to create a place that more and more people have a passion for wanting to work here?
Oh, well, that’s our HR organization. It’s like, you know, with all due respect to the talented human resources people, most of human resources is built to protect the corporation.
Peter: Right.
Jesse: Indeed.
Yeah.
John: … to inspire more loyalty to the enterprise.
Jesse: So I find myself curious about this notion that there’s a skillset that is needed in order to really drive design at this executive level, that these design leaders have not been able to cultivate within themselves. I work as a coach with lots of design leaders at different stages in this process. And for some folks, they get to that executive level and they realize that like, oh, everything that I’ve learned up to this point is almost completely irrelevant now.
John: Right.
Jesse: And so I’m curious about like, what are the corners that you’ve seen leaders have to turn as they kind of ascend out of simply overseeing design as a function to actually being an active participant in executive level leadership?
John: Well, design leaders recognize that virtually everything they do is part of a team sport.
Jesse: Hmm.
John: And, it inhibits their ability to articulate what it is we’ve contributed to the enterprise…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
John: … because it involves so many other people to get a product to market or to create a new experience or whatever those things are. And in most cases, rather than trying to step up and say, we had this impact, they often acquiesce and say nothing.
Jesse: Mm.
John: And so somebody else often steps in, you know, the ad agency is notorious for stepping in to say, Hey, we, completely repositioned this brand and we did this. We created new experiences, but it was the ad campaign that helped drive a 40% lift in sales.
And part of it is, he or she who has data, has power.
And design, there’s so much that design does that isn’t measured by data. And so it’s super hard…
Jesse: yeah.
John: … and to me one of the abilities is, how do I talk about impact? It doesn’t have to be a mathematical calculation or effectiveness.
And then the other is, creating a vision. As much as one of design’s superpowers, in my opinion, is creating the future for a product or service or experience. We do a terrible job doing it for ourself and our own organization and how we’re gonna fit in, in an organizational context.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: Yeah. In my coaching and in my masterclass I stress the importance of, I call it having an agenda, just because the word vision can mean multiple things. And so I call it having an agenda, and it’s something that so many design leaders, yeah, lack, like, they don’t realize they need to have their own point of view.
Jesse: Point of view, right.
Peter: Their own perspective, their own change that they seek, or if they don’t, they end up just getting in a reactive mode. They end up simply responding to whatever’s coming at them because there’s nothing that they’re trying to drive. One of the reasons Jesse and I were interested in having you join us is your background is consumer packaged goods, P and G, more on the marketing, brand, quote unquote consumer side.
Our experience is more on the digital side. And I think it’s interesting to consider what’s different, what’s the same.
Something that you’ve been touching on,
A designer’s and design leader’s ability to connect their work with value and feeling like they need to have every link in the chain specified or they can’t commit to any ownership of it. But I think related to that, you’ve touched on this, but I’m curious what you see in your world, Jesse and I have talked a lot about the primary value of design is in facilitating or multiplying other functions’ ability to succeed as opposed to design delivering direct value.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: You’re nodding your head. So it sounds like you’ve seen something similar, but how do you counsel those leaders to navigate that conversation when their leadership is like, well, what has design done for me lately, and design can’t say I shipped this thing. ‘Cause they didn’t, but they worked with these groups, and through that work, they helped those groups improve what it is they’re doing. What is your approach to telling those stories better?
John: I think you’ve struck a nerve on one of the big opportunities for design, because design often is a curious source of questions. What if, how might we, did we look into that,who said that? You know, who are we trying to reach for what purpose?
And the business is about, let’s go, I don’t have time for these questions. You know, we gotta get something out the door.
And especially in tough economic circumstances, the planning horizon becomes this quarter, next quarter, which isn’t a boundary space that design is very good at. Design is much better… they want to talk about the future of the brand, the consumer, the experience. And somebody at the conference used this rubric of the now, the near, and the far. Design tends to want to talk about the far. The capacity of the business leaders and the business, especially, the more dire the circumstance, the more they want to talk about the now.
Jesse: Right.
John: And so a CEO might only have capacity for 1% of their time on the far, even though that should be a part of what he or she is really thinking about for the corporation.
But design wants to spend their time beyond the near and into the far, and so there’s, a misalignment of planning horizons.
Jesse: Well, it’s a tricky place that design leaders find themselves in, too, because I think that often they feel like they are like standing on the dock with a stack of life preservers, watching these executives flail in the water, going, “Hey, I can, I can throw you this thing at any time. And you’ll be good.” And they’re like, “No, no. Focus on your current work.”
Right? And so like, how do, how do you strike that balance of actually activating the real value proposition of design as a function, actually, you know, maybe rescuing some of these C-levels out of the water before they drown, while also making them feel like they’re getting what they want from you.
John: Well, let me, continue your metaphor of the executives flailing in the bay.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: When an an executive is in that circumstance, who are the likely people or the likely functions they are likely to go to first…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
John: … in the attempt of trying to save the ship or save themselves? Design is often the last one,
Peter: They will go to marketing, they’ll go to sales, they’ll go to whomever.
Yeah.
John: They’ll go finance, they’ll go to supply chain, they’ll go to regulatory, you know, depending on the business and where the stress is. and that’s where I think design needs to learn how to lean in to show that they’re a business solver, not a creator of an artifact…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
John: …you know, code or a device or something. One of the best examples, and I use this example all over the place, is Logitech. Bracken Darrell, the former CEO hires Alistair Curtis. And everywhere Bracken went internally and externally, he said, I hired Alistair to help create Logitech 3.0. And so advocacy. Bracken set the vision for Alistair, and much of that continues now under Haneke Faber and Molin.
Peter: Hmm.
John: And, to me, part of it is, how do you empower the design lead so that the rest of the business expects you to be invited to the important business stuff.
Jesse: Right.
John: And in fact, lead some of the important business stuff. If the senior most people continue to see design as a creator of artifacts and implementer of execution, then it’s super hard for that person leading that function to elevate beyond.
Peter: Well, this begs a question that I have been asked for 25 years,
So we know that design seems to need executive sponsors. You’ve stated that your research has shown it, in a way that other functions don’t need executive sponsors, right? You mentioned that advocacy role is one of your six indicators of a kind of a design mature, design ready environment.
That begs a question, how do you realize that executive sponsorship, someone like Bracken, someone like AG Lafley, someone like Ginny Rometti at IBM, someone like Carl Bass at Autodesk, these CEOs knew that design could help solve their problems, so they didn’t need anyone to educate or evangelize.
Jesse and I, and I’m sure you do as well, but Jesse and I, the vast majority of the design leaders we talk to or work with, their leadership are not advocates. They might not be hostile…
Jesse: yeah.
Peter: … right? They might be even curious, but they’re not advocates. And so the challenge that, so many design leaders face is how do they turn those executives into advocates?
Can you even do that, right? There’s some commentary over the last 15 or so years that, like, if an executive doesn’t get it, there’s very little you can do to help them get it. Like, it’s not like it’s a hidden mystery. It’s not that no one knows that design can help business.
McKinsey’s written about it. HBR has written about it. Roger Martin wrote about it like AG Lafley proved it through the P and G success. And so is it a fool’s errand to try to convince or persuade that executive to advocate for you? Or is that worthwhile?
And if it is, what have you seen, at least in the organizations that you’re looking at, that starts turning that tide so that executives who may have been, again, not hostile– if they’re against design, there’s almost nothing you can do–but, are you aware of mechanisms that, have helped turn that corner.
John: There are some things that I’ve seen. There are some things I recommend. One of the underlying reasons that I believe design is being dismantled and diminishing, is what I call C-Suite ignorance. Part of that is there are new C-suite members being minted every week. Many of them have never been exposed to the idea that design could be anything but…
Jesse: right.
John: …a decoration station. So they just don’t know. And, the other reality that often occurs is the genetic makeup of people that reach C-suite status or senior executive status, they get to a point where they can no longer admit they don’t know something. So they can’t admit that they don’t know that design is or isn’t something. So they lean in to whatever they believe or perceive or have experienced design to be in their past.
Jesse: Yeah.
John: I mentioned earlier that I’m often hired by heads of design trying to articulate up.
The other group that hires me are the C-Suite people who want a discreet advisor who’s gonna whisper in their ear about, tell me the things I should know about design.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: They’re not gonna publicize broadly that they don’t know, then, and, you know, they ask me to be discreet about the relationship.
And it’s a Cyrano de Bergerac kind of thing. I try to tell them what they ought to know, and how they ought to play that out to their organization. And some of it is just purely an exploration. Why should I care? I keep reading that design is something I should know about, you know, why don’t I know more about it? Why isn’t it more prevalent?
And I think part of it is, nobody questions the existence of a chief marketing officer. No one questions the existence of a chief financial officer.
But design is a confusing word. It’s a confusing concept. It’s a noun, it’s a verb, it’s an outcome. It’s an organization. And most people in the business context see it as the participation or creation of an artifact, not necessarily a way of thinking or a mindset so to your question, Peter, small wins is a big successful pathway.
But oftentimes, if you read marketing publications, the typical CMO has an 18 to 22 month time window of their credibility and existence in a company.
Jesse: Mm-hmm. Right.
Peter: That’s it. Not even two years.
Jesse: Yeah.
John: Not even two years. So they’re not looking at things that are gonna be three years from now. They need to go prove and deliver now…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
John: … which again impacts the ability for design to help influence and be a partner in that, delivery. Something we did at P and G, Claudia Kotchka, in the very early stages, brought in IDEO to run a hands-on work session for the top 50 executives in the company.
And it was very much a hands-on exercise, that had nothing to do with P&G products, but more about how do you rethink and re-see, and how do you stay focused on the user and the consumer, and how do you build better experiences?
It was a half day workshop and, you know, imagine 50 high performing type A’s sitting in a room being led through a workshop, but there were varying degrees of impatience, I would imagine.
But a part of it was, then they translated it to a business opportunity for each of the businesses that were in the room. So, okay, we did this generic thing altogether. Here’s how we do this. Focus on the consumer, how might you create something.
Now, and they literally handed things out to say, we’ve looked into most of your other businesses, and here are some things that could be, as we look at consumer behavior, things you might be interested in looking at. Now it probably was a great commercial for IDEO, too, inside of this group to say we’ve already thought about some opportunities.
But, the economic circumstances were more positive. They weren’t belt tightening times like they are now or 2009. Capital was very cheap to acquire. So there were circumstances that I think accelerated our ability to do things like that.
Jesse: Right. I feel like all of this connects to a question that I often ask my leadership coaching clients when they are stepping into a role for the first time, which is, what are you inheriting? And yes, you’re inheriting a team and you’re, yes, you’re inheriting a product and you’re, yes, you’re inheriting a legacy, but you’re also inheriting a whole bunch of expectations.
Expectations that maybe were set by the leader before you, maybe were set by leaders that these executives, to your point, had other exposure to, that may have nothing to do with what you think the value proposition of you and your team and design as a function actually is.
And so it then becomes this game of resetting expectations, and in a lot of ways listening. Just simply listening for what these executives think you’re there to provide and figuring out how to start to lay out the stones on the path that will take them to the value proposition that you actually feel like your team has to offer. But that’s a time consuming process. It is not something that happens overnight.
And to your point, in a lot of these cases, 21 months is the horizon. So how do you balance those things?
John: I think you touched on something really important, Jesse, is the idea of, a design leader that might be interviewing for a gig inside of a company, are they asking the right questions about what does it look like today…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
John: …because one of the things that I’ve seen is most internal talent acquisition teams inside of companies have no clue how to hire for this role or even for the whole function.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: They think they need a portfolio, they think they need, you know, these things. And if they’re not getting help from a recruiter who knows this space, especially for a critically important role like the head of design or a VP of design.
One of the things that I coach the design leaders is, every meeting you have with your colleagues and counterparts in the company, you should be planting the “what if” seed somewhere in the organization to say, What if it looked different? What if it could be here?
It’s a super inexpensive way to try to get them to bite, you know, to lean in and say, you know, why would you say that that’s something we should look at? Then you can lean in with consumer data, or you can lean in with trend data, or you can lean in with economic circumstances.
The other thing that I advise every design leader I coach with is, put a gigantic bogey in the ears and the minds of your senior leaders. You know, hey, I think I could help get us a billion dollars of incremental revenue if, you know, and then lay out, have your hostage list there.
I need a team of this size. I need budgets. I need, you know, advice, I need your advocacy. I need these things, but I think I could help lead us toward an incremental billion dollars in revenue. And, almost none of them actually do it because they’re scared to death to be accountable for a number that they don’t have full responsibility of, How do you go deliver it?
Jesse: The big, hairy, audacious goal.
John: Yeah, exactly. Part of it, Jesse, to your question, keep planting seeds, keep leaning in, keep pushing, keep challenging, keep questioning, so that the business eventually sees… One of the things I often see, especially in consumer goods, is the business leader saying, we don’t have the time and we don’t have the budget to go do that ethnography study.
Jesse: Right.
John: We already know what we need to know about the consumer. And, here’s the idea that we’re gonna launch. And oftentimes it’s not a bad idea, but it’s not gonna be the disruptive category-changing domain-creating idea.
It’s gonna be a conservative… in most cases, consumer goods companies are notorious for calling flavored line extensions, a massive new innovation.
Jesse: Hmm.
John: And it’s like, I don’t think the consumer thinks cinnamon is particularly innovative.
Peter: The time dimension’s an interesting one. And I had a realization as you were talking about the 21 months, as you’re talking about how design often succeeds when it’s able to look far, and the results of truly impactful design take more than 21 months to be realized.
But on the flip side, what I also see with design leaders is an impatience that things aren’t as they should be now. Like, they know what that change should be. They know we should be doing more ethnographic interviews. They know we should be running projects in this different way. They have a sense of, it’s evident how this should be all operating, why aren’t we just doing it that way?
And so in some areas there’s this impatience that gets in their own way. You know, you’re talking about every conversation, move things a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. Design leaders are like, why? We know what we should be doing. Why aren’t we just doing the thing?
And so I’m curious your thoughts on squaring that designerly impatience and frustration that we’re not doing the thing that is evidently the right thing to do now, with this kind of two- to three- or however many -year time horizon for design to actually be realizing an impact and what you see in your world.
John: Well, if I use the concept of A/B testing
Peter: Sure.
John: out of the UX/UI space…
Jesse: hm.
John: … if a courageous, and maybe insane, design leader would say, okay, we’ll do it your way and not do this research, but I’m gonna secretly go figure out a way to get the funding to go do the research and I’m gonna create a parallel project and then compare the outcomes of what it is that is created, or envisioned, from it, to begin to show the business.
Because the astonishing thing that I see from more and more big consumer goods companies is they spend a lot of time doing what I call the CYA research. “I’m gonna do a test of the package just before I launch it. Not to say we’re gonna kill the project or change the project, but I just wanna make sure I don’t get fired if it goes south.”
Whereas if they just spent half that money on the upfront curiosity side, the impatience of the business to go deliver something this quarter, next quarter, now, doesn’t provide the ability for design to go do the alternative explorations.
Which is why, the safe flavored line extension and those things become kind of the standard fare of consumer goods companies, and not terribly different than the software digital space where, you know, I’m gonna do a live A/B test. And the user of this travel website’s not gonna know that this set of people are gonna have these buttons in this place and this set are gonna have this button.
But part of that gets to, how do you truly affect change? And I, think there needs to be a, if we do it this way, here’s the outcome, here’s the likely outcome.
If we do it this way, it can be a bigger payout. The challenge is, if I’m a marketing director or a CMO, am I really gonna fund something that isn’t gonna launch for three years?
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: It might cost me $5 million between now and then to launch it and have no results and it could die along the way.
Or am I safer delivering that line extension that is good. It, you know, it’s gonna, it’s gonna drive something…
Peter: 10% improvement is better than zero.
John: Correct.
Jesse: You mentioned affecting change and change is something that we talk a lot about over here on the digital side and design’s responsibility for and toward change, and I’m curious about your point of view on design and its relationship to change.
John: I believe design should be a catalyst for change.
I believe that design should be an arbiter of culture inside of companies. One of the other of the six attributes I talk about is, Is the enterprise people-centered?
Because one of the things I often see is most designers and, even UXers talk about being centered around the user…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
John: …and having an empathy for the people that are gonna buy my product, use my product, you know, use my service, experience the thing I’m creating. But then they say, oh man, but John over in supply chain, that guy’s a jerk. He’s a barrier to me. He’s always getting in the way. So the idea of empathy only seems to apply to the work you’re doing for the thing you’re creating.
Peter: Right. Yep.
Jesse: Right, right. Right.
John: One of the big opportunities for design is having empathy for the senior most leaders in the company. Do I understand the pressure they’re under, and what they have to deliver? As opposed to feeling like they don’t understand me and they’re just laying unreasonable mandates on me.
So a part of it is, this idea of change, this idea of culture, I think a lot of designers, when they’re creating that vision for the future and, potentially that next big thing, they’re not really thinking about what has to change to drive it.
Jesse: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It puts the design leader in such an interesting place too, because especially if you’re fortunate enough to be at an executive level, at a C level or a VP level, when you’re closely engaged with a larger executive team around the executive level decisions that drive an organization, it can often feel like your job is to create alignment, right?
Your job is to align and be aligned, and find the alignment somehow in the room to create the harmony and the unity across the executive team, to genuinely deliver on a strategy for the organization. But if your mandate is to be the one person in the room who is like, ” Hmm. The way that we’re doing things is not good enough,” your strategy needs something more. It can feel like it really puts you in an awkward position, right?
As an executive level leader, how do these leaders deal with that?
John: Using the life raft example of the executives flailing in the harbor: is design the voice in that room that people are gonna listen to and believe?
Jesse: Right, right, right, right.
John: When they say something has to change.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: You know, there’s a gentleman that I count as a friend in the design industry, Chuck Jones, who is a multiple-time chief design officer.
And he’s very candid about the things that design doesn’t do very well, but he’s also very candid about, you know, when you walk into that new job as the head of design, you need to walk in with a point of view and a vision.
And he told a story at the conference where he walked into one of his roles and he said, within some short period of time, four, six weeks, he said, I think I’m reporting to the wrong place.
Jesse: Mm. Mm-hmm.
John: And he made the case to say, this is the outcome if design continues to report as current, here’s the opportunity by changing it. And of course he had to have a few other meetings with important people to go make that change. The challenge is, if you can state the need for the change in the context of the business, not, not just an opinion, critically helps your case.
If you can bring a champion or an advocate along with you, ideally a peer that’s in another function,
Jesse: Yeah.
John: ” Hey, I agree because this needs to change.”
Otherwise people are gonna take the path of least resistance. I mean, human nature is to avoid conflict, avoid change, complain about change, especially if it’s difficult. It’s like the old adage. Practice how you play. And if you can’t practice in difficult circumstances when it’s game time, you’re not gonna play in them.
Jesse: Right, right.
Peter: So Jesse and I, and it sounds like you as well, John, think about this idea of design as an organizational function.
it provides clarity into the real role of design. Not to make things, not to artifact, whatever, but, like, it is a function that engages in a set of activities to realize some value to the business.
The challenge is design, as the three of us would like it to be understood, conflicts with the quarterly culture, quarterly requirements, needing to report to Wall Street, all the things we’ve been saying, right? That quarterly mindset that so many companies embrace constricts design, so that it’s no longer design, it’s basically production. Someone else has told you what to do and you’re executing on it.
That makes me wonder, is that true of other functions as well, or are other functions perfectly happy operating in a quarterly mode, and design is different?
And, I think it very well could be. But then, in that quarterly culture, things become more acute depending on the health of that business.
And so the next thought is, is design only available as a kind of luxury function for those businesses that have already realized some success and some stability and don’t have to be as quarterly minded, and can have a longer term point of view? Are they the only organizations that are really able to embrace design, ’cause they’re the ones who can allow design the space it needs to succeed.
But then that kind of conflicts with, again, what the three of us know that design could be doing to help struggling companies, right? Like it’s a set of tools that can be useful in a lot of different contexts.
The interesting story is how can design help a company that’s struggling, succeed? But those companies aren’t willing to spend the time to allow design to have that change. So the only companies that are really embracing design as fully as they could are those that were probably doing okay already.
Jesse: You need to be successful to have design, and you need to have design to be successful.
Peter: As someone who’s, you know, more of a business background than Jesse or I, operating perhaps at an altitude or with a set of companies that are different than the ones that Jesse and I, more traditional organizations say, how do we change the conversation then, so that design is not simply seen as a luxury?
Jesse: Where is the traction for design leaders within this context?
John: One of the interesting corollaries to what you laid out, Peter, is a design community inside a corporation, if they can create a cadence of a longer term pipeline, then it makes it easier to accelerate things inside the quarterly dynamic.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: So, if I do have the luxury of having a very small portion of my portfolio that’s a five or 10 year lighthouse project to say, you know, where could this company go in the future and have a, you know, a slightly larger one that’s five years and a slightly larger one that’s three.
And then the majority of the things we’re working on are inside of two years, then it becomes, you can play to the acceleration needs of the business to play the quarterly game. The challenge is there isn’t often appetite at the C level to suddenly create that pipeline if it didn’t exist..
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
John: …before and the monthly, quarterly, you know, this quarter, this year, kind of dynamic. If that becomes the exclusive of the portfolio I’m working on, you can almost never get to that longer term. ‘Cause somebody above you has to approve the budget and the time and the resources to focus on this thing.
I’ve taught a four-day design thinking class in an MBA program in a university. And I bring a brand partner in. I get the students into a consumer’s home based on the product. And the dynamic when I’m selling this to potential brand partners, the way I sell it is, I want the project that you think is important, but you haven’t been able to fund it for the last three years. The company hasn’t seen it important enough to put official funding behind it. And I’m gonna show you how design thinking can help you accelerate an opportunity.
And of course, they’re, you know, what can you do in four days and, you know, all these other things. We show them that, hey, two consumer visits can be better than none. And two consumer visits can be better than all of the quantitative survey data that you might collect that isn’t watching a human do something or not do something.
Jesse: Right. So, you know, I feel like there’s a lot within the stories that you’ve shared with us and the research that you’ve done that suggests diminishing opportunity for design and for design leaders, in a lot of ways, and increasing obstacles. And I find myself wondering, where is the bright spark within all of this, and where is the opportunity that maybe design leaders ought to be giving more attention to right now?
John: Coming out of the conference event that we held, we had three kind of principles that founded. The first was the question, Is design dead? The second was, you’re not alone and you don’t have to do this alone. The third was, “so what.” We wanted to have a “so what” component to every session.
You don’t have to do it alone is an observation that I’ve had, and no doubt you all have seen it as you’ve poked into different companies and met with a myriad of leaders. Everybody thinks they’re fighting a historically unique battle because they don’t get out and talk to their peers. As a result, they end up fighting it themselves without a roadmap.
And almost everybody that attended the conference used the term therapy. This was great. I realized I’m not alone.
But then the, “so what” thing kicked in? And we said, okay, so what are we gonna do about this? And so I do think that letting people learn from each other, not just from people like the two of you and I that might drop in for a period of time, and then we drop out, and get people comfortable with: What have you done? What have you tried? And use the massive community of design as a way of trying to help revive and resuscitate the opportunity to carry it forward.
I’ve got a great deal of passion for trying to see design change the trajectory and try to help drive that. And I do think that we need more examples of where design created an unexpected outcome.
Jesse: Fantastic. I love that vision. I love the call to design leaders to be those examples and provide those examples that inspire the community. John Gleason, thank you so much for being with us.
John: Jesse, Peter, thank you so much for the invitation. A amazing conversation, and obviously we could talk for three or four more days.
Jesse: Yeah, absolutely.
Peter: Yes. Thank you so much.
Jesse: Where can people find you on the internet if they want to track you down and learn more about what you’re up to?
John: Well, my LinkedIn profile is there to find me or John at GetaBetterView.com.
Jesse: Fantastic. John, thank you so much.
John: I enjoyed this. Thank you.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway.design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com. If you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett.com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.
58: AI is a Stress Test for Your UX: What Cracks Will It Show?
May 02, 2025
Show Notes
Jesse and Peter explore how AI is revealing the true value proposition of design teams. They discuss why “whoever controls the prompt controls the product” and why design leaders must understand their organization’s expectations before embracing AI. The more things change, the more they stay the same—AI may be new, but the fundamentals of design leadership remain critical.
Peter: Make sure to stick around to the end of the episode to hear a couple of new offerings from Peter and Jesse.
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: On today’s show, reflecting on my talk: The Elements of UX in the Age of AI, Peter and I sit down one-on-one to talk about AI and its implications for design roles, design processes, and design leaders. We’ll talk about the new skills teams will need, the old skills that won’t be going away, and why. In an AI-enabled world, whoever controls the prompt, controls the product.
Peter: So, a few weeks ago now, you gave a talk on the Elements of User Experience in the Age of AI. And that’s where I want to start. As a UX guy, when I see commentary about the intersection of UX and AI, or rather, primarily, design and AI…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: …it typically focuses on the top two layers of the elements diagram, the surface layer and the skeleton layer. And really the surface layer. I don’t even know if we’re getting much from a workflow standpoint. I’m just seeing screen design…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: …being what’s being discussed. And I’m wondering, am I missing something? Where is the conversation happening about AI and how it’s affecting the lower levels of the diagram? The structural concerns, the scope concerns, the strategic concerns? ’cause that for me, given my background in strategic design, is where my focus is at.
And it also feels like, well, that’s the kind of thing AI can’t do. It requires my human brain. But I also don’t want to be that guy and be ignorant of the possibility that these tools are able to have a more kind of foundational…
Jesse: mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Peter: impact on the practice of developing user experiences.
AI’s Strengths: Analysis and Synthesis
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. So the way that I tend to think about this technology is in terms of what I see as its two strengths, which are analysis and synthesis. Which is to say, finding patterns within a data set, and then extrapolating from those patterns something broader, right?
So the pattern finding is the analysis part, and analysis is the stuff that’s gonna kick in when you’re down at those lower levels on the elements of user experience, where you’re talking about strategy, where you’re talking about scope, where you’re talking about user needs, where you’re talking about business requirements, where you’re talking about business models, where you’re talking about functional requirements, content requirements, all of those kinds of things.
So this is where getting a whole bunch of data together and feeding it to the machine can help surface patterns that you might not otherwise see. And this analysis value proposition for the LLM is where I see it coming into play in these more kind of strategic and product strategy, scope oriented domains.
Then when you get toward the top layers of the elements, then you start to get into these areas where the synthesis matters more. Where it’s more about what can you create, what can you generate out of the insights that you’ve created, out of the, really, the constraints that you’ve identified on your design problem.
Because if we think about the double diamond, this is where divergent thinking comes in, where you are generating possibilities, creating ideas, and then convergent thinking comes in where you are refining those ideas based on criteria that you’ve developed. And so these are both areas where an LLM can potentially play a role in a user experience design process.
What we see though, is that in these analysis oriented areas, where you are turning user needs into insights, turning those insights into requirements where you are evaluating and refining possible strategic directions, these tend to be processes that are owned by people outside of design. They may be owned by people in a UX research role. They may be owned by people in a product leadership role. They may be owned by people who are in a business leadership role.
But often the direct purview of a design leader doesn’t actually extend all the way down the stack of the elements of user experience. And so what you see is a lot of the things that end up influencing user experience outcomes are actually owned by other roles in organizations.
So I think part of what you’re seeing is that what design leaders feel like they can authentically control is the stuff that’s closer to the top of the stack, whereas the activity that’s happening at the bottom of the stack is happening in other parts of the organization, or that design leaders are ceding their influence over those areas out of a sense that that’s somebody else’s job, and my product person is gonna handle the AI that generates requirements, and I’m not gonna try to handle that myself.
Peter: Weird that you say some of this, in part because I tend to think of the user needs part, the user research part is very much within the realm of design, typically.
Jesse: It depends on the organization. In some organizations, the people who actually own that stuff don’t report into a design leader.
Peter: That’s increasingly true, but not historically true, at least when it comes to UX research. There’s other forms of research.
Jesse: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Design leaders telling on themselves
Peter: As you’re saying this, I’m thinking about something I saw a day or two ago on LinkedIn where a design leader was saying that unless you know code or are some Jony Ive-level brand craft wizard…
Jesse: mm.
Peter: that AI is going to take everything in in the middle or AI is going to subsume the work you do.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: And I responded, well, maybe, if all your leading is production, but that’s not design, right? And so one of the things that’s been clear to me is design leaders telling on themselves about how they have led design and how they have abandoned those lower levels of the diagram.
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: And I say abandoned. It was not taken from them. If they knew what they were doing, it was there for them to lead. In my role as a design leader, I led folks doing the research. I led folks figuring out organizational models. I led folks developing the insights coming outta research that drove, that informed, I should say, product requirements. There were other means of informing product requirements…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: …certain kinds of customer conversations or whatever.
But, maybe the conversation about AI and UX is really just a conversation about UX and design.
It’s casting a light on just all the different ways, the varieties of ways that this has been led, this has been practiced in organizations, because, my point of view, both having led teams and working with design leaders of teams, is most of the teams I’m involved with have some responsibility all the way up and down the stack.
You know, they maybe have more responsibility the higher up the diagram you get, sure. And the lower down the diagram, there’s a conversation to be had, but it’s a conversation. They’re not simply taking user needs from someone or the strategic objectives from someone. I guess, if as a designer and design leader, all you did was executing on the synthesis parts as you were calling them, the upper levels of the diagram, yes, it does appear that much of that work can be done by machines…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: …and that, for me seems like an opportunity for design.
But it’s, intriguing how many people see it as a threat.
Jesse: Right. Well, so, as you know, this talk came out of the work that I’ve been doing with design leaders for the last several years as a leadership coach. And in working with design leaders on their leadership challenge, it was this recurring theme that kept coming up of like, I’ve gotta figure out what I’m gonna do about AI.
And what I found in those conversations is the value that AI potentially can deliver to your team depends a lot on the value that your team is seen as delivering to the larger organization. So if the value proposition of your team is narrowly focused on quality and speed of delivery of design assets, the value proposition of AI for your team is very different than it would be for a team where your value prop is more rooted in product strategy, user research, driving requirements, that kind of thing. And that kind of thing is gonna be highly variable because we’ve seen, as we’ve talked about with the variety of design leaders that we’ve talked with on this show over the last few years, we’ve seen a wide range of different frames for the value proposition of design as a function.
And so where AI fits in, I think really relies on the leader clearly understanding what the organization thinks design is there to do for them.
Peter: I had a similar conversation with some folks probably two years ago now about design systems, and the rise of design systems. And these folks were thinking of putting together an assessment of your design system situation. And as they were sharing this with me, what I realized is that that assessment had very little to do with the design system.
Rather, that assessment was a probe on the organizational maturity when it came to matters of design and user experience. That, what you got out of that assessment was going to more be an indicator of what you were just talking about in terms of how the organizations that these leaders are in, understand design.
And I think this is something we’ve talked a lot about, but I don’t know if we’ve talked about it on the podcast. And I wrote a little bit about it a couple weeks ago, which is the benefit for design leaders in considering their team, as a function, as an organizational function of the firm.
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: … not as a set of practices or activities.
Jesse: Yes. Or as a group of people to defend or protect, right?
Design is a symbiote
Peter: Yeah. It’s more than just a group of people. There’s lots of ways you can slice these companies. You can have departments, you can have business units, you can have functions.
And when you think of design as a function, it gets very simple in terms of what others expect of your team. You mentioned the word value proposition, right? What is the value proposition of your team? And, when you think of the value proposition of your team, as if it were a function, you can start looking at analogies of, well, what are the value propositions of product management, of engineering, of marketing, of sales? And how do you line up with that? And design has a really hard time lining up with that. That value proposition is different across different companies because design as a function is like a, um, a symbiote, I was gonna say parasite, but let me, let me say symbiote…
Jesse: [Laughter] better.
Peter: …design as a function is a symbiote in that it ends up taking on the shape of the organization it’s part of in a way that other functions I don’t think do, right? Marketing is gonna kind of look the same wherever it is. Sales is gonna look the same wherever it is. Engineering’s gonna mostly look the same wherever it is. Design is going to have to take on the shape of the organization that it’s part of in order for it to deliver its value, because design’s value is, much more about multiplying the success of other functions than delivering something straight on its own, right?
And so, maybe before people start getting caught up in, how am I going to be disrupted by AI…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: … to do some groundwork in thinking about, how is my team showing up as a function of the firm? What is our value proposition? What do people expect of us? How satisfied are we with those expectations? Or do we need to change those expectations? Are people thinking of us primarily as UI production, or are people coming to us for the full stack of user experience delivery?
And then once you have a sense of what your value proposition is, what people’s expectations are of you, now I’m wondering, how AI can be a tool to enable you to realize your objective in terms of how you want the rest of the organization to see your team.
Jesse: Right. So there is delivering within your existing mandate, so to speak. Like, we’re gonna leverage this technology to better meet the expectations that have already been set, right?
And then there’s the question of, well, can we push the boundaries of those expectations? Can we make a play for a broader value proposition for design in the product development process, for design in the product strategy process, to have more of a voice, to have more of a point of view that it brings to the table on where all of this is going.
Whomever controls the prompt controls the product
Jesse: One of the things that I mentioned in the talk that I think is a really important piece for design leaders is, in an AI-enabled digital product development workflow, whoever controls the prompt controls the product. Whoever is talking to the robot that makes the thing is the person with the power. And so your choice as a design leader is to figure out which things do you want control of the prompt over.
Which areas of the product do you want your people to be the most prominent voice around, and building processes that support that voice and that engagement with the technology to elevate that value proposition.
So it may well be that you’ve got, as we were talking about, product and maybe even research, people who are nominally owners of the lower planes on the stack who don’t have a strong point of view, who don’t have, you know, a facility with the technology or an ability to wrangle it toward those objectives. If you can step into that void, if your people can do that better than their people can do that, you can make a play for a wider value proposition for your team and for design as a function. But you gotta master the prompt craft first.
The Role of Power
Peter: This is interesting. I’m glad we’re getting to prompts and, I suspected we would get there. This ties into something else that I don’t think you and I have discussed on the podcast, but have discussed outside of it, which is the three types of power.
This is something that I was introduced to about a month and a half ago at the Advancing Research Conference in a talk given by Robert Fabricant. And it’s a model where within any group of people, but let’s think about it within organizations, there are three distinct types of power that show up in these organizations.
What most people think of when they think of power is positional power, right? The senior most person in their ability to tell other people what to do. The second type of power that comes up is expertise power, that someone has special knowledge of a thing, and because of that, other people will listen to them because they don’t have that knowledge. So this person might not be particularly senior, but they’ve, to use the example you just shared, they’ve mastered prompt craft. They know prompts better than anybody else.
The third type of power is relational power. and that’s how people, it’s gonna sound mercenary when I say it, use relationships to make those connections with others within the organization to then realize their power for getting things done, getting the things they want done.
And what’s interesting is, as you’re talking to me about prompt craft, that suggests a kind of expertise power, right? I know how to wield this tool better than anyone else, and this tool is super important, and so you’re all gonna listen to me because of that. In these analyses of power, far and away, what is considered most important is relational power.
Jesse: Right.
Peter: What often comes out are people say, well, what about positional power where you can just tell people what to do? If you think about. how people in higher positions tend to wield their power, they rarely do it by fiat. Yes, in the public consciousness, that’s what we see. But look around, even if you are a design leader, you’re not just telling your team what to do. You’re inspiring them, you’re engaging them, you’re making them want to do that thing. Not because you told them to, but because even if you’re senior to them, you’re wielding relational power to bring them along.
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: And so I, find myself getting maybe a little stuck on this idea of the person who controls the prompt controls the product, because that is this demonstration of expertise power, which UXers often fall back on as why they should be listened to, because they’ve done the research, they’ve talked to the users, they’ve generated the insights. We’ve observed the tests.
We know what is going to be the best experience, so we should be in charge. And that never works or rarely works. So there’s clearly some value in expertise power. It gives you your credibility that you’re someone to listen to and engage with, but it feels like there’s something missing in that equation that you’ve been shaping.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, so two things come to mind for me around this. First of all, I definitely do not mean to leave relational power out of the equation. You’re not gonna get anything done just by having. a phalanx of the most expert prompt crafters in the room. You get your hundred monkeys in there, and demanding that you be handed the authority over the entire product.
But the other part of it that I think makes this craft expertise different from other craft expertises, is that it is manifestly an accelerant for creative processes, for product development processes for product delivery processes, where your expertise doesn’t just make you an expert. It makes you the person who can deliver a better thing faster.
And so in these areas where, again, if there is a power void in the organization where somebody else hasn’t figured out how to close the gap around, let’s say, using AI to create really robust PRDs, if you’re able to take the junk that comes outta your PMs and turn it into really robust PRDs, you become the center of that expertise. You become the center of that influence, if you’ve mastered the technology that can bridge those gaps for the organization.
I’m not saying that that doesn’t come with a lot of political scaffolding to create that opportunity for the team. So the leader has still got to be engaging with and negotiating with all of their cross-functional partners, all of their executive stakeholders, to be able to make the case for why we should do things following all of this stuff that their team is producing with AI support.
But if they are able to do that, it starts to create a leverage point for more human-centered influence in product development. And so that’s, I think, the really interesting opportunity.
Peter: In your talk, you mentioned that you created the elements of user experience diagram because no one knew why you were there, like, why you were in the room. Why would I work with this information architect slash user experience person…
Jesse: He doesn’t even draw. Why is he here?
Peter: Yeah, how are you helping us develop products? And the diagram was a means to answer at least parts of that question. And so thus people knew, to bring you into the conversation.
Jesse: Right.
Peter: And that still feels in many ways, like, the circumstance today, like, UX is not eagerly sought after. There might have been a period where it was, but even at its most eagerly sought after, it was still relatively minor.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: People recognize its value, people understand its importance, et cetera. Another way to say it is there was never a UX gold rush. There’s never been a design gold rush.
Jesse: Right.
Peter: There’s an AI gold rush going on right now.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: And, there was something about when you were talking about the elements of, user experience as, this thing you needed to bring people along who could barely be bothered to understand why you were in the room. And now with AI you have to kind of beat them away, and many of them don’t even really wanna understand it, right?
They just want to do it. It’s, I gotta get on the AI thing. There’s something about this dynamic between UX still trying to pull people in, and AI being this gravity well.
AI in 2025 is like The Web in 1997
Jesse: Right. Well, so you may recall from our early years in this industry in the late 1990s, this brand new technology called the World Wide Web came along, and it was gonna transform everything, and they were wiring everything to be webby in one way or another. And nobody really knew why. Everybody just knew it was important and many of those things did not work, right?
Many of the projects and experiments and attempts to integrate web technology into enterprises around, you know, in that sort of 1995 to 2005 kind of timeframe, just plain didn’t work because they were bad ideas. We are in the bad ideas phase of this technology right now for sure.
I feel that what UX design was able to do for the web 20 years ago was provide some filters, provide some frameworks, provide some ways of thinking about these challenges that helped people separate good ideas from bad ideas. And I think that there’s a similar role for design to play now, in continuing to bring the human expertise to separate good uses of the technology from bad uses of the technology.
You know when we talk about use of research, one of the big things that comes up with AI is the concept of synthetic users. The idea of doing user research by basically asking LLMs to pretend to be users. This is a bad idea. This is not a good use of the technology. It is not a substitute for actual data. Again, if you want to do some analysis down there at the bottom of the stack, then you’re gonna get some high value use cases.
So separating the high value use cases from the low value use cases is part of the work that has to happen here. And I think that work is mostly going to fall, honestly, on design leaders even more than some of their cross-functional partners because, as you pointed out, the territory of design is so vague that if your goal is to drive human-centered process, drive human-centered outcomes, you might need to be piecing together a much more diverse portfolio of AI support tools than somebody whose narrow focus is just, get the code out faster, as might be the case with your engineering partner.
Earn Trust First
Peter: This is putting me in mind…. our conversation with Amy Lokey, Chief Experience Officer at ServiceNow, where, as she told it, her team has for a couple years now, really been at the vanguard internally within ServiceNow in figuring out how to best take advantage of AI tooling and AI opportunities, largely in service of creating highly usable and effective experiences, right?
They’re kind of the most boring of enterprise software, and I mean that with love, but very, very pragmatic enterprise software. It’s a lot about data-driven or data experiences. Lots of cutting and pasting from one thing into another thing, et cetera.
And recognizing that AI can play a role in automating a lot of this labor. And the value that they were able to articulate, that she was able to articulate from a user experience standpoint, was kind of classic 1994-era cost-justifying usability of time on task and how long it took people to do a thing.
And what was interesting about her story, I think in this regard… One, she and her team, she had the credibility such that others were listening to her, and that credibility had been built up over time by demonstrating that value proposition such that when she steps up to help the company figure out how to make the best use of this technology, people aren’t looking at her like, but you’re just the box-drawer, what do you know about AI?
But instead, oh, your prior work in helping us adopt the System Usability Score allowed us to see how, when we improved System Usability Score, we improved customer outcomes, which led to greater customer satisfaction on various metrics that we track, led to greater retention and, you know, business success.
So if, you’re coming up and saying, Hey, let’s let my team get out in front of this AI thing, we’re gonna listen to you because we know that you drive value.
Jesse: Right.
Peter: I think for me, I guess a lot of it is this functional concern. If you’re feeling fear as a design leader about AI, the solution isn’t to AI at it more.
The solution is to identify how you can raise the level of trust that others have with you in your organization, such that when you now want to engage with AI, they will listen to you.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. I think that AI is similar to UX in this regard, in that what it really has organizationally is a multiplier effect, but that multiplier effect depends on what’s already there to multiply. So, if you’ve already built the bridges, if you’ve already gained the trust, if you’ve already built the value proposition, AI will let you activate and multiply that value proposition.
If you haven’t already done that, if you’re dealing with a pretty scant value proposition, you’re not going to be able to multiply that very much with AI. So I think you’re absolutely right. The political groundwork has to be there. The operational groundwork has to be there. The cross-functional trust has to be there. The team engagement and commitment has to be there.
You know, there’s a lot of resistance on the part of design teams to engaging with these tools for the fear that that is going to take something away from them. It does absolutely depend on how the organization is approaching it, and if you are approaching it with thoughtfulness and sensitivity to where that multiplier effect can be applied, then you’re going to reap that effect more quickly. And if you’re just throwing stuff against the wall, you know, the spaghetti phase of AI development, trying to see what sticks, then yeah, things are gonna get messy.
So I think it is about being strategic. It’s about leaders being strategic about the value propositions of their teams. It’s about leaders being strategic about where that value proposition intersects with the larger ecosystem that they’re a part of, and where there is an opportunity to amplify that existing value proposition or build upon it.
Peter: Right, right. And I guess one of the things that we’ve talked about in the past is maturity, organizational maturity, design maturity. And one of the risks that many design leaders unknowingly kind of engage in is that, when it comes to design maturity, they are often way more mature than the organization that they’re part of.
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: And they tried to show up as this very mature person and the organization’s not ready for them. This is something going back, when we spoke with Jehad Affoneh he talked about how he’d had jobs in the past where he couldn’t talk impact because the people around him wouldn’t know what do with an impact story.
He had to talk about internal collaboration, ’cause that’s what they valued at that organization, was, did other teams like working with his team?
And so I guess on that note, in thinking about accelerants, about this situation, right? The risk here is that design leaders embrace AI in a way that misses, is not aligned with, is not able to be taken up by the organization that they’re in.
Right.
It might be amazing. It might be, something that could very likely drive tons of value for this organization, but this organization is just not ready for it. And so it frankly gonna be wasted time and effort.
And so design leaders needing to figure out where to pitch themselves, such that the AI- driven interventions that they are proposing are ones that can be taken up. And, when you meet your broader organization where they’re at, not where you are at, but where they’re at, click in with that and then over time bring the people around you along.
Jesse: Right. So, it’s about understanding the expectations being placed upon design as a function. It’s about being clear on what you see as your own value proposition, and the difference between those things and creating the space, if necessary, to expand how that value proposition is perceived by the organization or how that mandate is construed by the organization, yeah.
Practical Tactical
Peter: Let’s get a little practical, tactical.
Jesse: Yeah. Sure.
Peter: You talk about prompt craft and…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: …the person who controls the prompt controls the product. What is your understanding of the mechanism, of the process, by which that might actually happen? If you were to coach somebody, an interested design leader around getting control of that prompt, and then driving the direction of the product towards these human-centered ends, what would you coach them to do?
Jesse: Right. The first part is about just finding your opportunity. Finding the place where you can accelerate some part of the value that your team is there to create. So from organization to organization that might vary. Identifying the use cases within your workflow, your broader workflow, not just your design workflow, but the broader workflow of everything that you do together as a team to bring a digital product to market.
And looking at that through the lens of acceleration, and honestly, the lens of human expertise and figuring out where the human expertise is most valuable and preserving that, so that what you’ve got is AI not supplanting human expertise, but augmenting human expertise.
Often in digital product development there are these steps of translation. Translation of a strategy into requirements, translation of requirements into design specs, translation of design specs into actual design artifacts, translation of design artifacts into production code. Wherever you’ve got these stages of translation, those are places where the AI is gonna be a super valuable sort of an accelerant there.
So in different organizations, there are gonna be different specific use cases within their workflows based on, again, what the team’s mandate is, as well as what the capabilities are that the team brings to bear.
But ideally what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna get your most nimble, abstract thinkers, and you’re gonna get your best writers together, and you’re gonna talk about how we use language to define what we do. And start to develop shared language, common vocabulary, controlled vocabulary that enables you to have a shared knowledge base of repeatable stuff that works. You know from the work that you’ve seen me do with the prompt craft that I’ve been able to develop some highly reliable, repeatable tools for myself in supporting some of the work that I do.
I can see that being scalable beyond an individual to an entire team, where you are collaborating on a knowledge base of reliable language, reliable, literally grammatical structures, that people can take and adapt and reapply in new contexts to create new solutions. And so it’s that shared understanding that ends up being really the collective source of value that a team ultimately ends up developing through this work.
Peter: Shared understanding of what, and when you say team, which team?
Jesse: I think you can define the boundaries of a team as broadly as you want to invite people into your prompting circle, and shared understanding of what creates consistent results. So this is the big challenge with these technologies, is that by their nature they are probabilistic. We want them to be a little bit inventive and be a little bit creative and come up with things that we don’t expect. The trouble is that sometimes we really need to control how much the machine is giving us things that we don’t expect, and so the ability for the team collectively to understand, here’s how we constrain the framing of a problem so as to produce a consistent result, ends up being the shared craft of the team itself.
Peter: Apart from accelerating, and maybe automating, these interpretive breakpoints in the process, how do you imagine AI tools changing how we develop products? You know, we’ve got some fairly well worn, at least digital product design processes, not that everybody follows them.
Are we just doing our process a little better, a little faster, or do you foresee real shifts in how we work? For example, with the rise of design systems, some people thought that, oh, we should just start with high fidelity comps in our design process. Now, I actually think most of the time that’s a bad idea. But, you know, an argument can be made.
And so like what is being enabled that might shift the order of things, or the responsibility of things within a product development process?
Jesse: So I think it does depend on where you are in your product development process. Early stages, AI is gonna be great for rapid prototyping, right? We’ve already seen so many examples of this where, there’s enough in the training data sets out there that if you sketch out a general sense of the functionality that you’re looking for, it can create something that looks like it does that thing. It won’t actually do that thing, it’ll just be a prototype, but it’ll be a pretty good prototype and maybe even a testable prototype with some additional layers of prompt craft behind it. You could probably create some pretty robust, fully instrumented prototypes of different product features and functionality and put out into the world.
Once you get into later stages of development, I think that it becomes more about refinement and alignment, making sure that you are integrating features and functionality in consistent ways. In the talk, I talk about the prospect of human and machine readable documentation, the idea of creating product documentation that a person could read and understand what you’re doing together, and a machine could read and actually be able to take action on because it would have a fully formed understanding of what you were trying to create.
I can see organizations moving toward that as a means of activating this kind of potential. You know, you touched on design systems. I think this is one of the huge things where, as I see it, it doesn’t make sense to me for design systems not to have an LLM interface. To my mind, the future of the design system is that it’s a robot that you talk to, that you feed it requirements and it matches those requirements with the system that it’s learned and generates product for you, right? The idea that humans would continue to kind of like spelunk into design system documentation in order to cobble together bits and pieces of UI kind of doesn’t make any sense anymore in that world to me.
The Importance of Discernment
Peter: One of the things you mentioned in your talk that’s related to this is how LLMs and any tool built on LLMs will kind of regress to mediocrity.
Jesse: Yes. Mm-hmm.
Peter: And the role of the human is to help get the solutions past mediocrity.
Jesse: Right.
Peter: Right. And so something I’ve been hearing about the role of not just designers, but anyone involved in product development, but primarily, say, designers and product managers, or at least people doing the work, there’s gonna be perhaps even greater importance in that idea of discernment.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: Taste as it’s sometimes called.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: Talk a little bit about that, and what the implications are, that it’s less about just turning the crank and getting something out the other end, but this application of discernment.
Jesse: Yeah. yeah. So there was a slide in the talk that just says B-Y-O-B-S-D. Right? Bring your own bullshit detector, because the AI won’t be that for you. You have to be the one who knows more. So if you are working with the AI in a space that you are unfamiliar with, it is your responsibility to know more than the AI does, in order to be able to know when it’s feeding you something valid and when it’s not.
And so maybe that’s about choosing your use cases, and maybe that’s about developing more robust validation processes around the output that you get. But what we see over and over again, is where people go wrong with this technology, is when you tried to design a submarine, and you knew nothing about fluid dynamics and you knew nothing about, you know, the structural factors involved in submarine design. And so it gave you something that looked like a submarine but didn’t function like a submarine and, surprise, you drowned, right?
So this is the kind of thing that we’re seeing out there. Whereas, if someone with that taste, with that discernment, with that expertise, is able to leverage the tool and screen what comes out of the tool and say, this is valid, this is not valid, I’m gonna pay attention to this. I’m not gonna pay attention to that, that’s where you get the multiplier effect. But what gets multiplied is human expertise. Human capability.
Peter: And that leads to something that I wrote just this past weekend. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write for my newsletter, and I ended up writing about something that you and I had spoken about a few days prior, which is the definition of skills when it comes to design.
So in my org design work, particularly when I create career frameworks for design organizations, at the heart of those career frameworks is a taxonomy of skills, interaction design, visual design, information architecture, et cetera. And I looked at my skill rubrics to try to get a sense of, what does AI do to these definitions of skills? What does it mean to be an interaction designer in an AI world? And as I looked at my rubric, I pleasantly realized that rubric as I had defined, it was already tool agnostic.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: It didn’t say anything about OmniGraffle, Vizio, Figma, that’s not what the skill is.
The skill of interaction design is, are you able to design a system that allows people to interact with the system to accomplish their goals…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: …probably feel some sense of satisfaction, maybe even delight in doing so, and that is tool agnostic. Humans have been designing all kinds of stuff that provide that kind of sense for decades, if not millennia.
As you were talking about kind of enhancing these abilities though, or this concept of discernment, one of the challenges that comes with skills definitions is, skills are often about aptitude, but aptitude is different than taste. It’s hard to measure someone’s discernment ability.
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: I can say that, as you become more senior as an interaction designer, more advanced and developed as an interaction designer, you can design more and more kind of complicated and complex systems, wiring together different technological platforms, maybe online and offline platforms, like you can handle that complexity.
That’s usually what you think of when it comes to scale. And that’s typically what the definition of the skill involves. And so I’m, thinking about how discernment’s gonna become way more important, right? So much of the value that people are currently delivering is their ability to, themselves, do the task…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: …just get it done. If we can delegate much of that “getting it done” to a tool such that our job is to now shape it, mold it as you, I think you said in the talk, think about it like, you’re throwing clay, right? You throw the clay on the wheel and now you’re, spinning it and you could make an ashtray like I’ve tried in the past, that looks like ass, or you can make something beautiful. For me, it raises this interesting question, which I don’t really grapple with, with my career frameworks and career architectures, which is assessing discernment ability, assessing taste, not that that’s not important, but it hasn’t been very important in UX design, right?
In UX design, what’s been more important is the ability to create something that works, that’s usable. I think we’re gonna be shining lights on different parts of the work than maybe has been shining on it before.
We were so focused on someone’s ability to grapple with tools, right? The number of resumes in the past that talked about, I can use Photoshop, or I can use Illustrator, and now I can use Figma. That’s all going away. And so what’s left as we consider candidates…
Jesse: right.
Peter: …as we build teams, as we think about the folks that we’re bringing together to do this work.
Jesse: Yeah. So to my mind, it comes back to really what designers have always done, with an important twist to it, which is, can you visualize the experience that you can see someone having?
How fully can you visualize that experience that someone is going to have with your product? How fully detailed is that vision? How many of the different parts of it can you really see in your head? And then having visualized that, can you conceptualize what it would take, architecturally, to create that as a digital product?
Can you conceptualize the breakdown of screens and components and in some cases data structures and other things that are necessary in order to realize that vision? And then the third part, and this is where it gets tricky for a lot of designers, can you express that in language? Can you linearize that in a way that an LLM can ingest and interpret and make sense of and move toward, and then can you take that result and iterate upon that, and build upon what it creates?
Peter: So I have three things that I wanna make sure we get to before we go.
The first you talked about, can you express it in language and linearize it? I’m wondering when you say language, do you mean specifically words or could it be words and pictures?
Jesse: It absolutely could be words and pictures, yes.
Peter: Okay. Because, thinking of designers, right? Designers are visual people, but with pictures you can communicate multiple streams of information that the LLM could be taking in to better understand what it is that is being asked of it.
Jesse: Yes. Yes. Multimodal is what they call it. Mm-hmm.
Peter: And, I think when people think of prompts, they think of typing lots of words.
And so it’ll be interesting to see how prompts evolve to accommodate multiple modalities of input.
My second question, in the talk, you mentioned how, back in the day, 2004, 2005, you were giving a talk around, websites that evolve based on use, that can adapt to use.
And this is something you and I have in common. This is something we both pursued a long time ago, and we’ve seen bits and pieces of it, right? If you look at any page on Amazon, that’s actually a demonstration of an emergent information architecture. The things that you are shown are based on prior behavior.
But one of the things that people keep talking about, at least in the design space, is kind of emergent UIs and how the UI can shape itself to what you need, not the content that it’s giving, but literally the tooling, the interface elements that you’re exposed to.
And I’m wondering, what do you think of that? Because this is something we’ve also been talking about for 25 years, and I keep not seeing.
Jesse: Well, I’ve never been into this vision to begin with. There’s not a lot of precedent for humans preferring infinitely customizable tools. Humans would much rather use a larger set of more narrowly focused tools than one big, giant Swiss army knife with 1700 blades on it that’s gonna flip different blades out depending on the context.
The various attempts at this, you know, just straight up haven’t worked. The closest thing that we’ve seen, I would say, have to do with more sort of task- or context-focused workspaces in UIs, where you can flip between modes, where I think about something like Photoshop, where you can just like really dive in and just do, like, pixel-level editing and like push all of the other stuff out of the way, and then when you’ve got to do some big kind of document stuff, you can bring the tools back in and do other kinds of things with it.
So I don’t see AI creating infinitely variable tools because humans don’t like infinitely variable tools. Humans like tools that they can habituate to. And that’s not to say that there isn’t a place for AI in creating other kinds of dynamism within these environments, but I think that that probably is going a step too far for human brains.
Peter: And one last thing kind of drafting on this, or maybe a different way at it, and something I’ve been suspecting, is how the development of these AI tools and the accessibility that they give so many people in now building their own software is… Are we going to see more and more products for, I don’t wanna say smaller and smaller audiences, but for a bunch of audiences, every, every audience, whatever it might be, can get its own product because with these tools, you can spin up something that really serves that particular segment.
This might not be a tool that you know, gets to a billion dollars ARR, maybe it only gets to $50 million in ARR, but $50 million isn’t nothing.
And are we gonna see more and more folks creating tools that generate a $100,000 to $10 million in revenue and be fine with that? And it’s not quite artisanal. I don’t know if you can call something that’s created with AI artisanal…
Jesse: that’s an interesting question.
Peter: …that’s a whole different conversation about craft and the role of craft in this. But, that mindset of smaller…
I.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: … special purpose, you know, kind of Kevin Kelly’s “thousand true fans” oriented software, instead of what always feels like everybody around us is trying to do, which is create something that goes big.
Jesse: Right? Yeah, I think so. I think there’s absolutely an opportunity there. Honestly, I think that’s a part of the larger thing that we’re likely to see, which, when I hear about vibe coding these days and people generating apps out of nothing, what they’re mostly making are tools for themselves to fill some gap, to fill some hole in their own workflow.
And so I could definitely see a lot of creative professionals out there potentially creating tools to support their own workflow in different ways out of this technology. What it takes to scale that, to be a commercial product, to give it the stability and the security and the reliability necessary to be a thing that you could sell to somebody is maybe a different level that a lot of people aren’t gonna get to.
But to make something that can run on your machine, that can help you quickly, you know, organize your task list or prioritize features or whatever the particular thing is, I can absolutely see a lot of that going on.
Peter: So just last question for you. What are we not talking about? What have I not asked about? Or what are you not seeing in the discourse that you think is important and worth exploration?
Language Matters
Jesse: Hmm.
It’s hard to think of what’s not in the discourse because there’s so much discourse.
I’m gonna come back to the emphasis on language actually, because I think that there is not enough talk about the linguistic craft here, and the ways in which small changes in grammatical structures in word choice, in the way that you phrase and frame problems– because that’s what the work is, prompt work is problem framing for a machine to generate a response to the problem, and the more effectively you can use the mechanics of language to frame a problem in a way that the machine can understand, for you to have your own sort of theory of mind in the way that we use that phrase in philosophy and psychology to describe how we respond to the internal mental state of another entity in the world, the extent you can develop your own theory of mind about the AI and your own linguistic approach to engaging with it, that’s the skillset across the board, regardless of the problem that you’re trying to solve.
Peter: Sounds good. Let’s end there.
Jesse: Peter, thank you so much. This has been fun.
The Elements of UX in the Age of AI is now available as a digital download. Get your copy today at JesseJamesGarrett.com/ai.
Peter: Peter here. I’ve just launched two new formats of my Design Leadership Demystified Masterclass. You can take it either self-paced or with a cohort. For more information, visit petermerholz.com/masterclass.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway.design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com. If you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.
57: On Being a Chief Experience Officer (ft. Amy Lokey)
Apr 13, 2025
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. Joining us today to talk about what’s next for design is Amy Lokey, Chief Experience Officer for the enterprise software platform, ServiceNow. We’ll be talking about building a team that unifies product experience with customer experience, defining experience metrics that actually matter, investing in her own growth as a leader, and the real implications of AI for digital product design.
Peter: Amy, thank you so much for joining us.
Amy: You’re so welcome. I’m happy to be here.
What does a Chief Experience Officer do?
Peter: So, in the introduction that Jesse will have recorded before people hear us talk, he will mention that you are a CXO, Chief Experience Officer at ServiceNow. What is a Chief Experience Officer?
Amy: Well, Chief Experience Officer, I’ll say first is importantly not a CEO, because you can only have one of those. So that’s why I’m A CXO. But I run product experience and also customer experience at ServiceNow. My wheelhouse, my background, is primarily in product user experience design. My team includes all of the functions that you would expect in user experience design team.
So we have a large research organization. We have a large design organization. We have design operations and various operational functions that keep us kind of working together smoothly and things running. And then additionally, I have a large content team as well, too, that produces content for our technical documentation, best practices content, and is really the engine behind a lot of the content that helps our customers be successful with our products. And as part of that, we’re also responsible for a lot of the digital experiences that our customers use to be successful.
So everything from… We have a learning experience where our customers and developers can get credentialed on ServiceNow. We have our customer support site. We have a product called Impact where our customers get kind of white glove customer support and work with squads of people that help them get up and running. So there’s a number of digital experiences. Those are just a few that my team also is responsible for. And so that’s the customer experience side of it.
And then our product suite includes customer support software. So, there’s an intersection of our own product, is what we use for those experiences, so a lot of what we build to support our customers is the same thing that we’re building as a product that we sell to customers too. So there’s kind of an interplay in how all of that product experience design works and how we’re using it.
Peter: And just to kind of establish some boundaries here, when you’re talking about customer experience, what is your relationship to marketing and kind of that front end of the funnel? And do you do any design or research work on that side? And then on the other side, more kind of typical customer service and even maybe even customer success. It sounds like those are outside your purview…
Amy: Those are outside of my… yeah, yeah. From an organizational standpoint, so, we have a great CMO Colin, he leads our marketing organization. They do have a couple creative teams within that organization that work on various parts and pieces. And so our corporate website, for example, his team drives that.
The digital experience, that we work really closely to bring those together in one unified navigation. So we want, from a brand and from a user experience design standpoint, we want it to be really seamless. So whether you’re looking on what might the corporate site, meaning, like, you’re looking at our products, you’re looking at our marketing communications, you’re evaluating the company, or you move into, Hey, I need to deploy this new thing that I got and I need some detailed information on that.
You move more into the customer experience side of it. That’s my team. But we want those, you know, boundaries to be invisible to our customers. So we do have kind of an architecture that we work on from an information architecture standpoint, even like a universal login standpoint. So that’s, hopefully, not visible to customers, even though we have two different teams working on those parts.
Peter: Sometimes customer experience means customer service. Do you have a relationship there?
Amy: Absolutely, I don’t run customer service. So there’s another leader that runs customer service in terms of our support organization. But my team does work on the digital experience. So we design that entry point, right? And that’s, again, using our own product and then building it out to fit the needs of our particular customer service experience.
So the digital experience we are responsible for, we support that. But the team of people that are behind that support system, like they’re managed by a different person. Yeah.
Jesse: Within your team, you have an unusually broad mandate. In terms of bringing together both product experience and customer experience capabilities, and content as well. And I find myself curious about the organizational impetus to unify these functions. What’s the value of having a unified team with such a broad mandate that in most organizations is kept separate?
Amy: Yeah. it’s not all organizations that are separate. I will say, like reflecting back at my time at Google, when I led user experience for G Suite, I was also responsible for the technical documentation. So, I think there are cases where you might have one org leader over both. The reason why I think it makes sense here is, the documentation of, like, how the product works is in many ways just this foundational piece that all of our other marketing and other content pieces are built from. We’re kind of the source of truth, and the people who write that content really sit side by side with the designers and the engineers building the products.
So they are very much integrated into the product development process. And I think that’s an important part of why this all works. So, you know, my peer groups in my organization are, you know, product management and engineering, just to like very general terms, right? And then I have kind of the everything else bucket of user experience plus product, content and research and so on.
But all the functions within my team are very, very close and tight with the product development process. So they’re working with product management, engineering. We are part of that release cycle. We’re part of, like, QE processes. So I think that’s why it all makes sense. It’s just fundamentally, I’m part of an R and D org and all of the experts within my team are part of that process that deploys software and then builds the things on top of it that help our customers be successful with that software.
But we have to have that subject matter expertise of really understanding what it was designed to do and what it was built to do, and how it really, really works to be that source of truth. So we’re, you know, the customers that come to our documentation, they see it as very objective. It’s intentionally not positioned in a marketing type of framing.
It is just factual because then it’s very, very trustworthy and seen as like this is the absolute source of truth of how something works.
Peter: On your LinkedIn profile, when you define yourself as a CXO, you mentioned design and research, product content, design operations, but then there’s this phrase, information strategy. What is that?
Amy: It’s how we deliver the right information to our customers. And so we are doing a lot of work to think about the best way to deliver vast amounts of information and what that strategy is. So it’s very much information architecture. We have a team internally, we call it Lexicon, which is just how we actually name our products, how they’re actually affiliated into our customer support experience, right?
So if you file a ticket about our software, you’re gonna say what product you’re using, what functionality you’re using, that all has a data architecture in the backend that helps us tag it to particular products. So then we can kind of document the throughput of information back to the product team.
So that information strategy and information architecture, it’s not only how we externally organize the content, it’s also how we internally tag it and map the data basically. So we have that throughput of information.
The Holy Grail of Information Architecture
Peter: This is like a holy grail. Well, so Jesse and I came up as information architects, and I think one of the challenges that I’ve seen UX teams face is, when they want to get to data models and content models, who owns those relationships with engineering, a lack of broad horizontal view of a company’s information standards and platforms and, and practices, and so it gets in the way when you’re trying to create, say, a unified navigation across a multi-product suite when every team has kind of done things their own way. And I guess usually this is solved by enterprise architecture or something, but it feels like your team has a bigger voice in this conversation, I guess recognizing there’s a user experience component to it, not just a technology platform kind of component.
Amy: Completely. And, the team that does this work did actually have roots in engineering. So it started out as part of our engineering team. Hence, the affiliation to the data modeling and how we track that throughput of, you know, someone logs an issue in a customer support case, what part of the product is it actually affiliated to, and then can we even tie that to an epic and a record to show that we fixed the thing in the product, right.
So, because a lot of that information architecture team had roots in engineering, it moved to my organization about a year or so ago. It did move because there is an implication on the user experience and there’s this relationship to our content and product content and so on. There was a natural time and place to move them to my team, but we have this great history and this great foundation of the data architecture underlying it.
And then the other piece is just… ServiceNow is built as one unified platform with one data model. And so that’s just in our DNA here of like how we do things. So we continue to build on that. We have an internal tool like I just mentioned, where we can track our research insights and connect them into design records that connect into the epics and stories.
And like I said, we could even connect that to user experience, customer service issues that we see. So the fact that we can have all of that data in one system of record is pretty powerful because we’re getting to a place now where we can track our user insights, we can tie them to design artifacts that show that we’re fixing the thing.
We can then attach that to a PRD and then the, you know, epics and stories and we can show this connective tissue of, Hey, when we release the thing that solved that user insight, we actually saw a decrease in customer service issues related to that particular thing, which is pretty powerful to be able to draw that story together using data and show that that investment in user experience actually lowered the cost of customer support on the other end.
Jesse: So with all of this interconnectivity between your group and its work and the work of all of these adjacent groups that you’re intertwined with, it actually gets me wondering about the discussions that go on at the top level of the organization and you know, you are a chief experience officer.
A lot of organizations don’t even have a C-level person with your purview, and I’m curious how that changes things for you to be in a C-level role, speaking to experience issues.
Being in the C-Suite
Amy: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I have to change altitudes quite a bit. I mean, I still, like I said, my roots are of being a product designer, so there’s nothing I love more than being in a design review, looking at the you know, product taking shape, giving feedback, working with the team to ideate on things.
Like, for me, that gives me energy. But I do spend a lot of time thinking about our broader experience strategy in the ecosystem of our product, right? Which is, we have an enterprise software product. We design out of the box software products, right, that we sell to customers, but they’re on a very configurable platform.
So we also have to make sure that we’re continually training our customers and our implementation partners on how to use our best practices to design and build the right experiences on top of our product.
So it’s sometimes, I joke, it’s like the movie Inception where you don’t know which level of the dream you’re in because there’s kind of the root of it, which are our components, and then we’ve got our out of the box products. And then on top of that, our customers might configure and extend them. They might theme them. And we have a partner ecosystem as well too. So the role that I play now is much more externally facing, much more customer facing and much more involved in our partner ecosystem and the enablement focus.
It’s one thing to have a great internal product user experience team. A lot of my journey here has been growing and developing and maturing that. Now I need to mature the user experience practices outside of the walls of this company to make sure that our customers are successful with the product and have all the best tools, resources, and talent to build on our platform in a way that delivers the potential that it has to deliver a great user experience. So a lot of the work and the strategy that I do is focused on that outbound work to enable the ecosystem.
And then secondly, of course, I spend probably the largest majority of my time at the executive level on our product and business strategy, right? And the focus that we have on experience there is all around the transformation with AI, generative AI, agent AI, and so on. And that’s gonna be a massive shift in how people interact with technology.
So my team has to be ahead of that curve and also helping the executives understand where that’s going. So those are the two pieces that I would say are outside and beyond maybe the typical UX leaders remit. But that’s not to say I don’t love doing that core part of my job, which is helping shape the product design.
Peter: You just said the trigger word, or trigger letters, of AI, and it sounds like so much of what we’re seeing when it comes to AI in user experiences is some kind of, not quite shovelware, but it’s just being kind of spaghettiware. They’re just throwing AI at you in hopes that they’ll find some application that sticks. And given what you’ve been saying and the connectivity that you referred to, right, and there’s like a, detailed understanding of how user experience connects with these other kind of aspects of the business and, how value is realized in the business, I’m assuming that you are approaching AI with a different kind of consideration, and I’m wondering, what role is your team playing in contributing to that product strategy around AI, distinct from, or in partnership with product management, engineering, I’m assuming the typical function, sales, since you’re an enterprise software firm, I’m sure they’re getting involved.
Like, what is the chief experience officer’s team bringing to that conversation to ensure that it’s not spaghettiware AI, but, really things that your end users will find value in?
Designing with, and for, AI
Amy: I’d say there’s been multiple phases of this and it keeps evolving. But I think one of the most interesting phases was at the very beginning, right? So generative AI hit the market. Everyone’s trying to figure out what to do with it. And our research team played a really key role in looking at where we might find the most value and deliver the most value, and using a System Usability Score kind of usability testing methodology.
And so, you know, like everybody else, we’re wondering, well, where is the most valuable place to insert this technology? Right? And for what, what user, what persona, and in what parts of our software? And then obviously you’re looking at the business value that that might deliver and how you might monetize it, but also how you communicate that value to the customer. And largely the benefit of this technology is all around productivity and time savings, right? So how do you save time? And fortunately for us, our software is very much productivity software that’s typically used at scale by teams of people doing pretty predictable and often repetitive tasks, right?
And so our roots are all in like workflow and process automation and so on, where you can say, okay, given any enterprise or business, if they have a particular workflow, we can start to digitize that. We can start to automate it where possible. You can start to enable humans to be able to do more versus doing whatever that activity was before, right?
So instead of copy-pasting data from one system to another, we can automate that, right? So they can do more intelligent work. So AI was like a perfect fit to what we already did, but we had to figure out like, where are we gonna invest? Because you can’t just put it everywhere. There’s a cost to that. And so we used research and data and analytics to say, okay, what kinds of activities are most repetitive and happening in at volume and at scale, you know, so they happen over and over again.
So they’re fairly predictable. They happen at a lot of our customers and they’re happening at scale where many, many people, our hands have to touch that thing. And so it was just basically a simple equation where we could say, if we put AI in this particular place, then how much time does it save? So we used a usability assessment to say, how much time did it previously take someone to accomplish this?
So say that’s summarizing a case or writing resolution notes when something’s been closed. If that previously took them an hour and you can summarize it in five seconds with generative AI and they can edit it and complete that task. Now in a number of minutes, you can multiply that time savings across how many people, how many times a day at what scale in our customers, and you can start to extrapolate true value. And that even helped us figure out, How do we price this? So, so we were really formative at the very beginning, just trying to figure out where would it have the most value, how do we articulate it to customers and how do we price it? And that was very much based in those roots of just a before and after picture of time on task.
That was two years ago now, but it did help us invest in the right places. Now, you know, fast forward, we’re more strategic, too, in how we measure the quality of the output and the value before we take something to market. And that’s been a learning process as well, too, because as you’re working with LLMs and they have degrees of unpredictability and variability, we’ve had to work really closely with our QE team to come up with both automated and also observational ways of testing the value of what’s delivered.
And that’s been an interesting challenge. And, have to do with the pace that’s needed as well too. Generally working with internal simulated datasets before it gets into the hands of your customers. So that’s still a work in progress and something that we’re evolving, but we’re getting to a place where we have a pretty clear metric-based evaluation, too, of assessing the quality of the product before it goes out in market.
But that’s been a multi-pronged effort as well in terms of getting like data to work with and all that.
Jesse: What do you think designers and design leaders often miss about AI and how it fits into everything these days?
Amy: I think it just depends. I’d say like in the last year or two I’ve been able to participate in various like panels and discussions and summits about AI. And I think I’ve been lucky to be working so firsthand with it all along the way. And so I feel grateful that I am part of these meetings, whether they’re at the executive level or the team level to really understand from like our research scientists how things are working and evolving and our engineering team, how things are working and what we’re learning.
I think the most important part for any designer now is to truly understand how the prompting work, how orchestration works, what the variability is, and to get ahead of the quality in a way that’s harder to do than ever before. Because I think what’s really tricky with AI is to get the quality right, and to really understand what the end user experience is gonna be before you ship it.
And that I think is the new science and expertise that we’re all kinda still figuring out as we go along, because it evolves so quickly. So you’re designing for hypotheticals and you can’t predict the hypotheticals necessarily, so you have to find quick ways to assess and, modify and change.
Wielding UX Metrics
Peter: When you mention getting the quality right, and the quality of experience, and, earlier you’ve referred to some UX metrics. You’ve referred to some usability assessments that you all conducted. I’m actually curious of the story of UX metrics at ServiceNow.
Maybe it’s at least since you’ve been there and, when you joined, was there some UX metrics in place that you were able to kind of start with and then build? Or is this something that you brought in, in terms of how UX metrics are used? Not just, it sounds like within your team, but how your team uses these metrics to communicate outside of UX or CX and like, what that journey of metrics… It’s literally probably the most common question I get from design leaders is how to measure, how to value, how to define quality. And it feels like you’ve got your hands around this a bit more than perhaps most do, so I’d be curious what that story is.
Amy:
Yeah, really proud of that. Thank you. And huge credit to the research team and their leadership on this. But I would say when I joined, our, our research culture at that time was much more on the foundational research side, which is great and super valuable. But at that point in ServiceNow’s growth, we were expanding into a lot of different products.
So we’d started as kind of IT service delivery, and we were expanding into customer service. We were expanding into HR, we were expanding to all these different verticals throughout the business.
So the research team, and rightfully so at that time, was very focused on foundational research. What product should we develop? What would be the right product market fit. Almost a little bit more like market research than product user experience research. So when I joined, I had been at Google when a similar methodology had been formed. I think it started within the YouTube team, and then kind of grew across Google.
And now the name that they called is kind of escaping me, but it was based on something like called Toothbrush Journeys, which are like, you brush your teeth every day. So look at the most, oh, CUJs, Critical User Journeys is the acronym Google, I believe. So you look at the most critical user journeys that people take, and usually there’s data that you can look at in terms of what are people, where do they start, where do they end, what are they trying to do?
And I remember when YouTube first started forming this approach, they were just looking at uploading a video, what does it take, right? And they assumed, of course people are using YouTube, they must be having no problems uploading videos. There’s actually all of this drop off happening where people could not figure out how to upload a video.
And so that was just like a critical user journey for the product to be successful. So the methodology is simple. You just establish what those 10 to 20 activities are and you measure the usability of them. And that is based on that SUS score, right? Which is like time on task, I think, you know, level of correctness, in terms of do you get through it appropriately, do you make mistakes, do things break along the way, or do you do the task correctly? There’s some qualitative in that as well too. How do you feel about it? And so you’re looking at both like the success rate as well as the time on task and then how, you know, do people feel like it was a good experience?
And so you can kind of triangulate all that together. So we based what we call internally here now, UX quality, on that same approach, right? So determine what the most important things are that you’re hoping people can accomplish with the product. What are those journeys? And then you measure how effective they are and how long it takes and then qualitative, how do they feel about it.
So we’ve kind of expanded that system into a benchmarking study that we try to run at least semi-annually on a product. We do semi-annual big family releases. So ideally at least twice a year we’re kind of looking at, you know, a new version of the software and reassessing based on that same evaluation.
And we’ve had products where we’ve been doing this now, I’d say, over about six or seven releases, and we’ve seen tremendous improvements. The score ends up netting out to a percentage score on a hundred percent scale. And I believe in the industry, 80% and above is typically a considered a consumer grade usability score, where people can generally get in there, they can use a product. They don’t need tutorials. They don’t need documentation. It’s approachable, and it’s usable and simple, and they can be successful with it. So in enterprise software, the scores are typically in the fifties and sixties, right? Like typically much harder to use, more complicated, not as easy. So in the products that we’ve been running this methodology on, and addressing the feedback, ’cause it delivers really clear actionable feedback, we’ve had products that have moved from the 50 percentile up to some of our products are scoring in the 95th percentile, which is incredible for enterprise software that’s quite complicated.
So it’s just been a great tool in the toolbox and we’re actually now using these in our executive product reviews. So we do quarterly product reviews and now we’re bringing what we’re calling overall this UX health scorecard to the mix that includes this UX quality benchmarking where we can investigate, you know, is there a usability problem here at the product or is that fine, and actually there’s an adoption problem, where there’s something else working here that we could apply over there. So it’s been great to see that continue to get momentum here and continue to add value in how we look at our products objectively and make sure that we’re fundamentally delivering a product that people can use and enjoy using and they get value from.
Jesse: What do you think are some of the larger cultural factors that support that work in being successful? Because, like, I hear from leaders that they all say, well, our executive leadership absolutely wants to be research driven, data driven until they get data that they don’t like. And then, the data goes out the window, the process goes out the window, and executive fiat takes over. And I’m curious about the decision making environment that enables this more, you know, rational decision making.
When UX is aligned with corporate values
Amy: I think what helps is this kind of data is what our customers value as well, too, right? So again, like the fundamental value of our software is to deliver on business and end user productivity, right? So the fact that we have a methodology that shows very concretely improvements in user productivity and using the software, there’s no argument there, right, because that’s what we’re committed to do for our customers.
And we can also show our customers like, Hey, look at the improvements we’re making. You know, your users are gonna get through their work x amount of time faster because now all these hurdles are taken outta the way, or we can generate these things much faster for them.
So I think it’s just so well aligned with the value of our product, how we sell it, how we talk about it, that there’s never been an argument against it. There’s just been a hunger for more. I think in the consumer world it might be different, right? Like I’ve worked in consumer products quite a bit as well too, and in those cases, you’re not necessarily creating product that helps people be more productive. A lot of times you’re creating product where you want people to spend more time.
Jesse: Right,
Peter: right, right. “Engagement.”
Amy: And so very, very different very different motivations, very different design measurements, right? And so usability, it’s probably still important, especially when you’re looking at, can they sign up for it? Can I get them registered? Can they subscribe? Can they pay, put in their credit card information or whatever it is.
So, however that business model thrives, typically those usability scores will be very important. But in other cases, I mean, YouTube went for a really long time where people had a really horrible time uploading videos. It didn’t matter ’cause some people were figuring it out some way or another, you know, they were getting their videos up there.
And the product was successful, but it probably became a lot more successful when you kind of streamline that process. So I think it just depends, like, how the product business works, and can you align metrics that are both in good service of your end user, as well as that are helping demonstrate how you can deliver more business value.
Peter: It sounds like your team has generated some of these various UX metrics, but they’re now being placed on product team dashboards. And I’m wondering, where accountability lies now, right? is your team primarily held accountable for this, or is there joint accountability?
And then, how is accountability handled, particularly for your CX team? I’m curious if you are somehow expected to deliver a distinct kind of value within ServiceNow, or if it’s just broadly recognized that CX is valuable, like these other functions, and your contribution is not isolated necessarily.
Amy: Yeah. I mean, I think in terms of accountability, it’s definitely a shared accountability. So when we present these metrics, even though my team is helping produce the studies and create the dashboard and create the measurements and all that, we are making a hundred percent sure that we’re not blindsiding anyone with that, right?
Like, we don’t wanna go into an executive review and be like, ah, gotcha. See this thing’s in the red. What are you gonna do, right? so we’re very much in lockstep with our product and engineering leadership team. So everyone understands how the study was conducted. They understand the data, they trust it, but they also feel aligned on what they’re doing about it, right?
And so that accountability is definitely shared. It’s not just on us to fix it. And there’s also times where you might say, Hey, it looks like this is actually in a pretty good state, so as a cross-functional leadership team, maybe we need to invest in something else, right? Like, so I think it’s also how you’re making your investment decisions in terms of what needs the most right now.
And in some cases you might have a product that’s very new, and you really wanna get it adopted, you wanna get it out and, you know, getting traction. Well then probably a big investment in UX is really good. You might have another product that’s actually quite mature and successful, maybe there’s another area of the business that needs that investment.
So I think it helps us make like more thoughtful decisions across the board about what to invest in.
Peter: Is there accountability specific to your team or is accountability shared…?
Amy: It’s shared. Yeah, it’s shared across the product team. Yeah, absolutely.
How to know to grow
Peter: How has your team known, for example, how to grow, you know, you have hundreds, if not close to a thousand people in your organization.
That’s expensive. What is the investment calculus in growing your team as opposed to hiring another product manager, hiring another engineer? ‘Cause clearly your team’s delivering value, but what is that conversation in terms of, like, the money, the funding that you get to grow your team, versus maybe other places where that money could be spent?
Amy: Yeah. I mean, every company has different funding models. It’s a cross-functional conversation, absolutely. But ultimately the way that ServiceNow works is there’s a GM that at the end of the day makes those calls, right? So, they will get investment, they can choose to invest in sales, they could invest in engineering, they could invest in QE, they could invest in product content, there’s many competing areas that you can invest in.
We use a ratio based model to just have some form of a guideline of what a healthy team looks like. And then cross-functional leadership gets together and we have interlock meetings where we’re looking at what the investment plan is, making sure that we can deliver on that investment plan. Making sure even the quarterization looks good, right?
Like, are you hiring the right people in the right order? You don’t necessarily wanna hire engineering first and research last, you know, so things like that. But it’s a cross-functional conversation, which is really healthy. And, I think it’s rare to find that kind of operational health in terms of how things are funded.
But like I mentioned, there may be times as a leadership team where like, the number one thing we need is actually like translation services for this particular product, or it’s, we need more QE for this particular product. So I think we do a good job of putting on objective hats around, like, what will truly make this business successful, and making the right investment decisions. Not just fighting for, like, we need more design.
You know, I don’t approach it in that, way, but ServiceNow has grown tremendously over the past few years. So the team has grown tremendously during that time. I do think it’s an interesting advent with AI coming into the mix a lot more.
Like, I think we’re all looking at how do we adopt AI to increase efficiency and potentially decrease the need to continue to expand at the same rates, you know? So, I think that’ll be an interesting shift as well too, because we just wanna make sure that we’re enabling our teams that we have to be really, really successful. And continuing to add at the same rate may, like, probably is diminishing returns at a certain point once you get to a certain scale.
Jesse: So if you’re not in there advocating for more design, more design, more design, what do you see it as your role to advocate for on behalf of your team?
Amy: I’m not saying I don’t do that. There’s definitely times where I do that again, like we look at the makeup of the entire team and decide what we need, right? So there’s, plenty of times where we’re saying, Hey, we need more designers or more writers, or more researchers, and I, here’s, here’s what won’t happen if we can’t get those folks.
So trust me, like I have to advocate, but I think that just the culture here is one where there’s also times where I’m like, you know what? Instead of research, really what we need is more QE because, we do these interlocks, we’re looking at the bigger picture. So I just think that is a great business practice so that you are looking at objectively how is the team shaping up and how is it growing together, and that you’ve got everything you need to make the entire business successful.
And so having that visibility, I think is really great for the cross-functional leadership team as we do those interlocks, because then you can see the perspective of, okay, I understand we didn’t get a researcher this time, but I can now tell my team why, and that I understand that it was in service of a bigger picture need.
Jesse: What do you think is it that makes those interlocks successful, as opposed to simply being the recurring, repeating the same argument every meeting between the same people over and over again, over the same things.
Amy: Well, I think naturally we see people respond to those conversations, so, you know, maybe culturally that’s different at this company than others. But I think the transparency in having the conversation is the important part. And then I see people make accommodations, you know. So we have a GM and we’re like, Hey, we really do need a researcher for this, or we’re totally understaffed on this other thing. Like, generally they’ll do what they can do, you know? So I think just hearing that and actually trying to make adjustments based on those needs and feeling that there’s always this give and take and level of understanding to try to do the right thing is most important. Then it doesn’t devolve into just a battle.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: When you’re saying GM, I’m assuming there are multiple GMs. You have different business units. But design or CX is centralized, it sounds like it’s organized to align with those business units.
Amy: Correct.
Centralized vs decentralized
Peter: Um, You are getting to a size where, in many companies, there would be a discussion of decentralizing, and I actually see it in much smaller companies where when they go to a GM model, the designers report up through that GM.
And I’m wondering if that conversation has taken place at ServiceNow. And what are the, considerations around when does it make sense to maybe no longer be centralized as a function…
Amy: mm-hmm.
Peter: And yeah, just how is that discussion going? if it’s even going at all? Or maybe you’ll say, no one said it.
Amy: No one said it to me yet. I am very cognizant of that. I’m very cognizant of that.
Peter: I mean, Google,
Amy: Microsoft, Google, I think Salesforce, like most other companies, at a particular scale, you fork the teams. The reason why I don’t know if it’ll ever make sense at ServiceNow is again, it goes back to like our core, core value of our technology is it’s one platform, one data model, one architecture, one front end.
So we’ve been able to hold that together and no other company has, right? If you look at Salesforce, they’re all separate clouds, right? If you look at Google, all those products are different data models, different front ends, different back ends. The data won’t talk to each other. And that’s problematic when you wanna create cohesive experiences.
So, one of the reasons that I was drawn to ServiceNow is I was like, this is pretty unique. You know, like the front end component system truly powers every product. So do that, you have to have strong horizontal connectivity, right? And so I do believe that makes a lot of sense when it comes to our engineering and all of our EX. We are centralized under functional leaders. Our product management teams not quite as much, but again, they’re kind of oriented around big areas of the business. So my team does serve as that glue that holds a lot of it together and make sure that, you know, experiences are cohesive, we’re taking systematic approaches to things, and there’s a lot of leverage and efficiencies that come from that as well too.
Could it be decentralized? I mean sure there’s, and never say never, right, but at this point I think there’s a lot of value in having it together.
Jesse: Speaking of the value in having things together there are lots of design organizations that find themselves kind of caught between a value proposition that is very much oriented toward the delivery of great design work, right, and we’re gonna be an awesome design factory, versus a value proposition that is not as delivery oriented and is much more sort of forward looking and innovation or product strategy.
Amy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jesse: I wonder how you balance and reconcile those things across your teams as you are wielding this cross-functional influence.
Amy: Yeah. So are you, talking about kind of like the dichotomy between like craft or design with a capital D in terms of like creating something that is so beautiful and amazing and gorgeous and all that versus product strategy and business value and like are we actually delivering the thing that’s driving the… yeah, you know, that’s a, good question.
I would say on the spectrum of things, ServiceNow is probably a little bit more skewed toward driving business value, which is I think, the right thing for us. That being said, we’ve invested a lot on the aesthetics and are focusing a lot more on getting those details to a point of polish and beauty and, you know, brand finesse that we’re known just as much for that as we are for the foundational value that the product gives.
But our roots are really in value, right? Like, so again, that ability to automate and streamline businesses and, you know, we have a product called process optimization, for example, where when you’ve digitize processes on our platform, we can show you exactly where there’s bottlenecks, where maybe like an approval process is slowing something down or a lack of some particular thing is, and then we can help you automate that piece or streamline it.
So our software, like fundamentally helps businesses run more efficiently and effectively, which means better customer service, better employee engagement, better, you know, productivity with their products. So that is, I think, just core to what makes us successful. So I do think like the UX leaders on my team are very strategic, very much thinking about product strategy and influencing product strategy.
But we are also getting like much and much better at the beautiful aesthetics of it too. We launched a horizon design system this past year and it’s just absolutely gorgeous cutting edge design. We published principles around designing ethical AI. We’ve published all of our accessibility approaches as well, too.
So that work I think is very much in that category of a capital D where like, if you look at the motion and the interactions and the visual aesthetics and all of those things that I think designers just love, there’s a lot to be proud of there as well too.
Peter: When you mentioned publishing ethical AI and your accessibility standards, is that, I’m assuming by publishing you mean make public, like we, any…
Amy: Yeah. Yeah. They’re public.
Peter: What was the motivation behind publishing that?
Amy: Great question. I think it’s just kind of intrinsic to ServiceNow’s values. We knew that, obviously there’s a lot of nervousness and trepidation around AI, and we wanted our customers to feel really confident that we were doing this in the right way for people. And so even our marketing language anchors on that, which is you know, make AI work for people, right.
Put AI to work for people. And so people is always part of the statement and everything that we’ve done in our user experience design is to make sure that there’s humans in the loop at any kind of important juncture. You know, we’ve launched Agentic AI. Now we make sure that Agentic AI can work on all of the kind of research functions, but if it comes to, you know, like read versus write, it can do all the read stuff, it can pull things together for you.
It can tell you all the things that it has done. But when it comes to like write something, meaning make a change or click submit or take action on that information, there’s a human in the loop. So it’s important to us, ’cause it’s the right thing to do and it’s important to us ’cause it’s the right thing for business, right?
We need our customers to know that we’ve done this in a responsible way. And the reason we publish them externally is it’s literally a guidebook for customers and product development teams to use to make sure that every step of the product development cycle, they’re asking the right questions. They have the right representation in the mix and their counteracting the bias and their thinking ahead around where things might hallucinate and how to continually make sure that there are the right guardrails and checks in place so that their business isn’t compromised, or high stakes things are not at risk, right?
Because using AI in an enterprise context, and especially as we move into Agentic AI, you’ve got businesses with very, very high stakes things that could be at risk if you’re not handling it in a responsible way.
So we have to be very, very transparent about that, to keep that trust with our customer and not lose it and make sure that they have full transparency into how our models are built, how we built our own software, and then we can guide them, too.
It’s available on the Horizon website. So if you search for Horizon design system, those HCAI guidelines are all published there as well, too. And, you know, it’s, one part thought leadership as well too, right? Like ServiceNow, a big part of our brand evolution is that we’re now perceived at the forefront of AI and that’s been something we’ve worked very hard at the past couple years.
So all of these things, both in what we’ve delivered and shipped within our product and the success our customers are seeing with it, as well as these publications are important part of that whole story.
Amy’s journey
Peter: I wanna go back to when you started at ServiceNow, which I think was about five years ago.
Amy: Yep. Correct.
Peter: You started as a simple VP and global head of Design.
And I’m wondering, when you joined ServiceNow about five years ago, how much of the path that you were on, did you foresee, like, did you have an agenda?
Amy: Such a good question.
Peter: Did you have a sense of, you know, what the next three to five years would be? Or, and how much of it has been a response to how things have unfolded and how have you figured out when were appropriate points of growth to, you know, ’cause your mandate has expanded over time, like, given that growth that you’ve had in your role, how much of that was planned and how much of that was realized?
How was it known that that was the right thing to do?
Amy: So did I see this coming? I got an inclination that it might happen, but I was also skeptical. I am a, pretty healthy, you know, cautiously optimistic, somewhat skeptical type person by nature. So when I interviewed here, there were a number of things that drew me to the company.
It was not necessarily this promise of, oh, the company is gonna scale tremendously and you’re gonna scale the team tremendously and your career might grow along with that. I joined here more because I really like the culture, I like the leadership team, and I saw a big opportunity with the product that I thought was really interesting.
And so that’s what drew me here. And the culture was very much hungry and humble. And I like that because I worked at LinkedIn previously through kind of that formative growth time at LinkedIn and that was one of my favorite kind of experiences in my career. So I wanted that, again, I wanted to be part of a company that was still shaping where I could have influence, that was malleable and that was on a growth path because, you know, growing is fun. And I do like scaling UX practices and maturing teams and finding great talent and figuring out how to expand on product experiences. So, that part definitely drew me in.
When I interviewed, I remember being asked like, well, can you scale a team? And I thought, well, sure, I can scale a team. And when I was at LinkedIn, I think I joined and there was like six people on the whole user experience team and it grew to like 120. I’m like, that’s pretty big, you know? I can scale.
And I think here the team when I joined was probably over a hundred people, but under 200 maybe, let’s so call it 150. So I was kind of coming into a team that was equivalent to say the size of the LinkedIn user experience team or even the team at Google that worked on G Suite. So I thought, yeah, like it was already a pretty big team.
Can I scale it bigger? Sure. Did I think it would scale to over a thousand people in five years? I wouldn’t have believed that at that point, if you would tell me, and I remember the person interviewing me kind of said, yeah, well if you look at the growth rate of the company and what we plan to do, like, and you extrapolate the growth of your team, you’ll be at like over a thousand people in five years.
I remember being told that and I was like, nah. I was like, sure. I nodded. Oh, okay. Yeah, no problem. And I remember thinking in my head like, that’ll never happen. But here it did. So I mean, yes, was, I told that this could happen? Yes. Did I believe it a hundred percent? Not entirely, but but it’s tremendous that it did play out that way, and we’re continuing to grow and expand.
And it’s been a huge privilege. And, actually some of the best advice I got on this came from a engineering leader I work with. We were having dinner recently and they’ve been here longer than me, and I said, well, what has it been like? You were here, like, really early days of the company. And now you know, you’re managing, I think he’s got like a, say a 4,000 person engineering team. It’s like, well, every year the team’s grown like 20 to 30%. So every year I think about how do I get 20 to 30% better at what I do? How do I become that much better as a leader? And I was like, oh, that is so just resonated with me.
Like that’s what you have to do. You have to challenge yourself to grow, to meet the needs of your team and the business. And if you can’t grow at that same rate as you’re developing as a leader and someone who’s bringing strategic ideas to the table and making a difference, then probably you should bow out at a certain point and let someone else come in who can work at that scale, you know?
So it is been a privilege, but it’s definitely kept me on my toes and challenged me tremendously to lead at this scale and to continue growing along with the team at that rate.
Jesse: In what ways are you challenging yourself as a leader these days?
Amy: Getting much more involved in the business side of the house is a continual area of growth and challenge for me. So whether that is getting involved in really tricky customer negotiations or escalations and helping turn things around in a positive way that’s been a real good area for me to get comfortable with so much more of kind of an outbound role than internally facing, you know, and I, as someone who started out as a designer who really just wanted to put headphones on and hang out behind my monitor and design things, like becoming more outbound facing and extroverted in those kinds of types of roles are definitely a growth opportunity.
And then I think continuing to advocate for what my team needs. I mean, we talked about like, you know, needing to say, I need more designers. It’s kind of bigger than that now in terms of the story that I need to tell.
And being also expected to deliver a future vision continually when technology is changing so fast and helping people understand how the ways that humans interact with technology will evolve and what it would be like two years from now, four years from now, that’s getting increasingly more challenging because of how quickly the technology is moving.
But that’s a big part of the job and how I have to keep challenging myself too.
Growing as a design leader
Peter: I’m curious what the mechanisms have been for you to figure out the nature of your growth. As in, trial by fire, you’re just thrown into a customer facing conversation and you have to make it work? Or are you getting mentorship? Are you getting formal coaching? And not just with that, but generally, like what are the resources that you turn to, to help you as, you’re trying to figure out what’s the next 20%, to use that conversation you had with your engineering partner.
Like, how are you figuring out what it means to be better? What are the resources you’re drawing from to unpack that? Because this all new to you.
Amy: Yes. Yeah, no, every day is new in some ways. Lots of resources. So I definitely, I definitely don’t sit back and just expect it’s all to come, you know intrinsically. So obviously feedback. I do welcome and, you know, get feedback from various different avenues to figure out like, how am I showing up? How can I improve? What does my team need? What are their expectations? What are leadership’s expectations? So I do welcome that and focus on that, certainly as one avenue.
I have absolutely engaged with professional coaching all along the way, so that’s really important for me too, in various formats, different people. And I’m actually working with a coach right now that coaches a bunch of professional athletes, and that’s been really interesting too, because I do find, especially in these outbound facing roles, representing the company on stage or going into a high stakes meeting, like it’s very much a performance athlete kind of role, right?
Like you’re under pressure. And you’re getting evaluated continually. It’s competitive. And the psychology behind all of that is really important, right? Like what are the head games that you’re playing with yourself that might be setting you up for success or not. So that’s been really, really valuable recently.
And then I’ve got, you know an advisory board and friend group of a lot of other you know, UX leaders, design leaders and so on, that I continually nurture those relationships and friendships and their incredible sounding boards.
And you know frequently in these roles, you’re the only one in this role, right? When you get to a certain point where you kind of the head of a function, it gets lonely real quick because no one else does what you do. And if they do, they’re probably at a different company. So you can’t necessarily like, disclose everything, but you can certainly talk about the leadership challenges you’re facing or best practices you might be using or what you’ve tried, things like that.
So that advisory group of, other professionals in this space is incredibly important for me to continually nurture and learn from.
Jesse: Amy, what conversations are you most looking forward to as we move into this next phase for design?
Amy: I think what will be interesting is I do think the ability to design things will continually get more democratized, right? Like I’m sure you’ve seen things around generative UI, right? So anyone could describe an interface and it could be produced. You don’t necessarily need to know the tools, right? The Figma or the Photoshops of the world.
With that though becomes obviously a lot of room for error for those who maybe don’t have the same design principles or fundamentals or understanding or gut instincts, for maybe things to happen that are again, like not usable or not great product experiences. So. I do think it’ll be interesting to see, like, do our roles shift from being doers to being those who design the experiences that shape good experiences, right?
Which is kind of like the role my team is in. We create building environments like developer tooling, and we have a product called UI Builder, right? Where it’s the place where you can build user interfaces on our product. So how do we build the right expertise into those products or into the models that are producing the generative UIs to still guide and deliver great experiences.
If I put it into a metaphor of like an orchestra. You’re moving more and more people out of the roles of playing the instruments into being the orchestra conductors, but they have to know how to bring all those things together and make music. So how do you train someone about what good music is and how do you teach that?
So I think that’s like probably where it’s headed, where we’re gonna have more and more people that ultimately become the creative directors, the art directors, and they might have an idea and a vision. They may not have the classical art and design training. So how can you train that on the fly or provide that right guardrails?
Amy: And maybe that’s where design expertise sits in the future.
Peter: Hmm.
Amy: What do you guys think?
Jesse: I love that vision. I think it speaks to an evolution of design’s value proposition that potentially is a leveling up.
Peter: Well, it, starts to beg questions. I mean, that kind of orchestration or coordination type mindset is how product management is often categorized, as kind of the chief corraller of cats, depending on the organization, the people don’t report into the product manager, but the product manager has some decision-making authority, but they’re there to really try to get the most out of their team.
And so it starts begging the question, well, where does design and user experience end and product management begin? I don’t know if you have thoughts on that.
Amy: I would say I think there’s places where those lines are blurring more and more, maybe more so than you might say between UX and engineering. Although I think those lines will blur too. This tooling is getting so powerful that given it’s all conversationally based and we all have conversation, right?
We all have the power of language. We can all describe things. That becomes, again, a very like democratizing skillset. And the artifact that gets created, whether it’s code, whether it’s UI, whether it’s a product requirement document, matters less now. You don’t necessarily need the skills to create the artifact, you just need the skills to describe what you want.
It’s gonna turn us all more into those visionary roles where you have to understand what the need is. I think there’s still tons of need for research and psychology and understanding how to empower humans, but bridging that, how to empower humans with the technology.
The pieces that are in the middle of that, I think are gonna kind of merge together a little bit more, and there’ll be less distinction over the subject matter expertise of each part of that development process.
Jesse: Amy Lokey, thank you so much for being with us.
Amy: You’re welcome. It was nice to be here. So great to chat with you both.
Peter: This has been fantastic. Do you like to be found, and if so, where can people find you?
Amy: You know, I have to say I’m not a prolific poster of things aside for LinkedIn is kind of the main place I go. I worked there for a number of years. I love the product. I think it still provides a lot of value. So I would say anyone wants to reach out to me. A message on LinkedIn is always welcome.
I am not so much on the X type of platforms these days, so I think LinkedIn’s a a nice place to converse. So I’d say find me there.
Jesse: Terrific. Thank you so much.
For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.
56: Design’s Role in the Evolution of Product Management (ft. Sara Beckman)
Mar 23, 2025
Transcript
Jesse: Hey everybody, it’s Jesse James Garrett here. I wanted to let you know before we get into the show, we’ve got a special event coming up this week on Friday, March 28th, we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the elements of user experience with a live 90 minute virtual seminar at 8:00 AM Pacific, 11:00 AM Eastern.
I will be talking about the elements of UX in the age of AI. We’ll be looking at the connections between the history of user experience design, and the future of artificial intelligence. You do not wanna miss it. Peter Merholz will be there conducting live q and a. So please join us on Friday, March 28th.
Get your tickets now at jessejamesgarrett.com. Stay tuned for another special announcement at the end of this show, but now on with the show.
I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. Joining us today to talk about what’s next for design is Dr. Sara Beckman, Professor at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and longtime observer and commentator of the dynamic between design and business. We’ll be talking more about the legacy and impact, for better or worse, of design thinking, how design leaders should talk about metrics and how they shouldn’t, and what she’s learning from educating the next generation of product managers.
Peter: Hi, Sara. Thank you so much for joining us.
Sara: It’s a pleasure to be here, Peter.
Peter: To start off, while I’ve known you for over 20 years, our audience doesn’t. And so I’m curious how you introduce yourself these days.
Sara: It’s always a good question. I’m on the faculty at the business school at UC Berkeley, where I have, for multiple decades now, been teaching topics in design, innovation, product development, product management et cetera. I kind of hang out between two worlds there, between the College of Engineering and the business school.
I was involved in starting up the Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation. So a lot of focus, I guess, broadly speaking, on cross-disciplinary work in the university, particularly as it relates to design. The ability to create new stuff, I guess.
The Intersection of Business and Design
Peter: Excellent. I’m going to dive right in to something I was thinking about literally yesterday, where I was attending a session, it was a webinar given by a design leader talking about the intersection, wait for it, of business and design…
Jesse: ooh,
Peter: And how it’s important for designers to understand, and to be able to speak in terms of metrics and stuff like that.
And as he was talking, I was reflecting on work we did together over 20 years ago. So for Adaptive Path, you were kind of an advisor when we did a report on, at the time we called it, like, the working title was The ROI of UX, the official publication title is Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience. And the question I have is, why is it 20 years later we’re having the same conversation about how you connect design and business? Why doesn’t it feel like it has progressed? ,
Sara: Well, can I say something maybe a little provocative and say,
Peter: Yes!
Sara: Design Thinking got in the way.
Jesse: mm-hmm
Sara: So, 20 years ago, we were talking about, I’m going to call it real design. So, whether it’s UX designers, industrial designers, graphic designers, there was work that they did that we were trying to put value on. We were trying to say, if I make this product more usable, I can sell more of it, for example. So how do I make a connection between the deep work that designers are trained to do in design school, and the outcomes I can achieve with a product or service in the marketplace?
Design thinking came along, and, in my opinion, it trivialized the work of real designers, I’ll call them, and we said everybody can do design and we had all these things going on that we turned design into, frankly, to some extent, soundbites.
Oh, go talk to a customer and then design something cool and new. Nothing wrong with going to go talk to a customer. We kind of skip over a lot in design thinking the idea of actually getting insights out of talking to real customers and then designing to those insights.
I’m put in mind of Barry Katz’ book on the history of design in Silicon Valley and how it evolved. First, started at Hewlett Packard, where I happened to work way back when, as really usability or user interface, right, design.
And then as we moved into wrapping services around things, as we moved into software being the core of the delivery of capability, we migrated what design did, but design thinking was a whole different thing.
And so was looking through your recent interview with Roger Martin and, thinking about what is design thinking relative to what design was about. Sometimes they call them little d and big D design. That implies one is bigger, better than the other. But we used to do that in manufacturing. It was big M manufacturing, which we thought of as manufacturing strategy and sort of the wrapper that went around manufacturing. And I think that was different than the actual execution of manufacturing processes.
Somehow de-linked with design thinking, sort of the big D design stuff, we de-linked it from the actual actions of real designers. And that’s part of why people like Lucy Kimball talk about designerly thinking, as opposed to design thinking, because design thinking was a broader mindset and it left behind some of the roll-up-your-sleeves, we have real work to do here, because it made it seem like I could just draw a journey map and then design something, or I could just brainstorm for a bit, diverge, converge, and come up with something. No design process is that easy, right? I mean, you both know this from…
Jesse: Right. Yeah.
Sara: And so we left all that behind. Well, what’s the ROI of design thinking? First of all, nobody even knew what it was, right. I mean, you look at the academic literature on design thinking. I always felt like this was a bit of a tautological. Oh, well, let me go study companies that say they do design thinking and then I’ll define design thinking and then sort of over time we defined this thing called design thinking, but then next thing you know, design thinking isn’t just design.
Oh, it’s also teaming. Oh, so design thinking is going to resolve all the teaming challenges. Like we, it just kept getting bigger and bigger without an anchor around what is this thing. It became bigger and undefined, but we also lost track of… design thinking, which is different than the practice of design, is not the only way to frame and solve a problem.
And Roger talked about, well, scientific method is another way to frame and solve problems. Critical thinking is another way to frame and solve problems. Total quality management or DMAIC or Six Sigma, whatever you wanted to package all that stuff in, that was another way to frame and solve problems. Systems thinking is another way to frame and solve problems.
And the design thinking proponents came along and said, this is the way to frame and solve problems. And it became, therefore, a fad, right? Because, because you can’t say there’s only one way to frame and solve problems. This is one of my great frustrations, honestly.
So that’s what led me to the model that I’ve been using almost 20 years now, which is this experiential learning based model that basically says problem framing and solving is a process of sense making, toggling between the concrete and the abstract world, observing and noticing, framing and reframing the problem, and solution making, agains toggling between concrete and abstract worlds.
Sara: I have a great idea in my head. I go try it out. I can put all of those other problem framing and solving methods into that model, which then led me to say, well, then shouldn’t we be teaching students, at a generic level, the core capabilities of problem framing and solving, and then have them say, ah, this problem could use scientific method approaches. It’s hypothesis-driven, right? I observe customers or users and I create a hypothesis about a problem they have. And then I go test that hypothesis by playing around with different solutions and prototypes. Scientists observe nature, maybe. We observe people in the design world, but they’re observing something and then forming a question about how it could be different.
So, Sal Khan, in his book, One World Schoolhouse, his last chapter says, What if the university were a place in Silicon Valley that companies threw problems into and kids solved them for four years? And it took me a while to really kind of digest that notion, but I think, and by the way, it doesn’t have to be in Silicon Valley, and it doesn’t have to be corporate problems, but a general notion that education would really be about iteratively framing and solving problems of different types of different magnitudes over time with different methodologies. I think of different mindsets, different skill sets, different tool sets, right, that students would then learn in this setting.
A systems thinking mindset, skill set, tool set is a better way to tackle this problem than in this other situation over here, where scientific method might be more applicable set of mindset, skill sets, tool sets.
Taking The Time to Get It Right
Peter: So you’re laying out a robust, detailed, savvy framework for approaching, tackling problems. What I’m wondering is, I don’t think I have ever been exposed to a company that would engage in the kind of rigor that you are proposing as they work through their challenges, and so, what’s the misfit there, right?
There’s a misfit, I mean, you’re a B school teacher, I know you do exec ed. So you’re talking to people, not just students who’ve not necessarily had real jobs before, but people who are in the working world who are trying to get better at it, you’re engaging with folks with real world challenges.
Square this, you know, thousand points of light, very robust framing of all the ways an organization can consider how to best tackle the problem in front of them.
One of the reasons I think design thinking became popular is, in part, because by underselling design, it could be done quickly. And these companies just want anything that can be done quickly. They don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking upfront. You might not be familiar with this. There’s this saying “big design upfront,” which is like a bad thing, right? You’re going to spend three months doing all this work and designing, and then we’re going to get to start building it.
So square the rigor and robustness that you’re discussing with what we witness every day with companies who are barely able to tie their shoes, much less engage in any meaningful research to inform how they solve problems.
Sara: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s that’s a fair judgment. I teach hundreds of product managers every year. So I watch a lot of this. Clearly time matters, but there’s a couple of things that I try to do here.
One is, you know, I used to teach design for manufacturability forever ago, my industrial engineer side of me used to teach operations management, and we taught a case study about a disk drive company. These are commercial disk drives, right? So they’re very, very high volume, low cost product, right? And this company was working in a partnership with Japanese company that was doing the manufacturing. And the engineers at the Japanese company would say, We need you to properly spec this product. And the engineers in the U. S. company would say, We don’t have time to properly spec this product. And the Japanese engineers ultimately won. They won over the ongoing complaints on the part of the U. S. product development team who they said they just want us to be able to put the parts on the table and hit the table and the parts will jump together.
Like that’s ridiculous. But in the end they spec’d this product and they were able to ramp to volume manufacturing in way less time, way faster ramp to very high quality levels, because they had done some amount of initial investment.
The parallel I draw to that in the design and product management world is that having some degree of clarity around what problem you want to solve for the customer or user up front will buy you a whole bunch of time in the long run, because you won’t keep putting the wrong thing into the market. Now, I’m not suggesting that I sit around and look at my belly button all day to do that. That’s where the innovation cycle comes in, right? I talk to a few customers. I take a step back. I go from dance floor to balcony. I get in the balcony. I say, what problem do I think the customer’s trying to solve here? Then I say, well, if that’s the problem, here’s three ways I could solve it. And I take those three ways back out, and I find out they don’t really have that problem. So I pivot, right?
Or alternatively, I could say, I observe three critical problems that the customer has. I’m going to then generate ideas for each of those three problems, take them out, and figure out the customer’s going to say, I want to take that one home. Then I know I’m solving a problem the customer cares about. So the whole notion of rapid cycle prototyping is super critical here. But to frame it in terms of, I’m not just rapid prototyping to create the best product, I’m rapid prototyping to make sure I’m solving a problem that someone cares about, and there’s huge value in that, right?
Jesse: What I hear from many of the design leaders in my leadership coaching practice is that their leadership is on board with many of the ideas that you’re describing. They are on board with being customer centered, with really listening for the right signals and tuning the product to the market in these ways.
They just don’t see design as necessarily a partner in making that happen. And I wonder about design’s value proposition as it relates to this value that you’re describing because, you know, as you mentioned, you teach product managers how to do product management. And there are many, many people who see all of these things that you’re describing as being fundamental to the product management role, much more than to the design role in the organization.
And so I wonder your thoughts on design, where design plays in these spaces.
Sara: So that’s where I have to go back to this question of so-called little d design, right? I mean, product managers are generally not experienced or not taught or trained in doing UX design, right? So who is their partner, to be able to say, put this kind of curve on the product and this will happen. This goes back then to Peter’s original question of, you know, back 20 years ago, we were trying to characterize those kinds of connections, not this meta design thinking thing, right. We could have a long talk about customer centricity and whether companies really are or whether it’s just a lot of words and right, so, there’s a whole problem in companies.
The Folly of Net Promoter Score
Sara: I use net promoter score as my sort of measure of that. It has nothing to do with customer satisfaction. In fact, there’s no correlation between customer satisfaction or increased profit and net promoter score for any number of reasons.
First, it’s ill constructed from a statistical point of view. It randomly eliminates 2 of the measures. It’s not even a proper average. I look at mine, I go, it got better and I think I’m good, but I don’t know that my competitors is 2 points higher than mine. In which case, getting better wasn’t really relevant.
Peter: I like how for you, net promoter score, what it indicates, isn’t customer satisfaction, but a company that is kind of foolishly trying to engage in the idea of customer satisfaction.
Sara: I mean, they think it’s an appropriate proxy, right? And I think that’s, well, it’s not an appropriate proxy for really understanding, are my customers now able to achieve an outcome better than they could before? Now, you might have a proxy for that outcome, right? But I want to have a way to know, have I actually helped my customer execute the jobs to be done that I intended them to execute.
As long as you have these broader metrics, it’s very hard to connect what a UX designer does, right? I mean, I think it was an Adaptive Path conference where I put a DuPont chart up there. This is very old stuff. DuPont charts. Accountants would know what a DuPont chart is. Like, It starts over here with profit, which is made up of revenue versus cost. Revenue is price versus volume. So it basically backs all the way through financial metrics. And I put that out there and I said, “So where do designers affect this?”
Jesse: Right.
Sara: It could be at any of those levels. Remember Sam Lucente at Hewlett Packard. He had these multiple layers when he went in as the head of design. He said, well, it was clear that I had to do cost reduction stuff to prove my value. So I standardized the logos on all the pieces of equipment that HP sold at the time. Saved a boatload of money. Also, by the way, created sort of a standard brand identity in the marketplace.
So he had, at one end, let me save cost, right, by good design, and the other end, he was working on revenue growth opportunities, right? If I can identify an interesting new need in the marketplace, then I’ll be able to grow revenue.
Connecting Design to Business Value
Sara: So to me, we have opportunities to make very explicit connections between what designers are doing. We had a discussion about the DuPont chart. And I was trying to get the designers in the room to think about the CMO, the chief marketing officer as their customer. And I said, what outcomes is the CMO trying to achieve and how are you going to connect the design you’ve made over here to helping them achieve those outcomes? And it was really hard to get them to do that. I can’t remember exactly the details now or I would tell the whole story, but, in effect the person said, yeah, but it’s Claudia Kotchka’s, you know, put a gold rim around the top of a face cream so I can put it in CVS or Walgreens and have it look more upscale, and everything, there. And the executive saying that cost two cents per jar, take it off. And her having to say, but then it won’t say that it’s…
Peter: Premium.
Sara: Premium, right?
Jesse: Right. So, in some ways what you’re talking about are really qualitative outcomes that design creates in this increasingly, as Roger pointed out, as has frequently been a theme on this show, in an increasingly metrics-driven world. And I wonder what you see as design’s relationship to business metrics.
Get Your Proxy Metrics Right
Sara: So when we teach product managers, we try to have conversations about this. There’s a great case study, and this is kind of the classic case of Kodak. What was Kodak selling? Memories, and they knew that. What was their proxy measure for you to capture and share memories? Two core jobs to be done. Capture and share memories, right? Proxy measure, how much film and paper do we sell? So what happened to Kodak? They got too hung up on film and paper sales as the proxy metric, and when we shifted to digital, they didn’t shift their internal proxy metrics.
They knew they were in the business of memories, right? They invented one of the first, if not the first, digital camera. they were on top of all these things, but when it came to execute, the metrics they had in place, they needed to be changed as a proxy for that.
So mostly we use proxies, right? Like monthly average users. Well, you know, monthly average users is just a number that customers don’t care about. What did they care about: learning from the site, or getting a job, or whatever it is. So, how do I get proxy metrics? I’ve always hated sort of measuring everything myself, like it frustrated me when I worked in business, so I’m not not here to say, I think you have to be able to measure everything.
But if you’re going to measure, then for heaven’s sakes, don’t use net promoter score, at least try to use something that gives you some information about the customers and whether they’re achieving something they want to achieve. And I think the Kodak story is a great example of knowing what you want to help, but not migrating or connecting metrics over time to the outcome.
Peter: So you say, don’t use net promoter score. I agree. Many UX types agree.
Jesse: I also agree.
Peter: A few weeks ago a head of design shared with me that their boss, in an effort to give design some accountability, “We’re going to have you held accountable for net promoter score.”
And this design leader was uncomfortable about that. I’m wondering what you would counsel someone, ’cause I can point to dozens of design leaders who are in a similar situation, what have you seen, if anything, that works to start changing that conversation? Shifting it, when you are also not the one in power, right? This is your boss saying this.
Jesse: Right.
Peter: You might be new. This person’s relatively new in the organization, right? Like, so they’re still earning trust, building credibility, like, there’s some things working against them to be able to just say, no, that’s not the right way to do it. It should be X.
Any thoughts on how you turn that ship, to start advocating for what you do believe is right?
Sara: Yeah. Many years ago when I worked at Hewlett Packard, HP at the time was divisionalized, had 50 or 60 manufacturing sites globally, which was a lot, and they were all very small, and so we were trying to provide some evidence that consolidation of those sites might be useful, so we made a cost volume curve. And where was HP? Above the curve, on the steep portion of the curve. So we start showing this to people and we say, hmm, opportunity, right? Increase volume, reduce costs. Oh, no, we do better quality work than that. Okay, how many quality engineers would you like me to add to the curve?
Jesse: Hmm.
Sara: And it would move up, you know, a teeny, teeny, tiny amount and we’d go at it again. For a year, we had these conversations. Until one of the very senior, senior guys said, wait a second, how many engineers do we have working in each of those sites?
I said, well, it’s like two per site. You’ve got a hundred across the company, but the two, whoa, if we put them all together, we’d have an awesome printed circuit board assembly site. Like, okay. So it took me a year to get there.
Two morals of that story for this conversation. You’re not going to change the boss’s mind overnight. But you keep bringing this up. So there’s a whole bunch, there’s articles–the wallet allocation rule. There’s a whole bunch of articles out there, first of all. So I would start with, there’s evidence of the problems of using net promoter score, right? So I can put some of those out there.
But probably more importantly, I would start trying to build up some understanding of how I can create a metric that connects more closely to what the customers and users are trying to achieve. So I would start thinking about, is it weekly active users in the example views, or is it weekly learning users? Ah, well then if it’s weekly learning, what do I actually watch people doing? Do they scroll more? Do they post more? What evidence would I have that they’re actually on the site learning something?
So I would start to build up a conversation around what can we replace this with. If you’ve got to have a metric other than revenue, right? If you’ve got to have a metric, then what metric might I have that would allow me to connect to something that is the agenda that I think I have for helping customers and users.
Jesse: And it takes time. So part of this is patience. I’m new here. I’m not going to walk into my boss’s office, although I’ve been known to do stuff like that, walk into my boss’s office and say, you know, this is dumb. You should think differently. But, you know, building up a case. Maybe being able to collect some of that data, maybe talking to the data scientists and saying, if I wanted to construct a metric that evaluates memories, whether they’re shared and whether they’re captured, do you have data that could help me do that? So why don’t the designers make friends with the data scientists and say, you know, if this is something I would like to be able to evaluate, do you have a way to help me do that evaluation? So we begin to get little better integration.
You talk about organizations basically falling in love with their proxies and becoming so attached to their quantitative measures that they forget what those quantitative measures were intended to stand for, which had to do with some sort of different kind of qualitative impact.
Jesse: I work with lot of design leaders who are basically trying to break that spell of having fallen in love with those specific quantitative proxies. The challenge with that is, and I love your suggestion that like, don’t try to convince them to become a qualitatively driven organization, just give them different proxies, better proxies makes a lot of sense.
The attachment that happens in these organizations is often connected to financial incentives. It’s often connected to power. And design leaders often find themselves literally the least powerful person in the room when having these conversations about how we measure the value of the work that we’re doing together.
And I wonder about your perspective on the arguments that are going to hold water in a situation where you are the least powerful person in the room, arguing for everybody else in the room to change the way they measure their success. How do you do that?
Find Your “Trojan Horse” Move
Sara: It’s hard. There’s no… it goes back to my HP story, like, I couldn’t change the whole company.
Jesse: Right.
Sara: I could only change it one person, one division at a time. And so we used to talk a lot about, what’s our Trojan horse move, what’s our subliminal messaging, like how do we create shifts in thinking over time.
And the kinds of things I use with product managers are, I can’t implement a big thing all at once. I have to often start small. So what if I open every meeting with a customer story? Oh, I was talking to a customer the other day. You know what they were doing with our product? What if every time somebody came to me with a feature they want me to build, I said, cool, happy to consider it, what’s the customer going to do with it? What problem are they going to solve with it?
So there’s a whole lot of really simple little things, and design thinking did contribute a whole lot of these, but I can change my own behavior, and then what happens, you start to hear other people starting their meetings with customer stories, or you start to hear other people saying, but what problem is this solving.
But we have, to your point, incredibly entrenched behaviors in organizations. And I’m going to take that all the way back to where we started this conversation, standardized testing and the way we structure our school systems has caused us to reward people for quickly having the answer to a question rather than saying, wait, is that the right question? Or rather than saying, is there more than one answer?
We’ve got behaviors like that, that have been entrenched since middle school? Before?
You’re not going to change those overnight, right? This is the whole thing I have about problem framing and solving, right? And, Roger sort of describes it as scientific method, analytical, but we’ve trained a generation of people and then we rewarded them for those behaviors.
It’s not going to change if we’re just talking at this big level about everything. It’s going to change because we model behavior changes ourselves. So when I teach not just product managers, but executives, this is what I talk about. Say, you can’t ask the people in your organization to do ABC if you’re not acting that way yourself. But they don’t even know that they’re acting that way. So they need to be, in effect, called out on it in a nice way, right?
So I would literally, at HP, my boss would do stuff in a meeting and I would walk up to him afterwards and I’d say, don’t ever say those words again, because here’s how they are heard. Don’t ask people to do X. Suggest that they do Y. Or, right, like I was trying to do literal behavior change work with him in order to get some of these changes in behavior, so it’s, you know, it takes systems thinking. It’s a big systems problem.
This is not going to get undone overnight. I’m sure you’ve done this in your coaching. How many times do you have somebody, you know, you say, oh, well, you should be customer centric about that. And three seconds later, they’re telling you what feature they want to put in the product,
Jesse: Right.
Sara: And you go, what problem is that solving? And they’re like, Oh, it’s hard. It’s hard.
Jesse: Yeah, so it’s interesting because it suggests there are several layers of the kind of culture change that’s really needed in organizations in order for design to genuinely deliver on its value proposition, because you’ve got to evolve the way that the culture engages with decision making. But you also have to evolve the way that the culture engages with problem framing and problem solving…
On Being Customer-Centric
Sara: And measuring itself. And, right?
The reward systems. It all has to align around achieving… That’s why the customer centricity thing, there’s actually not as much academic literature on that as you might think. It’s kind of surprising. If you say, Oh, are you a customer centric CEO? Well, of course I am. I talk to customers all the time. Like about what? Oh, well, that do they like the curvature of this or did they like this feature?
No, I don’t want you to talk to them about that. I want you to talk to them about their lives, about the problems they have about, right? We don’t have those kinds of conversations, but we think that because we shared a roadmap with the customer that we’re customer centric, right? It’s not. It’s not.
But if you don’t get down to that level, and they’re just going to go, well, we are customer centric. And I work with some large companies where they’ll, “Oh, we’re customer centric.” I go, okay, write an interview guide to go learn something about your customer. And we’ll get specific about X kind of problem. And what do they write? “What’s the last product you bought from us? Did you like that product?” “What do you…” right?
Like they’re not able to get into a mindset of learning, not selling. Of being present with a problem as opposed to with the solution, so it’s incredibly hard for them, but they think that because they’re talking, I mean, particularly in a complex B2B large technology kind of company, they are out talking to customers all the time, but they’re mostly talking about the features they’re developing. Not about the problems those features are aiming to solve.
Peter: More proxies.
Sara: Right. you know, to Jesse’s point, why is it so important that this change now? And you probably read Experience Economy…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Sara: Pine and Gilmore stuff.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Sara: I really like the trajectory it lays out, which is to say, Commodities, the only differentiation is price, right? So coffee beans the value is can I get them at the lowest cost?
Then I make goods, grind up the coffee beans, put them in a can. I’ve added some value to the end customer. Services, I’ll make the coffee for you and serve it to you at Denny’s. Now I’ve added more value to the customer. Staging customer experiences. Now I’m, you know, at the Starbucks level of coffee where it’s the third place, there’s more going on than the coffee.
They’re now writing another book on guiding transformations. It used to be that most of the companies I taught were somewhere between goods and services. Now, most of them are trying to migrate to designing experiences. And very recently, people are starting to talk about guiding transformations. I cannot do experiences and transformations well, unless I truly understand what I’m trying to help my customers accomplish.
Jesse: Mm.
Sara: So, the trajectory we’re on, that trajectory is true. That increases differentiation and personalization, therefore increasing my opportunity to capture value, right?
So there’s an economic return to increasing the value I provide to the customer. Then we have no choice but to go through the cultural shift that you’re suggesting, Jesse.
And that’s kind of the broader argument that I’m trying to get people into, like, where do you want to be on this spectrum? You know, companies also talk about, well, hmm, sometimes we went to goods and then they got commoditized. So we went backwards. Oh, huh. I don’t know that I want to do that very often. Sometimes I might have to. But how do I always have my eye on the possibility that I might add additional value and differentiate in some way.
Embracing AI
Sara: Now, why is that being driven so fast? Because AI creates all this possibility to create, to stage experiences, to guide transformations.
But if I’m looking at it totally internally, I’m just going, how do I get AI into my product? So what’s everybody flocking to these days? Courses on how to put AI into their product. Rather than asking the question, how do I augment my ability to stage customer experiences or guide transformations?
AI will spit out a customer journey map for you, which, this is another place we talked earlier about, how do I get people to do this? I don’t have to spend time on this. It used to be I had to go interview a bunch of people. By the way, I’m not saying not to spend time with real customers. That’s a whole other conversation. But, but it used to be that I had to spend months to get an as is customer journey map, and now I can get one in less than a minute.
Are they always right? Are they always complete? No, they’re not. But in my experience in the last year or two, they’re pretty good, and that means I’ve had a lot of people try out prompts to get a customer journey map, and they can get a pretty good starting point.
Ah, if I can start there, now I’m playing a whole different game, because I don’t have to say, I don’t have time to blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
I can start somewhere. I can get a list of jobs to be done. What’s the customer support engineer trying to get done when resolving a customer issue? Here’s all the personal jobs to be done. Here’s all the professional jobs to be done. Do I still have to go play with that and say which of those jobs to be done would I like to support? What does my product support now? What are my competitive products support? Yes. But now I can do it with, more real detail.
Now, none of that is quantitative, right? You’re talking about a qualitative list of jobs to be done. I might try to do a quant evaluation, like how do I match up to my competitors on the ability to do those jobs for customers. That’s why I want a partnership with data science people.
Now I’ve got to get creative. And how do I take that existing experience and make it a whole lot better? So you’ve also got a whole bunch of questions about what are the roles of designers in a world when some of the artifacts that they’ve created historically, I can create pretty quickly now a first draft of. But now, now you’re in a cycle. Now I can go in with a first draft, I can say, you don’t have to pay me for six months of work…
Jesse: Well, there’s a catch in there though, right? Because the AI can make the journey map for you, but it can’t sell it to the executives for you. You’ve got to be the one to make the case and to frame the deliverable in some larger meaning, which comes back to this quant versus qual thing that we’ve been talking about.
But it also comes back to the notion of culture change, and the notion of organizational evolution that is a part of this. It is very common for design leaders to see themselves as organizational changemakers, as champions of a different way of thinking about decisions, a different way of thinking about prioritization, a different way of thinking about how you go to market as a business.
And you know, what I’m hearing reinforced in what you’re saying is that, like, you’ve got to really not just bring the data, but you’ve also got to bring the persuasion on a human level, to bring people around to this mindset as you describe it. The challenge that I hear from my clients is they feel like as design leaders, they are not sufficiently empowered to actually drive the mindset that is required to create design success. And again, coming back to the fact that you are not a design professor. You are teaching product managers. I find myself wondering about those design leaders who are asking, Am I even in the right place to create what I see myself creating in this organization as a design leader, or do I need to be somewhere else in order to actually accomplish these outcomes?
Create Your Own Power
Sara: Let me first say it is not just designers who say that. Product managers say that, you know, lots of people, so that’s not an uncommon concern. Part of the challenge we have is that the world is moving way faster, particularly since COVID, and we hit the knee of the technology change curve. The world has been upended. The people who are running the companies today have no experience in this new world. I would guess if you talk to some number of them, they’re terrified because…
Jesse: hmm.
Sara: …they don’t have the tools, the sense of what can happen. And so we’ve got real conflicts between the top of the organization and the people doing the work.
And the people who are doing the work often know more, but are feeling disempowered and I think part of it is this challenge of things are moving so fast, you can kind of get it. Even at HP when things weren’t moving that fast, you know, those of us more junior grew up with more technology then the people running the company, and so for them to be making judgments, they actually didn’t have that empathy, if you will, for what was happening out in their customer’s world.
So, so this kind of goes back to, create the power for yourself. I mean, no-, nobody’s going to come to you and say, I empower you to change how I think, right? It just isn’t that way.
Now, you could be in an organization that you should leave. And I assume that you coaches help people figure that out. Like if you’re pushing rope uphill, you know, there’s a point at which, don’t do that anymore.
But I ran the change management team at Hewlett Packard, right? Nobody said you’re empowered to help the company improve its teaming, change its product development process, improve supply chain management. I figured out that those were things that needed to happen, and went around and found places that would experiment with me.
I don’t have to change the whole company at once. I just have to redesign one product, and show that redesigning one product increased acceptance, adoption, whatever it is, right. So change doesn’t have to be, oh, they don’t understand me. No, they’re probably not going to, until you find that– I’m gonna go back to my thing.
I didn’t get that they cared a lot about consolidating engineers, not about consolidating production, right? Boom, I was telling the wrong story because I wasn’t listening to my senior management team.
That’s the same thing at the Adaptive Path conference where, you know, we were having somebody pretend to be the CMO. The designers who were sitting in my group weren’t listening to what the CMO cared about and creating a connection, right? it also goes to the whole storytelling thing, right? We teach storytelling a lot in product management. Why? Because, as our storytelling faculty member says, when you open with data, people receive it with their dukes up. Where’d you get the data? How’d you analyze it? Why are you sure that’s the average?
Start with the Story, Then the Data
Sara: If you open with a story and then provide the data, it’s heard in a different way. Even in companies that have very data driven focus, and I think, increasingly, in the product management space, I was just with a bunch of them this morning on storytelling, and one of them said, when we have a product that’s languishing, I use storytelling to figure out whether I should just kill it or what I need to do to fix it.
Because you can’t tell a good story if you don’t have a good story to tell.
Peter: Hm.
Sara: So it’s in the structuring of the story that I’m testing… “Once upon a time, there was a customer who really wanted to and could not do so because…” If I can’t tell a compelling, right, problem, then I don’t have something. So I would link these things together, right? Like, how do I bring the qualitative side? And I’ll come with data. “Once upon a time, there was a customer who really wanted to do this, couldn’t do so because, and by the way, there’s 400, 000 of those…
Peter: right.
Sara: in the United States alone.” Okay, now I’ve got my data. But you can’t expect it to happen overnight. I mean, that’s thing that I think is so… it just doesn’t, it just doesn’t.
Peter: Right.
Sara: So I’m a big “guide on the side” rather than “sage on the stage” as an educational concept.
And so to do guide on the side work, you’re gonna have a classroom that has tables and chairs, not the amphitheater style, right?
And so I used to go to these meetings about our new buildings and I’d be like, no, we’ve got to have flat classrooms. And it got to the point where I was in some meeting and it’s like 10 minutes into the meeting. So he goes, “Sara, you haven’t brought up the space problem yet.” So that’s what happens, right? Mean, to me, that’s what you have to sort of, with humor, be a bit of a pain in the neck, you know? Oh yeah, what problem is that solving? Oh yeah, what problem?
Pretty soon you start to hear it back again and they’re not even attributing it to you, which is the other part. You can’t take credit for it, right? Because, you’re just trying to get them to understand something and eventually it’ll click and then they’ll say it in their own terms and you’ll hear it come back. You go, well, I’ve said that. That’s right.
Peter: You’ve mentioned your work with product managers. Sounds like you’re teaching them working with maybe dozens, if not hundreds of them over the course of year. And I want to take advantage of your distinct kind of opportunity and perspective that that gives you, and I have a question which is, What are you hearing from them? What are the patterns you’re seeing in product management and with product managers? What are the things that are keeping them up at night or what stage are we at with product management?
I’m, just kind of curious as you look at the world of product management from your point of view across dozens if not hundreds of people from a lot of different enterprises. What have you witnessed? What insights do you have that could be of interest to people who are working with product managers and who don’t necessarily understand the challenges that they’re facing?
Sara: By the way, we have some number of designers who show up for the product management program. So it isn’t just product managers, we have fair number of technical or, engineering managers who show up as well. And I think it’s in part because they would like to understand a little bit better how business cases are being made for this.
So, first, let me say, because I’ve always been in this boat as long as you’ve known me, or maybe even before, I’ve always taught human centered or customer centered development, right? That’s what we taught at Berkeley in the MBA programs.
And that’s really how we anchor the product management program. So, yes, we teach segmentation, targeting, positioning, pricing strategy. But the Trojan horse, if you will, is it’s all customer centric.
So the first thing I would say is that companies used to push back heavily on that, let’s say, 15, 20 years ago. A lot of the stuff you’re saying, Oh, no, we can’t do that. My boss would never let me do that, etc. There’s a lot less of that now. In fact, it’s pretty rare. I can credit design thinking with that, if you like, that there’s been enough conversation and agenda around some of these first principles of customer centric work, and adoption of things like rapid prototyping, although aside, we teach risky assumption testing rather than minimum viable product, because there are often assumptions you can test without a minimum viable product.
So rapid prototyping has become minimum viable product instead of risky assumption testing.
Jesse: Right.
Sara: So being clear about what are the risks associated with the idea that I have for creating a new customer experience, and how might I test them, could lead you to, I’ll test them through a minimum viable product, but it doesn’t have to lead you there. But most companies don’t get that until you really push them.
This is another one of those things where you can push them at a micro level. It’s like, what do you want to learn from making that minimum viable product? And often they can’t even tell you, because it’s just built into their agile process that they all spit out minimum viable products.
These are all the little things that, if you could get that mindset to shift, then you end up in a different place. So that has definitely changed. And there’s a lot more acceptance of customer centric thinking on the part of product managers.
The second thing that’s really big is that, of course, the field of product management, as you probably well known, has grown significantly. So there are a lot of product managers now. I don’t remember the numbers on LinkedIn, but it’s grown significantly. That includes not only the classic externally facing product manager, but it also includes a lot of internally facing product managers. So they might manage a platform on which products are built for that external customers or users.
So, product management is sort of propagated in a lot of ways, which is probably why you see it encroaching more and more on what designers do, because, theoretically anyway, the product manager’s job is to bring together the customer with the engineering community, to make stuff happen, right? It’s more complex than that, but they’re supposed to be a representation of the customer.
I would say in big companies, most of them have CX/UX design group, but it’s not always accessible. So you can’t get your project in there unless it’s prioritized in some way. So not everybody in the organization feels like they can get to those capabilities.
B, very often what is produced is a bullet point list of things to build. So it’s not bringing alive the existing customer experience or the experience they want to build. Dorothy Leonard at Harvard used to call this empathic design. That I have in the guts of the engineers empathy for the customer.
Well, if the CX design group is doing all that, but it’s not presented to the product manager in a form that allows them to use it to create that empathy, right, then we’re missing a connection.
So the product managers are not really doing that kind of design work. Like many of them don’t interview customers. Somebody else does that. Which is too bad because they should be out in front of customers themselves. So this becomes the place where your question gets messy in the sense of, first of all, who does what, but then, where’s the connection between the two?
I had a PhD student write an entire thesis about this question of how I present the results of design research to the people that will execute the product and not lose something in the process. So this could be another reason why designers feel left out, because maybe the bridge, there’s a gap, like something’s jumping across from the customer experience group into the PMs, but it’s not really a connected thing, like, could they bring the PMs on interviews with them? They probably should once in a while, right? So the PMs can actually see the customers. Do they help digest the data with the PMs? Probably not, right?
What’s Next for Design
Jesse: So, I wonder what all of this suggests for the future of design. And I’m curious what you think and what you see from your vantage point, in terms of what’s next for where design is going in organizations.
Sara: Yeah, designers have very particular skill sets that are not generally present in the rest of the organization. For example, the ability to conduct a good ethnographic interview with a customer or user. The ability to create representations of an offering, whether it’s an experience, a service, whatever. There are capabilities that don’t exist elsewhere in the organization.
Jesse: So what you’re saying is they have a very particular set of skills.
Peter: Ha!
Sara: That are important, and the question is, how do they get embedded in the organization, right? How and where? So, do product managers really understand… And this goes back to, in 1993, a woman who was a fashion designer in New York came to get her MBA, and after she took my operations class, she came to me, and she said, shouldn’t business people know more about design? And I said, sure, start a class.
So she started a full on three unit class called Design as a Strategic Business Issue. And, Davis Masten, Jerry Hirshberg, Sara Little Turnbull, Bill Moggridge, right? Like, name people in that world. They came with their 35mm slide trays, and they showed what designers do. And it was eye opening and mind blowing for the MBA students.
That class isn’t taught anymore. Partly because Design thinking came along, and so we started teaching design thinking, and now we’re not teaching what those critical skills that designers bring are and what they produce, right? I mean, there’s all kinds of stuff that we talk, oh, in design thinking, we do visualization because we put post its on the wall. Well, that’s not the same as, you know, my friend Michael Berry sketching what a new drive-through would be for a fast food company while everybody’s talking about it, right?
And so part of the challenge then becomes, how do I make clear what those unique skills of designers bring to an organization. Then I would also ask the question, if I centralize something, then it’s not part of the fabric of the organization. So do I need a UX designer on every single team? Like does every product manager need one? I don’t know. Do they need at least consulting with one once a week? Maybe? I’m throwing this out there because I don’t know if anybody’s even asking those questions, probably the two of you.
But, how do I bring that skill set to bear when it’s most valuable and needed? Right now, my sense is that it’s separate out there for a lot of big companies. It’s somewhere up here and maybe I’ll get access to it, right.
And by the way, rapid testing of things is primarily A/B testing that’s owned by engineers, or MVPs that are owned by engineers. So this capability to do early testing is not embedded in the organization.
But the agile feature mill is a fast cycle, but I lose the front end then. Like, product managers works gotten sucked into the agile feature mill. Well, ditto with any front end design work, right? So the question is, where do you want to embed those capabilities, as opposed to thinking of them as people?
I know they’re people and they’re wonderful people, but really thinking about what is the capability set? What are the jobs they can help with? And where do I need to have those jobs done in an organization? And then how do I make that happen on the front lines, as opposed to in a big, you know, hand wavy way, which we kind of get stuck in, don’t we, when we talk about design?
Jesse: Dr. Sara Beckman. Thank you so much for being with us.
Sara: It has been my pleasure.
Sara where can people find you?
I’m reachable on LinkedIn. I just would ask if somebody reaches out on LinkedIn that they tell me why they know me.
Peter: Not just a message that says hello.
Jesse: Mention the podcast. Mention the podcast.
Sara: Mention the podcast. There you go. and I’m also available by email, which is just Beckman at Berkeley dot edu.
Peter: Awesome. Thank you so much.
For those who have stuck around, we have a special treat for you. We have revamped our website at Finding Our Way dot Design, and we have also launched a new online community through Discord called The Way Station. So go to Finding Our Way dot Design. Click on the link that says The Way Station, and you’ll see a link to our new Discord server.
Hope to see you there.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.
55: The Maker Mindset Connecting Product, Design, and Engineering (ft. Todd Wilkens)
Mar 08, 2025
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. Joining us today to talk about what’s next for design is Todd Wilkens, part of our leadership at Adaptive Path years ago, who has gone from design leadership to product leadership to fully integrated leadership of design, product, and technology. He’ll talk with us about his increasingly holistic view of product development and leadership, the signs that an organization is right for him as a leader, and what the C suite really talks about behind closed doors.
Peter: All right. So this is a little different than the conversations we’ve been having recently, ’cause this is one with an old friend. We are joined by Todd Wilkens. Todd worked with Jesse and I at Adaptive Path many years ago, helped lead our Austin office, and then went on his way and we have him here today because his journey is one that we find potentially illuminating as we explore what are paths forward for design leaders. So, welcome Todd. How are you?
Todd: I’m doing good. It’s really great to talk to both of you again. It’s been a while.
From Design To GM to Product Management
Peter: It has been a while. And yeah, if you could share just like your story beyond Adaptive Path and kind of that evolution you’ve had from design leader to whatever it is you call yourself now.
Todd: Sure. Yeah. So I think actually Adaptive Path was a place where I had a very pivotal thing happen, which was I moved to Austin and opened the second studio, and had to kind of own part of the P and L for the company. There was a little piece of the P and L, but I was still running part of the business all of a sudden.
And I learned from that, that there are a lot of challenges when you try to run something holistically, instead of just doing a part of it, you know? And I, I ended up kind of liking it. And so I say that because that, sort of is the theme of my career path now.
Which is, I left Adaptive Path. Went to the Mayo Clinic doing design work. Left the Mayo Clinic, went to IBM when they were doing that big design kind of transformation some years ago, also doing design work there. But within that change at IBM, we realized we needed to change some of how product management worked as well, because you can’t just change the design stuff.
And so I spent my last year at IBM actually sort of masquerading as a product manager. I helped redefine the product management practice for all of IBM, and thousands of people there at the time thought I was a product manager, even though I was technically a designer, right.
And then I kind of went on this path where I went to Atlassian as a designer, VP of design at Atlassian.
And then this was the moment where I was like, the holistic thing really kicked in, which is I had this opportunity to go become the GM of a business. So I moved to a company called Automattic. They do WordPress and I became the GM for WooCommerce. It’s one of the biggest e-commerce platforms. And did that for a while, which was really amazing.
And I learned that… I learned a lot of things. I learned that I don’t get up in the morning excited to do all the business stuff, even though I can do it well, right. I was there for two and a half years. We managed to grow at, it’s like 40 percent the first year, a hundred percent year over year growth the second year.
It was like, the business was succeeding, but I got up in the morning, excited to do the engineering and the product and design stuff. So I kind of moved my way back into product and now I’ve done a series of chief product officer, chief product technology officer jobs at a variety of different companies.
What I’ve realized is the theme on my companies is I like growth stage companies, typically that sort of series B, series C, there’s somewhere between 100 and 250 people there. They figured out that they have product market fit, but everything is kind of like held together with duct tape and bailing wire and now they want to scale it. And so they have to figure out how to do that. And I like to work in what I’ve started calling invisible industries. I work almost entirely in B2B and they’re always industries that make the world work that most people don’t know anything about.
So like shipping and logistics, employment, payroll and benefits, quality and compliance for life sciences. I really love those. They’re intellectually challenging areas to work, but I haven’t been a designer officially since 2013, 2014. All my titles and jobs have been general manager, product, chief product officer, chief product technology officer, ever since then.
So I, definitely, I sort of jumped ship from the design world officially, though, almost everything I do every day is, completely influenced by my experience as a designer.
Peter: Sure.
Jesse: I’d love to hear more about that because, you know, so many of the design leaders that I work with as a coach, they look across the other side of the aisle and they see these other functions and they don’t see themselves in it, you know, they don’t see the ways that they’re used to delivering value, the ways that they’re used to engaging with ideas, the ways that they’re used to engaging with problems. They really don’t see those things represented in these other areas, in these other titles that you’re talking about.
And so I’m curious, how has the designer in you stayed alive as the problem set and the problem space has changed over the course of your career?
Todd: Yeah, well one thing I will say to that is that in my first forays into being a product leader, I definitely sort of struggled, because what I tried to do was do the product leadership thing the way I saw other people doing it. And I really didn’t like it. And it turns out I actually wasn’t very good at it that way.
And through a lot of mistakes, I realized that I needed to find a way that was very authentic to my understanding of the world, how I see truth, how I make sense of the world, how I do things. And so I sort of have crafted a sense, a way of being a product leader that is very designerly. It’s not only designerly, it’s doing the things that I’ve always done.
So, very… dig deep into research, understand the problem, both the problem of the customer and the problem of the organization that I’m in charge of, right? It’s a very human science kind of attempt to understand and then articulate what we’ve learned and what the major parts, major levers are that we can work with to accomplish a goal.
I’ve learned over time that while I like to think abstractly, and will write and that sort of thing. I do my best work as a leader when I’m making things. So, I’m a much more hands-on leader than I think some people would think. Not like I’m in there always, you know, I don’t open up Figma and start designing the screens or whatever very often. But I do get in the weeds on things and I spend time making things to… either prototyping stuff or what have you. And I find that that helps me stay grounded. It helps me understand what I’m doing in a way that’s really, it’s just, it’s richer, right? Like, I’m not just thinking about it, or it’s like the difference between when someone says they’ve read about something versus they’ve done it.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Todd: I feel like a lot of people switch disciplines and get high enough up in the ladder that everything is like, well, I read about that, or I thought about that, or I understand that, but they don’t take the time to do the practice, to do the thing that needs to happen. And so the level of understanding they have is not very rich.
Whereas I think designers, like, they make things, right? That’s it’s like, so core to how designers do things. And I feel like especially since I’m not the sales leader, right. I’m not the chief marketing officer.
I do product, design, and engineering for the most part. And so they’re all maker disciplines really anyway. So having that maker mentality, the leadership level is a good balance. But I do think that sometimes I approach things in an unusual way because people often don’t expect me to behave the way that I do as a leader. I’ve had several people tell me that they’re usually happier about it, but they’re usually surprised.
Leading Product in Unexpected Ways
Peter: And, what is that expectation that you’re flouting specifically, like what are they expecting you to do and what are you doing that’s not what they expected?
Todd: Yeah. So like, when a growth stage company hires a chief product officer, it’s usually… one of the most important things is that they’ve been struggling to articulate their product strategy and roadmap. That is almost always one of the things that is missing.
And people assume that one of the very first things you’re going to do is come in and like, start to lay that out. Like, you’re gonna talk to a lot of people, and you’re gonna, you’re gonna create the diagram that tells the story. And so people assume that that’s what I’ll do, and that then I’ll try to get people to execute on that thing that I put together.
So that’s what they expect. And what I usually do is I show up and I spend the first couple months, like, just going to the, to the sprint meetings, like, and, I go into JIRA and I start digging around and looking at what’s going on and I just try to pull the stuff that’s in there up. I like, I really want to bottoms up it. Like, I don’t want to start with some weird abstract thing. And the reason for that is because something I, feel like I sort of learned when I was at IBM was it’s like one of my mantras, which is you have to execute well in order to earn the right to do strategy.
Jesse: Mm.
Todd: And so I always start off by saying, are we executing very well? We’re not.
And I was like, all the ideas we have, we could be working on my first six months, none of them are bad ideas. The concern we have is which one is the best one, but I don’t care. Pick one of them and let’s execute on it really well. And then pick another one and execute it on really well.
And then we’ll worry about finding the absolute best thing to do, right? Because if you spend all your time worrying about the strategy and you can’t execute it well, everyone is disappointed by that situation, but most people expect that from a leader, right? Most people expect the leaders to be telling stories and making diagrams and that sort of thing.
And I do do that, but I always start with, how do we make things? And one of the reasons I will say is because I’ve tried to get the team to fall back in love with making good stuff, because that goes a long way. If I can get the engineers, the designers, the product managers to fall back in love with making good stuff, then they’re ready for us to figure out what the strategy is.
Jesse: So the phrase back in love suggests to me that somehow they’ve fallen out of love. And I wonder, what you see is the dynamic there.
Todd: Again, engineering, design, and product are all making craft kinds of disciplines, right? So these are almost always people who got into what they’re doing because they liked, they like to make things. They’re usually driven by some sort of passion or creative endeavor, right? But then they end up working in a place where they don’t see the work they’re doing coming to fruition.
They don’t feel like they’re connected to what the company at the highest levels is saying or doing. And so what they start to do is become a little insular. Like they start to lean in on their disciplinary stuff. They’re like, I can’t really deal with the cross functional stuff, but I can be a really good designer now, or I can study product management skillset. And I can learn how to do all the, whatever the GIST method and the whatever method into this, right. And I can get really, really good at whatever, you know, like, doing AI and, like, prompt engineering, ’cause it’s an interesting thing to do that’s technical.
And that’s not really what they got into this for. They didn’t get into it to get good at a craft, though the craft is good. They got into it because they saw what the craft was able to accomplish. And, so that’s what I mean. They usually fall out of love. it loses its shine.
It’s also one of the reasons cross functional teams stop working well. It’s because they don’t know how to work well together when there’s not a clear direction and they don’t have a clear process for working well together. And so they become disciplinary insularity as well. You get to that, the designers really want to talk to the designers, and the PMs want to talk to the PMs, and the engineers want to talk to the engineers. So it’s a love thing to some degree in that sense, also, I think. They need to fall in love with their teams again.
Operating as Scale Grows
Peter: So it’s funny, I’m having this conversation less than an hour after I spoke with a design leader of a company, that’s probably series C. 300 employees. Exactly the kind you were talking about, and what I identified when I was talking to him as as an issue they were facing was one of scale.
They were wanting to operate as if they were 100 or 150 people, but the reality is there’s 300 people, and I’m wondering as, since this seems to be your sweet spot, when you go in and you see an environment like this, where there is that desire to get back to the love, but where my intuition would be scale is probably the issue here, right?
It’s big enough that you need to put some processes in place, some communication and coordination standards in place that maybe they’ve been fighting. And because they’ve been fighting it, they’re now kind of almost operating at cross purposes. How do you get them to, as you said, execute, execute, execute, or get back to execution at this and help them recognize that this, new waterline that they are operating at requires some different ways of working, but by embracing some new different ways of working, they can get back to kind of the magic that they once had when they were smaller. How does that conversation go?
Todd: Yeah. So I’m a back to basics kind of person, right? Like I use very simple frameworks for things, which tends to be good. So like what you end up finding is that up until, I don’t know, company gets to like 200 person range, they can actually swing a whole lot of things based on just intuition and people talking to each other on a regular basis without a whole lot of real process.
And then what happens is they’re not thinking about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. They’re intuiting their way to making decisions and intuiting their way to what seems to be the right approach or the right thing to do. And if you ask them to describe what it is they’re trying to accomplish, they can’t very easily.
And so in that situation, I’m like, Hey, this is a little bit chaotic right now. Let’s just get back to basics here for a second, okay? What are we doing? What are we trying to accomplish? And I literally break it down. I’m like, the only thing that matters for our company is new customers, expanding with current customers, retaining customers, right? That’s actually all that matters.
And I was like, it’s that simple. And I said, so let’s just talk for a second. Is everybody in the product development org and sales and marketing, are we just really aligned around how well we’re doing on that? Like, can anybody, tell me how we’re doing on that?
And then we eventually get to the place where we can. And then I say, great, what can the product organization do to bring in new customers, expand with current customers or retain customers? And what’s interesting is like most people in product development organizations have a hard time answering that question in any specificity. They have these kind of random things. It’s like very hypothesis, but like not good hypothesis. They’re like, well, we think if we did this, it would kind of grow new customers, because there’s a giant TAM out there or something. And I always like to just take people and say like, no, like literally, let’s just take the three biggest initiatives that we worked on in the last quarter, before I got here, or that we did, and just say, what’s the real hypothesis that we had about why this was going to bring new customers in, retain customers, or grow or expand the current customers?
And what’s interesting is you start to walk that back. And then, because then the next thing they’re like, Oh, well, here were the hypotheses. I was like, well, did it pan out? We don’t know. Well, that’s terrible. Or yes, it did. I was like, well, that’s wonderful. No, it didn’t. I was like, that’s not so good, but we learned why didn’t it pan out? Right?
Like we have this conversation, then I really have to tell them, I was like, all that you should be doing as a product development organization is defining what are the initiatives we’re going to do. And I use the word initiative very explicitly. It may include multiple teams in a 300 person organization. It will include multiple teams, right? But the initiative has to be directly tied to one of those business goals. And then you start to break it up and you start to execute on it. So I do that.
And then the only other thing I ever do, this is the love part, actually, quite honestly, and gets people is I always say, when somebody starts to get big and the first time somebody starts to put process into a product organization, they usually start with things like ticket burndowns and how many commits from each engineer and they start looking at, like, these in-process metrics, and I usually walk in and I say, “Hey, everybody, I don’t care how many commits, I don’t care how many things you shipped, I don’t care any other things, I only care about, if you made something and a customer or a colleague is using it. And if you have some sense there’s value from it. That’s the only thing you should care about.”
And so I just start championing the outcome. You made a thing and people are using it, which is back to the basics of what most people did when they were a startup that had five people. They’re like, Oh my gosh, our first user. It’s amazing, right? Right. That can exist to a 10,000 person company, but people lose, they lose sight of it, right?
And so that’s how I take them as I say, we’re going to put some process in place, but the process is based on super basic things, customer growth and retention. We have initiatives. We have clear hypotheses about those initiatives. All we care about is outcomes. All we care about is shipping a thing and getting it into someone’s hands and knowing whether or not it did a good job. And then people are like, Yeah, let’s do that.
And then we just start to say, well, where are we failing? Oh, we need to get a little bit better at the way we track JIRA, or we need to do a little bit more of this or we need to get really good at instrumenting the code because we don’t know how we’re doing or who’s using it. Like all that process stuff falls out. Like people just start doing it. I don’t have to tell them to do it because it’s a natural implication from the fact that we’ve aligned around this kind of cross functional product outcomes kind of approach. And like I said, used in a small company, but it works… you can take this to whatever scale of company. You just have to make sure the company gets out of its own way. ‘Cause sometimes it’ll get in its own way you lose that culture and you lose that approach.
Jesse: Yeah. So you talk about the importance of driving alignment and really creating a sense of shared purpose for the team beyond the immediate metrics that are sort of presented to them. I wonder about the nuts and bolts of that, you know like how do you in the day to day actually engage people with these ideas, actually help them believe in the things that you’re saying and keep them motivated through the process. Of trying to create these outcomes that you described.
Soaking in Salesforce
Todd: Sure. So The first thing is this is one of the weird thing I realized about myself in the last year or so is that I spend so much time in Salesforce.
Peter: I’m sorry.
Todd: Yeah, well, so you can say whatever you want, but that’s where the rubber meets the road for our customers, either, you know, landing new customers, what have you, right?
So I spent a lot of time in there trying to understand what the dynamics are. And I say that because that’s the first thing I tell the product development team, all the designers, all the engineering leads, all the product managers, is I said, “If you can’t just tell me off the top of your head what our numbers are? If you haven’t looked at Salesforce at least twice this week, right? There’s no way you can have a conversation about any work that you want to do.”
And it’s not like I’ve forced that on them. I’m just like, we can’t talk about anything you want to do. ‘Cause nothing you do matters unless it relates to those things. And so I start with that and then you can start to break it down almost like social scientific, right? Like you can start to say, well, we have an initiative that we want to focus on. We’re growing new customers. Growing new customers is usually a matter of… the mechanics are relatively straightforward.
Do we need to improve conversion rates? Which in my experience, there’s a couple of things you can do there. Are there certain features that it seems are missing, that come up in the closed-lost all the time.
Let’s go out now, that’s a signal. That’s a very rough signal, which you can take that signal and then you can go off and do some deep research and understand what are those jobs to be done? How do we know what’s successful there? Some companies can get very sophisticated, but most of them actually hide behind sophistication, right?
Like, I think any company can go a long way if they just truly measure adoption of anything they ship. Like really measure the adoption, and you have to know what adoption means, right? I’ll give you an example.
I was working with this company called Qualia, we make a quality compliance software for life science. In that situation, it’s very document centric. There are lots of documents. And so when someone hires us, they usually have thousands of documents that they need to migrate into our system. And it’s not the same thing as, like, copying something in. It has to get modified into our sort of format.
And it used to take our onboarding specialists, like, weeks to do that. And, that was bad for them. And it was really bad for our customers. ‘Cause our customers, like they just were kind of sitting and waiting.
We talked to one of our product teams, I was like, we need to solve this problem. How are we going to do it? And they said, okay, they went in and they started looking and they were like, well, what is it, how do we solve this problem? And what do our onboarding specialists need? And what do our customers really need? They wouldn’t define their own metrics because they went in and looked at what’s going on.
And what’s interesting is the metric they defined was, they said, it turns out most customers are bringing in, let’s say a thousand documents, but in the next six months, they’re going to use 20 percent of them. And they actually already know what 20 percent it is because of the dates on them. And because of the stuff that they’re doing. So, we’re going to focus on migrating this 20 percent in a couple of hours. And then we’re going to let them ad hoc bring the other ones in as they need them really fast.
So we took something that would have taken two weeks down to taking a day. And the team defined that metric by just going in and figuring out what really needs to be done there. That’s a super designy design research thing to do. It was such a design research kind of project to go do that, but it was not just the product team because our onboarding specialists were as equally involved in that, project as we were, cause they had to change the way they worked when we updated some of the tools and updated the approach.
Jesse: Well, you talk about scale, right? And the difference between the scale of 150 and the scale of 300 is that at 150, you’ve got a shot at directly influencing everybody, at least according to Dunbar. And then you get beyond that, and it’s like, you’ve got to wield some more sort of indirect influence. You have to wield cultural influence. You have to wield influence through things like strategy, things like roadmaps, things like milestones. And I guess I get curious about what the hands on work of leadership looks like for you when this is your job.
What does a CPO do all day?
Todd: Yeah. Yeah. So, I, what do I spend my day doing? Like, if you want me to, you know, yeah, Yeah. sure. So I am in… I probably spend
Jesse: hmm.
Todd: a third of my time during the week in either Salesforce or Looker, digging around to make sure I understand what’s going on. And part of the reason I do that is because it keeps my hands in the weeds of the work. But it’s also ’cause that’s something I’m particularly good at. I have a social science background.
So I spend a third of my time in there, partially ’cause it’s a skillset I have that a lot of people on my team don’t have, and partially because it keeps me really close to like, what’s really happening.
I spend another third of my time in mostly group meetings. I usually try to keep my direct reports down to close to like four or five. So I have one on ones with them, but I run almost everything as a team instead of with unilateral or bilateral kind of interactions.
So I find that it’s really helpful to just any part of an organization, I tend to just pull everybody into a weekly working session. And we have a set of tools and things that we prepare for that. And we go through it for half of it. And then the other half of it is ad hoc deal with issues.
I have those group meetings. That’s how I manage the teams. And then I have one third that is blocked off as focus time with zero plan.
Jesse: Mm hmm.
Todd: And then, that is for me to fight fires or to dig in on something that allows me to think about something that’s way in the future. Like that’s where I do my strategy thinking a lot, my own kind of research. And then sometimes that’s when I go and like, review a thousand SOWs or whatever, right? But I’m pretty good about those three parts of my day. Parts of my week.
Peter: When you mentioned Salesforce and Looker, I mean, a third, that’s like 12 hours in tools, what are you…
Todd: yeah.
Peter: What are you getting from that? What makes it worthwhile to spend 12 hours a week fiddling with user interfaces on these tools to understand what exactly, and then coming out of that, what does that then drive in terms of what follows from that?
Todd: One of the things that I think product teams have a hard time with, and then this is another thing that design really taught me, is they have a really hard time with ambiguity. They have a really hard time of having lots of questions and not having answers to them. And they usually lack confidence in the sort of pseudo answers that they’ve come up with. And so they’re usually uncomfortable making a decision about something because they haven’t sufficiently reduced the risk that they feel around making that decision. And so that is something that I see kill organizations of all sizes.
And so the reason I spend a lot of time in those two data- centric things is because that’s where I can get questions answered for myself or my teams so that they don’t feel afraid to make a decision, to move forward on something. And I’m trying to model for them that they don’t have to understand the thing perfectly. They need to understand it well enough to reduce the risk. And so I do a lot of that over time. I spend less time doing that because the teams start doing it. But it takes quite a while to teach a team to feel confident of knowing just enough, to make the decision to move forward. So that’s why I spent a lot of time in there.
I mean, I’m doing this as much for my colleagues, the other C level people on leadership teams. Like everyone in these situations is often uncomfortable making a decision. And what you end up finding is that a lot of people won’t make a decision, or they’re like, they push it off because there’s uncertainty, or they make a decision almost like because they trust their intuition too much, right?
Like there’s those two kinds of leaders really, in a sense, like, they’re like, I’m always right because it’s me, and I’m not sure if I’m right because I’m too humble or I’m too risk averse. There’s a lot of those. And so I’m often trying, that’s what I’m helping with my teams, but I’m also helping with my fellow executives is saying, no, no, no, right?
Like, my intuition doesn’t matter really. We’re not gonna make a decision just ’cause my gut tells me, and we can make decisions without perfect knowledge. And so that’s where all of our knowledge tends to lie.
That and talking to customers. I mean when I can, I talk to customers a lot, but usually I’m talking to customers when there’s a problem because of my role, as opposed to getting to just go talk to them when things are going well.
I wish I talked to more customers when it was going well.
Leading Design as a Former Design Leader
Peter: I’m going to get back to something that relates to this conversation I had with someone who’s just joined an organization that is operating at scale, a design leader now, new to an organization that hasn’t really embraced what it means to operate at this scale.
And so what I’m finding myself wondering is, how you articulate your expectations for your team and, considering the nature of our podcast, we’re about design and design leadership, you know, what is your relationship with your head of design? How do you…
Jesse: hmm.
Peter: …set expectations for them? What are you looking for them to provide? Like, what is that dynamic now that you’re on that side of the conversation?
Todd: That’s a great question. I struggled with this for a while. When I first started what I’ve done, over the course of the last, let’s call it six, seven years, I’ve been slowly developing a sort of career framework for product development.
It covers engineering, product management and design. It’s a skills matrix. It talks about competencies and skills. It defines the different roles and what the expectations are and the levels of mastery of all the skills of the different ones. And I’ve been kind of modifying and working on it, but I use that a lot.
And what I tend to do is, I bring that to the team pretty quickly, because I think it sets out expectations really well. Like, these are literally the expectations I have for you and your role. Here’s what it looks like for you to do the role that you’re in.
Well, these are the skills and competencies and you’ll execute them in this kind of way. And I think it’s relatively straightforward. And what I usually do is I say, take this, it’s a table. Add a column, rate yourself one to five. And then I’m going to go chat with a couple of people around the organization. And then I’m going to rate what I think for you one to five and we’ll just have a chat about it. Like, how are you doing, right?
And we align on what the expectations are pretty quickly that way, but it has nothing to do with my subjective understanding, right? I’m just like, I use this and they look at it and they’re always like, oh, that makes complete sense. And I’m like, great. It’s not my opinion. Let’s just use this. It usually fosters a really good conversation.
But to get really specific, okay. The thing I have done over time is I have learned that if you really value a cross functional team as the core unit of getting stuff done, 50 percent, at least, of the competencies that you have, need to be shared across engineering, product, and design. They need to be measured on the exact same competencies. And they’re things like user understanding, strategic thinking, communication, collaboration. But I break them down and I literally use the exact same ones for all three of the disciplines.
And then there’s a set of craft skills that are usually very specific to the discipline. And I found that that is also quite amazing because now most people have the same expectations from me, but from each other. And so that’s a very specific thing I have started doing that I found very powerful and works really, really well.
And most of the time, it’s the first time for designers in particular, because we’ve always been trying to get the seat at the table, right? It’s always, the perpetual conversation about designers.
And so oftentimes a design leader, when I tell my expectation is that you’re going to do all these things, many of which you’ve already been doing, but just so you know, your engineering leader peer and your product management leader peer have the exact same expectations, all of a sudden they’re like, Oh, I’m at the table, right? Like I’m not, I’m not cordoned off doing something special that only I can do.
There’s a set of those things, but mostly there’s a set of shared understanding about what we as a leadership team are expected to bring. That usually works really well for the people I work with that work for me that are design leaders.
Peter: So your career kind of gives lie to the whole idea of roles, right? You’ve been very fluid with your roles over time. And the structures that so many organizations place, I think, you’re an indicator of those things are fabrications.
And so I’m wondering, as you’re talking about how you’ve set up this professional development career matrix…
Todd: mm hmm.
Peter: What role roles play in your organization?
Because if everybody’s sharing 50 percent stuff, you could just call them product developers and put three to five people in a room and say, have at it, come back to me, when you’re done. Like, where do you see the value of role distinction, given just how much fuzziness you’re trying to encourage.
Rethinking Roles
Todd: That’s a great question. Yeah, yeah. So the craft and disciplinary background plays out a lot. Let’s say I have 10 competencies for every one of these roles. And let’s say six of them are shared. So there’s four that are specific, that I call a craft competency. Even though it’s less of the competency number, it still plays a huge role in what makes each person bring a unique thing to the table, right? Even though they should share a lot.
And so I found that no one is really great at being a generalist at everything all the time. You know, like, I’m a little bit of a successful, dilettante generalist, but I still really, there are things I just don’t do that well. And there’s some things I do really well and I can acknowledge that. And so there are certain kinds of jobs I probably shouldn’t have.
Like, I don’t think anybody wants me to be the CTO where there’s also someone who is a CPO. That would be a bad role for me because engineering is something I can help run. I understand engineering well enough, but I only do it really well when it’s combined, right? And so I’m just going to acknowledge, like, that.
So I think that what’s important about the role backgrounds is also that what makes a team really effective is the diversity of experience and skill that they bring to the table. And so the roles matter because you can’t make a product with five people with a product management background. You also probably can’t make a successful product for very long with five people who are all engineers. You can, but, it’s less likely. Same thing with designers, right? You need the disciplinary backgrounds, partially because of the skill sets and partially because they’ve been and done different things.
So the roles are important. They’re just not the most important thing, right? They help you find people. They help people figure out what path they want to chart for themselves. Where do they want to lean? Where do they not want to lean? What’s expected of someone in a different kind of role? It makes it easy for people to move between a management track and an IC track. It makes it easy for someone to say, I’d love to try product management. And I’m going to be like, great, here’s what’s expected of you, and here’s what’s different from what you’ve been doing. Let’s give it a shot. And after, you know, six months, we’ll go back and assess you and see how you’re doing, right? And a lot of people try it and go back because they realize the craft part of it is something that matters a lot to them, right?
But my cultures that I set up do not do a great job of having a lot of folks who are just really, really, really deep in a single thing. Having some is great, but like ratio wise, right, the bigger the organization is you want to have, I don’t know, like, 60 to 80 percent are going to be people who are a little bit more generalist, and then you may have a couple of like super deep design researchers, super deep, whatever, AI prompt specialists, super deep, whatever, market research, or, you know, product management specialists in some special place, right?
Over-specializing often makes it hard to collaborate. That’s the reason that I talk about shared competency a lot, because I think collaboration is most important thing.
Jesse: I’m glad to hear you talking about this because this has been such a huge theme in my coaching work over the course of the last couple of years with design leaders, as I have been really advocating for them to advocate for being measured on shared outcomes across functions. And for there to be really, you know, shared success cross functionally.
And often I meet resistance from design leaders who find that if they don’t have something that is unique to their team, that is their particular value that they deliver that nobody else can deliver, they lose their voice, they lose their power if it feels like the outcomes are shared.
In part, sometimes because it makes them vulnerable to having that power simply taken away by other people who can claim those same outcomes. But also I think that it comes back to the sense that their own seat at the table is itself a result of them having kind of created a moat for themselves around their own value delivery in the organization.
And I wonder if you’ve encountered this mindset and how you’ve addressed that in the organizations that you’ve built.
Todd: A thousand times I have, yeah, like that is such a common thing. And it’s a really hard question to answer but I think there’s two parts.
One is the expertise versus effectiveness kind of statement, right? A lot of people establish value in organizations by demonstrating their expertise. And that is a totally valid and very common way for any discipline to establish value.
Jesse: Especially a craft discipline.
Todd: Correct. Correct. Yes, exactly. And so the fact that that has happened makes complete sense. And a lot of organizations actually explicitly value expertise. And so the organizational culture, the DNA of the culture actually encourages people to lean in on their expertise. What’s interesting, though, is that the vast majority of companies really only care about outcomes when it comes down to it, which is effectiveness.
And so the challenge there is twofold. One is the person, if they’ve defined themselves by their expertise versus their effectiveness, it is a great personal risk to ask for shared outcomes and to change things. There’s a personal sort of, like, overcoming fear, taking a risk, trusting in your own value and changing, evolving, but frankly, that flower is not going to grow in every garden, right? It requires an environment that can also support that thing. And that’s actually often the hardest part.
This is one of the reasons I don’t go work at big companies very often. Like, I haven’t worked at a big company for a while. And it’s because I’m usually very disappointed by the fact that most big companies take on this, like, expertise focus. It’s like incredibly sort of bureaucratic and like big lines are on disciplines and that sort of thing. And I find that I don’t know how to fix that, right? Because I’m never going to be the CEO of a big company.
But I don’t want to go to a little company, which is why I like the growth stage, because there’s an opportunity for me to step in and create a culture that is pervasive. And then people have this opportunity to sort of blossom, right? And it can be done.
My one tangent to this that’s really interesting is, I also learned… In between jobs a couple of years ago, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. And I was like, maybe I do want to go back to a big company somewhere. Like, I liked working like at IBM. I really loved working at IBM in a lot of ways. And I started interviewing, and what I realized was that nobody knew what to do with me, because I did a lot of things. I didn’t fit into the mold, but the other thing was that was when I was looking at a middle management job.
But I had really great success talking to companies that were relatively large about C level jobs. I just sort of jumped past the middle management part because the middle management is often in so many organizations settled on this, like, it’s just very segmented and whatever.
But companies would hear the culture I was trying to build, or I’ve had built in overall product development organizations, and they’d be like, we need that. So come be our CPO and help create that culture here. Because they recognize there’s just no way for me to even have a chance at it unless I’m there.
So I have this kind of weird spot where, like, I know I’d only take C-level jobs in what most people consider a smaller company, but like there are several other companies that were two, three, four, five thousand people that I talked to in the last couple years about C level jobs also and got really close to taking them. But I had no luck at anything that was like a VP. No one had any idea what to do with me as a VP anywhere.
What does the C-Suite Discuss?
Jesse: Earlier, you talked about the conversations that happen among the C level and among design leaders who… not many of them actually find C level roles for themselves. They are usually on the outside of those conversations. There’s this intense curiosity and this kind of like wondering about like, what are they talking about in there? Like, how is the conversation different at the C level from how it is in these other levels in these organizations.
Todd: That varies a lot based on the organization. I mean, the things people talk about, like the topics, all conversations I have ever had in C level, like leadership teams, you’re doing a review of revenue. You’re doing forecasts about sales. You’re talking about budgets and that sort of thing, boring stuff, but that makes the company run. You tend to be talking about major customer escalations and issues.
And then people have like a period of time to have the fun conversations, which is usually something like, let’s talk about strategy. What are we going to do in the next quarter or the next couple of quarters? And those are the topics in almost every place I’ve ever been.
And that’s also this for board meetings, right? Those are kind of the topics for board meetings often to less of the strategy stuff, more of the reporting, but there’s still a bit of it. Boards kind of want to talk to you about some of those same things.
But what I found is the people in those meetings, the people in that leadership team, the nature of the conversation is really different,
Jesse: Mm-hmm
Todd: right? Like some people go through it, like they’re going through a checklist. It’s like we talked about this. We talked about this. We talked about this. Okay, great, let’s go, you know. And when it gets to strategy, like, what’s interesting, how do we figure out the strategy, right? Here’s what I think, right?
And then other places are like, why is this thing happening? I think this is happening because of this. Let’s go confirm that. Because if so, we need to do X, Y, and Z. Like some of them are very… get in. And then when they talk about strategy they want to, like, start where what the customers are asking for, or start with, like, a BHAG, a big hairy audacious goal that they’re trying to get to, and then work back from that, and say like, Oh my gosh, we have to do something completely different if we really want to make that happen.
I’ve been in leadership teams that worked in very different ways. Some are more functional, some are less functional. But the things you’re going to talk about are exactly what I said.
Jesse: Mm-hmm
Peter: You mentioned middle management earlier, and this is something Jesse and I’ve been kind of exploring over the last however many years we’ve been doing this podcast, if not longer, is, as designers grow within an organization, they are often living under an assumption that the people in the C suite or executive level and above know what they’re doing, and there’s a rationale and there’s evidence that’s driving decision making.
And then when they hit that middle management, that kind of director level, they look around and they’re like, oh, it’s kind of a bunch of chimpanzees flinging crap at one another. Maybe not that bad. But, like, what you’ve seen as you’ve had your evolution, like, was there an aha moment…
Jesse: how much crap was flung at you anyway?
Todd: exactly.
Peter: If you’ve maybe even had it, but I’m assuming you did right where it’s like, okay, I have this suite of tools, but I can’t just tool my way to success. There’s a dynamic here that I have to learn how to be part of. And how have you developed, embraced, engaged that dynamic in order to succeed where simply kind of reasoning out no longer was enough to quote, I don’t know, win an argument or whatever.
Todd: Yeah. So I can draw a really good thread here from actually my days at Adaptive Path. So we did a lot of really interesting design research work at Adaptive Path, helping companies do some kind of risky things. Like usually they came to us and they were trying to do something they’d never done before.
And so they really wanted some help understanding that. Some people go do, like, design theater. Like, we go talk to a lot of people and come back and tell you some interesting stories and run some workshops. And you feel, like, something massive, really amazing happened right? And then some people, I think some companies, and I think Adaptive Path always did this was we took it really sincere.
Like, we were, like, we want to deeply understand this thing that you’re trying to face. We believe wholeheartedly in the truth we’ve uncovered, and we want to help you make a good decision, at least that was the way I approached it and I felt like that was true for the company.
So that’s kind of my thing, like, we have to just feel like there’s some real truth we’re trying to get to here and we need to hold ourselves accountable for it and we can’t just pretend. And so that is a core piece of how I do almost every job I’ve ever had, but as a leader, it’s especially true.
And so what happens when I join a leadership team is that I start using that. I’m usually like, Oh, this team has some pretty clear understanding of what’s going on with their business and their customers and some ideas about what to do with it that are grounded in some evidence. And the pieces fit together.
And then sometimes I walk in and I’m like, Wow, there’s a couple people here who are very smart and very loud, and they have convinced everybody that they know all the answers. And so people just do what they say, and they don’t really seem to have a lot of evidence around at all. It pivots around a lot based on the person’s thoughts or feelings for the day, right?
And in both of those situations, I always establish that we need some evidence and some truth here. I always start off with the like, I could be wrong here. And if I’m wrong, I want to be right. I don’t want to win the argument, right? And, I start a conversation about that. And what ends up happening is either it goes really, really well, and I can give them some tools. I often use design research tools, like, and design tools, like collaboration tools, like how would we work collaboratively on this thing, whether it’s like post it notes and whatever, or we do it digitally or whatever. I use those tools to bring us together to work so that happens.
Or I get organ rejection. People are like, we don’t want to work that way, Todd. And… right? Like, basically, and I’m like, well, I gave it a shot,
Jesse: I’m in the wrong place.
Todd: I’m in the wrong place, right? And, that’s okay. That is okay, right? To me that’s actually the biggest interesting, let’s say, risk I’ve taken by becoming a serial CPO, CPTO is that I’m always coming in and taking someone’s baby.
They give me their baby and they say, raise my baby, and they’re either gonna be like, “Thank you, you’re better at this than I am,” or they’re gonna be like, “You’re not raising my baby the right way. You need to leave,” right? And you can’t know these things before you get into it. But I don’t change the way I interact because I know that it works.
I just have to find the right environments for it to work in.
Identifying the right environment
Jesse: So what are the signs of those environments? You know, you’ve talked about some of the things that you’ve identified in terms of an environment that sets you up for success as a leader. It has to be kind of a certain scale at a certain stage in its evolution. And lots of leaders have their own sort of moments that are the right moment for them to engage with an organization, which is like, I’m the right first leader for an organization, I’m the right 10th leader for an organization, or somewhere in between.
Todd: And I’m curious about not just that part of it, but really the telltale signs that you have been able to detect. You had a lot of conversations with people about jobs you didn’t take, right? What were you listening for that helped you know that this was a place where you could do the job the way that you saw yourself delivering the most value?
So there’s a few things that I tend to look for.
Todd: So one of them is, I’m looking for companies where the business mechanics are not complicated. Everybody on the leadership team, everybody can just tell me, this is how our business works, basic mechanics and here’s it’s profitable or is very close to profitable. That’s why it’s a good business. That is the thing I always look out for.
If, most people can’t explain to me kind of how the business works and where the margin is, then I’m usually worried that that’s an organization that will not hold up to investigation from me, and we can’t rest everything else on that, right? ‘Cause like I talked about, like, basics of the business are important to me. If I can’t talk to just almost anyone, they can’t explain it to me. That is a telltale sign for me that there might be an issue for me.
The other thing is a sort of culture of transparency, which is, if, in my interviewing process, like NDA and whatever, right, if someone’s not willing to open up the spreadsheet and show me the last three quarters worth of budget, spend, sales, with all the warts, if they’re not willing to be like, oh yeah, I got it, let me open up, let’s talk it through, that is often a sign to me that is not going to be a good place for me because I’m a very transparent, right?
Like I, grew up in that era of the internet where like everything’s a collaborative tool and everything’s open by default as far as I’m concerned. And so I use that as a sign.
And then for product development in particular. When software’s involved, the ratio of engineers to everybody else is always quite high. And so understanding the engineering culture is really important. And so I always look for signs that the engineers are not insular. They are actually open to true collaboration, because they will always be able to circle their wagons and win compared to everybody else. There’s just so many of them. So, I always look for signs of that.
I talk to senior leaders, and then I try to always talk to at least one, like, just engineer and just get a sense. How do you work? What do you think about these people that you’re working with? Sometimes I’ll ask them to show me their Slack. Like how are your Slack channels set up, right? Is most of the engineering conversation in a hashtag engineering channel, or is it, or is it in a, right? Or, or is it in a, product team channel, right? Like, these are really simple things that I can just ask somebody to do. And if somebody’s like, no, I’m not gonna show you my Slack, then like that gets back to my transparency thing.
Those are signs that I find that I can work really well with a company, if that’s the case. But if you don’t see those things, I tend to find that I’m not a very good match.
Jesse: I’m imagining that there are a lot of design leaders out there listening to this, who are excited about the possibility of wielding the kind of organizational influence you’ve been able to wield, to be able to step into the kind of authority you’ve been able to step into, but have a hard time seeing what the next step is for themselves, or in particular, I think potentially feeling bound to the identity of design in a way that makes it hard to step out of and let go of. And I wonder what thoughts or reflections you have for those folks on your trajectory out of design as a formal responsibility toward this. larger holistic sphere that you now take ownership of.
Todd: I mean, the first one is going to sound maybe trite, but it’s like, you have to be a little bit more confident than smart, a little, you know, like you have to be willing to do something that… you have to take a couple of risks, like calculated, but you need to be willing to take some risks to do something, like, so I, like I say, one of the most foundational moments in my entire life and career was when I convinced y’all to let me go open a second studio in Austin, right?
And like, it was a terrible idea for you to let me do that, but, but you’re willing to give it a shot. Right. Like I was going to go run part of the P&L and I’d never done that before, but I tried to lower the risk for you. You let me try it. But the fact that I was able to try that thing and work it out, that moment of being, like, I owned, part of a multi-million dollar P&L for a little while, was a toe in the door to a lot of other conversations I was interested in approaching later and that was a big risk I took.
And then I’d say the other thing is, like, in all honesty, the first two or three kind of like VP level design and, actually, product type jobs I took, I kind of really screwed them up a lot. And I was able to, like, look at myself and be, like, I’m really screwing this up. I need to really reflect on why I’m screwing this up. Like, they gave me the shot, which is amazing in and of itself. But I was like, I actually need to get good at the thing that they gave me to do.
And once I was able to really acknowledge that about myself and look for the places I needed to improve, and how to talk about them to other people, that was a huge win for me, in being able to change my trajectory, right?
Like, in this sense, I almost like cheated my way into the job, in a way, like, you know, song and danced in my way into the job. And then I had to get good at it. So I say that in the sense of like, not everybody can do that, but that was the best way for me to do things. And because like, I, said, I’m kind of designery, like I got to go start making the thing. I got my hands in it and that’s how I learned how to do it. I could have read a whole bunch of books, but it was never going to get me there, like trying it. But I had to be willing to have it blow up a little bit, and be self reflective about when I was doing a good job or not.
The craft of Product Management
Peter: I want to go back to something you said earlier and tie it to something that Jesse and I have been talking about for 15 years. So earlier you mentioned, you know, kind of the three roles within product development, design, product engineering, maybe, you know, if there’s 10 skills or capabilities or whatever, they share five or six of them. And then four or five are specific to the craft.
Todd: Hmm.
Peter: That begs the question. What are the craft skills of product management? I can imagine. I know what the craft skills of design are. I can imagine what the craft skills of engineering are, but always get stuck on the craft skills of product management, but I then find myself wondering, this harkens back to something Jesse and I’ve been going on about, this phrase, the experience is the product, right?
And that, what we are delivering at the end of the day is an experience for our users. And so I more recently have turned that into product management and user experience being very similar. User experience, not design, but user experience being very similar.
And so I’m wondering, kind of, where you have arrived at in terms of what makes product product, what are those four or five things, and then what is product management’s relationship to user experience, maybe different than a product development team, or would you argue that the whole product development team is responsible for the user experience?
Todd: The latter. User experience is one of those like just general, that’s the outcome. It’s a shared outcome of characteristic of the product or what have you. I think the team should be sort of essentially equally responsible for creating great user experience.
‘Cause great user experience is a mix of: Does this solve a real problem for me? Does it address a job to be done? Does it do it in a sort of delightful, usable, whatever way? And then is it very responsive and reliable and elegant? Like all the pieces fit in to make a great user experience.
I do think product managers need to think a lot about user experience. I encourage all my product managers, I always say, when you’re putting together the early stages of an initiative or piece of work, if you haven’t sketched something out, you haven’t thought about it enough.
Peter: Which of course would make a lot of designers very nervous when product managers start drawing, but that maybe..
Todd: It’s a, it doesn’t have to be pretty, right? And when I say sketch the thing I mean in particular, I’m like, if you haven’t thought about the flow of screens and steps, if you haven’t thought a little bit about how the thing you’re imagining kind of fits in, you’re not really doing your job as a product manager.
Like you don’t need to work out all the details. And in fact, your designer will probably be better at it, but there’s no way that you’re going to have a conversation meaningfully if you haven’t engaged in that a little bit.
I tell product managers the same thing about engineering. I’m like, if you haven’t thought or can’t sketch out the basic architecture of our product and what the basic objects are in the database, you haven’t thought about it enough, right? If you don’t have an opinion, at least a little bit you probably haven’t really thought about it enough. I don’t want you to code it. But you got to care about it enough to have thought about it.
And so if you roll that back, then you start to say, well, what does a product manager do uniquely? Since I’m just talking about stuff they share. So my trite answer is I always tell people I think of product management as a maker job, not a manager job, even though it has the word management in it. And so people say, well, what does a product manager make? And I say, they make decisions and they make clarity. That’s what they make. They make decisions and they make clarity.
And when I say they make decisions, they actually make decisions possible. They don’t have to make the decisions. They make clear decisions possible. And then they make clarity for people. They reduce ambiguity. They, you know, Brandon Schauer used to always say like crushing ambiguity. That’s a product manager’s job. Designers do this really well too. Engineers do this really well too. But for the product initiative as a whole, it’s fundamentally the product manager’s job to make sure the pieces are all getting pulled together, the ambiguity is being crushed, so that we can make decisions together.
And so, I look for things like: Can drive decisions with a cross functional group of people. And that kind of grows from, you can set up the characteristics and criteria for decision. And it moves to, you can drive the decision with your team members, to you can help drive decisions across multiple teams to where you can drive decisions with executives, right, like as somebody grows in their group. But that decision making drive is really important.
Can reduce the ambiguity and create clarity around user needs, business outcomes and feasibility decisions. But the idea there is that they have to be able to make the decision criteria and the decision super clear, right. If anybody’s sitting in a room arguing about whether their perspective is the right one or someone else’s, the product manager has not succeeded in making the decision criteria clear. Because in most cases, the decision should almost make itself, right? In most cases, it should never come down to who’s got the biggest paycheck or who’s the loudest person.
And if that’s what’s happening a lot, then your product manager is not succeeding at making the decision criteria clear, to reduce the ambiguity. So people are willing to take a risk or make a decision to move forward and so there’s lots of pieces.
Roadmaps are essentially the same thing. Roadmaps are me saying, I’m going to set in place over time, that helps you understand what we’ve all decided on, or considering doing holistically as a group, right? And most of the time it’s more certain on the next quarter and it gets less certain as you go out. And that’s fine. You just want to make sure that everybody understands the criteria for why something is on that list and why something’s not on that list.
No one should ever be coming to you, begging you, I’ll take you out for a beer, if you put my favorite thing on your list. You’re like, like, no, no, no, like, the stuff on this list follows these very clear criteria and we really understand the ones on this side and we understand the ones out here a little bit less, but I’m comfortable saying that we’re going to be going in roughly this direction because it meets these criteria, and we’ve reduced enough of the ambiguity that we can move.
So I have a few skills and things tied to that, right? Like when I talk about roadmapping, I talk about it in those terms. It’s not just, can I make a pretty thing with a bunch of horizontal lines on it? It’s like, can I align people around the fact that we really do all agree on it, and we know why we agree.
Jesse: You know, Peter and I have been talking for a while on this show about how the relationships between these functions are continuing to shift, and the mandate of design is continuing to shift as our understanding of how to do this work continues to evolve. So I’m wondering from your perspective, what’s next for design?
Todd: Selfishly, I would really love, what I think should be next for design, is that people with design skills and experience are able to really step into roles of leadership and companies that may or may not have the word design on them.
I think there’s a lot more opportunity for that these days. I think that the nature of how especially software gets developed is changing, like, even the technical skills are not nearly as differentiating as the ideas and moving quickly and learning, and those are all things that designers do really well, right?
And so what I would like is that more people take career paths that are kind of like mine, not because I think I’m perfect or that it’s great, but because I think it’s what the world needs, right?
The world needs people with those kinds of skills that can move very quickly, that are great at understanding both the human and the sort of, let’s call it, roughly, technical space. And they shouldn’t be locked in something that’s got the word design on it. You know, like you’re a journalist, Jesse, right?
Like you’re, you know, but you’re a designer, right? You know, like, and you’re a podcast host and you’re a coach, right? Like your background is design and journalism. But what you’re doing is really different. Like that you’re a success story in some ways of this as well.
Jesse: Todd. Thank you so much for being with us.
Peter: Thank you. This has been great.
Jesse: Where can people find you on the internet?
Todd: Toddwilkens.com is probably the easiest way. T O D D W I L K E N S. com. You can get a hold of me there pretty easily. It talks a little bit about some of the work that I do. I’m not a very social media kind of person, so.
Jesse: It was great to talk to you, Todd. Thank you so much.
Todd: This was really great. Yeah, thanks guys.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.
54: At the Intersection of Design and Business, Be The Anomaly (ft. Roger Martin)
Feb 08, 2025
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. Joining us today to talk about what’s next for design is business strategist Roger L. Martin, former Dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, who advanced the conversation about design and business with his influential work in the late 2000s.
We’ll talk about the parts of that vision that worked out as well as the parts that didn’t, the new forces shaping design’s business impact, and what design leaders should be advocating for next from Aristotle to Hermes. Here’s our wide-ranging conversation with Roger Martin.
Peter: Hello, Roger. Thank you for joining us today. For our podcast listeners who might not be familiar with you, how do you introduce yourself and what are you up to of late?
Roger: Ah, that’s a good question. Well, I guess I’m a writer, an advisor on topics of business, mainly strategy, innovation.
And I’m mainly an advisor, to mainly CEOs, and writer. And I kind of split my time fairly evenly between those two things. I was an academic for a while in the middle of my career. But what I like most is helping people solve problems that they don’t have a way of thinking about.
That would be the way would describe my goal in life. If there’s some problem or issue where you’re saying, man, I don’t even know how to think about this. I try to provide ways of thinking about that.
Peter: Jesse and I would have become familiar with you sometime in the mid-2000s when we were running Adaptive Path and you were one of the few business school people talking about the intersection of design and business, which was something we were interested in. We’d actually hired in 2005, a gentleman named Brandon Schauer from the Institute of Design, who actually had both an MBA and an MFA.
So that intersection was something we pursued. In fact, earlier in 2002 or 2003, we did research with Sara Beckman at UC Berkeley.
Roger: I love Sara.
Peter: So we were familiar with you from afar. So it’s great getting a chance to talk to you today. I’m curious, over these last 20 years, and where you land today in terms of your relationship with design and how you think of whatever the conversation is around the intersection of design and business.
Roger: Yeah, I, I’ve probably in some ways, even though it might not feel explicitly this way to folks watching, because I wrote more specifically on design in the late 2000s and then the next decade, like I had my book design of business was 2009, but my dive into design, I would argue, has deeply influenced my way of approaching business problems in general.
Learning from Aristotle
Roger: So even though I’m writing less about design, design, design those principles are there. And I would say it comes up particularly in my view of Aristotle, and the super important distinction he made that’s ignored by almost everybody on the face of the planet and certainly at educational institutions where he said, yes, I created this scientific method. He is the world’s first scientists. And he said, here’s how you be scientific: book, Analytica Posteriora, one of the most important books in an entire history of science, if not the most important book. And the world has become ever more scientific, all sorts of disciplines like the, my undergrad discipline was economics and it’s become highly scientific and quantitative and analytical.
But all of those people, in the entire world of economics, in the entire world of business, ignored what the father of science said, and he said, you should only use my method in the part of the world where things cannot be other than they are. Well, what part of the world would that be? Well, it’s the part of the world where I’ve got a pen in my hand, and if I let go of it, guess what? It falls. Last week. It falls in Fort Lauderdale. It falls in Saskatoon. It falls in Antarctica. What will happen next week when I let go of this pen? It’ll fall, right?
So that’s what Aristotle meant by the part of the world where things cannot be other than they are. Why? There’s a universal force called gravity that doesn’t come and go, it’s always around. It doesn’t have a different effect. It always has the same effect. And he said, use my scientific method. So essentially analyze the past, gather data from the past in order to be able to understand what he was most interested in his entire life was understanding the cause of the facts. So he said, you will, if you can study that enough, you’ll figure out the cause of, of of the effect.
And sure enough, the world eventually figured out that there’s a universal force called gravity, accelerates everything at 9.8 meters per second squared, unless you’re in America, which is an exceptional country there, it accelerates at 32 feet per second squared. But that’s the part of the world where things cannot be other than they are.
What the world has ignored entirely is a warning by Aristotle, where he said, there’s another part of the world, it’s called the part of the world where things can be other than they are. So if I think about, you know, smartphone, how many of those were there in 1999? Answer, zero. First smartphone was in 2000, the BlackBerry.
How many are there now? Last time I checked the data, 5.5 billion of them. That is clearly the part of the world where things can be other than there are. No smartphones to 5.5 billion in a quarter century only. Think about that. Quarter century 0 to 5 billion.
And Aristotle said in that part of the world, do not use my scientific method.
Now, that has a profound influence on the entire world of design. When these other disciplines like business- -and that’s super important for design, because fine art doesn’t deal with business, design deals with the world of business– in that part of the world, you should not analyze the past to decide what to do in the future, you should do what Aristotle said, he said, rigorous thinking in that part of the world, in the part of the world where things can be other than they are, is to imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling argument can be made.
The Internal Contradiction of the MBA
Roger: Not analyze the data and choose the thing that the data suggests the world of business teaches, and I ran an MBA school for, for a decade and a half. So like I’m absolutely sure of this, the MBA world, it teaches the only way to be a competent, even moral, business person is to crunch the data analytically, in scientifically rigorous ways, a big enough sample size, all of that, in order to make your decisions.
And that is the rule in business. Now, it’s a funny sort of rule, especially if you look at MBA programs. So in all MBA programs, virtually across America, at least, or North America, at least, first year, there’s a, there’s a required statistics course, and in that required statistics course, you are taught how to make inferences from a sample to a universe.
I’m going to take a sample of electric vehicle drivers to figure out what EV vehicle drivers, or people who might be interested in buying one, think, right? And the statistics professor will say, now, if you only interview men as your sample, you can’t extrapolate to EV buyers because that is not representative of EV buyers, of which there are a whole bunch of women, right? Or if you only interview women or if you only interview young people or old people, the sample has to be representative of the universe. Okay. And so you’re taught that in statistics, then you walk across literally 15 minutes later into a marketing class or a strategy class, and you’re taught here’s how you must analyze data to determine what to do. Okay. Fair enough.
But what assumption do you need to make in order to satisfy your statistics professor who taught in the same course across the hall from this? What you have to assume is that the sample from which that data was taken is representative of the universe that you want to make a decision about.
So you want to make a decision about what era, the future, making decisions about the past is kind of like, Hmm, kind of not helpful…
Peter: …history, but…
Roger: Yeah, history, so you’re taught analyze the data, to make a decision about the future. If you’re listening to your statistics professor, what do we have to assume about the future vis a vis the past?
It’s got to be identical, because Aristotle would say that’s… you’re on, that’s good. The future cannot be other than the past. Then taking a sample from the past, he didn’t say it this because, but is representative of the future world, but we know in the world of business, everything changes all the frigging time, right?
And so we have a schism in the business school world itself, where we teach statistics and then we teach abuse of statistics, right? Back to back to back.
What Designers Do
Roger: What implication does this have for design? Well. Designers are following Aristotle. Designers are trying to create, last time I checked, something that does not exist today, right?
Even if it’s a wedding invitation for somebody’s wedding, if they’re a graphic designer, if it’s a chair, right, if it’s a graphical user interface, they’re trying to design something that doesn’t exist in its current form. Now, by Aristotle’s definition, his core definition that is part of the world where things can be other than they are.
Otherwise, the designer would say, why hire me? Just keep doing exactly precisely what it is now. You say you want a better graphical user interface. Nope, world can’t be any different. Just use the one that you’ve got now. No, designers all work in this world. And what do they do? In my view, they imagine possibilities and choose the one for which they can make to themselves and others, the most compelling argument.
So designers arguably are the only people in the business world who systematically listen to Aristotle. Everybody else in the business world ignores Aristotle. They take his method, which he said, don’t use here, and they use it there. So that’s why you’ve got this huge schism between designers in business and other people in business, they’re all playing a completely flawed playbook. and it’s clear, clear as a bell.
And if you just say to them, right, like, if you just say to somebody in business, so let me get this straight. You want me to make this decision based on this data that you’ve collected in the past. So that means, the future cannot be different in any respect from the past. And they’re like, Oh, come on, Roger, that’s insane. And I have to turn around and say, then what you’re doing is insane, my friend. So there you have it.
Peter: Right.
Roger: It will not go away. The challenge of designers living in the world of business will not go away until business wakes up and says, basically, we’re being stupid.
Jesse: Well, I wonder about what it’s going to take to create that change, because certainly, within digital product over the last 25 years, honestly, we’ve seen a real, I think, waning of interest in, appetite for, desire to, differentiate on innovation in user experience design. Honestly, a lot of these design leaders are not asked to help organizations do new things that can’t be predicted.
They’re asked to create predictability and maximize the predictability of the work that their teams do. And I wonder about, you know, simply creating demand for innovation in business again, and what it’s going to take to get there.
Creeping Scientism
Roger: Yeah, no, I, I buy that thesis completely. And what I tie it to more than anything else is the takeover of science in domains that are not scientific.
So there’s been this slow creeping takeover, and it’s so that it’s getting worse, not, not better. And there are some things about the world of technology in particular that are exacerbating it. For starters, you have a whole bunch of people who are, who are trained in a more scientific discipline than not, let’s say a bunch of computer scientists, right?
That’s a really scientific discipline, computer engineering is a scientific discipline. And then they’re over in the world of business, right? Most talented computer sciences and computer engineers stop doing that pretty soon in their careers, and become managers. So in there in the world of business, and they immediately say, Let me use the rules that I learned in this new discipline, because last time I checked, most of them don’t read Aristotle, never, never have, never will.
And so they don’t realize the flaw that they’re building into their work. And then any technique that is amenable to analysis, more apparently amenable to analysis, because nothing in the part of the world where things can be other than they are, is actually amenable to analysis, right?
It’s just appears to be. So for example, performance marketing is a perfect example. I can just pay for clicks, right? Brand building. Ooh, if, how do you do that? Just pay for more… clicks, A/B testing is another one that’s assuming that whatever’s happening now will be determinative of the future.
So you have a whole cadre of people who are trained to be scientific going and applying those disciplines to an unscientific domain. And it’s not as though that the world of business is entirely non-scientific. I mean, figuring out how much server capacity you need and what the power is of each server, whatever, you don’t, that’s science, that’s, that’s computer engineering.
And there are rules of physics that says, well, this is not much heat dissipation. There is this far apart. You’ve got to have the servers. Here’s how much coolant you have. Like, Oh, there are aspects of business that are scientific, right? But most of the things that really make a difference in the world of business are, are not.
It’s, hmm, how could we appeal to human beings in a different way than they’ve been appealed to before? Hmm. How could we do that anyway? That’s not scientific.
Jesse: There are a couple of touchstones from the history of digital product design that come to mind for me here. One is that I, I wrote an article more than 20 years ago now, where I described this sort of creeping scientism as dressing up in lab coats. And…
Roger: Oh, good, good for you. I send it to me afterwards because that was ahead of it. That was ahead of its time. If it was 20 years ago.
Jesse: Yeah, depressingly still relevant. I’m also reminded…
Roger: More true today than then..
Jesse: …of, yeah, our friend Doug Bowman, who was a designer around here in the Valley for many years, who, when he left Google, kind of was a bit of a canary in the coal mine in this respect, in publicly calling them out for carrying A/B testing to absurd conclusions in the design process and testing 40 shades of blue and that kind of thing.
Roger: Yeah, yeah. Oh, good.
Jesse: It almost seems like you’re making an argument for poetry in corporate decision making here.
Roger: The only thing I don’t love about that metaphor is that you are talking about humanity there, and so there’s this difference to me, fine art and design are in my view, two different disciplines.
They have some, some roots together. Poetry is also a humanistic discipline. Like one of the reasons why I like design as much as I like design is because it is a business-oriented, business- related discipline. So you actually have to appeal to somebody other than yourself.
A fine artist can say nobody will ever buy a painting of mine, but I’m still a great artist, or nobody will ever buy a book of my poetry, but I’m still a great poet because I think so. And I’ve expressed myself. A designer has to have their design come to fruition, which often takes you know, somebody to decide to green light investment.
Jesse: Absolutely.
The Pragmatics of Design
Roger: You know, I consulted to Herman Miller and Steelcase in my life. And, you know, the designers there had to design with manufacturability in mind, right? If you couldn’t manufacture the new chair, like who cares? Or if it costs so much to manufacture it. That at that price point, it wouldn’t sell any, so they couldn’t get the scale to tool up a manufacturing line.
So I like the fact that designers have to live in those worlds where they have to actually pay attention to the economics. They have to pay attention to the consumers, even the distribution channel, the suppliers. Poetry is a little farther than I will….
Jesse: I guess what brought that word to mind for me was just wondering what the antidote might be to all of this excessive over-analysis and this worship of the analytical.
And what came to mind for me was arguing for the intangibles, for the human element. That can’t be measured, that can’t be quantified or nailed down and boxed in.
Roger: In advance.
Jesse: Yes. Yeah.
Roger: Like ex post facto, you can say, well, that would be about 3 trillion worth of design there at Apple, right? Yeah. But only after the fact, because prior to it, like, are you kidding me?
Jesse: Yeah.
Roger: You’re kidding me? This, tiny little useless company that makes these funny devices. No, no. 3 billion. 33 trillion. There are consumers who can’t live without them. As with most things, I’m a Kuhnian guy, structure of scientific revolutions kind of guy.
One of my favorite books of all time, because I think there’s some really core insights there, which is there’s always a dominant theory and as it builds strength and becomes the dominant theory, more and more people study in that mode, work in that mode, work with that theory completely in their minds. and anybody who does not buy that theory is, you know, cast out and suppressed.
So we got that. But then this, nasty little thing called anomalies pop up, and when enough anomalies kind of hit, there gets to be this momentum behind the idea that maybe the dominant theory doesn’t actually work the way it’s supposed to, because there wouldn’t be all these anomalies.
And then you have this sort of melting period where there’s a bit of chaos for a while until you settle on to a new theory. We are at the point of having more anomalies kind of showing up to this analytical view of business. More, we forecast this, we went and tested with consumers, this product, and then they didn’t decide to buy it or the like.
And, slowly, but surely, but it’ll probably take another quarter century, would be my guess, for the analytical view of business, the database analytical view of business, to crumble. And I’m not sure what other than more anomalies and Steve Jobs provides, you know, really, a touchstone anomaly.
They’re like, why, why with those rounded corners? And why do you need all that crap? Because you do. And I will show you only by the evolving of future events. That’s what the designer has to say. And I’m against designers who play the stupid corporate game.
Oh, I’ll try to quantify this for you. You know, you got to just say, yes, yes, I will quantify this for you on the basis of, future events. Because if you just think about it from a data standpoint, the problem with the next six months is we have zero data about it. A hundred percent of the world’s data is from the past. Do you agree?
There’s no data, right? So the problem with the next six months is there’s no data about it. That’s the problem with it. The good thing about the next six months is in six months, there’ll be plenty of data about it. Right. And so my view is the designer’s job is to figure out how to productively turn the future into the past.,
You’ve got to try and figure out how to convince somebody to let you try something, make a prediction of what will happen. And then after it happens, you can say to them, see, we have data. So the designer has to set up a situation in which they can say, I was data-based, I was, but only ex post facto,
Peter: Right.
Roger: To get to there, I had to have you try something. Now, let me try something twice as big. Five times as big, 10 times as big. And you’ve got to build your way to it by cleverly figuring out how to turn the future productively into the past. If you don’t tell anybody about what you predict, right, this is the Babe Ruth effect, Babe Ruth points to center field and then hits it out.
People say that was kind of a special homer. That was maybe like the most special home run that’s ever been hit in the history of the sport. Because boy, oh boy, being able to predict that on the next pitch, you put it over the center field wall is sort of crazy. So the fact that he predicted it rather than just swung hard and hoped made it that much more epic. It’s memorable. It’s memorable for all time. It’s considered onel with the Willie Mays over the shoulder catch, like, considered the most memorable play in all of baseball history. And it has this unique characteristic of, predicting something that you couldn’t prove, doing it and then being able to say, kind of like, see?
Designers should do that rather than spending any time saying, well, we can quantify it and we can, well, maybe this was, that’s playing the game of losers. Don’t play games with losers. Don’t play games of losers with losers.
The Late ’00s Were a Magical Time
Peter: I want to go back a little bit to the Thomas Kuhn and the revolutions thing, because around the time you wrote Design of Business, Adaptive Path wrote a book called Subject to Change, which is very much what you’re talking about, right? You don’t know what’s coming. So here’s a set of practices or approaches that will allow you to succeed regardless of what that future is, or to kind of plan for that change. We had articles like the MFA is the new MBA…
Roger: Ah yes, Dan Pink!
Peter: 2008 2009 was this heady time that design was going to remake business.
Roger: Yep.
Peter: And then it didn’t.
Roger: Yeah.
Peter: And so I guess I’m wondering, what was that blip around then that created some conditions where, this was in the air, but then what didn’t happen, or what happened such that it didn’t carry forward? Maybe because you said it’s going to take another quarter century, are we thinking in terms of the wrong timescale?
Should we be looking at this in like 50 year chunks as opposed to like 10 to 20 year chunks when it comes to this kind of change in evolution?
Roger: Yes. I guess I think what happened were, again, back to anomalies. There were some really substantial anomalies in that period. iPhone.
Peter: iPhone being the most obvious.
Roger: Yes, but Herman Miller, Aeron chair. Right. Cool, cool thing. Like, it became the best selling chair in the history and the most profitable chair in the history of humanity. Right. And it didn’t look like anything before it. And in the clinics when they brought in a student, they didn’t clinic well at all.
The research was crummy and they just said, we’re going to do it anyway. And the thesis behind it was they pointed out the real problems, the things they really hated about their task chairs. And we’ve solved those problems. The problem is it doesn’t look like a chair. In fact, the people at the clinics would come in sit in a chair and then be all mad and say, Why did you come and, make a sit in an unfinished chair?
Peter: Right, right.
Roger: They expected it would be padded and upholstered. Yeah. There were some anomalies. In that period, Samsung embracing design and taking on the Japanese, Philips, while many big Dutch companies were like having, you know, kind of European disease, was flourishing.
So I think there were enough companies doing this weird thing that got people excited about it. And I think the problem is, in some sense, there wasn’t a flow of the necessary kind of person that went into the business world.
And I pointed this out to Dan. Dan’s a great friend of mine. And I said to Dan, Dan, there is a slight problem here, right? Which is, you said the MFA is the new MBA. America produces 150,000 MBAs a year and about 1500 MFAs a year. So. If it’s going to be the new MBA, there’s going to be two orders of magnitude too few of them to fill those jobs.
And of course he didn’t mean exactly that. And we have a fun conversation about it, but, of those MFAs, how many of them care about business? Answer, maybe 2, 3 percent of them. So what I think you just didn’t have is enough people who had any useful training in design that knew enough about business to figure out how to overcome the organ rejection complex that happened.
And of course, I was intimately involved from start onward of the design thrust of A. G. Lafley and Claudia Kotchka at P&G. And that took incredible amount of skill and fortitude to make that so that it didn’t get killed, but boy, the attempt to kill it was all over the place.
So I just think there was a closing of ranks, as Kuhn would predict. We’ve got some anomalies, but those are weird anomalies, says the mainstream, and let’s close ranks and stop this before it gets dangerous and so. You know, we had a huge bubble and a crash on stuff internet in 2000 and 2001 was disaster, a crash it’s gone, but sure enough, 10 years later, 2.0 came along and now we’re maybe in 3.0 or 4.0, whatever people want, and it now rules the known universe. And so I think sometimes that Kuhnian kind of thing has spasms and that spasm was not big enough to overcome the, organ rejection antibodies.
Charting Anomalies
Peter: What are some of the anomalies you’re seeing?
I got the sense you feel like the anomalous is like ratcheting up again. You know, one of the things Jesse and I have been pursuing, the last roughly 10 conversations on our podcast is, like, where things are headed. And to your point, we, you don’t really know, but it felt like from about 2008 to 2022, there was a trajectory, at least for design, you could probably say for product, product development.
But then at the beginning of 2023, like there’s been this convulsion, at least in, tech spaces, right, with layoffs and all that kind of stuff. And what’s next is just this fog, like, whereas before you could kind of, you know, prior data would kind of indicate future results that is no longer the case.
Roger: Yeah.
Peter: And so I’m curious what you’re seeing or sensing or suggestions for navigating through that uncertainty that we all seem to be in right now.
Roger: Yeah, so I agree and observe it, too, the layoffs in silicon valley of all the ux people is, it’s quite sort of catastrophic in magnitude for that discipline.
And it’ll have a long term ripple effect. So, I think I see what you’re seeing. I still see it as a, bit of a, another spasm, right? Where, you know, there was over promising. And we have to have a more sophisticated view of what this sort of, in this case, user interface feature development, based on the individual.
One of the things I’m working on these days, I’m, collaborating with buddies of mine at Red, you know, Red associates, right?
Peter: Yes.
And… the folks out of Denmark.
Roger: Yep. And what our hypothesis is, is the world of strategy started out focusing on economics back in 1963, BCG learning curve, you get your economics better and you win.
And then in the 80s, starting with Mike Porter, to say, no, there’s something called differentiation where you’ve got to understand the user deeply and you can appeal to them, that then morphed into the whole design movement. How do you understand the individual? Oh, ethnographically, deeper user understanding and you start designing features and the graphical user interface associated with them in these digital products in a way that it’ll appeal to them as individuals, and then you will succeed.
A bunch of that success did happen because understanding consumers, their needs, their wants, and designing things for them that they loved made a whole lot of sense. But there was this massive investment in that individual, and what we think that obscured and did not help understand, that’s being brought to light by, in the tech world, another anomaly, and the anomaly is TikTok, which should not be able to do what it’s doing, right?
Network economics should have made it, squashable, like a bug, just like Facebook did to Snap, right? Just, our network economics can crush you like a bug. And we have put more money into feature development, understanding the user, A/B testing, feature development, so make the user experience, you know, so, so awesome.
Meta, what with both Facebook and Instagram have huge, huge lead over, TikTok on that. Why, how can TikTok violate the rules of network economics completely, violate the rules of feature design, feature development, UX design. Why, they shouldn’t be able to do that.
And it’s because It’s not a psychology problem, right? Individual psychology. It’s a sociology problem.
Actually TikTok has created a world that people want to be part of more than they want to be individually attracted by Facebook or Instagram. So you want to be a TikToker and be part of that.
That world has norms, conventions, rules, and you want to adhere to those so that you’re part of that world. So what I think is, the design imperative is going to shift from understanding the individual to understanding and developing, nurturing a world, which you have much less control over, it’s a trickier thing to nurture a world than to design a user interface that you maybe tested to be superior for kind of an individual.
So my explanation would be these companies invested in the new toy, which is user interface designers, feature designers, hired tens of thousands of them, and it didn’t produce the results they were hoping for.
And so they’ve said, guess that didn’t work, and they’re waiting to figure out what to try next. But the answers still are in, if you will, if we can use this term designerly attributes. But they’re not going to be designers who work on the individual.
It’s not as though that was never part of the thing. Your family being on Facebook was helpful to the network economics, but now you actually don’t want to be in the same world as your grandmother. To do your silly dance, you don’t want your grandmother on it. You want other people who love silly dances. And that’s a world and it’s got its rules. It’s got its norms, it’s got its conventions.
So I’m sort of obsessed about this now because I think of it as the next, kind of, forefront of strategy design. It’s designing worlds.
And Hermes has done that spectacularly, sort of, in the physical world. Absolutely spectacularly. There’s a world of Hermes people who want to be part of it as norms and conventions that has weird rules. Like you may want a Birkin or a Kelly bag, but we’re not going to give one to you, sell one to you at an exorbitant price. You have to go through a bunch of steps to qualify to be part of that world. And that’s why at 15 billion of sales, it’s got the same market cap as PetroChina with 240 billion of sales.
How could that be? It’s got a higher market cap to revenue ratio than any tech company except now Nvidia. How can that be? It’s so different from the other luxury goods producers. It’s because over the many years created a world. Do you know how much advertising Hermes does?
Peter: Not a clue. I pay no attention to the luxury market. Have you seen what I’m wearing?
Roger: Yeah, you got a point there. Uh, Jesse, do you know?
Jesse: No. Neither do I.
Roger: Almost nothing. Almost nothing for a exceedingly highly branded consumer product.
Exceedingly highly branded. What do they spend their money on, do you think? Just guess what they spend their money on in the way of building the brand.
Events. Events.
Peter: Oh, so, so, gatherings. Yes, gathering. Social experiences.
Roger: Social experiences, yeah. But not focused on an individual influencer. That’s what’s different about it. it’s incredibly, incredibly cool. Artistically, wowing kind of parties of every, every cool person in Hong Kong, or everybody who’s part of the Hermes kind of world in Hong Kong. So it’s a world oriented strategy, just like TikTok, world oriented strategy.
And so the next big design frontier is designing worlds.
Jesse: Mm hmm. So as I think about the opportunity for design leaders to lead a different kind of conversation to drive some dialogue that reaches beyond the anthropological toward the sociological to bring more of the humanistic into these analytical conversations, a lot of design leaders are struggling just to find the opportunities…
Roger: yeah.
Design Thinking WTF?
Jesse: …for those kinds of things. And your work a decade plus ago was foundational to a lot of people’s ideas about how to create those opportunities for themselves through the methodology that became known as design thinking. And now, at this point in the evolution of things I have to ask: Roger Martin. Design thinking, what went wrong?
Roger: Um, a couple things. One, you didn’t have the human capital necessary to, operate it, right? So you had some thought leaders weighing in on it. Tim Brown’s books. But you then didn’t have the horses to back it up. And so people started to reach for these folks who had a design degree on their resume.
And say, we’ll create a design department. But very few of them knew enough about business to fit in. But there was probably over promising that went on and I think in the tech world, a racing out farther and farther on the thinner and thinner branch, let’s have another thousand UX designers at Google or at, Facebook, and eventually it snapped off behind them because the results weren’t there.
Interesting enough, The Design of Business still sells. It sort of didn’t go… it kind of still sells and, it’s a more foundational, but like Tim Brown, and who’s a good friend of mine, wrote more of the manual for here’s the steps you take.
I said, how should we even think about this? That was Design of Business’s purpose. How can we think about this phenomenon? And I think the core thoughts about mysteries, heuristics, algorithms, code is kind of more right than wrong, shall we say, and just needs to be applied in a different way.
A big problem, though, is like America’s biggest single educational enterprise, higher educational enterprise is business. There are almost half a million, 450,000 between MBAs and undergrads in business, that comes out of that, were just huge. That’s over 20 percent of all people in tertiary education in America.
And, they’re being taught things that are inimical to design and are anti-Aristotelian in a fundamental way. And so what I tried to do, in part, by being a dean for 15 years was to convert an MBA program into a, what I said, I wanted it to be as a master of business design, that was my desire.
But like, it’s the hardest thing I ever tried to do in my life, like advising CEOs on their most important decisions was easy compared to that. And when I left as Dean, it pretty much went away.
At one point, people from around the world came to the Rotman school to learn business design. And we did a really good job educating them. And some of them are floating through companies doing awesome work, but even it is just a drop in the bucket. So the challenge is just might makes right. and the might of US business education is overwhelming.
One discipline, it’s bigger than all the hard sciences and engineering combined. It’s just gigantic. And it has got a core foundational theory is that if we teach you a bunch of analytical techniques, you will analyze the world and make good business decisions.
Peter: Can’t manage what you can’t measure.
Roger: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yes. I mean, what I just said is like demonstrably false, but it is the dominant theory, and that’s why I say it’s probably 25 years till it breaks down and, we need more, we Herman Miller’s and Philips and Samsung’s of the world to show that a different paradigm is what we need. And again, remember how tiny the design education field is. It’s really hard to tell how many graduates of undergraduate design there is. In America, but if it’s 10 percent of the 400…
Peter: …and it’s not, it’s nowhere near.
Roger: Yeah. Yeah. 10 percent of the 300, 000 undergrads, cause it’s about 300,000 undergraduates, 150,000 graduates, last time I checked the numbers, don’t hold me to that, okay.
There’s very little production of the human beings kind of necessary to bring about that revolution. And, as an educator, higher ed person for, 21 years, 15 years as Dean, I just know how slowly that, world changes.
Though, with the right leadership, like we were, attracting design students and teaching them business design.
Peter: Yeah. you just said something you said the phrase, the right leadership.
Roger: Yeah.
Peter: I want to unpack that a bit because something that has happened in the last 20 some years, even with some of the backsliding over the last couple of years, is that a majority of meaningful businesses have some flavor of senior design leadership, kind of director level or above.
They’re all over the place. You know, tens of thousands of design leaders at banks and insurance services firms and healthcare as well as in tech as in retail. They’re everywhere.
But the question then is, you said the phrase the right leadership and I’m wondering , how should these design leaders who are in these businesses have some presence and hopefully some say? How should they be showing up? What should maybe they be doing differently than they’re doing in order to help advance what you’re talking about and get some of these designerly ways better appreciated, to push back a bit on the overwhelming wave of scientism that is, that is drowning, potentially crashing over them. Yeah.
Like, are there tactics that they could be employing to reverse that tide?
How to Succeed
Roger: Yeah, there are. The thing I would first advise is, and this is the same advice I give to students who say, well, Roger, you’re teaching us all this stuff, but we’re going to go into a company. And how do I convince everybody else to do this? And I say, don’t.
Don’t. You’re responsible for something. It may be a tiny little triangle. Like the biggest triangle is the one that the CEO has the whole thing. You’ve got a little triangle, in that triangle to do what I’ve taught you.
If I’ve taught you well, and what I’ve done makes sense, guess what happens? You get a bigger triangle because you succeeded, right? And then you do what? Same thing again. Don’t tell everybody else to do things differently. Then get a bigger triangle, and a bigger triangle, eventually you have the whole thing.
And that’s the advice I’d give. And then the specific advice within your triangle is, you have to be Gandhi-esque, be the change you want to see, right? You’ve got to do things in your own sphere of control for which there is no proof from past data, like all my, you know, kind of consequential successes such as they are in my life have been by doing things for which there was no data to prove in advance, right?
So. Rotman School, fourth best business school in Southern Ontario. I say, I’m going to make it Canada’s only globally relevant business school. And we’re going to do it by embracing integrative thinking and business design, new way to think. We’re going to grow the thing like crazy and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
And everybody’s like, you’re kind of nuts and you’re crazy, but you did it. And we became Canada’s only consequential global business school. I went on the board of Tennis Canada, we were nothing, not top 50 nation. We said, we’re going to be a leading tennis nation with Grand Slam singles champions, Davis Cup champions, Fed Cup champions.
Everybody’s like, that’s nuts. We did it. We’ve won Rensselaer Singles, Davis cup, Fed Cup. Were always considered one of the world’s leading tennis nations now. Not the leader; at 30 million with snow you can’t, can’t be that,
So I was the change I wanted to see, by saying I can imagine a possibility. And we’re going to make it happen. And I will be undaunted by anybody who doesn’t buy it and try my best to convince them.
So, people say, yes, but you were the boss, right? No, deans aren’t bosses. I reported to the provost who reported to the president. I was two steps from the top in a hidebound, you know, universe, the university universe, I said, I’m just going to do this.
So I would say, stop looking outside, look inside. Have the courage of your convictions to attempt to do something for which there is no data to satisfy anybody who wants data that you will succeed, and just figure out a way to make it happen. And if that has to happen slower than you wish, because nobody else believes in it, so be it.
And I always used to say at the Rotman School, I’m patient, but resolute. But some things take a while. And in fact, I was saying, I want the Rotman School of the last year of my deanship to be unrecognizable as having had anything to do the Rotman School of my first year.
Those have nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with one another, but each year, there would be small enough changes that nobody’s going to kind of jump off the boat and swim to the shore saying this guy’s a lunatic. And that’s what we did. We transformed it utterly and totally to something that nobody thought it made even any sense in the business school world.
So, that would be my practical advice.
Jesse: I guess that if it’s going to take an accumulation of anomalies to create this kind of large scale change, we need more people who are willing to go out there and be the anomalies.
Roger: Yeah. Yeah. And, that is the rate limiting step. So you’ve Jesse, you, put your finger right on it.
Peter: Is that what we’re going to print t-shirts that read “be the anomaly” and sell those at design conferences?
Roger: I kind of think so. I mean, there is a bit of a Nike to this. It’s just do it, right. I mean, stop whining about it. Yeah. You’re a design leader and you’re like, they won’t let me do this. They don’t want that. Well, figure out what you are in charge of and be designerly about that. And, don’t be shy about it. They’re all just doable. But if you’re cowed by the lack of data, then good luck to you.
Jesse: So, embrace the uncertainty, imagine the possibilities, be the anomaly and just go do it.
Roger Martin. Thank you so much for being with us.
Roger: You’re most welcome.
Peter: Where can the people find you, Roger? how do you like to be found these days?
Roger: Well I write a weekly column on Medium, they can find me there. I’m on LinkedIn and X, and I have a website, which is http://www.rogerlmartin. com. You got to put in my middle initial L for Lloyd, my father, otherwise it goes to a real estate salesman in Houston, who’s extremely nice guy. I’ve sent him a lot of business. He’s got, he’s got, he’s just got a lot of emails and he always forwards them to me. So, but I don’t want to have him have too much work so you can find me at any of those places.
Peter: Awesome.
Jesse: Roger Martins of the world unite.
Peter: Yes. Thank you so much for joining us
Roger: Terrific. Thanks for having me.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.
53: Leading Design Through Continual Evolution (ft. Peter Skillman)
Jan 04, 2025
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. 2025 is the 100th anniversary of the Centralized Design Group at Dutch manufacturing powerhouse Philips. Current Head of Philips Design, Peter Skillman, joins us to share lessons from Philips’ century of design innovation, from light bulbs to the compact disc to healthcare technology.
We’ll also talk about the cultural factors that support design influence, what he learned and had to unlearn from his time in Silicon Valley, and how the game for design leaders has fundamentally changed in recent years.
Peter M.: Our guest today with us is Peter Skillman, a design leader who’s been working for quite a while with experience at Palm Computing, Nokia, Microsoft, Amazon, and now Philips. Thank you for joining us, Peter.
Peter S.: It is an honor to be here after, you know, connecting with you for so many years now.
Peter M.: Let’s start with what you’re up to now. What does it mean to be the global head of design for Philips?
History of Philips Design
Peter S.: Let’s start with, like, on January 5th, 1925, Louis Kalff was the very first head of design for Philips. And what’s kind of interesting is how his legacy is still a key part of, visible influence on, the identity. And he challenged Anton Philips back in 1925 by sending this letter.
This letter essentially said the advertising that Philips makes is not have the same standing and greatness in the importance of the company. In an edited way, he basically said, the advertising isn’t good enough. Hire me to come fix it. And the Philips wordmark at that point, there were 25 different versions of it.
And essentially the very first part of design at Philips, since it was a light bulb company, it all began with light, by unifying the entire visual identity. And he was around for a long time, working with some other great designers like Cassandra, who worked on the posters. And he also worked on the logo, which is stars, which represent light. And then also the waves, which represent communication. And today, data is the new light. And insights are the new communication. So it’s kind of come full circle in terms of its meaning as a health tech company, that’s looking at prediction and AI as a means of driving better care for more people.
So that was, like, the beginning. And, you know, you asked me like, what does it mean? And if I’m really transparent, you know, I’ve shown some vulnerability, you know, with my team and like, maybe like most high performance people, like it’s really scary. Like, I’ve had, I may have this facade that like, I’m on top of everything, but like, sometimes I fear I’m not worthy of this place in history.
And I, fear that I’ll mess up this huge legacy. ‘Cause I’m that eighth leader of design in Philips’ history. And Philips has probably won more awards than any design company in the history of the world, right? And so like sometimes the responsibility is pretty heavy. And I remind my team that I’m human and I’m trying to do my best to basically hold up to all of those great leaders over the past, you know, people like Stefano Marzano and Rainn Versema and Louis Kalff and Robert Bleich and, you know, Sean Carney, is like this long list of people that, really made a difference in influencing society.
Jesse: And I would think that in addition to your own standards for your performance that come from this legacy of previous leaders and previous accomplishments, there are also certain expectations that you’re feeling as well, given the history of design at Philips and the history of design’s influence at Philips.
And I wonder how those expectations, those perceptions of how design is meant to contribute at Philips, how that influences how you make decisions as a leader.
Peter S.: I think that you’re inheriting this tradition, like, let’s talk about legacy first, right, that involves maintaining consistency and functionality in the design, brand unification, and a clear focus on empathy. I mean, Philips, is, like, the first company that invented ESG, like way back in 1920s Philips was doing tuberculosis screening for all of its employees and then for all of Eindhoven and then scaled that to all of the Netherlands and at the same time set up things like corporate housing and healthcare for all employees.
Like that didn’t exist back then. And disability insurance, like these things were really new. And, so I feel like what’s unique about Philips is that. there’s all this legacy, but care and empathy form the basis of how decisions and trade offs are made as we look at the next hundred years of our future.
‘Cause we, respect our legacy, but we have to look forward, you know, we can’t look backwards. And, I think that has a part of how we communicate, with leaders and partners and our employees and new hires, that is really different than the ethos that I found in Silicon Valley.
Peter M.: So you’re talking about looking forward. I’m curious what role design has played in Philips’s evolution and shifting, right? You mentioned it started with light bulbs. It’s now a health tech company. And what you are being tasked for in terms of that ongoing evolution, what role is design playing to drive change versus, maybe, enabling change.
‘Cause so often design can be seen as, you know, when it started at Philips, yes, it was brand. It was advertising. That’s not core value.
That’s, kind of, related value. Now, it feels like design is woven into more core value realization within Philips. And, I’m interested in the mechanisms by which that happens, by which you take part in that.
Peter S.: I mean, let’s talk about the evolution. So in the early years, twenties and thirties, you know, it was all about that visually identity and presenting a consistent visual identity.
It’s funny, if you go back to Philips’s history, like, it wasn’t profitable for the first three years, like it was 18 93, And then they got a order for 50,000 light bulbs for the winter palace for the czar of Russia. Like that was the moment at which Philips became profitable. And people forget that there were hundreds of light bulb companies. Why did Philips survive and thrive for so long to become the innovation company that it is today?
And you have to go back to Gerard Philips, and Louis Kalff and many of the leaders, like today, even Roy Jacobs today, cares about the little things. No detail is small. Gerard Philips, I’ve had his notebook in my hands from 18 98. And there are extensive notes of everything that was going on in the shop floor.
So this is a place where the leaders are really into the details. I’m expected to know about everything on every project. You know, it’s an almost impossible task given the scale of the company, but, the ethos of leadership here is that you’re not a manager. You have to be a designer first or actually deeply participate in whatever your role is.
Individual contributor work may be five or 10 percent of my time, but I do get involved in individual, you know, contributions. And I think that at a lot of large leadership positions, it becomes a lot more managerial or role based and, you know, we’re really about rolling our sleeves up and caring about those details, and you lead by example.
So it started with that visual identity, where there was this history of leaders being involved in the details. And then, you know, from the 40s to the 80s, you know, is really a transition to product design. And we’re talking about consumer products, domestic appliances, and then, you know this design evolved with Knut Rahn and Robert Bleich into doing centralized design leadership, evolved to a point where there was a design and review process that became the model for many other large corporate companies at the time.
They even had this like giant round table with like a Lazy Susan in it. They would put, like, products down on top of it and evaluate every detail and decide, like, yes, we have to change this. This isn’t ready to go. This has to go back. And of course, a lot of that was industrial design focus. And so huge transition from, you know, an industrial company making light bulbs at scale, to products that it was aesthetics as it relates to self-esteem.
And then the connection from there to doing things like personal shavers and grooming, where it really had an impact on how people felt about themselves and I think that, you know, if you look at companies, it was only Sony and Braun that had that level of design orchestration that was occurring centrally at the time, where design wasn’t just a part of the organization that was like an agency producing work by order from the businesses, but this was a role that was an equal product stakeholder at the table. Which is very different than how design was treated in many early, you know, large innovation companies.
And so, then there was this big pivot, you know, we’re starting visual identity, product design, the next wave is experience design. So this is when we went from product-centric to an increasing focus on healthcare technology and user experience. And I think you know, at that point, you’re delivering value by truly understanding customer needs and working backwards from the customer, trying to understand the context they’re in, doing contextual inquiry, like the evolution of the customer, co-create happened during this evolution, as we started to move into really, you know, becoming a health tech company.
And that co-creation was, you know: step one, discover and research the context. And then step two is like framing and putting those needs in context. And then step three is ideating where you’re generating solutions and then, four, delivery.
And I think that process, doing it with customers, together, with them essentially participating in the design work, was something that was like really, really new and led to what is, I think the fourth major transition in our history, which is from visual identity to product design, to experience design, to now predictive and insight-driven experiences. And I think that’s a really significant change.
Jesse: It’s interesting also to think about what you’ve inherited from the organization and its history of design being an equal product stakeholder, as you describe it, which suggests to me that there’s a value proposition for design that’s already well understood at the executive level before you ever stepped in the door at Philips.
How Philips Succeeds
Peter S.: Yeah. I mean, this is amazing, but like a year ago, two years after I arrived, Roy, the CEO, and he had talked to me, so I knew it was coming, announced, What are the core impact drivers of Philips? Those are: innovation, because we’re a hundred and thirty year company of continuous innovation actually moving through and transitioning through major, I mean, we’re a TV company for a while, we produced, you know, vacuum cleaners and air fryers and, you know, like light bulbs. We don’t do this anymore. We don’t do consumer radios. We don’t do VCRs. We co-invented the compact disc with Sony, and we’re not in those industries anymore because we continuously evolve based on how the market dynamics change.
And if you look at the evolution of first Japan Inc, and then Korea Inc, in many of those areas, these were areas where the supply chain ownership and cost basis didn’t allow Philips to continue having a leadership position in those segments. And so the leadership really carefully looked at what are the areas where we can continue to drive value for customers. Where we could maintain often a premium position in those markets. And health tech was one of the areas where we have and continue to show innovation that competitors can’t match. We own the majority of, you know, the hospital patient monitor market as an example. And there we’re looking at things like, with this incredible amount of data, we can predict hemodynamic instability in a patient hours before a life threatening event occurs, and then recommend a protocol to take action that saves that person’s life.
That’s not something that was even possible before large language models emerged. But very quickly, we can take advantage of our position to actually deliver better care for more people. And I think, you know, going back to your original question, like, how did Philips maintain its position? Well, it came from that history of innovation, and then the other two impact drivers.
Those other two impact drivers are design and sustainability. And so we have a comms framework where we are investing in the legacy of communicating those impact drivers, innovation, design, sustainability, because that’s where we are differentiated from most of the other companies. And it helps us maintain a position as an equal product stakeholder, but note, we’re not design led.
In fact, I really don’t like the term design-led. It’s terrible because it’s so cocky to assume that everything is going to be led by design when, you know, all of the other influences, clinical, marketing, brand, you know, product, marketing, engineering, et cetera, matter so much. And so we’d like to think of a model more where it’s overlapping circles. And so I want engineering and marketing in design space doing some design work. I want the designers coding and working on product specs and PRDs and basically influencing that.
And so we play our position, but we also are often really outside of our swim lane. Which is threatening to the organi–, this is not easy. There’s conflict that comes from doing that.
Psychological Safety
Peter M.: Is that an intentional conflict? Is that a positive creative tension that you sometimes hear about in organizations? Or is this just kind of a byproduct of your leadership and prior design leadership and how you operate?
Peter S.: You know, I think if you go back to, you know, what is psychological safety, you know, and look at Amy Edmondson’s stuff, you know, on psychological safety, it doesn’t mean that everyone’s being nice. It actually means that you are openly challenging people, but in a very transparent way. You are never attacking them. You’re only challenging them and in a unique way, it’s so central to Dutch culture.
Like this is a Dutch company originally, and those value systems are part of every site, right? And this comes from John Locke and Spinoza and a culture where there wasn’t an entrenched king or elite class that drove decision making, and since a third of the country is actually under sea level. Amsterdam is like two meters under sea level. It meant that any one region or small village could basically break through a dike and wipe out a third of the country. And so power became distributed.
So what that means is this thing called poldering. A polder is actually the land that’s below a dike is a polder.
And poldering means that everyone has to become aligned, and listened to, and challenged in this really open egalitarian way. And so, you know, often it means a ridiculous amounts of alignment to get decisions done, but then everyone really marches forward. And so it’s not top down, hierarchical the way European, maybe many German companies are more top down. Many West Coast companies are top down, but the Dutch companies are not. And I think that is a unique competitive advantage because it’s also highly tied to a tolerance for other people in terms of equality, access to health care, and how people take care of its citizens, et cetera, and a freedom to express yourself without judgment.
It’s like that empathy actually becomes a competitive strength in how we care for our customers. And the transcendent purpose of better care for more people.
Philips’ Distinct Culture
Jesse: So this definitely suggests to me that you had to change some of your ways of doing things when you came into this organization, that the models from your years in Silicon Valley perhaps were not directly translatable to this new cultural context. And I wonder where you found yourself having to adapt the most in leading in this sort of decentralized fashion.
Peter S.: Great question. That is a great question. First, let’s talk about why I came here in the first place. I came here because of the transcendent purpose that what you do matters. And there are many examples where we’re saving people’s lives, every day. Like there are moments where you actually have goose bumps from the stories that you hear about that man who falls off of an exercise bike in Seattle and has a heart attack, and then he’s saved by a Philips defibrillator. And you know, they, stand back and nobody knew how to use this thing before. And it’s so clear and they rip off the pads and put them on his chest and, press the button and it describes, you know, three, two, one clear, move out of the way. And that saved his life, right.
But that’s not the end of the story. Part of the story that is unique about Philips, tied to purpose, is they scan the device. And then they got everyone who assembled that product, with him, personally, to connect to, like, what you do as it relates to patient safety and quality, saved your life.
And like, there’re moments where, like, I’m almost in tears about how deeply personal that stuff is and, that’s not manufactured, that’s like really authentic, but so okay, there’s my example of purpose.
The second reason I came is because the people, and I was lucky that Roy was actually one of the people that interviewed me, and I’ve never met a CEO like him, other than Satya, he, those two together are, are at the same level, I think, in terms of excellence and leadership and empathy and values and integrity and yeah. Like, one, I’ll tell you a story as it relates to people.
Like, one night that we were doing a a user test. And that user test, there was a video, you were dialing into somewhere in Germany, there was a clinician who had this 3D printed housing with an iPad in it, you know, with a new UX that we have been working on for hospital patient monitoring. And it was going pretty well. And I just thought, you know, I’m just going to see if Roy is interested in seeing this, you know, it’s like taking a risk to the, how often do you message the CEO?
But I just thought it was really interesting that he understands what… how things are built and process and made at Philips. And so I sent him a message on the internal Teams channel and he replied in like five milliseconds and he was waiting for a plane, you know, he’s at the airport and he dialed into the meeting and then the other designers in the call, it was like an 8:30 at night, really weird, you know, testing with, you know, there’s Roy Jacobs, you know, pops up on the header and they’re like, what, you know, like the CEO is like watching it and he never turned on his camera and he didn’t say anything, but he just listened, right.
And so like the fact that you have a leader that’s willing to dive down into that level of Gemba, it’s one of the reasons why I’m proud to be here. Okay.
So, purpose, people. And the last reason is that there is so much work to do here. And I felt like I could really drive impact. We have a lot of work to become a first class software company, because we’re an innovation company that now is maybe almost two-thirds software.
Building Better Software
Peter S.: We are world class at the hardware. We have a lot of work to do and the reason why Roy and others wanted to recruit me here is because of a digital acumen, you know, around things like DORA metrics and software quality and UX telemetry and design language adoption and how we deliver platforms and really up our game digitally.
And, what struck me is how little resistance I get to driving those changes. The other thing is that… let’s take the best things that I’ve learned from Amazon. Amazon is the highest execution acumen I’ve ever seen in my career. It was two very difficult years that I had. It is not easy. There are moments where you’re grinding your teeth, right?
And the psychological safety at Philips is vastly higher. But I will say that, like, if you want to see excellence in execution, AWS is a great place to look at. Amazing depth of mechanisms. And so some of those mechanisms, so, you know, captured in my head, you know, preserved all their intellectual property, of course, I haven’t challenged that.
But those things that in terms of thinking about how you drive excellence in interviewing, or even writing. I started a Powerful Writing at Philips class to up the level of our communication.
And so like you asked me, how did I change? And what is so amazing is I didn’t really have to change. The culture’s so welcoming of that challenge of raising the game. It’s the least conceited culture I’ve ever been part of, in terms of people are not threatened by ideas. You know you will be asked and challenged and like people will argue with you, but, it’s not political or personal nature ever. And so that makes it, you know really easy.
And then the other thing that I think has helped, because, you know, it’s always hard when you’re trying to bring about evolution or change in a particular area, is that we built a design agenda and the design agenda is a response to the business strategy as a compass for everything that we do and it’s composed of four themes: care, unite, simplify and elevate.
And each of those four themes, Care, Unite, Simplify, Elevate, have a set of guiding principles that each design leader thinks about. And it’s how we evaluate the trade offs that we’re making so that we maintain the excellence that Philips has delivered for the next 100 years. And I think that being able to communicate and tell those stories has been a really powerful and important part of how we’ve driven, you know, those kinds of changes and…
But I would say that the one place where I have changed substantially is maybe less related to coming here, but part of my own lessons, is that I’m not focused at all on my own position anymore. I’m more focused on unlocking the creative potential of other people. And I don’t care about my ego. I don’t care about comp, you know, like, I realized in, maybe too late, maybe 10 years ago, but I started to, but like, it’s really true today that my ego is not wrapped up around the role and I’m really having so much fun recognizing that the more that I give back to others, the better the outcome is.
Peter M.: I want to go back to the design agenda. Agenda is something that, Jesse and I talk a fair bit about, and you mentioned these four principles. I’m curious though, what is the Peter Skillman agenda, right? You have been granted…
Peter S.: yeah.
Peter M.: …a role, an authority, a leadership position, and with that typically comes some idea of where you would like to take things, right? You’re not there simply to mind the store. You’re there to realize some evolution or change likely. What is that?
Peter S.: I have four priorities right now and it comes from how can we deliver the best industry leading experiences to deliver better care for more people. And it’s always grounded in that transcendent purpose, right?
And so if I look at what are the threats to the next 100 years right now, it’s around software quality, UX telemetry services, experiences, and design language adoption. Like, how do we ensure that every single component is code backed with design tokens so that we increase agility by 50 times. And, you know, that effort at Amazon took four and a half years. At Microsoft, it took seven and a half years to drive full adoption of things like, you know it’s called Polaris at AWS, it’s called Fluent at Microsoft.
And there’s a lot of infighting about that adoption. But then some folks at Microsoft, with Satya’s support, delivered on One ES, or one engineering system. What happened when they executed on that, is that they were able to deliver Copilot in like three months, across all of Office.
That level of agility was never part of the Microsoft platform level software that was completely disunified. You know, look at Outlook. I was the head of Outlook when I was at Microsoft. And If you look at Win32 and Mac and OWA and mobile, though all those code bases were completely disunified, every single button had a separate instance of code. And so it meant that when you want high agility, you couldn’t deliver on that.
And it took them seven and a half years. But then what I saw was the insane amount of agility that you get. Now, one thing I love is that, you know, Satya and Roy, they talk every quarter, right? So they’re talking about this stuff that like Roy knows what DORA metrics are, you know, for developer productivity, you know, like, how cool is that, you know?
So my agenda is about ensuring that we have the foundation to build an amazing future, right? Like, I’ve become a software evangelist and that’s where I’m honestly quite often out of my swim lane. And that gets to like how design leaders of the future– and you can ask me later about the design freak out, I have some super opinionated thoughts on that one– but like, I think that all of these things represent how I have to ensure that we have the conditions for success.
Peter M.: When you say “out of your swim lane,” do you mean you’re now swimming in engineering waters? ‘Cause software seems to be your swim lane.
Peter S.: If you look back historically, you might think that my swim lane would be industrial design. Industrial design is amazingly, like, superb. Color materials and finish thinking and, you know, we had a thousand colors. We went down to 100, and that saves incredible amounts of money and improves sustainability, like all of our systems and mechanisms around, you know, production and evaluations of first shots.
And I mean, you know, I was forged in the cauldron of collecting first shots out of multi-cavity injection molding tools in Asia and Taiwan and Mexico and, absolutely getting into details about different aluminum grades, you know, and, how they anodize…
Peter M.: over chamfers…
Peter S.: You’re right, that was part of my DNA. And I don’t have to weigh in on C2 surfaces here, and ellipses rather than radii on, you know, surface continuity. Like, everybody knows how to do that here. Like, they’re really good. But on the software side, I really have to work on providing industry backed examples of how we achieve that level of agility that you see at AWS and Amazon and the big magnificent seven, right?
Because, those other companies are really truly world class at that.
Managing At Scale
Jesse: I wonder about how you manage all of this at the scale that you’re operating, and especially as you have a leadership that expects you to be conversant with detail. Sometimes you are right there in the weeds as an individual contributor. Sometimes you have to maintain kind of a higher altitude and I wonder how you set those priorities for yourself and how you choose where you lean in and how you lean in.
Peter S.: This is where again, being reforged in the cauldron of AWS, I learned some really excellent mechanisms about how to communicate. We have a QBR quarterly, like we review every single project in a condensed form and a document and all the design extended leaderships review have visibility into what’s happening across 18 different businesses, right?
So that kind of clarity allows us to help maintain things like simplify, unify, elevate and care, like, the design agenda then becomes part of that. Like, Oh, you’re working in a very similar kind of use case. Let’s share Figma files and make sure that, you know, we’re, leveraging the same module or that we’re delivering a unified experience.
Because what you want is you want every experience at Philips to be unified. I mean, obviously the consumer side, a little bit different in personal health, but you want to ensure that you have communication to ensure that that excellence happens. So that’s one mechanism and we do that both at the central team level and all also at the business team level.
And then we have guilds. So we have nine guilds. Data and AI and we have product and spatial and we have design thinking and we have operations and tools and we have digital and all of those, sustainability, all those guilds meet to raise the bar on that particular specialty so that anyone in the company, regardless of whether they’re in design or not, can invest in ensuring exactly what is the top, most relevant, most meaningful thing happening in the industry and they learn and share so that we continue to raise the bar. That’s elevate.
Then we have obviously all hands. Then we have some really amazing mechanisms around the career ladder. We communicate to people, here’s how you get presented. We have a set of six lenses that we use to evaluate promotion. We do promo docs.
I learned this from Amazon. Amazon has the best mechanisms for evaluating talent of any company that I ever experienced. And so I can leverage things that I learned there, and recreated from memory with, and then optimize them and change them, so that they’re relevant in the Philips context, because the Philips cultural context is very, very different. So it’s unique. It’s not Amazon’s thing, but it’s what the things I learned about those mechanisms for delivery for communication.
Also, for writing strat facts, strategic narratives, PR, FAQs. That’s actually been adopted. Because working backwards from the customer through a structured document of high information density with like an open commenting culture in the document. So if you’re not in the meeting, if you missed it for some reason, you go back and read it. It’s far more inclusive. So this is also really good for, inclusion and diversity and ensuring that people that are neurologically diverse or introverted become part of it.
Peter M.: You, mentioned the guilds and that made me realize that we hadn’t kind of level set just in terms of, like, what design means at Philips, like, where are you situated? Who is your boss? What are your areas of, what are your functional areas, right? If we think of design as an organizational function, it sounds like industrial design, software design, maybe design thinking, like give us some, clarity in terms of your organizational situation and kind of size and scale, just so we have a…
Peter S.: sure.
Peter M.: baseline to work.
Peter S.: When I assumed Sean Carney’s role, I had you know, over 600 and we went through a pretty substantial reorganization under Roy’s leadership and there, it was really important at that time that we go from a horizontal organization to a verticalized organization.
This has happened many times throughout our history. And the design leadership, regardless of whether you’re vertical or horizontalized, so, what’s really interesting is that unifying leader, regardless of whether they report to you or not, has always been present.
And I was part of a group, along with my boss, who is the head of innovation and strategy. So I’m one layer away from the CEO, right? I’m an L3, level three. and honestly, nobody, no design leader, should report to the CEO. It is way better being one layer away. It means that you have an escalation path. It means that you’re not pulled into a lot of discussions that are not relevant to ensuring you raise the bar.
The best place to be as a design leader in any organization is L3.
Peter M.: Just so we’re clear. L1 is the CEO. L2 is your boss and you are L3.
Peter S.: That’s correct. Right. Exactly. So I had all 600 in 12 different studios, 35 different nationalities all over the world, you know, it’s Blumenau, Bangalore, Shanghai, Haifa– experiencing a rather intense, obviously, tough place to be in that studio, so we are highly empathetic with what’s happening there. Then we have Eindhoven and Amsterdam, which is kind of treated like one studio, and Bothell and Cambridge, Massachusetts. So it’s a distributed team worldwide.
And so, for example, we have other mechanisms. When we do all hands, we have to do two, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We always have two, so that we are mindful of double time zones. And then we have you know, quarterly all hands and we share information and then there’s, like, newsletters and there’s all kinds of these mechanisms.
Shifting from Horizontal to Vertical
Peter S.: So we went from horizontal, right, and what happened is we got really, really big, and there was a lot of research that design was doing unilaterally that the business didn’t necessarily want done. And so by verticalizing… so design evolved a little bit as an agency during that period. And so by embedding design back into the business, it absolutely doubled down on trust, and that alignment, like now that we’re verticalized and I don’t have, you know, I have a third of the reports or, you know, a little less than a third of all the reports.
I have more influence now than I did before because of the trust that has resulted from that restructuring. And honestly, there is no one best structure. You actually need to move from one to the other based on what is happening on the ground and what the organization needs at that given time. I used to be quite opinionated about this, but then I learned that you actually want, you want both.
The Big Design Freak Out
Jesse: So let’s talk about the freak out. You brought it up.
Peter S.: Yeah.
Jesse: What’s going on out there, Peter?
Peter S.: So, I think that, first of all, at Philips, design is an equal stakeholder. We sit at the table and there is no design freak out at Philips. And for listeners, the design freak out, there was this Fast Company article that came out, and several others, that essentially said that design has lost influence and power and provided a bunch of examples.
And I think that those examples might’ve been true. You know, my thesis is that that article about the destruction of the creative class got it wrong. It isn’t the erosion of leaders. It’s that the existing leaders, in that cohort failed to recognize that the game had changed. And I can give you some examples.
You know, like actually what’s amazing is you have a new series of significant growth in amazing female leaders like Daniela Jorge, we talked about Kat Holmes. Amy Godee, you know, is an example at Publicis and Sapient, you know, she’s a designer that, has a huge organization, right. And these are the designers that are thriving, and they’re the ones that are actually jumping out of their swim lane.
And I think that there was a cohort of design leaders that got a little bit less humble about their position, and you could apply that they’ve lost a sense of their humility. You know, I think there are exceptions in the noose and the knives and the sort of Damien Hirst level of boutique influence that, but that stuff, you know, that doesn’t scale though.
But when we’re talking about mainstream business, I think what’s changed is that bias to action and ownership for execution with a willingness to jump out of your swim lane, and absolutely be addicted to the learning associated with every single detail of how the business operates.
There are great examples of, if you look at the fashion, Yves Saint Laurent and Anna Wintour and Coco Chanel and, Miuccia Prada, like all these people. Alexander McQueen. They’re in control for long periods of time. But now there’s a lot of turnover in fashion. You know, Virginie Viard just left Chanel. So if you look, the optics might suggest that there’s, you know, that’s happening in a lot of places.
But I think that what happened is that the job requirements for CDO or for a leader of design really changed, because, it’s, everything is focused on execution. And I’m a judge for the IF UX design awards. And so this weekend I spent like 22 hours judging 375 UX entries. It’s insane. And I will tell you, it’s fascinating because it’s a window into what’s happening in UX in the next two years. And I will tell you that the Chinese and Korean, like, the amount of innovation that is happening there is crazy.
There is a huge amount of entries that focus on the fact that, you know, ChatGPT blew design thinking and, you know, people are adding all these irrelevant AI things to the products. But I think that there’s a hunger and a competitiveness that is really starting to influence the work of others.
And I think that basically some of us got complacent and we need to double down on the unavoidable truth in this world, is that there is no substitute for putting in that intense hard work and really focusing on doing whatever you need to do to drive the business.
It’s interesting that you call out innovation in this because it seems to me that, for a lot of design leaders, innovation is the piece of the value proposition for design that gets lost with this focus toward execution.
And so I wonder about how can design leaders keep the spirit of innovation alive in an environment where there’s so much focus on delivery. There was a period for Philips when there was a vast amount of money and time invested in doing long range vision projects. And I think that I’ve arrived at a different time in our business need. And, like, there is an incredible amount of innovation happening, but it’s focused on where we can drive unique value for better care for more people and, not like, okay, let’s envision, you know, the future of kitchens and, you know, 50 years and, spend, you know, a lot of money on, you know, custom copper, you know.
Like those investigations, I think we’re part of that era and I’m not critical, in fact, you know, some of it is kind of lovingly, you know, produced work that gave people, you know, maybe a sense of their context and culture and how I should think about, you know, some esoteric thing that they’re working on, but, like, the world has changed.
It is so radically competitive. It’s still innovation. It’s just not open ended exploration, right? I think that you’re just naive if you’re going to assume that that’s what leadership is like in today’s context.
Every company, even look at Google, like Gen AI could potentially threaten the very existence of Google search as the dominant part of their revenue stream. I don’t know that to be true, but, that is certainly being discussed and so, like, constantly innovating means, like Philips has done for 130 years, that we’re gonna continue to evolve and find the place where we will deliver meaningful value to our… really to the customers that we care about. That’s where the heart, our heart is.
Design Evolving
Peter M.: You’re speaking the heart. I find myself wondering, as the game is changing, as you’ve explained it, right, a focus on execution, a focus on kind of nearer term relevance, and the need for designers to be more business conscious, you mentioned the complacency, right? Where it felt like these design leaders had kind of drifted away from a certain reality, a feet on the ground reality. I find myself wondering, what then is the heart of design?
Design starts bleeding in to these adjacent functions as it gets more business savvy. And I’m wondering where you see that center of design being, is it empathy? Is it craft? Is it creativity? It… like, how do you talk about it? ‘Cause design can be, I mean, you mentioned a design thinking practice, right? Design thinking is about letting everyone else embrace design. Design can have a squishiness. And so I’m wondering what you do to kind of reify it so that there’s at least some center that holds when you talk about design at Philips.
Peter S.: Well, let’s talk about what leadership is first. For me, leadership is creating clarity, delivering results, and then the third and most underappreciated part of this is, generating energy and enthusiasm. So like, what we do is to unlock the imagination and potential of everyone in the business.
And I don’t think that having those constraints, that we’re focused in a given area and making sure that we’re also driving the execution means that you’re not doing exploration. We have this amazing research group you know, that’s about Hermione, my peer, and who is the next great leader of research.
You know, Philips has a set of tools and business mechanisms to invest in new things. Basically it’s almost like Y Combinator, you know, like a startup farm, you know, to invest in those. And so there are a bunch of ways that you can do that, but they’re not unilateral decisions by somebody that wants to just try something out. There’s a structure and governance for evaluating those ideas, and ensuring that they either receive or, if they don’t hit their milestones, and they don’t get money moving forward.
And it’s no different at Amazon. I mean, you would say that is also an innovation company. They have a part PRFAQ process and they allow for multiple products to be launched at the same time. I mean, at one time there were probably five different products that were doing anomaly detection and AIML, and they just wait and see which ones win and they keep them. Super frugal investment. I think that that’s, like, a great way to think about how you invest overall in your portfolio.
Abby Godee, this incredible design leader at Sapient Publicis, and she’s also involved in, you know, organizational transformation, right? So, like it is design almost applied to HR, right?
And so I think that, that’s, what’s different today to be effective as a design leader, what makes it really hard, is you have to master a radical number of things if you’re going to manage at this scale. Because you have to have fluency, and it’s not a narrow area of UX or industrial design or experience or even co-creation, etc. But it’s also like how you look at HR and how you look at like, you know, business and organizational structure.
And it does mean that at this scale, that the personal commitment is pretty high, right? It’s not an easy job. You know there’s absolutely no substitute for doing the hard work. You never think small. Luck favors the prepared mind. You have to sell, sell, sell. Your ideas are your marketplace. You have to reframe failure. You have to break the rules. You have to shut your mouth and listen and learn and focus on others and not yourself. And doing all that simultaneously is really hard. And I’m still learning.
And I just fear, like I, let’s go back to the beginning of this conversation. Like, I’m always afraid that I’m not going to be good enough. This is so big historically. Like, I refuse to be the person that let design down, our hundred years of legacy.
Jesse: Peter, what do you think other design leaders should be paying closer attention to here as design enters this next phase?
Peter S.: I think that there’s one unavoidable truth. There’s no substitute for putting in the work. That means a bias to action and ownership for execution. Execute, execute, execute. There are tons of expensive vision projects that don’t belong in a modern company. And if I look to Asia, the pace of that execution is insane. It’s just moving faster, right? So, we cannot get complacent, right? and I think that next leaders have to become vastly more focused outside of their domain swim lanes, HR, PM, dev. I think that everyone has to become fluent in AI, because it’s just fundamentally changed how we do work.
AI
Peter S.: I mean, for us, there’s three big things with AI. It’s amazing, we haven’t talked about AI yet. Isn’t that great? Let’s celebrate.
The three things are the design tools have radically changed. You know, we’ve got AI and Morone, we’ve got our own internal enterprise version of, you know, C hat 4.0 and GPT.
And we have Amazon Bedrock, and we have multiple models and we can produce an amazing persona that’s better than any of my career in like 30 seconds. I can just type in a new name, electric cardiologist, and it pops out the entire persona with a picture and pain points and everything. It’s like, it’s insane how much faster it’s made certain kinds of work happen.
But it does not threaten our jobs at all. It does not. You just have to be able to use them or else you will get hurt. Spun out by others that do.
The second thing that’s changed is insights and prediction. It allows us to deliver insights and deliver products with those insights. It’s called clinical intelligence. It’s like the idea of using data to make predictions, and that becomes a game changer in healthcare.
The third thing that’s changed is that it’s radically personalized. First, at the cohort basis, you know, we would hope that we have data that’s based on female or male and, and that we leverage that personalized care to become even more detailed. If it gets all the way to your DNA, we’ll need to make sure that we’ll have pretty good security so that maintains your degree of privacy.
But in the beginning, it should at least be cohort based. And then mechanisms for ensuring safety such as bump stops and human in the loop to know that you have, you know I think I’ve already agreed to some summary, or I’ve read it, and, yes I agree with that AI prediction or action that’s being taken.
The second of course is that you have visibility that something is AI generated. And it could be through a blue ring, or it could be through an animated icon, so that you know whatever’s being served to you, it’s clear, it’s transparent, and that there’s also traceability for the people. But, okay, so there’s those tools. It’s personalization, and insights, and it’s radically different tooling for us.
But then I think that the role of design is also to focus on the beautiful essentials, simplicity and speed, bridging the gap, it’s still, you know, an everyday fight to ensure that we focus on doing less better.
What you remove is more important than what you put in. You should invest in building agility before you invest in new features. The unconventional wisdom is that if you address customers’ frustrations, rather than adding new features, often fixing and making better what you’re selling in the truck today, that’s far better then adding a bunch of new stuff.
It’s just optimizing workflows in healthcare. There’s a crisis for our clinicians that spend 40 percent of their time entering data. And they’re getting farther and farther away from what brought them to the field in the first place, which is caring for people, right? And so that burnout is leading to a threat to the quality of care, and it’s also to the cost of care. And, the thing we need to focus on, the main task for Philips, right, for this, it’s workflow, and simplifying their lives, minimizing the number of clicks so that they’re more efficient.
And when you apply AI, most of the… 95 percent of our value is just in treating the mundane, beautiful essentials. It’s not doing some extra high acuity AI task with a very expensive, complicated model. A lot of it is just, like, improving search. And so I think it’s really important to stay focused on the basics. It’s really easy to forget that. That’s the core of what design does.
Peter M.: You’ve been at this for over 30 years, as Jesse and I have. You talk about the amount of work and effort it takes, even for you now, today, to maintain a level of your performance that you would consider acceptable. And when I hear that, I get exhausted. And so I’m wondering, what is driving you? Like what, what’s motivating you? Why are you still willing to, I’m sure, put in the long hours and get on planes and you know, whatever it takes in order to do this, what’s driving you?
Peter S.: Let me ask you this. What motivates ambitious and creative people? Both Peter and Jesse. Tell me.
Jesse: Growth, purpose,
Peter S.: Okay.
Jesse: Making things real.
Peter S.: Awesome. I’ve been asking this question in interviews for 30 years. So I’m really interested in how people respond. Peter.
Peter M.: I mean, when Jesse said purpose, your own sense of purpose, whatever, what, you know, we each have a thing that drives us that gives us meaning. And so that’s what… usually that. And so I’m curious if, is that it for you? And if it is, what is, that purpose for you?
Peter S.: For me, I am on this earth to unlock the creative potential of other people. I figured out about 15, 16 years ago that that is the funnest thing for me. And when I’m done with Philips at some point in the future, I’m going to go teach part time. I love to teach. It’s really fun. And I mean that, that’s how I derive energy. That’s my purpose.
The second thing is, Jesse, what you said so beautifully is growth, mastery. Like I am addicted to learning. And this place is an amazing place to learn. So that makes it really fun. And the work-life balance is still a lot better. I do not wake up at three in the morning, grinding my teeth. And I also have people that are so empathetic, you know, my weakness is that sometimes I can overwhelm people with my passion, and so I sometimes need to meter it back a little bit.
And the second thing I have is that if I feel like I’m being undermined, I can become a little fragile, and then become less self aware. And so in cultures where I felt undermined, I’ve been less self aware and sometimes that’s run into problems. But, Philips is like, it’s really loving. And so it just makes it easy, like, because it’s fun. It’s just like relaxed.
So anyway, we get to purpose and mastery. And then the third is self-direction, right? Autonomy. This is now, I’m referring to, you know, Steve Pink, you know, RSA.org. The autonomy is the other highly motivated thing is… I am not micromanaged at all by my boss. My boss is like completely like, you got it. Go drive it, right? Here are the constraints. And that makes it really fun cause I have a leadership team that is like welcoming of these changes. And so, you know, all those things like combined together, like that’s what’s driving me.
Jesse: Peter, thanks so much for being with us.
Peter S.: It was just an honor.
Peter M.: This has been fantastic.
Peter S.: Thank you so much. It was really fun.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched the Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter.
Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.
52: Design at a Crossroads (ft. Audrey Crane)
Dec 01, 2024
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. Joining us today to talk about what’s next for design is veteran Silicon Valley design and product strategy consultant Audrey Crane, who will share her perspective on the changing mandates for design among her clients, the power that consultants wield that in house teams don’t, and why sometimes the most effective design leaders are those who talk the least about design.
Peter: So Audrey, excited to have you here to work through some of the topics that Jesse and I have been discussing for a few episodes now, on kind of where things are going, for design, design leadership.
But before we dive into that, I think it would be helpful for our podcast audience who might not have met you, read you, heard of you, how do you introduce yourself? What do you do? How should people think of you out there in the world?
Audrey: Yeah. Well, so Audrey Crane, I’m a, partner at DesignMap. So we’re a consultancy. Do I say we’re a design consultancy? I don’t know. I think that’s one of the things we’re going to be talking. Let’s say product strategy, with some design support, company. So we’re San Francisco based. We’ve been around for 18 years, and we do a lot of B2B, B2B2C, like, complex product strategy. But I’ve been around for a long time. I was working at Netscape in the mid-90’s. So I consider myself, I flatter myself, a graybeard of Silicon Valley.
Peter: Does that mean you’ve been doing this work for almost 30 years? Um,
Audrey: That can’t be right. But I was super lucky to be, you know, at Netscape with Marty Cagan. With, I worked for, for Marty. I worked for Hugh Dubberley. I was in the room when Marc Andreessen first started talking about the famous “good product manager, bad product manager” stuff. So it was the olden times, but those people are, in a lot of ways, I think more relevant.
And I was super lucky to get to do that.
Like most theater majors, you know, just like somehow landing in the middle of Silicon Valley during the dot com boom of the late nineties.
Jesse: Your company, is called DesignMap, but you hesitate to call your work design. And obviously there’s, there’s something going on in that. And I’m curious about just your own relationship to design yourself as a creative professional.
Audrey: I did study theater in college and I studied math as well. I studied a form of mathematics that’s like very theoretical. And so growing up, I think a lot of kids still are like, they’re good at math or they’re good at English. They’re good at one or the other.
But theater in particular, as a creative outlet is really, really bounded, right? You have like the script and what you say and what other people say. And then on the other hand, the kind of math that I was doing, which was really like, by my senior year of college, we’re just writing proofs. Like there’s no numbers left anymore. And there’s actually a lot of intuition and creativity that goes into that.
‘Cause like of all the things that we know to be true about whatever kind of math we’re doing, like, what’s the next thing that’s going to get me to where I want to go. Even to the point where I mean, this is like the nerdiest thing I could possibly say, but like reading proofs that gave me goosebumps because they were just like so elegant, you know, and, and so smartly put together.
And so when I graduated from college and I was like broke and happened to be able to, have done some tech work because my dad was an engineer, way in the olden days, I landed at Netscape. Solely because Hugh Dubberly saw my resume and was like, math and theater, like, that’s super weird. I got to meet this person.
And then I got to work for him. And through him, I found that this design thing, which for me, at least is like a perfect match of empathy and creativity, but also like problem solving within boundaries towards a particular goal. And so it, matched my brain pretty well, that for me is like the creativity of constraints is really, really fun. And design is a place where I think still, like, a lot of people don’t know that it exists, that you, don’t have to be just like a highly creative, quote, unquote, right brain person or the other.
Jesse: What’s your relationship to design these days in your practice?
Audrey: I think that you can apply a design process or design thinking, if you must, to pretty much anything. So a lot of times now the design work that I’m doing is like, this client really needs this thing and understanding what the thing is that they really need like that by itself is like a listening and learning process.
Sort of like when somebody goes to the doctor and says, I need this medicine. There’s a lot of questions to understand, like, what’s really going on and is this medicine really going to help you? Or is it something else? That and figuring out, like, what do we do that might help solve that problem, and can we do it within this timeframe and this budget, is actually like a pretty fun, creative process for me. It maybe sounds horrible and dry, but I really love it. And if we can’t help them, figuring out who can help them, and brokering that introduction.
But at the end of the day, it’s still a problem. And I want to understand the problem and think through lots of different ways to solve it and figure out a path there. So that’s not to say that I don’t work on projects specifically. And sometimes I do, and that’s really fun. But a lot of times it’s more at that kind of second order, third order of design, if you like, from the, product.
Now, is that strategy? I don’t know. Yeah.
Peter: Well, and, reflecting on something you said at the outset, where you weren’t sure what to call DesignMap, which has the word design in its name, but you’re like, are we a design consultancy anymore? Which, you know, Jesse and I started Adaptive Path in 2001, and we called ourselves a user experience agency, and we didn’t use the word design in how we defined our work for years, because of associations with that word that we didn’t feel were appropriate for us.
So let’s, get to that, you know, your company is called DesignMap, but you’re not sure if you’re a design consultancy. What’s up with that?
Audrey: OK. We are a design consultancy. So I say that a little bit tongue in cheek, but if we think about what the market wants, does the market want design? You know, I’m not sure that if, I just approached somebody and I said, Hey, we offer design services, that anybody in the market at the moment is going to be like, “Oh, great, I need design services. That’s what I need. I need design services.” Right?
They might need help with stakeholder alignment. They might need help kind of articulating a vision. They might need help solving you know, a problem where the usage of a product has plateaued and they need it to improve. All of these are things that can be solved with design.
But I posted about this recently, and I think that what I’m seeing is that people are using the word design less, and it’s not just quote unquote, “speaking the language of the business,” which I think we’ve been talking about as a design profession for a while now, right?
It’s not just being articulate in you know, whatever, TAM, what’s the total addressable market, but actually just only using those words and design just happens to be the tool that we’re using to solve whatever problem or opportunity we’re talking about.
Peter: When you mentioned people are not using the word design anymore, who people are not using the word design anymore? Is it that prospective clients aren’t using the word design anymore? Is it the designers are wary of that word?
Audrey: Who’s the they? Yeah. I mean, I think famously Katrina Alcorn, like, really put her finger on it when she left IBM and said whatever my next job is, is going to have the word product in the title. I remember a part of what she said was, I feel like I’m doing so much of what is maybe traditionally considered product anyway, like I might as well take the title and have a bit more control and it’s almost like the word product is hard and the word design is soft, somehow.
So I think that was kind of the first famous moment. But then I have a lot of, friends who are VPs of design and at DesignMap, we have a voice of the customer program where we pay a recruiter to recruit VPs of design. And we sit and we talk with them for an hour. We do this as like a regular practice, like taking our vitamins, as they say, right?
And when I hear my friends talk about it, see decks from VPs of design, it’s so striking. And they don’t even point it out to me, but the word isn’t even there. Like, I, just saw a VP of design, it was her budget for next year and her proposed budget had foundations, and investing in foundational work, and acceleration and all these other things.
And I commented to her, you know, you’re a, she is a trained, like, dyed-in-the-wool career designer, like, and the word design doesn’t show up here. And she said, “Oh God, no, you know, absolutely not.” No, what this actually is, is it’s a design debt. What this thing over here is, is design systems and like heuristic review and improvements.
So she like almost code switched with me. But when I’m talking about investing money in my team and in external support, that’s not the word that I’m using. It’s super interesting. And there’s, something about all of these things, right? Like how many years have you heard designers complain that they are having to do product managers’ jobs?
Like not every designer and not every product manager, but I mean, I’m sure that I’ve heard designers talking about that for 15 years, right? And then, on top of that, this, not just being able to speak business-ese, but that’s all you’re speaking in, is really interesting to me.
Peter: So yesterday I was onsite at a company for their internal design celebration that very much used the word design. Public company, 84,000 employees, lot of hardware, manufacturing.
So when they talk design, they actually were talking a lot about industrial design. They had their Chief Product Officer show up at this event and talk about how he wants this business to be design-led.
And I’m saying this not to disagree. I’m saying this to suggest, I think, the conversation is really scattered and lumpy. And in some contexts, design has become a dirty word or it has become minimized to mean production. And so like the leader that you were talking about, right, if they want to talk about stuff that isn’t pumping out assets for engineers to code, they have to use new language to get at what we used to call design or, you know, user experience practices.
But then there’s still other companies that are celebrating the opportunity of design and want to be design-led and talk about Apple as a standard bearer. And I guess I’m trying to make sense of, this polyphony around the concept of design.
This company that is celebrating design, when this Chief Product Officer talks about design, he had a fairly, I would say, narrow view of what it is. And he talked a lot about the emotional connection and the emotional engagement that design drives.
So, while you’re talking about how design can be a tool to help I don’t know, roadmaps and all this kind of strategic thinking and all, this leader is still seeing design as how do we create something that people love, in this kind of visceral, emotional way that feels very product-y, feels very, you know, Apple…
Audrey: Like fonts and colors…
Peter: Yes. As opposed to, like, what you were talking about, which is design as a means to solve all kinds of problems.
Audrey: Articulate a strategic vision.
Peter: Well, yeah, the opportunity of design thinking was this recognition that design is a set of practices that can be applied to literally any problem.
Audrey: Yeah. Well, were you surprised that the design celebration happened, that it was so design forward that the product, head of product talked about it that way? . .
Peter: I was a little surprised. I mean, many companies still host internal design and user experience summits, right? And so, you know, I expect that community to come together. I was a little surprised that this Chief Product Officer took, I think, at least an hour out of their day to communicate to this group about the importance that he sees this group of people having for the future of the business and his commitment to it.
It was also interesting, you know, hearing how he talked about design in a way that was very, again, product-oriented and, frankly, kind of hardware oriented. Whereas this was a group of people who were mostly working on software. But what I reflected to the group when I spoke at this event, you know, listen to how your leadership is talking about design, right, and, what kind of purchase does that give you? How can you start with where they are in terms of that understanding of design and then, and then move them along?
So there’s an opportunity there.
Audrey: Yeah. It’s interesting that they use the phrase design-led and also seem to talk about it just in, like, the product emotional appeal way. It’s very interesting. I’m super interested in the overlap of the Venn diagram between like designers and product managers or designers and engineers, or just, you know, designers and the rest of the world.
And you know, there’s so much designers talking to designers about design. I wish we talked more outside of that. It’s interesting though. I, I’m friends with Marty Cagan and I was at his book launch a couple of months ago for his latest book.
And, I think like the shorthand of it is that I actually think it might only be designers that are not wanting to use the design word. Right? Because I can’t think of any product leaders who have done that, or even really that know what’s going on.
And so when I chatted with Marty, and then I was lucky enough to have drinks with Dan Olsen as well. He runs like a big product leadership get together at Intuit on the peninsula…. I can’t remember where, but there was like no awareness about the big design freak out at all.
And so I’m like, oh my gosh, like whole design teams are being let go, like amazing design leaders are looking for their next job for actually years. Like, designers are changing their titles from design leader to product leader. Like it’s a whole big thing. They weren’t aware of that. And I think that’s interesting, especially because those two folks, Dan and Marty, are like talking to everybody all the time. Right.
So that was interesting. And also one of the things that Marty said, you can see the video of this in the talk that he gave at his book launch ,was I was just chatting with a CEO and he said to me there’s 200 product managers in this organization, and if I let them go tomorrow, I’m not sure that anything would be any different. I can’t tell you what it would be.
And Marty was using that as like a, Hey, you guys, you got to pay attention and start doing great product management. To me, that sounds like what’s happened to some friends, frankly, where like the whole entire design team did get chopped off in places because, I don’t know, Elon Musk, like, I don’t know why there’s just this like, oh, we can let everybody go and we can still operate in the black, and so why not?
Two points, I guess, right? One is maybe, like, trying not to use the D-word is maybe something that’s only happening in the design community and that other people aren’t aware of that or concerned about it. But that also maybe this is impacting other roles that have, you know, arguably potentially similarly squishy impacts on outcomes for businesses. I’m sure a product manager wouldn’t like to hear me say that, but…
Well,
Jesse: it’s interesting to think about it from the product management point of view, because it’s true that if you look at the discourse, such as it is, on LinkedIn, if you look at what design leaders are talking about, they are constantly talking about improving the relationship with product and making the relationship with product successful.
If you look at what product leaders are talking about, they are almost never even referencing a relationship to design, never mind investing in strategies for improving that relationship. And so I find myself wondering about the cultures that both sides have now inherited, you know, in the 30 years since Netscape, that kind of bake in a bunch of assumptions and a bunch of expectations of the other side that are creating these blind spots because, yeah, seems impossible for all of this to be going down on the design side and the leadership in the product community, not even recognizing that it’s going on there.
Audrey: Having no idea.
Jesse: Yeah. So I wonder about, like, what’s it going to take to build some bridges between these communities so that we can at least have that sense of mutual visibility.
Audrey: Gosh, I mean, I think that’s an amazing question, Jesse. I, you know, I’m in the Leading Design Slack channel and I’m in the Mind the Product Slack channel, and Mind the Product has, like, product and design, like, within there and nobody ever posts there. And similarly, there’s a similar channel in Leading Design, nobody ever posts there.
And, you know, I mean, I think it’s great, Christian Crumlish wrote his book, Product Management for Designers. My book, Design for CEOs, is about, like, trying to talk to other people about the tangible value of design and just the basic language. I mean, hopefully neither of you have ever read that book, because it’s so 101-y, but what we were finding is that CEOs were asking us why wireframes didn’t have color in them, or saying, like, when are we going to get the design maps? Like, we just didn’t even have the most basic shared understanding of language and process.
But also, every time I go to a design conference, if there’s a non-designer speaking, like, that’s one of the most interesting talks, right? So, I don’t know why we don’t reach out more.
But also, just talking about like product managers and designers working together, like, I sort of looked for a while for like, here’s a framework that we can say, this is what we expect of product managers and this is what we expect of designers. Like surely there’s a framework, right? And so I reached out to, I don’t know, 40 designers and I said, tell me the best thing that you ever got from a product manager and why you liked it. And I’m a pattern finder. I love models and concept maps. It’s like totally my jam for making sense of the world.
And what came back was total chaos, just all over the place. Absolutely, I couldn’t find a pattern in it anywhere. And, I mean, the reflection that I had is that these are two individuals who have their own experience, their own, things they love, things they hate, strengths, weaknesses, training, expectations, and that kind of like three-in-a-box idea, or like dedicating teams that get to work together long term so that they can storm and norm is maybe the only way to do that because, there’s too many different things that need to be done at any moment in time, the product discovery and design and development release process and people are just too unique, and maybe we can’t do that.
But, I agree with you, it seems very odd to me that there’s not more conversation across disciplines and, business, strategy, product, and we’re so sophisticated, I think design, I mean, you guys are giving PhD level talks at conferences, like we’re, we, I feel like we’re pretty good at it, you know, but what we’re not good at is, like, working across teams. And I really don’t know how to make that work better.
Peter: I find myself wondering… The anthropologist comes out in me, and how much of this is cultural and, and the cultures of design and design practice and design as a function.
And I’m having trouble saying the culture of product management because I, think product management isn’t nearly as coherent a culture and a function as design, right? So many different paths into product management, so many different flavors of product management, depending on what kind of organization you’re in, right? To be a consumer product manager at a social media company is very different than to be a B2B product manager at an enterprise SaaS firm, or to be a product manager at a bank or whatever, like, I think there’s a less shared culture.
But there’s something in terms of where folks are coming from, and then when they’re brought together, no work is being done to bridge those gaps. It’s just like, you got to work together and please start producing value tomorrow.
Audrey: Right. And you got six weeks and then you’ll be on something else.
Peter: Right, And you mentioned storming and norming… There’s a whole category of assumptions I had…. So Jesse and I, you know, we worked at Adaptive Path. I left Adaptive Path at the end of 2011. And as I entered the world of in-house product building, this was the start of things like Spotify squad models and stuff that was written about in 2012, Amazon two-pizza teams was also at least kind of popularized in 2012.
And I was under the assumption that like, Oh, when you go in house, you get this stable team of folks who are working on a problem together for, weeks, if not months, on end.
And they’re no longer working on projects. That’s the bad old way. That’s an internal services model. They’re working on a program and a product, and they’re just always endeavoring to make it better. This is over 10 years ago. This was what I had been hearing as the prevailing model of…
Jesse: right,
Peter: balanced teams, empowered teams, agile teams. And then you go in house and you’re like, no one is operating anything nearly like that.
Audrey: I mean, a few companies, but yeah.
Peter: So few.
Audrey: Yeah. Right. You got six weeks to do this and then you’ll be in the next thing. And, oh, by the way, you have 20 percent of your time to do it. And for whatever it’s worth, I think the kind of… “strategic sacrifice” is a phrase I learned from one of these VPs of design, I’m like, I’m just going to call bullshit.
Like there’s no way that with 1/16th of their time, that this designer is doing anything except for going crazy and maybe getting complained about, right? So like, I’m just not going to resource it. And we all know that like an engineer or product manager or somebody somewhere was designing it anyway. But we’re pretending like this poor schlub is spending 1/16th of their time? Like, no.
And I, agree with you. I mean, I’ve been internal too, and with our clients as well, we ask them these questions, but it’s just like a resourcing shell game. I mean, I agree with you about the differences between the design and the product culture, but we’re kind of all doing the same thing, right? We’re, like, trying to help somebody somewhere do something with this company, product, or service.
And we’re telling and testing stories about how we’re going to do that. Our tool for storytelling is Figma, their tool for storytelling is Excel, but otherwise, you know, I just don’t think it’s that different.
A big question is like, how are people incented in the organization, right?
Jesse: Yeah. When Peter was talking about the cultural diffusion in product management, I think it largely has to do with the very diverse range of incentives that exist in product management, depending on the category, depending on the product space, depending on the problem space.
Whereas design seems to have some kind of sense of its own center in a way. It has a sense of purpose in the world beyond what somebody told us it was, you know?
Audrey: I mean, it would be super interesting to try to map out the product management culture. I think it’s, it’s easy to say from the outside, like, Oh, there’s no real culture. It’s very diverse.
Jesse: Yeah, of course.
Audrey: But when I hear you say, Jesse, like we have a center, I don’t know if this is what you’re thinking of, but certainly one that I could think folks might go to is like, we are the advocates for the user, right?
That’s our role. I’ve heard product managers say, I do not ever want to hear a designer say that ever again. We are all advocates for the user. Like I’m not anti-user. That’s what we’re all trying to do. You guys don’t own that.
Peter: But then I hear one of my client’s Chief Product Officer, where I was helping him hire a VP of Design, saw Design’s primary role as the voice of the customer within the product development process, right? And so that’s again, like. there’s, not an agreement or alignment more within product.
All designers see their responsibility as being a voice of the customer and a representative of the user in the process.
Within product. Some do, some don’t.
Audrey: It might be to meet a deadline.
Peter: Some think it’s a good thing to delegate it, right? Like it’s not like they don’t think the customer matters, but they’re like, well, the product person’s got so many things to deal with, thus, the designer is the one who’s best responsible for that right? I don’t think it’s out of neglect or disinterest. It’s, how do we get all these people to get things done without overwhelming them?
Audrey: Yeah. I think that that product manager was reacting to the idea that, like, there’s some high ground that the designer could stand on, or they had a veto because they were the advocate for the user versus the product. I think it’d be, like, super fun to have a conference where engineers and product managers and designers came and all the talks were my favorite, or my worst, experience with other disciplines. And that would be really interesting. And at least we’d be like, listening more, you know, outside of our little talking bubble.
Jesse: You know, in your client work, you have the opportunity to directly observe both design leaders and product leaders as they do what they do in organizations. And I wonder what you’ve seen has helped design leaders have that broader influence and drive that broader vision of what design has to offer. What’s helping design leaders be successful as cross-functional partners?
Audrey: I think a lot of “yes, and”-ing, Ooh, I, you know, kind of being opportunistic about ways that they can help. And I don’t want to say being nice to work with, but I honestly have, heard and seen designers say, I used to be an asshole, and now I just try to be nice to work with, that’s what I tried to do. And then if there’s an opportunity where I can help, then I do.
And one person in particular was talking about like, we used to just like really focus on the products and just like, we were just product design, but I started to see opportunities where people are having trouble making decisions or getting alignment or just making time for whatever. And so I started to offer to help. And this is a VP of design saying, like, can I facilitate a workshop for you? Like, I would be happy to help.
And these conversations, they were, I think, again, a bit opportunistic about, like, these like more senior strategic level conversations, only casting themselves in the role of facilitator, but being in the room, being perceived as helpful, perceived as being able to support progress.
And at the same time, like, that person sort of grew that into almost like a practice inside of their organization, where folks would come to him and say, Hey, we’re having trouble with this, can you, like, lend me somebody to help with this conversation?
And so he’s doing a bit less product design, and at least, has a bit more visibility into more strategic conversations.
So there’s two parts to that. One is like the gatekeeping, fighting, you know, for the seat at the table. That language and that stance is gone. They’re like nice to work with.
And then just looking for opportunities to help in a way that gives them more influence and visibility in the organization. Which also I wrote about it on LinkedIn and, a couple of people were like, Oh, so acting like grownups is what you’re saying.
Peter: I was about to say like, how, who the fuck were we, that we could show up as if our shit didn’t stink and expect people to just like engage with us? Like, if that’s how people are showing up, then yes, no kidding design is going to be excluded.
Audrey: But didn’t you work in organizations or haven’t you seen organizations… like I certainly did, and then what happens is like the product manager tries to go off piece, and like hire their own designer because it’s so hard to get a resource, and you have to go through this central blah, blah, blah, and they get in trouble for that too, and it’s just, it’s really like controlling and there’s the whole bottleneck thing and like, but we did, we did act like that. Some of us. Sometimes, probably not me or you guys, but you know.
Jesse: Well, no, I mean, I think that it’s a cultural pitfall, really, of the entire field. I think that, you know, if you come up as a practitioner, you have to invest a bit of your ego in your work. You have to be willing to stand behind it and defend it and argue in favor of a point of view just to be successful at the design part.
Then you get into design leadership and that same stance kind of gets carried forward. Only now it’s not about the craft anymore. It’s about strategic direction, and things like that, where the weight that you carry in the room is a little bit different, right? Once you’ve kind of reached that leadership level, and the ego that served you in shoring you up to defend your creative ideas is now a disservice because it, it’s a wall between you and your partners.
Audrey: What I love about working with designers who have been to design school, honestly, is that they spend four years getting criticized. And so they have like, a tenuous relationship with their work, where it’s not that they don’t care, and it’s not that they don’t feel good about it, but also there’s like a separation, and I flatter myself that being a theater major, I also got criticized for four years, but I hadn’t thought of it the way that you’re talking about it Jesse, and I think it’s interesting and there’s got to be some merit in that.
You’re putting yourself out there in a way that nobody else in the room would be willing to do, right? How many times are people like, I don’t want to draw on the whiteboard, much less all this, right? And it’s just, it’s very different from like what happens in a code review, for example.
I also think, like, the profession is just so new that we had to spend some years being like, no, no, no, we’re here. We’re here and we do stuff and the stuff that we do is important and helpful. We want to do it. Like it’s important. What I do is important and I can help the company. And I’m going to keep saying that over and over and over and over and over again. And it just got kind of like rigid, like fighting for his seat at the table.
And now maybe we’re here. And if we want to stay here, then we got to act like grownups.
I mean, I remember the AIGA was, like, involved and wanting to talk about like, what are all the specific titles and what’s the difference between user interface and user experience and interaction design and wait, interface design, wait, and I just went in a whole circle.
I was at a conference once, this is probably in the early 2000s, where there were like three talks and all of them, it was a design conference, all the talks had like a Nelson clock, like, you know, that iconic Nelson clock with a big circle in the middle and then the balls on the outside. And each talk was like, My role, insert role here, information architecture is the center of the design universe. And then the next one was like, user experience is the center of the design universe.
So I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favors with I mean, especially like UX, UI, like my gosh, like I can’t tell you how many times people say, oh, we need a UX/UI designer. And I’m like, hmm. So you would think that I would know what you’re talking about, but I actually have no idea what you’re talking about when you say you need a UX/UI designer.
So some clarity sounds good. And you’re right, like who would want to say like, no, I just do like digital product design. I don’t do strategy. That’s not me. That’s not what I do. Like all consultancies that I know of, that are more than a person or two, have been in decline for the last two years.
So there are fewer people coming and asking these questions. So if I tick off, like, the last five clients that came to us, who are not heads of design, one person has a giant B2B product that has been around for 10 years and the usage has plateaued and they wanted to get better. So I’m very glad that they’re coming to a design consultancy for that.
One, similarly, kind of, like, how to go with an IT product that, basically, like, customers are hating. And so we’re picking some more key workflows and obviously, like, looking at customer support calls and things like that. Another one is a head of product where they have a homepage and then this wild hare, that’s like a favorite idea of the C-suite, is competing basically with the homepage, and he’s like, I don’t know how to make sense of these, and it is a pretty strategic conversation, right? It’s not just like, what do they look like? But who are they for? And why would they use them? And I’m kind of stuck with this pet project and I need to make sense of it so that it doesn’t suck, because I have to.
I don’t know if you can draw any conclusions from what I just rattled off there.
One is a regional bank who’s moving off of the white label stuff that they use. So, from their point of view, they have a product team. Like they have a CIO, not a CTO. They have product managers who are really product owners that work for the CIO. They have two designers that work, actually, for the marketing team. And they’re kind of ready to move into, like, rolling their own products.
But even though, obviously, they have digital services, it’s like a digital transformation problem, like the whole organization needs to change. So they came to us to like design the product, but what we’re talking to them about is like, you’re not going to, this isn’t going to work, and we’re not just going to give you a, like, a prototype that you’re not going to be able to build.
So it’s kind of all over the place. But a lot of what we’re doing, actually, I can draw one conclusion is we’re doing more and more, like, vision work, where either there’s one guy, let’s say he’s a founder and he used to be able to get all of his employees in a room and get them excited.
Now he can’t do that anymore. And he has a clear vision of where he wants to go, but he can’t articulate it and get people excited about it. Or there were a bunch of acquisitions and now we’ve got to figure out like how the whole is going to be greater than the sum of its parts. And so there’s, like, a somewhere that we need to be in a year or two or three, and we want to get clear on where we want to be, and we need to communicate where we want to be.
So you could call that a visiontype if you want, like some of it is so near term that it’s a prototype and it’s, I flatter myself maybe, that it’s kind of what you would get from a management consultant that you trusted, where it’s like, we talked to customers, we talked to stakeholders, we looked at the competitive landscape, we’ve got these eight bullet points. And then like everybody nods because they’re just bullet points, right?
But then we actually do a prototype that illustrates where those show up and that difference between, like, quote unquote “strategy,” which I think would just leave off at the bullet points, and like design, where we can make it tangible and you can click through like how that key insight shows up in the product and shows up for the customers. You can touch it and feel it and get excited about it. You could show it to your CEO or your board or your customers.
Like that is something that we’re getting more traction around and people are more interested in. And also is something that I think design is uniquely qualified to do, because that tangible bit is really important.
Jesse: It’s interesting that you bring up this tension, because it really does kind of circle back to what I think of as the original promise of user experience design, when that term came to the fore, which was the idea that there was an opportunity in the synergy between the conceptualizing, the ideation and the execution.
And if you had that unified as a single function, that there was value to be gained there, that there were better outcomes at the end of it. If the people who did that early conceptualizing were the same ones who ultimately specified what shipped. I can see that in the context that you’re talking about still absolutely being a viable value proposition for a lot of in-house teams that hasn’t really been proven out.
And in fact, their structures have evolved to a place where there isn’t really space for the people who are responsible for shipping your pixels to participate in ideation. We don’t have the processes for it. We don’t, we literally haven’t hired the right people for it. And so I’m wondering about what you see as the future prospect of that value proposition.
Audrey: Yeah, that’s a drag. I, you know, for sure have been in-house and it’s, awful, right, when you’re in house, you probably even have ideas, right, that’s the kind of work that you want to do.
But then honestly, the mere fact that dollars are being spent outside is what makes it possible because it seems like we can say that this is a priority until the cows come home, but as soon as we see a highly paid consultants invoice, or even a moderately paid or a lowly paid consultants invoice, like somehow those dollars feel different. It gets prioritized. You get time with the stakeholders that you need to meet with. It gets time boxed, right? It doesn’t get, like, drug out because, oh, we have these internal resources on it, but now there’s this feature and this customer is demanding it and they have to go over there and it just like fizzles out.
It’s a bummer and I, I’m quite sensitive to it, because I have been internal, and my take is, like, strategy without implementation is just bullshit and nobody wants to be in the bullshit business, right? But I have been internal and gotten a strategy with no thought, not a second thought to whether we could actually implement that.
Jesse: Mm-Hmm.
Audrey: And then they got to go and they didn’t have to live with it. And it’s not a good position to be in. You know, there’s at least two things that can make that different. One is, is working with a consultant who can point you to people who have received their deliverables. And because , we can all say, Oh yeah, no, the internal team will be highly involved and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But until you can hear the impact on the internal team, like you don’t really know. So that’s one part is there can be like really great co-creation, skills exchange, and also the work that the external consultant does is worth so much more to the organization if somebody internal was there and understands why the decisions were made and, you know, can really steward the work. So there’s a lot more value there.
And then I think the other bit is, I do see VPs of design, like the guy I was talking about before, that’s kind of started up like a little, like innovation facilitation service internally. Like, I’m not saying, like, spin up a greenhouse or anything, like, incubator. I’m not saying that at all, but I’m saying, like, provide an internal service, which is an innovation service. And there’s all kinds of complicated questions about how that gets budgeted and how that budget is managed. But, you know, I definitely have seen teams do that sometimes, like, even with their own brand and stuff, and they market themselves internally to the organization. And it’s sort of an agency model, but they’re in there. It’s a lot more porous because designers can come into those teams or go out of those teams and they’re still there when you’re trying to implement.
They haven’t taken off to the next client or whatever.
Jesse: Right.
Audrey: Yeah Well, I see you just like picked up what I put down and ran all the way to the end with it, ’cause sometimes we’re the ones receiving what the management’s consultant left the client with, right? Like the management consultant is like, here you go. You will be making 250 million by this time next year. Bye.
And then they’re like, Oh shit. Like, I don’t know what to do with this. And so we come and we help with that. And it’s not the most pleasant experience ever.
And then I go back and I talk to these management consultants and I say, Hey, do you want to see what we did with what you left here and like, and how it went, you know? ‘Cause I always want to know, like, I always want to know the impact of the work that we do. And they usually say yes. And we have those conversations and it baffles me that they don’t do that stuff, but surely some of them must, I just haven’t seen it. What I’ve seen mostly are like spreadsheets and feature lists and deadlines.
And then, you know, they’re like, here’s your certainty. Like you’ve paid them for certainty and they’ve given you certainty. If you release this list of features by this date, the TAM is this. And if you get X percent of the TAM, here are the dollars.
So I don’t see management consultants do that. I don’t understand why. It definitely is a lot more compelling to click through an interface than to look at a spreadsheet. I don’t know. I guess if you’re the board, maybe that’s not true. But then also management consultants don’t have a very good reputation. But, you know, McKinsey has a design arm, right? Maybe they do that stuff. I don’t know. I don’t think that they have a very good reputation amongst anybody below the C suite.
The whole point of Marty’s last book, right? It was like that PDE were coming to him and saying, we want to work like these empowered teams, but we can’t because we just are in an environment in which it’s not possible. And so how can we change that environment?
And that’s why he wrote the book. You know, he didn’t get done with Empowered and say, I know what my next book will be, like, he got done with Empowered and then he listens. I think he spends like four hours a day answering emails and on the phone with people. So he’s really got an ear to the ground.
So I say that, and then I’ll go back to describing that, like we can’t do that with internal teams because they’ll get sucked away, you know.
And some organizations that do this successfully, they manage their budget that way. And they say, okay, we’re gonna spend this money, meaning these people’s resources, it’s allocated for this quarter to that. And it’s not going to this over here. Like we’ve made that the stuff that we’re not going to do. And that’s hard to do if you’re swallowing an elephant, especially, right, if it’s like, what’s our three year vision. You know, we don’t need that long term.
So I think of like a snake that’s swallowed an elephant. So we’ve got this big hump. And are we going to carve that out of our features and releases, or are we going to get somebody else to swallow the elephant that we can just let go. But I think there’s a huge amount of value in swallowing it internally.
That metaphor went further than… swallowing the elephant with an internal team, because they get to do that stuff. It’s fun. It keeps them engaged. They’re invested in the long term health of the business. You know, again, it’s vitally critical that the external team is working closely with the internal team so that you don’t get this, like, you guys are crazy. We can’t do this. We’re not doing this. There’s a hundred things that you haven’t thought through, and how you know that you’ve brought in a consultant that’s not going to do that stuff is an interesting question for another podcast, I guess.
Jesse: Audrey what is one question that is foremost on your mind as we enter this next phase?
Audrey: I’m really curious to see how and where the decline in investment in design, that I think is happening, shows up. Like, maybe the recent Sonos release was the canary in the coal mine. I don’t know if you guys read about that. Yeah. But we’ve been saying, and I said it in the book, right, design is there to have a positive impact on the business. And if we lay off a bunch of designers and design teams, then the inverse should be true, right? You don’t have designers. And so there’s going to be a negative impact on the business, but how and where that first starts to show up and we notice and can… not point to it, but reference it as like, Oh, this is where we had the most immediate impact or the lack of design had the most immediate impact, is something I’m really thinking about, or cover your ears, it doesn’t happen.
Jesse: Mm hmm.
Audrey: In that, like, Oh, we, let all these designers go and like, nothing happened. It was fine.
Jesse: Well, I guess we’ll all find out together. Audrey, thank you so much for being with us.
Audrey: It was absolutely my pleasure. I’m so excited to get to do this with you guys. Thank you for having me.
Jesse: Audrey, if people want to connect with you and your work, how can they do that?
Audrey: They can go to designmap.com or they can email me, Audrey at designmap. com. Connect on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to chat. I’m really interested in cross functional conversations, especially about all of this stuff. So please reach out.
Jesse: Awesome. Thank you so much.
Peter: Yes. Thank you.
Audrey: My pleasure.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.
51: Design-led Innovation in Emerging Markets (ft. Gaurav Mathur)
Nov 20, 2024
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: Welcome to the Next Phase. On today’s show, we’re joined by Gaurav Mathur, VP of Design for Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart. He’ll share with us his perspective on the big issues facing design leaders in India today, including hiring and training for junior designers, as well as design leaders making the case for the business impact of design, and the opportunities for design-led startups in the Indian market.
Peter: Thank you so much for joining us today.
Gaurav: Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Jesse, for having me here. I’ve been a follower since Adaptive Path, and it’s wonderful to be speaking with both of you.
Peter: Oh, awesome.
Jesse: Thank you so much.
Peter: It would be good to get a sense of who you are and what you do. So, how do you introduce yourself and how do you talk about your career?
Gaurav: Sure. So currently, I’m the VP of Design at Flipkart. So Flipkart is a e-commerce company in India. Before Flipkart, I headed design for Myntra. Myntra is also an e-commerce company, but focuses on fashion and lifestyle. And it also happens to be a Flipkart Group company. So I have been in the e-commerce domain for probably, like, nine years or so now, and before that I worked with the SaaS division of Citrix.
The SaaS division used to make products like GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, et cetera. I also had a brief entrepreneurial journey where I was the co-founder of a design company and we were providing design services, to get our bread and butter essentially, but also building some educational products on the site.
I studied design and architecture a long time ago. So I have been a designer at heart.
Peter: Excellent. Let’s focus on your more recent experience, both Myntra and Flipkart. One of the reasons we were interested in speaking with you is, you know, our viewpoint is very North American. So, I sometimes work with companies that have design teams in India, cause they’ve got some development teams in India, but they’re usually still like doing design for a North American or European audience.
And I know with Myntra and Flipkart, you’re really focused on working within the Indian market. So , tell us a little bit more about these businesses and what your role is, specifically let’s say with Flipkart, leading design there.
Gaurav: Sure. So Flipkart is a horizontal e-commerce platform, and it’s a marketplace that allows sellers to come on board and sell all kinds of products. We categorize these products under categories like fashion, beauty, electronics, mobiles, large air conditioners, refrigerators, et cetera. And Flipkart also manages the supply chain, warehouses, logistics, and the last mile delivery of products so that we can deliver a better customer experience overall.
So the design team at Flipkart has the product designers, or UX designers essentially, that work across all kinds of products. We also have a visual design team that works on visual merchandising for various category stores. This team also manages the design of sale events. We have a UX research team, and we’ve recently integrated the market research function, so that we are able to create a unified research and insights op for the company.
Peter: And that’s within your team?
Gaurav: Yeah, that’s all within the design team. We call it the One Design Team at Flipkart. Besides this, we also have a small content team, because Flipkart is available in 11 other languages, 11 Indian languages besides English. So there’s a bunch of content work that we do, and I feel that my primary role is essentially to act as an orchestrator for this multidisciplinary org.
And I also engage with product and business leaders in the company to achieve org goals.
Peter: How many people are in your org?
Gaurav: We are about 100… 110 people across UX, visual design, research and content.
Peter: So you have a little over a hundred folks in your org. It sounds like you’re designing for all the audiences in this marketplace, the merchant side, the seller side, internal.
You mentioned this one design team. Has that always been the case or, has it kind of evolved to this single unified design organization over time?
Gaurav: Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think it has evolved over time. So when I joined, for example, the team that works on the seller platforms was not part of this team, and we eventually integrated it. And that’s been a process, I think, it’s been a journey of integrating different parts into a single One design org.
So we think of users in three broad buckets. The first is shoppers that come on Flipkart to buy products. And the experience that we give to our shoppers is primarily on mobile devices because that’s where most Indians shop. They shop on mobile devices, not so much on the desktop website. So that’s a large, large base that we cater to.
The second set of products that we build are for sellers. And this is essentially our seller platform where sellers come and manage their listings, their catalog. They’re able to place ads, configure offers, et cetera.
The third set of users are essentially the partners that work in warehouses, in the logistic space, and the delivery partners that manage the last mile delivery. So we create a lot of products that get used in the warehouses also apps for the delivery agents. So these are products that get used across the supply chain.
And in terms of the teams we have a part of the product design team that focuses on the B2C experience. So it builds all the features and products in our mobile apps and on the mobile website as well as on the desktop website. And then we have a team that works on the B2B or the enterprise product. So these are products that the sellers use and our partners use.
So my time is split across these teams. I just love to get into the details of what we are building. And the design details, so I’m really passionate about solving navigation, interaction design, and visual design. So I have time set up in my calendar review all the key projects that are happening across all these products.
Jesse: In such a complex environment, what do you think is important for design to advocate for?
Gaurav: Yeah, I think both these areas have slightly different kinds of goals. So when we think of shoppers, I think we want to deliver a very, very delightful experience to them. We want to ease their shopping journey. We want them to find the products fairly quickly, and get to the right set of products with ease, and people come with very specific requirements. Sometimes a person may have a very specific requirements and sometimes they may just be window shopping. So we need to cater to all these kinds of users.
When we think of enterprise products, I think the primary goal is to just make them really, really efficient. So think of someone whose product’s at the warehouse, and putting the label and then just getting them ready to be shipped. Now, this is a very repetitive task, and if you’re able to shave off even those few seconds for this person, we just make the whole process very efficient.
Jesse: What do you see is your role as design leader in creating the environment where these kinds of experiences can be delivered?
Gaurav: Yeah, I think, building a really competent design team, I think is the first goal that I have. And also growing this team. It’s not just enough to build a team, but then to grow this team and grow the people in this team as well. Also, to facilitate or to kind of bring together people from different domains together.
So, for example, if you’re solving for grocery, we may have a product designer looking at grocery. We may also have a visual designer looking at grocery we’ll also have a researcher looking at grocery. So getting this pod created and facilitating this journey with the product managers and with the engineers so that we are able to build and deliver a really high quality product.
I think my job comes into play in different kinds of forms. I also want the design team to do a lot of innovation, and I call it design-led innovation. So I believe designers are at the right intersection because they are able to understand user needs fairly well and then they’re also able to visualize what the product could be.
And so therefore, they could be these facilitators, or the catalyst for driving innovation in the org. And therefore, as one of the north stars that I’ve set for the design team, design-led innovation is also one of them. We also want to build our reputation within the org through the work that we do and through the impact that we create.
So I think, just like I said, like just orchestrating and facilitating some of these becomes a very critical area for me to focus on. Besides this, obviously, like engaging with the product and business leaders is the other area that I kind of spend a lot of time. So we have product leaders that work across these products and just within the app we have multiple product managers looking at, for example, how do we acquire new users, retain them? How do we facilitate journeys across categories? How do we optimize our core shopping funnel, et cetera? so just working with them, understanding their strategic areas of investment and aligning the design team’s work with these strategic areas becomes a goal.
Jesse: So it sounds like you’ve been able to build up this really operationally robust design function, this really fairly mature design function. You’ve got a range of different design capabilities from visual design through to research. Those capabilities are being integrated in meaningful ways that are kind of driving this broader impact.
It feels like what you’re describing is a fairly mature state for a design team. I wonder about what it took to get to that place to bring the business along with, or maybe just to capitalize on, the opportunities that presented themselves to demonstrate the value to make the case for a robust mature design function like this.
Gaurav: Yeah, I think I have to give credit to a lot of consumer apps that kind of exist out there. And they’ve set a really high bar for design in the industry. Specifically, if you look at the consumer Internet industry, the design bar is fairly high. And so design is today a very well recognized function in these orgs.
So the role of evangelizing is kind of come down for me. I don’t have to really sell design. We get requests from product managers, from business teams to go and dig deeper into specific areas and solve for them in a better way.
But I think why that part has been easier, I think, influencing some of the decisions from a very customer centric view has been the focus area. And I think within the tech function, if I look at, for example, product management and engineering they are very familiar with how design operates and they collaborate with us day in and day out in building and shipping products.
But as I move away from the tech team, I feel that the awareness of design kind of slightly goes down. And specifically, when I talked to some of the business leaders they may not be as aware as, for example, a product manager about the role of design. And for awareness building, in the past I’ve just put the work out there and we’ve done it in different ways. We’ve done it in a format of a road show, for example, we’ve also done it in the form of just a UX open house where we would transparently share the work that we are doing as the design team and let people come in view this work, comment on it, critique it, give their feedback and in the process we are able to build partners across the org, and once they see what design can bring to the table, and how design could impact their objectives, how it could enable their functions, they’re fairly eager to cooperate and collaborate, and also invest in both design and research.
Peter: Where are you located within the organization, within the org chart? To whom are you reporting and who are your partners?
Gaurav: So I’m part of the larger tech team at Flipkart. I report to the chief product and technology officer at Flipkart, and my peers are some of the other product and engineering leaders in the org. So there are different views that look at different kinds of products that we’re building, like for shoppers or sellers for partners.
And my stakeholders would primarily be the product managers and engineers, but also the business leaders. And these business leaders primarily drive category functions. So they could be leaders leading one or more categories. For example, fashion or mobiles and electronics.
Peter: You mentioned how you’re wanting to show impact, build a reputation and showing impact, but a challenge that design teams often have is demonstrating impact of their own accord, right? Because typically design’s value is realized through partnership and collaboration.
So I’m wondering how you navigated that. If your boss, the CPTO has specific expectations of you and design that you are held accountable for, like, you know, this is something we hear from a lot of design leaders, which is around, how do I demonstrate value? How do I show my impact?
Like what has that journey been like for you and clarifying design’s distinct impact?
Gaurav: Yeah. So I’m accountable for certain common company level metrics, for example. And these metrics are around customer and engagement. And also some new growth areas. The second area that I’m accountable for are a number of product metrics. And I kind of co-shared metrics with the product team members who are running some of these strategic initiatives and experiments.
And then third are like the people goals that include just the team health, how are we growing and retaining people, things like that. I also have some like more inward looking goals as part of the design team. And these tend to be around like driving more efficiency within the design team with the design system that we’re building, getting the design system adopted across different parts of the product.
And since it’s a fairly large product, the adoption is not a very straightforward activity. So we look for opportunities, you know, whenever we are updating a part of the product, we also adopt the new design system. There are also responsibilities around enabling research. And getting research to influence some of the key decisions in the org.
So there are different kinds of activities that the research team does and kind of leads ahead. We evaluate our products, but we also do some formative work, and influence the product roadmaps.
Jesse: Influencing the product roadmaps is one of these things that we hear from design leaders over and over again, that they are desperate to try to find some way to create in their organizations. And I’m curious about your thoughts about how to create that influence over the product roadmap, where is it appropriate for design to be leaning in and contributing toward these strategic decisions that, in a lot of people’s minds, technically sit outside the domain of design.
Gaurav: Interesting question. So, I don’t think there is one way to look at it. I think different products are at different points in their journey. And there are different kinds of opportunities to influence them. So, for example, if you are making incremental changes on a product, I think a lot of influencing happens in the way the designers and product managers collaborate and shape it together.
If you’re looking at something that’s fairly new, a new initiative, something we’ve not done before, I think a lot of influencing can be done through research work and through some of the early prototyping work that we do and validate with our customers. So I think there are just different kinds of models that work in different situations.
But broadly having this thought of influencing and representing the customers in every discussion. Having that thought at the back of your minds, as a designer in these discussions, really.
Another area that I’ve often found where designers play a key role is kind of safeguarding the customer interests and also safeguarding the design to some extent. We, we often get into discussions about where all can we highlight the offers that we have on different products? What’s the right space? What’s the right kind of tonality for it? How large should it be, et cetera. And that’s another area where I feel designers play a key role, in safeguarding the experience
Jesse: I think one of the challenges in that is engaging with audiences who don’t necessarily have design as a language, and helping them see, honestly, sometimes just see the difference between two different design directions and to be able to help them see the potential impact of that. How do you support and elevate your teams in their ability to build those bridges with people who don’t necessarily share the same language, so to speak, of design?
Gaurav: I don’t think we’ve done anything special here. I think a lot of the design awareness gets created through the discussions that we are part of, and how we present the designs, how we present the customer viewpoints. But we’ve not looked at special workshops, training programs or design thinking workshops, anything of that sort, in the organization. It’s just the collaborative style of working that kind of leads to this.
Jesse: So you keep, kind of, keeping it alive day to day, rather than kind of making these big bold statements with these big training programs or initiatives and so forth.
Peter: But kind of to that point, something I’ve been wondering is the purview of design. You know, you mentioned it’s a unified design team, one design team, product design, visual design, both UX research and market research, which to me suggests there’s a potential for design to be even broader than your boss’s organization.
Like, there could be touchpoints outside of product and technology. Maybe I’m mistaken, but, given the complexity of the ecosystem that Flipkart is operating in, there’s a lot of potential for design as a practice to influence all kinds of things, to influence… you mentioned last mile, it could be even potentially real world customer facing interactions or something, which might not be part of, you know, a product and technology group.
And I’m just wondering how you see the scope of all the things that design could touch. Are you fairly circumscribed within technology, or are you, you know, working on things outside of what would be considered typical product and technology?
Gaurav: Yeah. Well, I think if you look at purely from a product perspective and the kind of products we are building, then they tend to remain in the tech space largely. But if you look at some of the interactions that we have with our customers, so, for example, researchers and designers together often run researches with our CX teams, and we reach out to customers through them.
We go and look at how the warehouse operations work, how the delivery partners are delivering, the kind of challenges that they have, when they are operating in different kinds of environments. Tier Two cities are very different from metros in India. And what kind of challenges do these people have in navigating through the day?
So designers do go out and interact with a varied set of users. All the three sets that I mentioned earlier. But when it comes to building products, I think it still remains in the purview of what the larger tech team does at Flipkart. We do interact heavily with our business teams. We understand how they work with some of our suppliers, sellers as well.
And, what are their goals? How are they meeting their P&L goals? And we figured out innovative ways of kind of working together in this journey.
Peter: Earlier, you mentioned design-led innovation, which was a goal for you, an objective that you’ve set for the team. And I’m wondering, like, literally how that works in terms of what is necessary to make a space for your team to propose, new opportunities, new solutions, right, that might not be on anyone’s roadmap yet, right? Are you able to peel away a group of people for two or three months to have them work on something?
Like, there’s an investment there that has to be made, right? If people are working on design-led innovation, they’re not working on the next iteration of the product experience. So like, how do you make the space to enable that and, get whatever approvals you need from your boss or whomever in recognizing that, that is a worthwhile effort?
Gaurav: Sure. So I actually feel that a lot of innovation comes when designers actually spend a lot of time with the problem at hand. So for example, if I’m a designer working on a specific project at Flipkart. And if I’m able to wrap my head around that problem together with the researcher, then I may have unique insights that will help me innovate much faster than what the rest of the org is kind of thinking about at this time.
We do create some special time as well for designers. We do what we internally call as a design jam. So this is just, it’s like a hackathon, but for designers. We give time and space to designers to come up with new ideas. We ran this one year and then we also realized that there is also like a tech hackathon that happens at Flipkart.
And so the next year, we ran this before the tech hackathon so that some of these design ideas could then feed into the tech hackathon. With that kind of a process, we are able to see something end to end. We are able to see something that got started in the design hackathon, but also got carried forward in the tech hackathon, and we were able to build a POC out for people to play with.
And once it’s tangible, people are able to react to it a little better and it also has a higher potential to to see the light of the day in the hands of the customers. So that’s an activity that we’ve been doing every year now. And it’s been quite successful so far.
Jesse: So, you know, it’s interesting what we’ve been hearing for the last couple of years from design leaders especially in North America and Europe, but I would say also to some extent in South America and in Asia as well, we’ve been hearing a lot about kind of a shift in the way the design is valued, a shift in the way the design is perceived in these organizations, and a shift in the way the design is approached in these organizations.
And it’s interesting to hear you talk about innovation, reflecting a point of view that, honestly, I think has been a mainstream point of view within the user experience community at least for a long time, which is the idea that the people who are really deeply immersed in the use cases, the people who are really in there, sleeves rolled up, crafting the interfaces are going to be your best source for insight for new opportunities to serve those audiences, because that immersion gives them a view on the problem that an external, you know, innovation lab jumping in for the first time is never going to have.
However I feel like what I’m hearing from a lot of people is a shift away from that as a value proposition, and toward a scope of the design role that stays much more focused on delivery.
And I’m curious about what you’re seeing in the landscape in India right now, in terms of approaches to design, ways that other organizations are managing design, and where are things going these days in how design is being framed among Indian companies.
Gaurav: Great question. So when I look at the landscape in India, I, I see designers working in three kinds of companies
The first would be companies that are building products for India from India. These are essentially product-led organizations, building core products. The second would be what are called as GCCs or Global Capability Centers. And these are essentially multinational orgs, large companies that have setups in India to tap into the rich talent pool in India. And the third would be tech and design service orgs. So these traditionally provide services to other companies. And they also employ a large set of. Designers.
I think the work kind of differs in each of these buckets. I think the first two that I spoke about, like companies that are building products out of India and GCCs, have a very similar kind of a profile, I would say. They’re essentially focused on scaling and building product. And very similar kinds of roles exist in these organizations. you would typically have product designers, researchers, UX content writers, et cetera. I feel that the, scope of innovation also kind of varies, with the kinds of responsibilities that each of these orgs have in India.
I feel that the largest opportunity for innovation lies with the startups in India, startups that are trying to build new products, grounds up. So these are zero-to-one initiatives. And I think here the designers have the opportunities to work with the founders and the key stakeholders in that organization, and help shape the experience for the end customers. In the process also learn a lot about the business that these companies are operating in, what kind of problems are they trying to solve, figure out MVPs for products and also get into the details of actually building it. Like really, really working deeply with engineering teams because these kinds of setups tend to be small. And so designers end up wearing like multiple kinds of hats in these setups as well.
That’s largely how I see the Indian landscape today. I think historically probably the first companies to hire design talent in India would have been the tech and design services orgs, because they’ve existed for about three decades in India. While the first set of consumer internet companies building products out of India… When we started in about 2008, 2009. And some of those entrepreneurs laid the foundation for building and designing products out of India. The designers that we have today in India also come from varied backgrounds and that’s probably very similar to how things operate in the US as well.
We have designers who have a formal education in design, some that are kind of like self taught, and some that kind of migrate from other domains of design into UX. So it could be architecture, industrial design, graphic design, etc.
There is a vibrant design community now in India, and, and these platforms and these events are a great opportunity for designers to kind of connect, share experiences, share the work that they’re doing.
Peter: What you just mentioned is, one of the values of events, right? The shared experiences, people talking with peers and sharing kind of the challenges they’re facing. And I’m wondering what you see, let’s focus it on a design leadership level, right?
You’re a design executive, a VP of design, leading a decent sized team. I’m guessing that, you know, other people in similar roles whether in Bangalore or other parts of India, what do you all talk about when you gather, or you get on a call, or you’re messaging each other, like what are those topics among the Indian design leadership community, at least that you’re part of?
Gaurav: I think there are some things that always kind of remain the center of discussions. Some of these are around hiring and challenges around hiring. While it’s fairly easy to hire at junior levels, I think it becomes extremely challenging when it comes to senior roles and especially leadership roles in India.
I think the talent pool that exists at senior roles in India is fairly small. And with all kinds of companies operating out of India, this is a talent pool that gets a lot of attention as well. So hiring and discussing hiring challenges always is a topic of interest for people.
The other one I would say is, it’s just about kind of sharing challenges of influencing stakeholders in different kinds of forms and the kind of challenges that people have around, sometimes, frustrations around what would enable them to do better work at their organizations and what could be the learnings out of different scenarios, different organizations.
So that’s another, topic. I recently been involved in a lot of discussions at Flipkart and also elsewhere, where I’ve seen when designers at a certain level of seniority start thinking about how they should grow further. And a typical path that they pursue tends to be the people management role and growing as a people manager. Senior IC roles are kind of missing in India at this moment. And these opportunities also kind of missing. Flipkart, we’ve laid down career paths for senior ICs and build that track as well. But I think many young start ups are not yet aware of them.
There are GCCs that have fairly well documented paths for senior ICs. They also have a lot of senior ICs in the org. So that’s another topic of interest that has recently cropped up in conversation.
Jesse: I meet a lot of design leaders who say, I’d love to elevate ICs. I just don’t know what I would do with a bunch of principal ICs now. I don’t have a place for them in my processes or in my organization. And then I end up meeting a lot senior level ICs who haven’t been set up for success because the role hasn’t been defined clearly enough. Their influence hasn’t been defined clearly enough. Their measures of success haven’t been defined clearly enough. And I’m curious your thoughts on how you set up a senior IC for success.
Gaurav: This was a very passionate debate that happened within the organization while we were defining this path and laying down the competencies for the senior IC track. We leveraged a lot of work and a lot of documentation that exists for senior IC engineers, actually, and architects, as part of laying down the competency for engineers.
Engineering being a slightly more mature or… across the world actually has spent a lot of time defining these roles and defining how they differ from the people management roles. So we leveraged a lot of that work.
I see it as a technical mentorship role as opposed to people management role. And that’s the key difference in my head, at least where these people will then lead a lot of technical mentorship and large scale design operations roles as well.
So they would, for example, anchor the design systems. They would make sure that we build coherence across very different parts of the products that we’re building, which otherwise the two designers working on them may not even think about. So helping connect the dots across different parts of design and research is how we frame the role.
Peter: Something you mentioned at the outset when you were talking about your vision for the design team was growing the people on the team. And I think that connects with what we’re discussing now. And, I’m just wondering, what are the approaches you are taking to grow people?
Is it formal, you know, classes and training? Is it quasi-formal, kind of, like mentorship, that senior ICs could do? But yeah, just how are you operationalizing growing people in your team?
Gaurav: It’s a mix of both. So we do have some formal trainings that are led by the Learnings and Development team at Flipkart. And then we do some informal trainings from within the team. Actually last year, we spent a lot of time figuring out people from within the team who could then train a lot of other people across the team. So, for example we could have a person who’s really good with motion design. And now we want to take this skill set across a large set of designers so that we just raise our bar on motion design overall in the product. And so we’ve identified such people and enabled them to train others and kind of mentor them in this process.
Peter: You mentioned earlier the hiring challenge. And I’m wondering if that’s related to your incentive to focus on growth. Are you putting these growth plans in place? Because it’s easy to hire people with less experience, but now you need to train them up. Is this a strategy for kind of addressing this gap in the market of senior design talent that is really hard to hire. And so you’re growing them from within, or is there a different motivation?
Gaurav: No, I think we look at both areas. We look at growing people from within, as well as we constantly look at the market as well, whenever there are opportunities to hire from outside. So it’s not one versus the other, I would say, but a combination of both. We do have a large base of designers at junior levels, and a lot of training and mentorship while the senior leaders kind of run on their own, they do need training at different levels.
For example, new people managers need training around managing people, having difficult conversations, giving feedback. Some of the more administrative work that people managers end up doing. You know, performance conversation, stuff like that. So there are different kinds of trainings based on the role and the skill sets of designers that we look at.
Peter: One thing I hear all the time, from design leaders I’m working with or design orgs I’m supporting, is they have trouble making space for junior designers, right?
They can’t hire junior designers because of the environment that they’d be bringing them in. They wouldn’t be able to support junior designers as needed, right? ‘Cause designers are expected to be embedded in teams, possibly on their own, they might not have a management structure that can bring them up.
And so, at least in North America, a lot of companies just have kind of forsaken the junior designer and start, sometimes they start at senior designer, right? You know, five to eight years experience, because they know they can just throw them at problems and not worry about them.
It sounds like you’re taking a different approach, right? You mentioned a decent, you know population of junior designers within your organization. How intentional was that? Like some companies, that’s an intentional strategy to hire juniors and grow them up. So is that part of it?
And, what have you put in place to make sure that you’re setting up these junior designers to succeed, that they’re not flailing and sinking, right, in the sink or swim metaphor, being given too much responsibility too soon, and then they’re struggling.
Gaurav: Yeah, I think it’s also one of the differences between US and India. I think it’s also got to do with the kind of market dynamics and the supply of designers that exist in the market.
So there is definitely a shortage of senior designers in India at this moment, while there is an abundance of junior designers, I would say. There are a lot of design schools now in India with… that has courses in interaction design and UX design. So, I think we are producing designers in great quantities at the moment. So it’s just easier to hire at junior levels.
In terms of you know, not letting them sink, we do pair them up with senior designers. So as they learn about the organization, learn about the business. they are able to work with senior designers, with the managers, and kind of learn the ropes, and mature in the organization. But I would say it’s just a factor of the Indian market at this moment.
Peter: In the North American market, the complaint that you hear from junior designers is like, there’s a lot of us, but no one is willing to hire us, right? So there’s something different about how many North American companies are approaching hiring because I think the conditions are not all that dissimilar where you’ve got a sizable population of potential talent.
But whereas in North America, they’ve just kind of chosen to neglect them in hopes of hiring that senior designer, it sounds like, at least in the Indian market, there’s a recognition like we’ve got to make this work. So…
Gaurav: Yeah. And about the challenges in the US, where the junior designers complain about not having enough opportunities, I was also thinking about the organizations and how the organizations are kind of set up.
So the designers in each of these organizations, who are they kind of collaborating with? What kind of seniority of product people are they collaborating with? For example, in my organization, if I have to collaborate with the senior product leader, then it would be really hard for a junior designer to kind of voice a design stand. And therefore, I think it’s also critical to look at the kind of setups, and the kind of stakeholders that are building this product.
Maybe in some of these companies, there aren’t enough junior product managers as well, and therefore, the designers end up collaborating with fairly senior product leaders. So if that happens at Flipkart, for example, I’ll have a senior person, a senior designer or a lead designer or even a manager in those conversations.
Jesse: In so many organizations, design faces a fundamental cultural gap with the people who are in control of the business. The business has its way it likes to do things. It has its way it likes to communicate. In a lot of cases, these are practices that are inherited from legacy businesses, pre-internet businesses that are now entering digital spaces.
And I didn’t hear you talk much about kind of legacy businesses and, where they fit into that landscape. But I’m really more interested in how design culture runs up against business culture in the context of your experience. And what you notice about the challenge of bridging that gap.
Gaurav: I think designers are traditionally not great with business, and it’s also got to do with how designers are trained in design schools. For example, business schools have adopted design thinking as part of their curriculum.
There’s very little business exposure that designers get when they get trained. And often this seems to be at odds, business thinking, and the way kind of designers approach a problem. But actually in large companies, I think both need to work together fairly closely. And it’s important for designers to build that business acumen as well, to understand this company in the space that it operates in.
What makes a business successful? How’s the company generating revenue? What are the levers for the company to make profit, etc. And I think that background helps designers actually design better and helps designers collaborate better with business folks. If designers only take the user perspective and don’t look at the business, I think that’s where kind of conflicts arise.
But if they are able to effectively wear both these hats, the hat with which they are able to think user first and also think about the business, I think that’s where really powerful products emerge.
Jesse: Couldn’t agree more.
Peter: Towards the beginning, you mentioned how you like to keep your hand in for lack of a better word, the craft, the details, right? You mentioned the visual design, the interaction design, the research, understanding what’s going on in those details, but given, the conversation we’ve had since and just now, talking about business, business culture, relating to the business, right, you only have so much time in your days and so many days in a week, and you have to figure out where it is most valuable for you to spend your time.
And I’m wondering, particularly you’ve been in this role now for three or four years, right? Almost four years, how spending your time has evolved over these past four years, and kind of what that trajectory has been like, have there been themes or stages of your leadership since starting at Flipkart and, where are you now in that evolution?
Gaurav: Yeah, there have definitely been very distinct stages. I joined Flipkart in the midst of the COVID lockdown. And when I joined, it was a very inward-looking journey that I initially took. Inward-looking as in inward-looking towards the design team Fixing issues and gaps within the design team.
I also felt that there were certain parts of the product that needed attention. So for example, the core navigation of the product and how we laid out the core navigation for our users, it was kind of in different parts of the screen. And I thought that we were not enabling users to build habit on our product, and not letting them use Flipkart with ease. So these were some of the areas that I focused on heavily.
Also some parts of visual design. So we ended up changing the typeface that we used on Flipkart. We ended up uplifting our visual design language through the design system that we were building.
And these were immediate changes that everyone in the org and hopefully our customers could also look at, and reflect that. Just looking at the team, I think they were just areas of, for example, building our competencies, figuring out a track for senior ICs, defining that career ladder, defining how we wanted to use competencies, not just for reviewing and for performance, but also for hiring.
So these were some of the initiatives that I took early on. And I think once some of these elementary things, I would say, kind of settled, that’s when I started engaging more deeply with, especially, with the business stakeholders. I don’t think in a product org, you can live without engaging with the tech stakeholders, but definitely with business stakeholders, the engagement kind of increased also, the ending of COVID lockdown had a big role as well because then it was easier to meet people face to face, bump into them and have these conversations.
Peter: And so what stage are you at now in your leadership journey at Flipkart? You mentioned starting with, like, managing down, getting the best out of the team. Once that’s settled, you kind of look up and out a bit more and partner with those business stakeholders. Are you still in that phase, or is there almost like a lean forward now, almost four years in, like, are you at a different point in your journey here?
Gaurav: Yeah, no, I think there’s definitely a lean forward. We are looking at creating more strategic impact. We are also looking significantly redesigning certain parts of the experience. We’re in a space that’s constantly evolving. So we are also creating new products for our customers.
We’re getting into quick commerce and how do we look at these kinds of experiences. Satisfying customer needs in a very short time. So there are different kinds of areas now that we are looking into and playing an active role in building these in a, in a fairly delightful manner, I would say.
Jesse: Gaurav, what are you looking forward to in this next phase for design?
Gaurav: I think I would like to see the Indian startup ecosystem kind of mature and grow and also design create a larger impact in this journey. Flipkart is a large player in this space, but I think there are also a lot of other companies doing some really good work in India.
And I think there is a huge opportunity for designers to design for Indian needs. India is a very, very diverse country. We have a population of about 1.45 billion, but it’s actually made up of many different Indias. We have 22 recognized languages in India, and we have diversity in terms of the affluence, in terms of technical savviness.
We still have people in India who are just experiencing the Internet for the first time on their mobile devices, and so their trust levels with the platform are quite different from someone who’s been using lot of digital products for a fairly long time.
For example, there is a small population in India, which is primarily in the urban centers of India, okay, that behaves very similar to Californians, in terms of how they use digital products and the ease with which they use digital products and the frequency at which they use digital products. And at the same time, there is a population in Tier Two, Tier Three, and rural parts of India that is very different in terms of their taste preferences, rootedness in the Indian culture, and trust on the platforms. So it’s a very diverse space. There are lots of problems for designers to really solve for. And I would love to see more digital products built out of India and addressing these needs.
Jesse: Love it. Thank you so much.
Gaurav: Thank you. Jesse. Peter, for having me on the podcast.
Jesse: Where can people find you if they want to know more about you?
Gaurav: LinkedIn would be the best place. I do have a website that I don’t update very frequently, but that would be the other word other way to reach out to.
Jesse: All right. Thank you so much.
Peter: Thank you,
Gaurav: Thank you.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched the Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter.
Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.
50: Balancing Design and Business as a Utopian Pragmatist (ft. Leslie Witt)
Oct 26, 2024
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: Welcome to the Next Phase. Joining us to talk about what’s next for digital product design is Leslie Witt, chief product and design officer for mental health care platform Headspace. Along the way, she’ll share with us her journey from designer to design leader to P&L business leader, she’ll also talk about building the credibility for a broader mandate for design as well as for yourself as a leader, and what to do when your intellectual tendencies get the better of you.
Peter: Hi, Leslie. Thank you so much for joining us.
Leslie: Thank you so much for inviting me.
Peter: So we always start these conversations in pretty much the same way, which is who are you, what do you do?
Leslie: I mean, that’s like an existential question, yes? Maybe I’ll start with the concrete answer. My name is Leslie Witt. I am the chief product and design officer at Headspace, which is the world’s largest, most accessible, and, I would say, increasingly most comprehensive mental health care platform out there.
And I also am a mom to twin 13-year-olds.
Peter: Excellent. Jesse and I are on a exploration. There’s been a lot of conversation in the community around some of the challenges of design leadership.
We’ve engaged this topic on the podcast a few episodes ago, on this thing we call the phase shift, and what we’re interested in is trying to figure out, or maybe do some sense-making around what’s next, right? Where are things headed?
And so we noticed that your job had changed from a VP of design to a VP of design and product, and we thought, oh, well maybe that’s, at least, a way forward. So, love to hear that story of what that shift has been like, from a design leader to a design and product leader.
“Utopian Pragmatist”
Leslie: Look, titles matter–and they don’t. And so I say that just… I’m going to, I’m going to go a little side path first, and then I promise to get back to your core question.
I started my life with a very clear title and role. I trained as an architect. I got three degrees in it. My entire self identity was as an architect, and I discovered 10 years in that I really disliked being an architect. Oh.
And I decided to take a plunge into the world of what I would say, the unnamed. Now, many would call what I plunged into… I became a designer. I joined the company IDEO and one of the things that I most loved in that and kind of connecting to your, you know, I am now a this, was that we got to pick our own titles.
And, you know, in their ecosystem, I was at the time an environments designer, that was the non-formal way of saying architect. But I didn’t put environments designer on my business card. Instead, I picked a title that I would say through all my career permutations is probably what I most see myself as.
And I picked “utopian pragmsatist.” And I think many designers are utopian pragmatists, which is that we’re in this game because we believe we can change the world for the better, and that the better is possible, and that we’re then ruthlessly pragmatic about navigating the vicissitudes of now, the technical capabilities and possibilities, the compliance constraints, the commercial constraints to actually make something come to life.
And that’s the kind of designer I’ve always been. That kind of designer has woven into many categories and incarnations and titles.
And as I transitioned out of a consulting world that is very flexible about what you call yourself and how you show up and who you are and what you can be and in many ways has a model that benefits from that flexibility, into a corporate world that really likes to see people aligned against a skills matrix, loves to see things kind of crossed off and ticked off and told who, you know, owns decision making criteria, what I found was that my style of design was sometimes in direct conflict with the way in which the organization operated.
And so I spent six, seven years as VP of design at Intuit. Thankfully at a company who saw design as a strategic function on par with product on par with engineering. It wasn’t a subdiscipline. And one where design was chartered with core service innovation, something that many other companies is kind of the provenance of product.
What I came to feel was that I had a designer’s approach to problem solving, but in a world that largely ascribed that level of authority and decision making and kind of rights to drive change to a title called product.
And so, as I shifted over into another discipline, another organization, a different sector and industry I kind of, you know, had a brief, like, mourning and grief moment of kind of stopping my fight against the fact that these were the rites and rituals and promises of the design discipline, but instead to take a designer’s hat and approach and ethics into the world defined as product.
So, well, a little bit of a long narrative, but I would say, like, for me, this was coming to grips with the fact that the way I approach design, is largely mapped to the role of product in many tech organizations.
Peter: Follow on that, when we had our podcast that we called The Phase Shift, we actually talked about ego death. That designers need to be willing to let go of that identity as a designer and possibly embrace, and be willing to embrace new identities where they can still be whoever they are, but they might be known in a different way. And it sounds like that’s what what what has happened for you.
I’m wondering though…
Leslie: Can, can I, can I like slight, slight parsing on language? ‘Cause I actually think, like, the identity of the designer is important. I, I definitely feel like it’s, it’s my, it’s my soul and it’s a huge part of my arsenal and worldview, but the title doesn’t necessarily map.
And I think that there’s a difference between say an ethos and an approach, and a titled role. And that the designerly approach, you know, the power of divergent thinking, the ability to take behavioral insight and transform it into new propositions to actually have an aesthetic value that takes things beyond the utilitarian, like, a lot of these kinds of core ethos are things that don’t always map to the title designer.
You can still hold those to be true as you navigate a range of different disciplines.
Product + Design vs just Design
Peter: Totally. I’m just wondering if, if what you are doing is any different with the title product and design than it was with the title design, or are you kind of showing up the same way and it’s just a different label?
Leslie: I, I would say a bit of both, to be fair. I think that as wearing the design hat and title, you are commissioned to be agent provocateur, right? And I would say, especially for me, like, coming from an innovation background, like you are expected to present with some level of future visioning, novelty, operating outside of constraints.
Yes, understanding commercial value, but not necessarily being foundationally constrained by it. You add a lot of value in that frame by kind of helping the group expand what could be very kind of here-and-now analytical thinking into a divergent possibilities-oriented space.
Now, I have to navigate more schizophrenia that impulse to do so, but with the power to actually be the person making the decisions on what we do or don’t prioritize, and it’s hard to do both well, and to own when you’re kind of stepping in which role, and that’s something that I’ve had to get much better at is when I’m not the person that’s commissioned to act in a particular way.
And so instead say, I’m going to have my head of design actually lead a visioning exercise, and then I’m going to be the person helping to deconstruct that and look at capability buildings, and data that we want to collect in order to prove out path X, Y, or Z. That the power position, you know, if I’m if I’m being honest of the product leader, it wields more authority, but then with that comes a level of constraint that doesn’t naturally sit with the role of design.
Jesse: I think that for a lot of design leaders, it’s just very difficult for them to square the role that they see over on the product side with their identity as designers. Now this seems like it’s been an easier bridge for you to cross in part because of what your design practice has always been. But I find myself wondering what you did have to reconcile yourself to as you were making this transition.
What was maybe hard to accept having to leave behind as you are squaring your identity as a designer with this new role, and what was maybe hard to accept that you had to take on.
Leslie: Yeah, no, that’s a, that’s a great push. A few things, you know, I would say like, I would have been out there in the early 1900s as like a suffragette. Like, I, I am the person that wears the banner that is the champion. And I’ve always been, and I do continue to be, a champion for design. And I mean, design here with like a capital D.
Like the art of, the practice of, the craft, and I would say what I’ve had to reconcile, even in a company that has a high premium on quality, is that there are dimensions and places where it matters a lot less. And so where do I fight that campaign and where do I say, actually, this is a workaday problem. This is something that is motivated by a very different set of need states, both organizationally and even from a member. And it’s not where there’s outsized value from levying design craft towards a challenge.
So I would say like that, that stepping aside and viewing things more clinically has been a change that I’ve had to make versus being the person who’s chartered to act as the champion.
And another that I would say has been a dimension to reconcile, is the level to which I have to lead with analytical thinking. I’ve always been, you know, I was a mathlete. I love numbers. I love data. But I historically was able to use it to reinforce a point, versus to kind of operate within a data landscape, first and foremost. And to use that to construct possibility versus to kind of throw out ideas that are either subjective or qualitative and to use experimentation only as a means to kind of prove or disprove.
And so a very different relationship to data, metrics, and numbers, and then a deeper level of responsibility. I mean, one thing I didn’t mention, I also am the head of our consumer channel. And so that level of responsibility for delivering the business and needing to make those decisions on prioritization with you know, an accountability to deliver a number as top of mind.
Peter: Does that mean you’re a operating as a general manager? Like you have P&L?
Leslie: Essentially. Yeah. I own the P&L for our consumer business.
Jesse: Accountability is an interesting thing when we think about the evolution of design. Because I think that on the one hand, design leaders would love to have more accountability. They just want to have accountability for things that actually matter. And there’s a lot of a sense that the business doesn’t know how to create accountability for design because the business doesn’t know how to evaluate design’s contribution to the business.
And I wonder from your perspective, kind of, both wearing your general manager hat and your designer hat and your product hat. That’s a lot of hats, but like…
Leslie: …it’s a lot of hats.
Jesse: …yeah, what, what can you see from all those different perspectives?
Leslie: Yeah. I mean, I think that when I only wore the designer hat or mainly wore the designer hat, as a designer, largely, the qualities that you are caring most about aren’t necessarily always the ones that you are most accountable to deliver. And they’re not far apart, but would say most designers I know, and I put myself in this category, care first and foremost about member value or customer value.
Is this thing that I have brought to life actually doing something meaningful and important? Did it fulfill its mission? And the range of proxy metrics that we sometimes use for those things, say, like, adoption or engagement, don’t necessarily prove out that you’ve actually added value.
There are also things that most people realize can be gamed to deliver a result that looks good on a dashboard, but isn’t necessarily getting to the core point. So like, I’ll give an example from the world that I live within, which is our core member value is that we help you feel better, that you’re less stressed, that you’re less anxious, that you have lower symptoms of depression, that you sleep better, right?
Those are actually like the values that we deliver. Now, I will always say, like, engagement is like the a priori to be able to deliver value. So I am pro-engagement, but it’s not the goal. And simply by delivering engagement, I don’t prove out that I actually delivered on value. By delivering on value, I don’t necessarily deliver value to the business.
And so what I have focused on, and where I see these worlds coming together and how designers can kind of bridge the synapse is one, to understand how the business makes money, to understand what value an end user derives from a service and to try their damnedest to bridge between those worlds and realities.
And sometimes that means actually getting into business model design. So, in a world where you want heavily for the reward to the organization to be that you built something of value, how do you actually think about the ways in which that either saves money or earns money, or, you know, kind of does, does something that actually sustainably means the organization is incented to actually align to that.
And I think that those dimensions… proving out that you understand the mechanics, that you are focused on durable value and that you can connect the bridge between those things, I think that’s where designers both gain a lot of credibility, and maybe that credibility supplants what often I think accountability translates to, which is I got autonomous decision-making authority.
I think very often that’s what, what folks would like accountability to mean. I think it’s that I am going to be someone who shows up and says, I’m going to move this number. I’m going to do this thing and no matter what, that’s the end outcome. And I’m going to move mountains in order to do so.
Jesse: It’s interesting because it also suggests sort of taking accountability for outcomes more than activities.
Leslie: I believe so. And now I’m talking at different levels of the food chain, right?
Jesse: How’s it different?
Leslie: I think that if you’re someone who’s on a working team that’s assigned a set of tasks, and asks if you’re, you know, a junior I C, independent of function, like, that set of arguments and kind of conceptual resolution has to have happened above your pay grade largely so that you are actually empowered to do that thing.
But that thing, doing that action and doing it well, and understanding how it ties up is something that you can be accountable for no matter what level of hierarchy you are at.
Peter: In conversations that I have with clients and just people out in the industry, and I’m wondering your take on, is as design attempts to identify how it can be held accountable, how it can be seen as valuable, those measures are, at least in anything that is used by people, the same as a product managers’ metrics, right? Design and product end up driving towards the same thing, which maybe speaks to why you’re in the role you’re in, but then, how have you, have you had to, how do you encourage others to navigate this tension where, at least in some organizations, functions need to prove themselves in order to like, you know, get headcount or whatever.
But if design doesn’t have a value distinct from product, how have you navigated that? Or how do you counsel others to navigate that?
Leslie: Yeah look, I think right now it’s shifting. So I could tell you how I navigated it in the past and we still, by and large, have, you know, a triad or a quad model where we’re looking at having, you know, a product leader who is, you know, establishing the product requirements and really kind of prioritizing attributes of the of the process in tandem with an engineering leader, who’s, you know, building out the kind of capabilities and scoping, and a designer who is, you know, anchoring exactly how that comes to life concretely within the user experience. Like we largely fall along a kind of traditional triad model.
But I’d say that, you know, with the rise of AI, right, and the reason I bring that up is that some of the technical dimensions of what have held those two disciplines apart are falling away as barriers. You know, I have a very, like, experimentation and data oriented designer on one of our membership teams who loves to build dashboards and technical experiments. Well, that’s something that used to be the kind of technical skill set of the product manager. I’ve got a pretty young and very ambitious product manager who has learned a lot about how to set things up in Figma, and is able to kind of take modern tools and, increasingly, content generation and like put together some pretty compelling flows and prototypes.
And so the blur that used to kind of exist between craft skill sets and things that I’d say had like a technical barrier to entry–and this is very much true for engineering as well, right? You know, it was like code, code was like the Holy Grail that no one could cross. And, and, you know, like that, that key to the castle that was locked up by computer science capabilities is, is it’s getting unlocked at least partially.
And so, what do you do with folks who, yes, have different potential biases, but come in with a lot of shared skill sets or lower barriers to entry on those skill sets? And I’d say we’re still very much navigating that reality. More apparent in certain sectors than other.
Peter: What do you mean by certain sectors?
Leslie: I mean, like depending on the problem that a team is chasing, there are ways in which the unique skillset of a craft based designer, it’s like we just defined and designed a new AI bot, but we’re joining the crew. The skillsets of conversation design, and even like brand design, we created a character.
It has a complete tonality and a name. Like, that’s a more craft-oriented challenge and one that it’s incredibly important to have someone with expertise nail, then say an adaptation of a set of flows and a simplification of clinical intake. It has a form. It has examples out in the world. I don’t necessarily need someone with deep finesse and deep craft expertise to tackle that. I need someone who knows how to build and test and use tools.
The Distinct Role of Design
Jesse: As I imagine this playing out, into the future, it seems to me that if you’ve got, like, craft level design work that’s now happening in lots of different parts of the organization across a range of roles, some of which are not design roles and not participating in design processes per se, then it seems to me that the role of design leader, someone who’s going to be that champion for design as a practice, design as, as a value driver in the organization, it almost becomes more like governance.
Leslie: Maybe it’s governance and inspiration. I mean, I think like anyone, who’s played in the space of more traditional, like, graphic design. Often this still is the reality of say, like brand creative. That world has existed for a long while in defining guidelines. And then acting as enforcer, you know, brand police, they’re here like, you did it wrong. And, you know, while the team is deputized to do X, Y, and Z, if they have the skills, like the rest of everybody needs to align to a particular zone. And not to say that that doesn’t have some real value.
But I think it’s, I think that’s a depressing role. If what you’re out doing is kind of guard… it’s a retrograde role, right? Like, you’re almost by default, then, protecting the status quo versus pushing and defining the future.
And so I would argue that you might have less dominion, right? Like, there may not be 300 designers on your team who are involved part and parcel in everyone’s work streams or in a subset of work streams, but in some ways you have potentially more influence. And so, how are you out there now that everybody is cracking open ChatGPT to apply their hand at conversational design now that everyone is playing around with a variety of different tools and seeing what they can bring to life.
How are you, one, inspiring them with what quality looks and feels like, and how you think about a design process? How are you out there showcasing what good looks like? And then I’d say where I’m more interested in design-led governance is on questions of ethics, and, what is that insight into human behavior? What is that foresight, into the way that technology can evolve possibility, doing in terms of driving us to a better future? I think design kind of owes itself the responsibility of having an ethical viewpoint on it and helping an organization think in that capacity.
Peter: Why does it feel like design is often the one that raises its hand to care about ethics and the rest of the organization let’s it slide? Like this comes up a lot that that designers feel like they’re the ones who…
Jesse: why do we have to be the ones all the…
Peter: …yeah, who like, how is not everyone concerned with the ethical implications of what we’re doing, but designers, at least in my experience, are the loudest in the room, reminding people… deceptive patterns, right, was, was a concept that emerged from the design community, right?
It didn’t come from somewhere else. So yeah…
Leslie: To be fair, I don’t think designers are the only ones who care, but on the flip side of what we were talking about earlier, which is that designers are often not held accountable to a metric, I think there’s amazing freedom that comes with that too, because it’s freedom to operate outside of behaviors that are dictated by achieving a number.
Like, let’s say I’m a marketer who is going to be gold and bonused on whether or not I was actually able to increase sign up by 5%. I’m going to do my damndest to increase sign up by 5%. I’m going to do my damndest to increase sign up by 5%, right? And out of probably very seldom actually bad intention, I’m going to chase doing that in such a way that might have a lot of unintended consequences.
And designers have the right and the responsibility to point out what are the things that we’re systemically avoiding or how are we taking negative advantage of human behavior and motivation and, in a way, because designers also know those tactics, they are the ones most able to come back and say, hey, we’re actually like weaponizing,right, human psychology, we are doing something that sits opposed to our values basis. Now that’s like one thing to do when what you’re talking about is you know, a tactical marketing campaign.
It’s quite another, and I think it takes a level of intention and it absolutely takes buy in by other disciplines, and it takes both good intentions as well as mechanics to audit what actually happened when you’re talking about applications of LLMs, when you’re talking about what data privacy rights and consent are we putting in place of our members? Are we as explicit about both the intended use and the actual use of this as we need to be?
And, like, kind of holding up that lens of inspection for the organization. I think design often is one of the few disciplines that has both the skill sets to do so, and in many ways operates enough adjacent to the litany of metrics to be able to have the oxygen to do so.
Jesse: It seems to me the gap, then, here is really one of credibility, that the designers have the capability, they have the mindset and the appropriate, you know, resources to take on these challenges but they’re not being asked to, and when they do bring these things up they’re kind of like shunted aside.
Like, don’t bother me, kid, I’ve got a business to run here. And so a lot of these Design leaders feel like, if I talk about anything other than corner radii and button placement people think I’m talking out of turn. And so I wonder about, how to make the case that design has something to contribute here, even in cases where that alignment is possible, you know?
Connecting Design to the work of the Business
Leslie: Yeah, I mean, I’ll be honest. I have not personally had that experience. So well, I respect that many have. I do think there’s a dimension of, what are the values of the place that you work and, that no one’s perfect, right? Like, but are you working in a place that has some level of precondition to care, right?
I mean, because there are places that surely don’t, and then I think you’re trying to run something up the flagpole that never going to stick. But I think most places, like, there’s an intention. There’s a set of positive intentions, at least at a like mission declaration level, but then bridging the gap between the operational metrics of how that business runs, and it’s ambitions, there’s a wide vacuum of definition between what those things are.
And you know, I think it’s incumbent, especially on a design leader to foundationally understand the commercial mechanics of the business that they work within, so that they can bridge that gap.
I mean, the same thing is true here. Why should the business care? To be able to speak in the language, not just of like, Hey, all we should care and we should do the right thing. Why? Like, what happens if we don’t?
Because what is often being seen if we don’t is, I either just cut costs, well, that sounds great, or I just put a little bit more money in the coffer. Well, that sounds great.
So you’re going to tell me a different narrative about why I shouldn’t. I think you need to do two things in tandem, like paint a concrete picture of the risk, okay, of continuing, and then create a concrete pathway of what else, like, if I don’t do this, what should I do? And so I think you can get into a position where you’re the person that’s flagging, why not, but you’re also not painting the path of possibility.
Peter: From what I can tell you have worked in pretty high design maturity environments, right? IDEO, Intuit. Now Headspace. And I think some of the challenges that we’re seeing are with design leaders who are operating in lower design maturity environments, where they have designers, but they, kind of, don’t know why. They just got them because that’s what you were supposed to do.
I’m wondering though, What can help people in these lower maturity environments, get some purchase, get some traction?
Leslie: A lot of the companies who hired IDEO back in the day, and I was there 2005 to almost 2014, were coming because they were not high design maturity environments. They were organizations that lacked these infrastructures and capabilities, and they often did have design organizations within them, but they were extremely tactical design.
You know, it was maybe one step different, one step more technical than a brand creative team. And that’s not to slam any of those things, but like, it was not design as a strategic function. Design didn’t own research. Design was very much, you know, there to execute.
Setting Design up to succeed
Leslie: And what I would say essential to do, is to understand who cares about the idea of design, slash the things that you can do through design, having more power, actually having purchase and finding that champion as high up in the organization as possible is essential. And so, you know, one of the things I learned from that time period in life was we needed two things in order to be successful as consultants within those environments.
We needed like C-suite level championing, and we needed operational level advocacy buy-in and collaboration to what we were doing. Because if we had one without the other, the ideas were dead on arrival, right? Like, great, the CEO loved what we came up with, but this business leader has zero interest in executing on it. It wasn’t their idea. Thanks for the gift, but no, thanks, right.
And then the opposite side, if it was just like a passionate business leader who, you know, had zeal in the organization, it tended to have no staying power. And so there’s still real value because I would say, like, well, you’d get like a demonstrable point on the board. You’d have somebody who is committed to seeing something through from like, Idea to execution, but it was very hard to then kind of harness that as a repeatable event.
But, but if you can get that orchestration of a triangle, and maybe you’re doing it by proxy, you’re showing how this has worked effectively to build a business and other organizations, and as an individual, as a design leader, you’re making those relationships happen. You’re finding a high level advocate. You’re finding someone with whom you’re partnered who might have more decision making authority than you and you’re demonstrating in a tactical, tangible way that working in this capacity, where design has more influence or has more of a strategic charter, actually helped to do something meaningful, then you can start to grow that into a broader way of working.
I will say for the very same reason, as I stepped from consulting into corporations, I knew and I’ve stayed very strong on this. I would never take a head of innovation role or say, like a chief design officer role at a company that did not have any type of organizational maturity around design. And for me, that was because I had seen too often the way in which, like, that was, it was novelty. It was somebody to be brought out to an investor relations group to parrot, like, really cool vision work that really had very little consequence on the way in which the organization operated. And I don’t think a singular hero can affect organizational change.
Peter: A question that I’m often asked is, how do you know that the companies you’re talking to are mature? Like, what are the indicators that they’re the kind of place where design could thrive? I’m wondering, as you shifted from Intuit to Headspace, what were those indicators that you saw at Headspace that allowed you to feel like, okay, this is a place where I can actualize myself in some way.
Leslie: Yeah, I mean, in that case, for pure honesty, I was recruited by someone I had worked with before, who I’d worked with at both IDEO and Intuit, at least adjacently. And so I had a trust in who would be my boss, the CEO, and that was huge because I knew that person had a visceral understanding of both me and the role that I saw design playing in the expanded field.
I would say that the other indicators, you know, I could look at the product and tell that there was a care for craft. There was a demonstrated history. And then probably the kicker for me was that the conversations I had multiple times across, even like the CFO, referenced the research that design had led to understand the core landscape opportunities.
And, that proof point of hearing someone else unbidden reference qualitative design research that was like, okay, this is real. And this is a place where that input is taken seriously as part of driving a business strategy forward.
Jesse: Yeah…
Leslie: And look, I don’t, I don’t pretend that everybody gets to cherry pick. Like, well, no, I’m not going to join that organization. And no organization is perfect. Far from it. For any role. And I would say, like, part of now wearing more and more hats, like the, person in charge of that P&L and the person in charge of our product prioritization, I see that there are frustrations and downsides and maturity issues across the continuum in a way that I probably didn’t respect as a designer who felt like I was lone man on an island and a place where everyone else had well-defined, well defined, well respected roles. this frustration I think is actually something that can be leveraged positively as a universal driver to enlist collaborators in your cause, because you can actually help them buoy their cause.
Relationship with the C-Suite
Peter: If my quick Googling is bearing out, you’ve had two new CEOs since you joined. So you’re on…
Leslie: …that’s correct. I’m on my third.
Peter: So given that you were brought in by one CEO and that relationship was so important, what has changed for you? This is something I noticed myself as a design leader, even if I wasn’t reporting to a CEO, even if the CEO barely knew who I was, who the CEO was had a very direct bearing on my ability to succeed as a design leader. And I’m wondering, kind of, how that has shifted and evolved as you’ve had new leadership come in, and how you’ve had to kind of show up, either the same or differently, given the nature of what was happening in the C-suite.
Leslie: Yeah, it’s a great question. And, you know, I will say that it’s hard to navigate a managerial change. And I think about that all the time you know, I think there’s not a designer out there, there’s not anyone who’s worked in a corporation who hasn’t gone through a reorg. And then, you know, if you’re, newly mapped to a new manager, even if that person existed in the organization before, they’re new to you and establishing that level of trust and belief and knownness and shared philosophy and prioritization is hard, right? Even if at the end of the day, you have mutual respect across the continuum.
And so, yeah, it’s been an interesting journey. You know, I mentioned I was recruited by someone who knew me and actually had known me at least in these kind of like off and on ways for over a decade. And so I was able to hit the ground running and I had really been hired, although my title didn’t say product, I was hired to drive our explorations around stepping into the mental health care space for us, like, running a therapeutic pilot that then led to a set of M and A evaluations and that’s actually something that I discovered when I was into it because I was leading a lot of the innovation product space. I really love actually thinking about not just organic growth, but inorganic growth and helping to drive that evaluative process. It’s itself a very, like, creative act.
And that path led us to acquisition of a company Ginger. Which is how I got my 2nd boss, because as we made that decision to merge, the decision was made that that company’s CEO would become the boss. And deep respect for that individual who was with us for the last 3 years and just recently left the company, which will be the kind of 3rd chapter.
But what was different foundationally was that I would say we went from an organization whose business model meant that design as an act and product as a medium were the primaries to an organization that built an enterprise benefits platform where sales was the primary, and so a very channel centric view of the world versus necessarily service centric world and a really different means by which you make money.
You have to get a singular buyer to see enough value to sign up for a massive, sometimes multimillion dollar contract. And so they’re looking at like, how many boxes do you check? How confident are they that this thing is going to stand the test of time? And it deprioritizes some of the dimensions of what I had most cared about in the advocacy that was very directly mapped to our ecosystem.
And so in that world. You know, as I saw how I could both shape our commercial model as well as shape what I wanted to have happen, that’s how I became the head of our consumer business. Was like looking at where does the influence that I want to have actually sit within this ecosystem and, you know, to be quite honest, I would say with our, third leader who’s come in really to help us take the world that we’ve now fully integrated, and, you know, we kind of like we have gotten through that incredible platform transformation that if any of you have ever gone through, it’s not necessarily a fun one, but it like gets you to a place where it just has different potential energy forward.
Like he’s now here to act as like a maximizer. How do we take that and really take all the latent potential and maximize that energy. And I imagine that we’ll need to permute again, right? Like what are the things that the organization now cares about? How do we meaningfully shape them? And, in a world that now has a whole set of new technologies, in this world, what are the things that will matter most to an organization, both from an innovation and an incrementality standpoint?
Planning for Innovation
Jesse: I’m curious about where things are going, as we’ve seen innovation, as a standalone function, kind of fall by the wayside, innovation consultancies are having a hard time selling those services these days. And yet you did identify it earlier in this conversation as being something that design really has an opportunity to contribute toward, with design’s own toolkit and mindset and skill set. But then I wonder about what you said about having to embrace the spreadsheets and step into the world of the analytical in order to actually take on that role. And I’m wondering, where would you see an ideal place for some more of that old innovation magic in here?
Leslie: Well, believe it or not, I actually think I’ve come to love the world of prioritization, and that where I see it able to really create space for the new, both the minor new and the mega new. You know, there’s a variety of different frameworks you can use, but the one I’ve loved for years is a horizon innovation framework, and it looks at the portfolio of SKUs and channels and kind of activities of an organization and ranks them on their maturity, and then assigns resources really based on that maturity.
And what you want to have is a lot of things that are in the horizon one category, which means they’re fully mature. Like that doesn’t mean they no longer get investment. It actually means they get your most investment because you, you know, far more as you get further down the pike, the value of level of effort equals level of result.
And so they’re highly predictable. You know, it’s where almost all of your go-to-market dollars should be spent, and it’s the cash engine that runs the company so that you can invest in a few things that are in horizon two and maybe one or two things that are in the horizon three hopper.
And, you know, if you go to horizon three, that’s where I’d say, like, that’s where innovation sits. And as a company, you want to be placing as small, but as a complete, of a bet around a set of things that you think could be your future and giving them enough oxygen that they can deliver meaningful results that will actually be indicative so that you can decide whether or not you should fuel them or kill them, right.
You know, it’s more of a. intrapreneurship type of experience and one that I’ve found a lot of pleasure in doing within the idiom of, if successful, it’s transformative, either to the way that we do business or to the way that we drive commercial value and to know that you may not necessarily, even if it’s greenlit, get permission to then build it internally.
That’s a great hopper horizon three, for M&A, right? Like, okay, great. We proved this out. This actually is something that there are more mature businesses out in the ecosystem that we might decide to bring in, or this is actually something that we want to grow and scale internally.
And that’s really what that middle hopper is about. So I would say, like, the space I found for innovation is to develop a kind of discipline and rigor about it that lets you allocate resources, as unsexy as that sounds, but to quarantine those resources so that they’re protected and can actually do their job.
Jesse: Right. So this suggests then that if design really wants to actively participate in these processes, it means sharpening your ability to do some strategic long term forecasting from a design stance, a user value stance.
Leslie: Yeah. I mean, yeah. One of the things I learned at IDEO, I mean, not like in a formal way, but by, like, peering over the shoulder of the few, we called them business designers, but basically the 10 human beings in the organization who had MBAs, was, they would do a lot of discovery driven planning, which is a fancy word for basically saying like, I don’t know what this is going to do, but I can set up a set of variables, like, and some of those are known: H ow big is this addressable market? What might we price this at? What would be a believable, you know, X, Y, and Z in terms of adoption. And I can make this machine that lets me explore possibility and see like, from an incrementality standpoint, does this matter if I get 10x more people to sign up?
That passion for, I can make this so much better, has to be linked to, and if I do, does it matter? And making a model to kind of prove out to myself, okay, yeah, yeah, this is something I should continue to think is a big deal. Or, ooh, okay, even if I 5x this, at the end of the day, we’re talking about a business that’s in the single digit millions. Well, that’s probably not worth the time and effort versus something that has just a much bigger, you know, delta.
Peter: As you were reflecting on some of your experience at IDEO, I found myself thinking or wondering about career development, right? You had an opportunity for career development. You were able to pivot from architect, into environments designer, into some type of general strategic business savvy design lead, who then was able to then kind of take that and go quote, unquote in house and, thrive at places like Intuit and, Headspace. And it’s not a secret that design agencies and consultancies have, whether or not they’re on the wane, the percentage of design practice happening in those environments versus in-house is way skewed.
And I’m curious your thoughts on what we as a community, as an industry, as a practice are missing by not having those types of environments that tended to create a space for a certain kind of practice that you don’t get typically inside of enterprises, inside of corporations. And then, not only what are we missing, what, if anything, have you tried to institute as a design and product leader now with authority, with people listening to you, you have power. What have you tried to do organizationally within the spaces that you oversee to encourage that kind of professional development?
Personal professional development
Leslie: Yeah, I mean, first of all, I just want to acknowledge, I think that, you know, through no dimension of will, but through total serendipity, it was an incredible time to get to have that moment where design was a darling at the ball, where IDEO had that type of like broad stroke permission to come into spaces and to be consulting fortune 100 company CEOs about perspectives on their companies with total hubris.
And like I look back on that as something that gave me probably undo confidence, but a level of confidence that certainly is valuable as we carry forward. So I want to acknowledge that as a starting point. So that’s not necessarily the reality of right now.
I think, like, in exchange there has been, you know, at least up till very recently, and I believe it’s not going to like change and pivot on a dime, many more roles for folks with design backgrounds of a variety of ilks to step into high paying corporate roles. That wasn’t really the world that existed back then.
And I think in exchange, however, it becomes very easy to become, you know, in the kind of ideal parlance of the T-shaped individual, where the long arm of the T is your depth and the horizontal arms, IDEO worked really hard on building those horizontal arms. And that makes it really easy to grab somebody else’s hand and skip on over and, you know, pretend for a while that you have another depth and then actually develop it.
And I would say that those arms have to be very intentionally exercised in a corporate environment. You can get pigeonholed, especially in a large corporate environment, into extremely kind of technical sub-dimensions of a skill. And that might be how you get hired, right? Like, I actually got hired to IDEO because I was a good 3D modeler, and they needed somebody who could 3D model. Now, I did two projects where I 3D modeled, and then I tried my damnedest to never do it again.
But I do think a lot of times why you are hired isn’t necessarily why you stay, and it’s definitely not necessarily why you move up in the world. And so, you are the one who knows both, like, who you are as a myriad individual the best, the organization doesn’t know. It doesn’t fit neatly into a matrix. Grab the thing that you’re both most passionate to learn and that you actually think you have a chance of being successful at, and raise your hand, use it as a ladder to advocate for what you think you can do, what you want. And then try your damnedest to do it well, and that’ll create opportunity.
It’ll also help you understand, like, do I actually enjoy doing this? And so I think that that dimension, and that does assume that probably is some privilege wrapped around that, but like that dimension of intentional self advocacy, and not necessarily foresight on what’s going to be important, but insight to yourself is key. And being okay with the fact that I think like another design nature is like, you get bored. Seize that boredom as like the biggest thing that jets you forward. Don’t just like keep rinse repeating.
Like you’ve mastered that skill, you’ve achieved mastery, move on. Keep it as part of your like, it’s part of your toolkit. What else do you want to know? What else do you want to explore? What else do you want to learn? I would say in our organization, we probably aren’t as institutional about it as we could be and should be. But we have a fair number of forums that are very democratic in the way that they work. And everything from, you know, your kind of traditional hackathon, those can be formed with teams from kind of anyone’s input, anyone can kind of propose sets of ideas forward.
I make myself available weekly with an open office hours, and I would say what I see is across functions and across levels, the folks that most want to come and kind of pitch themselves in an idea, show up, they show up and they, they put themselves out there. And I do think you have to take some of those risks in order to yield the opportunities that you desire.
Peter: I realized I don’t know what all you oversee. I imagine design and designers, maybe researchers, but is there like data or other product functions that are in your world as well?
Leslie: Not necessarily producty functions. I also have our whole content organization. So, you know, Headspace makes, a wide variety of multimedia content. And so that organization lives within my purview in reporting structure, the brand creative team lives within my structure as does our science team.
And so that is group of folks who have mostly clinical backgrounds, as well as actuarial backgrounds, who are responsible for evaluating whether we are efficacious, right? Like, do our services work? They run RCTs, they collect real world evidence, they run longitudinal studies to understand health outcome savings. And we do have a few clinical psychologists who are product managers as well, because we are making, you know, healthcare a consequential product.
Peter: How did you make it clear to the C-suite that you were credible in leading clinical psychologists, right? You don’t have a background in that. You don’t have a degree in that you’re like, or…
Leslie: I don’t,
I don’t have a background in that.
Peter: But I get the sense you must have demonstrated some ability or capability that allowed others to go, Oh, okay. She can stretch beyond the boundaries that, that she’s currently in.
So let’s, give Leslie more responsibility. What do you ascribe that to?
Leslie: I tend to wear a pretty strong veneer of credibility period, like, to own that. Like, I am versant, I am fairly intellectual, I’m pretty rigorous and I used to be an academic, and while I wasn’t an academic in areas like clinical psychology, you know, like with ability to speak post-structuralism and kind of go heady, you can, you know, help yourself like be nimble and appeal to the folks who have PhDs.
And so that’s how I ended up inheriting the science function, was when our head of clinical at the time left the company. That team asked to report to my organization. And I think that’s because they had experienced directly that I cared about what they were doing. I valued it and I could get smart enough quick enough that I knew how to empower them.
And I do think that a large part of that, you know, organizational choices tend to not just be tops down. But they’re bottoms up and which functions decide they can thrive under your leadership is a major factor in terms of where things end up sitting.
Peter: I’m glad you used the word intellectual. Because it’s been evident, frankly, in our conversation that you are well read, extremely articulate, broad vocabulary. And if I am immodest, I like to think similar things about myself and that has gotten me in trouble in a lot of contexts,
Leslie: Me too. Me too.
Peter: I am very comfortable going very abstract, being very heady, being very conceptual, being intellectual. And I think, losing people overcomplicating situations. All of that. And I’m wondering, it sounds like you, you know, you’ve had a little bit of that experience, is this something you’ve had to kind of consciously dial in?
What, what have you done to manage maybe some of these tendencies and inclinations in making sure that you’re coming across as, confident, capable, but not like overwhelming in the way that can sometimes happen to folks who get really spun up about their ideas.
Leslie: Yeah I mean, I think I’m still on that journey. Let’s be completely honest. But I’ve had some great advice along the way. I had my first boss at IDEO was a gentleman named Fred Dust, who also came from an architectural background. And, a delightful human, and he would just call me out and mock me endlessly when I would use way too many multisyllabic terms. And I think one that I remember, I was talking to, like, I think American Eagle Outfitters, it was like a very workaday retailer that we were doing a project for. And I said something about perambulate and he’s like, she means walk. And so he would just, just make fun of me.
And I realized that there had been this normalization, especially in architecture of speaking in a particular way that wasn’t intended to obfuscate, but did. And so I try to like tap that down. I would actually say like in a funny way, the more excited and ad lib I get, the more it comes out because then I’m not like intentionally thinking. And in my natural state, I still retreat there. I do a lot of writing and I tend to write like it’s some long form prose,
Peter: For yourself or for public consumption?
Leslie: Um, for all sorts of reasons. Both, I do both. But I would say, like, first and foremost, I was mentioning it because I tend to write to think. in order to process, like, what really do I think about this and how is that going to manifest in, you know, X, Y, Z sets of decisions, and I need to do the corpus you know, some people are like, I just need the TLDR.
I’m like, well, to get to the TLDR, I have to write the big part first, and then, like, distill and reshape. But yeah, so I’m definitely still on that journey. I can be pithy at times. But, tend to like love a good long form debate.
What’s next
Jesse: Leslie, what are you most curious about as we enter this next phase?
Leslie: I tend to be hopeful. And, I’m going to just kind of focus on, like, what the possibilities of technology bring. I like to imagine a world in which, like, these radically more empathetic means of interacting with technology help us address the loneliness crisis. They help us have people feel more seen and more heard and that doesn’t have them needing to navigate some obscure graphical user interface in order to find what they need, but like, just kind of surfacing the world to them is knowing what they need. And it’s kind of working in this capacity that’s helping fill the blank.
I think that when I think about being an employee, kind of independent of function, that we’re not being made obsolete, but we’re becoming super-powered and that that’s, you know, allowing us to step outside the mundane, do a hell of a lot less of that and reserve time for things that creative human beings can only do, and that we’re going to understand that those dimensions of what I just articulated as kind of best case scenario are highly privileged. I’m less worried about like, do, does so and so’s profession become obsolete, do radiologists get replaced by the machine?
Like, I’m less worried about that because largely all of those people will be fine. I am more worried about you know, an economic reality, a social reality, a political reality that is already harshly schismed and divided. And where both the resilience of folks who are at the bottom of the pyramid, as well as the means to take positive advantage of the evolution of technology is so much lower and how do we, as a society, as, as social engineers, how do we tackle that intentionally, so that we’re not increasing what I would say we are already, already clearly seeing, which is that it foments immense discord, violence in the world.
Jesse: Well, if design leaders and design teams can do something to shift all of that, that’s a vision worth reaching toward.
Peter: Most definitely.
Jesse: Leslie, thank you so much for being with us.
Leslie: Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Peter: Yes. Thank you.
Jesse: Where can people find you on the internet?
Leslie: Sadly, I would say LinkedIn is the best place to find me
You can find me and connect with me on LinkedIn. I, for whatever reason, just never hopped on the Twitter brigade. And then once it became X, like had no interest. So, you know, hit me up on LinkedIn and look forward to connecting.
Jesse: Thank you again.
Leslie: Thank you.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched the Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter.
Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.chrome-extension://knjbgabkeojmfdhindppcmhhfiembkeb/index.html
49: Unraveling Complexity in Product Development (ft. John Cutler)
Oct 08, 2024
Transcript
This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited. Apologies for any mistakes.
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: Welcome to the next phase.
Joining us to talk about what’s next for digital product design is John Cutler, veteran product manager and product management consultant. Along the way, we’ll discuss what product leaders know that design leaders don’t, facing ambiguity and uncertainty from executives, and how design leaders can more effectively advocate for the true value of their team’s work.
Peter: John, thank you for joining us.
We usually start by having our guests explain a little bit about what they do. And, in particular, in your case, I think that’s important because Jesse and I were saying right before you got on, like, we’re trying to track the narrative of your career arc but maybe you could just walk us through what you’re about, where you’ve been, and where you are now, or what you’re doing now.
John: Sure. Yeah, I’ll give the quick story. Dropped out of college, had a video game company. I made a bartending CD-ROM game called Last Call. It’s like when you shipped games on a CD-ROM..
Jesse: Yay, physical media.
John: And then I slipped into playing music. And touring with different bands, which is a lot of fun, and then sort of picked up more and more tech type jobs over the years you know, like adtech.
And I worked at a company that literally took PDF catalogs and made them into flipping page catalogs. That was a thing at the time that was, yeah, there’s probably a lot of good UX lessons in that. And then I got involved in B2B SaaS company. So software as a service companies and a range of companies from Zendesk and Appfolio and a company called Amplitude, where I actually was a product evangelist, where it was, I mean, I basically lucked into this crazy role at a company that fit my personality, where I like thinking about this stuff and I’m curious and I like teaching and I like packaging the things I’m doing as a product.
And I was this product evangelist at Amplitude. And that put me in touch with teams really from around the world, you know, hundreds of teams, I forget the number, but we maybe did, you know, a thousand one-on-ones with product leaders and met with hundreds of teams along the way.
So at, by that point, I had done some product management, UX research, then I was this product evangelist role. Then I did this product enablement role at a company called Toast. And here I am today. And that’s it, you know, UX research, product management, working in New York City and doing tech with that before it was called product management and just doing stuff and music.
And so yeah, pretty across the board, but there are some through lines. But that’s generally where I’m coming from.
John’s distinct drive
Peter: As you were sharing, I was thinking about how I have gotten to know you, which is primarily through your voluminous engagement on LinkedIn. And you are always someone, kind of, processing conversations that you’re having with folks, things that you’re seeing, you’ve got your newsletter, you’re often posting and we’ll get to the content of that in a moment.
But before then, I’m wondering, what is your drive? Like what, if you had like a personal mission or a purpose statement or something that’s kind of underlying all of this, that’s driving this questing kind of behavior, that at least, as I witness it.
John: We could probably go way back to childhood for that one. I mean, it is sort of funny. There was a school play, I think it was second grade, and the teacher, it was called Vernacular Island. She wrote the play called Vernacular Island, and I was the question mark.
Jesse: Wow. You were branded early.
John: I was branded very, very early. It’s like they got through all the letters with Cutler. Cutler, the question mark, you know. It’s funny because I always want to go back and find who the exclamation mark was. It’s probably the CEO of a company or something.
Jesse: Wow.
John: You know, so this goes back a long way. I think it’s a combination of being curious, working things through in writing, seeking to understand, and seeking some level of coherence from what I’m seeing.
Yeah, a lot of it is actually thinking through writing. I mean, if I had done it all over again, I would have taken more careful notes on what I was seeing and probably written less. I didn’t need to think in public as much as I’ve been doing probably over these years and putting it out there. It’s been pretty time consuming to be honest.
But that’s generally what’s driven me. You know, I get, I get these… I’m curious about something. I have these open questions that I’m trying to think through either in my personal life or my personal professional life, or more broadly, the sort of zeitgeist of things.
I mean, working at Amplitude, one day would be Amazon and Intercom and then some bank and then some plumbing supply company. And then some company that was going to do massive layoffs, another company hiring 10,000 people. And that just leaves you with tons of questions.
I mean, just one day like that will leave you scratching your head for months, right? And that’s generally what you’re seeing as I work through this stuff.
The variability of product management
Jesse: That’s interesting because I think that for a lot of the design leaders who listen to this podcast, the vantage point that they have is so narrow because they are operating within their role, within their vertical, within their market context. Peter and I were actually just talking about this the other day, the way that our experience as consultants required us, I think, to do a different level of sort of pattern-matching.
My sense is that although you do have a design background, you’ve been really focused on the product management side of the fence and the problems that exist in that space. And there are a lot of problems that exist in that space that are just simply unfamiliar to the design folks in our audience, despite the fact that they are engaging every day with the people who are directly trying to solve these problems. And so I guess that’s the first thing that I wonder about is, What are you noticing broadly these days about what’s going on with product management that might be really hard for design leaders to actually have a view into? I know that’s a really big question. Mm
John: Yeah, I, yeah. Let’s, let’s first acknowledge the diversity of contexts out there. I think that’s really important. So even when we believe we have deep or broad context, it’s usually not nearly as deep as one other person or as broad as the next person. You know, a lot of people in Silicon Valley are like, “I worked at 15 companies in the Valley.”
And you’re like, “Yes, you’ve worked at 15 companies in the Valley.” It’s actually still pretty narrow or, you know, I’ve definitely observed that product management is both decades old and years old in some ways. So one thing when you’re observing product management, I was speaking with a design leader recently and they just couldn’t make sense of it.
They said, you know, I don’t get this. I mean, we’re… design community, we figured these things out for a long time now and I don’t get product. They seem so wishy-washy at the moment. I mean, they seem like the weak link at the moment.
And I think what’s kind of funny is, that people, if you go to a consumer goods company, for example, they have product managers, the product manager owns a clothing line or a shoe line. I have a friend who works at Deckers here in Santa Barbara, Hoka, their shoes. There’s a PM for that. Pretty defined areas of responsibility for them to do that. They own the P and L for that particular product. They have partners in engineering, the people who make the shoes. They have people in design, the people who design the shoes, right? There’s an understanding of how that thing works.
And I was chatting with them about the problems in the product space. And they’re like, this makes no sense to me. Like, we figured this out. I don’t understand why things are so wishy-washy in software at the moment. So what we were reflecting on when I was talking to this design leader is that certainly some things that we’re doing now, some companies were doing 20 years ago, but there’ve been massive changes at the same time in ways of working.
I mean, I was speaking to someone the other day and I said, “Have you ever worked at a company where you could deliver something in days or hours?” He’s like, “Days or hours? No. I mean, it takes months to get anything done, right.” I said, “Oh, now take your skills and mash that against doing things in days and hours.”
“Oh, wow. Okay. That’s different.”
Or another example during, you know, the, this zero interest rates thing. Imagine being at a company that’s not yet public, that suddenly has decided to have 10 products and 10 GMs and decide it’s a software as a service, but everything’s multi-product and you have to interact with finance and people say, well, these PMs don’t seem to have their shit figured out.
Yeah. Tell me how many times in history, a company that’s five-to-10 years old has 10 products, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and there’s that much pressure and there’s investor pressure and it’s growing that fast.
So then I was talking to the design leader, they’re looking at the site, like it just seems so disorganized. Like, couldn’t they have figured this out? I think design was so much better in 2013. We had it all figured out then.
And I was like, well, yeah, you had it figured out at the bank you were working at then. And you know what, the bank you’re working at then is not working all that different 11 years later, realistically.
But now run ways things were working through the ringer. And someone made this point, I was looking at Reddit, and they were talking about Marty Kagan. And they said, you know, yeah, Marty Kagan worked at eBay when eBay was the only marketplace in the world, and he worked at Netscape when it was the only browser in the world.
And, but I think there’s something very telling in that example, right? We could look back at those ways of working or Ben Horowitz or any of those and say, we had product figured out in the Valley in the mid 2000s. See, it was… We were doing it. It’s not acknowledging the rate of change and the diversity of situations that exist that PMs are finding themselves in.
And so I think that’s what a lot of people miss, and folks who are not on the product side miss. But frankly, I think the same thing’s happening in design. I said to the designer recently, “Have you worked with a modern design system such that developers and designers could collaborate in real time on, almost everything they’ve done?”
“Oh, no, no, no. I thought a design system was just, you know, our pattern library.”
“Yeah, but have you ever worked with an active pattern library that allowed you to prototype in real time together?”
“No, never worked with that. How would that work?”
“Look, you can even go in and change the CSS yourself in this library.”
“Really? I can make pull requests?” “Yes.” Mind blown. Like, wow, collaboration would be so much fun if I was working like that.
And so you just see, it’s just a very diverse set of experiences and swirl in the world. And I think that that’s one challenge. When you look at the LinkedIn idea-sphere or what people are sort of hot taking about product at the moment, it sort of removes context from it. The fact that some companies are operating like it’s 2004 and some are operating like it’s 2024. And there’s a huge mix and mash of what’s going on in the industry at the moment. And so I think that’s what makes it difficult for folks to wrap their head around what’s happening.
Peter: So I totally agree., I’ve seen this and I think… There’s a phrase context collapse, which applies…
John: Yeah.
Peter: …to, social media in this regard. I’ve had conversations recently with Kristina Halvorson around the world of content, because what happens is you have content strategists and content designers, and they use a lot of the same language and don’t realize that their contexts are totally different.
One tends to be much more marketing-oriented or kind of big, lots of words, content oriented, and the other is product-oriented and much more aligned with product design than it is with content strategy, but they both use the word “content.” They’ll say similar things around style guides or whatever and then not realize they’re talking past each other.
But i’m wondering, then, because I think you, particularly given your opportunity at Amplitude, we’re able to engage across more organizations than most individuals, like, maybe, analyst companies would be the only ones, you know, your Forresters or whatever, who were similarly like every day they’re talking to a new company.
And I guess my question for you is, Is it a continuous spectrum of diversity and variety, or are there categories? Is there 10 types of organizations, 20 types of organizations, still might be big but a manageable set, or is it, you know what, like, don’t even go there. It’s more of this smear of what all is going on and you just kind of have to meet each company where they’re at.
John: So one of the funny things about this is that when people have deep experience in one context, they tend to extrapolate that context to all contexts. So they think they’ve figured out the first principles of the world, right?
However, when you’ve, when you’ve worked with a bunch of different contexts, you also fool yourself. You think that you see the patterns of everything that goes across the world. And my friend Josh Arnold has this great quote, like the reverse Anna Karenina principle, where you start, like, detecting anti-patterns. So Anna Karenina said, You know, dysfunctional families are all different and happy families are the same,” you know, and it was like, well, actually successful companies are all different and the anti-patterns are the same.
So when you look across companies, you tend to be like, aha, look at that. They’ve got too much work in progress. I’m a genius. I noticed the pattern, but what you find out is like, yeah, no shit. You know, every company has that problem. Even the companies that are successful have too much work in progress to do those things.
I do think that you end up with some clusters. Or at least meaningful clusters. And the ones that I ended up in a lot of cases were, you know, I’ll just give you a real world example.
Like at Amplitude, we had sort of five or six categories of companies and some were just very rapid scale-up we call the digital product native, but literally they sold a digital product. You pay for that thing. And you could divide that into B2C or B2B, but these also tended to be world-scale companies like a Figma or a Miro, these were just very rapid scale-up native sort of digital product selling companies.
And then you start to get into the earlier B2B SaaS companies, maybe launched in the mid-2000’s or even earlier, and they’re on their second or third act. They’re more stable companies. They’re public.
And then you got these massive world-scale brands like an IKEA, LEGO, or world brand like an Adidas. And they’re now embracing the sort of digital surface areas for what they’re doing, but they’re sort of world-scale.
And then you start to get into more complex healthcare and very sort of detailed non-digital product selling companies, which I sort of called service ecologies. I mean, they really were like a product… You could fool yourself that everything’s a product, but at that point, I don’t even care about using the word product.
They’re just very interesting things. I could probably add one or two more onto that, but I think that , if we thought about what are the variables. How old is the company? Did they take a leap of faith by selling the thing that they built, like the digital product, or did they make their money somewhere else?
Very, very important example for that. A massive brand, like a shoe company, is only going to afford one to 5 percent of their revenue on tech spend. So when people complain about this sort of centralized IT model for those companies, it’s literally baked into the business plan. They don’t have a lot of money left over. They thrived because they had centralized digital group that would do stuff for them. And so it’s very easy to point at those companies and say they might be behind, or you’re not Figma. Like Adidas, why can’t you be like Figma?
There’s a huge reason. Like Figma sells Figma.
Jesse: Yes. Yeah.
John: It’s sort of like, how old is the company? Did they sell a digital product? Did they start with a centralized IT model? And there are some regional differences in companies, and then you could sort of do subdivisions from that.
And that gets to a lot of the themes that you’re talking about. You know, B2B, vertical SaaS or horizontal SaaS are all subcategories from there.
Peter: This kind of dovetails with the hypothesis I have that I’ll bounce off you, which is… So functions like design and engineering travel more completely between these types of organizations, right? How a designer performs at Meta is how they are going to perform at Workday is how they’re going to perform at Chase Bank. They’re going to kind of do a lot of the same stuff. And same thing with engineering.
Whereas product doesn’t travel, right? Like maybe 50%, maybe it’s even a third because the nature of the product practice or the product function is so specific to that organization it’s in. And I’m just wondering, one, if you see that as well, and then, two, what do you make of that?
Because one of the challenges that we hear all the time from designers, you know, being more design oriented, is a frustration in working with product. And if it’s because, like, the person you mentioned earlier, like we’d kind of figured it out in design 10, 20 years ago.
We know how to work, why doesn’t product? And it’s maybe because of this variability. So what do you counsel then in terms of navigating these relationships, if product is that much more variable.
Product, Design, and Engineering
John: You know, I wanted to go back to one thing I said there about the sort of centralized IT model. When I think about that model and you think about how designers could look back two decades ago or engineers who could look back a while ago, I think a lot of that comes from the fact that those centralized models sort of allowed that stability, you know, it was the business, and tech. Business and tech, or the business and IT, and I think you’re exactly right, because if we think that product either sits on one side or maybe sits on the other side, or maybe get squashed into the middle, that explains why the role is very, very sensitive to the overall business model of the company or the culture of the company.
I mean, engineering leaders also have this frustration. They do, as well, frankly, a lot of the most interesting things in org design at the moment, and collaborating with design and thinking about systems thinking and thinking about ecosystems and platforms are coming from engineering and design.
They’re not coming from product, right? So Product is still sort of sitting there in that sort of weird business- tech overlap to do things. So, I mean, other than design leaders understanding that, Hey, it’s not all figured out and B, product in this company is having to adapt to the particular model, whereas maybe you’ve already accustomed yourself to being adaptable.
So, you kind of know how to adapt the practice of design in these contexts. Maybe just the empathy is a good start, but here’s another thing I would urge design leaders to do. And I was meeting a great… last week, a great design leader from Google, and he was talking about an effort they had done in Google around Google Maps.
One thing that we discovered is that there’s still this problem that design comes in and comes out with what I would call their functional models. You know, we’re going to work in terms of journeys. We’re going to work in terms of X, or we’re going to do this. This is how we’re going to operate design.
John: And engineering is often coming up with their systems to think about their work.
And meanwhile, in this group in Google, the product team had their own model, thinking about it in terms of engagement or thinking about these sort of business metrics or thinking what they can do. So one thing that all design leaders can do is to maybe resist the immediate temptation to sort of go back to your functional camp, pick your models, like we’re going to work in terms of journeys, we’re going to work in terms of whatever it is, jobs to be done, we’re going to work in terms of scenarios. Product is going to do its businessy thing over there.
One thing I did at Amplitude, and I’m not saying frameworks are a dime a dozen, but one of the things we did was this framework called the North Star framework.
One of the things it sought to do was to try to bring design and product and engineering together to a sort of a common model, and way of working to align.
So I call this like the functional model trap where design leader comes in. They have got 90 days. They figure out their group. They figure out, we’re going to work in terms of journeys and X, Y, Z, A, B, C. Product’s off doing their thing. Engineers off doing their thing. This goes on for two or three years. And then the design leader wonders why they kind of quote unquote lost their seat at the table.
It’s because the business got frustrated with all three functions and just decided to go over the top of them and come up with some framework that doesn’t work, right. So I think you have to reach out and try to forge a common model versus getting kind of too seduced by your functional models.
Jesse: That’s, that’s a very interesting point of view, I think, because a lot of the design leaders that I work with in my coaching practice I think really feel kind of cornered. And they feel cornered especially by the power that is invested in product as a function. That it is perceived to somehow have the inside line on some operational insight that is going to drive the ultimate model that everybody operates by.
And I think that for a lot of design leaders, the sense is that if you don’t show up with your own model, you’re going to get slotted into somebody else’s and the outcomes that you’re trying to drive and the success criteria that you and your team have been optimized toward, you’re not going to be set up to deliver those things.
So I wonder your thoughts on, on how design leaders address that.
John: Yeah. I wrote this post around the functional model trap, which offers some ideas. But I think that the summary there is you need to cross the aisle and see where the common ground is. A great example of this is journeys. You may have already had them on the podcast or will, but I worked with the design leader, Jehad at Toast, and he was great about just doubling down on a model that’s called journeys, a model that had a lot of salience across the organization, had a lot of salience with our customer support team, and had a lot of salience with product to a degree. And he doubled down on that particular model. So one thing is just, pick models that have salience in your company and make sure that you’re explaining to the product leaders why it makes sense to think about this and how it can be helpful, et cetera.
So that would be number one. I think the number two is, look to engineering, because… This is fascinating to me. All the org design stuff happening in engineering now, trying to sort of refactor the orgs so they can move faster and be more customer-centric, that will ultimately define a lot of the ways design works and can work and how quickly you can ship and how fast you can learn and the feedback loops in your company.
It’s amazing to me that there are architects in engineering doing something called event storming. There’s other forms of domain mapping. There’s behavior driven design. There’s all these techniques they’re using to basically figure out how to structure the architecture and structure the teams, essentially, that have massive implications for design.
And I’ve brought a designer into an event storming activity. And the designer said. This is the best journey mapping activity I’ve ever done. Does it help engineers? The engineers are like, yes, this absolutely helps us. And product is sitting there like, wow, I guess if it helps both of you, why didn’t we have this conversation earlier to be able to do it?
So that’s the second thing. Don’t underestimate what engineering is doing in these efforts, because it may have a huge impact on how you can work later on. And a lot of great work is happening in engineering around that.
Now, there’s a lot of acceptance of socio technical systems. There’s a lot of acceptance of the need to reduce cognitive load. There’s interesting sense-making frameworks like team topologies. And other mapping type frameworks that are very familiar to designers. Like the capabilities are there in language that they can understand. And that’s a huge, huge opportunity. So that would be number two.
And I think that number three is, wow, if you could work with product, and I’ve seen it happen where you acknowledge, not to get too nerdy, but there’s three fundamental model types. There’s capability model types, journey model types, and flywheel or business model type flywheel types. Product tends to own the business model flywheels. Design says they’re going to stake claim on the journey type things with a bit of capabilities and engineering wants capabilities ’cause they think that’s what they’re going to need to build an architect around.
There’s so many opportunities to find common ground for that, or at least surface those models and work together with them. And so that would be the third thing, is seek the opportunities to jump over the aisle and integrate those frameworks together. The Google leader that I spoke about they did just that, you know, they really aligned around a journey, but then products started layering in their KPIs and other things in that framework and they were successful from doing that.
Jesse: I think one of the biggest breakdowns in here is how product perceives what design is there to do, and what design is there deliver, and what their partnership actually entails between the two of them and, and what they were there to negotiate and what they’re there to stand for, honestly, as partners, and I’m curious about your thoughts about that, about how that fits in with everything you’ve just now been talking about, because I think this is so important for design leaders to understand how they are being perceived from the other side of the aisle, right?
John: Yeah, and this goes to that weird aspect of experience, and sort of depths experience. So you meet this product leader and they’ve worked at maybe even these famous companies. And the first word they’re saying to you is, you know, where’s that Figma file or something, right? And you’re like, Oh God.
And so I think that the first part is realizing even people with deep experience may not have had the opportunity to work directly with a designer who cared about the overall company strategy and could help shape the product strategy, so be empathetic at first, they might not have had that opportunity to work closely with designers to do that.
And I think that the second thing is, in many organizations, things are so reactive and there’s so many fires. The idea that there’s any time to think. I’ve seen a lot of design leaders get a lot of success by just putting, investing their social capital and finding some space to slow down. And they don’t see the other 30 meetings that these product managers in or look at their calendars and to do these things, and see how scattered a lot of these PMs are.
I mean, their calendars, their minds are just very scattered. I heard in many cases. And so I think that by carving out that time, like a couple days of deep work together and moving through these things, or maybe inviting engineering to do some of these sort of more domain-oriented or architectural activities at the same time, that can be huge.
But I go back to my, I worked at a company here called Appfolio, where I was a UX researcher and it just will stick with me my whole career. You’re in this thing, you’re doing some form of participatory design. The designer is… their mind is sort of semi being blown by these engineers, not necessarily being great designers, but surfacing really, really interesting possibilities that technology can do. The product manager is just blown away by everyone. And then the engineers are like, wow, okay, that’s why you are paid to be a designer. At the end of the day, so that kind of working side by side in those activities, I’ll just always remember how the mutual respect meter just went through the roof.
Instead of talking and telling we were doing together. And I’ve never seen that level of just mutual respect and admiration. Just even two days of doing that just goes through the roof. And it lasted for years. I still think about it.
Peter: Taking from what you were just talking about in terms of product design, engineering, collaborating closely together, that raises a couple of things. One, it sounds like at Appfolio you had a healthy collaborative environment, whereas many environments inadvertently discourage that kind of collaboration because each function is supposed to own something. And what do I own if my work is just being done together as a team?
But then the other thread that I’m unpacking here is around the role of product. So, one of the things that I’ve started to say more and more is: sufficiently senior UXers with a particular orientation should probably just become product people, right? And, I think there’s some relationship between that kind of like almost pragmatic recognition of like, yes, there’s these functions that each have their responsibilities, but really it’s a group of people just trying to get something done.
So navigating teams versus individuals and then navigating how you move between these different functions. Curious your thoughts.
John: Yeah, well, a couple thoughts is that first, this is about national cultures and regional cultures as well. So you know, realistically, like in the valley, in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot more distinction between the roles.
You know, it’s this sort of product designer persona. Yeah. We’re gonna bring this person in there, you know, we hire these rockstar engineers that ,they just want these other people to own it because that’s why they’re going to get their promotion if they own it. And I was talking to a friend at a company in the Valley and they said, well, engineer and designer looked at the PM and said, “Idea rejected, not going to do it. It’s not going to help us.” You know, so they had the autonomy, they had the power in these organizations to go back to the PM and say, sorry, you haven’t given us enough data or evidence about why this is going to work and it’s not going to help us, I’m not going to get promoted off of that, you know, this promotion driven development and design, I call it in some sense but it works.
A new model for product development organization
John: Not sure, you know, maybe it works in some settings, but it works in those cultures. So anyway, I’m trying to acknowledge that there is a, you know, a world scale of collaboration and individualism spreading things that probably impacts a bit of that. But I share your theory. I think that in the next 10 years, you’re going to see the following model emerge in some companies.
There will be groups of 30 to 50 people with one product manager, one sort of design lead for the whole group. A pod of insights. Insights will include UX research, quantitative, quant, qual, analytics, data science. So there’s a pod with an operations team that might have a subgroup of design ops and product ops, but generally operations. And so research ops will merge into that.
I think 30 to 50 people is probably the maximum boundary of contained trust you can have in a pseudo remote world, where you can build trust around 30 to 50 people. I think in person, it could probably be more, but there’s a kind of size limit to that. It’s not going to be more than three levels of hierarchy. You’ve got to keep it pretty flat and efficient.
And then I think what you will find is you will find 30 to 50 engineers and designers, maybe five, 10 designers, and then the rest engineers. And I think that they’re going to function, that there’ll be 1 PM for that group. And the reason why I think that is exactly to what you’re saying is, I think people are going to come to the conclusion that a product-savvy engineering lead and a designer are perfectly capable in those environments for, for leading.
All this idea, and whatever we could say it came from the agile world, but it just came from a period of time for a couple of decades where someone decided that every group of three to five people needs a PM or a PO or something like that. And so now we assigned all those people and we called everything a product. Everything is not a product. Everything is not a product.
So I think that this, honestly, we’re going to see this pendulum swing because there’s so much hype around products right now, the next three to whatever many years are going to be all these huge companies calling everything a product only to realize what the B2B SaaS companies are realizing right now, which is no, not everything is a product.
And maybe for the design leaders here, think ahead, let’s say that I’m right. Think ahead to how that might change your role. Do you want to be that person who sits to the side of that PM and then has a five to 10 people reporting to you?
Do you want to be one of those people there? Do you want to sit across the whole organization, across multiple pods of 30 to 50 people? I don’t know, but if, let’s say if my theory is right, you’d have to think about what that would mean for your role.
Jesse: Yeah. I think what you’re describing is a reshaping of the value proposition, both of the product lead role, as well as the design lead role.
I want to bring your research background back into this, because I wonder where research fits into the mix here, because it seems to sit in this really, actually really important strategic space between design and product in informing the choices that both functions make.
John: Yeah, the research first, I feel so much the pain that the research community is going through at the moment. I do sort of feel as someone involved in the product space that there’s this, I would say it’s an unintentional gaslighting that’s happened for researchers around this kind of weird product discovery stuff and this research stuff.
And having been a researcher myself and PM, maybe I have the privilege of being more pragmatic. I’m like, yeah, I could just go either way. It doesn’t really matter to me, but I noticed for a lot of people, it really does matter what these titles are and what their boundaries and spheres of influence are in the organization
You know, at Amplitude, I dealt with a lot of analysts, like analytics people, and it’s amazing the similarities between your average analytics employee and a researcher. Day in, day out, they’re called in to be pulled to like… Can we have a dashboard for that? C -uite needs a new dashboard for that. They’re like, damn it, but there’s strategic insights that could be saving the company right now. Why do you have me making a dashboard for the deck again? Just do it, go and do that.
The data quality is often really, really messy. They’re having to fix it, just like a researcher is having to figure out this fire hose of qualitative data and what they’re going to do with it. There’s so many similarities, but in both of those cases, there was… A couple questions.
Pull versus push. Am I just pulled in, am I “as a service,” am I research as a service, or am I strategic insights as a service, or am I a question answer as a service? You know, are we data snacking or on a good data diet? The same thing with UX research. Are we, are we research snacking or are we on a good research diet to do things? That’s why I think that, I mean, first of all, it’s hard to be a researcher, but I think that if we just extrapolate all these ideas, something’s got to give eventually.
And the scenario I gave you, the idea that you are elevating insights, both the quant and qual side of that, like, does it matter whether they have a leader that sits right to the side of the PM lead, the engineering leader, whatever? I don’t know, or maybe that doesn’t matter as much, but I think that there’s going to have to be some acknowledgement that quant and qual and these things to improve decision-making and sort of strategic sense are going to have to have some kind of first class place in this particular model.
In other words, it might be more centralized than people would like, but the size of the groups might be smaller and more containable, which might make it a better role for those people At Amplitude, you would find some companies with one quantitative analyst per 150 people, yet at a place like Canva or another place, you might find an analyst per every 10 people.
You’d find a UXR for every 15 or 23 people. And so those ratios have to come down in my mind for it to be pulled into less of a data snacking type role. And so I’m just trying to think of the physics of the problem. 30 to 50 people, then you can start having a group of people who feel they’re empowered and are driving strategy versus running around and playing whack-a-mole all day.
Peter: With the 30 to 50 people thing, your hypothesis or proposal that you only need one product leader over a group that large, Melissa Perr i actually said something very similar a few years ago when she was on our show. She was also reacting to basically what happened with agile transformations and, we needed to have thousands of POs, product owners, and now it’s becoming clear that those people aren’t adding much value.
What I’m wondering though, and, I’m buying into your vision, right? As my wheels are turning, I think it solves a lot of problems that remain when everything is a group of six to eight people, right? Your two-pizza team can only do so much.
John: it’s like we’re talking about thousands of people or five people. There has to be some unit of size that’s between six and fifteen hundred.
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: And that led to some of the thinking in the Org Design for Design Orgs book, where we had design teams of about six people working across what at the time were multiple squads, each with six to eight people, but if you could just take that design team of five or six people and plug them in and say, you know, they’re just part of this group of 30 to 50 people doing work together, the interface is clear.
You’re saying it with some degree of confidence, which I appreciate, but, that’s leading me to wonder, are you witnessing this happening anywhere? Are there early signs? I’m just curious, like, what have you seen in terms of companies trying to operate, I think of the 30 to 50 feral hogs on Twitter, in this group of 30 to 50, with a product manager and a pretty robust suite of capabilities.
Then you get product, you get engineering, you get design, you get insights and analytics, you get content, you get data, whereas when everything is eight people, you miss out on so many functions. Anyways how confident are you in this as a direction? And what is your evidence?
John: Well, let’s… Here’re the signals that I see.
One, the pressure to flatten the orgs out. You’re seeing many companies just eliminate a whole level of management. So, if before everyone was thinking you need a PM for every seven people, someone is asking that question now at the moment. Well, what, if you had a PM for more?
So that’s, one, the ratio thing. Two, way, way, way more roles open right now for principal or staff PM than there are for junior PM. So there’s some acknowledgement now that having a bunch of junior PMs running around the org doesn’t help the teams, doesn’t help designers. That, like, one senior or staff or more experienced PM can, can drive the coherence necessary for a lot more people than just six people. So that’s the second theme that you’re seeing there.
The third, I think that comes along with that is you’re seeing the insights roles start to talk more about things like this, right? Like, isn’t this just insights and decision support? Like, isn’t this just a coherent thing? Should we be drawing these boundaries? Why?
Imagine you are an analyst, you feel a little marginalized. Imagine your UX research and you feel a little marginalized. You look at your fellow marginalized people and you say, you know what? We’re kind of doing the same thing here. Wouldn’t it be great if we just joined forces here? So I think someone in that thread actually said that. So that’s like another signal.
And then I think what you’re seeing in organizations is like the beginning of this, right? So you’re seeing, you know, these changes and reorg starting to happen, but I could be completely wrong. And one thing that we know for sure is it just takes forever for the industry to do anything, right?
So, even if some org started moving in this direction now, it might take a while for it to work itself out. And maybe in more stable domains, that number could be bigger, maybe in very rapidly changing domains, zero-to-one type situations, it’s way smaller. You know, there could be a lot of variations of this, but I think it’s more helpful for us as like a thought experiment to tease out some of the, like, the zeitgeist issues at the moment.
Making space for holistic vision
Jesse: It’s interesting to frame this in terms of the way that the design community has talked about itself and its own value proposition over the last, I don’t know, 20 years or so, because you know, we’ve been on this march toward the C-level, where the idea was that if you could create more, more centralized, more executive, more higher-level strategic leadership over design as a function, that would have a kind of cascade effect in terms of business value, in terms of product and user outcomes, all the things that we all love to see.
What you’re suggesting doesn’t really create a space for that. And I’m wondering about, like, where does holistic vision sit? Because I feel like that was like the promise, right? The promise was everybody would be aligning to some kind of holistic experiential vision for the product or the offering or whatever, and we could all feel really confident that we were doing something that meant something as opposed to running off in a million different directions.
So I wonder, yeah. What are your thoughts there?
John: Well, I think this is one of the things that many companies have realized is that the cascade, especially during times of a lot of incoherence and dissonance and rapid change, just creates fog.
I don’t want to talk too much about the military, but in the military, they have something called mission command, and Stephen Bungay wrote a great book called Art of Action which tries to take those ideas and basically determines that, like, Andy Grove’s idea of cascaded goals and cascaded context, It’s just a version of the military’s mission command.
Now, mission command believes in these frontline teams that are autonomous and that, you know, you cascade context and then they cascade feedback and magically it’s going to work out.
I was talking to an SVP the other day and they’re like, I have no idea what’s happening in my company. It’s so incoherent. I’m only dealing in these broad strokes. I have no idea what’s happening on the front lines. I’m being told by leaders, I need to get into the details. I’m not even sure the details I’m supposed to get into. And things are just… I’m sitting in this, in theory, exalted role, that I should be able to have all this impact, and it’s just too murky and too foggy at the moment with all the changes that we’re seeing.
But I guess what I’m observing is you have to be able to translate that overarching context to action somewhat effectively. And I think that what a lot of these large organizations are experiencing are actually their strategy has changed, but their org structure and architecture have not changed yet.
So the company, for example, now believes that the end-to-end experience is important. They hired in the chief digital person to make sure the end-to-end experience is important. And, literally was on a call the other day where someone said this, like we went through that, we were all bought in. And then we realized we have teams of 250 people and someone had a great model the other day, they called kebab orgs and cake orgs. A kebab org is like a kebab is the journey, you know, like a journey based teams and a cake is. You know, you’ve, got these layers…
Jesse: yeah.
John: …and it was kind of an interesting analogy that like, there’s a certain physics to the problem. So you get this design leader coming in with the aspiration and the mandate to create these consistencies. The strategy has changed. They’re thinking about the bank in terms of end-to-end experiences. They’re thinking about the consistency, but the architecture and the org design hasn’t caught up to the point where you could do that in any meaningful way, with teams working effectively to do that.
And so I think what I’m talking about is not a challenge against that idea, but I’m thinking like, say you were the CDO or whoever, and you did have these sort of pods of groups that had at least some sort of domain focus or maybe owned a journey or maybe owned, they’re big enough to do something meaningful. I mean, like with 50 people, you can do something pretty meaningful. I wonder whether that would give them more ability to actually act on their aspirations for consistency versus just talking about vision in theory.
Look to engineering
Peter: You just mentioned how strategy has changed, but the org structures haven’t necessarily caught up yet. And that’s leading me actually back to something you were saying, where you mentioned how engineering has been refactoring. This seems to be a trend that you are witnessing.
I’m not exposed to engineering and engineering teams much, so I don’t know what the trends are over there, but you mentioned how they were refactoring so they can be more customer responsive. Architecture using new techniques like event storming, STS, those types of things.
If this is a trend in engineering, what is that in response to? Where are we at in the arc of this? Is this happening industry-wide or is it like a crossing the chasm, only the leaders are doing this right now? Help unpack that a bit more.
John: it’s happening industry- wide. So, I would highly recommend any design leader to join Gene Kim’s community, which is the enterprise leadership community. He wrote an amazing book called Wiring The Winning Organization.
Gene’s community are the CTOs. These are the, engineering leaders of these organizations. What’s fascinating about that community is the level of dialogue. Now we’re like, again, we’re talking about. How can we reduce cognitive loads so that people could actually get anything done? Are we aligning our architecture around customer domains? The driver there is speed, but it is customer centricity to be able to do that.
Also, if you’re a design leader and you don’t know necessarily about the engineering side, if you get this wrong, or these things are incongruent, all the pressure to design everything up front or all the inability to experiment or all the inability to research and spend time in divergent thing is probably driven by the fact that nothing is happening because there are thousands of dependencies. So when there’s thousands of dependencies, the only way to get something done is to turn it into a big ass project.
Jesse: right.
John: And run it like an old school IT project. So a lot of the drivers for this in Gene Kim’s book, it’s, like, slowification is one of his things. Like, how can we actually slow down to be making better decisions? How can we have lower cognitive load? How can we have time for deep work? How can we do these things?
And I think that that’s, what’s driving that group and that community. It’s controversial, but I would say there were more that will impact the designer’s lives coming from the engineering stuff that’s happening at the moment, then it’s happening in the weirdo product world.
Product world’s always going to be a weird place. So I’ll give the why it’s so critical to be collaborating. If you don’t get designers involved in these activities to refactor the architecture and think about the need and the journeys and the customer needs, you’re going to come up with the engineer’s view of what the customer domain is.
For example, you imagine a company that’s trying to fix the problem of auto body shops. If you just tell an engineer, Hey, guess what? We need to rearchitect our architecture around the jobs of an auto body shop. What are they going to do? If you’re, I’m just being all, I’m being friendly to engineers here. Unless they do these activities like event storming, you know, the things are gonna go like, well, an auto body shop is a formula. You know, you’ve got to bring the car and you’ve got to fix it. They’re going to think about it in very mechanical terms. That’s what an auto body shop does.
John: If you as a design leader don’t get involved in that activity and say, no, let’s start considering the domain here. let’s start considering the journeys across an auto body shop, or who are you really serving? It’s actually parents instead of, you know, hot rod drivers or whatever. The critical thing is, if it takes three years to ship anything, you know, the world will have changed around you and all your great research and wonderful designs will be obsolete by the time that team gets that thing done. So I think that’s important.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: Is this a recognition that agile transformation failed? ‘Cause part of me is like, weren’t these engineers, the one who advocated agile transformations, which are causing the problems that we’re all on now trying to unwind?
John: No, no, no. so this is what folks need to understand is that you know, Agile circa mid two thousands, was a group of people who were not selling anything necessarily, right? They were literally like this podcast, right? These are the people, if you go back, there’s something called the C2wiki, which is this old, like agile wiki. If you see the depth of conversation on that thing about challenging the norms of what they’re doing, the first “agile is dead” post came out in 2005.
That community is way ahead of this. They’re 20 years ahead of that particular thing. And so folks like Martin Fowler and other folks who, you know, Kent Beck, kind of distance themselves from the, this agile industrial complex that’s happened. Design also has its industrial complex.
You know, it’s the CX industrial complex, just buy all these tools and you’ll be set. You know, you’ll be a great design leader, customer 360. You know, there’s all kinds of, everyone has an industrial complex to do stuff.
I think that the challenge was agile was local by design. It was about teams. Small teams doing work and that was a feature, not a bug. The idea of scale at the scale we deal at in these organizations was just a non-topic.
And that was part of what made it special. And so you see what I would say is these things like SAFe are almost institutionalized incoherence. You know, so, SAFe isn’t saying, by the way, you’re not going to be doing Safe in a year. Like if you keep refactoring what you’re doing, it’s, Oh, guess what? We’ve got 3000 people with tons of dependencies and somehow we have to get those 3000 people to ship anything in the next six months or the next three months to do things.
So I think that, like, Gene’s community these architects, these people are thinking in terms of socio-technical systems, are definitely at the right spot at the right time to deal with the challenge of the moment. And it’s not an indictment of the agile community to do it. It’s just, it was never really part of that problem thinking on that particular scale to do it.
Acquiring influence
Jesse: In my coaching work, I’ve worked with a lot of design leaders for whom it’s so hard just to know what to advocate for…
John: yeah.
Jesse: Where to push, what ideas to champion, what things to let go of, what is the actual path forward that is going to drive them toward fulfilling, you know, the vision that they have for what design can bring to organizations.
And so I’m wondering from your vantage point, acknowledging that we’re painting the entire industry with a very broad brush, what are the things that can help design leaders prioritize what they advocate for and where potentially they can turn to these fellow travelers for support?
John: Huge thought that comes from that is what if we apply the same principles that we do to our external customers, to our teams?
And that’s basically what, when I talked about thinking about in socio-technical systems and reducing cognitive load. So for example, if a design leader comes up and says, you know, I want it to feel effortless for our teams to work together, and for us to collaborate and for us to do these things yeah, that might not seem like it’s advocating for the customer out, but it’s advocating for the customers internally and that’s a common sphere.
I’m just thinking about things that are resonating in other communities…
Jesse: Yeah.
John: …that could then, like, up the influence. So for example, if the design leader’s saying like, “Wow, it’s so curious, like the architects they use words like flow or lowering cognitive load or the ease of release, ease of experimentation” or things. And yeah, you could go in and say, well, that doesn’t sound very user centric, I don’t care about your velocity thing.
But maybe the common ground is, wow, I would like it to be really easy and effortless for our teams to work together, to collaborate. The engineering side is sick of shipping things that don’t work because they have to maintain it. Ironically, the people who feel the pain, the worst are the engineering teams that have to to maintain the feature soup shipped over five years, none of it’s working and they have to maintain that stuff. So that would be number one kind of, that’s where the connection is. They hate maintaining all this stuff. So, that might be the engineering side. Like how can we make it easier to do those things?
I think that another area, sort of another vector of influence is: just humans and the pain that they’re experiencing. Think about, wow, you know, there’s a UX researcher and I don’t think she was even a trained service designer, she was wearing multiple hats, but came in with this great analysis of like what an outage feels like. What does it feel like for everyone involved, employees, customers, engineers, support? And I mean, CEO down to frontline person’s mind was blown.
Like, this is a real example, human pain, right? All the humans involved. So I think that’s always a great place. So I do think that there is some alignment there, especially even in the product folks where they look to design to really understand that and expose those insights and think about that. Like, where are people struggling and where is it really having an impact on humans? And I think that that always counts.
And then I think that the third element is you can go a long way by just deeply understanding the business situation that you’re in. And so I often ask people like, have you listened to the last earnings call? Do you understand the situation that the company is in at the moment?
And I think that that’s where it’s always that balance between the healthy tension model, you know, you pay attention to users or that happy customer thing I just said, and we’ll take care of the business. And, I’m beginning to think that what that model does is… Healthy tension works when conditions are generally healthy, but when the shit’s hitting the fan, healthy tension becomes highly unhealthy tension, right?
So I think that there’s that element of just deeply understanding the situation that the company is in and thinking strategically about, like, where will great design be a huge force multiplier for the company and for folks here and thinking on that strategic level. So I noticed a lot of design leaders say, well, I’ve been brought in, so I need an experience vision or I need an experience strategy.
And I keep waiting for them to say like, no, given this landscape and given that we’re in just from a business level, like these are the three levers where design as a discipline is going to create huge force multipliers for this business.
Jesse: RIght.
John: And a great example is, let’s say you’re selling into an enterprise environment and it’s highly complex multi-sided ecosystem of partners and other folks, and no PM is gonna really understand all of that and keep that in their head.
You know, you want to go into that meeting and say, We’re going to win as a company if we can understand the complex relationships between these three or four different parties and enterprise companies, including their partners and their customers outside the building.
The only toolkit to really understand that is the design toolkit. Like, we have a way, our capabilities, our design capabilities are purpose built. And that can be a huge differentiator for the company. It can lower our customer acquisition costs, our customer retention costs, all that kind of blah, blah, blah, business stuff. I’m, of course, I’m a PM and I’m saying that, so maybe design folks are like, ah, I’ve heard that whole shtick about the business impact. But I’m not talking about business impact of UX. I’m saying, what is your strategy for the design toolkit and how it’s going to create force multipliers for the business?
And you know, people talk about, what is this product-led or product model or whatever. I’m sick of all that, to be honest. I think we have a toolkit. The toolkit is design, data, and technology, and each of those is like its own toolkit, right? Like people in technology understand the technology toolkit. They understand what we’re going to be able to do with these ones and zeros and how we’re going to do it. Design is also a toolkit. You know, it’s like a toolkit of methods and techniques and all kinds of great things you can do. And the reason why I put data as the second one is that’s like information, right? Like ultimately, a lot of times we’re moving information. The data we have is really important and data is neither purely technical or purely design. It’s its own thing.
And so I tend to think that, like, what we’re doing is using this toolkit to create great outcomes for customers and create good outcomes for our business and our communities and things that we’re doing it. And labeling that all “product” seems disingenuous. That’s silly. We sell products.
You know, like, I don’t think it matters what we call these things internally. Just say, there’s a design toolkit, a technology toolkit, and a data toolkit. And how are we going to work through those together to create great things for the customers? And that usually gets them excited as they’re doing it.
When it feels like things are beyond your control
Peter: The sense I get from reading what you write, John, and the conversation we’ve had, is you tend to operate, and correct me if I’m wrong, at a waterline that’s like director down, right?
It’s about development. It’s about making stuff. And how can we get the people who are trying to make stuff to do a better job working together to make that stuff? The 30 to 50 people kind of solution, right, would be kind of director level down.
But when I think about the forces that have led to some of the challenges that we’re facing, right, like the corruption of agile, or the engineers hating having to maintain products that don’t make sense, oftentimes those things that they were required to build did not emerge from the group who was responsible for product development, but was put upon them by executive leadership.
And I’m wondering what you’re seeing in terms of, how do you engage this leadership suite? These executives who aren’t always good actors, right? There’s a lot going on at that level. There’s a lot of things they’re responding to in terms of the market or whatever. But where many of the problems that I see my clients addressing, is because of stuff that’s been pushed down on them from an even higher source that they can’t ignore.
John: I mean this is a tough one because, I mean, even VP, I mean, everyone’s feeling this fog and swirl and stuff right now. It just depends their perspective on it and a lot of it feels self-inflicted, but a lot of it is sort of macro factors.
I don’t know, I do talk to a lot of people and like, if the leaders just understood design or if we could just do this and do that, it would all be okay.
Like, in the United States, too, it’s like any problem, we just need to lead harder. If we just led harder, it would be better, I think people need to also think about their own sanity and their own sustainability in the business and realize that we’re in a fairly incoherent time at the moment. There is that quote from the Shane Parrish book, Clear Thinking, is, like, no unforced errors.
And I’ve extended that to think about, just don’t do things that have a low probability of working. And so what I think about that right now is there’s so much swirl and so much dissonance that like, take care of yourself. And for example, like, you could probably project yourself three to six months ahead and say, does this presentation really, really have a shot in hell of making any difference in the sort of current zeitgeist?
And the answer would be no, like five to 10 percent probability that’s going to work. That’s the thing that you can just save yourself the heartache at the moment, like, just conserve energy.
And so this is probably not what you want to hear, but I think what everyone can do at the moment now is just work within their sphere of control or locus of control. Conserve energy. Don’t gaslight yourself. Maybe try not to gaslight other people, and see how these things are going to pan out.
But there’s also an incredible opportunity now at the moment, this dissonance presents this opportunity, right? Because there’s new things. I mean, AI is a really good example of this where it’s just freaking everyone out. And there’s a lot of dissonance in the companies and people are throwing around money or not. And like, that might be an opportunity to think about a journey, for example, that could benefit from focus. And yes, just sprinkle a little AI on it, whatever you need to do, but this can be like a big opportunity.
So I think that we have to like, we have to surf the wave of incoherence and sustain your sanity and don’t make unforced errors.
Do the all pre mortem: It’s three years from now. And legitimately, is the idea that you went to the C-suite and told them yet again about what human-centered design is, that presentation that they’ve done. What’s the probability that’s going to make any difference compared to, oh, guess what? There was an AI hackathon and we like basically hacked it to bring in a lot of ideas about what customers are trying to do in here. And we won the hackathon with a group and we’re shipping that next week. Like probably the hackathon thing is a lot more coherent in the grand scheme of things.
So I don’t know, take care of yourself. Like we need you around. The idea that there’s 48 year old design leaders who have like stellar background and think they’ve just had their last job in tech is one of the saddest things in the world to me.
And I’ve seen that in multiple folks now at the moment, they’ve been simultaneously like aged out, which is ageism, but the market is not looking for them at the moment, the other companies are like, no, we’re, we’re back down to business. We’re trying to get the work done. We’re moving and grooving. We’re in the details. We don’t want that C-suite shaper at the moment. Like we need the person who’s going to get it done.
And so I think you almost have to like ride the moment. Like that’s the zeitgeist at the moment. And, stay sane to work, continue working. ‘Cause we need all these people with these vast amount of experience over these decades. I think that that’s very important.
Jesse: I’m curious in the face of all of this uncertainty and challenge what is there to hope for, do you think, for design and product leaders together and what they can create on the other side of this moment in the zeitgeist and this place of uncertainty?
John: Well, maybe it’s the North American in me talking, but I’m like, well, who knows? I mean, this, followed by working out of an impending recession, might be an opportunity to do things differently. This is a great point. So if you’re looking at right now and saying, Oh God, the business world is going to stay like this forever, just sort of very ruthless, not really systems thinking, you know, it’s like very simplistic. There’s a lot of justing going on. There’s a lot of like narrative soup at the moment. If you imagine that it will stay that way forever, this is a very depressing time.
But I think that there are possibilities here that this is like every bubble, like every phase shift, there’s a sort of this liminal period, which is really uncomfortable. And I think that we could project also some good outcomes to come to this. Like, I’m kind of excited by the idea of these 30 to 50 person pods, if that would happen, because I think that that maybe is the next level of doing this.
I was listening to a podcast recently from an engineering architect and they said, wow, I think we’ve learned some major, major lessons. What would it be like if we could get our teams collaborating a bit better to come outta this? I think that we’re in for a couple years of pain, but I mean, maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think someone like, Cameron Tonkinwise would say, we’re gonna design our future here, like design futures.
There’s all that complex stuff that I… I should have been a designer. Seriously, you guys have so much fun. You could be in all these different levels all at once. I think that there’s a future here that could be very exciting and interesting to work in.
And so I’m just holding out hope for that. And I’m just saying that don’t assume right now that everyone is a malicious actor. There’s just, again, I was talking about that VP who just imagines the world being very foggy.
I’ll leave people with this thought. Think about how many times in your life, you had to choose between staying in the wicked problem or just seeking the simple solution.
I remember packing up my car from New York City, done a lot of not so good things in that. And I’m like, that’s it. I’m out. Clean slate it. That’s kind of equivalent in many of these environments to the layoffs, right? It’s like, Oh my God, things have got so incoherent. We don’t know what’s happening. We’re not profitable. The economy’s changing. Ah, ah.
It’s not a wholly irrational thing to think, I don’t know, maybe if we just start with fewer people, something will work out. Have you ever been a designer and gone so deep into some design and been like, I’ve thought about all this wrong, let’s clean slate this thing and move it out.
So I would just say that the idea that it’s all malicious acting at the moment, again, maybe I’m just showing my sort of optimistic side, but I’m an optimistic pessimist. It’s really shitty right now, but I’m sort of optimistic that maybe it’s just murky for everyone. We’re just doing what we got to do and it’s going to work its way out.
Jesse: John, thank you so much.
John: Yeah. My, my pleasure. This is great. Yeah. this is a great podcast. This is awesome.
Jesse: Thank you.
Peter: Yeah. What’s the best place for folks to follow up with you?
John: Oh, okay. So right now, after the many years of 50,000 tweets on Twitter and over 2,200 images that I created for Twitter, I have them all in a file. Decamped from Twitter. Once it, once the logo changed, I could emotionally disconnect. It was fascinating. There must be a design lesson in that.
Jesse: The power of design. Yeah.
John: My dopamine was so set on the bird that once it became that other thing, I didn’t look at the tab again.
I’m just not, not on Twitter. And so LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is driving me crazy, but LinkedIn for now, or the newsletter is a good spot. You could, it probably, I think it has my email in it because somehow people figure out my email from the newsletter and then write me messages. So that’s the best spot.
Jesse: John, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
John: Yeah. My pleasure. Yeah. I admire both of your all’s work too. So this is a real honor to do this.
Peter: was fun.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.
48: Leading Design from IDEO to In-house (ft. Anne Pascual)
Jun 28, 2024
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: On today’s show, Anne Pascual, VP and Head of Design for European fashion e-commerce giant Zalando, joins us to talk about driving innovation in a mature product category, the differences between leading design for an agency and leading design in-house, and creating a culture of trust at scale.
Peter: Thank you so much for joining us. Just to start off, it would be great to hear what you’re up to. I know you’ve been at Zalando for a while, but tell us a little bit about your journey and how you’ve arrived at where you are.
Anne: Yes, I’m happy to do so. Great to be here. So yeah, I’ve been with Zalando now over seven years. My current role is SVP Product Design, Marketing and Content. I actually started working with Zalando already nine years ago. At the time I was an executive design director at IDEO. And had the pleasure to consult Zalando, building up an innovation team, and then work basically side by side with Zalando for two years until I made the decision, okay, I want to now join and build a team from the ground up.
So I started off building up the product design team, which at the time, there were only two handful of UX designers, quite low design maturity in general, but a thriving startup with incredible growth rates. And so the first couple of years, I really focused just on product design and matured the team to a decent size and build different leadership layers, processes.
Then I expanded my role to also look after brand marketing and content creation, which is super exciting. As those are adjacent fields, but also very different fields and job families. So I’ve been learning a lot about that, but really the reason for this role is that obviously in order to build the brand and a coherent, compelling customer experience, those parts are super important when you work for the largest fashion e- commerce player in Europe. These journeys are quite intertwined. How you discover the brand, how you look at an ad, how you think more in general about fashion, and then come to the app to explore the assortment through content, through imagery, that then gets produced either in-house or sourced from brands, creators, or third party vendors.
So yeah, my job is definitely super interesting and I keep learning every day.
Designing for fashion experiences
Jesse: Fashion is a really interesting category for design because design has, I think, a special impact in that category on brand perception and perception of value and luxury and things like that. And I’m curious about how that’s come into play as you’ve been building up a design function for a giant fashion ecommerce retailer.
Anne: Yeah. I mean, luckily I’m also personally very passionate about fashion. I think it’s a super interesting way to express identity, to communicate, to innovate. So I’ve been always kind of interested in fashion as an individual. And when I got to work with Zalando, it became clear that fashion is this really important vehicle for people to express themselves connect with others.
And it’s also a super interesting industry. Where you see on one hand, large established fashion brands that in the beginning didn’t have any real connection to digital channels. And that’s where Zalando came in to really become the first big player in Europe to help those brands get their assortment online and make this access to fashion very easy and convenient.
This is also what Zalando became known for in the first couple of years. And design at the beginning obviously played a role in making that experience very seamless and trustworthy because, you know, people still had to get their head around how do I buy a pair of shoes or dress online? And, I’m comfortable returning it if it doesn’t fit.
So initially design is really about making the functional aspects of e-com work and doing a decent job in representing fashion through the right image representation, the right product detail information, but obviously also the whole transactional flow of adding something to the checkout and cart.
Now, what’s been super interesting is that from moving beyond just designing for these functional aspects I believe that also our team became more and more important to provide strategic guidance on where the overall experience should evolve to. And especially over the last couple of months and years, we’ve seen how fashion desires a much more emotional experience than maybe we have been providing until now.
So yes, the transactional part runs super smooth and very successfully. But if you look around, fashion is very much related to inspiration, and these days there’s a lot of it happening on social media. So now the design team, not only the design team, is focusing a lot around how do you get across these elements around storytelling and entertainment. How do you make the experience around fashion a lot more emotional? And less transactional and functional.
So yes, you’re absolutely right. This is exactly kind of the interesting design opportunity here to, on one hand, fulfill those functional needs around the shopping experience and the product as the garment and piece of clothing. And on the other hand, to be able to convey the stories behind the products, the stories behind the brands, and also really connect with our customers on an emotional level. And that’s not always easy, but super, super interesting.
Innovating in e-commerce
Jesse: I think that for a lot of people who work outside e-commerce, but we are all, of course, e-commerce users, e-commerce as a category feels very mature, right? We’ve had now 30 years of e-commerce best practices to draw on. And it’s interesting. because it sounds like what’s happened for you and your team is the realization of the need to go beyond those best practices to reintroduce design innovation into a category that doesn’t really feel like it has a lot of room for innovation, and I’m curious about how that’s come about and how you’ve gone about it as a design team.
Anne: Yeah. I mean, you’re absolutely right. We’ve done extensive work to actually map all the jobs to be done along this purchase journey. And they’re quite clear around, you know, finding an item, making a decision, understanding what you’re getting, how it may actually fit compared to other items and your style and then receiving it, potentially returning it or, keeping it.
So you’re right. There’s not like that many new problems to discover. At the same time, there’s still some fundamental problems to be solved. One, for instance, being size and fit. So it’s still one of the biggest challenges in comparison to the physical world, to know if something will fit me. And we have a dedicated team that’s been working for over many years now to identify different ways to provide size advice and recommendation. But also help customers build a size profile on Zalando and, through their usage, get better recommendations.
Now on the innovation side, what’s interesting is obviously that this industry is under fundamental changes, or going through fundamental changes, and there’s a few of them that now have really informed also our most recent strategy update.
One is this generational shift that many of our future, near-term customers have been growing up now with the Internet and smartphones and for them shopping in itself is of very different nature than maybe for our generation. We’ve been kind of happy to browse a category tree and I would say more of a warehouse-like UX, but this new generation has very different expectations and is used to different ways to discover what they like.
The second big shift, and potential for innovation, it’s obviously also technology– Gen AI now introduces totally new ways to interact with customers. Being at conversational UIs, but also how you generate content, and that obviously is super, super exciting to see.
Then there is obviously also the environmental shift that we are all very aware of, and that requires the whole industry to adapt. Thinking about how to provide the right information about a garment, how to give customers better choices to understand the environmental footprint. And this is something that obviously not a single player, even a large one like ourselves, can design in isolation, but it’s about working closely with authorities, other fashion brands, to really establish new standards and new ways to do justice to these big challenges for the industry as such.
So, there is a lot to innovate around and that one particular part that I’m focusing on in my current role is around inspiration and entertainment. So how do you create a completely new experience for customers to discover fashion and lifestyle, and to spend quality time on Zalando to learn more about fashion, fashion brands and products, but also to enjoy different ways to participate and play a more active role in this experience.
So right now, as I said, shopping is very one directional and very transactional, but if you think about it, it’s by nature, a lot more social and a lot more entertaining than purely adding something to your cart. So we want to really crack content in commerce.
And yes, several social media platforms have tried to enter commerce, have failed. In other parts of the world, they’re extremely successful doing it. And we believe that we’re very well positioned to now conquer this next era and to make that seamless transition from discovery to purchase much, much easier than anywhere else.
Peter: This move, to go beyond transactions and towards experience, feels natural for a design organization, but often design organizations aren’t given that permission or freedom to explore. There’s too much needing to prove themselves that often happens.
And I’m wondering you know, you’ve been there for a while now. So what have you done to bolster your team’s credibility in these ways, so that they’re given opportunities to try things that might be, I don’t know if risky is right, but say experimental?
And how are you working with the other parts of the business, right? I’m assuming design isn’t, you know, doing these experiential experiments on their own. So what is that like in terms of your connection with others to realize these opportunities?
Anne: Yeah. By any means, the design team is not the only team to work on these ideas. And indeed it’s, much more of a cross-functional growth vector for many parts of the business that believe that there’s a new era and a new frontier to conquer for us.
The first 15 years of Zalando were very much focused on growth, and we know those sets of customer problems to solve for, and to be able to scale and to optimize for speed. And there, one of the biggest strengths of Zalando is probably the analytical part of being very data-centric.
But also being really good at, you know, the commercial parts of the business, the strong brand relationships and, by now, being the largest fulfillment network for fashion across Europe. So these are kind of the, I would say, business and operational backbone and infrastructure that has been built.
When it comes to the design team, I think we were very much focused on adding a layer of customer experience that would be very robust and very solid, so to say, and very scalable. And I think that, you know, helped scale the business specifically throughout the years of the pandemic. That were obviously we were very fortunate to go through as a business.
Establshing an innovation practice
Anne: And then always keeping an eye on what’s next. So this team that I initially led when I started working with Zalando, this innovation team always remained, not at the same size, but it’s been always part of the design team. To pick up topics that organizationally would not have yet a permanent team staffed or a clear mandate and mission defined so that we could pick up some of these signals and explore them further.
And that gave the design team permission to not be fixed or constrained by structural boundaries and keep exploring. But to be fair, I think this focus on experiences is something that was rather led by the vision of our co-founders who have shaped now the strategy for many years, and were also very convinced about this path.
And they now lean on senior leaders like myself and many others to really articulate: how do we realize this vision and what are the different capabilities that we need to have on the team? And one of them is product design and specifically also this element around storytelling and content.
And so I think it’s really a combination of having built a solid foundation, a mature team, and process working very closely with product management and engineering on eye level, being very much aware of the core business and also the affordances of running that day to day, but making room for innovation and investments in further growth areas.
So yeah, it’s probably been, you know, a couple of attempts to also really define what these new areas are. But I’m very happy to say that we have found a really good way to now structurally and systemically work through some of these opportunities.
Peter: And am I right in understanding that part of your design team is a like small innovation function?
Anne: Yes
Peter: Interesting. I would love to hear more about what the makeup of that is, because a lot of design orgs try to either have a strategy or innovation team, and it often doesn’t work because they’re not connected with the day to day.
And so they do these explorations and it’s green field and blue sky and very exciting. But then when you try to productize it, it doesn’t go anywhere. And so I’m wondering how you’ve been able to set this team up where it sounds like it’s actually gotten traction, and the sense making and explorations they’re doing do get brought into the broader fold.
Anne: The first advice is don’t call it the innovation team. You don’t do that team a favor because no matter what size a company is, I don’t think you will find someone who says, I don’t do innovation, right? So don’t make it like this exclusive elitist little team that gets to work just on the fun idea so to say.
And again, going back to how I started working with Zalando nine years ago, it was a team that was quite distanced from the core and was the satellite team that had minimal connection to core business. And that had some advantages. Blue sky. You don’t feel the pressure of the day to day. You really think you know, white piece of paper and you kind of have this freedom, right?
What I personally really started lacking though is exactly that thrive for impact because many, many of the ideas that the team came up with, they were not wrong, but it was really, really hard to implement them and to scale them. If you wouldn’t have access and integration to the rest of the team, which was also ultimately why I wanted to join because it was also quite frustrating after a while to feel like you had the right ideas, but no means to act upon them.
Now the studio team, as we call it, it’s nature probably shifted every year. Every year we’ll be sitting down and thinking, okay, what’s the most important thing we need to solve as Zalando? How can we help? What are the specific skills we have? What are specific topics we can do? What are specific projects we can do to really advance on the most important topics? And we never, from then on did that in isolation, but we partnered up with other parts of the business, in many and most cases with other product teams to really a learn about what are the biggest feasibility challenges to consider, but what are also the critical business inputs and requirements to understand better.
And then most importantly, how do we identify the future owners of these ideas that would basically be part of the process. And then really take on some of those ideas to implement them.
That worked in many, some instances. In many instances, it didn’t. But the team, again, it’s a small team of now, I would say, five to eight people. And the makeup would be design strategist with very strong actual hard skills. So the deliverables were things that could be implemented by an engineer. And even now the team is driving large part of the roadmap definition and the solution designs we’re working on. Why? Because there’s really no other way to make very complex ideas work across many different teams if you’re not literally embedded and feeling part of the rest of the team. So it’s sort of a ring fence team but really it works side by side with all the other product designers.
Jesse: I noticed in the way that you talk about it that design seems to have a pretty significant influence on, really, product strategy. And I’m curious about a couple of things. I’m curious, first of all, who is your boss? And secondly, what is your relationship to a product management or product oversight function?
Anne: Yeah. My current boss is the co-CEO and co founder Robert Gentz. And my most important peer is the SVP product management Andrew Watts who joined Zalando four years ago. And that was actually amazing, because with such a strong counterpart who also understands and appreciates the value of design, you can make a lot of things happen together.
And so I have to really mention and give credit also to the VP product design who now runs the product design team on a day to day basis, also former IDEO-er, so that I can also add a focus on additional topics like marketing and content creation. So just want to make that super clear that without Tim I couldn’t do my job.
And again, I think it’s this ability to get your hands dirty, get things done, work on prototypes in a short amount of time. But then also be able to sponsor very large, very complex implementation projects over a couple of months where even Tim, the VP product design, is the main sponsor although it could be a very technical project.
So. I think it’s about this deep understanding of both the business and the technology that allows design to play this influence. And preparing for this podcast, I was reflecting on the journey, you know, over the last 20 years to be in design. I think that’s been the most rewarding part. To feel like because I’m now so deeply embedded in the business and in the leadership, it’s so much more exciting to see what design can do versus maybe being part of a design only team, or maybe a much more design-focused organization where you’re just one of many. But in my case, I know it’s one perspective that is very unique and very different that the team brings. It’s highly embedded and integrated and can hopefully make a big difference in many, many different ways.
Design consulting vs design in-house
Peter: You mentioned your head of product design is also from IDEO. Your background is IDEO. I know you’ve been at Zalando for a while now, but you also spent a long time at IDEO. Jesse and I spent a long time at Adaptive Path, so we understand the design consulting space.
I’m curious, what your experience was, shifting from operating within a design agency, design consultancy, and then coming in house. And I suspect you have motivations similar to me, which is to try to bring a lot of the good things about design agencies and how they work and the quality they drive.
But you also recognize you can’t just put an agency inside of a company and call it a day, right? There’s a different way of working. So what has that transition been like for you? What have you done to maintain whatever ideals you might have had in an environment like IDEO, but within an enterprise like Zalando?
Anne: Yeah. I mean, there’s definitely a lot of things that I still apply day to day that I learned throughout my time at IDEO. One is how to deal with ambiguity. The fact that you are being tasked to solve something you don’t really understand fully, but you’re able to grasp and work through and decompose is something super, super important.
Even when you work over a couple of years in an established environment, and also your role becomes more and more familiar. I think this ability to also seek ambiguity and understand where there is an opportunity is something super, super valuable that I still, use from back in the days.
The second aspect that I also still keep using and that, you know, comes from having worked in that environment is tangibility.
The need to come up very quickly with very concrete ideas because you have limited time to get across, you know, what you want to get across in terms of design opportunities and being able to make that tangible and through that. great conviction and believe on the other side that this is where we could go. This is where we could take the product or the service.
That’s something extremely powerful and much more effective than doing just a PowerPoint or having yet another meeting or a discussion.
So, and then the third aspect that I also still appreciate thinking back about that time is resilience overall, around changes in scope, changes in timeline, changes in deliverable, changes in team members, changes in stakeholders. Like you never know what to expect when you work on a project or program on the consulting side. And that really sharpens your tools, but also your communication skills and also your ability to collaborate. So those were the things that I really appreciated and took with me.
Now shifting into the more corporate world, the few things I had to learn there was, in general, how to deal with complexity, because, you know, working in a small project team, you know your four other peers and you work with them day to day. And that’s it. In order to get something done in a large company, you have to understand how you navigate complexity organizationally, technically, business-wise.
And there’s a lot more inputs you have to take into consideration. The second part that I really love and that is obviously not always the easiest: leadership. The amount of decisions you need to make, the amount of change you need to manage, the amount of translation around what the strategy is, what the roadmap is, that requires a lot of leadership that I don’t think I ever had to apply when I was on the consulting side.
And the third thing I really had to build muscles around is in general execution. So being quick in decision making, being clear around certain priorities thinking through what could go wrong. thinking through who needed to be involved, what needed to be true, what could help the other side.
So execution is just something that yeah, requires very different muscles than if you only work on the strategy side.
Jesse: I wanted to ask a similar question and maybe you don’t actually have any additional answers here. But I’m also curious about because you spent such a long time as a consultant. You were at IDEO for more than a decade. What ideas about the practice you might’ve had to unlearn or leave behind as you were transitioning out of consulting into the in house environment?
Anne: I mean, I would say that what’s true in particular for IDEO and what IDEO became famous for was a lot of the qualitative insights that, don’t get me wrong, are still super, super important. But I think now looking at how important data is and how important KPIs are, I think it’s less about unlearning, but just learning full steam and continuously around that part.
Unlearning, maybe it’s also this endless amount of opportunity where, when you work in an organization and in a business, resources are not endless, and there’s business objectives. So at some point it’s about, you know, really assessing what is the most important thing to focus on. Even though I remain super curious and I remain to see lots of different new things, it’s also important to provide stability, continuity, and focus to the teams.
The other thing I think I had to unlearn is that as a consultant, you’re very much trained to listen to the stakeholder and to kind of help align the different perspectives, but being in a leadership role myself, it’s even more important for me to have a perspective and for me to be able to, you know, debate and disagree. And that’s not always what we’re used to, because we start with this empathy for every different perspectives in the room. And we try to, you know, really listen to everyone as a consultant. So that’s also something that I think I have to unlearn a bit.
Peter: As you were reflecting, I found myself thinking about how this podcast is about design leadership and navigating the space of design leadership. And I’m curious what you found to be the difference in design leadership as a concept within IDEO where it sounds like you were like an executive creative director, at least quite senior, and now as a VP and then SVP of design in house. Does design leadership mean different things in these different environments or have you found it to be the same thing?
Anne: Yeah, 100%. I would say at IDEO, being a design leader meant, in this particular role of a design director, to raise the bar, right? To raise the bar on the thinking, on the ideas, on the quality of the work, and to push the team to think bigger.
Now internally design leadership is more about accountability. What is my contribution? What is my team’s contribution to the overall business? And are we doing the best we can to accelerate, to improve, to optimize what we are doing? So that is a very different way I would define the aspects of design leadership in both instances.
Scaling everything (including yourself)
Jesse: One of the challenges that you touched on, as you were talking about making the transition from the consulting role to the in house role, was just simply the challenge of scale, bigger team, bigger problems, you know, bigger stakeholder community, just everything operating at a larger scale, everything operating at, as you pointed out, much too large a scale for you personally to engage across everything.
And I’m curious your thoughts on strategically scaling your team and especially strategically scaling yourself as a leader and how you’ve gone about that.
Anne: Yeah, that is a really good one. I would start with maybe something surprising which is culture. I think from the beginning, because I was used to such a strong culture coming from IDEO, it was very important to build a team that felt more like a community and not in the soft type of way, but more in terms of the level of trust and safety, psychological safety, and also the level of collaboration and support the team would give each other, because that allowed everyone to raise the bar, to move faster and to really go for the best outcomes.
On top of that, it was also about setting the right standards who to hire. So how do you run hiring interviews? How do you assess the seniority of a designer? And then how do you also keep up with type of talent that you are looking for, which was something super, super important.
Then obviously as a third thing, processes, to kind of have the right rituals in place, design reviews weekly check ins, all of that.
And then fourth, luckily, I think we saw a lot of great things happening on the effectiveness of designs teams and the scalability of them through the introduction of design systems, or even design operations, and then also just the rise of new design tools that would make it a lot easier to collaborate as a design team, with tools like Figma, Miro.
And then, yeah, being lucky to have a really great leadership team that is able to really drive things forward, that share your vision. That are equally equipped with stakeholder management skills and great craft. And that can, you know, run on their own and identify with a bigger vision.
Jesse: One of the issues with building up a trustworthy team in this way is getting the business to trust that team especially as, you know, you have a mandate that extends beyond things that are readily measured. You have some somewhat more qualitative things that you and your team are on the hook for. You can develop a certain amount of personal trust with your counterparts at the level in the organization that you are.
But again, you can’t be everywhere and you can’t be in all the meetings and you can’t be engaged with every stakeholder. So I’m curious about how do you support your team in helping them develop trusting relationships that enable them to deliver on these things for their stakeholders.
Anne: Yeah. I mean, I also want to make sure it doesn’t sound like everything is easy and always going smoothly, but again, we’ve been lucky to, as I said, build up maturity of the design team and also the product and tech organization over many years. And we have had very strong tech leaders who have had many years of experience, for instance, at Amazon and brought a lot of great things to the team that allowed everyone to work better together and understand, okay, what are we trying to do here?
So we, for instance, write PR FAQs. We go through the solution design phase, and then the execution phase. And so we’ve been spending a lot of time a couple years ago to really define what is each other’s roles at what step of the process and who is at which time leading or following. And it’s been very clear that, for instance, in this very initial phase, this PR FAQ phase, product is leading and design is supporting. Design is supporting by helping with ideas and research and insights and sketches, maybe some initial visuals but really giving, you know, the front seat to product.
On the second stage, solution design, it’s where design picks up the baton and takes the lead and really going really, really deep on the user journeys and the different features and, you know, how things would come together.
And then the third stage where engineering is leading and driving the execution. We also introduced some really great project management that would establish great drum beats, great documentation. We invested quite a lot in written documentation which, you know, helped everyone to have the same understanding of certain problems we were trying to solve, created a lot of transparency that maybe otherwise gets a bit lost when you only do it in workshops.
Maybe during the pandemic, we did that a little bit too much and we had to rebuild trust more from a, you know, personal interaction perspective over the last two years. But even the fact that when you come to the floor and the building where the design team sits, like they are embedded then across different parts of the buildings to really work side by side with the other product teams.
Yes, they have a home base, but it’s this commitment to the respective areas that they work with day to day that there’s no idea of like, oh, this is, you know, this other team. But it’s really about touching different parts of the experience together with product and engineering.
Peter: I’ve been doing some work with European clients, one in particular where it’s totally remote.
And one of the challenges that we’re talking about is how do we collaborate better remotely, asynchronously? And I’m wondering how you guys are working, collaborating. Are you remote? Are you hybrid? Are you part time hybrid? What have you found or where have you guys landed in terms of what’s working well to support the kind of collaboration that you want to do?
Anne: Yeah, we have a hybrid model in place. And that means split of 40, 60 if I’m not mistaken. So 40 percent onsite and 60% remote, with lots of flexibility built in when exactly you are on site which is defined by what we call team charters so that the different leaders can decide, Hey, what’s the mode that works for us?
It could be, you know, we all come for specific dates, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is a very almost common one. The other ones say, let’s come together during that week and spend the whole time together. So it’s flexible and it works I think for the design team and again, you know, there’s obviously lots and lots of work happening that I’m not directly involved in, but we have, for instance, what we call the weekly design review, and that is encouraged to take place in person. Why, because it’s a lot easier to look at designs and look for, you know, cues and like body language around like, Hey how would that work?
We also try to print out more of the work again, because it’s so much easier when you have things up on the wall and can point at things. So, you know, the old school way kind of and then obviously we still have people sometimes on the screen that dial in from other tech hubs and where we can seamlessly have them look at the Figma file and equally leave comments to ensure there’s an inclusive way to moderate and host the session. And then, I think in general, outside of these important rituals, it’s really about having a feeling for how the community is doing, how much energy there is, and being able to bump into each other and grab lunch together. I mean, all these important things that we missed so dearly during the pandemic, but that make every team work much, much better together.
Peter: Kind of related. So you mentioned teams are the ones deciding when they come together. And I’m making an assumption here that those are product teams, cross functional teams. But then you mentioned the design review and something that I see particularly scaled design organizations have challenges with, particularly the designers within those organizations, is the degree to which they are beholden to their cross functional product team, their squad or pillar or whatever it ends up being called in their organization, and their functional design team, and what that design team is trying to get done. And those things are not always aligned, right? There’s different modes of working, might be different OKRs.
How are you helping the people in your org navigate what can sometimes feel like being beholden to two masters, their product team masters and their design team masters?
Anne: Yeah, I have to admit, I haven’t heard that many issues around that. Maybe… yeah, because I’m not aware and they still exist. That could be, but also because this model has been in place almost from the start. And it hasn’t been questioned and designers report into design and we have design leadership levels from what we call team leads, heads, directors, and VPs up to my role, really having a level of cohesion around the performance, the communication, the processes, but have equally this eye-level peer on the other side. And I think that helps a lot around escalations or dealing with friction or agreeing on Hey, maybe we should, you know, rethink this.
Peter: When you say the other side, is that primarily product? Is it like, so,a design VP has a product VP, and a design director has product director and it’s one to one?
Coming together as a product design team
Anne: Correct. Exactly. Yeah. And obviously, they have rituals as well, but then we have these moments where we come together as a, product design team. One thing actually that is super, super nice, I haven’t been in a long time, but if I go, I’m so inspired. It’s what we call the Campfire where we bring actually all product design from the entire company together.
So if I refer to the product design team until now, it’s basically everyone who works on the B2C side on the fashion app, but then we also have designers in B2B, we have an off price business and so there’s another, 50 people, 60 people joining on top of the big design team we have in B2C to really bring all their work together once a month.
So you get within an hour, a snapshot of what everybody is working on. And that’s super, super nice because you really appreciate the diversity of the work, the diversity of the designers but also through that, you achieve a lot of helpful rotation of ideas and people. So I think one reason why we’ve become such an attractive employer for design is that you have people to learn from and you have options and opportunities to grow into different roles and to work on different topics along the way.
So that’s been super, super nice and very effective to keep the work at a high level.
Jesse: It seems to me that so many of these scaling challenges come back to having a leadership team underneath you that you can invest a lot of trust in so that you can turn your back on so many of these different aspects of it and focus on these higher level strategic priorities. And I’m curious about what you do to stay aligned with the folks who are directly underneath you, who are overseeing all of these aspects of design on behalf of the business.
Anne: Yeah, I mean, maybe one thing to call out is that while I’m able to delegate a lot, and there’s a lot more work that other leaders are driving, there’s definitely a couple of topics where I’m deeply, deeply involved myself and where I do a lot of the actual thinking and the actual, you know, alignment myself.
So I think that is actually super important to stay grounded. And so up to the executive level, we’re all sponsors of projects and goals that require a lot of leadership attention day to day and being into the details. We have this leadership principle called fly high, dive deep. So being able to still keep in touch with the design details and the design decisions is super, super important.
And by now I may, you know, include what does that mean for marketing? What does it mean for content or what does it mean in general for some of our business priorities and goals that I think is super, super important to stay aligned because I could see how, if I wouldn’t do that, I would just lose touch and I would just, you know, come up with unreasonable ideas and unreasonable requests.
And I think this way, I think it’s much more natural to walk up to any design leader and, you know, work together on something as concrete as, you know, the next launch, or the next reduction of a customer defect that we discuss for instance, every week as part of a broader leadership group.
So alignment can only happen, I think, through the actual work and on the strategic level where the team needs to be super, super clear and as aligned with the rest of the organization, including commercial teams, including other parts to say we all understand where we are going, and we all use the same language. And we all contribute to some of those milestones that we define, for instance, on a yearly basis. I think that is the important ingredient of alignment.
Taking initiative
Jesse: You mentioned that part of staying aligned with the team for you is having some things that you personally own and some initiatives that you personally drive. Are you generating your own initiatives for yourself? Or is this more a matter of assessing what the business is asking for and picking the things that you think are the places where you particularly are able to dig in and if so, what are your criteria?
Anne: Yeah. I mean, I was just imagining how I would wake up one morning and say like, Oh, let’s start this initiative. I don’t think that would work. But back to, you know, picking up on the understanding of where the business is going, where the opportunity lies.
So for instance, also by meeting with brand partners, understanding what they’re trying to achieve. And then being able to also take a request from the management board that says, Hey, can you please help define, explore what this opportunity could be like or, you know, here’s a couple of important signals we’re getting on the main business KPIs. How can we tackle it, be it customer life cycle management or ad revenue.
We have a retail marketing business to support. So those are the things that I pick up and that I work together with other leaders on, and then with staffing teams that are fully dedicated to making things happen.
I do have obviously things that I then personally drive that maybe initially didn’t have an owner, but that I feel like I should do. So for instance two years ago, we acquired a media company called Highsnobiety. They’re globally known for identifying fashion trends and they’re a publisher themselves. And we started working with them just because they have these storytelling capabilities that we believe we have been missing and that we should invest further on and going through this process was in itself, super interesting.
But then working with them side by side to identify what could be initiatives that help us to really develop those muscles. And that’s how end of last year we launched what we call Stories on Zalando. It’s the first content-first experience in our app, where we developed a content strategy and content franchises that we would scale very quickly within weeks to be able to publish stories three to five times per week. And that had to bring together lots of different teams across the business in content creation, and marketing, product design, but also obviously on the engineering side, to make happen. And obviously also on the assortment side, because we often talk about specific products and specific brands in those stories.
So working with colleagues on the fashion proposition side, as we call it, was super, super essential. And I, devoted a lot of time to make that happen. And for me to be able to, together with other design leaders, to think about what are the subtle paradigm shifts we want to introduce, like a video, short video format. And being able to anticipate what would that do for this transactional journey to bring in these stories. That was something that I was personally and have been, and still are, super personally passionate about. And quite, quite involved.
Peter: You’ve mentioned how you oversee not just product design, but brand and marketing design. And then you talk about content. I’m curious if anyone else besides maybe the CEO has the same breadth of purview that you do from true end-to-end customer experience.
I found when I was running design at Groupon, because I also had the brand design team, I knew more about what was going on across the experience than… my boss was the SVP of product, because they were limited in scope to that product experience. So I’m wondering if you really are like unique within Zalando, apart from maybe the CEO, in terms of really seeing an end-to-end experience that no one other, even executive might be aware of, and what are the implications of that breadth of perspective?
Anne: I don’t think it’s so unique to my role and mandate. If you think about other functional leaders like the SVP product management. Runs the entire e-com platform end to end. So, you know, knowing exactly how product data, customer data, checkout, all of that works is huge and important for all parts of the business.
The commerce team as we call it is really, really big because it includes all the partner services. So we also have a partner program, marketplace business that allows us to broaden our assortment that is massive in terms of technology and operations. In that remit is also the retail marketing organization, which is another big, big business unit.
So, I honestly don’t think necessarily that my role is that unusual, but I agree very broad when it comes to how to shape the customer perception. What makes the role still interesting, at times challenging, is that it’s not given that you have end to end control on all these different parts because obviously as a function, you receive a lot of the requirements from the different markets from the different parts of the commerce team.
And so it’s, I believe, very different from, for instance, an organization like Airbnb, where you find a lot more centralization, simplify some of the decision making right away. And then the other aspect that is important to keep in mind is that the experience we built is very dynamic in terms of the different business steerings that you have in place.
So it’s a seasonal business where you have a lot of commercial activations happening. You also have the whole element of personalization, being able to cater to almost 50 million customers individually.
So even if it sounds like, you know, there’s a lot of control and end to end influence, yes, and at the same time, there’s only as much that each individual is immediately influencing right away. That said, what’s super, super important in what we call mission and mandates is that each leader at a given seniority is very clear in terms of what are the KPIs you’re accountable for and how do you, even if lots of things are not in your control, are the ambassador of this KPI.
So that if something goes wrong, something develops differently, you can be the one who chases the root cause. So I think that’s also something that makes, I think, the whole work of working with other teams so important because ownership is super, super important to move the business forward.
Peter: What, what, what are, what are your KPIs?
KPIs for design
Anne: Yeah. So one part of my team is actually a tech team that runs our home, our launch screen when you open the app. So understanding how many customers open the app and spend time on Zalando. Right now we focus more on the views of these customers, but then also how quickly do we engage them? That is super, super important.
Then it’s the amount of content creators that we have on the platform. So here you have the influencers, but it’s also, for instance, how many brand shops do we have where brands upload their own content. Some of those placements on home are sponsored placements. So understanding how much ad revenue is generated through those placements.
And then on the product detail page, it’s obviously, you know, the amount of product imagery or time to online when you look at individual SKUs per product which is also an important KPIs. So those are a few when it comes to the app experience.
And then on brand, it’s obviously brand awareness, consideration. Brand loyalty yeah, things like this. So it’s slow and fast moving KPIs that I’m accountable for.
Peter: You mentioned influencers and something I’m finding myself wondering about your organization is how you think about your user types, to be as kind of generic as possible. Just, it sounds like shoppers, there’s influencers, there might be merchants, maybe there’s others that I’m, there might be internal people.
Like what are the audiences that you are responsible for delivering these experiences to? And how do you navigate, kind of, that ecosystem of people and their various wants and how they come together in this platform.
Anne: I mean, I would distinguish maybe two aspects. One is like, who do you have in mind when you design experiences? So more on the kind of behavioral user types. And then obviously you have on the actual marketing more the definition around who do you target and what are the customers cohorts that you want to develop further, which is mainly defined by commercial teams in the different markets.
And then you’re right. There’s this dimension of like, who are the actual people using technology or interacting with it. And you already mentioned a couple. There’s on one hand the brand partners that can upload content. Then you have creators who we hire to submit and then there are internal teams, obviously.
So it’s definitely already quite a broad landscape, but I could also see how over the next coming years, it could even further broaden. Meaning, you know, what if we would allow our customers to create, upload content which is not something we’re immediately working on, but that could become interesting maybe over a couple of years.
Jesse: What are you most curious about right now as a design leader?
Anne: I’m most curious about this idea about speed, speed and quality. So we talk about this internally because when you reach a certain size and you run a very large business, then obviously things get more complex, et cetera.
But if you go back to, you know, how can we accelerate our velocity and decision making, but then on the other hand, how do you also not jeopardize quality, quality in the experience or quality in the decision making? I think that’s a super interesting tension, and I’m super curious how I can get good at this, but also how, obviously, collectively we get good at this.
And even beyond being part of an individual organization or company, I think it’s something super interesting on a societal level where I think we all got used to things moving so quickly, that it’s sometimes already overwhelming and we overlook, you know, what is the important part where we should slow down or where we should revisit and hold onto.
So I think it’s one that is probably important, not just as a professional, but just in general, as a human being.
Jesse: Anne thank you so much. This has been great.
Peter: Thank you.
Anne: My pleasure.
Jesse: Where can people find you on the internet?
Anne: I guess on the new Facebook called LinkedIn. Yeah in Berlin and on LinkedIn and obviously through the Zalando app. So if you want to see what I’m up to, please download Zalando and become a customer in Europe.
Peter: Excellent. I’ll do that when I’m in Europe.
Take care.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.
47: Seeking Balance (ft. Koji Pereira)
May 18, 2024
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: On today’s show, Koji Pereira, Chief Design Officer for Brazilian fintech Neon, joins us to talk about his career journey from Brazil to Silicon Valley and back again, finding the balance between speed and quality, and strategies for making the design team and the design process more inclusive.
Peter: Thank you so much for joining us, Koji. I think where we’d like to begin is just to get a better sense of your story. Who are you? What are you about? Where are you from? And what are you up to?
Koji: Awesome. Well, first of all, thanks a lot for having me, Peter and Jesse. I’m very happy to be here. I’ve been following the podcast and you’re doing a great work. Thanks for that.
Koji’s story
Koji: I am originally from Brazil and I think my story began on design with graphic design. I was on graphic design for a pretty short period of time, starting doing posters for bands. I had my own band back in 1997 and then the internet was becoming a thing in Brazil and, you know, I was an early adopter. Before, I had a BBS, a bulletin board system where people could, you know, call my BBS and access pretty much like a website on DOS, which was crazy.
So when the internet began, I was like, this is interesting, because to me, there’s a potential here for design to become something interactive and something with motion. And, you know, I started doing websites for companies and small businesses. And then around the year 2000, I joined another person who was building this website where people could order food from, and it was desktop internet back then, people would open a website, turn on their computers, that would take a lot of time anyways, then dial up to internet connection, open a website, and then, let’s say, 15 minutes later, they have a website where they can order pizza from.
And I had a server connected to a facsimile. And we had a software that would send orders to the pizza place. Then the pizza place would deliver the pizza, they would get the money in cash. And that was our business model.
Basically we were like a white list or yellow list for pizza. And we had this small service that run in the background. So that was my first experience with web design back then. And because of this company, we ended up selling this and I joined Google to work on Orkut. I don’t know if you all recall was the biggest
Peter: I’ve met Orkut.
Koji: You met Orkut? Okay, cool. So you’re very familiar, but for people who don’t know, Orkut was the biggest social network in Brazil and India. In U.S. I think was most of the time the second, losing for MySpace at some point and for, I think, was Friendster before.
Jesse: Yeah.
Koji: And of course, like Google was a totally different world for me back then.
Working in tech
Koji: The typical corporate job was very different from what it is today, and especially in Brazil, even more different. And for me coming from like a very, you know, half neighborhood in Brazil and going to this world, working at Google and even in Brazil was so, so different for me and kind of opened my eye to a lot of different stuff. So I think that’s pretty much how I began back in my career with product design, UX slash web design at that time.
Peter: Tell us a little bit about kind of how you’ve evolved as a designer and design leader.
Koji: Right. So I stay at Google for almost 10 years, and the reason why I stay 10 years is because with Google you have so many options, right? Like you can move from one team to another team, and there’s always these smaller teams trying to build something new. And those are the teams that I liked the most.
You know, I was never really excited about the teams that were kind of, you know, keeping things going in a bigger scale. I was more interested on, like, teams are building something from scratch, zero to one products. And the last team that I joined was a team that I enjoyed the most, which was Next Billion Users.
And to me, it was full circle because we’re trying to create products for emerging markets. Back then, we did a lot of research in India, Brazil, China, too, and Africa, and we build a product called Files. And what Files did was help people to free up space in their phones by looking at their storage.
And for us here in the U.S. might not be an issue, but when you look at the population in the world, like 80 percent of people are using, at that time, Android. Most of the people are in phones that are under 300 dollars. So those are phones that, after three months, If you use WhatsApp a lot, then your phone is fully blocked with things and there’s nothing you can do with that.
So with that team, we build Files and we help people to free up space and became like a one billion users app; from zero to one billion. And it became the default file manager for Android right?
So that’s when I decided to, okay, like now I built something from scratch at Google, became very successful, I want to go and work in totally different fields, smaller companies. And that’s when I joined Lyft and Lyft to me was this interesting mix of service design, product design. You know, it’s a marketplace with multiple types of users. You have the social interaction and the, real life business model going on behind that, which is something that Google was not really working at the space that Lyft is right now.
And that’s where I learned a lot because when I joined Lyft, I saw that the way that Lyft thought about design was super, super different from the way we thought about design at Google.
And then like I joined Twitter later, it was all about coming back to social and working in a product that was more established in the social space. And that was pretty interesting area to be for me because I was able to use some of the learnings that I had back at Google, but in a product that was already kind of established and have more users in the end of the day.
To where I am now, where again, I feel like it’s all the circles that come back and forth now working for Brazil remotely here in US. It’s a company called Neon. So it’s a fintech banking company, which for many might not be known, but banking and digital banking in Brazil is one of the biggest space for fintech companies in the world right now.
Jesse: So I’d like to rewind to that moment early in your career where you got started doing web design for the Brazilian market and then Orkut, you find yourself thrown into a different context, different kinds of design challenges. And especially designing for a much broader and more diverse audience than you had before.
And then I notice as you were talking that this seems to be this recurring theme for you of trying to address these very large scale challenges for very large scale audiences that are potentially very different from you. And I’m curious about how that’s informed how you approach design as a design leader.
Koji: That’s a great question. So Google was not interested in building something specific to one group of users. When we talk about like, what’s your target? At Google, we’re pretty much saying like, our target is everyone.
We want to build something that works for everyone. And in one hand, this is almost, you know, impossible because, of course, like, in the world, you have so many different people and different cultures and different interests and different even perception of aesthetics, in a sense of visual design.
On the other hand, if you build something that really tackles a pain very well in one place, and then you’re able to figure out how to adapt that solution to other realities, then you’re likely be able to build something that will be more successful than if you start building something that are meant to be for everyone from the beginning.
If you think about even Facebook, right? Like when they started, they started as a niche kind of product for universities and then they slowly grow to what they are now. So, same thing for Google. I felt like when the products that I worked on where we try to really build something huge from the beginning, some of them, I don’t think they really worked, because we’re trying to embrace the world from the beginning.
Whereas for Files, because, and I will take WhatsApp as an example too. Because WhatsApp started with a very specific pain in a very specific market that helped them to grow and scale to other markets because they’re kind of solving a pain that only existed in certain parts of the world with certain parts of users, where they lack, you know, very fast connection or the connection was laggy.
And because of that, they built a very good messaging system that works pretty well, even if you’re hiking in Yosemite and the internet is not working. Whenever you go back and you have your connection back, all the messages are keyed and they will be sent. Right now, all the messaging apps, most of the messaging apps do this type of resilience over laggy connection, but back, I don’t know, three years ago, Whatsapp was a pioneer on that. And, you know, pretty much every single messaging app kind of followed that lead.
Company-specific design
Jesse: Another thing that you touched on in here is the difference that you noticed in the way that different companies think about and approach design. There’s a strong sense, I think, among people who work outside the Valley, that the Valley is really kind of strongly unified in its approach to product development, and they’re sometimes surprised to hear that Lyft might have a different approach to design than Google has.
What did you notice there?
Koji: So many things, but I’ll start with craft, the focus on craft, quality, versus speed or the balance between speed and quality. I think that changes from company to company and for certain companies, it’s part of the DNA, right?
Like if you think about Apple, I’m pretty sure that Apple is not afraid of delaying things, even to an extent of being the second or the third in market. We see that with Vision Pro. In a way for them to be able to then work in something that is more finished and more refined.
And you see companies like Lyft and Airbnb that maybe sits in the mid range of the scale. I think Figma probably will also fall in that category where they, have a better balance of quality versus speeds of the market. And then you have other companies which are more all about speed and it’s not that it’s wrong. You see that many of those companies are very successful and they’re able to evolve their designs over time, whenever they launch the MVP, whatever, but it just becomes part of their DNA, right? Like it’s hard to change that once established, once it’s like, two or three years old of practice.
And to me, that’s the trickiest part when I join as a design leader in an organization, like, what is our way of doing design? What is quality and what is good design for us? And of course, like, that to me is connected to all the, umbrellas of design. It’s not just visual. It’s not just interaction. It’s also research. It’s also, how do we make decisions. It’s also, how do we operate with other teams. It’s also, how do we connect the go-to-market strategies to the design strategy. Like, what are the things that we care about? What are the things that we are open to make tradeoffs in terms of speed, to make sure that we deliver something that it’s on the bar that we believe our company is set to do.
Peter: To the question Jesse asked earlier, there’s this assumption of kind of a monolith when it comes to Silicon Valley and tech companies. And clearly they’re different.
But also I find that a lot of designers and design leaders want to think that the businesses they work for are rational, right? And they’re making decisions based on some clear framework, rational framework, that’s driven by some concept of business value. But, if that were true, then every company, well, maybe not, but I was about to say, maybe every company would work the same, right?
‘Cause if there is a rational way of running a business, then everyone should approach that business similarly in order to maximize their returns. But clearly that’s not how it works. And so I’m wondering, kind of, what you’ve unpacked in terms of these different corporate cultures, different environments, different contexts that suggest where these bars are set for design and craft and quality.
Make sure it’s a fit
Koji: Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s an amazing question. It’s, first of all, it’s very hard. And that’s something that when I mentor, other people, I tend to say, like, the most important thing for you when you’re interviewing is to find the right place for you. It’s not just, you know, getting hired in the end of the day.
One, because you can become miserable very quickly. Second, because if it’s not a fit, then, it won’t work for you, mid, long term. So, yeah. There is a few things that I learned so far.
First of all, you can’t like really think that the CEO won’t make a difference, right? Like a CEO makes a lot of difference. Like how does CEO think about design makes a lot of difference. Does the CEO really care about quality in the way that you care about. I think that will be the first fit question to me. And maybe you’re not, you know, responding to the CEO directly, but if you’re just talking with the company, you can just go to YouTube and see some interviews and podcasts with that CEO. And that will give you a lot of hints of how the CEO thinks about quality, and I would not even say design, but quality in general.
Then the second thing to me is just looking at the product itself, because when you look at the product, I think that’s a classical thing, right, at this point already where you can look at a product and say this is created by, you know, this team and this is created by another team and those teams clearly don’t talk to each other, right?
Like that’s one thing that you can clearly identify when you look at a product.
Second thing is, you know, is this product really run in a way that things are being pushed to promote things, promote specific areas or specific features. We all remember, like, the web news portals back then where they have a lot of pop ups and ads. I think those are things that you can really identify when you look at a product where teams are kind of just pushing their products in the whatever home screen or the most important part of the UI versus a product that really coordinate those things and create something that is a scalable. So those teams get their exposure, but at the same time it’s not disjoint, right?
So I would say CEO and the product will tell you a lot about those things. There’s other things that I kind of feel that maybe give you the hint sometimes, but there’s so many times that I got it wrong by looking at, I don’t know, let’s say the principles, right? Like, which is beautiful to see, but then how many times you see like a company that has perfect principles or even design principles and then you join or you talk with someone who works there and they say like, Oh, no, this is just to put in a wall. That’s not real.
Jesse: This issue of speed versus quality is one that I hear a lot about from my coaching clients and in a lot of cases, the way that they frame this challenge is as one of culture change. That they find themselves in a culture that tips that balance toward speed and away from quality. And they see it as their role as the design leader to advocate for a different culture and to try to drive a different culture.
I’m wondering, listening to what you’re saying, whether from your perspective, that kind of culture change is even really possible. What do you think?
Koji: I mean, it’s nuanced to me, because it really depends. I mean, like, let’s be clear here. Perfect to me is when you have a balance, right? It’s not like too late in the market, but it’s also not too fast in a way that you can really launch something that you’re proud of or not even proud of, because you know, I would say that you have to launch something as quick as possible so you can actually have time to learn with that.
But I think what’s most important is to understand and have agreements, right? Like, and you can have that agreement even before you join a company, you can talk with the CEO, you can really understand, like, how that CEO thinks about speed versus quality and see if you have a common, you know, agreement on that.
Like, do you feel like you are in the same page? And I think that helps a lot for me, like having that conversation before joining me on, it helped me a lot to just establish some agreements and some things that I use later. After I join, then it’s more about the tactic, like how do you get to that, you know, agreement that you already had.
And I would say in this case it wasn’t that hard because I had this conversation before. And to me, it was more about how do I actually communicate that decision to the rest of the team, to the rest of the other VPs and the other organizations. And that can be done by, and in my case was more about like creating processes where we have design reviews, we have certain mandates where we don’t launch anything until it’s approved in a design review.
Which I know is not the default for many companies, but it’s something that we decided that it would be important for us because the bar was so low and we really wanted to raise the bar for design at Neon. Maybe in a different company where design is already high quality, maybe that’s not needed.
And that’s something that I would say it’s important to have as an agreement as you start your role the leadership.
Working at Neon
Peter: This is awesome. I’d love to dig into Neon since you’ve brought it up. You’ve been there a couple of years now. You’re the chief design officer. What does that mean? Where are you in this organization? Who are you reporting into? Size of the org? Just situate us in your current context.
Koji: Yeah, so my team right now is 33 people. I report directly to the CTO. I reported most of the time to the CEO, but we had a change of structure where CEO was having too many reports. I think it’s another common theme. And now I’m reporting directly to the CTO. In terms of how I spend my time, I would say like 50 percent on working with the VPs and other C levels in the company to, you know, understand structure, understand the business, what direction we’re taking, how my team can help on that direction, and 50 percent of time working with my team to really, like understand where we’re going in terms of execution and making sure that the quality level is being kept. That first 50 percent is also spent with like presenting to leadership things or presenting, you know, the thing that we just did.
We just launched a new version of the app in the beginning of this year. And that began by myself presenting to the board what the vision for this new web would be. That was about a year and a half ago. So one year, and a few months to put the vision to a closure, I would say because we started implementing the first steps, let’s say five months after the first speech.
Peter: And you’re in San Francisco. Where is your team located?
Koji: So, We started a office here in the Bay Area. We have 30 people in us right now. CTO is here. CPO is here. We have a small office in San Mateo. But most of the company is in Brazil and the CEO is there. Some VPs are there. I would say the company is 2000 people. So then you can tell that we’re minority here in us.
From Brazil to the US and back again
Peter: One of the themes Jesse and I have been pursuing this past season is design leadership outside of the United States. And one of the reasons we were interested in talking to you is your experience leading design in Brazil, coming to the United States, learning kind of how design and design leadership operates here, and now, even though you’re still physically located in the United States, you’re working with a Brazilian company or you’re engaging with what I’m assuming, correct me if I’m wrong, is a different corporate culture, different kind of approach to how things are done.
And I’m curious, just kind of how that’s been as part of the journey, kind of situating yourself, not just necessarily in a business culture, but like that broader social culture and what you’ve had to navigate, maybe what you learned that you’ve been able to bring back, what you’ve had to let go of in order to embrace, kind of, your new reality.
Koji: I love that question. Yeah, Brazilian culture is so different in many sense and I’ve been here in the U.S. 10 years. I feel like I’m not even 100 percent Brazilian anymore. Like I’m, you know, when you’re an immigrant you say like you live between worlds, right? Like you’re not here and not there. So first of all, Brazilians are definitely a more relationship-based, workforce. Even here like there is a different between East coast and West coast. I would say that we’re more West coast than East coast for sure, in terms of culture, in terms of how we work. But even more, even more closer, I would say.
Then the second thing that to me was a big shift is just like how companies operate in general.
In Brazil, there is so many, and I think here too, like, when you look at especially the smaller companies, the startups, they tend to just grab a specific framework and be so tied to that framework, and try to like replicate every single thing of that framework.
And I think Scrum is probably one of those frameworks that were kind of produced everywhere. And for some reason people thought that it was a default in Silicon Valley, when in reality, like most of the companies I work for, they never use anything from Scrum outside of a standup you know?
And same thing happened with the Spotify squads. Spotify launched that post about squads and all of a sudden, all the companies were building squads and, you know, the reality of squads to me is, imagine you’re going to a party, you have a squad that is cleaning the floor, a squad that is, you know, fixing the dinner, a squad that is you know, working with the beverage, and the floor is super dirty, the food is done, the beverages are ready to drink. But nobody is helping the, floor sweeping squad because they’re not from that squad.
You know, that’s the most common issue I see with squads is that they feel like they can’t do anything else other than that specific problem, space, or even feature, which is the worst because, you know, initially squads were not even meant to be a specific feature. And now they’re locked in in that feature that may not even have a market fit, because they’re supposed to be in that squad. So you know, all these frameworks, I think, they have good things, with squads, you have autonomy, you have great sense of ownership, but they all have limitations that when you look at a book, when you look at a blog post, those limitations are not stressed.
And when you go to Brazil, for instance, and you go to a smaller startup, they lack references and they just grab that book or grab that blog post and replicate it a hundred percent. Whereas the outer maybe just did that once or maybe saw that working in three, four companies, but might not work for you.
So that’s. That’s the most common issue that I saw in terms of culture once I joined smaller companies, but also working with Brazil.
Jesse: As I reflect on these examples of cultural breakdown that you’re talking about, it’s interesting to notice the role that alignment plays in this. And keeping teams aligned around common purpose, and for the leader just stepping into an organization, as you touched on earlier, the importance of vetting and validating that you as a leader are in alignment with the intentions of the larger organization, the philosophy of the larger organization, how they measure success, what constitutes good, what constitutes done, those kinds of things.
And I’m curious about, especially outside your own team, cross-functionally, how you build that alignment, especially from your seat at the executive level.
Koji: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many ways to me. It’s all about, you know, really understanding each other, really like building empathy and understanding. That everyone in the leadership team, they have their own struggles. And finding a way to help each other and to really, like, understand where our shared language or where our shared goals are…
Jesse: mm hmm.
Koji: …those to me are most important things to do. There’s no recipe to do this. It’s just, like, time, a lot of, like, one on ones, a lot of get togethers, a lot of, like, hard conversations and tough discussions. That’s the only way to figure out where to be. I would say a lot is through understanding that people have no clue and that’s okay, what design is, right? Like design is such a specific discipline that people imagine what design is and they think that design is all this like magic or artistic thing that come out of nothing and we build something brilliant, right? Like, which is not true. We all know that design is a lot of like research, is a lot of like understanding the users. It’s a lot of iteration and, you know, polishing things over time. It’s learning and it’s not a recipe that you can replicate every time or you solve this problem before you can just apply it again. It’s not, like that.
So just having the time to, and the patience to really like be open to any type of question to be open to bring people to your process and make them part of your process. Those are the things that worked for me so far. And I think I will definitely continue to do and try to learn new ways to do too.
Peter: In these past two years at Neon, how much of your time have you had to spend educating about design? It sounds like you haven’t had to do much evangelizing. The sense I got when you mentioned the agreement that you had, like, even before you joined, was that they were bought in to at least what they thought design was, but it also sounds like since you’ve been there, there’s been a process of helping them understand all the things that design could be delivering: the distinct values, the processes and approaches. Is that something you’re having to spend a lot of time communicating and expressing, or is it, I could also imagine it’s something that you’re, like, you know what, we’re going to do what we do. You know, I’m not going to try to impose my value system, my processes on you. I’m here to deliver outcomes. Tell us what we’re trying to drive towards and we’ll get there. Like how do you navigate just how much to share about design?
Educating others on design
Koji: Yeah, on the first part, yeah, I’m privileged because I have a CEO who is, you know, into design. He was a designer for some years, so he really cares about quality design and building something that works well for our users, which is great.
And he really understand users. He talked with the users every day, pretty much. So I’m privileged in that area of not being needing to be an advocate for design, which is totally different from Google, by the way, which is an engineering driven culture, and we had to do this all the time.
Now for education, I think, like, as a designer, I saw myself doing this my whole career from an IC at Google and talking with, like, a PM that just joined Google and never worked with a designer to today with VPs that really didn’t have much contact with design that much in the past. And I would say it’s going to be our second nature for a couple of years still. The way, I think it’s been kind of helpful is to have someone on design ops or a group of people on design ops helping to build that, you know, internal training slash communication slash education about design.
So we have materials on onboarding, like, whenever someone joined a company, everybody goes through the same process and we have a presentation about design. We have, you know, internal trainings about accessibility and trainings for our team too, just to make sure that they’re level those skills and we continue to grow in specific areas. So right now we have a small team on design ops that takes care of all this internal education. And that helped me a lot.
Jesse: I’m really intrigued by the fact that you have considered these educational activities an extension of the mandate of operations. I don’t think I’ve seen that before, and it makes a lot of sense to me. I do think that it’s hard to bring people along with processes if they don’t understand the thinking that goes into them.
You know, you were talking about the challenge of leveling up your cross functional partners in their awareness, in their sophistication, in their understanding. And I work with so many leaders who get frustrated by these relationships, and they get frustrated by the fact that nobody else understands design as well as they do, and nobody else has as sophisticated an understanding of what makes good design as they do.
And my response to that is always like, you’re the design leader, you should be the one who has the most sophisticated understanding of design in the room. But there is a certain skill set in bridging that gap with people who don’t have that level of sophistication. So the ops team is running all of this stuff on your behalf to help drive this awareness, drive this sophistication of understanding. Where do you step in?
Koji: One of the things that we started doing, and this is a theme in my career, is to give visibility to research. Giving this ability to research, not in a way of like, oh, here’s a research team, this is what they’re doing, but more like, here are users. We’re talking with them this week, this is what we learned. Or, hey, tomorrow we are talking with users, anybody in the company can join and watch us talking with them.
Or you know, we’re doing this research trip end of the year. All the VPs and execs are invited and we’re going to a specific part of Brazil and we’re talking with our users and hearing their pains. This is something that first time I did this was at Google when I was working with emerging markets and I had a team and as you can imagine, you know, very diverse.
I have people in U.S. who were never had the experience of living in a third world country. So I took all the VPs, directors to the field to talk with the users in a favela in Brazil. So that was such a, you know, eye opening moment because they saw with their own eyes and they started to have their own insights of like, how are we going to solve this problem? then we did the same one work at Lyft. Twitter. We did some of that, but because we had like the lockdown moment. We didn’t have in person. And now if neon we’re doing that same work to bring, you know, the company closer to the users, not only products or design or engineers, but in general, the company to hear firsthand What the users care about, you know, their struggles, their feedback and so on and so forth.
So that helps a lot to just bring that shared knowledge and the shared goal of solving specific challenges. And I see people going on and commenting and saying like, Oh, I saw that video. Like, I think we can help in this way or that way, you know, so it becomes a simple thing you can do that I think is really powerful.
Equitable design
Peter: There is some critical commentary within design and user experience around a certain kind of colonial mindset, right? Extracting understanding from them. Building something to sell it back, where power dynamics can be fraught, right, in terms of the people who are showing up, wearing nice starched shirts, and the people they’re talking to… not, and I’m wondering how you think about this, how you navigate this, how you help others.
Maybe first at Google, because I can imagine there were a lot of folks in Mountain View who really wouldn’t know how to show up. It’s probably less of an issue at Neon since that seems to be the intent of the company to begin with. But something I think many of us have learned over the last three or four years is, to approach these circumstances with a much greater degree of sensitivity and awareness than, at least, Jesse and I had 20 years ago when we were starting doing this work.
And I’m wondering how you think about this how you make sure that like those dynamics feel equitable and not at odds or where one group showing up with just so much more power than any other.
Koji: I love that question. So, as you can imagine for me as being a Latino here, that’s a very important topic for me. I feel like the only way to do that in a fair game is by having a very diverse team. And as much as possible to have representatives of that specific community in your team.
I’m saying as possible because of course like if you’re doing research in a favela, hopefully you’re not hiring someone that you’re not being able to pay a fair salary to be able to move on to a better housing, you know. But, you have a lot of people who came from you know, very humble backgrounds.
And my feeling is that, and myself included here, I think that experience for me kind of made me feel way closer to the problem. And I think there’s a difference between, I always say this, looking at a report and just saying, Oh, this is what they feel. That’s a problem. Versus, like, being there once and really, being in that type of situation, let’s say living in a favela, for instance, knowing the violence, knowing how it is to wake up every day and not having clean water, versus just reading that in a document. having people from diverse backgrounds in your teams. It’s a qualitative level to that lived experience that it’s very hard to capture by just doing research.
And that’s what I’ve been trying to do every time I join a team that is working in specific communities, is to have that diversity embedded in the team, which is easier said than done, that’s what I would say it’s something that I strive for.
Jesse: I notice that frequently when you talk about the value that your teams deliver, you’re talking about it in terms of customer insight. And really connecting product strategy to the patterns that you’ve discovered among your users. And it’s interesting because these insight driven practices are kind of a little bit up in the air these days. Product teams are building increasingly robust research practices. Design teams are often being asked to set aside all of that insight gathering stuff and focus on optimizing for delivery. What do you see as kind of where this is headed for the role of insight in design, in design teams and in design’s value proposition?
Koji: Again, I feel I’m lucky because, you know, my team is design, research, and content. So you know, we own that whole spectrum.
Jesse: Right.
Koji: But one thing that I would say is that with research, our goal is also democratize internally, by one, giving visibility, but also training people to do research. Because we feel that in the end of the day, we want everyone to be able to talk with users.
I think there’s always the question of bias, of course, like if you’re building something, you’re biased and you’re asking a specific question that may be biased. But in the end of the day, it’s inevitable at this point with the market, how people are coached to be PMs, for instance, they’re asked to be talking with users.
So it’s better to have that with some training that not you just, like, do that recklessly. So that’s one thing.
The other thing to me is, I think it’s my duty as the leader of the organization to push my team and work with my peers to make sure that my team has a space to not just be pixel pushers, right? Like, I keep saying we’re strategic partners. design is not just pixels. There’s so much more about it. And yes, we should deliver fast. And I think in the end of the day, that’s what the business needs are, right? Like, and that’s why sometimes it’d be just, like, focus on the execution and do it.
But we also are not here just to design the surface, right? Like there’s way more beyond that. So it’s not an easy conversation, but again, I would urge people who are looking to join a new company to not let that discussion just go over after they join, but do this before. ‘Cause when you do that before, then you’re able to identify, like, is this the right place for me? You know, if enough good leaders are not you know, accepting places where design is being reduced to pixels, then I think there’s maybe some hope.
Peter: You’ve mentioned a few times to understand the nature of the company that you’re joining, and that your values are aligned, and you did talk about having an agreement, I think, as part of the conversation when joining them.
But what was it specifically about Neon that you were connected to that you felt you could kind of go all in on. What was that? And how did you realize that?
Koji: A few things. One, I was doing a lot of free mentorships during the pandemic. Mostly with underserved communities, end up doing a lot for Brazilians. And I felt like, Oh my God, I wish I could do this full time because, you know, it feels good to get back to the community that I came from. So that was the first thing that I had in my mind.
Second thing is, when I start to talk with the CEO and CEO was a person who hired me. He had two things in his head. One was like, I want to redesign, rebuild this thing from scratch, because this is five years old and I want you to join and just rebuild it.
And I’m not a person who is in love with just keep things going. I’m more like a transformational, like zero to one person. Like, I like to change things. And I think I’m better at this than just keep things going.
And then second, he really wanted me to rebuild the team culture, rebuild what is good design for the company, what means to launch a good quality product. We didn’t have a CPO for the most of the time I’m here. So I did some work as a, hybrid CPO, too. Like, the first PRD template was created by me, things like that, very operational things, to even more broad, like, how do we operate as a team together with PMs was also something that I helped to build a lot here.
So, yeah, I think it’s very rare to see a company of this size kind of wanted this amount of change, right? So it’s very specific of the space that Neon is in the Brazilian market.
The challenge of change
Peter: Even though it sounds like the CEO asked for change, other people in the organization asked for change, you mentioned you like being involved in these transformations, what I’ve seen is even when people ask for it, when faced with the reality of change, with the implications of change, you meet a lot of resistance, right?
So they’re coming to you, like, we want better design. You’re an amazing design leader who’ve worked at these great Silicon Valley companies. I’m sure the conversation was, bring us some of that Silicon Valley style design to what we’re doing here. And you might’ve told them ahead of time. Well, this is what it means.
But then when you’re in the mix and you aren’t going to launch something because it doesn’t meet a quality bar, or you need to change literally like how PM works with design, works with engineering from a process standpoint, you know, and they’re like, but this is how we’ve always done it and it’s worked fine.
And you have to tell them, well, but, in order for design to be its best, we need these changes that others are bringing, right? How has that gone? Or as a former guest said, change is not for the faint of heart. So how has that been navigating transformation, even with an organization that’s asked for it?
Koji: Yeah, I have a friend that tells me like, Oh, I think you like to suffer. Yeah, I mean, a lot of ambiguity and a lot of hard work. I would say that when you get to the reality of change, when you get to the reality of like, okay, this is where we’re going, even after presenting to the board and the board, you know, went back to the CEO and say, like, when we’re launching this, even after having that moment, I think we have like seven VPs, five different business areas. So it’s tough because it’s a relatively small company, but we’re already divided in different goals and all this business areas have different KPIs.
And guess what? Design KPIs are not there, so it’s not necessarily something that they would be rewarded for if they work in a redesign or in a new home screen, for instance, because they’re focused on credit cards or they’re focused on loans or other things. So, and I would credit, you know, the talk that Brian Chesky gave on the Figma event last year,
Jesse: hmm.
Koji: And to me, the most important part that he talked about there was not, PMs, that’s not the part that I really thought it was important for me, but designers working directly with engineers, those two paired up together, make things very quickly. And I got that video, I talked with the senior leadership and I said, like, we need to create a tiger team if we really want to build something new right now. Because I tried before, was to work with the different organizations within the company to build a new product, a new app. And it was so difficult because again, like, they’re rewarded by different KPIs organized by their business units and focus on the business side of things, but they’re not looking at, you know, the holistic view of what the product could be.
And honestly, in the end of the day, we just launched and we’re seeing improvements in pretty much all metrics. There’s some metrics that either are neutral or unclear, but there’s so much improvements in metrics that we didn’t thought about in the beginning because, you know, when we’re moving so many pieces together with a redesign the impact is huge. It’s not just one specific area.
But, in the end of the day, we end up creating this tiger team. It started with design only, we got front-end engineers, who were pretty much prototypers in the beginning, just building like a usable prototype, but without back-end. And then later, we got the back-end joining the Tiger team. And that’s where we rebuild the app. Some parts, very important parts of it from login to home screen to onboarding. And slowly that is helping a lot of the other teams to look at this new surface and to look at it as a new bar and change their own flows.
Jesse: What’s one question that’s on your mind a lot these days as a design leader.
Koji: Wow, so many questions, trying to pick one. I love design and I love the umbrella of what’s under design with all this gen AI things, all the change to 2D and potentially changing to 3D in the future for design.
I’m very curious about, like, Where are we going in terms of organizations, in terms of specialties, like, you know, will content design change? Will research change? Will product design be more focused on specific areas? Where are we going terms of future, in terms of even visual design, instance, which is something that I would say for me personally, like, I when I got into UX, I kind of negated visual design a lot. kind went against visual design a lot. Like, yeah, visual design is something that I don’t care about because, know, the whole user experience more important.
Now I think we’re seeing that visual design is having coming back. It’s been very hard to actually find good visual designers in the market. I’m also curious if we’ll have another, separation again of visual design roles versus interaction design roles like we had in the past. There are so many unknowns for me in the space right now. There’s so many changes going on right now. And I think that excites me and makes me a little bit nervous at the same time.
Jesse: Fantastic. Koji, thank you so much for being with us.
Koji: Thank you so much. Very happy to be here. Appreciate it.
Peter: Yes, thank you. This has been great.
Jesse: Koji where can people find you on the internet if they want to connect with you?
Koji: Alright, so I think the best way to find me is LinkedIn right now. So if you look up for Koji Pereira you will find me there, to post sometimes and where my business profile is right now. And yeah, I think that’s pretty much it at this point.
Jesse: All right. Thank you.
For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.
46: Leading with Clarity (ft. Vuokko Aro)
May 05, 2024
Transcript
This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited. Some errors may remain.
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: On today’s show, Vuokko Aro, VP of Design for the UK’s popular digital-only bank Monzo, joins us. We’ll talk about shifting your design approach as your company scales, building a true peer relationship with product leadership, and creating a sense of togetherness for remote and embedded teams.
Peter: Hi Vuokko, thank you so much for joining us.
Vuokko: Hi guys. Thanks for inviting me.
Peter: We’re going to start where we always start which is to learn a little bit more about you. So, who are you? What do you do? What’s your role? Give us a little background.
Vuokko: Absolutely. So I’m Vuokko VP design at Monzo, which is a digital-only bank. It’s a scale-up based in London. And I’ve been on this startup scale-up journey since the early days and have scaled myself with the company.
And before this, I was at other startups in London, New York. I have a kind of a strange background, where I have a master’s in design, but before that I actually studied economics. I have an MBA, which used to be a fun fact about me. No one would ever know, but actually as I’ve progressed in my career, especially the startup that took off being a bank, it has become pretty useful.
I would say that I can, I can help lead the company without adult supervision.
Peter: You, got your MBA before your design degree.
Vuokko: I did. Yes.
Peter: That’s the reverse of many of the design leaders we talked to.
Vuokko: Yes.
Why design?
Jesse: I’m curious about the pivot for you. What drew you to design?
Vuokko: Mm, yes. It’s a good question. Well, I’m one of those people who’ve always done creative things since like a young age, just drawing and designing things and, I don’t know, high school, someone needed a hoodie, I would design it. At my school of economics, if we needed to make a magazine, I would do the layout in InDesign.
So I guess it was just always a calling. But earlier on at the time when I was starting to choose a career, it didn’t seem like a real one yet, at least if you ask my parents. I think I chose something more traditional and then ended up drifting to it anyways. I worked as a journalist, a copywriter, concept designer, drifted into full time design when the, actually when the iPhone was released and touch devices became a thing and that was very exciting that you could touch these things and actually people would feel things through those.
So that’s how I made the leap.
Peter: Interesting. I hadn’t realized just how much of your journey was also Monzo’s journey, and I think kind of charting that path could be interesting. But to set a little bit more context, you mentioned Monzo’s a digital-only bank. How many people use it, and in what parts of the world is it used?
Vuokko: Yes. We’re mainly UK-only now. We’re starting to work on our US product as well, but it’s very early days. But in the UK we are a household brand. People are very passionate about it. It’s the kind of thing, it’s funny. Outside the UK, people have not heard of Monzo, and in the UK, you can’t tell anyone you work at Monzo without hearing so much love and excitement about it, and we have this, like, iconic, hot coral, we call the color hot coral, debit card, and everyone knows it, so we’ve got a big consumer brand.
We’re also a social network, in my opinion, because every Monzo customer has 37 contacts on Monzo to send payments to and so forth. When I joined, we were a prepaid card. That’s how we got going just to build the product out in the open.
The original team, which I’m not part of the original team. I just joined early. The original team started applying for a banking license, but already started building the product to learn from customers and to like start finding product-market fit early on. And then we got the banking license and then built the bank app on top of that.
So the earliest version of the product was kind of like a Venmo. But for the past five, six years, more than six now, we’ve built loans and overdrafts and investments now. The goal is not just a bank, but, the interface to all your money, basically, which is a lot of complexity for us to handle and make simple for our customers.
Design’s journey at Monzo
Jesse: So you mentioned you were not part of the founding team. Where were they on their journey when you joined the company? Did design already exist as a function or were you the first designer or like how did that go when you were stepping into this?
Vuokko: Mm hmm. Design already existed and, the first few designers were amazing, so they had set a really strong foundation already. There were three designers when I joined, and I came from other startups, I had designed other consumer apps, so came in to build a delightful consumer experience and looked across the whole app and things have scaled from there, so started managing every other designer who came after me, and introducing design critiques and design culture and all that good stuff.
So taken from there, we were less than a hundred people in the company when I joined. Maybe a hundred thousand users. There had been hockey stick growth just before I joined, and a nice funding round so they could hire me and some other people.
Jesse: Did they bring you in in a leadership role?
Vuokko: No, I joined as a lead product designer, I think. Although the company was very flat at the time, there were no leadership roles other than the founders, really.
Jesse: Yeah, so they needed to create a leadership role for you at some point. How did that come about?
Vuokko: Yep.
So we had our original head of design, Hugo, who’s amazing. And he was the first designer. And then I joined and did my thing and have been on a journey from that time when we didn’t really have any titles or no one cared, to, as we scaled up, created a director level and that became me and then VP.
Jesse: Mm.
That’s been, six, seven years.
Peter: When you were director level, was that the senior most role? As things have scaled, have you been scaling kind of on top with that?
Vuokko: No, Hugo, the original designer, was VP design for a while, maybe a year, two. But before he left, I became VP and then that’s been the last however many years.
Peter: Couple of years according to LinkedIn.
Jesse: Was that previous VP one of the founders?
Vuokko: No, but he was there from day one.
Jesse: What was it like to step in as the, kind of, the second leader? You know, like you’re inheriting something, but it’s not yet what it needs to be? What was that like?
Vuokko: Yeah. I didn’t think about it too much at the time, to be honest. It was one of those times in a startup where everyone’s doing everything from, like, jumping on customer support if there’s a problem, or packing cards in the office if a lot of signups happened the previous day, so we were just doing things together, but I think I also had the privilege of learning with him and he was out there on the frontier and I could watch what he did and learn very quickly as well. I think I was at the right point in my career where I had enough maturity to watch and learn quickly and then do whatever was needed.
That’s the thing in scale-ups. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for anyone to take a lot of responsibility, but it’s not always the right time for different people. It’s a high level of discomfort when you don’t know what you’re doing and you have to figure out the next step and the next step.
So I guess you have to be ready for it to put in the work.
No victim mentality
Peter: You mentioned Hugo kind of being out in front, what were some of the things that you learned that you saw that maybe were, eye-opening for you as he was operating, and maybe that you’ve adopted in your leadership?
Vuokko: Great question. I think one thing that I always respected about Hugo was he didn’t have any kind of victim mentality about design is not respected, or design needs to sit at the table. He was very grown up about it and just showed people what the impact of design had been to the success of a feature or a phase in our story, and kind of took it apart and explained like this is how it works. It’s not just magic that happened. We put in this effort and then this was the outcome of it. So I think I’ve learned that a lot, now that I represent design in rooms where I’m the only designer and other people don’t have my background, is to not be preachy about it or complain-y, but just… people love learning about this stuff anyway, it’s fascinating.
I think I learned that kind of open mindedness about just being excited, about teaching, about design and you kind of can’t overdo it. There’s always more for all of us to understand and learn.
Jesse: Mm hmm. So you’ve referred a couple of times to this business as a scale-up opposed to a startup. So implying that it’s gotten to a phase in its evolution where growth really, really matters. And I’m curious about what you see as the difference between design’s role in the startup phase versus design’s role in the scale-up phase of a new business.
Vuokko: Yes. A lot of differences, a lot of similarities. I suppose early on it’s much more about creating new things and not everything’s going to be good. And now we’re getting to a phase where the brand is very valuable and we can’t risk just destroying it overnight. For example, where in the past we would do a lot of things and just see what works, and now we’re in a phase where we’re really defining what it is, who we are, and maturing a lot of things. Which is different, but still we’re clearly not at a phase where we’ve stagnated. We’re still creating new things just with a more careful approach, but still need to move fast and be bold about it.
I think we used to take massive leaps and now we still take leaps, but I think that’s my biggest fear as well, that one day we slow down to a crawl and stop innovating, but that’s not. I can’t believe I used the word innovate, but you know what I mean. Yeah, so still creating, but with like knowing that all of this is actually very valuable.
Product *and* brand design
Vuokko: Now one thing about my role that I forgot to say is I look after product design, user research and brand design. So I think about the customer experience in a very wide sense. So thinking about the app, if… when we redesign it…I’ve done that a few times now… obviously breaking metrics and taking a leap into the unknown, those are huge things, but also changing the brand and the visual brand, for example, like refreshing it, and how will this change the sentiment of people who interact with all of these things. I’ve been on many startups before, but I’ve never gotten to this phase before where we have to be this careful. Which is, I’m not saying that as a bad thing, it’s actually, it’s what a privilege.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: Had you done brand design, marketing design before, or is this new for you in this role?
Vuokko: I’ve done it before. I think I’ve actually gravitated towards startups where brand and product are very intertwined. So, just before this I was at Citymapper, which is another London startup which is huge here. Less so… It exists in the US, so maybe some people will know it. But also very much a strong brand and charismatic product, kind of intertwined.
And I suppose I’m old enough to have worked in design when there wasn’t that much of a separation yet between brand and product, as there is now with younger people coming into the industry only having, for example, studied product design and worked in very tightly developed and matured roles, I think. At some point I was quite drawn to early stage work where you do everything.
Peter: What I see that’s unfortunately common is, as companies scale, design, which had product and brand together, ends up getting separated because some new marketing leader comes in and that marketing leader wants the design team to report to them. Have there been any of those kinds of conversations or has it been recognized that design is more powerful when it’s all together?
How have you navigated those discussions?
Vuokko: We have had that discussion. It was a few years ago, actually, that that did come up and I… it was the first time I very forcefully put my foot down in what I believe we should do. And it was a discussion for a while, but ultimately I think we have enough proof points at Monzo, just the power of, I would say design is our moat, or at least one of the strong moats we have as a business, where it’s kind of not disputable that design is what draws people to use the product, to work at our company, all of these things.
And it’s not just how easy the product is to use, or the card and the visual brand, but all of it, how it works together. I just look towards examples of where that worked and where the risks would be to separate it. I do very strongly believe that the way we build the product and the way we market it should feel like one fluid experience, and should feel like it’s made by one hand, even though we’re a large team now. But, it’s not been discussed since.
So the last few years we’ve settled into this model and I actually proactively brought this up because we hired a new CPO a year and a bit ago. And when we were interviewing candidates, I made it very clear to everyone involved that It’s absolutely not personal towards anyone, but before we even get started, I don’t want to report into a CPO either, because I believe that design is wider than just product. I look after the product experience, but also the brand and the way we talk to customers in our app, our cards or the carrier letters, everything.
So to me, design being a part of product is more narrowly focused than how I see it. So that’s been the way, and I think, obviously, it always comes down to personal relationships, but I work closely with all our execs and it’s gone well. I’m very collaborative and everything, but this is the way I prefer the team to be set up.
Peter: So where is design situated in the organization?
Vuokko: So I report into our COO. Which I thought was like a once in a lifetime setup for design, but I listened to an older episode of yours and you had someone else on from Instacart, I think, who had the same model. And that’s been really, very fruitful relationship for me, I have to say. But it’s, I suppose, it comes down to individuals as well.
Our COO is a amazing business leader who I learn a lot from. And also I’ve gotten to teach non-design execs and non-product execs about the power of design and customer centricity in ways that they might not have heard about before, so. I prefer just reporting to a business leader. Who’s also an amazing person.
Jesse: So you mentioned that there are a lot of people in the industry now who have spent their entire careers solely in the realm of product design and have never been exposed to kind of this broader field of brand and graphic and identity and all of these other forms of design that come into play for you.
What do you think those folks are missing? What advice or direction would you give to somebody who has a lot of depth in product, but no experience with brand, like how can they level themselves up here?
Vuokko: I love that question. I think when you work in just one medium, let’s call it, you do end up solving a lot of problems over and over, a similar framing and similar problems, and it can limit your thinking. I think of what are we even doing here as a designer, or what are we solving for? So I think, thinking widely about the brand, it’s more about storytelling and really simplifying a message so that it resonates with the customer so that they notice it in like the busy life that they’re leading and they don’t really have more than two seconds for us.
And I think it’s also different kind of constraints. I think, now that I think about it, for example, when we design debit cards, it’s a tiny surface with about 100 different kinds of constraints because it’s a physical product that’s regulated and has to fit into an ATM, and when I think about being young and designing book jackets, that was a different kind of constraint and people need to notice it in a busy store.
So I think just there’s a richness in thinking about different kinds of products, I suppose.
Peter: At some point I had to deepen my understanding of brand, and designers, when designers think of brand, they tend to think of brand identity. But you have an MBA and there’s a whole world of brand management within the land of MBAs. And I’m wondering how you’re bringing a richer business-savvy mindset of brand into your conversation and, do you own the brand or, how is brand ownership or stewardship considered at Monzo, particularly considering how important it is?
Vuokko: Yeah, I would say our brand’s owned by our COO, who has that background and is very good at it. Or marketing as well, perhaps. It’s not me. I don’t actually, I don’t own a line on the P&L. It’s a gift and a curse. Again, I think it comes from also me being one of the most tenured employees and being the one person left who’s created the product and the brand kind of from scratch and been here the whole journey that I have this outside voice as well, defining when we work on brand pillars or a brand proposition that I have a big voice there just because I have this track record of having created it and understood what works.
Made some mistakes, too. But yeah, the MBA background I think definitely helps. I, I don’t think about it enough sometimes, but it is very much, I suppose, part of my internal vocabulary that I take for granted.
Influence without accountability
Peter: I’m assuming you have points of view and perspectives that you’re trying to advocate for. And so how do you justify or rationalize or advocate for positions when you’re not seen necessarily as accountable?
Vuokko: Mm hmm. Yeah. I think if I had to kind of distill it down to one, I care about quality of experience in different ways. And obviously there’s, I think this has been a hot topic on a lot of podcasts recently, about things that you can measure and things that you can’t. But I think that’s kind of the role that I want to bring and having a tenured design leader, I feel like there’s that trust that I don’t feel held back by the lack of metrics. And obviously I’m very privileged to work in a company where design has clearly been the driving factor in our success. So much so, you know, our investors and board and everyone knows it.
Jesse: Has everyone always known it or was it a journey to help people understand the value that design was delivering for the organization?
Vuokko: I wouldn’t say everyone’s always known it, I’m sure. And, I want to be clear that design is not the only reason for success. We have an amazing tech stack that we built from the ground up and amazing team. There’s a lot of things, but design is clearly one of these major factors.
No, it doesn’t come free, that’s for sure. For example, I’ve been lucky to have been invited to talk at a board meeting about how we do design at Monzo and what our role is and how it differs from other companies and give examples of what we’re working on. We had defined our long term company strategy, I got to be involved and bring my point of view.
Which at the end of the day, it’s absolutely not at odds with someone with a long term career in banking either. It’s we all want to build amazing things for our customers that they will use and love. But I think it’s introducing new people to that vocabulary and obviously, like, our exec team, for example, everyone joined in the last three years, board members change ,we have new investors every now and then, so it’s not like it’s a set group either.
Educating others about design
Vuokko: Sometimes I kid myself and think everyone at Monzo understands design, but then next week someone will join who’s never worked with a design team like ours, that’s so empowered and opinionated. So I think it’s not like the job’s ever done either.
Like you can be in a place where things are just about as good as they can be, but still you have to keep educating people. That sounds condescending though, I don’t mean it that way. But kind of explaining the craft and, why it’s different here.
Peter: What are some of those talking points of difference? You mentioned both, to the board, you’ve given presentations on how design at Monzo is different, and now to people joining, maybe as kind of part of onboarding, how the role of design at Monzo is different than whatever you assume their expectations are.
So what is that delta? How do you frame that?
Vuokko: Yeah. That’s a good question. I guess you never also know what other people’s, where they’re actually coming from and what their actual expectation is. But I suppose, like, a stereotype, that’s out there that I remember myself, someone could have is that design is just something that comes in at the end and decorates the thing.
Or that it’s somehow detached or part of marketing, or that it’s not actually as embedded as it is. So I talk about how we work, just the process of how we structure cross discipline tech squads and the role of a designer working closely together with the other disciplines, and well, I think we’ve also invested a lot when it comes to being different.
We’ve invested in user research a lot in Monzo over the years, over the last year or two more than before, and we’ve always been very customer centric. But in the early days we had no user researchers, we hosted events and we’re very, like, community-centric product.
So in the early days we had events. It was hard to get out of the office without a slice of pizza because we had people over every night to test the product, to hear about how we build it, the thing. It was like a very Shoreditch, the kind of tech neighborhood of London, Shoreditch thing in the early days that I remember well.
Since then, well, like our customer centricity has obviously taken new directions. Like that group was a very specific group. A lot of engineers who then later on joined us, customer, like, community forum. But since then, like, we obviously developed a user research discipline, but we’re really invested in it now, to get back to answering your question.
I feel like research at Monzo has really reached levels that I certainly haven’t seen in my career before, and like we have an amazing research director who’s built a team and has been able to connect them to our strategy in ways that they impress me all the time. For example, we’ll set out to build one thing, but research just comes up with this insight that will actually build a completely different thing that then blows everyone’s socks off.
So I think when it comes to like first principles thinking and, and all of that, those are the things that make us special, even within tech.
Jesse: I talk to design leaders all the time, both within my coaching practice and just generally out in the world who I feel like would kill for the opportunity to get in front of their board of directors and make the case for the value of design. And they can’t get there and they can’t do it because they don’t have anybody to invite them in.
They don’t have anybody who feels like that conversation merits that level of attention. So I’m curious about how you got into the room, the executive level alliances that you’ve been able to build, to maintain what you’ve built, because I’ve seen so many design leaders who’ve been able to, to gather a certain amount of power and influence for themselves, and then had it all kind of like dissipate, drain away over time.
Vuokko: Yes. Yeah. I am in a great position. it didn’t happen overnight. I think I’ve learned to do different things. Some of them, not to keep banging on about the MBA, but I think just speaking their language as well and well, speaking the language of execs, and bringing my own flavor.
No one wants to hear more of the same. I think the reason you get invited to a room, you make sure that you’re actually providing new perspective and value and then if that happens, you’ll be invited again and again, and you build piece by piece.
I think of myself as a really good writer and I write a lot internally, I write weekly updates and I write about this and that, so I think that was one of my ways in was to write vision papers and papers about how we design magic customer experiences, and those kind of things click with people about this is the, like, behind why… our success or why we’re growing or why people continue opening the app every day and all of these things.
So I think, yeah, it’s a mix of fitting in, but also bringing that unique perspective. I suppose it’s another kind of cross disciplinary team. I always love being in a product squad and working with engineers and other people. So I have a kind of a new cross disciplinary squad now. So just to remember my unique perspective and always bring it.
I don’t ever want to be in a room and just nodding. I feel like then that’s probably the best way to never get invited again. It’s to really focus on, like, what is the unique thing that you can bring, with your experience and skills. And we have amazing customer centric execs, but obviously having a design background helps you articulate things and, make connections maybe that aren’t there for everyone.
Maximizing the impact of design
Jesse: So you’re working with this amazing team that really understands what you bring, the value of it. I can’t imagine that you see eye to eye all the time. And I get curious about the challenges that you face, still, in, maximizing the impact of design, maximizing the value delivery of design.
Vuokko: Yes. Yeah, it’s, we wouldn’t have jobs if it was easy and automatic. So it is definitely, there are definitely decisions to be made. And I think it often comes down to everyone wants high quality. Everyone wants consistency and everyone also wants to move fast. So I think it’s often a case of, what’s good enough?
How far do we reach? Or do we just go with what we can have in two months, or now? And then what kind of commitment do we make to getting back to that?
Jesse: Lot of those kinds of decisions come back to, in the simplest terms, the roadmap, what’s getting built on what timeline. And I’m curious about how design influences the roadmap for Monzo.
Vuokko: Yeah, great question. Different ways. For example, we have user researchers obviously working on product, embedded in squads on more delivery projects, but also going ahead, investigating different topics, or often we might pair a user researcher and then, like, a business analyst, for example, to go and get clarity on what kind of opportunities there are.
And then I’m part of our product senior leadership. So just a voice in the room, along with my directors, kind of on a regular basis. But in, in addition to that, I think the biggest part of my job is to open up big conversations about the ways that we’ll win as a company and how we structure the app and what are the new spaces we need to build and how do we support our business goals through the product.
So if I explain that a little, so we did a kind of a app redesign. That rolled out this summer, but it was actually like more than a year of work for me starting to map out the problems with the top three business goals we have as a company, and what’s stopping us from reaching those, then mapping it back to the product and its structure and how people navigate through it and the feedback we’ve gotten and, obviously, a lot of work went into that and then writing a vision paper about it. Where we should take the app and its structure next.
So we’ve built a new home screen and we have some ideas, but, for example, currently, this autumn, I wrote a follow up about, well, what’s next because I think that’s the power of design as well. We can imagine the future and, like, create the direction for where we should go. Because I think there are a lot of smart people in a lot of different roles and disciplines, but a lot of them are about combining what exists already and I think what I’ve been able to bring is not just how do we optimize the space we have already, or how do we cram more things into it, or how can we do this or that, but it’s actually, you know what, we’re missing another space and this one is no longer serving us and we need to create these other things.
So I always try to get ahead of it. We do, like, ahead of quarterly, or half year planning or anything like that like, way ahead, to build the excitement, alignment, understanding of where we need to go. Kind of the bigger leaps. And so far I’ve had a, good track record of seeing where the company and the business need to go.
But it’s not like a lot of it’s like rocket science either. There are big patterns that other big apps have, and you combine from there, but I think, yeah, a combination of user research, being in the room regularly, and then these bigger vision pieces. But it, that’s not, just you write it and everyone is excited, of course there’s work off the back of that, but it’s now a way that we’ve done things and it’s worked. So that’s obviously each time it gets easier.
Jesse: So what I’m hearing in what you’re saying is that there is a tremendous amount of influence that design has over product strategy. But you don’t report into a product organization. And you are, in some ways, kind of a peer to the product organization.
And I’m curious about how you manage that tension of authority and control and decision making power in the structure that you have in place here.
Vuokko: Yeah, it’s a good question. Yeah, I work closely with our CPO, who I have tremendous respect for, and he has a lot of experience from different tech companies around the world. So he definitely has a lot of experience that I don’t have. And I have experience that he doesn’t have either. We have a one to one every week, and talk a lot and, align amongst ourselves.
And I think we really bring different parts to the leadership of our product. So he’s very commercial. He has an engineering background. He’s an amazing product leader, but obviously I have this like experience leading our experience. So, I think he trusts me a lot on that side and it all works out.
Always comes down to individual relationships, but in the end he’s more senior than I am. So that’s fine with me.
Upholding quality standards
Peter: You mentioned earlier the concept of quality of experience, and I’m wondering if that is a explicit bar that you have set, if there is a framework for quality that you’ve established, and if so, what does that look like? And how does that then support your conversations with your CPO, right? In terms of, I’m assuming there’s a go/no go, right? Like this doesn’t meet our level of quality, so we shouldn’t ship it. Like, how do you handle those kinds of conversations?
Vuokko: Yes, great question. This is something that a few of the execs have actually asked me to define. And I haven’t done it yet. One thing I am in the process of doing is writing some product principles together with our CPO and his team. So I think that should help also defining the brand a little more.
But it’s a tricky thing to pin down as well. I often try to, depending on the thing, I, try to inspire the team to aim high in ways that feel tangible. Like one designer on my team worked really hard for a half a year on a thing that’s like UI-wise, one card with an icon, but it’s just so meaningful to our customers. It’s too complex. I won’t go into what it is now, but it’s cool. But it was so industry-defining that we got a lot of press from it and how we’re keeping customers safe and this and that. So I think that was a great bar for quality of design, is the press wants to write about it, but that’s obviously very high, but then how many pieces of feedback do we get where people are just so happy they wanna post about it, or tell their friends, or whatever it is. So I think it all comes down to these things. Our growth is heavily, like, product led growth as we have organic growth. And that’s part of our big story as a company. So to keep that going, obviously we also need to have features that people want to show their friends and tell their friends about. And to keep that bar high in that sense as well.
But yeah, it’s hard. To answer your question, I don’t have a clear definition for it, other than obviously there’s a bar of like, it works as you would expect, and isn’t flaky, and the affordances are in place, and all of those. The way I’ve tried to define it is to go beyond what a customer would expect a bank to do or this feature to do so it doesn’t just work and we definitely never want to just design a slightly better version of where it’s already out there, but just go beyond, ideally. Not that it needs to be different, but to kind of be a surprisingly good.
Peter: You mentioned earlier that that Monzo is digital only. I do a lot of work with financial services and banks. And even when you’re focused on just the digital, there can be a significant complexity. I have here, I’ve written down things like service design and omni channel.
And I’m wondering what your relationship is, even if you don’t have branches, are there customer service representatives, and what your relationship is to that true end-to-end experience the customers are having, so that it’s not really just what’s on a mobile app screen, but what all are you trying to orchestrate with the experience, and what is your team given, kind of, access to or responsibility for in that orchestration?
Vuokko: We’re lucky to be transparent company. So designers have access to data, to customer feedback, the different channels that we use, and we have some speaking of, like, how great our user research team, they have some like always-on research channels and feedback through the product outside of it. And I think that’s one of the upsides of me reporting to our CEO is I get to be part of our Ops VP’s group.
So I get exposure to, like, our VP of operations and financial crime and compliance and people who I might otherwise not spend as much time with. But obviously that’s a huge part of how we serve our customers and what, people deal with, whether the product’s working well or not.
But, as for my team, we’ve embedded designers in our customer operations team. So they’re designing tooling for our customer operations, but also helping people like self-serve and do things more easily in the app. And then also in like financial crime, helping deal with things like fraud and other things that might affect our customers.
We look at this pretty widely from not just the website and signing up and using the product, but also, what happens when something goes wrong. And what if people can’t find what they’re looking for in the app? What channels are they going to use to figure that out? Are they going to search in the app? Are they going to Google it, call us? So, we don’t have branches, we are digital only, so we have an in-app chat that’s always open and we have a phone number you can call.
Peter: So you mentioned the Ops VPs and things like compliance and control. So again, I work with banks and usually what you would call Ops VPs, designers would see as stakeholders, right? There are people that you have to get buy in for or you have to run things by to get their sign off on, but it’s often not seen as a partnership where it sounds like you have an opportunity for a partnership.
And I’m wondering how you think about the relationship with, and I don’t know enough about the UK regulatory environment, but kind of the relationship between design and regulatory controls, right? In the United States, there’s certain experiences that banks cannot offer because of federal regulations, but there’s also an opportunity for those banks to possibly work with the federal government to try to make change if it was seen as in the interest of consumers.
And so I’m wondering, do you end up operating in that space of trying to change some really like fundamental aspects of banking so that it is more customer or experience centered?
Vuokko: Yes yeah, we have several regulators in the UK, and they’re doing a great job, and we work with them. Earlier we were talking about, how things have changed. I feel like we were really learning to work with regulators and, and pushing back a lot, I think.
But ultimately obviously, we’ve grown and matured a lot and, it’s not a direct part of my job, but I think it’s an extremely valuable context that I get about everything I wouldn’t be exposed to if I was just sitting in product, all of that is so valuable to doing my job well and giving context to my team on, for example, what the trends are that our customers might be dealing with and the cost that comes with that and all of that to the human cost to our customers, what they have to deal with and the cost to our business and all of that.
I think it’s the other side of the coin almost and it’s, I’m really privileged to see it. It’s a partnership, but it’s more also just visibility, and I think it helps solve some of those problems through design. I think ultimately like having all that context soaking in my brain helps design a product that helps us serve customers better and keep them safe.
Scaling UX Research
Jesse: I’m curious about this investment in research specifically that you’ve been able to drive for the organization in the last few years because it sounds like something that in most cases would be basically incompatible with the thinking of a scale-up, you know, an organization that is invested in growth, invested in speed.
The last thing that they want to do is take a bunch of time and do a bunch of research studies. So I get curious about how you made the case. Did you need to make the case? How did this shift toward investing in deeper customer understanding come about for the organization? And what was your role in making that happen?
Vuokko: Sure. I’m not going to take too much credit for this. I mentioned earlier, we have an amazing director of user research and it’s really her understanding of the business and how her discipline can help it grow. That’s been the main factor here. What she’s done is been very pragmatic, to be honest, to start small and show the impact and grow from there piece by piece.
So I think I mentioned earlier that sometimes we investigate the opportunity in a new area we might not already be in. So I’ll pair a user researcher, maybe a designer and a business analyst, for example, to just go and investigate the space and customer needs, business opportunity for a while and then come back with a recommendation.
So that kind of thing obviously is very cheap compared to sending a whole squad to build a thing that might or might not meet an actual customer need. So that’s been a real valuable part of how we work and especially how we expand to doing new things. And then, good examples of where a researcher was able to really change direction and for that direction to have been the right one for us.
And then suddenly you get a few of those and everyone wants some of it.
Jesse: Hmm. So it seems like, tactically, this is about packaging research findings in a way that people inside the organization can consume them and getting your researchers in front of your stakeholders.
Vuokko: Yeah, I think that’s definitely part of it. Then I think the research team has also done a great job of empowering everyone in squads, building product to do their own usability testing and kind of the simpler research work, which then frees up their time to do higher level things that no one else is skilled in doing.
And then that then leads to breakthroughs in ways that wouldn’t have been possible if they were busy doing usability testing. Which is also valuable, but just there’s different flavors.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: I’m wondering if you also have a content practice or how content is handled with relationship to design.
Vuokko: Yeah, I think brand design being under design is surprising to many, but then another surprise is actually, I don’t have content or writing in my org at all. We have a writing discipline that sits within marketing. And I would say that’s probably for historical reasons, where we hired the first writer and then they built their team.
But, like I said, we’re very collaborative, so it’s not been an issue, because of our strong consumer brand that we built, also have one of our superpowers, I think, is our social media and content team, but that’s kind of outside the product. But I’d be curious always to, like, how we can reflect all of that more within the product as well.
Peter: Do those people in marketing do, like, the UX writing, are they part of that conversation? Or are your designers, some of them, doing the UX writing?
Vuokko: Early on, we were pretty dogmatic about only hiring designers who were also good writers. And when we were interviewing, like, that was part of it and only hired people who care about, like, all the aspects of putting together an experience. As we scaled it was very difficult to hang on to that.
So now we have designers who would probably tell you themselves they’re not strong writers, but they’re amazing at other things. And we have writers embedded in different business areas. Not maybe on a squad level, but in like we call them collectives, kind of the Spotify tribes. At least like on that level to be close to the work.
It depends I suppose on the project. Sometimes there is a writer assigned to a project and making sure every thing there is up to standard and, sometimes it’s more a designer and a writer might then come in later, but it depends on the project.
I think we probably do have a lot of maturing to do there. But at least the way I talk to my team is that they are responsible for the experience in the end, so we never use lorem ipsum, for example, even if English isn’t your native language, or you don’t feel comfortable you should do your very best to convey the message and the feeling, dare I say, of what we want the customer to know and what this screen is all about. And then obviously, writers are amazing at then, like, maybe bringing that more to life and making sure it’s grammatically correct, but ultimately the designer can’t shy away from the responsibility of what like, a screening question conveys.
Jesse: What’s challenging you right now?
Vuokko: It’s the scale of, like, of everything getting bigger and more complex and fast around me. So I think we’re doing more things at once than we’ve ever done before. And I feel like, I guess I’ve said that every year or every few months, but it definitely feels like that now, where we built such a strong business over the pandemic.
And then that’s thanks to our strong exec team who’s come in and helped us really, like, on top of this product and brand that people love, also built, like, a really strong business and we’re now profitable and we have kind of this, like, right to win and go big towards everything we’ve always wanted to do. So I think it’s obviously challenging and I think, not the flip side, but with great power comes great responsibility. It’s like we’ve been trusted as a design team to really help lead the direction and to make sure that goes well.
And we help move things in the right direction. So definitely to be humble and listen to customers and make sure that we’re taking the right steps, but yeah, doing it at a scale and on many, many different fronts at once is a new experience.
Peter: When you’re thinking of those scaling challenges, I’m wondering which is primary. There’s a lot of things that are kind of interwoven, but is it for you, at least, is the primary challenge one that’s more internal, just kind of building and managing and maintaining an organization that could continue to work at the level of quality and, dare I say, velocity that you’ve maintained, or is it more external, where it’s the offerings that are going out there and maintaining coherence and cohesion in a product suite that’s evolving. I’m sure they’re both problematic, but I’m curious, for you right now, where do you have to focus your energy?
Vuokko: Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah, it’s a bit of both for sure. Maybe the former more so. So we’ve grown our team pretty quickly, and some parts of the organization have way more tenured designers than others and I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times and experienced it, but as you grow a team, all your rituals break every now and then regularly. You just have to be prepared for them to stop working and then you reinvent them.
So I think we’re at another one of those points where, how do we do critiques again at this size, and how do we make sure things are consistent, and everyone shares the same view of what quality is, and all of these things. So, been there, been here multiple times before, so we’ll figure it out again.
Peter: I’m wondering what your experience is, because I know that before Monzo, you were a practicing designer. You were an IC. You know, a senior. But now within Monzo, you’ve become this organizational leader. And I’m wondering, I have a soft spot for the world of design operations, and I’m wondering how you’ve engaged that as you’ve scaled, and if you’ve embedded in design operations, how that has helped you or, what you’ve learned along the way working with design operations.
Vuokko: Yes. We have an amazing research ops, person, who honestly, it could be a team of five, she’s so, smart and efficient, but we don’t have a dedicated design ops team or even person. I think early on I was influenced by, someone once said something about if you have design ops, you’ll end up rolling all your problems to them and like managers not handling enough on their own plate, which I’m also butchering that now, but I heard that a long time ago. And it stuck with me for a while, but I definitely don’t believe in it anymore, but…
Peter: I was about to say, you’re at a scale where…
Vuokko: No, that’s, those days are long gone. So our research ops person used to run both research and design ops. And actually has been a huge, huge help to us, how we structure things over in product design and brand design as well.
So I would say. definitely see and appreciate the value. But we are still a pretty scrappy team where we get a lot done ourselves. I do have a executive assistant support which is also like helps day to day.
Jesse: We’ve talked so much about your relationships with the executives and your relationship with the founders and the leadership.
We haven’t talked very much about your relationship with your team. And I’m curious about your philosophy, the leadership structures that you’ve built underneath yourself to help yourself scale as the organization has scaled.
Vuokko: Yes, great question. So I have a team of about 60 people and that’s about 10 in brand design, a bit less, and then the rest split evenly across the other two disciplines. And we have three or four directors across design and research, and then a few senior managers and a few IC/manager hybrids who are doing a wonderful job early on in their careers as leaders, and then I have a principal, or staff, we just changed our naming structure, so I’m forgetting myself, but one director-level IC who’s been also very transformative for the business to have that level of experience to go in as an IC to help create clarity on what we want to do.
Jesse: You mentioned that early on, it was an environment in which everybody was participating in everything, to some extent. As an organization scales, that obviously is no longer sustainable. And for design organizations, what that often means is a shift from generalist roles early on to more specialist roles.
And I’m curious about your philosophy of that shift and how you manage that shift, and when you know it’s the right time to pivot towards specialists for a design team.
Vuokko: Yeah, definitely started with generalist, even there were no product or brand designers separate. Whereas, that’s now happened. I think it’s where we first felt a need for a specialist was actually within brand design, to really bring in. We’ve invested in motion design as a practice, felt like that’s something that a modern consumer app should live and breathe.
So that’s a specialist skill we’ve invested in. Also being a bank, there are some things that are very unique to us, like fighting financial crime and fraud and things like this. So we hired a, for example, a specialist who’s experienced and excited about the field and it’s obviously a very specific thing to design for.
But I would say mostly we still aim to hire generalist product designers who could work in any team across the company. And I think it’s also a richness to see multiple parts of it and understand how our personal banking customers use the product and also our small business customers on business banking side, for example.
Ideally I’d love to continue hiring generalists. And I think it, even though we’re a bank, we’re a consumer app. So I think there’s no one set of skills that’s needed to build that. It kind of depends on what different teams are working on,
I think obviously every individual has their own strengths and weaknesses. So that’s a thing that then defines how we staff different teams and what phase a certain feature or product might be in at that point, but I think definitely trying to build a diverse team of generalists, if that makes sense, where everyone brings their own background. We have some people who have studied industrial design or architecture or have no formal design education, or they might have worked in this kind of startup or company before.
And we’re a pretty tight team, considering product designers are embedded in different, like, dozens of teams across the company. We do get together for rituals and have built this, like, trust, and a lot of different social and other kind of rituals, because I think it’s really important when you do creative work, it’s so important to have that team to come back to, even though you have your first team in the cross-disciplinary space, but to have people you know who share your practice and also like to give honest feedback and have that group of peers who can openly challenge decisions. And I try to be part of that team as much as I can, make myself vulnerable and not seem like a separate part of the team.
But I mentioned I write weekly updates. I talk about what’s on my mind. I try to be in the office and talk with people informally. I think it’s important for us to break down any barriers of who’s new or what anyone’s level is. We’re all designers and creating this experience together.
Maintaining connections within the team
Peter: One of the challenges I see when you have designers embedded in cross-functional teams is that they start losing touch with the other designers. And you need to be very intentional about design team rituals that bring them together. And I’m wondering what are some of those intentional rituals that you’ve had to establish to kind of, counterbalance the lone designer who spends most of their time with people who aren’t designers.
Vuokko: Yes. I don’t think we have any business area with just one designer now. There might be obviously a squad with one designer, but some squads even have two designers, so. But definitely it can get lonely out there. Currently we have one weekly ritual where everyone comes together and it’s a, kind of a case study and a context share that one designer or pair of designers or researchers are working on.
Early on, obviously when you’re a small team, it’s easy to have million different rituals and we’ve had some very fun ones that didn’t scale. And during the pandemic, when everyone was remote, I mean, that was like a very big and intentional investment in talking with each other and having these remote things together, especially as we were hiring remotely with people who we’d never met in real life before, so that was a huge moment of investment in team rituals and culture. But since returning, I would say we’re due a reset and we’re actually working on, while we speak, there’s a meeting about resetting our design reviews, critiques and jams and how we start redoing them in a new way for a new size.
Because we’re such a large team, there are starting to be different pockets of… not cultures, but ways of doing critiques more locally, but I really care about bringing everyone together. And now with the pandemic, we’ve also hired outside of London, where in the past we used to be an office space, London based team.
So now one of the things we do together is a quarterly team day where I do more of a business update and I have other kind of collaborative workshops or things. So rather than before we used to do a monthly thing together, it’s too frequent when people have to travel in. So we do a quarterly thing and try to do celebrations and all kinds of things like that.
Jesse: It sounds like there’s a lot to be excited about. Where all of this is going. What are you most excited about?
Vuokko: I think I’m most excited about just building some new things and maturing the things we have and kind of, having been on this journey so long and there are things that we’ve talked about for years of, “later, when we can afford it” or “when we have enough customers, we can do this and that.” and now, now it’s kind of the time. So I think just, it feels really exciting to have been patient to like stay on the journey and now get to kind of also reap the benefits of all the hard work.
I’m definitely a builder and creating new things and going after new types of customers new markets all this is very exciting.
Peter: Excellent. Well, thank you for joining us.
Vuokko: Yeah, thanks for having me it’s really fun.
Jesse: Vuokko, thank you so much.
Peter: Where can people find you on the internet?
Vuokko: I’m on LinkedIn. I don’t check it too often, but I’m on there. Vuokko Aro my full name, and on most social media, my first name only. So Vuokko, V U O K K O. You can find me on Twitter, which is what I call it, and other places.
Peter: Excellent. Thank you so much.
Vuokko: Thanks.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.
45: The Phase Shift
Apr 24, 2024
Transcript
This transcript is auto-generated, and then hand-edited. It may contain some errors.
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: On today’s show, design leaders are feeling some major shifts in the landscape these days. In the wake of COVID and sweeping industry layoffs, leaders are facing difficult questions about the value of design, both from inside and outside the field, while new technologies and a chaotic job market make the future of the work harder to see than ever.
Peter and I take some time to explore what’s going on with design leadership here in the spring of 2024 today on Finding Our Way.
Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hi, Jesse. How are you?
Jesse: Welcome to the show.
Peter: I’ve been here.
So we’ve been having a lot of really rich conversations with a variety of different design leaders about their challenges. And those have been really great. But there is something larger going on out there in the world of design leadership. And I wonder if we can take some time today to try to put a name to it and kind of define the parameters of the elephant in the room here.
Peter: Name it to tame it.
What’s going on with leaders these days?
Jesse: Yeah. So what’s going on with design leaders these days?
Peter: Oh, you know uh, the usual. What’s going on with design leaders? So many things. I found myself, in the last six months, part of a number of conversations around the state of the industry, where things are going, whether it’s on LinkedIn or these recorded conversations.
A lot of them have taken as a jumping off point. Robert Fabricant’s article on the big design shakeup that he wrote for Fast Company, reflecting on what he’s seeing as some step change that’s occurring, and the struggles that design leaders are having with figuring out, like, what to hold on to, to take them to what’s next.
And I think what’s going on with design leaders is there’s a recognition that what we’ve been doing for the past 20 to 25 years…
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: You know, I’m thinking about around the time we started Adaptive Path, maybe a little bit before then, there was an evolution,, a curve, at times gentle, at times quite bumpy, but, you could draw a line between 1997 or 8 and 2022, in terms of what was going on with design and thus design leadership.
And it feels like something in the last two years has broken such that we can no longer rely on that trend just to continue to carry us forward. But it’s not clear what the new thing is to hold on to, and so design leaders are struggling with their relationship of, like, what’s next? What’s expected of me? How do I show up?
Because it’s not clear for many people, not even just in design. I, think we’re seeing this… I listened to a podcast interview that Lenny Ratchitsky did with Marty Cagan. And one of my takeaways from that is that product management is in a similar vein of disruption.
Jesse: Oh, it’s just as bad on that side. Yeah, absolutely.
Peter: I think we’re in this phase shift. And we’re in this middle of it, but you can’t really be in the middle of a phase shift, right? You’re either in one state or another, but we’re no longer in the prior state. We don’t know what the next state is. And I think a lot of the tsuris, a lot of the agita, the anxiety that we’re sensing out there is because we’re in this uncomfortable middle space.
The value proposition of design
Jesse: Hmm. You know, as I think about trying to describe the shift that’s happened in the last few years, and I think it goes back more than the last two, but definitely in the last five years, I feel like there has been a real shift in the way that business has framed the value proposition of design.
And for this generation of design leaders, they’re very attached to a particular value proposition of design that has to do with product discovery. It has to do with customer insight. It has to do with experiential exploration as a way of discovering new product opportunities in the market. The value proposition there has paid off in a very inconsistent fashion over the last 25 years.
And there are now quite a lot of, because of the growth of the field, because of the hockey stick curve that we’ve been on, there are now a lot of organizations that are finding plenty of value in the market without ever engaging with any of these practices, which then has their competitors looking at it and going, why are we investing in this stuff when we’re getting incrementally better results?
Peter: Yes, I think this, actually, also leads to one of those parallel conversations happening in product management, because if you read you know, Marty Cagan and you have this view of the world of product managers as, you know, empowered leaders who, given an outcome to realize, have the autonomy to figure out how to get there…right?
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Mm hmm.
Peter: And that’s this kind of common conception from your product management thought leaders, your Marty Cagan’s, your Perri’s, of how product management works, but then, this came up on the Lenny Ratchitsky show, there’s this recognition, most product managers, like, well into the majority, 70%, 80 percent, maybe more, are operating in what would be called a feature factory environment, where they’re not empowered, where someone else has said, this is what you’re going to build, you can figure out how you want to build it. Sure. But this is what we’re doing.
Those decisions have been made outside of that team. And, I forget who wrote it, but there was a product thought leader who was like, yeah, feature factory PMing is fine. That is right for some contexts, similar to this conversation, where mediocre-ish design is fine in some contexts, not necessarily every business will benefit from superlative design.
And that’s a tough pill to swallow, I think, for a lot of leaders.
Jesse: Or at the very least the threshold of diminishing returns kicks in way sooner for some businesses…
Peter: right, right, right.
Jesse: …than for others.
Peter: Erika Hall talks a lot about exchange of value, right, between the business and customers, and the source of that value exchange might not be rooted in something that user experience design has a meaningful impact beyond a very basic, like, functionality threshold.
Jesse: Hmm. You know, when I think about when we started Adaptive Path and the value proposition that we were putting forward into the market, I’m reminded of the arguments that we had internally, the seven founders, about whether to call what we did design, even, because, you know, truth be told, our deliverables at that time didn’t look like design deliverables
A wireframe was an exotic, strange thing. If anybody had in-house designers, they were working in Photoshop. We at Adaptive Path literally had no one with those skills. So we were trying to define user experience as something that was little bit different from, and a little bit distinct from a traditional design discipline. Over the years, , the value proposition that emerged there was that the same practices of customer insight the same practices of experiential exploration that are a normal part of a design process could also benefit business processes as well. And that’s where the whole design thinking methodology comes from, among other things.
That value proposition was a strong one during a time when there was a lot to be discovered, when there were not a lot of best practices to draw on, when nobody really knew what a lot of this stuff was going to look like, and we had to make it all up.
That’s simply not where we are anymore. And those processes and practices, that value proposition, has a lot less potency in most product categories these days because the exploration and the discovery has been done. The best practices are there. There’s no need to reimagine the shopping cart. We’ve had 25 years 30 years of shopping carts.
Peter: Yeah. So let me start with where you are and then I want to pull it broader. We’ve had 30 years of shopping carts. That is not an interesting problem to solve. Much like onboarding a new customer is not an interesting problem to solve. They fill out their name and password. They put in some information, they give you some money, whatever.
But, we still treat onboarding flows as if they’re some source of innovation or some opportunity for innovation. And one of the things that you’re touching on that I think reflects the discombobulation that we’re feeling in design is, especially for those of us who’ve been doing it for 20-some years, is we haven’t taken into account that we came in where all of it was interesting. We published a report in 2002 on how to design a registration flow right? Because like, it was an interesting problem to solve, but we also recognized, like, 20 years ago, like, let’s just solve it once and everybody just use this thing. At this point, that stuff is basically done.
Commodification of UI design
Peter: And I think what design leaders have trouble recognizing is just how much of, I’m going to say this intentionally, UI design is commodified, is not strategic, is not interesting anymore.
Much like… I tend to draw an analogy to residential architecture. Plumbing is commodified. Electrician work is commodified. Your basic contracting is, roofing is commodified. It’s not that it’s not important, but there’s a way to do it. You do it the same way. There’s standards and practices and codes. Just follow it and done.
We still want to treat it like it’s a source of inspiration and new thinking. And so learning to let go of that, I think, has been a challenge for design leaders. There’s an opportunity that we as a community are missing of building a workforce of UI designers, highly trained UI designers who can design to code, who could come out of programs, like, in a community college.
You know, you should be able to get an associate’s degree in software UI design. Instead what we’re doing is we’re asking people with 10 to 15 years experience to design onboarding flows. ‘Cause that’s, who we have around. We’re not staffed appropriately.
Let me finish with one last thought though, which is reflecting on one of the conversations we had, which was with Rebecca Nordstroem from LEGO.
She was this first UX designer on this manufacturing and supply chain team. And they realized, oh yeah, we’ve got some software, so we should have a UX designer on it. So she showed up and she did some UX design. And then she asked, what are your other problems? And they said what their other problems were. And she’s like, I think I can help with those too. And they weren’t UX screen based design problems, right? They were more systemic, more procedural challenges throughout supply chain and manufacturing that she realized, Oh, I can apply my UX design abilities to all kinds of problems that would not be considered standard UX challenges.
And what I like about that is she didn’t define herself by her medium. She defined herself by… I am a capable problem solver with a set of tools, sic me at your problems and I can help you resolve those. And I think that shift is one that a lot of design leaders have not made.
They’re too rooted in the media and material of their practice and not in the opportunity of their practice.
Jesse: I can see that. I can see that. I can also see those opportunities being pretty tightly constrained by the environments that they’re in, and the mandates that they’re given, and the way that their roles are framed.
You know, a lot of the fear and anxiety that I’m hearing out there comes from the fact that these design leadership roles, which used to be positioned as pretty highly strategic roles, influencing product strategy, product direction, product roadmaps, that kind of thing, are now being recast and reframed as operational delivery style management roles.
The disjunction
Jesse: And there’s this significant disjunction for people with what they thought their value proposition was, what they thought they could offer. And they haven’t been able to get the traction that Rebecca was able to get in demonstrating value in small ways that opens up those larger opportunities because nobody’s even giving them the small opportunities because they’re like, you’re our pixel factory; why do you care about all this other stuff?
Peter: I imagine … this didn’t come up, that Rebecca might’ve been met with some of that resistance. I suspect… This speaks to how you and I interface with different audiences in our practices, because what you’re saying in terms of the strategic alignment of the senior most designers getting taken away and, retrenchment to production, I am not seeing that with the audiences that I’m working with.
There is still a desire. I’m working with companies hiring sometimes their first design executive because they want a design leader in those discussions.
Jesse: I’m not disputing that aspect of it. I’m definitely seeing that part too.
Peter: I guess then it’s lumpy.
Jesse: Yeah, it is lumpy. It absolutely is. It continues to be the best of times and the worst of times.
Peter: A concept I’ve been recommunicating a lot over the past year is the Leadership Ceiling. Our conversation with Tim Kieschnick a few years ago now. And, there are folks who are hitting a ceiling that they can’t move above.
But what the Rebecca story said to me is that I think too often designers make their own ceilings. They are so wedded to a particular space and way of working that when even given those opportunities they don’t engage them. They think that’s not what they do.
Designers getting in their own way
Peter: They don’t recognize it as an opportunity. I am generally far more critical, and have been for 25 years, of designers being the primary constraint on their own ability to have an impact, than anyone else in the organization.
Because what I see elsewhere in the organization is people looking for someone with answers. People are looking for someone to show up with confidence, and if you can show up with confidence, you can make more change than you think you can. And I think designers lack that confidence often in new contexts.
Jesse: That’s interesting because you’re suggesting that there is a cultural thread within design itself that holds it back.
What you identified as this kind of reflexive passivity, this learned helplessness on the part of designers, or on the part of design leaders, such that they can’t see themselves as being bigger than what they’ve always been.
Peter: Something you and I discussed a few days ago… In order to evolve, the need for ego death, right? They need to recognize that who they have been for 10 to 20 years is not serving who they could be and the impact they could have, and they might have to let go of what they thought were core aspects of their identity, say in craft, in some particular part of the practice, and be, you know what, I don’t define myself by my ability to model difficult interactive systems well, because that only was going to get me so far. I am needing to let go of that part of my identity and embrace a new identity in whatever that opportunity is that’s in front of you, whether as a leader or solving new kinds of problems.
And, I mean, ego death is hard. That’s why it’s called death. If it was trivial, we would just be like putting on a new hat and be like, Hey, I’m a new person now. These identity shifts are challenging.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. And certainly, if you have spent your career mastering a craft and advancing in your career by proving your value by demonstrating your mastery of that craft, it can be very, very difficult to let go of that mastery as being the source of your value. I think that for a lot of these design leaders, there is kind of a choice that you have to make, as to whether you’re going to take a more kind of operational stance where you are going to be someone who is going to build a really awesome design production delivery engine for an organization, or are you going to be a leader who’s going to take a more strategic stance and try to be the kind of design leader who is going to try to drive product strategy and try to drive product roadmapping through the work that you and your team are doing.
Peter: I don’t have much to say, but, but yes.
Yeah, I mean, it’s… both designers and researchers feel entitled to work in certain contexts. And when they are let go, when people say we don’t need that practice anymore, it’s this grave injustice to this whole field that you let go of that team. And my thought is like, no one’s entitled to a job ever, anywhere.
And how did we get to this point of entitlement, this entitlement of “How I want to do it,” right?
Jesse: Yeah, the orthodoxy.
Democratization
Peter: Yeah. This is this whole democratization of user research controversy, which I don’t think is controversial, but a lot of people do.
It’s like, well, no. We should have trained UX researchers doing research. If we let other people do research, they’ll do it wrong, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m like, okay, but, No. Like, like, that’s clearly not what others are feeling, and upon what rock are you standing, claiming that anyone building software must have a PhD trained UX researcher, or they’re doing it wrong?
Clearly they don’t care. And so there’s a lack of self awareness around the nature of what people have to offer, the value they’re bringing into these contexts, and that was enabled or protected by, you know, a decade of really good times. And then when that tide rolled out, they were left exposed.
Jesse: Hmm. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s true. I think that’s true. The thing is, that these organizations that are not adhering to the orthodoxy, they’re not doing anything wrong. They’re not suffering in the market in any way for not having an army of PhDs and formalized processes and all this stuff.
It would be a really different story if we could all see that there was a lot of value being left on the table, but it’s simply an unproven hypothesis. And at this point, 25 years in, you got to wonder how much more time you give it to be proven out.
Design as a choice
Peter: That’s probably true about anything. Any function in a firm is a strategic choice. I was just having a conversation with another design leader who was talking about how she communicates to her team why a company is making certain decisions.
‘Cause sometimes, the team gets frustrated that design is not allowed to kind of practice to their fullness. And she uses this analogy of airlines. There’s some airlines like Emirates who spend a lot of money on designers and the experience, because that’s the value proposition.
And so if you’re working in a place like Emirates, you’re going to get to do good design on behalf of the people there. And that is their strategy. And then there are companies like EasyJet and Ryanair, located in Europe, who… their value proposition is cheap. Full stop. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
That is a perfectly legitimate… hundreds of thousands of people choose EasyJet and Ryanair recognizing that they’re going to have a worse user experience in exchange for affordability. And so I think we’ve lost sight of that variability. It’s not that it’s… that user experience is proving to be not valuable enough across the board that every company is going to sacrifice it.
But everybody was like, oh, we need to have a UX team because they all have UX teams and five to 10 years later, they’re like, what is the value of that team for us? Now in some organizations, lots of value.
Jesse: Mm hmm.
Peter: I have one client, a single company that has multiple product lines and some product lines are worth investing in design and building out big design teams and in the same company, another product line is laying off half their designers because it’s not materially important to that part of the business, so.
Jesse: Yeah.
Yeah. And I think that’s the appropriate way to think about it. There are going to be a lot of different flavors of design teams according to the product, the category, the market, where that product is in its life cycle.
You know, you can’t hit the ground running with a feature factory. There’s too much, there’s too much still unknown. You have to build your way up to that. So there are practices that apply differently. There are styles of leadership that apply differently at different points on an organization’s journey. So it’s extremely lumpy out there and honestly, probably just going to get lumpier.
Peter: And kind of a related, I think, trend line, starting in 2008 or 2009 with the financial crisis and the time of zero percent interest rates. And I think a lot of companies were willing to try things like invest in scaled design programs because it didn’t cost them much of anything anyways because money was generally free, and now that a lot of companies are having to practice mindfulness with their balance sheets, if they hadn’t realized the value of design in the last 15 years, yeah, they’re going to scale it back.
Others, others are like, no, this has worked. So, the state of things in UX in 2024 is way better, just generally, than it was in 2008. I mean, just in terms of the number of people doing it, however crappy so many experiences are.
Like the fact that any credible business that I engage with, has a mobile app, it has something I can use on my phone to get my business done. That kind of thing, even on the web, was not true 15 years ago right? So there’s been a general improvement…
Jesse: absolutely.
Peter: …that I think gets lost in the pain of today.
Jesse: Yeah. The baseline for user experience in the world continues to rise. There’s no question about that.
Peter: I think there is some question. There’s a lot of angry middle aged white people on LinkedIn who think we’re going backwards.
Jesse: I think the question is whether the practice of user experience design has continued to elevate along with the experiences that we’ve delivered.
We’re raising the baseline on the quality of the experiences that we’re delivering, but user experience design was aiming for the ceiling…
Peter: hmm.
Jesse: …not the baseline.
Peter: Yeah, yeah. There’s kind of a money-ballishness to this, right? Like there’s an optimizing of just how much UX do you need for what gain?
Something that I realized a few years ago as I turned on my television, and it was evident that the Prime Video logo on my screen was a rasterized image. And I was like, that is a demonstration of a lack of care in design on Amazon’s part, right? And then I was thinking like, you know what? That’s kind of true of Amazon. Amazon, because they are a moneyball organization, right?
Lots of data that drives decision making. They have figured out just how much to invest in design and no more, to realize some, whatever that optimal result is. And if they, I mean, you mentioned diminishing returns. If they were to invest another a hundred dollars in design, they’d only get 1 back after that point. And so they stop, and they just stop at mediocrity. ‘Cause that’s what works for them and their business with their market. And that’s a perfectly rational decision.
Jesse: Yeah.
You can call it mediocrity if you want. I would say that you know, another term for that is good enough. And that’s the thing that designers tend to lack, is a sense of what is good enough. They’re always trying to close the gap with the perfect, with the ideal. All they can see are the ways in which the thing is falling short.
SNL’s “Papyrus”
Jesse: So this past weekend, Ryan Gosling hosted Saturday Night Live. A number of years ago he was on that show doing a sketch called Papyrus, which is about the typeface Papyrus and its use in the film Avatar. They came back to that character in that premise for a follow up sketch this past weekend.
And designers are all like, ha ha ha, I feel so seen. And I’m not sure you should feel seen by this sketch because this is about somebody who is obsessed with something that doesn’t matter. The choice of typeface in Avatar has made no material difference to the billions of dollars that the franchise has made. None. The extra dollar that they would have spent to choose a different typeface would have had no material impact on the project. So now the question is, what are you so obsessed with here? What is the ideal that you’re actually upholding?
Peter: Right. And there is a…
Jesse: And is it any wonder you’re getting yourself shut out of strategic conversations by advocating for this stuff?
Peter: Because you’re foaming at the mouth talking about typefaces.
Yeah, yeah.
Or
Jesse: whatever your version of that is.
Peter: I literally just watched that sketch last night, ’cause I’d heard so much about it. And I don’t have much more to say besides yeah. Like, yes, you feel seen because it feels like the writers are in on the joke with you, that, you know, this billion dollar movie couldn’t be bothered to spend any effort on their typefaces, but then the punchline of the second sketch is, like, the jokes on you, that shit doesn’t matter, right? And, this wild -eyed advocate realizing he needs to move on with his life, that he was the source of his own pain.
Yeah. And I think that’s true of a lot of designers. And I think that speaks to, that’s a little bit of the identity and ego death, especially if you went to a design school, this thing that I was taught 15, 20 years ago as the most important thing. This thing that you have placed so much of your sense of self worth in, hitting the shoals of ignorance and neglect on the part of the organization around you. Understandable ignorance and neglect on the part of the organization around you.
And you’re like, but my value system and, unable to move past that, looking at some of the comments to things I read on LinkedIn, I’m seeing designers who are retrenching, who are like, no, craft is even more important, like, everybody-else-is-wrong-but-me kinds of mindset, which ends up making them appear like the crazy man in the Papyrus video,
*Your* value proposition
Jesse: Well, and it’s such an interesting thing, too, just the label design and designer, and ways that people get attached to that. Because you know, in my coaching work with my clients, part of what I often do is I help them articulate for themselves, in order to articulate to others, what their value proposition is as a leader, distinct from the value proposition of their team or the value proposition of design as a function.
What do they bring as a leader to the room, to any given conversation? And as we start to unpack the mindset that they bring, and the values that they bring, and the perspective and the philosophy that they bring, often we get to a point where we take a step back and I look at it and I go ,”This doesn’t actually look like a designer. This is about connecting customer insight with product opportunities.” Or this is about being able to envision things in holistic fashion. This is about being able to make strategic trade-offs. This is about a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with the way that anybody else construes the role of design.
But because you’re so attached to that label for it, you’re pigeonholing yourself, potentially, into a corner of the organization where you can’t be effective, where you can’t do the things that you came here to do.
So this is why I’m having this conversation with a lot of design leaders these days about like, if you want to do the job as you see the job, if you want to deliver value the way you see yourself delivering value, you probably should be looking at some product job descriptions.
Peter: Well, I was going to ask, ’cause now you’re helping people recognize their own complicity in their own ego death.
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: Right, as they’ve been the ones define the distinct value that they can bring. And the sum total of that isn’t rooted in their practitioner past. What do you see in terms of how folks respond to this? How do they take this in? And what do they do about it?
Jesse: It’s a process. It’s not something that we do in an hour. You know, I work with my clients for months at a time, peeling the onion. And sometimes there is a really strong emotional, kind of, coming to terms. A lot of it has to do with your history and how you got into the field and what that got you out of sometimes. For some people design was the thing that was going to allow them to use their creativity in the world for good. And reconciling themselves to the way that that’s worked out is itself a process that they have to go through before they can embrace a new identity.
Creativity
Peter: So many thoughts. Well, no, when you said the word creativity, that was a trigger because a week or so ago, I wrote a thing on LinkedIn around professional associations and how we don’t have a credible association for the digital product design thing that we do. We have many, but none that are really advocating for people who do this work in a way that feels meaningful given the problems that we’re talking about, this confusion that our industry is in.
But the creativity thing, someone I just saw today, was arguing against what I was putting forth in terms of professional association, because they said “no one is going to legislate my creativity or my ability to be creative in however I choose to be.”
Like, it was exactly kind of the issue that we’re seeing, whereas this middle aged white dude’s definition of creativity and his need to be free to be creative as he sees fit is exactly how he is constraining his ability, ultimately, to have a real impact within the context that he likely wants to have an impact in. Those things are directly related, and many, if not most, people don’t recognize that.
Peter: We talk so much, so fucking much about outputs, sorry, outcomes over outputs, right? That is a mantra that we in product design, we use a lot. Won’t shut up about. But when we say, in order to deliver outcomes, it’s not about you as identifying with your practice and craft, but you navigating this organization to, to make positive change, all of a sudden, a bunch of people are like, actually, maybe it is just about output. I just want to output pretty comps and shiny files. ‘Cause that’s, that’s what I like to do. And if that doesn’t drive the outcomes, maybe I’m okay with that.
Jesse: Yeah. So you referred to the fact that we don’t have an organization that really everybody looks to, to advocate for us and there is this essential centerlessness to the community, to the field, to the practice but then when it comes to advocacy, what I wonder is advocacy with whom, you know, there’s no Congress to lobby, no producer’s guild to negotiate with.
Peter: There are aspects of the work we do that are already have been lobbied for, primarily around matters of accessibility. It is a demonstration of this gap that we in the user experience community weren’t the ones to get Congress excited about deceptive patterns. That’s a failing on us.
That’s a failing on us that we, we’re not able to articulate the problems with this thing that is core to our practice, user interface design, and how it can be used to negatively impact people, to trick people into engaging in things that they do not think that they are doing.
We didn’t have any representative function that could have found the right congressperson, got some laws, got the conversation started, got laws passed. That is something that is a kind of advocacy. You’re, you’re making a face. What’s the face?
Jesse: Oh, I just, you know, again, this kind of assumes that there is a mainstream of thinking in this community. And I’m not sure that there is, you know, I think there is no Us here. There are scattered pockets of different practices and different philosophies and different mindsets. And I think that what you and I perceive to be the center of the mainstream is actually just the opinions of the people that we are closest to and talk to the most.
Peter: Perhaps if there is no center, if there is no mainstream, there will be no advancement. There will be subgroups sniping at each other till time immemorial. and we’re just going to continue to squabble towards irrelevancy.
Jesse: Digital product design generally, I think some part of it will always be a vernacular form.
The UI Design Ecosystem
Peter: Maybe I’m out on a limb here, but something I’ve been thinking about is, there’s a set of interlocking components here, where it actually starts with, we need more basic skilled designers because we have too many people with senior and lead level skills doing basic level work. If we need more basic level designers, we need a way to develop that practice, that base. That’s where I think about things like how do we turn UI design into a community college, something you get in two years, but a degree of rigor.
But that degree of rigor means that there’s testing and standards that these folks are being measured against, such that when they get their degree in UI design, they are seen as worth putting into a practice with a baseline of understanding around human behavior, information processing, all those types of things.
And then you need a set of codes that can enforce those practices, right? So there’s many parts here, but again, it’s not unique. And in fact, it’s not unique to UI design. Many other practices have this ecosystem of operation. And I believe that UI design is too important to not take this on in some similar way.
Jesse: I admire the vision and I agree that such a thing in place would raise the baseline for our practices and for some of our outcomes. I still don’t think that that’s going to be the guard against malpractice on the part of designers that a lot of people see it as being.
Peter: I mean, something else that is inferred by what I was saying before would be a requirement of some form of professionalizing, whether it’s certification, licensure, et cetera. If you are in some form professionalized, you have protection now to push back.
To pull it back to, I think, the core of our conversation, the value of this is legitimacy. I think one of the issues designers face inside these organizations is it’s easy to be perceived as illegitimate because literally anyone can call themselves a designer. Five different designers have five very different sets of skills, levels of skills, et cetera. There’s not a mechanism within these organizations to often, to appropriately judge that.
You hire designers that might work out and it might not. There’s no bar that any of them had to exceed in order to be considered a designer. And if you were a clueless hiring manager, because you’re an engineer or product person or a business person, a startup founder or whatever, you’re just like, I don’t know, I like the look of the thing that you had on your portfolio.
I’d like you to do that for me.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: People get burned. I mean, I do hear this story. I know folks, design leaders have told me about how their boss will never let them hire UX researchers because in some prior job, that boss had bad experiences with UX researchers, ’cause those UX researchers did it badly.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: Not because there’s something wrong with UX research, but because they were exposed to something called UX research that was evidently crappy, did not add value. And so this person is now categorically like, why would I invest in that anymore? If that’s what UX research is.
Jesse: Well, again, it’s about delivery against a value proposition and making sure that that value proposition is clearly communicated and understood. That leader with the previous UX research team was, you know, sold something that they couldn’t deliver. And so tuning your value prop to something you can actually deliver and that is actually valuable to the business I think is the trick.
And yeah, it’s true. A lot of these business leaders have seen a lot of design teams waste a lot of time. Endlessly, you know, fleshing out models of customer behavior that aren’t leading to material changes in the design. It’s like, why are we doing another round of investigation here? What, what…
Peter: More journey maps!
Jesse: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so again, the diminishing returns really kick in there and it starts to be a case of stick to the stuff where you know you’re getting value from your design team and, and double down on that. And that, again, comes back to production and delivery.
If we can’t have a professional association, what do you see as the way forward, do you think?
Ways forward
Peter: I surmised there are multiple ways forward. One that we’re starting to see is designers who are not wedded to the practice and the craft, willing to let go of design and embrace adjacent practices like product management.
And I would love to see that. The more we have design-informed product managers, the even better, everything is going to be, right?
I had this conversation with someone a couple of weeks ago at one of my client organizations, kind of manager-level design leader who’d been offered, the way I understood it, basically offered a product job.
And he was hesitant to take it because he’s like, but, but my, my home, my people, my tribe, my thing, the thing I love, et cetera, and I’m like, I’m just like, go do that. You’re going to do more for your team in that role, in the product role than you are able to do in your design leader role in terms of their ability to have impact and influence and bring that customer-centricity to the product development.
And so that’s one thread is, embracing other roles in the organization that enable you to have the kind of impact you want, even if you’re not oriented on practice. So that’s an initial thought.
AI something something
Peter: There’s something, something AI, something, I don’t know. I’m still figuring that one out.
If I’m hopeful about AI, it’s AI does the scut work so that the people doing design get to do the higher level, more strategic thinking, systems oriented, complex work. You’ve looked into it. You’ve, you’ve been pursuing AI ish stuff in design for a couple of years.
What do you see as a credible trend going forward?
Jesse: There are a couple of different facets to it. There are people who are folding AI features into existing products. There are people who are building brand new products, incorporating AI features, and then there’s the use of AI in the design process itself. This last area is extremely immature.
It’s been very difficult to get reliable results in terms of getting an LLM to provide anything resembling design guidance with any kind of consistency. So it’s still early days for all of that stuff. I don’t see AI taking away design jobs anytime soon, if only because the processes will have to adapt to accommodate the technology.
And right now I’m not seeing that happening.
Peter: You’re not seeing processes yet adapting just because everything is so new?
Jesse: I don’t see anybody changing their processes to integrate new tooling.
Not from what I’m hearing. I’m sure that it’s out there, but no tool has yet been good enough to inspire somebody to revise how they do user experience design. Put it that way.
Peter: One of the fears is that a tool is good enough that means we can just fire 50 designers because the tool does some aspect of the design work, and we don’t need, in the same way that, you know, an LLM can write my five page term paper now and get C minus, but maybe a C minus is good enough.
Jesse: So again, I’ll refer back to how you construe the value proposition of design. If the value proposition of design is you know, ship screens faster, AI is going to be a really important part of how you achieve what you want to achieve as a design leader. If the value proposition of design for you is more around customer insight and driving product strategy There are different opportunities there, and the human element, I think, plays a much stronger role in that aspect of it.
Peter: Multiple times you’ve returned to this concept of value proposition. And I’m guessing that’s something you’ve arrived at after some period of work, practice, reflection, whatever. I’m wondering what you see in terms of that resonance of this concept of, designers and design leaders, articulating a value prop, doing the work to identify their value prop, why has that seemingly become so central to your thinking around this?
Jesse: It is frequently the pinch point. It is frequently the place where the design leader is disconnected from the rest of the organization in some way. It has to do with how aligned they are with their leadership and with their partners about the value that they’re there to provide. And it’s important for leaders not to make too many assumptions, stepping into a new role about what people think you’re there to do.
And I, you know, I work with a lot of leaders who just haven’t asked enough questions of the executives, of their partners, about the role of design in the process, and what they see as the value of design in product development, where they see design participating.
And so first we have to unpack the design leader’s own model of these things, and then do the gap analysis against what they’re hearing back from the organization, and then figure out how to reconcile that.
Peter: When a design leader has articulated a value proposition, is this something that you encourage them then to be explicit about within their work, and to share that with their leadership and their peers?
Jesse: It depends on the situation. It depends on how bad the disconnect is. Sometimes, yeah, it is about a propaganda campaign. Sometimes it’s more subtle and thematic.
Peter: Are you familiar… something that came up in one of my leadership training classes is a user manual of yourself, right? Atlassian has advocated for this process. Is that a, and so this would fit into that..
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: Are you an advocate for that kind of thing?
Jesse: Yes.
I am actively working with clients on their user manuals. Yes.
Peter: The impression I got is that, at least through your work with design leaders, these design leaders feel that whatever their value and value proposition is, has a perhaps greater delta, or there’s a bigger gap, between that and what the leadership, business leadership, et cetera, values or expects from them in design. But I’m wondering if you have any insight into, is that specific about design or does every function feel that their value or values have a gap, or are there certain functions that are feeling more disconnected to the overarching value system than others?
And again, you might only know this from a design lens, but does there seem to be something specific about designer unique to design in this framing?
Jesse: I wouldn’t say it’s unique to design. It is, I think in part, an artifact of design’s age as a function in these organizations. It just simply hasn’t been around as long. I think also design’s value proposition has been a moving target. As we’ve been talking about for the last 25 years.
And so there is some need to clarify, to elicit some shared understanding, you know every one of those executives is coming into the room with either some past experience working with design or not. In either case, you’ve got to reconcile those different views of it in order to align on a value prop.
Peter: And that’s something I stress with all the design leaders that I work with. I’ve been doing a bunch of work with Chase Bank over the last two and a half years. It’s a quickly growing team from 350 to over 900 people in just the one team that I’m supporting. So even within this team, there’s a lot of newness, people with a lot of different backgrounds.
Some people with financial services backgrounds, some people with tech backgrounds, a lot of people with agency backgrounds who, even within the user experience organization, there’s a lot of different points of view as to what their job is given their backgrounds and then they’re interfacing in turn with product leaders, some who’ve been at the bank for 20 years and have a, probably, a very legacy and outmoded view of design. But then other product leaders they’ve brought in who are new, who they, in fact, these designers might be more aligned with the new product leader than that product leader is with their peers who’ve been at the bank longer and just navigating all this…
Jesse: Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah, this is the thing that I’ve seen more than once with new leaders coming into an organization, where they’re hired into an organization they felt a really strong alignment with the manager who hired them and they get in and they find out that that manager has no alignment with the level above them and they can’t get anything done. Surprise! Leadership ceiling
Peter: Weren’t we going to try to finish this on a high note?
Jesse: Yeah? Oh, dammit.
Peter: Um, I don’t know, I think the highest note for me and it’s, one of my few drums to beat, is that I think design and design leaders will succeed most when they get over themselves and focus on the problems and focus on the impact and less on the process and things like quote craft.
And it’s kind of that simple. And I think the more we do that, the more we will realize greater influence and the more it will actually benefit the practice of design, right? ‘Cause this is, as I’m saying this, this is something I think about with respect to working with design executives, design executives who’ve come up through the practice often want to stay rooted in the practice.
And what they don’t know is, by staying rooted in the team, that they are actually doing those people a disservice, because in their role, they have special access granted to the people with real power and authority in the organization. And the best thing they can do for their team is to ignore their team. And spend a lot of time with the senior leadership who have access to money and resources and strategic direction, spend that time up there. And then through that work, it will benefit that design org because of your ability to help shape or move those questions.
But if you’re just managing down and ignoring all the leadership stuff, yeah, your team is going to stultify.
Jesse: Yeah, yeah. Design needs allies, period. Design needs allies to succeed. The design leader has to be in the role of cultivating those allies. And honestly, if you’re feeling stuck as a design leader, maybe it’s time to go become one of those allies.
Peter: I like that. That’s a good place to stop.
Jesse: Thank you so much, Peter. This has been great.
Peter: This has been fun.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.
Peter: I’m like, how are people going to make sense of what the hell we just spoke about? But I…
Jesse: That’ll be, that’ll be part of the fun.
I trust our audience. They can keep up.
44: The Mindful Executive (ft. Christina Goldschmidt)
Mar 25, 2024
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: On today’s show, in a conversation recorded in November 2023, Christina Goldschmidt reflects on her first 60 days on the job as the newly appointed VP of product design for the music industry giant Warner Music Group. She offers thoughts on getting up to speed and finding early success as an incoming leader, profiling your stakeholders as if they were users, the leadership power of personal vulnerability.
Peter: Christina. Thank you so much for joining us.
Christina: Thanks so much for having me. I’m so happy to be here.
Peter: As, usual for us want to start out just by getting a better sense of who you are and what you’re up to. I know you’re in a new role, so if you could just share kind of your professional affiliation and, what are you doing now?
Christina: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. So I have been in the field of digital design for over 25 years and that’s been many twists and turns. And I just started a new role as the VP of Product Design at Warner Music Group. And I’m just a few days shy of hitting my 60 day mark And so it’s a very, very interesting time to have a chat about that.
And my role there is that I lead product design, which is both user experience design and visual design, but also working to build out our user research practice. Also, our brand new content design team, design operations, and making sure that we are just a fully functioning working product design team.
Also adding things like design systems, things like that.
Starting a new role
Peter: It sounds like you’re introducing a lot of. new elements into the organization. Was that something that they knew they needed and were looking for the leader to bring it? Or was that part of a conversation you were having with them as they were talking to you? Like, oh, this is, this is what I would want to do if you were to bring me in.
How did that conversation go?
Christina: Yeah. So one of the things that’s really interesting is that my entire hiring cycle was three weeks and I’ve never actually had a job, I think that was that quick, except for maybe 25 years ago. And so that was a real testament to them knowing a lot of what they wanted in a leader, but also trusting in me to be able to come in and diagnose everything that needed to happen.
And so we would have conversations along the way of maybe we need this, maybe we need that. So, halfway through the conversation saying, Oh, you know, we don’t have content here, so think about that. You know, that would be the kind of aspect of the conversation, but larger things like design systems the larger structure of how to build out research, adding design operations, those are things that they’re trusting me to really bring, diagnose and decide how to structure.
Peter: What group are you in? Are you reporting up to a product leader or are you in a different kind of organization?
Christina: Yeah. So, because Warner Music Group is a music company, I report to the president of technology. And so it’s very different than, say, my last job at Etsy, where we were a technology company and I used to report to the chief product officer. I’m still one away from the CEO, but I am in this interesting new space where our entire organization is the technology organization.
So now my immediate peers are engineering, product management, and something called product solutions, which is really our liaisons with the various labels and business, business partners.
Jesse: So you described this three-week sprint of a hiring cycle and, that just feels like this whirlwind where you have absolutely no time to prepare, no time to even really get your head around how you want to show up, who you want to be, who you need to engage with, how you want to engage.
It feels like you had to hit the ground running and make it up as you went along. How did you start figuring out how to engage this brand new organization? A very different kind of a problem, different kind of context than you were used to.
Christina: Well, I think that hiring process was sort of a, in a sense, a preview of what the job might be in the first year.
Jesse: In a good way, I hope.
Christina: In all honesty, right? Like, it’s a two-way street every single time you’re in a hiring process. And the concept is, is that it’s a startup within an enterprise company. And so being able to actually intelligently show up in a super fast hiring process, diagnose what they need so that I can show myself in my best light to them, shows that I can have basically a bunch of things thrown at me every single day and be able to diagnose that and move it forward.
It’s not for everyone, we’ll just say that, right? This was not a role that was for everyone. Yeah.
Peter: You know, one thing I’ve noticed, just following you on LinkedIn, is, and you mentioned it earlier, expanding the organization. Something else I also know about you is that you went and got an MBA at one point, so you know how to do math in spreadsheet form.
Christina: Yes, Yes, I do.
Peter: I’m sure your PowerPoint game is on point. But I’m wondering, what, if any, business case did you have to make around expanding your team? Was that something they had done the work to realize there’s some broader expansion and, we’ve already assumed it, or were you needing to argue for, may not be the right language, but help them understand the potential and opportunity and, thus do business casing. Like, how did you free up the resources for headcount?
Christina: When you’re undertaking something like this, that’s the first thing you ask. Especially in such a short cycle you want to understand how open they are to design, how much they value it, what they think the role of design will be and therefore my role. I was actually very happy and pleased to hear right out of the bat that they were already planning and had already started to put budgets in, that were very appropriate for things that I would want to need. And so I did not have to actually make the business case. When I got in the door, there was definitely finagling, horse trading, and things like that. I will say that immediately from day one, I had to prove value, and have to make sure that I’m not going to lose those heads, right?
But at least they understood and they value design and they see how important it is to build a really great product arm and that they had actually already allocated significant amount of head count to design. And that they left it up to me as to how to carve out that headcount.
Jesse: I think one of the biggest challenges for leaders who are new to an organization, trying to figure out how to deliver some kind of short term value, is the fact that they just don’t know anything yet. They don’t know anything about the context. They don’t know anything about what people really care about. They don’t know what their priorities ought to be, really, in terms of value delivery. And so I wonder, how did you go about learning the landscape in order to figure out where you could start delivering value right away?
Christina: Hmm. Yeah, so let’s be clear I don’t know anything. But I know just enough to be a little bit dangerous, right? One of the things that’s interesting about Warner is that their fiscal year starts in October. Planning was basically close to being done when I was walking in the door. And so, that was a really important time for me to understand where things were really important.
By knowing what their major focus areas were, and getting involved to help them make a better PowerPoint, to present that to the executive leadership team to the CEO so that we could convey that story, I was able to then say, Okay, I now understand this because I’ve helped to better visualize it and help us tell that story better
Jesse: Hmm.
Christina: And then understanding what that is, talking more deeply of… what does this mean, and having basically weekly prioritization conversations every week to say, I could choose to do 1000 things this week. Which do we think are the top three, five that matter this week?
And that kind of triage is really important.
Jesse: Who are you having those conversations with. Whose opinions really matter here?
Christina: Yeah, so it happens with my boss, the president of technology, and you know, I’m four in a box, right, with my other three peers. And it, oddly, is not happening all together. I’m having them as sort of more one-off conversations than triangulating it myself.
But it actually is pretty consistent. They’re just nuances that come with it when you have it as individual conversations. And I actually think in our environment, it’s working very well because it allows me to be that filter as opposed to us trying to work very hard to get in a consensus mode, which, If I was trying to facilitate that, it would take us much longer than if I’m taking in quick information and then choosing it for myself.
Jesse: Hmm.
Peter: The speed with which they moved suggested they had a, and I think you said this, like a pretty decent idea of what it was they wanted. And I’m wondering, what was it about you that landed? What were those qualities or characteristics, and then perhaps related, how clear was your mandate upon arrival? Or is that something you’re having to tell them? Sometimes we hear from leaders who, their first three months is to figure out what their mandate should be. And other times, when they come in, there’s a pretty clear idea of what’s expected of them.
Christina: Yeah. I can only report what they’ve parroted back to me, right? So there could be other things that I don’t know about why and how they chose me. But the question that they asked me for my case study was to present to the most complex project I’ve ever worked on. And they also were like, and it doesn’t matter if it’s like song and dance beautiful, just show up with some work.
That was their instructions. That’s a very different sort of prep sheet than other jobs that I’ve seen and things like that. And I think that that really shows to me sort of how they think and what they value.
Telling a transformation story
Christina: And what I gathered was a massive transformation story that I had done previously in the insurance space, where I had taken extremely legacy systems, you know, things that are on green screens, things that look like they’re Windows 98, variety of legacy old systems where there are three different systems, systems that had stories about people needing over a year to get trained on how to use them, systems like that, and showing them how relatively quickly was able to diagnose, was able to prove that the system that my team was working on was actually going to be better without having A/B testing or statistical results. That I could actually leverage both quant and qual in a much smaller in-house pool as opposed to, what I might do at Etsy, which is A/B test very quickly at scale and be able to prove that with metrics and be able to make something that is simple, usable, beautiful out of something that was previously none of those things, you know, cause I think I have that idea that because we all have really stunning cell phones in our pockets now, right?
These mobile devices, that no matter how deep into enterprise software or workhorse software that you’re in, everyone has a mental model of really beautiful, simple, elegant interface design now. And so there’s no reason for any tool to not take the, like, deep, really thoughtful customer experience into mind there. I think that philosophy also really was exciting for them, too, that I also had had experience bringing that kind of consumer facing interface design and simplified user experience to actually enterprise-based software and it was for, actually, business improvement, right? Things like reducing training, improving time on task, that is also always about making the experience better, making tangible metrics better, being able to prove that value.
I think that that was a big part of that story for me. And that I was able to show them that case study that they were like, Oh, this is exactly our problem here. You get it and you’ve done it. After, you know, one 30-minute conversation with the hiring leader and one, 30-minute conversation with the in-house recruiter. So being able to pull that out, I think made it look like a good fit.
And then the other thing that I think was helpful was that they were signaling that this is a hands-on role and you know, my last job was very much at scale. Very much where I was primarily doing operations and improving the way my team worked. Yes, I would have regular weekly reviews. Yes, I would think about the holistic customer experience, but my job was not day to day in our products and making them better and leading designers day to day.
I had an entire, you know, hierarchy of managers and directors underneath me who I deeply trusted in order to do that on a day to day basis. Here we’re a much smaller organization, where my ability to still give day to day design decisions is actually important. My ability to still be able to do that and to show that I could still do that, learn and talk about the work and not be just at a pure operations level, I think was also helpful.
And, to understand, I think, part of the larger value proposition to go to your second question They didn’t fully articulate this to me, but I could see it immediately when I walked in the door, is that you know, there are three major, like, music companies out there, right?
And we’re one of those, and it’s a great time in the music industry where there’s all this growth and really learning how to leverage streaming to make the business better. It’s a time for great innovation. But not all of the experiences are really, truly human centric and don’t actually meet the mental models of the users or the customers that use them.
And so to be able to actually bring innovation, to bring the tools of the trade of helping the team use more modern design techniques, really upping their game, so that we can look at design as a center of innovation, so that we are more competitive, that we can produce software that will gain us more business, that kind of aspect is definitely an aspect of my job. That it will be a competitive differentiator that the experiences that we make and the software that we ship will actually help us improve our business.
What does it mean to be ‘hands-on’?
Jesse: So you raised the question in here of how close you actually get to the work as part of your role. And for a lot of the people that I talk to, stepping from a highly leveraged operational oversight kind of a role into a role where you are closer to the design work, you’re kind of sleeves rolled up in it, for a lot of people that raises this fear that they’re not actually progressing as leaders, that this represents some sort of backsliding toward craft and away from leverage. And so I wonder what it was like for you to step back into craft and how that has affected how you see yourself as a leader.
Christina: I think one of the things that design leaders have is craft and that it’s our, not to reuse this term again, but it is our competitive differentiation as a field.
Jesse: Mm.
Christina: That there’s lots of overlap with the people that we work with every day, right? There’s this Venn diagram of, oh, we can set strategy together. Oh, we can determine technical feasibility together. But the craft is the thing that we do and that we own. And so as a leader, when I had an organization at scale, I never actually hired managers who did not come from craft. You know, there is a school of design leaders who are wonderful and design managers who are wonderful and are great managers.
But there can be a lack of credibility with them if they actually have never done the work themselves. And so that was my philosophy why that was so important. The reality is, is that it’s like our center and our core of understanding the work and how the work gets done and making sure that our teams are always able to do that work.
So I will say I do not make comps in Figma myself. I am in Figma looking at Figma, you know, whiteboarding with the team, putting notes in Figma. I’m not pushing the pixels, but it is still the craft of what is the best way to craft this experience? How do we understand the user? Things like that.
So just to let people know where my edges are. And then to get back to your question, I actually missed it.
Jesse: Mm hmm.
Christina: You know, and sometimes this is a blessing and a curse for some people, right? That, you know, the thing that you’re good at and then you miss it. And then it’s very comfortable to be able to go back to it.
And it’s about achieving the right amount of balance. I am definitely doing a massive operational overhaul here. I get to do that here, right. I get to think about how I’m making an organization at scale, building all of those things in and what’s going to be the right thing for us, for the long haul and to set the team up for true success, make a great culture, etc, etc.
But having a good balance with the craft is really important. And being able to say, I can walk into the CEO’s office and really defend that what we’re doing is right, and be able to talk about it probably within my first 30 days of, I know that we are going to be able to make a competitively different solution for this because I’ve already been in the sessions where we have come up with it, makes you feel really good that you’re not in those first 30 days being like, what am I going to do? What kind of value am I going to add?
It gives you fuel to then keep going, to keep growing, to keep being able to do more. So that’s how I kind of look at it. It’s almost like it’s low hanging fruit in a way. Don’t get me wrong. It’s hard. So it’s not that kind of low hanging fruit, but it’s like relying on something that you know.
Peter: You’re a relatively new leader, things moved quickly. I’m curious about the team you’ve inherited. That could put the team that you’ve inherited feeling anxious, uncertain, hopeful, all kinds of things.
Christina: Yes, I’m sure they felt all of those things. Yeah.
Enabling psychological safety
Peter: Well, and, based on our conversations and things that you’ve presented in the past, I get the sense that you’re attuned to the state of your team. And I’m wondering, as part of this first 90 days, how you’ve engaged them, what you’ve heard from them, and what are you doing to bring them along into this period of rapid change that you’re leading?
Christina: Yeah. So one of the things that’s interesting about the team is that they’ve already been undergoing this change for over six months now without me. And this is something that’s actually happened to me quite a bit, is that I come into roles where the position has been open longer. For some odd reason, the design team seems to have a lack of leadership.
And then the team is extra anxious because all of this change is happening around them. And they’re the one team without a leader. I don’t know if I’m attracted to those kinds of situations or what the correlation is with that, but that happens to me. So yeah, so a lot of this change has been happening prior to me joining.
So for about six or seven months, they’ve already been in it. What they’ve told me is actually having a leader has been helpful. And then one of the first things that I did was try to figure out how to actually bring them all together. ‘Cause some of them, though they’ve been there for multiple years, have never met each other in person.
You know, if you joined within the past three or four years, you’ve been working with people for a very long time. But because of the pandemic and then additional change, you’ve never met someone in person. For me, it’s like, I want to meet everyone. I want them to meet each other. I want to make sure that we’re starting to really build a culture of working together and having a culture of open critique so that we can move fast and really try and make great work together.
I brought the whole team together to New York and we did a design sprint for a week, and it was definitely a new way of working for a majority of them. But it was also fun, right, and that they could see we could do something quickly, if we did it together. Making sure that we had happy hour the very first night that everyone was together was really important. Most people are like, oh, I don’t want to have happy hour on a Monday, you know, I just got here. But, it’s important to make sure that people let off steam, have a good time, actually get to know each other, so that the hard parts of the rest of the week are less hard.
Peter: Of the things I think a lot about, and I’m wondering if it’s possible to accelerate, is your team’s sense of psychological safety, right? We know how important that is, particularly for designing UXers, in order to do their best work. And in moments of uncertainty and moments of change in certain corporate cultures it can be hard to feel that. And I’m wondering how specifically attentive you’ve been to that, and if you’ve got tools or, practices or behaviors or something you’re doing to try to bolster that?
Christina: Absolutely. I’m very attuned to it and actually have a couple of small techniques that I think anyone could follow or could try that I’ve been doing. So one is having a regular time for critique. That is not me-centered, but the team-centered. One, I bring work to that so that we can talk about the things that I’m involved in that they may not be involved in, so that they can actually know that I’m open to hearing things from them and getting input from them.
So that it’s okay, we’re just working together. That I think was really important. Things that I would share might not, again, be a beautiful comp, but it might be a strategy on something or it might be a flow on something or something like that. Or it might be an approach to something, but so that they can actually give me input.
And then allowing it to be a conversation where I ask other people’s opinions, where it’s not just my opinion. So though it’s a meeting that I set and that it’s a time where everyone makes sure that they have access to me, right now it’s three days a week. So every other day. So that there’s always reserved time on my calendar for them. They know they can always get me at that time.
I don’t know that it will stay at that, but right now that’s where we are. Other things are how I show up, in conversations and even in Slack, where I, make sure I’m deputizing people to have ownership over things.
Actually, the other day someone commented on it of, Oh, you replied to something and said, this person is the owner of this topic, which we know you were working on with them, but you gave it to them to own. And therefore you weren’t going to be a bottleneck, but it also showed a deep trust and it allowed everyone to know that I indeed trusted this person, trusted their ideas and just so happened that she was more on the junior side on the team.
So it also showed that it doesn’t matter what level you are, that if you’re showing up, doing great work, that that’s what matters here. So you can be your best selves no matter what.
Destigmatizing mental health
Christina: And then I would say another thing that I do is I try to create a safer environment for our entire organization. I’ve done it twice now, but we have town halls every two weeks across the entire technology organization. And I try destigmatizing mental health in those meetings, and so I will actively, vulnerably talk about my own mental health, and use situations where I have the floor, to what, I think, sometimes… they won’t be surprised about it anymore, but the first time I did it, very much surprised people.
Peter: Did they know? Cause you’ve been public about this. Was this part of the hiring process? Like, did some people know that this is something that you advocate for? Was that a side benefit of you being in this organization?
Christina: I think for them it’s a side benefit and it’s also like you do you sort of type thing, you know, like no one told me like, Oh, we want you to do that here, right? Where sometimes when I talk to people they’re like we really need that, you know, That wasn’t one of the main reasons, right?
But, we were having a conversation around trying to help people So, we’re moving very quickly. There’s so many things going on. And we’re also global. So we’re in multiple time zones. People were giving feedback that it feels very hard to have work-life balance because we work with people in London, we work with people in Los Angeles, and some people work with people even more further abroad than those locations, and so that leads to a mentality of being always on.
And so we were giving tips as senior leaders, setting out principles for how we don’t want that for everyone, and how we think about that, and things like that. And so the tip that I got to talk about was time shifting. And it just so happens that our office is near my old office from maybe ten-ish years ago.
And so my therapist that I have seen for a decade, her in-person office is now six blocks from my office now, and so what I was telling everyone is that, hey, on Tuesdays, you’re gonna see that I walk out the door right at five o’clock, and that I might come on later to check Slacks and whatnot, but don’t worry, I will be scheduling Slacks and I’ll be scheduling emails so that I’m not going to bother you, but the reason why I’m doing this is because now I can go to my therapist, my shrink, in person, and I, think there were probably gasps because I said, I go to my therapist.
So, you know, moments like that, where I just sort of tell people that this is a thing and that it’s okay and that it’s normal and it normalized that for the entire organization really helps to drive psychological safety for my team as well.
Jesse: I’d love to hear some more about the value you see in putting yourself out there in that way as a leader. And you know, for design leaders who might not yet get why that’s important or why that might be valuable. What is it for you?
Christina: Thank you for asking me that question. So I’ve actually done a lot of research in the healing space and I’m sure if people have seen any of my other talks, they’ll know that I talk pretty openly about my own healing journey from complex post traumatic stress disorder. And one of the things that I’ve learned in my research for that, and on my healing journey, is that if senior leaders are vulnerable, it makes it safer for anyone else to actually understand and have the tone set for them to know what’s acceptable and possible in their work environment.
That, for me, hit home so hard that, if I can share, maybe somebody else can feel just slightly more that who they are is acceptable, that they can take care of themselves and ask for help or seek the things that they need, that they don’t have to fear any issues or any retaliation around those topics because I’m out there talking about them and normalizing them, very often.
And also, I have found that when I make myself vulnerable, it makes me more relatable. I’m sure you’ve heard from other design leaders that it’s a very lonely job.
Jesse: Yeah.
Christina: And, one of the reasons why I think is because you lose some of the camaraderie that happens with other designers when you ascend to you know, the highest levels.
And so your entire career, you’ve been with other designers who are in the same boat as you, who understand you to a certain extent. And then when you graduate to be a design leader, design executive, now your peers are all cross functional. And your team treats you differently because you’re their leader, even if you yourself don’t feel differently.
And so when you share, it makes you more likely to have a personal relationship with those on your team because now they see you as a real human as opposed to just a leader. And so I actually find that it gives me something back, too, like it allows me to have more with the team.
Peter: And when you say with the team, I’m assuming you mean the team that you lead, your design and user experience team, because I’m wondering, somewhere, here it is, you know, I have my Patrick Lencioni, right? Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He talks about one’s first team, which is, that cross functional team.
And I’m wondering how your approach has lowered barriers, that might not be the right word, but has made you more accessible and made your cross functional peers more comfortable relating to you, in a way that allows you to feel less lonely, even if they’re not fellow designers, you’re all part of a team trying to move things forward for the business, and what impact has it had for you in those cross functional relationships?
Christina: It’s also extremely beneficial. I feel so connected and supported and helped by my cross functional peers. And I also think it’s because I’m willing to show up and say, Hey, this is who I am. I’m advocating for all of us, but also I need help. I’m willing to say those words. And, that exchange makes it so that we can be really real with each other, and then you can go so much deeper with someone and understand what they’re actually trying to achieve and get to a very win-win situation, because you now know that you’re working towards the same thing. You can connect on that deeper level. And so I think it’s been extremely beneficial for me to also do that.
Because I say things that they might need to hear. Or that they’re so happy I said because they were thinking them, but didn’t have the words to say them themselves. Things like that. And so it also makes it easier for them in a sense.
Peter: We’re approaching this as an unalloyed good, and I’m wondering though, if you’ve ever overshared, if you’ve been in contexts where it didn’t work, where it actually got a little blowback, either someone else wasn’t ready to be as open or as vulnerable, or in a certain corporate culture, it was just like that doesn’t work here or anything like that, or if it has always worked for you.
Christina: No, it hasn’t. I’ve really only been in this mode of sharing since 2020 and pandemic times, when it’s really been, you know, sort of dire for us as a society. And I have, in difficult environments, like I started to share more at Accenture. And that was actually a really interesting experiment for me, where I actually, was treated very well and very respectfully when I did share.
But previously at another job, multiple jobs ago, when I was very close with someone, that was, let’s say, someone higher in the food chain than myself, and had shared, I definitely felt that there was retaliation against me for sharing. And I definitely don’t think that I overshared, but it felt like just sharing and them knowing that about me put me in an extremely vulnerable position.
Ever since then, I’ve been extremely cautious and then also have tried to figure out how can I make this better for others. I’m also dyslexic, and so there’s a lot of conversation in neurodiversity circles about do you disclose, do you not disclose, and that’s actually a pretty also interesting one for a lot of people to talk about, too, where I’ve definitely met people who are in environments where they will not disclose because they know those environments will basically start to try and exit them out of their organizations.
Whereas for me and design, accessibility is half of our job sometimes. And so having the ability to talk about processing differently and how it helps me with my job actually is a benefit to me. So I also feel very privileged in that now I’m at a leadership level and have less fears about disclosure. That also I’m in a field where certain aspects of the things I disclose are actually pretty much always beneficial.
But it’s definitely, you know, I’m not going to tell everyone to just run out there and tell everybody everything, because I, I’ve seen it go poorly for me and for others, you know?
Jesse: It’s such an interesting cultural challenge, because as much safety as you might be able to create when people are interacting with you personally, that second order, that second degree of safety beyond you out into the larger organization, I think becomes the real challenge of actually encouraging other people to show up in similar ways.
So it’s not just about how people behave when you’re in the room. What do you do to encourage, not just vulnerability and psychological safety, but, leadership traits and leadership values in the leaders that you bring up within your organizations?
Stakeholder management
Christina: The best thing that I can do is help people become really good at stakeholder management because we can be the best leaders that we can possibly be, but if we can’t manage other relationships, whatever you’re doing internal to your team, can all, you know, can all go to hell, right? I didn’t actually plan to be in design when I was a child. I wanted to be an anthropologist.
Peter: Couldn’t hack it though, could ya? I have an anthropology degree.
Christina: Oh, amazing. So no, I wanted to use the Internet, you know, data viz on maps to do some more predictive modeling in the field. And in the mid 90s, it was like a no-go.
Peter: Now that’s how they find lost cities in the Amazon, but not then.
Christina: No! Yeah, definitely. It’s a whole new day. But really teaching people a design based framework for stakeholder management so that they can do it, and become studies of their partners, and other techniques in order to shore themselves up and understand the world and have decision making.
That, I think, is how you can help design leaders be prepared for the future and to be able to lead and set the right tone because they can, in a sense, defend themselves, and that they can move ahead and advance the right agendas. And I do have some elaborate frameworks for that. I don’t know if you want me to go into it.
Peter: Maybe, well I don’t know about elaborate, but, you know something that I end up talking a fair bit about is the need for designers to change their own mindset. Designers do more to constrain themselves than anyone else.
And part of it is thinking that the work stands on its own without any communication. And part of it is politics. Like you don’t advance any agenda without playing politics, and, you called it stakeholder management, I call it playing politics. They’re kind of the same thing. I mean, there’s different shades to it, right?
And so maybe this question then: How have you helped, because I’m sure you’ve had folks who have been resistant to that, right? What have you found helps others see the opportunity and the value of these more political approaches?
Jesse: How do you help designers get over themselves?
Peter: Sure.
Christina: Okay. I can actually answer it from that lens, Jesse. So, I’ll quickly talk about one of my frameworks and that is a proto-persona-based approach to stakeholder management. It is explaining to your team or the person, first thing is to manage towards outcomes. When someone comes to you and constantly says, I can’t get my ideas heard, I can’t do X, Y, and Z, I’m not being effective, nobody listens to me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that’s the best right time to help someone have a design-based methodology to overcome that.
Other people will, you know, give people, conversations around executive presence, et cetera, et cetera. But I’m like, no, let me give you something a little bit more tactical to do, and I’m going to be a, little bit silly about it, but I basically talked to this designer, let’s say, and it’s best if it’s done at least in a group of three people, to figure out who their target is that they are trying to make change with or convince of something, and that they basically need to study them.
Sometimes I use the word stalk, but really it’s, try to get into their mindset and follow things like, what kind of questions do they repeatedly ask? What kind of data sources do they trust more than others? How do they make decisions on a regular basis? And actually catalog these things and make a little proto-persona about that person. And then to go into a role-playing exercise where there are at least three people doing three roles, and you have to do all three roles, where one person plays the target, one person plays the presenter, one person is a note taker, and you go through a scenario, and everyone is in a different format, right.
The note taker is actually really important because they can see the whole scene, and give more holistic feedback, but when you’re embodying the person and when you’re actually trying to talk about the thing to the person and doing that three times gives you enough practice, right, that you can actually start to think more like that person, have more empathy for that person and get muscle memory about how that person might react and therefore how you can help that person see your point of view. And it I think relates well to designers because it’s using things that they already use in just a way that actually serves them in a different way.
Peter: As you were talking, I found myself Googling “empathy map,” right? Like, many of us use empathy maps in our work. What would it be like to do that for our stakeholders? Not just for our users or customers.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, I regularly recommend to my clients that as they’re heading into big stakeholder meetings to write a user research protocol, exactly like you would for…
Christina: yes.
Jesse: … user analysis. You know, it’s the same thing.
Christina: That’s so great, Jesse. wonderful. I love that. Yeah. Yeah, and then of course I have more esoteric opportunities that not everyone’s open to, but, I definitely have another line of opportunity where you might look at the world through the lens of tarot cards, or try to access your subconscious through shaman—
Peter: I thought you were going to start talking ayahuasca…
Jesse: Different podcast, Peter.
Peter: ..it is called Finding Our Way, you know, going on that journey.
Shamanism as leadership practice
Christina: Yeah, shamanic journeying and breathwork though, breathwork is a completely natural version of psychedelic journeying. So…
Peter: is that something you do with stakeholders? Do you breath work with stakeholders or is that something that you teach people to do with themselves and it allows them to show up better, or is, is there a group aspect to it?
Christina: I teach people to do it with themselves or in a small group, not with stakeholders, so that they can actually get to know themselves and tap into their subconscious to understand a situation better and to learn how to move forward. It can be pretty helpful. It’s very similar to, I think, the psychology of traditional design thinking techniques, things like liminal spaces or things like systematic brainstorming techniques when you’re pushing two ideas together to get to a new idea. Having regular access to your subconscious, we normally use it for brainstorming, for innovation, but it can be really, really helpful if you have that window into there, if you’re actually trying to use it to solve problems dealing with people, dealing with business challenges. It can be really powerful if people know that they have access to that too.
Jesse: There are always interesting sort of cultural headwinds that we face when introducing techniques that maybe haven’t been covered yet in the Harvard Business Review.
Christina: Right, right.
Jesse: And I wonder about what it takes to lessen the fear of the unknown here for people, and help people embrace new frameworks, new ways of thinking about, and doing the job that they think they already understand how to do.
Christina: Yeah. So one, it definitely helps when I lead with like, oh, I’m,y You know, the design leader that has an MBA, and I like to back stuff up with data and things like that, that gives me a little bit more credibility.
Jesse: Mm hmm. Sure.
Christina: It’s a little helpful in that sense. But in a sense there are gateway drugs. Um,
Jesse: Uh huh.
Christina: Metaphorically, right? So you can have people think about things like relaxation techniques, with basic breath practices, or talk about meditation a lot, and not call it that we’re going to do breath work. You know, like you can sort of help people get into something.
But also what I like to do is, if I’m really trying to convince someone to try one of these techniques, is walk them through the larger landscape, show them how it fits into a larger design practice, how it is very similar to other techniques that they use, talk about the neuroscience and the psychology behind it, and try to say this is a technique you can use regardless of its origins and that If you want to give it a try, you can.
But the reality is that so many people are mystical-curious right now that it’s actually not that hard. So, when I was at Etsy and we saw all that sales data, all, like, huge trends were in New Age rituals and in, like, sometimes during the holidays, psychic readings and drawings would pop as, like, number one, number five product across the board.
Like, the number one selling product would be one of those items.
Jesse: Wow. So maybe there’s more cultural permission out there than leaders might think.
Christina: Exactly. Exactly.
Peter: We talked a little bit about playbooks and frameworks, but as you’re looking forward, and as you’re looking at now, it sounds like growing your organization and you’ve been inside scaling organizations, I’m assuming, you just came from a scaled organization and you’ve had a chance to like, I don’t know if step back is quite right, but you know, you’re operating currently with a smaller team, though you’re going to be growing it to some greater size.
And I’m wondering, what you’ve learned in your past that is maybe changing how you’re thinking about scale and growth this time around, how are you approaching this opportunity differently than you might have four or five years ago?
Christina: Oh, absolutely. Well, I’m like, I have a framework for everything.
Peter: Hey, Frameworks are my love language.
Christina: Yeah. So I, think what’s been great about being in scaled organizations and in scaling organizations is it has allowed me to try and make some sense of that. And so I do have a nine part framework of everywhere that I want to look and investigate, so that something, like, I know I can come into a very fast moving situation where I have to go quickly and start to make my playbook so that I know how to tackle things and move forward.
Peter: And not just simply be reactive, but that you have an agenda that you’re bringing to bear, even without all the information.
Christina: Absolutely, absolutely. it’s gonna have me do things like, make sure I am from day one ground in the business goals. And if I can’t figure that out, then I can’t set the tone for the rest of the aspects of the framework. And hopefully I am figuring out those business goals even in the hiring process so that I know what I’m getting myself into oftentimes.
And then trying to assess, basically, where I think the design org is and, I’m sure you guys talk about this as design maturity and things like that, but, what’s the overall approach of the design team that’s there, and how the larger company or organization as a whole reacts to it and values it and interacts with it.
And what might be needed in order to make a shift there to an ideal state or better or more ideal state? And then some of it is just the mechanics of given that sort of landscape, what’s the best kind of organizational model? Should we go after what’s the right kind of ratios regarding cross functional teams that is going to make us successful right now, making sure that those mechanics are in place very early.
So that if I haven’t gotten the head count, I know how to go get that head count or to fight for that head count. And then starting to think about the team itself, you know, looking at their career paths, career ladders, thinking about longevity, thinking about the transparency there that becomes really important because if your team doesn’t actually know where they are and where they can go, it also makes it harder to help move and shift them into different ways of working or into growth patterns.
I feel like, even though it’s been a hard year or so, I’m clearly stepping into an organization and hiring and growing. I think that most design leaders still tend to do this. So, then it’s getting those kinds of systems down. How are we going to go about recruiting? How are we going to go about onboarding? How are we going to make that work really efficiently so that we get other people in that help fuel us, in that they’re able to hit the ground running too, you know.
And then more things around development, leadership, and coaching styles of the team looking around those areas Trying to make sure that everyone sort of has that right culture fit and is doing the right thing to keep fostering all that stuff that you’ve put in place. And then probably things like communications comes into play a lot, I would say, yeah, like making sure that I’m having the right amount of communications and transparency, setting context, helping the team really understand what’s going on, how to do their work, how to put it in context, how to keep moving forward and understanding the larger business context.
Yeah. And then, you know, whatever we can do to continue to develop that culture of rituals and, make sure it’s happy and thriving.
Jesse: I love it. What an optimistic vision.
Christina, thank you so much for being with us. This has been great. If people want to find you on the internet, where can they do that?
Christina: Yes. So I am definitely on LinkedIn, though right now my inbox is a little full since I put out that I was hiring.
Jesse: That’ll happen.
Christina: So that might not be the most effective means of finding me. So, but yeah, under Christina Goldschmidt, you can try. I’ll try to get back to you. But also I’m on Instagram christinaonUX. Is a fun way to see all the other crafting things that I’m up to outside of the office. That’s always fun.
Peter: Thank you so much for joining us.
Christina: Yes, thanks for having me!
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.
43: Leading Enterprise UX for LEGO Group (ft. Rebecca Nordstrom)
Mar 09, 2024
Transcript
[This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited. Please forgive any copy errors.]
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: On today’s show, one of the largest scale and highest precision plastics manufacturing operations in the world belongs to Denmark’s LEGO Group. LEGO’s Rebecca Nordstrom leads the team designing the software they use to produce those billions of little bricks. She joins us today to talk about bringing UX to the factory floor, measuring success when user adoption is mandatory, and the differences between leading design in North America and in Europe.
Peter: Thank you so much, Rebecca, for joining us today.
Rebecca: Thank you for having me.
Peter: Typically we start our conversations with a very easy question, which is: who are you and what do you do? What’s your job? What’s your role? Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Rebecca: Yep. So I am the head of digital product design for our area inside of digital technology inside of the larger LEGO Group. So, LEGO Group is a little bit of an onion organization, if you will, and inside that we have digital technology, which is responsible for all of the external digital tools that our customers and play experiences support, but also we have a lot of internal. And then I am in charge of a digital product design team of around 20 folks and we are primarily supporting internal-facing applications. So, these are supply chain and manufacturing. So it’s a little bit of a different flavor. And I hope that listeners are not disappointed that we’re not going to talk about the fun LEGO play experience. But I think we really do some fabulous work where it is focusing on enterprise design work, supporting folks in the factories, folks in supply chain, and it’s a lot of really tricky, complex problems. But we also get to deal with a lot of kind of cutting edge technology and the things that we interact with, which is really fun.
Peter: You mentioned the factory and supply chain, like I’m assuming there’s like internal design and development. What’s your relationship to that, if anything?
Rebecca: Yeah. So for the internal design and development, we have product teams, and my team is the design resource into those product teams. And then we have product managers, which sit on the business side. And then we’ve got engineers inside those product teams as well, which sit kind of in the same area as me in digital technology.
So, the product teams straddle both sides of the organization, if you will, and then they are dedicated into kind of user group areas within LEGO. So we have a product team, for example, all around packing. And so that is supporting all of the packing functions that help produce the finished LEGO good that leaves. Yep. I don’t know, I feel like, I feel like the stuff that happens behind the scenes in large organizations like LEGO is like this hidden gem that nobody really ever talks about or looks at, but there’s so much interesting things and like fantastic work happening there.
Design for Internal Tools
Peter: What’s the top thing that no one knows about that you wish they did?
Rebecca: I think one is that we, we strive to create those play experiences for our internal employees inside LEGO as well. So even the factory workers should get that fun, enjoyable experience because we have that people promise to them. So we are creating, you know, polished end products, even with like the little microinteractions and animations and all of those things into it, for the factory workers.
And I think that’s something that, unless you really, like, pull back the cover, you would never know that about LEGO. And we do that in a lot of organizations, actually, not just LEGO, but I think we have a high promise to our employees in that way.
Jesse: it’s fascinating to think about the tension between playful experiences and supply chain and manufacturing logistics. And so I am curious about how products even get conceptualized in an environment like that. I feel like a traditional, kind of, requirements definition approach is not going to quite capture it for you guys, right?
Rebecca: Yep, so typically we are approached with a business problem that needs solving. Either that we need to cut down the cost for manufacturing the finished good, that’s the one that we are constantly kind of battling year over year, because we always need to drive down cost, right?
And so then what we do is we work with business.
So the designers will go out and start researching with business on the processes that they’re involved in and start to identify different areas where we can change the process, and so, in that way, a lot of time, we’re not doing kind of traditional digital design in that way, but it’s really looking at end to end process, and how do we redesign the entire process and experience that we’re supporting in the shop floor. And how can digital tools play a role in that, and then working together with business to kind of tear that apart and put it back together.
Jesse: I imagine that entails a different kind of a partnership with the business than you might see in other places. Because you need that deep process expertise at the table, right?
Rebecca: Yep, so we have designers embedded into the product team. So they’re not, we don’t work as a agency or consulting centralized team. We’re embedded into the product teams, and in those then the designers over time are getting those relationships with all of the stakeholders in the business, but they’re also getting a lot of domain knowledge in there.
So you can go in and talk to the designer that’s working in the molding area and ask her about all of the different settings and all of the processes to do with like molding and manufacturing. And by the way, LEGO is the largest producer of tires in the world. If you don’t know that. So like we are, we are a massive manufacturing company actually, and that’s kind of at heart of what everything does.
And so the designers really deeply know those areas and those processes, and they are experts in their own way of that. But also you need that expertise to be able to talk to business about it too, because it’s not, it’s not an app for buying a cup of coffee where it’s super relatable,
Jesse: Mm hmm.
Rebecca: it’s getting into these really complex and engineering-focused processes. And so you have to be able to speak a bit of the language with the users for them to trust you and to open up.
Peter: Nothing against apps for buying cups of coffee.
Rebecca: No, those are, those are wonderful too, but I think, I think it’s like a totally different end of the spectrum of like what we deal with. Yeah.
Peter: I’m wondering then, as you’re looking to build your team, right? Because you’ve had looking at your LinkedIn, I’ve seen you’ve had jobs in corporate America. I don’t know exactly… I saw Capital Group and Kaiser Permanente, so large legacy organizations. Then you’re now at LEGO. You’re working in this really specialized environment, like, like an uncommon one.
Hiring for specialized environments
Peter: Not that many people are probably working on the design of manufacturing and supply chains. And I’m wondering how that, that has caused you to shift how you approach recruiting and hiring, or your orientation on skills. Like what is it you’re looking for in building your team that might’ve been different than the kinds of things you were considering in the past.
Rebecca: Yeah, I think one is, people that really fall in love with the problem, right? So it’s not people that are super focused on the solution all the time, but that can really fall in love with the problem. So they are willing to spend time investigating that problem, spend time understanding it, and really understand all of the, the nuances and edges to the problem.
So we get these like really crazy wicked problems of… you have all of these VPs and stuff and they’re looking at it and they’re like, we don’t know what to do. And then we get some of the design team in there. And so they need to fall in love with that problem as number one and really enjoy that it is complex.
And you’ve got some really amazing designers that that is their sweet spot. They don’t, they don’t want the, the easy showy stuff. They want the stuff where they know this is going to take a bunch of iterations to really smooth this out and understand where the places that we can move and where are the places that we can’t move.
So I think it’s, it’s that problem that’s number one and then the other one is just really strong collaboration skills, because part of what we also face on a regular basis is the change management portion of design as well. So for like consumer-facing things, you can kind of release it. And then the adoption of it as a proof point that you’ve made something of value to the consumer-facing audience.
That’s not really true when you talk about internal applications, because it’s a mandated use of those applications, and so the adoption of it and the change management of that is a totally different beast, right? Where you need to be working with the training organizations to understand what are their obstacles around the change that you’re proposing, working with all of the different local teams that should be adopting it to also understand what’s their point of view because they adopt, like, local practices towards their work as well.
So it’s kind of the problem, and the stakeholder management, and collaboration and the ability to kind of lean into those things. So it’s, it’s maybe less of a traditional design role where you’d get a brief and then get to kind of rock and roll and create something that’s really, really fun in that aspect, but enjoying the other types of problems in there.
Jesse: And in your role as leader, how close do you get to these problems?
Rebecca: So when I joined LEGO Group five years ago, I was actually an individual contributor in a team. And I was the first designer that they hired in to my area inside LEGO Group. So at that point I was kind of acting as individual contributor. And then over the last five years, we formed a team of 20 people and I’m head of this larger department.
And so I’m more triage for some of these things and to be the glue between all of the different applications that we work on as well. So when we have supply chain and manufacturing, all of those pieces need to kind of flow together this bigger system design. And so my role now is kind of to look across and to spot where we need teams to be collaborating, where do we need designers to be collaborating, and then encourage as much as possible for our designers to steal from each other with pride. Like don’t, don’t keep reinventing something. Like we have our Figma files completely open and people should be in each other’s Figma files. They should be copying each other’s work. They should be leaving comments and asking questions and trying to, to bridge it so that it is cohesive across.
Jesse: Well, it’s this interesting balance that you have to strike because you have this need for deep specialization and expertise, kind of team by team. But then you need something that’s going to hold all of them together in some way. How do you do that?
Rebecca: I think one is, so I’m partnering with the heads of product in that way to create kind of the bigger picture of those larger cross-product initiatives that need to happen. And part of that is also the vision and they’re calling it roadmap. And I really cringe at the word roadmap usually, but, so they call it roadmap of where manufacturing should be going.
So part of it is to see, okay, in, you know, 3, 5 years, what is the ambition from the LEGO Group of where they want to bring supply chain and manufacturing, and from the knowledge that I know about the product teams, how does that piece together to move towards that, and then we have a lot of recurring sessions together with the heads of product and engineering and the product teams to then review what they’re planning to work on and get it there.
So I think it’s more in that trio function, I’m playing at kind of like that leadership level to then steer the direction of the product teams and help coach the designers to support that bigger vision.
Jesse: Mm hmm.
Rebecca: But it’s, it’s chaos, honestly, right? Like it’s, you know, it sounds all good and it sounds like we have a nice plan and a path there, but it is constantly things popping up and it is a bit chaotic, but that’s part of the fun.
Peter: Chaotic because you’re responding to what?
Rebecca: Chaotic because we have 30 product teams and 600 plus applications inside those 30 product teams. And then we’ve got 5 factories, soon to be 7 factories around the world that each have their own set of stakeholders and want to have a say in what’s going on? So it’s, it’s a big communication game sometimes.
Jesse: And are you also operating in that trio mode when you’re engaging the stakeholders?
Rebecca: Yep. So we try to have the trio within the product team. So with one of the designers in the product team, the product manager, and one of the more senior engineers, and then we also have the trio at the leadership level. So head of design, head of engineering, head of products working together and this kind of trio at the leadership level.
That’s the one that is engaging with a lot of the different stakeholders across the factories and across the supply chain, because they also have those kind of leadership hierarchies and are trying to put together plans at these wheel levels or leadership levels. Yeah.
The intersection of physical and digital
Peter: And you’re… I’m curious. You’re the head of digital product design. So your team is largely building software or designing software. And that’s what these groups are doing. But I, I’m imagining there’s a need for integration between your software stuff and some form of hardware physical manufacture… like when I think manufacturing I’m thinking giant robot arms moving things around, and so like, where does your design end? Where does other design begin? How do you coordinate and integrate with teams to make sure that it’s all coming together? Given what you said about the chaos, I can imagine part of the chaos is all these different modalities and kind of ways of working.
Rebecca: Yeah, no, you’re totally right about that. I think with the integration with the hardware that’s in the shop floors and the factories, that is a different team. So there’s a operations technology team that handles the purchase and design of that hardware, but by and large, it’s off the shelf purchases for that.
So that team is kind of screening which hardware we should purchase. And then it would come into ours to deal with, okay, how does somebody actually interact with that hardware now? And more and more we’re learning that that decision, when they’re purchasing the hardware, needs to start engaging with the design team as well, because we see that we purchase a lot of hardware where there’s built-in interfaces that are completely unusable, or there’s clashes between the way that the hardware operates and the process of how the user actually needs to interact with that hardware. So, I think more and more, we’ve kind of learned our lesson that it needs to be this holistic approach where we have the design team, the product team, and this operation technology, all looking at the tools that we’re buying, both in terms of software, but also hardware, to make sure that it actually works together.
And we have a couple more collaborative initiatives that we’ve been running more recently where that’s been really successful. And it has been a nice kind of proof of concept of that collaboration. But I think the integration with the hardware is really like a fun thing for the team, actually, because like, you know, you, you’re doing something and you can physically see how it is interacting. And then we have some initiatives where the team, even though we’re digital product designers, we are designing things directly onto the hardware as well.
So, whether it’s signals with lights and sounds and things like that, or screens that we’re mounting onto the hardware, that sort of stuff.
Measuring success
Jesse: You mentioned earlier that you don’t really have, you know, user adoption to guide you in terms of evaluating the success of a design, the success of a product. How do you measure the success of your work collectively, but also specifically for design?
Rebecca: Yeah, I think one of the key things that we try to pay attention to is gray IT or shadow IT, depending on whatever you want to call it, but the systems and workarounds and tools that users are often creating themselves, because there’s a gap for them. Something is not working for them, so they’re going to solve it themselves.
Jesse: hmm.
Rebecca: So that’s a really good signal to us that something has gone wrong, or we’re not supporting the right thing. And so that’s often something that we are trying to pay attention to. Do we see that the shadow IT is going down? Do we see new things popping up in that area? If so, then we need to go do some research and figure out, you know, what’s going on. What need do you have that is not being met by the tools that we’re giving you?
And another thing we’re trying to do is to get more data into the tools themselves. So, get user feedback integrated into the tools. So, just like a consumer app, they can rate the tool. They can provide feedback into the tool. They can capture screenshots of what’s going on and write back to the team and say, “Hey, this needs to be different.” So to get that feedback directly in from the users, interacting with it, and then also get analytics into the tools so that we can see that they’re actually completing the process that we want them to complete, but where are they getting stuck in there? Where is it taking too long or where do we actually see, because we kind of own the whole ecosystem, where do we see that they’re leaving this tool and going to that tool and coming back to this tool, because then we need to integrate.
Peter: Kind of related to that, I’m wanting to go back to your story of 1 to 20, right? You started as a team of 1, now there’s a team of 20. In order for that to happen, I’m assuming value was made very clear and explicit. What was the nature of that value? How did others recognize what it was you were doing? How did you then build momentum to scale this organization? How did you have to navigate the organization? Were there any politics involved, or was it a fairly straightforward kind of business case? ” Let me hire 20 people. These 20 people can realize, you know, n number of millions of dollars in cost savings” or something like, what’s that story of, of one to 20?
Nurturing organic growth
Rebecca: Yeah, it’s, it’s really a very organic story, actually, and we still have the debate within the team and with the broader design community about value. And I think it’s something that we see people talk about all the time. What’s the value of design and how do you quantify that? But actually, I, kind of disagree with the whole concept that we should quantify the value of design.
And I have not, I’ve not been a super vocal in LEGO about that either, because I think the value of design is in the success of the product, and it’s not a separate metric. It’s not something that we should be creating separate standards for design than the rest of the product team. Like, we should be functioning together with them.
The success of the product is the success of the design. And so I think that’s mostly been my approach towards it as well. I think the thing that helped traction in there is that I started out on a project that was the third or fourth time that LEGO had tried to do it. And each time it had failed and cost several million crown, so hundreds of thousands of dollars, right, each time it fails.
And I think they’d been trying to do it for four or five years at that point. And I came in and I took a design thinking approach and it was different than how they had approached it before and it succeeded that time. So I think the proof in the value in that was actually that it did succeed, that it was successful.
It was a different way than how they had thought about doing it because we involved the users in the creation and the design of it through workshops, through research yeah, and involve the stakeholders in the testing. I actually got a lot of the stakeholders to be running the user testing themselves, which was a nice one.
Jesse: Nice.
Rebecca: Yeah, because they, because you know, like in these super specialized areas, you have these people who are SMEs or subject matter experts, and they want to own everything. They want to own the voice of the end users and be the representative, and that’s kind of their role in the organization. And one of the only ways that we kind of got around that was to have them be the user testers. So we say, you can own it, but you need to take this and then go actually run the tests for the users. And we train them in that. So I think the kind of success and pitch to the LEGO Group to build the team was just in the success of the initiatives that I was part of. And the fact that because I was part of them, they ran differently than they had previously.
Peter: And so was it a matter of demand was being generated, and you were simply meeting the demand. More product teams are seeing that success and saying, Hey, we want some of that. And it’s like, well, you’re going to have to hire some new types of people and we’re going to have to engage in some new ways of working. And it just kind of slowly built over time.
Rebecca: Yeah, it was, it was super organic like that. It was that that product started getting some momentum. We started getting some success in that people that I interacted with as part of that process said, Hey, can you come over and look at this other thing and help out with this? And it just kind of snowballs, right?
So you start to get a reputation in the organization and it’s a very relationship-driven company at the LEGO Group. So you start to get a reputation, you start to get more people requesting you as a resource. And at that point I still wasn’t officially a manager or anything like that. So what I did was I started hiring in student workers cause I didn’t need approval for it.
Jesse: Ha, ha,
Rebecca: So I talked to some of the other managers and I was like, Hey, I’m going to hire in this student worker officially, they need to report to you, but I’ll take care of everything. So don’t worry about it. So we started kind of building the team there and getting different students around. And luckily I went to graduate school here, so I had relationship with some of the universities and things here already and the design programs. So we just started bringing people in, and over time, they were kind of like, okay, well, maybe they should report to you. I’m like, okay, cool. So then we just started kind of building from there. Yeah, it’s been really strange to look back at it and that it’s changed so much in 5 years, but it’s also been really organic and kind of natural in the shift there.
There’s not been any big battle or pitch to it. It’s been based off of demand.
Peter: What I’ve seen over and over again, as organizations grow, is there’s a point at which you can’t run it organically anymore when it’s six, seven, eight people, you can run it organically. It’s enough people that fit around a conference table. You can manage it pretty directly.
When it’s 20 people, you now need to put some systems in place and some processes in place, or the chaos you were referring to kind of affecting you, you’re generating chaos if you don’t have something. So was there a, a liminal moment where you had to like, establish some organizational practices just within your team, to kind of manage this organicness. What did that look like? What ended up working for you?
Liminal moments in growth
Rebecca: Yeah, I think there’s been a couple key points in that journey where we’ve had to step back and say, okay, we need to restructure again. One was with me getting to the place where I can be holding the same conversation with the engineering leaders and managers, and then the product leaders and managers as well, so that we weren’t getting pulled in last moment into things as designers.
And I think this is super-typical, right? They like, they’re going along and they have all these ideas and then they get there and they’re like, oh, we need somebody to make it look nice. Get the designer, right? So we needed to shift that at some point and make sure that we were up front in the work and part of the discovery and the research going into it and part of the foundation to the work. So I think part of that is getting me into the right place.
Another one was when we started having design managers below me. So that’s also kind of a different shift, right? So you like leader of individual contributors and then you start being a leader of leaders. And that, that was actually really hard because you kind of let go of a little bit more there. And you think like, you want to know all the details. You want to know what’s going on in the product teams. And then you need to step back and let somebody else handle that and just trust that it’s going to go, but they’re not going to do it the way that you would do it if it was you running it.
And so it’s a little bit of like, you know, passing your baby to daycare when you leave like maternity leave or something, right? You’re like, I trust you. I’ve read good reviews about you. Please take care. Yeah, so there was a little bit of that when we shifted having the competency leads or the design managers below. And then recently we’ve seen that we really needed to align more across the different squads now that are inside our design organization.
And so with that, we’ve made a design definition of done, to help manage expectations toward the designers, but also to give them a clear role in the product team, because their role inside the product team was really varied, depending on the maturity of that team.
So, for the really mature teams, they were integrated into the product trio, they were part of the decisions, part of driving the strategy. For other teams, they were getting, the UI work at the end, just in time for getting it out the door, but not getting integrated into the rest of the discussion. So we started working with a definition of done for design in there. Was a bit strange because I thought they would have one for the engineering as well, because I always picture that it’s like more mature than the design inside LEGO, because design is so much younger. But actually we see that the engineers are taking a lot of lead from the structure that we’re starting to put with design now, which is interesting.
Jesse: That is interesting. It’s interesting to think about the influence of your design work and, for want of a better term, design thinking, extending beyond design activities, and I wonder, what advice you have for folks who are trying to extend their influence beyond design in that way?
Rebecca: Yes. I don’t know that I have a magic, like the golden ticket of advice there. But I think at least my approach that has worked for myself, and I think everybody’s a little different, but what’s worked for me is to have in my head kind of where I want to drive things and then to not say no to opportunities and engagements and then just make those what I need them to be, if that makes sense.
I can give a example that today, one of the heads of product came to me and they’re like, yeah, we need to do this thing around adoption within the factories, but from a compliance point of view, right? So, like, with the chief operating officer for all of the manufacturing across LEGO that he’s really interested and the factory is having compliance and stuff like that.
So he came to me, can you help with that? Sure, why not? Not, not my field that I play in typically, but I think I’m really good at looking at those things and then thinking, okay, what’s the opportunity in here to, like, help my team move forward in there? So, like, in that example, I can see that we can talk about user adoption and there we can make sure that teams are better at getting those metrics in place. Getting the feedback in place.
So all of those things can actually help ladder for that bigger story that they need that maybe is not traditionally design, but design can have a point of view and a voice into it and benefit from that getting there. So I think finding those little connections and ways that like design can help, but it can also help design in the backwards way. Those are good ones to spot.
Peter: I’m wondering these five years you’ve grown organically, if you’ve seen certain things work and other things not work, right? And what are the things maybe that don’t work that you’re like, let’s not do that again. Let’s not try to evolve in those ways and instead lean into the things that have worked. What has shaken out in that way for you?
Balancing structure and autonomy
Rebecca: Yeah, I think something that I’ve learned over time is the need to provide structure and then back off. So when things grow organically, I tend to just be like, yeah, of course everybody’s on the same wavelength. Like we’re all moving together. We’re all, you know, it’s like we’re dancing together, right?
But when the team starts to get to a certain size and when you have people of different maturity and experience inside design, you really need to provide a good frame for them, clear expectations, and then back off and let them do it. And that was like, that’s a really painful lesson to learn, honestly, because I want to trust everybody on my team, like, 110 percent and know that they have best intentions and believe that they are capable.
But sometimes I’m too hands off and believing in their good intentions. And then you kind of get burned from that because things are not turning out as they should be, right? And then you need to step in. And so I’ve kind of learned over time that it’s much better to get those clear expectations, even a little bit too harshly and then let them run, rather than think that it’s okay and have to come in later.
Peter: Is that where the definition of done has, has kind of emerged? What does that even, what does that mean?
Rebecca: Yeah. So the definition of done is like requirements that we’ve put towards the product team of what they need in place before they are allowed to go live with something. So, from a design perspective, they need to tick all these boxes before they should be going live with something. And that is partially so that my team also has the right frame of expectations of, I expect you to do these five things before we go live with something. Otherwise, it’s not ready.
So, I think that one works both ways though. So that’s helping the team. Have expectations toward the designers, but also the designers understand my expectations towards them.
Jesse: It seems to me that with so many of these things that you’re talking about, the partnership that you have at the leadership level with product and with engineering, the opportunity you have to go wide with your design explorations and your efforts to understand users and their behavior, the opportunity that you have to be involved in the earliest stages, all of this stuff is stuff that lots and lots of design leaders dream of trying to attain and seems to be just kind of out of reach. So I, I wonder about what is the formula here? Why is this working?
Rebecca: I got really lucky. I have a amazing manager. So I think that is part of why it’s working is that I have really just gotten as lucky as I could get in that I have an amazing manager who really believes in me and what the team is doing. And basically is there to just clear roadblocks and otherwise is like, whatever you want. Yeah, you got it. Like, go for it. Which is fantastic.
So I don’t have a lot of handcuffs or push back from my manager in that. But he is also a really good advocate for me and the team with those other forums as well. So he asks, like, why isn’t design in this conversation? And when I meet new colleagues and heads of engineering and HR partners and things like that, and they ask, how can we support you? That’s usually the thing that I say, like, if you’re in a conversation and you don’t see design in the conversation, ask why, why is design not here? Because I think us being part of that conversation and it’s such an innocent question, right?
Because there’s no bad intent from them from asking that. It’s a, it’s a kind of a very naive question if you want to like, ask in a conversation. So having them ask that on my behalf in the parts that I have not been included with has really helped me get included in them.
Avoid UX fundamentalism#
Rebecca: I think the other thing is, I see a lot of design managers and leaders that I interact with that are very like, kind of fundamentalists. So they, I don’t know if you, if you remember, like, maybe 5 or 10 years ago, all of the job postings, they wanted UX evangelists, right? You had to be like a, an evangelist and go on a crusade in your organization and, you know, tout the benefits of UX design or design thinking. And it was like a war zone that they were pitching in the job posts and stuff.
And I think I’ve intentionally tried very hard not to have it at us versus them or battle in that way, but rather, Hey, you may not understand what I’m doing, but I’m here to help and just invite me in and I’ll, I’ll help you as best I can, and I’m not gonna be super dogmatic about the approach, but rather really, really flexible. And we’ll make it work. And if I play out of field, that’s okay.
So I think that openness and flexibility and the lack of like strictness to the approaches.
Yeah, exactly. That, like, I see people burn so many bridges with that stuff where it’s like, you know, they, they want to like take a design thinking approach and like hell or high water, like they’re going to do it by the book. And it’s like, that doesn’t work, man. Like those things are great. I have a whole bookcase full of books about those things, but that is just the starting point, right? That is not how you actually end up doing that in any organization.
So I think also that really practical approach, if people want to get good traction, just be super practical. don’t kill yourself on the theory.
Peter: I totally agree, but it raises a question, because you were mentioning earlier how your executive is advocating to make sure that you’re always in the room. Design should be in the room. But then what you were just saying is that design is happy to show up, roll up our sleeves and do whatever is needed in order to get things done. And so why design? What is the thing that design, as a function, the team that you’re building, bringing to that conversation? If what you’re bringing is just a willingness to do whatever it takes to get done, clearly there’s something that that has been recognized that your team is primarily responsible for, and I’m wondering kind of how that was defined, how you carve that out, in particular, your relationship with product.
This is something Jesse and I talk a lot about and see, is there’s that uncertainty often, as design gets more strategic the relationship between design and product can get unclear in terms of who owns what or does what. So how have you carved out your niche, kind of established your space, that you and your team are doing, given this need for flexibility.
Rebecca: Yeah, all honesty, I do think our input and role in the product teams is still blurry with the product side. So with the product managers, and then with the more senior designers in the team, there’s often that really blurry overlap in there because you talk about like product strategy and things like that, like, both are contributing into that. Who’s responsible for shaping what those epics are, shaping what that sequence and strategy for rolling out different features and things like that are, it’s often this kind of amalgamation of the designer and the product manager working together.
I think the thing that my team is bringing that is otherwise absent in the product teams is the voice of the user. So it’s not business, and I know that in this case, the user is business, but business that comes from the business side is typically, like upper management, looking at cost savings, looking at, you know, increasing productivity, those sorts of things.
And my team is coming in and bringing the user’s point of view about how is the process actually working or not working for them. And nobody else is willing to do that legwork, figure that out and to represent that and bring that into product team. So I think the methodology can vary. And I think the methodology is what I’m not really like dogmatic about, but the role and function of the designer to represent that user, bring in that voice and do the best thing for the user at the end of the day that I think we’re pretty, pretty strict about.
Jesse: In that relationship between design and product and everybody side by side hashing out the roadmaps and so forth, I start to wonder about how disputes get resolved and how differing points of view get reconciled, in what’s supposed to be a partnership of equals.
Rebecca: So between the product manager and the designer, for example,
Jesse: Yeah, between yourself and your counterparts.
Rebecca: I think within the product team and the designer, and it’s primarily the designer and the product manager that are sometimes stepping on each other’s toes in terms of roles and responsibilities there. Typically, when there’s really bad kind of conflict there, it’s because one is compensating for the other’s role.
So that can be, yeah, we’ve had a couple of different cases where either the product manager is not doing what they need to do, or the designer is not doing what they need to do. And then they kind of are compensating on top of each other and stepping on each other’s toes in that way and then that, yeah, that can be an escalation to the different people leaders in that.
It can also be that, sometimes if it’s the design, they’re compensating for the product manager. Actually, the guidance that I give is to just stop. And I know that sounds really mean, but at the same time, they’re not going to learn to do their job if we keep doing it for them. So sometimes they need to realize like that there is a gap and then stop and let there be a gap there, which is maybe not the friendliest approach to that.
But yeah, we can’t do everybody else’s jobs all the time either.
Leading design outside North America
Peter: One of the reasons Jesse and I were really interested in speaking with you is you have experience leading design and outside of North America. And most of our conversations have been with people in North America, and we’ve gotten some feedback from listeners that they’d love to hear from design leaders outside of the United States and given that you’ve worked in the United States and now outside, I’m wondering what, if anything you see in terms of differences in how you’re able to lead design, if there is anything more broadly societal, cultural, whatever, that you find. I mean, you’re at LEGO, which is probably a pretty weird company, so I don’t know. Or maybe not, maybe it’s typical Danish company, but I’m, curious what you maybe had to unlearn in order to succeed in your new context? Anything as an anthropologist yourself now looking at these two ways of, being, what have you noticed?
Rebecca: I think my experience in different companies in the U.S., so, and this is primarily with Kaiser Permanente and the Capital Group, was that things were very structured, right. So there’s clear hierarchy. There’s the design team, which is sitting with product in both of those cases. It’s very top down and you get the work once the work is defined and ready, either for the manager to then allocate out or the designer to tackle.
So it’s, you’re not kind of opening up to the entire organization, right? It’s very kind of isolated and protected and padded. LEGO is not like that. LEGO is really, so it started out as a family run company. It’s still a family run company, but it’s grown to 7000 plus people. But it still acts like a family run company.
And I think the feedback that I get from others coming from other parts of Denmark in organizations that have joined the team is that it’s pretty similar, where it’s really about, it’s about knowing people. It’s about taking the time to have coffee. So when people onboard, it’s not the work that you onboard to, it’s the people that you’re onboarding to. So you should set up and have coffees with like 45 people to get to know them.
And when you interview, this was so weird when I was interviewing in Denmark, actually. So you go and the first things they talk about, like, I think 90 percent of the interview is not about your profession. It’s like, who are you? How many kids do you have? Where do you live? Where do you come from? Where are your parents from? You know, what are your hobbies? So, it’s all of these things that you’re not allowed to ask in the US, like at all.
And a strange, like, add-on to working in Europe, I guess, but I’m also like the oddball because I’m not Danish and I’m not European. So maybe that also, it affects people’s impression of me and whether they want to work for me. That’s fair. I think part of what I do in those also is I share a fair amount of, like, personal stuff about me in those interviews as well, to kind of make it feel like an equal exchange, which would never happen in the U.S.
Rebecca: And for the design, it’s not so tricky to make sure that we are having, all sorts of, like, folks from all around the world in the team– different, different religions, different nationalities, all sorts of dimensions.
But I think for some of the other areas, it’s really hard, especially in Denmark, because it’s not the most diverse population here. Maybe it’s why they can get away with those questions, too. But it’s not the most diverse, like, you know what I mean? Like, it’s the, the majority of Denmark is Danes or Germans. Or maybe you get, you know, the odd Swede or Norwegian, but it’s not, as many nationalities coming together as you get in the US.
Jesse: So, You’ve been on this journey with this group building up this competency from an idea, bringing these people into the fold. What I wonder about is what’s the next stage for what you’ve created? Where is it going?
Coordinating UX/Design across LEGO
Rebecca: Yeah, I think one is that right now I’m working with some of the other heads of design to get more of a design structure and community across all of digital technology then. So that would be both with the play experiences for the kids as well as the adult experiences and then the consumer.
So LEGO.com and retail and things like that. So shopper retail. So bringing all of those design teams together so that we have some collaboration across, and learnings, because each team has different things that they’re more skilled in, just by nature of the work that they are doing.
So one of the things… we’re having a creative boost around that, where we have some themes that are overarching themes that hit across kind of bigger domains in LEGO.
And so typically product teams are not getting to deal with the themes. So we’re having all of the designers come together, in person, like gather from all the different teams around the world. And then we get to spend some time collaborating with the different designers across, see what pops out of that and then do a big exhibition and showcase with the Chief Digital Officer and see if we can get some of that work picked up into the portfolios. I think those kind of larger collaborations across the design teams within LEGO, that’s kind of where next focus is. Yep.
Peter: Is there an existing design community of practice? Like, is there some connection already, or is this pretty new to bring these teams together?
Rebecca: So the teams have never gotten together. So that part is new. We do have occasional Teams meetings where we’ll get on a call together and maybe talk about topics and things like that. The thing that I struggle with, with those kind of bigger forums is once you get, you know, 60, 70 designers on a call, it’s not really a conversation at that point. So somebody presents and then somebody has a different point of view and like maybe three people get to talk. Or people start to kind of spiral down on a certain topic and you can’t really like lift the conversation into something good again. So these kind of larger forums that we’ve tried to get together with these Teams calls and stuff are a little, they’re a little hit or miss.
So I’m hoping that like getting people together and then having them form kind of mini teams where it’s people that they’ve not worked with before to then tackle these kind of cross domain themes hopefully that will kind of spark a little bit more community there as well.
Peter: I’m also wondering if each of these distinct teams defines design differently, I’m thinking about it from a very kind of operational standpoint, like, do you have a shared job family that your user experience designers are using the same as others, or does every group, because I’ve seen where in big companies with federated design orgs, every team defines it differently, has their own job families, has their own recruiting and hiring practices, their own compensation bands. And then that can create this internal… more chaos as these folks start trying to come together and realizing it hasn’t been shaped coherently across the organization.
Rebecca: Yeah, so we do have one single job family and we have clear descriptions of the different role levels in there. And then the salary bands for each of those is aligned. And so that’s across all of digital technology for design.
The part that gets interesting is that we see some design role starting to pop up in the business side as well. And those are not necessarily falling into that job family, even though they’re interacting with the same product teams. And also the pay bands and stuff like that can be a bit different. So, within digital technology, we’re actually pretty good on the structure there. And over the last year and a half, we’ve been running a lot of workshops and sessions to get input on that and make sure that we’re aligned.
So that part’s pretty set up. But I think because we’re inside the IT organization and then product is sitting over in business, product has started to kind of hire some of their own kind of rogue design roles over there. And then that’s kind of putting a little bit more, intrigue into the story around.
Peter: Are they hiring UX designers or a different kind of like more strategic or service designer?
Rebecca: Yeah, so it’s the user research and service design roles that they’re hiring over there. But the way that the archetype, so this digital product design archetype is written for within digital technology that should cover research and service design inside that archetype too. So it’s, a very kind of bland, broad umbrella for that. And then you can have specialties inside it, but that way the levels and the pay and things like that are pretty aligned.
Peter: I’m curious, as your team has scaled and I’m assuming other teams have scaled, if you’ve instituted some type of design operations capability in order to handle within, say, your team, a lot of that communication and coordination across, you’ve mentioned like 30 product groups and all that kind of stuff, or operations to help keep these different design teams connected. Has that been something you’ve needed to institute in order to maintain this, to minimize chaos and maintain a community, or is it more just being done by the leaders kind of in fractional time?
Rebecca: So, right now, it’s mostly done by the leaders in fractional time. It is something that we’re trying to push. So we’ve tried to put it into the portfolio objectives for the next year. I don’t know if it will get approved, but the idea that we then spin up a design ops across the whole digital organization though, so not having separate ops functions, but rather one across all of the different design works that are in there.
I don’t know what will happen with that. I really hope that it gets picked up because even the tooling alone is like a huge pain point for the teams. Because we’re supposed to have owners for each of the tooling. And then that you have designers like managing licensing and things like that is just a waste of time.
it’s just absurd. It’s like the most expensive licenses possible then, right.
Peter: Yeah.
Rebecca: It doesn’t make any sense. So hopefully that’s something that will come is that we start to get a more mature design ops set up within the organization. I would love that.
I think it will happen though, because they’ve actually set up kind of an engineering ops in the original kind of restructuring with the digital transformation. So, I think it is coming to the maturity point with design that we also should have a design ops.
Rebecca: And I think they start to see that. So…
Peter: …there’s a model there that you can point to and go, it works for that function, we need something similar for ours.
Rebecca: Exactly. Yep.
Jesse: Rebecca, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for being with us. If people want to find you on the internet, how can they do that?
Rebecca: Yep, best way to do it is on LinkedIn and just look up Rebecca Nordstrom and if it says the LEGO Group next to me, then that’s the right one. There’s also Rebecca Nordstrom in Sweden who gets an awful lot of my mails. So don’t, don’t pick her.
Peter: Sounds good. Thank you so much for joining us.
Rebecca: Yeah. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.
42: Leading From Trust (ft. Cynthia Savard Saucier)
Feb 23, 2024
Transcript
[This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited. Please forgive any copy errors.]
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: And I’m Peter Merholz.
Both: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership,
Jesse: On today’s show, Cynthia Savard Saucier, co-author of the book Tragic Design and VP of UX for the Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify, joins us to talk about what’s worth fighting for and what’s not, sharpening the business acumen of her teams, and the strategic value of kindness.
Peter: Hi, Cynthia. Thank you so much for joining us.
Cynthia: Hi. Thank you for having me.
Peter: So, if you could share with us what your role is, and I’m curious, because I know you’ve been there for a little while, how your role has evolved.
Cynthia: Oh, yeah. One answer is faster than the second. So my role is four letters: VP UX. I like it. It’s very short and easy to reply. I’m vice president of user experience at Shopify. At Shopify, we use UX as a overarching word for content design, research, and design as well. So I lead all of those disciplines.
In the past, I’ve had other roles at Shopify. So I started there almost nine years ago now when it was a much smaller company. I started as a designer, IC on the team. I was leading a smaller team at an agency before that, but I chose to join a tech company as an IC, and then I grew from designing the thing to leading one person and then the Montreal team, and then eventually becoming a director and then eventually leading the whole discipline at Shopify.
And then recently I just made a bit of a horizontal shift where I chose to focus on the product. So now I am VP of UX for core. So I directly manage a team of around 200 people-ish in UX for core. Core is the core offering of Shopify. So it’s mainly the admin experience for our merchants. So that’s how I went from IC to VP in nine easy steps.
Peter: Thinking about the organization, I know Shopify has gone from having a centralized UX org to a federated UX org. Did it then go back to centralized and now it’s federated again?
Cynthia: It’s a bit of both, actually.
So we had a chief design officer that was the co-founder of Shopify. So he had been there from the beginning. And when I joined Shopify, I was actually reporting into Daniel, who was the co-founder. However, as the team grew, we then went into product lines. So the whole organization got split into like a bunch of, I think, seven groups.
After a while, we just reached the edges. Like we were, we were, like the seams were cracking from these groups or organizations, and then we reorg-ed the company into two larger groups. So there is core and merchant services. And now all of UX reports into UX into core and all of UX reports into UX into merchant services.
So it is somewhat functionally reporting. All the way up to me and Andrea Manini, who is the VP of UX in merchant services. But under that, if you are a UX or you report into a UX leader all the way to me basically. So it’s federated and functional at same time.
Peter: Andrea doesn’t report to you. She has a different…
Cynthia: Exactly. So we both report into the leaders of these groups, basically. They both happen to be from product, but it’s not that UX reports into product. It’s that we happen to report into the person that also leads product.
Peter: And given that you have these two UX teams, is there anything that’s holding the center of user experience at Shopify, or is Andrea able to kind of “do whatever you want,” and maybe it starts to diverge, or how do you make sure this stays aligned across your orgs?
Jesse: Well, even beyond that, I want to ask, is it actually all that necessary for the two teams to be aligned or are you really separate worlds entirely?
Cynthia: I mean, we are separated in many ways. However, we are touching very common user experiences. So for example, the core, the admin of the product. While I own the scope of the majority of it, there are still a lot of services that merchant services, the other organization, is responsible for bringing to life, and this does get introduced into core.
So we do need to be very tightly aligned, but ideally loosely coupled. And this is why we have different leadership structures. There’s many ways we create, like, a centralized organization, like a centralized culture, centralized discipline, hiring practices.
Leading The Discipline, Maintaining Coherence
Cynthia: So this is through discipline work. So that was a role I used to have, which was leading the discipline of UX. Leading the discipline doesn’t mean everyone reports into you. It’s more like all of these horizontal tasks. So you can think of design, or UX ops, recruitment, hiring the big goals of the organization as well.
What’s the makeup of the discipline? How many people? How should it grow? So now this is something that Andrea does. The discipline is horizontal, so we look at it across all the teams. However, the ownership of the user experience and, like, really how that transpires into the product, this is reporting into both of us basically.
And the way we achieve unity or cohesiveness to a certain extent, well, first of all, we have a design system. So we have Polaris, who’s a open source design system. It’s, it’s a really good design system, actually.
Peter: It’s one of the OG design systems. It’s been around forever.
Cynthia: It’s one of the OG ones, yes, yes. But it’s still very well maintained. We’re at v12, that was just released, not too long ago.
So the design system is one of the way that we achieve like some sort of alignment. But overall we have design principles, we have design values, and really we work with each other as much as possible. Like this whole idea of like providing a lot of feedback, getting really involved, not being afraid of going into details as well, is definitely one of the tools that we utilize to make sure the experience just works together.
The whole principle of, like, not shipping the org chart is very important to us, and our merchants are using our admin without any understanding that the organization might be organized a certain way or not. So it’s very important for us not to let that bleed through.
Jesse: You know, when I hear stories about these kind of horizontal leadership models where, and correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but, a case where people are driving outcomes across teams that don’t report to them…
Cynthia: mm hmm.
Jesse: …and they are, attempting to influence the organization on a broader scale than the reporting structure itself actually provides or allows. And what I hear from folks in a lot of these cases is that this is a recipe for frustration, disappointment, and disempowerment. And so I wonder. If it’s working for you guys, what do you think is making it work here?
Cynthia: Yeah I mean it requires a few things but first and foremost like it’s a set of tradeoffs. Like there’s no magic answers. You could have everyone report into a single person, and that would be good for certain things but really bad for other things, such as the decoupling of decision making, or it is impossible for any one person to have context on every single piece of the organization of the product.
Really, the product is really complex, but also, like, I fundamentally believe that different organization makes decisions differently. But that’s a feature, not a bug. We want the growth team to be a little bit more gutsy. We want the growth team to be more aggressive with the features that they’re willing to test out.
And at the same time, we want and we need the core team to be a little bit more resistant to creating a lot of quick iteration. We want it to be more foundational. And that is also part of how we achieve good results. So to me, like this is a trade off that we are making, but one that works for us.
I have been in this situation before where I had, like, to influence without the authority, which is what you’re referring to. And yes, there are pieces that can be frustrating, but like, I think I’m an eternal optimistic. Like, I, I can recognize that something can be frustrating without being frustrated about it.
And this is what I try to tell people as well, that like, hey, the disempowerment that someone might feel is actually just a misreading of the priorities, because in the end, our CEO actually really, really believes in the importance of UX as a discipline. Like I don’t need to sit down in a room with Tobi and explain like, “Oh no, UX is important, Tobi, please remember that it needs to exist.” We don’t have to fight for that. It’s a given. It’s actually like our CEO has to remind us sometimes like, “Hey, fight for yourself,” because we don’t have to do it naturally. And because Shopify doesn’t have to fight for UX most leaders that have grown at Shopify were not selected because of their ability to fight for UX, if that makes sense.
So. I mean, we do have the classical executive sponsorship, so this is not something that at the discipline level you need to convince up and down. It’s just about convincing down and bringing people together. And then when you are that person that is trying to create that cohesive experience or culture, of course, like some people are motivated to ship their thing and you might get in the way of doing that.
So there’s a lot of negotiation, there’s a lot of conversation that needs to happen, relationship building as well, like only through trust can you achieve anything really when you don’t have authority. But I operate from a place of, you know, I have a trust bank and then sometimes I need to make withdrawals, and sometimes I put back trust in the bank, and this is how I achieve anything basically.
Accountability for UX
Peter: I’m curious how you are held accountable as the head of UX for core products. Like does your boss have a set of things that are expected of you, to deliver outcomes, impact, anything like that, that is somehow specific to UX separate from the work of the product team.
Cynthia: Yes, the answer is absolutely yes. My boss, my manager, Glenn, basically leads core, will absolutely come to me if an experience is broken, if something is suboptimal, if something is not as good as it should be, if there is a visual bug, but sometimes other types of bugs as well.
So I think it’s hard to really define precisely what my role is. Like, we always say, like, aim, achieve and assemble is the framework we use, but I don’t think it does a great job of explaining everything that I’m expected to do. But mainly, I could not do anything about the discipline. As long as I have the right impact on the quality of the user experience, I’m doing my job at Shopify. Like we are very product-impact-driven and, like, what that means for me is ensuring that our product gets better every day.
If I do this, I do my job. Everything else are tools that I set for myself to achieve that role better. So my boss doesn’t care about what culture I’m creating on the team. My boss does not care about what tool I’m putting in place, or systems or processes or any of that, as long as I have the right incentive structures in place for my team so that we achieve great UX.
That’s all that he cares about, but he certainly cares about it and will hold me accountable for the quality of the UX, of anything shipping under my scope and sometimes outside of my scope as well, as he rightfully should. So if something ships from a different team that happens to touch a surface area that I own, and I didn’t pay close enough attention, I wasn’t curious enough, I didn’t get involved enough, that is on me, because in the end, our merchant don’t care. If I’m the boss or not, like they are using a page and if it doesn’t work appropriately, I don’t get to say it’s not my fault, it’s this other team. That’s something that we really don’t ever want to say at Shopify.
The Trust Bank
Jesse: So this shift into taking more responsibility for the outcomes was a natural result of your moving from a position of influence without authority to a position of authority, and you mentioned that when you were trying to wield that influence without authority, it all relied on what you described as the trust bank.
And I love that that metaphor for it. You know, a lot of leaders, as they are moving into these executive levels for the first time, they might not have a trust bank to work with yet. And I’m curious about, now that you’re in this role where you do have the authority, how does the trust bank still play into how you do your job, and how can someone who’s stepping into that role go about building that trust bank for themselves?
Cynthia: I really like that question, because it is unfair for me to assume that everyone has been at a company for 10 years. And I have, I’ve grown and I’ve been in every position, so I have a really good idea of, like, the context and the people and the organization, and it’s not true that everyone comes in with that, so that’s actually a great question.
Trust plays a role that people misunderstand sometimes. They believe that the exchange currency between an employee and a manager is money. But really, that’s not the case. Money is a currency between the company, the employer, and the employee. A manager, an employee, the only currency is trust.
And if I want my team to achieve anything, I cannot just use authority because they can choose to not listen to me and that’s it. It’s about trust. It’s trusting that I will say the thing and if they achieve the thing that I have said, they will be properly rewarded for that thing. It’s believing that the thing I say is closer to the end result than if I didn’t say that thing.
It’s trusting that I understand enough about the craft that I’m not going to send them in a crazy goose chase, trying to find solutions that don’t exist. So that’s a trust that I need to build even with people that are reporting to me. Trust is multiple things and you don’t just have it by magic. It’s three things.
So, it’s interpersonal trust, it’s disposable trust, and institutional trust. So disposable trust is, as a person, how likely am I to trust? This can be influenced by like, have I been scammed in the past? Were my parents trustworthy? So this is very individual. This is hard to influence.
And you have to recognize that you are interacting with people. They have their own ability to trust, and this is something that is hard to navigate. However, if you know that you’re with someone that is less likely to trust, you just need to build a lot more trusting moment, because trust is built.
In order to build trust, you go through interpersonal trust. And that is basically, like, how credible are you? How knowledgeable are you? How likely are you to do the thing that you said you were gonna do? Do you have a lot of experience achieving the thing you said you were going to do? So, if I need to do something with someone that I know is not trustworthy, I will say a lot of small steps, like I will say a thing and then do the thing.
And then I will request for them to do the same thing. And this builds mutual trust together, until we are in that stage of like, they know they can trust me. I know we have to create smaller trust steps, if that makes sense, instead of just pointing at the mountain over there.
There’s also institutional trust, and that is really hard, because the institution is really anything that is supporting the trust relationship. So that can be the organization, the company, but it can also be like the banking system, or technology, or the stock exchange, you know? It’s all of these institutions that are underlying the trust relationship. And again, this is really hard to build on that trust. But if the person doesn’t trust the institution, if I have an employee that doesn’t trust Shopify, there’s very little that I can do as a manager to change their mind.
I can try to explain better certain strategies. I can try to involve them as much as I can so that they understand where things come from. But aside from that, that’s the best I can do. If they don’t trust it, there’s very little I can do. If they work for a tech company and they’re like, actually tech is going to crash, oh, I can instill a certain amount of optimism, but in the end, like that’s going to be very difficult.
So I would say for someone that just joins an organization, they have to look at like the interpersonal trust level and do as much as they can in that layer. So showing that you’re credible, showing your experience, relying on that experience, and then setting a lot of small steps saying you’re going to do a thing and then doing that thing, whether that’s this afternoon, I will send you an update, send that update and like create a lot of opportunities for trust building.
Peter: It’s clear you’re leaning quite heavily into the concept of trust as part of your leadership. And I’m, I have a few questions around it. This framework of, was it disposable trust? Was that the first one? Did I hear that…
Cynthia: DIsposable trust, just [like] disposable income. You have disposable trust as well.
Peter: Okay, so disposable trust, interpersonal trust, institutional trust. Is that a framework you developed or is that something you learned somewhere?
How did you hit upon those three trusts?
Cynthia: This is a real framework, however I’m explaining it and I’ve reused it in leadership, in the concept of leadership for many years at this point. So I cannot go back to the actual study that actually points, but there’s a real trust model. It’s also very, very Important in e-commerce and like, this is my business, but like, we’re building a trust relationship between, like, a buyer and a merchant.
And basically buying online is a trust action. I expect that in exchange for, like, fake money, literally, like I’m sending a number and that’s gonna be money, hopefully everyone understands that money, that I’m going to get an object in exchange that is worth the same amount of money.
And then merchant is like, I’m hoping that the numbers that are sent and written in a form are reliable and I’m going to get money in exchange of this thing and I’m going to send that back. So it’s a trust relationship that we both agree the value of the exchange is the same. And lean in a lot on the trust model there, because in the end, like our goal is to make sure merchants can build a lot of trust with their buyers. So everything we do there, like helping them have better product picture is about building trust. Helping them have a professional website is about building trust. Helping them create better content is about building trust. It’s all about it, basically.
Peter: And then, so you, drew from and then have developed this framework for trust in your practice. I’m wondering if you have tools to help you understand how to manage your trust relationships with others, like documents where you’re writing down, like, trust, trust quotients and stuff…
Cynthia: 74%.
Peter: …or, or if this is, or if you used to have tools and now it’s something that’s just like a muscle memory that you’ve developed and you don’t need to be as intentional, or do you actually have, I’m thinking about it on behalf of the other leaders who are listening to this, like, like, is this something that, like, there’s worksheets to help kind of scaffold your way through this, or is this just something that it’s just kind of how you engage with these things kind of rattling around.
Cynthia: So it’s definitely not, I don’t have like a worksheet with everyone’s name on it and I’m like, oh, this person trusts me or does not trust me and therefore I will like tune in to like how long or how often I send in updates or like whatever. I don’t have that. I do like at one point intuit it from my interactions with people.
However, I do find myself using it and even explicitly when someone starts reporting into me and like, hey, I’m your lead, I’m really hoping we get to build a horizontal relationship, not a vertical one, where like, we are both as valuable, we just happen to have different responsibilities, but in order for that to happen, we have to recognize that I will know things sometimes that I don’t get to tell you, and trust me that I will tell you the things whenever I can, and if I can’t, it’s because I have a good reason for it, I’m not like trying to play with you or anything. I’m not playing like a power move or anything.
So I will use and say, like, trust me that this will happen. And whenever it happens, I reinforce it. Like, hey, see what just happened. We had to announce this thing. You see, I could not tell you that information. I wish I could have, but I could not because of that reason, and that reason, and that reason. If it would have been legal for me to share that information, I would have. Or if it would not have created an external risk, I would have shared it with you. So I also share, like, very explicitly the reasons that have led me to maybe make a small break in trust at that moment, or use it to explain my rationale and hopefully increase trust with that person.
So I definitely am very, very explicit about it. But I don’t really have a worksheet. I will, though, like, create a lot of, like, systems to support it. So I die by my calendar. Like my calendar is like literally my life, but I’m very intentional about designing it in a way that supports it.
So if I say like we’ll have a one on one every other week and I never cancel it unless you want to cancel it. Well, I do that and I make sure my calendar is up to date and like it has designed that time in so I’m very very intentional about how I use that time and making time for trust building moment is super important for me.
So trust building moments are, yes, one on ones, but also like separating one on one and product review is very important to me because one on ones will talk about you and me. Product reviews will talk about product, and then you get to invite whoever you want. And you get, as a leader reporting to me, to use that time to build trust with your own team, that you will bring them and create visibility with me. So, I don’t have like a worksheet or anything, but I certainly introduce processes to make sure I stand by the things that I say.
Peter: You’re very intentional in your practice, even if you’re not, writing it all down in a spreadsheet somewhere.
Cynthia: I don’t look like it. I’m very casual, but I’m also very intentional. Yeah.
Jesse: So I love this concept of institutional trust, and I can totally see how that plays out among your design team in terms of making sure that they feel like they trust where the business is going. They trust, you know, all of it. I noticed that there is also an exercise in institutional trust building that design leaders often have to take on, which is not team facing, but which is rather about building institutional trust in design itself across the other functions of the organization and getting people to believe in the power of design, the value proposition of design.
What has your experience been building institutional trust in design as a function over the course of your journey?
The “Seat at the Table”
Cynthia: I’m very I would say lucky because I recognize that not all organizations start from a place of like caring about UX, and, like, our organization very much cares about it, as I shared before, so I recognize that this is not everyone’s experience. However, I always say that don’t beg for a seat at the table and like I always do like the big air quotes like “seat at the table.”
I, I don’t love talking about seat at the table because really like the only thing that I have seen working is merit. As in, like, if you want to be invited, you will be if people believe that you’re valuable to the organization. And if you are not valuable to the organization, you will be dropped out of the invite, even by mistake sometimes, and then no one will notice that you’ve been missing.
So, I’ve found that providing value to the organization and placing the organization first is the best way to come from a place of strength. So whenever I am sitting at the metaphorical table, I’m not representing design like, you know, the UN each representatives represents their country.
I’m not, I’m sitting at the table trying to achieve the best outcome for Shopify. And sometimes it’s, it’s not in UX’s best interest, most of the time it is, because I believe that, like, the incentives and what UX is trying to achieve is 100 percent aligned with the best interests of both the users and the organization.
But sometimes there is, well, we need to defund certain things, or we need to share our resources, or we might need to kill certain initiatives. Might not always be the discipline’s favorite thing to say, but you can’t just come in and fight for UX and think that nothing else matter, and it’s just like, Oh, it’s UX, UX, UX. And like, let’s fund it more, more, more, more, more.
Like it’s an organization. I’m working for a company and if I wanted to work for a nonprofit, I could, like, I’m choosing right now to work for a company whose mission I care about. I care about deeply, but I also recognize that the vehicle of that organization is a company and therefore, like, making profit.
So as long as I’m at peace with this, I know that the vast majority of the time it is really well aligned. But whenever I’m sitting at that table, I put my Shopify hat. I don’t put my discipline hat. Now in one on one conversations, that’s different. When I’m meeting with the person that leads engineering, for example, well, I do need to explain certain point of views to make sure that disciplines that are more numerous than my own don’t simply forget or like in French, we say “far from the eyes, far from the heart.”
So when you don’t see something, you stop loving the thing. My role is to to prevent that from happening and to advocate for the value of it whenever the value is real. It’s not to create fake value around something and I’ve seen and heard a lot of discipline leader that were fighting for their discipline at any cost. And I just don’t believe in that approach. I just believe, like, provide value to the organization, understand the business in which you are, and then you’ll be invited at the table.
Jesse: I think that a lot of these design leaders who feel the need to fight for UX all the time, if you ask them why they are doing that, they would say it’s because the organization is leaving unrealized value on the table, that an evolution of their design processes, just deploying the people that they already have in different ways, can help them realize that value.
And they see it as their role as design leaders to advocate for that unrealized value, to try to grow the value that the design team is delivering. And I wonder, you know, where do you draw that line? Where is it worth it to fight for the thing that the executives don’t see the value of yet?
Cynthia: There’s legitimate cases of fighting and like, I tried to pick my battles. Like, I stand firmly that no dark pattern will ever see the light of day for as long as I work at Shopify, whether that dark pattern would come from my team or from another team. This is a battle that I’m willing to fight.
I will pick that fight every single time. And thankfully it’s not a fight I have to fight very often, so I’m pretty glad.
Peter: [patterns] gets right at the heart of trust that like what you were talking [before].
Cynthia: It does, it does. And it only takes a user being scammed once for them to never, ever use your platform again. When we’re talking about e-commerce, if one merchant scams a customer, that customer will stop buying, not from that merchant, from all merchants. That sort of feels the same. Like this is unrealized value, literal unrealized value.
Like lifetime customer value is way more interesting when you look at it across all merchants than just like between one merchant and one customer. But that’s an aparté.
Most fights aren’t worth it
Cynthia: So there’s definitely some fights that are worth fighting for. I just I guess my criticism of some design leaders is that not every fight is worth fighting for. And we shouldn’t always show up as like, “Oh, poor us. Again, engineering didn’t understand that we really wanted to do wireframes.” And I’m like, no, they don’t understand. And that’s cool. We don’t understand their frameworks. And like, they’re not crying to the CEO about it. Like, they’re doing their thing not caring about us.
So, like, I often refer to the little sister syndrome, family of four, I’m the youngest kid and I’ve always had like that “I wish I were 16 so I could drive.” “I wish I would be 18 so I could drink,” you know I always had like that little sister, I see what the other wants.
The reality is like, you can complain, but you’re not going to get older faster, you know, like there’s nothing you can do about it. The UX team is never going to be more numerous than the engineering team So let’s stop that fight, you know, there’s always going to be a ratio, well, whether applied or not. But there’s always going to be more engineers than UXers.
It’s not unfair; I actually don’t want to work for an organization that has more UXers than engineers. We would never get anything done. Like, nothing would ever get… So once you recognize why certain decisions are made, then those fights, drop those fights and pick the one that are actually valuable. And again, you can only win a fight if the other person trusts you.
It comes back to this, but like, if you show up as an executive, you show up at putting the company first, not your discipline first. And when you’re approaching it from that way, the fights that you’re bringing to the table are by definition fights that are benefiting the organization, not just your discipline.
Peter: How do you help your team, the 200 people that are in your organization, how do you help them understand what you just said, right, because they’re looking to you as the head of UX, so you are representing UX. They’re looking to you to provide inspiration and possibly creative direction, but you’re like, actually my job is to be an executive first, a UX leader second.
How have you helped them understand the nature of your job?
Modeling leadership
Cynthia: I’m sure some will actually listen to this podcast and be like, hmm. I would say, I try to tell people and explain how this is benefiting them in the end because the reality is, like, I get a lot of leeway from the whole executive team because they know that I’m not like being ridiculous about my spends, for example, that I’m being very strict about how I do performance management, for example.
They know that in advance, so I don’t get shit for it ever, you know, so I tried to represent the importance of that to the team. I’ve also been very careful about, again, representing UX as something that drives value to the organization, but not always measurable value.
And this is something we don’t need to argue about. We don’t need to measure the value of making a design change. Like, we’re good. This only happens when people believe that you’re utilizing resources well.
Else, they’ll start asking you like, okay, well you need to A/B test and prove me the value of every change you make. ‘Cause I don’t know if you’re using your resources well, and you have a pretty big budget. So if you want to maintain it, like show me impact, product impact. If instead I show up saying like, Hey, I’m going to be fairly conservative about how I use my resources, but trust me that I do it in the best way possible, that will drive as much value possible to the organization, then I get to make the call.
If, hey, just a design overhaul might be worth it, we just won’t be able to measure it. Actually, we won’t measure it at all. We’re not even going to be able to do it. Just trust us that it’s better and it’s better for the experience.
And it works, you know, we get to do those all the time and it’s great. So to people on my team, I tried to explain them that by having a seat at the table, which means acting as an executive, it creates a lot of leeway, creates a lot of flexibility and gives a lot of freedom to the team to really achieve their goals.
But also I tried to be very, very transparent about these decisions as much as I can with people on my team. And of course, like it requires a certain amount of seniority to understand certain decisions.
But I discuss a lot of financial literacy, like, Hey, we’re a public company, our numbers are out there. You should understand those numbers so that you understand the context in which certain decisions are made. And by sitting those decisions into reality, it really helps explaining certain decisions that might be harder to swallow sometimes.
The intersection of business and design
Peter: Your participation on this show was suggested by Andy Healy, someone that you used to work with. And he said in an email to Jesse and I, Cynthia has been a driving force at Shopify, encouraging all designers to think about the intersection of business and design, which I’m bringing it up because I felt like you were, you were getting…
Cynthia: I’m glad he believes that!
Peter: You were, you were, you were getting there. And so I’m wondering, when he’s mentioning this intersection of business and design, is that something you address explicitly? Do you have ways of talking about how design and business integrate, interact, intersect, whatever it is? And what are those ways?
Cynthia: Funnily enough, no. Like, I rarely talk about the importance of UX for the business. Surprisingly. So it’s rare that I come back and say like, Oh, because we’ve made this uplift, like it has led to 33 percent more conversion on that page. However, when we have that data, sure. That’s a very fun thing to celebrate, to say like, Hey, really just this design uplift has led to higher conversion. That’s amazing.
And I love those stories, but honestly, it’s pretty rare that this is how I approach it. I’ve done a few things directly to the whole team. When I was leading the discipline, I chose two big rocks one year. The big rocks are things we want to work on as an organization. And I was like, the first thing is everyone needs to have a test store. So everyone needs to have a store that is actually active, that you have a lot of things happening on. And the second thing is you have to improve either your technical proficiency, or financial literacy.
And these are the only two things that I will talk about this year, and I will measure. We had like a survey bot sent to people and we were asking them like, what have you done this week to learn about something new? And we were looking at the results there. We gave some talks internally, but also we have a lot of very, very smart people at Shopify that can explain financial results in the most descriptive and interesting way.
They’re basically like MBAs in 12-minute videos. I definitely ask people to watch those. I discuss those. I try to make as much noise as possible around it, because by definition, if you chose design, you probably weren’t going to go in business. There’s a little bit of a self-selection process that is happening there.
And I’m like, hey, do as best as you can in the things that you’ve selected by definition, the default will be that you’ll continue doing this thing. You chose to do this as a career. You’re interested by it. You’re surrounded by people that will propulse you in that direction. So I kind of need to break that default a bit and say technical and business literacy is very important in the context that you are operating at.
Peter: What proportion chose technical and what proportion chose business?
Cynthia: Actually, the vast majority chose technical.
Peter: That does not surprise me at all.
Cynthia: But I’m not disappointed by that. ‘Cause I think it’s also like, If someone has another X thread of like, should designer learn to code? Like I might break down, like, I’m like, just should designer learn period? The answer is yes. Just learn. Learn about the other things. Why would we argue against this learning to code doesn’t make us any less important, valuable, necessary. No one says you should learn to code instead of being a good designer. That’s a little sister argument in my opinion that we should not learn to code.
Learning is good. If you work for a tech company, learn about tech. That’s a good thing. Should designer learn about commerce if they work at Shopify? Yes, yes, they should. They should be very interested in commerce if they work at Shopify, that’s just basic in my opinion.
And we want to hire people that have a growth mindset that are interested by learning that aren’t learned helplessness of like, oh, but I don’t know, so I won’t do it. It seems hard. That’s not what we want. That’s not the people we want to attract. So, yeah, I have no problem with people choosing to learn about our tech stack more.
Jesse: I want to back up to something that you said earlier. You said that part of what you do is Recognizing that a situation can be frustrating without personally being frustrated.
Cynthia: Frustrated, yeah.
Jesse: And this touches on the notion of emotional resilience for leaders and your ability to ride it out when things get tough.
And so I wonder, you know, how do you acknowledge the frustrating nature of the situation without getting frustrated yourself, and how do you maintain an even keel through all of this?
Cynthia: I’m going to quote a, well, not quote, refer to a psychologist, I believe. I cannot remember their name. I just remember reading what they shared in at one point. And they were specifically talking to women in leadership positions. And I’m not, I will rarely talk about being a women in leadership or women in tech, because the reality is, like, UX has a very high proportion of women, like, we’re not in a situation where like there’s not enough women in UX. Like, it’s great. We have a lot of women, something that is amazing, but it’s not really like a fight that I feel, like, well-equipped to do because like more than half the team are made of women.
So I’m not in the minority here. However, like in leadership positions, I’m very aware that there are certain traits that tends to be punished more when they come from women as to when they come from men. And this is having an emotional reaction to a situation
When a man has an emotional situation, they are seen as vulnerable. Or the situation is bad enough that their emotion is warranted. When a woman has an emotional reaction, and i’m saying in general obviously, but these are facts, but it’s in general, when a woman has an emotional reaction to a situation, it is her that is the problem. Whether the situation warrants it or not, is not part of the message and the judgment.
So that person said, instead of acting angry, say you are angry. Instead of acting out and, like, screaming, say, Hmm, this is very frustrating. And using the words will be enough for people to understand, because you don’t want to hide your emotion either. Like, that’s not the point of the thing. It’s not like pretend you have no emotion. I don’t think that’s a good way or human way of operating. I’m all for, like, emotions being shared, but saying the emotion is just as satisfying as it is to actually act the way that you feel, and is enough to actually operate some change and not get the punishment that comes with the emotion.
When I read that, I thought it was actually super powerful and it was a good way for helping me navigate situations that can be very stressful, that can be very frustrating. But when it comes to, like, recognizing things can be frustrating without being frustrated about it, I think this is me, like, growing up.
I’m fairly young still. And I know that I have things to learn. I’m still on this journey of, you know, growing up and being more mature and not having such a hot reaction to things that I think are not ideal, because I am very passionate and I care very, very much about how things are done. And like, if the things are not done in the most optimal way, it gets in the way. It’s frustrating to me. Like, these things really matter to me, so this is something that has just been a very helpful tool. Recognizing, like, hey, this is super frustrating, but am I actually frustrated about it? Like, will I think about that overnight, or is this just not ideal? Is it just like messing with my idea of how the thing should be working, or is it really frustrating and will have an emotional impact on me?
It’s been very empowering.
Jesse: Well that sounds wonderful and almost like a Buddhist monk or something in terms of your non-attachment that you’re practicing here. Yeah, but I wonder, you know, aren’t there days when you bring it home, right? Aren’t there sleepless nights for you, or are you really able to just let it all go?
Cynthia: I mean, my husband works at Shopify, so like, bringing it home literally means like every day. I still get frustrated about things. I get angry at things, but I try to choose which one I really get angry about. Like, I get angry about the work being not good, the product not working well, or, like, when for organizational reasons, we got into a position that is bad or that is frustrating to the users.
Like, these are the things that are frustrating to me. I get frustrated when there’s bad intent, when someone is just not operating from a place of like, just good intent, or like ego these are actually frustrating to me. I’ll get angry at that, but again, choosing what I get angry about makes my anger spur a lot more powerful…
Jesse: mmmm…
Cynthia: Anyone that is using anger is using it as a tool, whether you realize it or not, you’re trying to convey a certain message by reacting with anger when like, in the work environment, let me be very clear, I’m talking about work here, like, not in your personal emotional relationship, but at work, if you’re choosing anger, it’s that you are trying to convey a message. That the thing the person is saying is not the right one, you believe it’s the wrong one, or like, whatever. So choosing anger as a way to convey a message is actually very powerful when you’re not always angry. When you’re always angry, then people dismiss your anger for being just like, you’re just someone that reacts a lot.
So yeah, I’ve tried to turn it more into like a leadership tool and a communication tool, like designing the communication basically,
Jesse: Mm hmm.
Pragmatism
Peter: One thing I’m picking up on is a strongly pragmatic orientation.
Cynthia: Yeah. I tend to be that.
Peter: I’m wondering if, if pragmatism is just kind of who you are and how you approach things, or if pragmatism is something you’ve had to learn on your journey.
Cynthia: I mean, surprisingly, I was a creative kid, you know, like I, I was in arts and stuff like that, but I think I’ve always been extremely pragmatic, and this is something that serves me well in the industry because there’s also a lot of less pragmatic types that become very creative and very good at what they do and they’re super talented, and their lack of pragmatism creates a lot of creativity as well, and I value that immensely, I really really value that piece. I love people that are extremely ambitious, but also like delusional about their ambition because I tend to be more pragmatic and risk averse, yet I have great ambitions.
I think that design as a whole is made of a wide range of personalities. A lot of people are more creative types, and leading with pragmatism actually contains people in a certain way. My hope is that I don’t restrain people, I just contain so that they can be very free inside of that container. But I mean, I’m not going to hide it.
I’m a very pragmatic person, but again, I’m very fun. I insist.
Jesse: Well, I wonder, fun notwithstanding, I wonder what the role of idealism is as you see it in the midst of all of this pragmatism, because I think that for a lot of design leaders, what you’re saying is breaking their hearts right now, because they see themselves as champions for an ideal, for a higher standard of service to humans and of creative practice and of all of these things that they are fighting, fighting, fighting to try to bring that ideal to life into reality for them.
If you’re not doing that, where does the idealism come into play in how you do your job?
Cynthia: My pragmatism and realism is that I am making the world a better place through design, that I’m using my design skills to improve the human race. Really fundamentally believe that I literally wrote a book about it. This is how much I care about it.
I fundamentally believe that creativity is a business tool. So I just happen to have a pragmatic view of idealism, if that makes sense. I happen to be very, very aligned with the values that comes from the design industry, that comes from helping the human, that comes from the fluffy stuff, like the fluffy things that people, like, struggle talking about, because it’s just about being nice.
I just see the value of being nice. I very much see it. And this is why I put it into frameworks, because this allows me to use that tool without falling into this place of being unable to discuss the other things as well, and making enough room for the other things that I need to have in my role, while fostering and caring and being present and wanting people to be creative and to do funky and fun and different things and fostering it. So my pragmatism is actually tied to the fact that amazing design is good and is actually helping humans. And that I always say, like, I strive to be kind, not nice. And again, that comes from a place of pragmatism, because I see being nice as getting in a way of achieving great things. I see being kind as a way to achieve everything.
Jesse: Mm hmm.
Peter: I want to continue this. So I am, I’m a pragmatist as well. And the risk of pragmatism as a leader is…
Cynthia: mm-hmm
Peter: …accommodation, right? There’s some dominant way of behaving that, practicing your realpolitik, you are going to accommodate to whatever that dominant way of behaving is. And then you’re essentially acceding to it, as opposed to, we were talking about fighting, maybe fighting isn’t the right word, but advocating for what you know to be the potential.
And so I’m curious, what your vision is of the potential for change, right? Most design leaders have some vision of the change they want to realize. And I’m curious how you think about that, how you approach that, ’cause you’re probably not satisfied with things at Shopify; however good they are, they could be better.
So what is, what is it you’re trying to drive people toward?
Cynthia: Yeah, I think, like, I’m not a peacemaker. So, my role is not to accommodate everyone, to make progress. I– We’re analyzing very deeply everything right now.
Jesse: Welcome to the show.
Cynthia: Yeah, I know. That’s great. But my role is not to accommodate, and my role is to definitely fight the right fights. I am very thankful for the leadership team that I have and my boss as well, where if I go to my boss, I’m like, Hey, this doesn’t work and requires more work or requires more resources. I’m blocking this. I might get pushed back, we might have a discussion, we might have disagreement about it, but in general, there’s huge trust that if I say like, hey, this is bad enough that it needs to be unshipped, or it needs to be delayed before we ship it, or even if it increases conversion, I believe it should be pulled down, or like, hey, I know the tests were positive, but I believe it has second order effects that might be bad. All of these things are totally respected, and appropriate.
And this is my role to have those conversations. It is my role to make sure that UX is not defunded because I believe that it has to be right-sized to achieve its goal. So it’s not about accommodation. It’s not about just peacemaking and being always the one that takes the hit just so that no one gets mad.
My vision for UX requires tension. So it needs engineering, UX, and product to have like the right amount of tension. And if UX is the one that keeps folding, the two other pieces will fall over it.
Like I want to hold that tension. And I think I do very seriously, but I don’t want to pull too hard on that string so that it breaks that filament at all. Does that make sense?
Peter: It does. I’m, I’m wondering what, if any, agenda you have, like, what is Cynthia trying to advance within this context?
Cynthia: I ultimately just really care about the quality of the design in the product. So everything that gets in the way of that, I will fight for. I care very much about someone using our product and feeling empowerment through it. I care that our employees see the value that they create in the world. And I always say, you could be working at any companies you want in tech, at a certain level, like you could go to a different company. I personally, like, chose to become a designer because I wanted to use my brain, my creativity, and what I’m able to do, like my ability to shape things in order to improve the life of the person that I’m designing for.
And as long as I work for a company who’s a hundred percent aligned with that, I’m good to go. Designing is about, like, changing a person’s behavior. You’re trying to make them do something. As long as I’m using my brain to make them do something that benefits them and someone else along the way, and if Shopify makes money along the way and I make money then, like, we’re good to go.
I want these to be in perfect alignment. I never want to shape a certain behavior that is actually not in the person’s best interest, but in the organization best interest or in another user’s best interest.
So i’m not taking a stab at any company in particular. But if the majority of what you do is, for example, creating advertisement opportunities, you are trying to shape behaviors to create more advertisement opportunities. Then the user’s best interest is not aligned with the second user for which you are actually designing for. This is what I care about. This is why I became a designer. This is why I want my design team to continue working for and working really hard. And that’s the goal that I want our team to not just do, but feel like they’re doing.
I want them to know that their design is in the best interest of literally everyone that it touches.
Peter: How have you shared that vision with the team? Does the team know this about you?
Cynthia: That’s a good question. I think the majority knows that I care about these things. We do have, like, conversations. We do have internal conferences. This is something I share when I’m interviewing as well. It’s a very common question that people ask, why do you still work at Shopify?
Like, yeah, money’s good, but I mean, I could have good money elsewhere, you know, and specifically a few years ago, it would have been very easy to just like seek a different paycheck. And this is what I tell people, I choose Shopify because it continues to be the place where the mission is the most aligned with my personal values and where everything I get to do gets to benefit everyone along the chain. I don’t think that’s the most accurate way of sharing that message to be fair. That’s something I might want to share a bit more. I thank you for the idea.
Jesse: Cynthia, what are you looking forward to right now?
Cynthia: Oh, great question. There’s a lot of super interesting projects that are about to ship and like, honestly, I know that’s a cheesy answer, but there are certain projects that have been so frustrating for a while because you just want them to ship for so long. And like every time I would use a product, I’d be like, Hmm, is it just me? Or is that complicated? Am I being dense or is this thing being dense, you know? And for so many reasons, sometimes honestly, just resource limitations at one point, or like optimization, it never gets fixed. And some of these are about to ship and they’re big changes. And this is super exciting to me.
I’m looking forward to the peace era in technology, if I may. Right now, we’ve just come out of a crazy stage of like, things are all like 10x-ing and it’s like super exciting, super exciting, super exciting, but like any bubble burst at one point, and we’re seeing that pop right now in the industry, unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve gone through 2022 and seen what has happened.
This, of course, has been very difficult for people involved, for employees, for everyone that is, this is very challenging for them, and it does impact your emotions and how you live and, like, your family life. Like, it’s very difficult. I’m looking forward to being on the other side of this and being in a more stable, trustworthy environment.
And I believe the best creative work comes from a place of people having creative courage. And to have creative courage, you have to have a sense of footing. You have to feel secure to put yourself out there and do super creative work. So this is definitely like the era. I call it the peace era that I’m looking for.
I’m looking forward to my kids that are growing up and are very, very exciting to watch. I’m excited about the general shape of Shopify right now. Like it’s, it’s fun. When people that are starting to work at Shopify ask me why I want to still work at Shopify, I answer because it’s value-aligned.
And when people at Shopify ask me, like, why are you still here? It’s because I still believe that I have more fun at Shopify than I would have anywhere else. And until I feel like that’s no longer the case, I’ll stay at Shopify and have that fun.
Jesse: Fantastic. Cynthia, thank you so much.
Cynthia: Thank you so much.
Peter: This has been excellent. Thank you.
Jesse: Cynthia, if people want to find you on the internet, how can they do that?
Cynthia: My very poor LinkedIn profile. You can find my book, tragicdesign.com. It’s currently on sale on Amazon, by the way. It’s still very relevant. I’m at conferences. You can find me on YouTube, but I don’t have a personal website.
Jesse: Fantastic. Thank you so much.
Cynthia: Thank you.
Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.
41: Leading Experience Design for the Military (ft. Colt Whittall)
Feb 05, 2024
Transcript
What follows is a lightly edited transcript produced by our podcast software. It may retain some textual glitchiness.
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: And I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, “mission critical” takes on a whole new meaning when you’re the Chief Experience Officer for the United States Air Force. The first person to take on that role, Colt Whittall, joins us to talk about getting things done when you have more influence than authority, finding meaning and purpose in government service, and taking risks in an environment where failure is not an option.
Peter: So Colt, what I’m curious about is, I think this is a new role, right? This role didn’t exist before. I don’t know if it was created for you or if someone had the idea and then found you. But why were you the right person to be the first Chief Experience Officer at the Air Force?
Colt: So, great question. First of all, yes, this was a brand new role. Well, let me just tell you how it was created, and then we’ll talk about, why was I picked to do it? So it was, it was really created because the Air Force knew we had a user experience problem, primarily with IT but also with software. We had a lot of complaints. And this has been going on for years, and I think there was a general sense that maybe things were getting worse and not better.
And so the CIO at the time knew he had an issue. He also had an understanding of the importance of software, which, the CIO role is a little different in DoD, their control of enterprise IT is fairly direct, but their control of applications is less direct as in a corporate environment. There’s generally control of those that’s spread out amongst a bunch of different organizations. He knew he had an issue. He had some authority over it and wanted to create this role. Then why me? I came out of about a 20, 25 year career in the digital agency space, digital consultancies.
I was at Deloitte in the nineties, built one website after another and mobile app and so on from. 2000 to 2018 with a digital agency that we spun out of Deloitte and did a lot of fantastic work in a variety of industries, media, health care, wellness, travel, hospitality, financial services, and some federal government.
And Bill Marion, the CIO, had been a client of mine at one point. And so I had a, probably a fairly typical background for people that listen to your podcast, right? A mix of digital strategy and user experience and customer experience. And by 2018, I was at the equity partner level, practice lead kind of level. And we sold the company and we were looking to get out. And so that’s what I did. And took a little time off.
I had always had an interest in federal government and user experience and technology in the federal government. And when I was in graduate school I pursued it a couple of different ways and kind of built on that. Did internships in DC. One of them had to do with high definition television. I worked on the high definition television project for AT&T, interacted a lot with their government affairs group with Bell Labs up in Summit Hill, New Jersey.
And then I did an internship with the FCC. It was set up by my thesis advisor, who’s named Dale Hatfield. And worked on the first ever narrowband PCS auctions. This whole idea of the intersection of technology and government’s always been a big passion of mine.
And so after a career in the digital agency space , I happen to know some people in government. I approached Bill Marion, Bill Marion had a problem. He knew me, didn’t know a lot about me, but he, he knew enough about me. That on LinkedIn , I basically just said, “Hey, Bill, I’m thinking about going to work for the government for a while.” In my mind, I’m thinking US Digital Services or something like that, which you may have heard of.
I wanted to talk to Bill because I knew him and I need a little advice. Like, how would I even go about this? , I don’t want to just go looking for, jobs on USA Jobs and just start submitting resumes. I’m like, there has to be a better way. And Bill responds on LinkedIn five minutes later, says, “meet me at the Pentagon on Tuesday.” That’s literally what he said. And I flew up and I met with Bill and we started talking about the challenge of user experience and performance across IT and the Air Force. And I think we began to formulate what this role could look like and that’s really it.
Most of my background, as you just heard, is more in the software and application, and more consumer and outward facing. However, a lot of the tools we need to fix our problem internally for airmen– which is what I focus on, I barely touch the external facing web stuff at all– but a lot of the same tools apply internally for the applications and systems and IT that airman use.
The Scope of the Chief Experience Officer
Jesse: So I think it might be a little challenging for folks to conceptualize what those needs might be inside the Air Force. Why you would need a chief experience officer. I would love to hear a little bit about, to the extent that you can without committing treason, the communities that you serve, a little bit the broad use cases that you’ve served just to get a sense of the scope of the challenge that you’re really talking about here.
Colt: Sure. The scope is huge. I mean, first of all, think about all the missions that we do, right? You know, first of all, we’re the, air force and the space force.
Jesse: Right.
Colt: Delta Airlines has, I want to say eight or 900 planes. We have over 6, 000. All right. So it’s huge. And we have a vastly wider range of aircraft, right?
Both fixed wing, rotor, drone, all of it. Right. Plus we have the space force. We fly satellites. We work with contractors that launch us into space. We do all of that. Right. Then we have land base missiles. We have air defense type stuff and radar installations of all types. All of that it, all of those systems have an IT component to it. All of them, right?
Just one, for example, we’re replacing the Minuteman missiles that sit in ground based silos. It’s a program called Sentinel. That will have big deadlines coming up over the next few years because we have certain timelines that we have to hit. But there are 10, 20, I don’t even know what the latest number is, there’s a number of systems that support all of that. Everything from the logistics to the control, to all of it, right? All of that has to be designed and built. So we have, you know, I was talking with the CTO of a major, well, I’ll just say it was Coca-Cola, several years ago, and he was telling me about the number of systems they have.
First of all, they have more than I would have thought or a global organization, right? I thought there’s a lot of duplication, right? They’ve acquired a lot of companies over the years. Yada, yada, yada. We have many, many times more than that, right.
Jesse: Mm
Colt: It’s a big complex. Okay. Now, so you got all these we have, let’s call it 700,000 total airman contractor. That’s active duty guard, reserve, civilian, and contractors that are like on our networks in our systems.
Call it 700,000 plus or minus. And they are interacting with, call it, there’s maybe 40 systems that have more than 50,000 accounts, quite a few of those over 500,000 accounts. And then there’s this long tail of systems that go all the way out to very tactical things, some of which are extremely mission important, that might only have a few dozen or a few hundred accounts, right. And they’re doing everything imaginable, right? They’re flying satellites, they’re handling logistics, all of it, right? They’re putting together schedules of flights and sorties and getting fuel on planes and recording the hours of pilots and crews and making sure it’s scheduling of all of the above.
And then you’ve got really mundane things like getting people paid on time and dealing with health care and booking their flights. It’s everything that a typical large organization does, plus all of these other long tail of missions. And then on top of that, just to make it even more complicated, we are literally around the world and supporting a lot of hardware out there.
Across Levels of Security
Colt: And then we’re doing it at multiple different information security levels, which if you’ve never dealt with information security in this kind of an organization, it gets a little crazy, right? Because you’ve got completely public information, right? Then there’s unclassified and essentially public, like the public could have it. And then there’s controlled unclassified information, which is just things that aren’t publicly releasable, but they’re not classified.
And then there’s secret, top secret, and various flavors and things above that, So, it’s a complicated environment. And these systems, think about it, some live at one level, some live at another level, some live at the other level. So it, it is a complex environment.
It’s not unique to the air force and space force, right? This is across all of DoD.
Developing an Agenda
Peter: Given this complexity, I would imagine a big challenge in your role is maintaining focus, figuring out what, what to work on. And I’m wondering, when you joined and then maybe over your time there, something that we heard from prior heads of design was the importance of some vision. Not necessarily destination, but generally a direction they were trying to move things towards.
And I’m wondering, did you have something like that when you joined? Or what did it take for you, because it sounds like this was probably a new environment, to realize this is what I’m here to do. This is my personal North Star. And then how did that help you make sense of this complexity, where it would be very easy to get overwhelmed by all the things you could do, and you needed to focus on the things that actually advanced your agenda toward that vision.
Colt: So we definitely have a vision now. But it took a little while to evolve. It’s not that the vision evolved. The way that I talk about it got clearer and clearer. And it can probably be clearer still. When I took this role it was June of 2019 and like any kind of incoming executive, I kind of set the expectation there was going to be about a 90 day sort of study transition kind of plan, and then I’ll come back with an approach. And the good news is, after that meeting at the Pentagon with Bill, I had about six months while they were creating the job, and I had a pretty good idea that I was going to get the job. So I had a lot of time to prepare.
And it was a little bit my sabbatical, or you know, I call it my gap year. So I had a lot of time to prep. So I came in with a lot of preparation. Then I had my 90 day transition. I booked a lot of plane tickets. I visited a lot of places. I talked to a million people. I looked at a lot of data. I’m a career professional consultant.
So I came back with a nice, big, thick document. And I thought it was very well- structured and clear. And , like a good senior executive in the federal government, my boss said, “Love it. On board. This is exactly what you need to do, but it’d be better if you could put it in a placemat.”
And I’m like, okay, can do. Put it in a placemat. And did a lot of talks and you can actually go out and you can go on YouTube and you can actually find videos of me presenting my placemat in public events and the placemat was helpful, but it wasn’t clear enough.
Colt: And so not long after that, people were asking me, Colt, okay, love the placemat, but what’s our strategy? And we needed something that applied to both enterprise IT and software that people can understand very quickly. And so essentially the strategy is, we’re going to treat airmen like they’re customers.
Which is a big shift in mentality in a government organization. So we’re gonna treat our airmen like they’re customers. As if we’re a major IT services company, like a Microsoft or Google or somebody else, right? And so we treat airmen like customers, and then we’re going to measure the experience from their perspective. And then we’re going to track that over time, figure out how to make it better and manage service levels. Fundamentally, that’s a strategy.
So it’s an outside-in type of user-centric approach focused heavily on measuring experience, because that’s something that we can do at scale. I mean, think about the scale of the organization I described earlier. I can’t think of another way to do it. Well, there’s many challenges with user experience, but one of the challenges with user experience is, at the end of the day, it improves system by system, application by application, user journey by user journey.
And so we needed a way to kind of say, okay, how do we go set the bar, measure the bar, figure out where the bar is, and then start trying to get the entire culture to move the bar up. We needed a clearer, more succinct strategy and that’s when I got down to, okay, here, the strategy is fairly concise: treat airmen like customers, as if we are basically a big IT services company, and measure user experience from their perspective as they’re doing the mission. There’s implications to all those things, and then track it over time and manage service levels, you know, to improve them. And that is fundamentally the strategy.
People seem to be able to understand that very easily at all levels. I talked to general officers, totally get that because they apply similar techniques everywhere. You know, the organization understands all aspects of that. They understand about measuring service levels and managing service levels. Once you start putting user experience into those terms, an organization as big as with these kinds of missions can grab on to it and say, yeah, that’s a good way to do it.
Jesse: This is fascinating because it feels like such a shift for you, away from consulting work, which I know that you’ve done for many years. And I’m curious because it feels like there’s an element of consulting, which is about get in, make the strategic impact, get out and move on to the next thing.
And this is about, getting in and going deeper and deeper and deeper and getting sort of more into it. And I wonder, what was attractive to you about the shift to this context? And what did you discover when you actually got to the other side?
Colt: You know, you’re right. Career professional consultant going from project to project. And we had a very good run. I mean, I was with essentially the same organization the entire time, right? I was with Deloitte, we spun a company out, we sold it so I was essentially with one organization the whole time. But never really got to see a lot through in the way of our client work. I even had accounts for years, one account 7, 8 years, so saw a lot of things through, but not like this. So my goal was, let’s see if we can move the needle in a massive way for an organization this big. And I was fairly convinced that we could, but that was what was really attractive to me is, let’s attempt to measure user experience in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to airmen doing the mission, and their mission. And then let’s track it over time. And then let’s figure out what levers we need to pull in order to move the metrics and deliver a better service level. And have everybody agreed that we did it.
I mean, fundamentally, that was what I wanted to do. That’s what attracted me to doing this. And I went in fairly convinced that we could do it. I didn’t know exactly how we were going to do it. But I had a lot of ideas on how we could do it. But you’re going to go look for what are the biggest levers you can find to shift how airmen perceive the service level though they’re getting from IT and focus on those areas.
Peter: I want to unpack a couple of terms just to make sure that we’re all using the same words to mean the same thing. I’m not used to thinking of user experience as having a service level mindset, apart from, like, my design team will have a service level commitment, maybe to some part of the business, but that’s not what you’re talking about.
So what do you mean when you’re saying service levels in this context and what is UX’s responsibility, if it’s separate from the rest of it.
Colt: Yeah. No, great question. Okay. So when I’m talking service levels, I’m using the term a little bit broader than you’re probably thinking about it. So it’s, performance response time and all of those kind of aspects of computing. You know, my computer not crashing, stuff like that, it’s just service levels.
Peter: Kind of what we would think of as quality and quality assurance.
Colt: Quality assurance. Exactly. But I’m also just thinking of making sure that the applications that you are using are easy to get to, meet your requirements, and are easy to use without having to get a lot of extra training that is specific to the application.
There’s a lot of training that you need to do your job, but you shouldn’t need so much training in the tool. So I’m using service levels just in a broader sense.
Peter: Almost like, yeah, how we would think of quality.
Jesse: Yeah.
Colt: One other thing just to clarify, because this confuses a lot of people, and don’t even think about it so much when I talk about it anymore. But keep in mind that I work for the CIO. But my job spans both enterprise IT and software and applications.
So, think Google. Google could produce the most fantastic search results on the planet, but if it took 10 seconds to get the search result back, you would still think it was terrible. And we have that kind of problem, right?
Trying to putting it on our terms, our search results wouldn’t be that great, and by the way, it would take 10 seconds. So we got to solve both problems. And if I’m trying to move the bar up in a significant way, that is noticeable and meaningful to airmen out doing their part of the mission, then i’m looking for the ways to figure out how to move the bar up on wherever I can get it. So in some cases that’s on the software side, in some cases that’s on hardware systems, networks, operations, wherever I can move the bar up and deliver a better service across all of it.
We ask a Big Question
Peter: I want to unpack that. ‘Cause something Jesse and I love to talk about is multi-channel, omnichannel, very broad user experience, right?
Experience
Jesse: strategy.
Peter: Yeah, we all come from an environment where people thought UX was screens, very simple kind of software mindset, but we all know that an experience mindset can be brought to bear on a much broader set of challenges.
What I’m wondering is, you’re talking about hardware as well as software and other systems. I’m realizing I’m curious about the makeup of your team, right? You’re the first Chief Experience Officer. Who are you assembling in your organization in order to address this variety and complexity of challenges that you’re now facing?
Jesse: Well, I actually have a related question that I’d like to piggyback on this which is what did you inherit when you stepped in? Your role was brand new, but the work being done was not, and I’m curious about what you were handed, how you shaped that into something new, and what, to Peter’s point, what did you need to create along the way?
Colt: We had to create a lot. Okay. So why don’t I start with that? And then let’s come back to Peter’s question. So I didn’t really inherit much. There was not an existing team. And to Peter’s question, I don’t really have a team. So I’m what’s known as an HQE appointee or highly qualified experts.
It’s basically a type of senior executive service equivalent hire. It’s equivalent to a one star general or a first level senior executive service, where the government goes outside directly to commercial industry and brings somebody in with a particular set of expertise to solve a particular problem.
And then by law, maybe it’s by policy, but regardless, you have to be done in five years. And one other kind of odd rule is that as an HQE you can’t really manage government people. So it’s kind of like going out and pulling a commercial person into the government for a short period of time.
And so when you saw the reboot of healthcare.gov going back about a decade, I think they brought in one, two or more HQE’s. It’s not that unusual, but so I can’t go and like build a team and have a lot of people working for me.
What I can do, remember, career professional consultant, is go figure out who’s allied with this cause and line everybody up and get them all working on the same thing.
And so that’s what I was able to do. There are multiple organizations that have some stakeholder piece part responsibility for user experience.
Most of them don’t call it that, they’re DevSecOps organizations doing software development, or they’re software factories, or they’re software acquisition teams, or they’re IT organizations that are supposed to be optimizing the performance and the security of our networks and systems and desktops and everything else.
So there’s lots of organizations that do a piece part of user experience, or they own some part of it. All of them had to be lined up, put together in teams virtually to go after this. All the organizations existed, but the virtual teams going after these problems, thinking about it as UX and performance and then going after it, none of that really existed.
We did have software factories. Our largest is called Kessel Run. They’re an interesting group. You may want to talk to them sometime. Over a thousand people now, and they have a pretty robust UX capability. So they existed, but there wasn’t a lot else.
And then what had to be built? So the key things that had to be built were,- -keep in mind what my strategy was, let’s go treat airmen as customers, measure UX from their perspective, track service levels, manage service levels, make it better. Okay, so what do you have to do?
First thing you got to do is start measuring user experience. And you got to do it across enterprise IT. And then you got to do it across software. It’s a lot easier to do it across enterprise IT. There’s a lot more tools and products, and I don’t need so much consent from individual applications.
We’re in an environment with thousands, probably, of individual applications and platforms, if I had to go to each one of them and get permission to monitor their performance, and we can’t use Google Analytics inside our firewalls, but let’s say we could, we wanna attach Google Analytics and maybe do usability testing or something on a thousand applications. I gotta work with a thousand different programs. Can’t do that.
So how do you do this? So on the enterprise IT side, we had a thing called the Air Force Survey Office. They use Qualtrics at scale and there’s a FedRAMP moderate version of Qualtrics so we can attach it and we can do surveys.
And this is the way, like if you hear about a study in DoD of, pick a topic, whether it’s diversity, inclusion, or retention, or sexual harassment or any other topic people research, this is the platform that they do those studies on. So what I did is, I met with them and then we set up a, what’s now it’s evolved a bit, but starting in January 2020, we began doing a pulse survey of it.
And then we launched digital experience monitoring, which gives us performance of all the software running on individual computers. So now we know where it takes a long time to start up in the morning.
We have people complaining of 20 minute startup times, boot up times. And, and we know where it is, geographically, bases and everywhere. And then we added a network of boxes that plug into the routers that run a set of tests, looking for things that tend to disrupt performance and mess up performance of software , tests that check our PKI infrastructure, that check various changes that sometimes happen with DNS and in various other things. And so now we’ve got sort of, this is gonna get really geeky really fast, but all seven layers of the OSI stack we’re now monitoring.
So we understand the whole technology stack. Really, we understand at the top level what the user is experiencing from the technology stack. That’s on the enterprise IT side. On the software side, more complicated because in order to instrument an application with just basic web analytics… Now understand, you can’t go hook up tools like Google Analytics to our systems, right? Even the unclassified systems, you can’t really do that.
On the public facing site, yes, there’s actually a really good public facing version of Google Analytics that’s run by General Services Administration. It’s a great capability, but we can’t use that for our, call it… just inside the firewall stuff. So we, we stood up something called user experience management, and it has a user feedback capability, just a simple link so that users can provide feedback with a simple 3 question survey. And then it has an open source web analytics tool and we’ve gone through two years of security approvals to get it what’s known as ATO or authority to operate on our networks, so that all of our applications on the unclass side of the Air Force for now, and we’re going to try and take this to the classified side, now, all these applications can get basic web analytics and user feedback.
That sounds very simple. Like, if you were to go start any business on the public internet, those are probably two of the first things you would attach to your website, right? It’s just a feedback link and web analytics, but our stuff, we can’t, we have not been able to do that.
And that’s a problem in the government, by the way. When they did the analysis of what went wrong with healthcare.gov, one of the findings was that they didn’t have web analytics. And I know why they didn’t have web analytics. It’s actually kind of hard to get that in a government site. So we solved that problem. Now that’s being rolled out. There’s several other things we’re doing at the individual application level. But one of the things that I think is unique that we’re doing is we needed a way to start managing the portfolio overall.
Influence Without Authority
Jesse: What you’re describing sounds like a tremendous effort of orchestration cross-functionally, and I find it especially interesting that you were able to achieve this in a role that is expressly designed to limit the amount of direct control you have over what actually happens, right? You’re expected to wield a lot of influence, but you have very little, it sounds like, direct control or direct authority to actually tell people what to do. Is that true?
Colt: That is, that is true.
Jesse: How do you get a job this complex done when you have those constraints?
Colt: So a couple of ways. I put so much of a focus on metrics measurement because once you have that, then you can provide, what we call in DoD, situational awareness up the chain of command and get buy in. So in other words, if you can show that performance and user experience is bad with certain bases, certain applications, certain missions, and the data is clear and presented clearly, then you can, get buy in, because that’s information that has to be dealt with. That’s, I think, the most powerful thing that you have. I think that’s why I’m such an advocate of a data driven approach. That’s number one.
And number two is, you gotta have, you gotta have air cover, because it takes a while to put in place the tools to get that kind of data in quote unquote situational awareness.
So you gotta have air cover to be able to get you through to the point where the data is out there and it’s clear and it’s compelling and actionable.
And then the third thing I would say is, you have to get a little bit… lucky is not the right word, but you have to get a little bit lucky in the sense that once you start having good situational awareness across a broad portfolio of technology, where you get a lot of data and you can see what’s really going on, then what you need is you need leverage points where sort of the, the 80/20 rule comes into effect or the 90/10 rule, and you can go and say, okay, if we solve these 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 problems, even if we solve them 75%, we’re going to get a 20, 30, 40, 50 percent improvement in our metrics. And it’s identifying those points of maximum leverage across the enterprise where you get the biggest result. And if you’ve got enough data visibility, enough visibility across the whole environment, you can start to identify those points. Fundamentally, that’s it.
So that’s how we’ve been able to move the needle.
Peter: Much of what you’ve been explaining, feels a lot like lifting a floor, right? There was a broadly unsatisfactory level of quality across the systems and your initial orientation was to really like dig in, get that data, really understand kind of where the breaks in the chain are in order to raise the floor.
And I’m wondering, because you were, you’ve been there four-ish years, was there a point at which you started to also get to look at raising the ceiling, to think about innovation, to think about net new, or has it really been this very kind of practical, tactical, we just got to get these things working, and then that in and of itself is a win.
Colt: So I probably spend at least 50 percent of my time on the “get it working.” And that’s a huge win, by the way, if you look at what airmen complain about most. That’s it. At least in IT. However, to answer your question, yes. So when we conceived my role initially, one of the ideas was there are several, I call them the mega user journeys that apply to almost everybody in the Air Force and Space Force that are not very well automated. They might be partially automated, but they’re automated by multiple different systems. There’s a massive amount of paper involved. The churn involved is insane. And so there were those that I wanted to take on.
Peter: You mentioned getting kind of cover from your leadership, but how are decisions made? How do you get on everybody’s backlog or whatever, across this extremely complex organization in a coordinated fashion, such that you can make the progress that you know you need to make. Like, is that just you in a lot of meetings having a lot of conversations? Is there some communication, operational kind of a set of people and practices that can weave this together? Like it just feels daunting.
Colt: Well, I mean, it probably is a little bit, but I was very fortunate that I had I’ve had some good bosses and it’s important to have a good boss. I’ve had some good bosses that I was very in sync and they were very in sync with what we wanted to do and what was possible.
And so I had air cover when I needed it. But a lot of this is just a tremendous amount of communication. So one of the things that I use to our advantage, when you’re in my role, you do a lot of public speaking and conferences. And so two or three times a month, I’m giving some kind of a public talk and then probably a couple times a week for the last four years, I’m giving some sort of a large group presentation inside the Air Force, going through, okay, on improving performance of enterprise IT. Here’s all the things we’re doing. Here’s the vision. Here’s strategy. Here’s the measurements. Doing demos. Whenever we stood up the tools, people have to believe this stuff is real, right? And they have to experience the benefit.
And so I do a lot of demos, demos of our digital experience, monitoring demos of our survey platform, etcetera, etcetera. And then on the software side, same thing. A lot of demos. The job is fundamentally a communication job, making people aware, showing people it’s real, getting people to buy in, coaching people, teaching people, but doing it at scale. And you know, if there’s one thing the DoD does really, really well, we do a lot of things well, actually, but one of the things I do think we do well is communications at scale. We do well.
Jesse: So I’ve never worked with the military. What I imagine of that environment is one in which the default answer is going to be no. Unless you can make a pretty strong case for yes, because of the need for things to absolutely work without question.
Colt: You’re right.
Jesse: And I imagine that that creates a certain amount of institutional risk aversion. It creates a certain amount of skepticism toward new ideas, especially… Experiments that we’ve never tried before. And you came into this role having to advocate for all of those things. And I’m curious about, aside from having really awesome metrics to back you up, how did you make that case? How did you convince people to take on the risk of changing their processes, changing their approaches, looking at things in a new way?
Make Change by Connecting to their Past
Colt: Great question. And metrics were a big part of that. But there’s a few tricks. You gotta be able to learn and speak the organization’s language and speak to what matters to them. That’s important.
And by the way, the notion that you’re talking about, in our environment, they call it the frozen middle.
Jesse: Mm.
Colt: When it comes to user experience and performance, we actually have, I would say, senior leaders at the Department of the Air Force , we’re talking in the what we call the glass doors level. So I think the top six or so leaders in the Air Force, the second half, the chief, the undersecretary, the vice chief, and the chief master sergeant at that level, they actually use the term user experience which is encouraging. They know what it means and they know what it means to them. They’re not experts, obviously, but at that level they really do get it. And they support it and they want to know how to make it better.
And then at the sort of the airman level, they totally get it right. Technology is like air to them. They breathe it. It’s part of their lives. we hire a tremendous number of young people and they just breathe technology. So what everybody talks about is the frozen middle. It’s all these folks that want to say no because they don’t really want to take a risk.
So I use Lieutenant Colonel Fitts story a lot.
I do a million conference presentations and internal, I close practically every presentation with Fitts because it shows… The point is that human-computer interaction and user experience and human factors engineering, these things are all within the DNA of the Department of the Air Force, right?
And you guys know the history here. Frankly, you probably know it better than I do. But in case some of the listeners don’t, the story at a most basic level is that we were losing hundreds of B-17s in World War II in Europe. You can read Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell, good book about it. And, but a lot of these planes, in fact, really thousands we were losing, and but hundreds of these planes flew back into Britain and the pilots would just make a lot of mistakes and the Air Force and our infinite wisdom basically said, Hey, we’re getting crappy pilots.
And so they decided, Hey let’s go do a study on this? Right. ‘Cause we’re the government–studies, we do that. And so they hired a, psychologist who had been Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Air Corps.
Gone back, got a PhD, comes back as a psychologist and he starts digging into this problem with the intent of helping hire better pilots or choose better pilots, select better pilots. And starts looking at the records of the plane crashes and realizes that there’s patterns in the data. Same types of things were happening again and again and again, right?
Pilots that would fly a mission over Europe, come back, land in Britain, and they would open the bomb bay doors instead of put down the landing gear. Things like that. And so he and a pilot and others started looking at the planes and began to realize that what we had was not crappy pilots.
It was a badly designed plane. Certain controls were too close together. They looked exactly the same. They worked exactly the same. You know, if you put yourself in the position of these pilots and crews, I mean, good God, I mean, they just flown for hours over Europe.
There’s probably smoke in the cockpit, maybe one of their buddies is bleeding in the back or worse, and I mean, the stress that it must be is unimaginable, and then add into that that you flip to a console and the controls are all the same, it’s a miracle anybody got back at all, and so they began redesigning the cockpit of the plane, focusing on things like shape coding of the controls, and it’s interesting, those techniques are used to this day, anytime you tell this story in our environment, there’s almost always an Air Force pilot or a former Air Force pilot on the line and they get in the chat on our team’s call. And they’re like, oh, yeah, that explains why , this control is shaped totally different than this and this one is like a gear and this one is shaped like a flap and I’m like, okay, it turns out those things are still done to this day. So, but the point of telling that story is that anybody in our environment can understand it. They all respect it because there’s a lot of respect for that kind of history in our culture.
And it conveys a few things. It conveys being data driven. It conveys solving the problem. It conveys the connectedness to the mission. It conveys frankly, it just conveys that this is within the DNA of our culture and organization already. And if we can tap into it in order to solve problems like that, we can tap into it in order to make the user experience better for our weapon systems today. In World War II, they were a B-17. Well, today, they’re still weapon systems. They’re different, right? There’s a huge IT component to our weapon systems today. It’s not just all about super expensive hardware that circles the globe or whatever. There’s a lot of software. So that’s how we do it. That’s the technique to cut through.
Jesse: I love that story. You know, it’s interesting because I asked you, what did you do to talk people into doing something new? And what I got from your answer was that your approach was basically to convince them that it’s not new at all, right? That it’s actually already a part of the culture that they’re a part of.
And that this user-centered thinking is really just an evolution of what’s already in the organization.
Colt: Totally agree. Think about it. I mean, what are the odds that me, an outsider, are going to come in and change the culture of the Department of Defense? Not going to happen.
So, you got to be realistic about that and then… Use the culture for what it’s really good at. And this is something that our culture has been good at in the past and can be going forward.
Bringing a Service Mindset
Peter: I actually want to build on that, because you wrote a post on LinkedIn and one of the words that I noticed in your post was, “if any of my friends from the commercial world are interested in serving,” and serving is not how we typically talk about the kind of work we do. And I’m wondering, what it has meant to be in an environment where to serve and serving is the value that everybody, to the highest level, is bringing to the work and how that’s affected how you’ve approached it, or evolved and changed how you’ve approached it.
Colt: First of all, this doesn’t apply just to DOD, right? I mean, what we’re talking about here really is government service.
it’s service to your country or your state or your county or city, it’s government service. I think military work in particular can be a bit of a family business, right? My grandfather was in the Navy. My dad was in the Navy.
I was not, but I do this. We need people who are willing to go serve and it doesn’t have to be in the military. It’s a million ways to do it. I have the highest respect for Jennifer Pahlka, who just put out a book called Recoding America and the work that people do in that on the civilian side of the government, and it’s all vital and it’s all technology that has to work, frankly, for the institutions of our country just to operate.
So I think it’s a important thing, an honorable thing, and I encourage it for everybody. We have some countries like, I believe, Switzerland and Israel basically require a certain amount of military service. I don’t think it has to be military but I think it’s a good experience for everybody to do some of this, and I think it makes you more connected to , frankly, everyone in our country and around the world, I think whenever you spend some amount of time providing service. So something I feel strongly about, and I would highly encourage anyone in the commercial sector, as I was, if you’re interested in doing something like this, if you’re a UX designer, software developer, whatever, and you’re interested, reach out to me anytime.
Peter: I’m wondering how your posture in leading this kind of work shifted as you approached it with this serving mindset versus a more consulting approach.
Colt: Yeah, really good question. From my perspective, you have to take sort of a balance. There was a two star general that I respect tremendously, General Schmidt, who was in acquisition and in a week or two after I started in the job he kind of asked me, okay, well, how are you going to approach this?
And of course, I didn’t have much of anything at that point. And the first thing out of my mouth was, well, it’s going to take a lot of humility. And I think that’s one, that’s a big part. So when you’re going to be a change agent and you’re going to try and really move the bar in an organization this big, and you gotta have a certain amount of humility because there is so much you have to learn and you have to just recognize that at the same time, you also come in with a completely different perspective and you’ve got to be confident in that. And do your homework and rely on a lot of experts. So as I was preparing to take this job. I leaned on friends that were former CIOs, current CIOs and kind of laid out the problem to them and they all kind of pointed and here’s sort of what your strategy is going to have to be. This is the only way that will work.
So I would say humility plus confidence, not arrogance, but a certain amount of humility plus confidence, making sure you’ve done your homework and have in your back pocket a plan that has been proven to scale elsewhere and will apply.
Jesse: I’m curious about the future for you, and where you see all of this going, and what role do you see for yourself going forward?
Colt: Sure. Let me hit four things. So Air Force, DoD, federal government, and then me.
So Air Force. We have a new CIO, Venus Goodwine, and she replaced our last CIO, Lauren Knausenberger, just last month. She is committed to building on and expanding what I have been doing. And I’m not going to make any announcements beyond that, but what we’re doing will go forward in the Air Force.
DoD, I think you’re going to see some exciting things when it comes to UX and performance software and I T. The CIO at the Department of Defense is named John Sherman, and he’s absolutely committed to this. They have already stood up something called the Office Performance Management. And they’re going to be doing some of the similar things. And frankly, you’re also seeing the same type of playbook we’ve executed here at the Air Force. You’re now seeing the Navy pick that up and run with it. And I think you’re going to see it elsewhere in DoD and probably increasingly coordinated DoD wide by the overall CIO for the Department of Defense.
So this is going to become more than just an Air Force thing. It actually already has.
And then federal government. There’s a tremendous amount of activity in UX and CX across the federal government. And I’m not really qualified to talk about it at length. But I am part of those networks, at least in terms of all the email distributions and some of the conferences and things.
It’s super exciting. You’ve probably heard of the 21st century IDEA Act and there’s various federal policies and policies from the White House and OMB to raise the bar for citizen experience across the federal government. They’re also creating a lot of resources for people like me and organizations like this one , tools, resources.
So the survey tool that we’re using just for feedback on applications, it’s called Touchpoints. That’s a GSA tool that we can use even in our environment behind our firewall, which is very interesting. So they’re, they’re doing some amazing things.
And then last, me, personally. So I have a rough plan. And part of it’s going to be advising regarding user experience within DoD. I won’t go any more to it than that. So I’m going to continue to be engaged within DoD. And then I was with a small company before and I’m probably going back to a small company. And in fact, I’ve got a idea and a little bit of a plan for a startup.
So, I may be in the startup world here in the near future.
Jesse: Very exciting Colt. Thank you so much. This has been great.
Peter: Yes, Thank you.
This has been really eye-opening.
Jesse: Colt, where can people find you on the Internet if they want to follow up with you on this conversation?
Colt: Honestly, best way is LinkedIn. I’m not a huge Twitter user or X user. LinkedIn’s pretty reliable.
Jesse: Fantastic.
Peter: Excellent.
Jesse: Thank you so much.
Colt: Thank you.
Jesse: For more FindingOurWay, visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.
40: The Cross-Trained Design Leader (ft. Rajat Shail)
Jan 19, 2024
Transcript
Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Peter: And I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And we’re finding our way,
Peter: navigating the opportunities
Jesse: and challenges
Peter: of design and design leadership.
Jesse: Hardware design, software design, package design, experience design. Rajat Shail oversees all of it for home automation company Vivint. Rajat joins us to share what he’s learned about managing design as a holistic function, the benefits and pitfalls of using design thinking training to engage executives, and what to do when your mandate is broader than your boss’s.
Peter: Rajat, thank you so much for joining us today.
Rajat: Thanks, Peter. Thanks for the invite. It’s good to see you and Jesse.
Peter: So we’re just going to start at the top, which is to better understand: who are you, what you do, current role, responsibilities, what it is that you’re up to these days.
Rajat: Great. I’ll give you a quick synopsis. I am currently leading the design team, user experience team, and the industrial design team and working very closely with the research and insights team here at Vivint, which is a home automation company, which recently got acquired by a Fortune 120 company called NRG, which is focused on delivering great energy solutions.
So we’re really looking at what we call a category of one where we’re looking at home automation along with energy combined, could be a really nice foray into how people live in the future in smart homes. A little bit about me. I started my design journey in India, I did my undergrad and masters in India in design. Worked there for a short time, moved to this country about 20 years ago, and went on a journey working for different companies like Motorola, Whirlpool, Honeywell, Resideo, Bose, and then most recently at Vivint.
My journey has been starting from being an industrial designer to getting to Institute of Design, Chicago, and focusing more on design methods and frameworks and strategy. Not practicing it as much because you know, when you just start, you’re at a certain elevation where you can’t really influence thought leadership at a very high level, but you can use those frameworks in your work and projects. But as I grew in my career, I not only started to focus more on training, you know, the VP/GMs on design thinking, but also started to, over a decade last decade, I started to make a transition into the digital space because there is no such thing as, you know, hardware design, digital design, it’s the end to end experience.
So, in order to be more holistic in creating a great customer value, I had to learn on the job from some of the best digital designers UI, UX. And for the last 10 years, I’ve focused more on digital, less on hardware, even though I manage hardware teams and I’m very familiar with that. So that’s been my journey.
Spanning the physical and digital
Jesse: What was the biggest shift in mindset for you as you made that transition from the focus on hardware into the digital?
Rajat: That’s a really great question, Jesse. I think I asked myself that question a lot, right? Like what, what makes me special?
The biggest shift was starting with imposter syndrome, saying, “Oh, I’m trying to play digital designer when I’m not really traditionally trained as one,” to starting to figure out that there are things I bring to the table as a traditionally hardware designer, which make me more adept at understanding things differently, which was, basically, in industrial design, people are looking at form and function together, right? And in digital, I noticed that there were a lot of subcategories around interaction design, visual design, usability, which was not something we typically divorce in hardware. So for me, when I started to look at interaction design, when I started to look at UI, UX, I was looking at the visual design and the interaction, mental models and the information architecture with the, holistic lens. And I found myself to be good at that because I could look at something that potentially looked complex, could be simplified with better visual design and vice versa, right?
So to me, I felt like I was realizing in meetings that there was something there that I brought to the table, which everyone doesn’t naturally have, because they’re so specialized, and of course, it was a journey and learning from the best interaction designers and visual designers to really understand the realization has also been that it’s not about digital or physical design.
It’s about what is the best way to solve a problem, right? And digital design, hardware design, just enablers in the journey to solve that. We focus a lot on touch points, but it’s really about the experience, the end experience and the most acute realization for me has been as little design as possible and sometimes really forcing myself not to design a piece of hardware and not to design a feature on a, product in a, like an app, which is not needed.
Peter: So a big reason we were interested in having you join us is that, as we’ve been talking with design leaders, they’re often purely software, maybe software and service, but you’re distinct in that you’ve maintained this connection with hardware, industrial design in I think for your last three jobs, right: Honeywell, Bose, and now Vivint.
You know, we’ve talked to other former industrial designers who have kind of let go of that. I work with one, a different design leader at an enterprise SaaS company who was trained in industrial design, but now works primarily in software and service. And I’m wondering how you’ve been able to maintain a career at this intersection of hardware and software.
And, were you motivated specifically to stay there or did it just happen?
Rajat: Yeah. Again, you’re asking me questions that I’ve asked myself a lot. Honestly, it would have been easier to move into digital in its entirety because of its complexity, but to be able to manage teams which are very hardware focused, which work still in a very very waterfall approach versus digital teams, which are working with very different set of engineers in a more agile approach, it would have been easier to focus on one, but I continue to realize that design is holistic. It’s integrated, right? Today’s experiences are physical. They are physical and digital coming together. If you do not look at this holistically, you start to see a disconnect in the work.
And it’s, apparent, like there are cases where I’ve seen the hardware is great, and I actually work for those companies, but the software is very poor; or the software is very robust, but the hardware touch point, the first point of delight of holding something in your hand which delivers additional experience, is just weak.
You cannot not look at these together. And of course my heart is in both the places. So it’s become something more of a natural approach for me now to switch on and off between the two teams and how they think. And I’ve also come to see that both sets of designers slightly look at design differently, right?
Their approach is different. And it always makes me chuckle when I see that fine difference on how an interaction designer solves a problem versus an industrial designer solves a problem. I sometimes feel really, really fortunate that I can see from both those sides and almost to the extent now that I’m able to see it from a mechanical engineer’s perspective as well as a software developer’s perspective very clearly.
Peter: You are leading design and I’m wondering what it means to lead these two flavors of design and how you maybe, do you need to show up differently with the digital side than you do with the hardware and industrial design side, or are you showing up the same and trying to help them understand that they have more in common than they thought?
But like, how does it affect how you lead when you have these teams that you’re responsible for that have different perspectives, preconceptions, different kind of starting points themselves.
Rajat: Yeah there is a difference both in the engineering development as well as the product leadership within both teams, right? There is a stark difference. One is focused on getting the word that I like the least, which is minimum viable product, into the market. The other one is rabidly idealistic about creating the greatest hardware and tools.
Neither one is wrong, because in digital it’s easier to go back and refine. In hardware, once you cut the tools, it’s very difficult to go back and make those continued improvements and refinements. So, that being said, I also like to believe in any product development, once you launch something, the followup becomes an afterthought, right? And, and so I like to use the word minimum lovable product as we use here at Vivint.
What is the best experience that we can give and then build on longterm value on that? So, changing this mindset, that let’s not just focus on the speed, but let’s focus on the quality of the experience which is loved, and at both those touch points is what’s been very different for me within the teams.
Jesse: You know, it’s interesting because what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard in a lot of organizations that are in the hardware business fundamentally, is that the software design is almost never actually unified with hardware design in this respect.
In a lot of cases, I hear from people on the software side who wish they had more interaction with, who wish they had more engagement with the industrial design side.
Apple famously tried to organize all of design under Jonny Ive on both the hardware and the software sides before deciding that that unification didn’t work. What do you think makes this unification work in these contexts that you’ve seen that other people are finding so challenging?
Rajat: They’re finding it challenging because the natural order of things is to create focus and speed, which frankly is achieved through a siloed approach. When you are in your lane and you’re moving fast, you’re not looking around. You achieve the speed that you need, but it also leads to a level of compromise on the quality, Jesse.
Building a culture of just ‘design’
Rajat: I don’t know how it played out at Apple. It was very interesting to hear Jonny Ive when he took over the interaction design team. What I’ve learned to do is, I think it starts from ground up, right? You really have to build a culture where designers are not calling themselves UX designers or industrial design. They’re just calling themselves designers or design thinkers.
I would extend that all the way to engineering and product because we train product folks to do good design thinking, right? So we need to be very, very open to anyone who is thinking creatively, thinking from a user-centered point of view to be addressed as a designer, right?
It comes down to very small, ground-up changes, making people sit together, okay? So they look over the shoulder and understand and learn every day from each other. Start to find these nice synergies and wonderful moments where they find that if I did this thing slightly different, the person who is connected to this experience can alter their design. So I’m finding those magical moments by forcing people to listen to each other.
It’s very easy for an industrial designer to switch off during a design review with the UX. And it’s very easy for a UX designer to switch off during industrial design. I often ask questions to people so they stay a little bit more aware. That’s at a design level.
At a leadership level, and this is a practice we started at Honeywell and I gained a lot from that, we don’t like to review designs. We like to review experiences. So let’s say you’re designing a soundbar, okay, for a home entertainment system. You don’t want to review the hardware of the soundbar, the industrial design or the UX.
You want to review the end to end experience. How is someone going to buy this? What is that? How is someone going to find out about the soundbar? And what is it about it that’s so unique? How are they going to purchase it? What is that purchase experience? And how is it better than everything else out there?
How are they going to get it shipped to them? What does their out of box experience feel like and then what does their first time user experience of setting it up feel like and then part of that is the hardware, part of that is the software install flow, and then finally how does it feel like when they start to use it for the first time and 60 days and what does long term value?
So we kind of lay this out in a long table, almost 20 feet long and we build all these touch points and prototypes and have our leadership go through it to say this is the product. The product is not what you’re holding in your hand. The product is that entire journey that customer is going to go through.
Which, frankly, Apple, I mean, I was trying to avoid using the Apple word, but Apple set the ground rules for it, right? Really well for us. And they’ve shown us the map and it’s shame on us if we don’t follow that, a good customer journey is what people enjoy more. For the longest time, people struggled that Apple’s features are not as good as maybe some Android phones.
That’s not the reason why people are buying Apple phones. People are buying Apple phones for the consistency of the ecosystem and knowing that they just need to learn once and rinse and repeat, right? At different touch points, whether they’re in the Apple store or the Apple website or on the help desk, right?
So I think that approach is what I am forcing leadership to look at holistically. And then you, you get a lot of help from different functions, because when you bring so many minds together people come up with newer ideas, which a traditional UX person would not have thought of, which a traditional marketing person would not have thought of, right?
The power of forcing functions
Jesse: A few times now you’ve used the word “forcing” to describe the way that you engage different parts of the organization with new ideas. Forcing the designers to see things in different ways, forcing the executives to see things in different ways. Forcing is some pretty strong language to use, and I wonder, you know, does it have to be a fight?
Rajat: I don’t say that in a pejorative way. It’s not forcing as a fight, but more like, in big corporations, speed and cost are the defining factors, right? People want to get things out and the natural order of things is the path of least resistance, is the shortest path, but it’s not the best path. It’s often the minefield also, people like to focus on their function, whether it’s the finance person, whether it’s the, even the CEO or the salesperson in what they are good at.
They do not have the time to understand the other functions and see how well they can integrate their thinking with that. When a designer is designing something, they look at solving problems. They look at understanding the value proposition. A salesperson can gain a lot from that. In defining what the sales and marketing approach, go-to-market strategy is.
So forcing I say because… let me put it this way. There is a really great practice that’s happening at Amazon right now, which Mr Bezos describes as forcing function, which is they don’t allow any PowerPoints. They say when a product person is going to present their product plan for a new product, we’re going to have all the cross functional people sit down together around a table, including the executives because the executives have attention of a gnat, right? Attention span of a gnat. We tell them to keep their phones away. They sit down and they are going to read the six-pager. Everybody in the room is sitting quietly for an awkward 35 40 minutes reading the six pager. And understanding they’re not looking at quick slides and taking key points. They’re reading the story, the value prop, the go-to-market strategy, the experiences. It’s well articulated. It’s well written. And they are reacting after that to that. To me, that is a force function, which is very uncomfortable because we live in a world of Keynotes and PowerPoints. But when you force people, when you incentivize people to collaborate, it starts with a forcing function and then it becomes a natural behavior.
So that’s the change I’m talking about.
Peter: Following that thread. One of the leaders we spoke with, last year, was Kaaren Hanson. and she mentioned operating mechanisms, right? One of her ways in to making change is by identifying the operating mechanisms and placing what she wants in there so that the system then kind of carries forward her agenda and it sounds a little bit like what you’re saying with with these forcing functions, the six pagers, that kind of thing.
I’m wondering what solutions you might have come up with in these last five, 10 years as you’ve been leading across these different design practices, that maybe weren’t there to begin with, or that the parties in one side didn’t know about, but that you’ve introduced as a way to kind of affect the operating mechanisms, apply these forcing functions.
Are there practices, are there activities, new ways of working, that you have either borrowed from your past that others weren’t doing in this new context that you were able to bring forward, or that you had to generate whole cloth? ‘Cause you’re like, we actually don’t have a way of helping digital and hardware work best together, and so we have to come up with something. Like how has that gone for you?
Rajat: A lot of war scars have taught me it’s not through best practices. It’s through failure that I learned things that don’t work and they sound really good in TED talks, but they don’t end up working. And some of the best practices are the ones that I learned from mentors and the ones that I learned through failure because I was doing it wrong, and repeatedly doing it wrong.
I’ll break this down into two sections here, Peter and Jesse. One is at a leadership level. How would you approach this? And one is at an individual contributor. Because everyone really, and I don’t say this in a cliched way, I do believe everyone is a leader at their level, right?
It’s a leadership mentality more than a position. At a leadership level, you create this cultural change through operating mechanisms, absolutely. But the operating mechanism cannot just be another overtly shown process because people get fatigued by that, right? You have to create very subtle insertions of interaction.
As a leader, what has worked for me is you want to bring change, if you want to bring collaboration, you have to continue every day to do bottom-up approach and top-down approach simultaneously. There is not one approach that fits all.
Which means like, if you are forcing the awareness around design and collaboration, you need to start training. At Honeywell, we trained about 60 VP GMs on design thinking, including the CEO, which gave us carte blanche. Once they got it, it’s like religion. Like, we get it. We believe in this. Go hire more people. That’s the reason we were able to scale our teams from 10 people to 300 and something people. Because the realization was we absolutely, absolutely need these cross-functional thinkers and connective tissue. So, at a leadership level, it’s about building that and it’s building real empathy for me in my leadership role. It has been about learning to think like a product leader, learning to think like a finance person, learning to think like a salesperson, which is not taught in design schools.
It’s been a journey for me and we get so focused on how design is the most important thing. You just really figure out it’s a subset of a larger mechanism that is an organization. So once you understand what, and this is where I think “customer-centric thinking” is most often overly used word and underused practice, right?
Your customers are also your stakeholders around you, right? Like if my finance person has no idea what I’m talking about, if I cannot tie it to how his P&L is going to change, or a marketing person. So those collaborations happened at Bose with a fantastic marketing leader who understood what we were trying to say.
So you have to learn to speak that language. That’s at a leadership level.
Learn from functions outside of design
Rajat: At an individual contributor level, I think it’s, it’s really about setting up mentorship programs, right? I was lucky to have managers who said, you need to find a mentor who’s not in the design organization. You need to spend at least an hour a month with this person to really understand what this person deals with every day, and what their challenges are. So that was a great practice for me because I didn’t know anything.
My first mentor in my experience here in America was a person from supply chain, and I’m like, what has supply chain got to do with design, right? And it was such a great relationship because I understood there were so many problems to be solved in supply chain which design could solve and which me helping think, in a design thinking way, could, I could solve for him also.
And he taught me so many things about the real challenges of sourcing, you know, materials, sourcing product, and it’s the same for other functions. So, one is really, finding for individual contributors, mentors outside, and then again, putting them in those environments where they learn.
Designers have this habit of sharpening the same pencil, right? If someone’s great at Figma, they’ll continue to get good at Figma. Someone’s good at sketching, they’ll continue to be good at sketching. Stop sharpening the same pencil, sharpen new pencils, right? And again, I use the word force because people find it difficult to get out of their comfort zone. Telling people, okay, tomorrow I want you to spend a day with our finance person and tell me what does she look for from this organization. It creates an amazing amount of empathy, and understanding, holistic understanding and improves their communication skill when they are trying to create that kind of holistic design approach.
Jesse: I love the approach that you’re describing here, this holistic understanding that you create by taking the perspectives and the points of view of lots of different people and being able to speak all of their languages. But as I think about the scope of what you’re describing, software and hardware and packaging and everything that touches the experience, putting it all together into that journey spanning that 20 foot long table. I look down that table and I see a long line of invested stakeholders with different agendas that you’ve just invited into this process. How do you manage the complexity of all those different needs, all those different requirements, all those different points of view, and reconcile those into something coherent?
Peter: And not get bogged down or,
Jesse: paralysis, right?
Peter: …paralysis. Yeah. Get pulled in so many directions that you can’t make any movement because you, you start one direction, then someone else is like, nope. So yeah.
Rajat: Yeah, that is, that’s a brilliant observation because that is true. When you set up all these touchpoints and this entire journey, which is dependent on so many things from sourcing to software development to yeah, yeah, we are great at building great smoke and mirror show. But then it has to be delivered, right, at the end of the day, and the dependencies are all these leaders from other functions who are, like, this is awesome but at the end of the day, how do I do this?
I think there have been those reviews, executive reviews, which have gone really well and there have been ones which have not gone well. But what my learning has been is, firstly, you have to be very careful about the invitee list for that level of executive review. Right? You cannot open it up for everyone and their sister and brother, right? It has to be the right number of people.
Secondly, you have to set the stage to tell people it doesn’t matter who we work for. It doesn’t matter what we do at that company. What matters is this is what our customer’s going to see at the end of the day. Okay. So keeping a focus on the fact to say, please put on your customer-centric glasses at this point and stop thinking about your function. It doesn’t matter.
And thirdly, I think the most important one, at least for me as a design leader, has been having the humility to really listen because most often I’ve found myself, I don’t know what I don’t know. Many times someone will tell me something which I have no understanding or I have no background in, or I have completely failed to register because I’m not a dev guy, but the kind of dev load this is going to take on the existing architecture.
So, not to be reactive and just kind of take in that input and set up a series of follow up meetings to say, I understood your point, but I would like you to kind of explain me a little bit more on how we can resolve that. So a typical review like that is typically followed by a series of follow ups after and sometimes even before. Because the one thing I learned about design leadership is you should have presented the work to everyone you’re going to invite in a group setting before the group setting, you don’t want to find yourself in a position where if I’m inviting Jesse and Peter to gain alignment on something, and I’m exposing this thing to them at the first time, at first glance here, they’re going to have a lot of feedback to give.
So you need to collect feedback. You need to have them get familiar with what they’re going to see in an individual setting and then bring them together so they can see each other’s perspective and kind of calibrate on the level of acceptance and the level of interest that the executive leadership is wanting in actually delivering something that…
Because at the end of the day, no level of complexity, no level of internal politics, no level of personal conflict matters. What really matters is, is the customer going to like and should we do this for the customer, right? And that’s what we really need to see at the end of the day and make it possible. So I’ve often seen people who have been completely disagreeing many times find themselves in this group setting and find that the majority is agreeing with this path and very quickly their opinions change and they find a solution where there wasn’t one.
Jesse: Hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Peter: Interesting. Do you, Rajat, have the authority to bring all these people together? And related to that is, what you are being held accountable for, what is your leadership or whomever you’re accountable to expecting of you? Do you have metrics that you’re expected to move? Or some other kind of defined accountability in the organization that then gives you the authority to do certain things?
And thus, yeah, you can say, hey. ” You five people. I need you in this room” and they will listen to you because of an authority and accountability. If you could unpack some of that.
Influence without authority; taking accountability
Rajat: Yeah, that is a big challenge, Peter. I think you both are really asking some really deep questions. Design has a lot of opinion with very little authority. I can share that based on my experiences. And no matter how strong the position is, unless you’re working for a founder company who is complete design enlightened person.
And there are companies like that, like Apple, where Steve Jobs completely understood the value of design implicitly. Or I would say even another great example would be Logitech, where Bracken Darrow understands design and uses the Chief Design Officer as his right hand person to bounce off ideas. You don’t often find those situations or Airbnb for that reason, right? Airbnb really gets it. You often have very little authority, but you have presence and you have a seat at the table.
So you have to employ a lot of different techniques to gain alignment. We try to use this approach is, and I’ll get to the second part, which you’re asking them, how do you measure the success for someone in a leadership role?
But firstly, getting people to align is not about aligning with design. It’s about aligning with what we call a winning definition, right? So once we’re out of the fuzzy front end, we come up with what’s called a winning definition. This is what we believe from a user experience perspective, from a tech perspective, from a go-to-market perspective, from a business side, the three legged stool.
This is what is going to be a winner for you, a winning definition. Okay, you are going to be evaluated… If you agree that this is winning definition, because we have research to say that customers are going to love this. We have research to say that our numbers say that it’s going to give you the projected revenue and growth. We have the research or we have your opinion to say that this is a viable, a feasible product, feasibility, viability and desirability. Once you align on that, then that becomes the measure for success for each one of us. When you go into design validation stage later on, which is many months later, you want to compare it with the winning definition.
And if you strayed way too far from it, you can easily identify who dropped the ball and who didn’t drop the ball, right? And what were the dependencies there that led to, I started with a horse and I ended with a donkey on the other side. There were a lot of compromises made. Death by a thousand cuts, right?
So you need to be able to hold yourself accountable to the vision that you collectively set. As a designer, success of a design group or even a design leader is very difficult. I’ll be honest, we have so many dependencies. Most companies have tried to figure out a metrics for success And they try to go with, you know, PSAT scores or customer engagement scores.
And, but I still think they’re very nebulous, right? Because to parse out from that, how much was design’s accountability versus engineering versus marketing is always very difficult. But that being said. I think that’s where design leadership is a little bit organic, right? You can see a design champion has to be someone who is fighting the good fight very, very clearly.
He or she is not the silent person on the table. I will go as far as to say I, I do believe design function is the true champion of the customer in large organizations, which are fortunately or unfortunately driven by revenue growth, are driven by volume expansion. Designers are driven by this other ideology that we learn in our colleges, which is all about great customer experience and delight.
Companies often focus on the outcome, which is building revenue and making money. That’s not an outcome. The outcome is great design, which leads you to make money. Right? Because you could argue, like, making money is not a goal. Everybody, every company has that. Corporations have been set up to generate revenue and market share. People often confuse that with the end goal, right?
So I don’t know. It’s very difficult question to answer. Every place I’ve worked at, I’ve tried to kind of calibrate into how do we create great measures of success for design and I’ll be upfront and say it’s not easy. It’s not that easy to define true success because it’s so interwoven with other functions. But at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. If the product does well, everybody wins, right?
Where design leadership needs to be judged is did this person call out the right things at the right time? And did this person put the right red flags at the right time? Or put the veto, and those are difficult decisions, right? To be in a place where everybody is like thumbs up and high fiving and there’s a design leader, she is saying ,I don’t think we should go to market with this, it’s a very difficult position to be I think, that needs to be rewarded and appreciated rather than being seen as, oh design is again creating you know, a challenge for us, which is going to delay launch.
Jesse: Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point because as you mentioned earlier, large scale organizations are optimized to maximize speed and reduce cost. And design almost always feels like it is pulling in the opposite direction against those things.
And you know, it’s interesting to hear what you have to say about defining success metrics. ‘Cause it is obviously something that lots of organizations struggle with. Lots of design leaders struggle with. What I notice in there is that it’s one thing to talk about measuring the success of something after it’s launched. It’s a different thing to justify the continued and growing investment in design on the part of an organization.
And it’s on the design leaders often to make the case to these executives who don’t have good metrics, who have, as you point out, their own lenses, their own ways of seeing things. You have built and scaled multiple design teams, as you have said, in the absence of really good, strong metrics to justify those efforts. How do you get people to continue to invest in design and to put more investment in design in a situation like that?
Rajat: Again, it varies from organization to organization and it is very top down in my opinion. Organizations with the executive leadership team and the CEO understand design intrinsically, it’s not difficult. I’ve worked in those organizations where they’re like, we get it. You don’t have to explain it to me. I get it. I saw Steve Jobs turned their company 800x. Design… they talk about design. Okay. Thank you Steve Jobs for doing that for us, right?
But in most companies they are driven by saying, okay, design sounds nice, let’s sprinkle a little design on this, and they treat design as a service function not as a strategic partner, right? The job for a design leader in those organizations is especially difficult, because not only do they have to convince the value of design amongst the peers, they also have to build competency and capability to scale to deliver that, right? So you, you are saying that this will allow us to win the race, but you’re building the car while you are participating in the race, right? It’s difficult.
So how do you show that? And I think again, we can get into this. There are matrices to measure input in terms of what the bottom line is. What I’ve at least noticed is it really comes down to training top down leadership on design thinking, okay. Once they understand and at least what worked for me in a very large Fortune 100 company was, don’t try to boil the ocean.
Start small
Rajat: Start small, like a prototype, locate your design organization as a prototype, right? If a big corporation has five verticals each multibillion dollar vertical and sub verticals, don’t try to create a design impact across. Focus on one or two strategic business units and show the results of participating, putting design embedment into that, and showing… And you don’t have to show it to the people who are working with the designers, because they’ll spend a month and be like, I love having a designer make me think very differently and bring a lot of value and research and quality. They will get converted.
Once you are able to embed that and show what the results look like in terms of the P&L, then you can scale it across organizations, then every VP/GM is going to say, I want a similar kind of team embedded within my group, because I saw what happened in complement with the training that they went through, right?
So start small and scale big, and hope that there is not a lot of executive leadership change that happens in that process.
Jesse: It’s interesting that you describe training the executives in design thinking as a key part of the strategy here, because in my experience, what I hear about initiatives to train executives in design thinking, I hear two different stories.
One is, Oh man, the design thinking training, it was a total bust. We went in there, we taught them everything. We showed them all the frameworks and the methods and stuff. And they said, Hey, that was fun. And they patted us on the head and they sent us back to our cubicles.
The other story that I hear is, yeah, the design thinking training was a huge success. All the executives that got way into it, they’ve decided to incorporate it into their own decision making processes and they decided that they don’t need us there at all.
So how have you managed to find the third way here?
Rajat: Jesse, the second thing is happening to the entire design function, to be honest overall, right now, we have manufactured the guns to shoot ourselves, we have trained people in design thinking, which has led to people thinking that they don’t need designers, which is not true, which is not true.
I think it comes down to the level of maturity and style of design training, where a little bit of knowledge doesn’t mean… and it’s cyclical, right? Like, a lot of product leaders who have gone through design thinking think they understand it and some of them do. And the reaction: one is, that I want to build a design team. Like I currently report to a chief product officer whose background is engineering, but he’s a brilliant product leader. But during the early days of his career, he got a chance to work at frog as an engineer, and he told me that, you know, when I worked at frog, it opened up a different side of my mind, which I never knew. I have never felt the need to convince him of design thinking because he gets it. In fact, he pushes me on more design, more design, right? So once you turn on that switch, it can lead to a reaction saying, I get it. And I don’t need a big design team. I’ll just work with consultants and hire them as needed or it can lead to a thinking saying I get it and I need equal parts designers and engineers, right?
Both those situations are not bad. In my opinion, if you’re an in-house designer, you might complain about the first one saying all the design is getting outsourced, right? But the challenge with that is it’s great for the front end thinking, but then when you have to deliver designs, you really need embedded designers and it can get very costly because design product development time takes very long.
It’s great for consultants because confusion at the part of client is money for the… right, right? And I don’t criticize either one of those parts. The way I have at least tried to do is when we did design training, it was a two day event. We didn’t make it abstract. We said, bring your best people and bring the biggest problem that you’re facing in your organization right now.
And let’s use that as an example. And when they see that, how much we uncover in two days, whether it’s about problem identification, root cause, or about solution space, they just can’t leave it at that because that directly impacts their end of year goals. And they’re like, I need you to put two designers in my team right now.
I want to continue on this path, right? If you make it very abstract, then they, it’s like reading a good book and they’ll forget it in a couple of days, pretty much.
Jesse: Hmm.
Peter: Did this role already exist before you joined or was this role created when you joined? And then, two parter, how has the role evolved or how has your mandate evolved since you’ve been there?
Rajat: This is a great question, Peter. I’m smiling because I wanted to share this story, but I didn’t know how I’ll weave this into this conversation.
Peter: Boom!
Rajat: I was always interested in home automation because I feel homes are very analog in my opinion right now, right? Our cars are a lot more advanced than our homes and we pay only like, we pay 20x on a house versus a car.
But our cars have smart security, smart comfort, you know, all kinds of smart lighting our homes don’t. And when you live with those homes, with those features, you realize, a home can care for you, can understand you and know you. And be very, very proactive in terms of setting conditions that you want during different times of the day, different times of the year.
So for me, it’s a very fascinating space. And I think we will live in an era where we’ll remember homes when they were very analog versus homes when they were very smart, right? And we’re going through that transition right now. When I was approached by this company, because I also worked at a spinoff of Honeywell called Residio, which was also focused on home automation, which is when I started to understand the potential of the space is incredible if done right. If I can convince my grandmother and grandfather to understand home automation, I win. Right now we are only targeting power users who like cameras, who like devices. It’s not about devices. It’s about experiences that the home can create for you. So, I found out about this company Vivint, which started as basically buying hardware and selling hardware door to door to getting into the service space, to getting into building their own platform, to building into new services and domains like insurance and energy.
So, I was like, this company has been making right moves. They reached out to me and said, we are looking for a design leader. I’m like, okay, you don’t have a design leader right now, you have done so many things which are changing the home automation market.
They said, we have a leader for UX. We have a leader for industrial design. But both those leaders are recognizing that their teams need a voice at a much higher level, right? And I was like, wow, this realization is incredible. And the chief product officer pretty much said, I need someone who sits with me and can understand me and help me understand the design team better, because the leadership I have right now is so focused on following directions and delivering on what is required in a fantastic way, that sometimes I don’t know if I’m able to build their capabilities to their full potential. So I need someone who can look at it at a higher altitude and understand how design can be woven together, both in terms of customer-facing, non-customer-facing, which is service techs, sales channels, marketing, someone who can really bring this as end to end experience.
To me, that story resonated really strongly. And I’m like, okay, they know what design can do. And that’s why they’re looking for it. I was interviewed by the chief product officer, the CEO, and people I manage today, which is great, because they wanted to see who is going to be this person who’s going to be our leader.
So my managing staff, my directors, they interviewed me and they said, this could be the right person for us. So for me, that was very comforting that there’s not just a realization at an executive level, there’s a realization at the team level to say, we simply don’t have that vantage point, nor do we have the time to be able to focus. We have to focus on the eye of the fish. We can’t focus on the blue ocean. We need someone to be able to look at where we are, look at it at a different altitude.
Peter: And that was a year and a half ago. Has the role been the same for that year and a half or has it evolved since you’ve been there, and if so, how so?
Rajat: It’s been one of the smallest teams I’ve managed in my career. And it has been one of the most rewarding teams I’ve managed because I have never had a chance to work with a product leader and executive leadership team, which is so woke in terms of design. So I’ve not had to train them or push those agendas because they understand it.
What has changed is we started as a mid-size company of five to $6 billion, and we got acquired by this massive company called NRG, which is based out of Houston. And NRG also doesn’t have a complementary group as a design group there, right? So they are now looking at us and thinking, wow, they have a design group. How do we use a design group? We have five apps and we have websites and we have products and, but energy is a commodity at the end of the day. How do we build energy as an experience and story where we can differentiate in markets like Texas and you know, the Southwest where people can shop for energy, you can buy energy from different vendors, right? So what is that experience around energy that differentiates us?
So I think what has changed is now I have to really think even bigger than I was thinking to really understand our home automation now includes energy and our Trojan horse into people’s home is not going to be just a security story, but it’s going to be energy story which will be complemented by energy, comfort, lighting, aging in place, and all the other things. So I think that’s what’s changed is I’m recalibrating, how do I scale up my role in a way that I’m best able to serve the needs of the new company?
When your mandate is broader than your boss’
Peter: Something I hear from folks I work with. So you report to a chief product officer…
Rajat: Mm-hmm.
Peter: …but it sounds like your mandate goes beyond your boss’s mandate. You mentioned things like packaging. That’s typically a marketing responsibility that you’re involved with, that would be separate from your chief product officer.
You were also mentioning end to end experience, so there’s likely some, some relationship with sales or channels or whatever that you’re looking at that would be beyond your chief product officer’s remit. And I’m wondering what, if any, struggles you’ve had in going beyond the bounds of the silo that you happen to find yourself in? As you recognize, end to end means literally end to end, but they had to put you somewhere and you’re not reporting to the CEO. So, your leader does have bounds that are maybe closer in than your own.
Rajat: There is a saying, right? Culture eats strategy for lunch, right? A good strategy would be having a very robust operating model where there is dotted line reporting, direct reporting, and a very clear structure. I would love to have that. But since we’ve just gone from a relatively smaller company to a much bigger company, it would be a little audacious and a little bit assuming of me to want that happen immediately. I need to be part of that change.
But what is working really well is the culture of this company is so strong that there is a very innate sense of working together. So I haven’t had to lean on an operational structure as much as I would have in other companies because the relationships are so close with the marketing, with the sales, that they are opening doors and they’re saying, yes, tell us you don’t need to be part of our structure or my reporting structure.
So I’m able to influence that more easily when I hit a wall, I will go back and knock on the executive doors and say, we need a more robust structure because I can only take goodwill that far.
Jesse: So I’d love to zoom out of this context and look at design leadership broadly, if we can for a second, ’cause you’ve got a, a unique perspective, on the challenge and the opportunity of design leadership. And I’m curious what you think is missing in design leadership. The way that other people talk about the role and the challenges and, and maybe the opportunities that other people are overlooking here. What are some ways of thinking about design leadership that you feel like are underrepresented in how people talk about it
Rajat: You know, I, it’s so difficult to answer this question because I was just at Institute of Design meeting with a lot of my friends who I graduated with, who had come back for a panel session there. There were a lot of design leaders there. And I don’t know if I have the perfect answer for you because we are still a relatively young field, right?
And we’re still figuring out, we’re going through our teenage right now. And everyone has their own flavor of doing things, right? And me as a design leader, I’m learning from other leaders and listening to them and we’re all trying to solve similar problems, but approaching it slightly differently.
I don’t think there is a cohesive way. The one thing I do feel we as design leaders need to be doing slightly differently is, when we meet at design events, wearing our nice black coats, and black shirts, and skinny jeans, and we get so excited, we share the work that every team is doing, but we don’t often talk about common challenges that we’re facing.
Right. We are not as united in terms of a guild as we are in terms of expression, right? We need to get together and, and have discussions about similar challenges we are having.
I, I feel that kind of approach needs to happen at conferences. But conferences end up being more of like show and tell less about collaborative, like let’s solve the common design problems because all the design capital is here right now, right? We don’t do that as much because we are siloed within our own function a little bit.
I feel that that’s been my thought but other than that I think there are some design thinkers and leaders who are doing incredible work and I would steal that at a moment’s notice. I don’t care about, you know, I don’t care about self-expression if someone’s doing something, right? I’d love to borrow that idea and use it, which is what I’ve done over the years. Things that work.
Peter: On that note, I’m wondering, what have you seen recently that you’ve found enlightening, illuminating, that you’ve gravitated towards? Is there some person or some, something out there that you’ve stolen from recently?
Rajat: Yeah, I’ll give you a perfect example. It is so difficult to design a design org, right? I’m preaching to the choir here. It’s so difficult to design a perfect design org. There are so many different ways you can slice and dice it. So we tried two different ways. First one didn’t work. Second one did work and it worked to the level that we were able to bring in some incredible leaders from Google, Microsoft and other big companies to come and be very engaged working there. And that point, the leader at Bose reached out to me and said, I want to talk to you about design organizations, right? How do you build it? What are the challenges that you’re facing?
So for me, I think the most recent one was not just sharing my thoughts around it, but learning. And in the process, he said, I would like you to come here. I didn’t know he was planning to leave, but I went there and I found that there are a lot of different ways to structure design orgs. And that’s an area that I’ve tried to learn from different leaders and figure out what is the best solution for that particular company, because there’s no one size fits all, but that’s one practice that I’ve kind of used. And then honestly, Jesse, what you just said, what I’m working on right now, from other leaders is, how do you measure success of design as a function and design as a organization, a function as in like expertise within a project and organizations like holistically, how are we performing, that we can increase our base by 10%, 20%. That clarity of measurement is something I’m trying to seek and understand and I’ve been in a lot of different talks and I’ve not yet found the perfect solution around that.
Jesse: I don’t think anybody has. Peter, do you have anything else for us?
Peter: I was going to ask but I think Rajat just kind of preempted it. I was going to ask like, you know, what, what are those things that you are looking to uncover, you just mentioned things like organization and metrics. I don’t know if there’s additional stuff, you know, you’ve been very you’ve been very honest, I think even a little vulnerable in, in terms of your journey as a design leader.
And while you figured some stuff out, it’s clear that you’re still figuring stuff out. So is there anything else that you find yourself kind of pushing at the edges of as you’re trying to expand or extend your leadership space?
Rajat: Yeah, again, I’m so happy you asked me this question because my personal journey is to answer this question. As a design leader, I’m trying to figure out for the last two decades, what makes someone creative? What makes a truly creative individual because most often I see that we as designers have standardized frameworks of thinking and I, I’m guilty of that, right?
We have standard ways of research, standard ways of discovery, and translation and visualization, but what I’m finding, at least in the last 10 years working in big corporations, that disruptive innovation is not getting in through the door. Incremental improvements and incremental are seeing the light of the day. I am seeing more disruptive innovations happening at startups, right? And what is that creative thinking that is enabling? I mean, there are multiple hypotheses here. Yeah. Not only what is that creative thinking as a group that is leading people to Uber as an example to make strangers, to go sit in a stranger’s car, to have strangers come stay in your house and Airbnb, to binge watch on Netflix.
What are they doing to create an environment of support and creativity where ideas which are truly disruptive with 10x, 100x growth are able to flourish? And how are they able to recruit those thinkers which are still having the capacity to not get burdened by process to the extent that they can only come up with incremental improvements and not look at the world so differently that they can make a dent in the universe.
To me, that is what is really keeping me up because I’d like to be part of that change somewhere.
Jesse: I love that vision. Rajat, thank you so much.
Rajat: Thank you so much, Jesse.
Jesse: If people want to find you on the internet, where can they find you?
Rajat: They can find me on LinkedIn under my name. They can email me. There is an email address there and of course I am an avid photographer and traveler so they can find me on Instagram under my name because as I travel through my life, I try to capture moments a lot on Instagram.
You can find me by my last name Shail and the letter Z–Shailz.
You should be able to find me with on Instagram.
Peter: Excellent.
Jesse: Terrific. Thank you so much.
For more FindingOurWay, visit FindingOurWay.design for past episodes and transcripts. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, PeterMerholz.com and JesseJamesGarrett.com. If you like what we do here, give us a shout out on social media, like and subscribe on your favorite podcast services, or drop us a comment at FindingOurWay.design. Thanks for everything you do for others. And thanks so much for listening.
39: Reflections on the State of Design Leadership (Season 3 finale)
May 31, 2023
Jesse and Peter drink a “Warp Core Breach” at the Star Trek Experience, 2007. Photo by Leisa Reichelt.
In this episode, Peter and Jesse reflect on the conversations they had with senior design leaders, the themes that emerged, the challenges facing design leaders today, and our hope for a brighter future.
Transcript
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Together: And we’re finding our way…
Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, for our season finale, Peter and I take a look back at our recent conversations with design executives to explore some of the emergent themes we’ve heard, including how to make sure you’re set up for success as a leader, the personal qualities such as resilience and pragmatism that help leaders thrive under pressure, and how to succeed as a design leader by being truer to yourself.
Design leadership as change management
Peter: So probably kind of most obvious place for me to start when thinking about the conversations we had was this thing I wrote at the beginning of the year where after the first five discussions we had with design executives, I went back, I analyzed the conversations we were having, I tried to pull out themes and topics, and as I went through my process, I hit upon what struck me as an an overarching emergent theme, which was around change management, how four of the five design leaders we spoke with very intentionally approached their job as a change management initiative. and Katrina, the very first person we spoke with, said that right out of the gate, at the start of our interview with her, that design leaders have to be change agents because businesses still don’t really know what to do with this function.
Jesse: Right.
Peter: And that was an interesting start because then Greg, whether or not they said change management, Kaaren’s approach was a change management approach, Greg Petroff’s approach was a change management approach, Rachel Kobetz’ approach was a change management approach, in terms of an intentionality of taking not just their team, but the function of design wherever they found it when they got there, to some new place and a set of activities that they were going to use to get them there.
Jesse: Right, right, right. Yeah, it’s a really interesting thing, because if you think about the different kinds of change that a leader could potentially make, you could definitely see how in a more mature organizational function, something that has a more robustly defined value proposition than product design currently has, that has better entrenched practices and ways of talking and thinking about that value proposition, you can see in a lot of those kinds of functions where change management wouldn’t really be part of the job. There isn’t a lot of change to be made if you’re a CMO, for example. I’m sure there are people out there who would disagree with me.
But for design where it is in its maturity, on its trajectory, there is still a lot that is not understood or not widely understood about what the value proposition of design as a function to an organization that creates digital products actually is. And what we see across this range of leaders that we’ve spoken with are a bunch of different frames for that value proposition. But in any case, they all have bridges to cross with their partners, with the business, to help them fully appreciate that value proposition.
Because that understanding is going to be discontinuous through an organization. Not everybody’s going to get it. Because of the level of maturity of digital product design as a practice, because of the breadth of understanding of it beyond people who have engaged directly with design processes.
So there’s a lot of evangelism, education and, really, shifting people’s mindsets, that’s necessary in order for these leaders to deliver on the promise that they see as there.
Peter: Totally agreed. Even before these conversations, when people would ask me, well, how is a VP of design different than any other VP…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: … it’s because they have to spend so much time educating and evangelizing and increasing organizational maturity or awareness around the design function, which is
Jesse: Yeah,
Peter: understood for engineering, for sales, for marketing.
Jesse: Exactly. Right, right.
But I then I think that for the design leader, it’s a question of how far do they want to take that? How far do they want to go? You wanna level the product up to, you know, to be something more than it was, to take the design to someplace that it hasn’t gone before. Do you wanna level your team up in terms of expanding the capabilities of design, changing the shape of that value proposition of design as a function within the organization?
Do you wanna change the organization beyond design? Are you interested in seeding, you know, for want of a better term, design thinking beyond design functions in the organization? Like these kinds of ambitions are all part of the balance that you have to strike as an executive design leader.
The importance of clarity of vision
Peter: One of the leaders that we spoke with, Kaaren, had the most clarity in terms of, like, ultimately where she was trying to head, and she used this phrase, “one freaking experience,” right? So she’s responsible for the consumer bank for Chase, JP Morgan Chase. And she saw kind of ultimately her vision is how do we create one experience for customers across the suite of products and services that Chase offers consumers.
And when you do that, when you have that kind of clarity of vision, it ends up that gives you the almost marching orders to address the questions you were asking. Is it about the product, is it about the team? Is it about the broader organization? I mean, the short answer is, it’s all of those things, ’cause in order to deliver one freaking experience, she has to figure out how do we get these different internal lines of business aligned, the credit card business with the home mortgage business, with the basic banking business. And so that can’t be just something happening within design. You need to figure out how to weave it into the broader organization.
But…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: … something else that she talked about when we spoke with her, that I’ve used since in, conversations with other design leaders is, where to begin? And in order to deliver on that one freaking experience, she saw where she needed to begin was with her team.
She talked about the very first thing she did was establish or work to establish a world-class team, right. That that was gonna be the foundation upon which everything else rests. And as someone who’s been supporting her for the past year and a half, I’ve seen some remarkable hiring at all levels, but particularly at a design leadership level, as that initial step towards that greater vision.
Organizational maturity
Jesse: Mm-hmm. And you know, it’s interesting, too, because I think there is the question of, to what extent does design, by definition, regardless of the maturity of the organization, regardless of the maturity of the design team itself, to what extent does design necessitate organizational change if design is actually going to deliver on its value? And I think that for a lot of these leaders, they feel that if we’re just delivering better product over and over again, that’s not going far enough because we haven’t gotten into the roots of the culture of the organization. And one of the things that has come up a few times in these conversations is the notion of how much permission does the culture allow design as a function to have to push the boundaries of its value proposition to offer new ways of delivering value to the organization.
And those experiences are wildly inconsistent based on the specific cultures of those organizations that those design leaders are stepping into.
Peter: I like this frame. The companies that would hire people, like the folks that we interviewed are likely more permissive…. Have a greater maturity around these things, or they wouldn’t be hiring someone to lead a team of 400, 800 people, like, there’s some investment in it that suggests a greater permission.
But I like the permission frame because I think something that a lot of design leaders don’t do, but need to do, when they enter into that new role, is assess, measure, understand where the, where that organizational maturity is at.
Jesse: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Peter: And permission is going to be caused, by that company’s maturity around design.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: And, and that was an insight. Another one that I’ve dined out on since we’ve spoken with him uh, came from and, wow, that was an unintentional almost pun because it’s with Jehad, who’s Chief Design Officer at Toast. You know, we had spoken with these other design leaders, and they would talk about impact and they’d talk about co-defining outcomes, and it was from a place of greater maturity.
And Jehad pointed out that, at least in his growth, he had to dial in his conversation to meet the maturity of the organization he was part of. And so it might not start with impact because your company might not be ready to hear about the impact that user experience or design has. They might not be mature enough to take advantage of that.
And so he used a frame that I’ve, again, employed often since then, around “show your worth,” because your worth might be just understood relatively in the environment you happen to be in. It might have very little to do with the impact the metrics of the products that your team is building. And it might be around, Do your peers like working with you and your team? And, and measured through some internal pulse survey or whatever.
And that in an immature organization that is actually a legitimate measurement when you don’t have anything else to go on. And, and that really got me to be thinking about how important it is for a design leader to tune their message, their engagement with where the organization currently is, not where they hope it will be.
Jesse: Right, yeah. It’s huge. It’s huge. This comes up with my coaching clients all the time. The way that I talk about this with them is that the problem space at any given moment is the intersection of the trajectory of the larger organization and its maturity as it relates to design practice, the trajectory of the design team itself and its capabilities and its maturity, and the trajectory of the leader, what their past experiences have prepared them for and what new challenges they are well-suited to take on. And when you put those three things together, then you start to be able to define the shape of what the role actually is in that context.
Peter: The maturity cube.
Jesse: Sure, sure.
Peter: Well, yeah, and I’m curious how you help your clients manage through this, ’cause one of the things that inevitably leads to is frustration, because I think the design leaders often feel like they are ready for a more mature organization. Or they’re ready for the organization to be more mature, to take advantage of what they have to offer. And so then they’re frustrated because when they try to push that, it doesn’t go anywhere. How are you helping your clients manage their own sense of… not trajectory, but, cadence and, traction to dial it in with what’s organizationally appropriate and not get defeated in that process.
Resilience
Jesse: Right, right, right, right. So part of it is about resilience, right? How do you maintain the emotional resilience day to day, week to week, to keep having the same conversation, keep fighting the same fight, keep having the same argument, right? The persistence that’s required there and the patience, and this is another thing that new leaders frequently don’t really get, is how long it takes to create cultural change.
It’s one of the slowest -changing elements of an entire organization. You can turn a team over really fast. You can turn processes over, you know, pretty quickly. Cultural change is the slow-moving deep currents of the organization. And what that takes is, it takes persistence, it takes patience.
It takes a dedication. A dedication to repetition. It requires the ability to ride it out for a while and know that you might not see any significant impact of this culture-shifting mindset, shifting work for a long time before it starts to actually pay off, because you’re laying the foundation, you’re building that foundation of credibility and trust for design as a function within the organization that’s gonna enable you to expand that value proposition.
Peter: Well, and this gets to something you’ve written about recently on a post on LinkedIn, which is the job is bigger than the person. A design executive’s job is going to be bigger than any individual.
It’s just by nature there’s more work to be done than any one person can do. And so, how then are you helping your clients navigate that, figure out, given all the things they could be working on, do I work on these long-term culture things, ’cause that’s ultimately what I want to drive. Do I work on near-term quick wins? Just to get some traction. Do I work on, building my team? Do I work on managing my relationships? Like how are you helping them navigate all that opportunity or all that potential activity so that they’re not feeling like they have to work 60 to 80 hour weeks in order to…
Jesse: Right,
Peter: …get it done.
Jesse: Right, right. Well, it’s an interesting thing because, first of all, those three trajectories are a huge influence on how I help leaders set those priorities, to be able to assess where to invest their energy. ‘Cause you’re absolutely right, the job is just too big.
So you have to choose that selective focus of your attention and how you set those priorities. A lot of leaders get into trouble by not having an agenda of their own for their priorities. They’re receiving priorities from the business, they’re receiving, you know, requests or sometimes demands from their teams and they see their role as mediator, negotiator, reconciler of everybody else’s point of view about what’s needed. And they don’t bring their own point of view.
And the irony in this is that often what’s needed in order to narrow your focus of attention is to take your focus off of everything for a minute and reset and reflect. And that’s one of the big things that I help my clients with is, you know, whether we’re doing some reflection live in session, or I’m helping them create the patterns that create that space for reflection so that they can engage more strategically, so that they can get out of these reactive loops where the first thing that they do is they open their email and they’re immediately fighting fires to start their day.
Peter: Kind of related to this, what I drew from those discussions with design executives was, in order to make sense of how to spend your time, what you’re calling reflection, to me, it feels aligned with just that recognition of having a vision, like, what is it, what ultimately is it that you’re trying to get done? And, and how can you use that as some internal orienting point, north star, that helps you make decisions about how you are spending your time?
And then how you’re spending your team’s time, ’cause you wanna focus yours and your team’s time on work that moves you toward whatever that point on the horizon is that you’ve identified.
But you need to take the time. You need to make sure you’ve given yourself some time to just figure out, What is that thing that I want?
Jesse: Right,
Peter: And you’re allowed to have, you’re allowed to have that desire.
When I did my analysis and did the change management, that was clear. That each of these folks, part of their success is they had vision for where they wanted to take things, that they weren’t reactive. None of them showed up and were just like, what do you need? They all showed up with some sense of their agenda.
Cultivating a point of view
Jesse: Right, right. So having a point of view, continuing to cultivate a point of view over time, which is where this reflection work comes in. You know, when we talk about vision, in a lot of cases that’s gonna mean different things to different people. Is it your vision for the product? Is it your vision for the team?
I do come back to, I feel like leaders are able to activate the most potential when those three trajectories intersect, when the organization is at the right stage of maturity, and the team has developed its capabilities to a point that the leader can activate all of that, is really where I think the magic happens.
And in a lot of cases what’s happened is that they’ve left that third piece out, which is their own point of view, which is their own sense of, of direction. You know, one way that I sometimes talk about this is: be your own executive stakeholder, right? If you’re the head of design, head of design is one of the major functions in this team.
If you’re not regularly having meetings with the head of design, you are missing out on something. So in other words, I’m saying have an executive stakeholder session with yourself on a regular basis.
Peter: I was very recently introduced to the song ” I Have Never Been to Me.” Are you familiar with this chestnut from the late seventies?
Jesse: I, I, I, regrettably, I am old enough to know this song. Yes.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s about this woman who’s been to Italy or you know, all around the world…
Jesse: Good.
Drank champagne….
Peter: She’s never been to her.
Jesse: On a yacht.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah.
And, anyways sorry it’s– sidebar, but, but crucial. Find the video for it on YouTube. There’s actually two of them you can find. Both of them are worth watching. One is set at a Scottish castle. The other is from a Dutch, like Top of the Pops type show, where it’s on this, it’s in a beach, but it’s inside a studio, like, soundstage. It’s, it’s, It’s awesome. it’s beyond awesome.
Well, but, but it’s interesting as you were saying that about the trajectories, it made me think, ’cause there’s one of those trajectories you can control. You can’t really control the organizational directory. You can influence it. You have a higher degree of influence over the team trajectory, but you still can’t control it. Right? There’s gonna be things outside
of your control…
Jesse: Yeah. No, it’s not about control, it’s about responsiveness. Mm-hmm.
Peter: But you can control your trajectory, by which I mean, as you look at these three trajectories, that point of your trajectory is, is going to hopefully be farther than where those other two are meeting today. right?
But what you can do is dial in where you are today on that path, right? By having that, longer term vision, you know where you’re pulling yourself and then maybe pulling the rest of the team.
If you’re too far ahead, there’s no connection, right? You’re untethered. There’s this concept of flow from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is people work best when they are operating just beyond their level of competency and capability. That’s when you get in that flow state.
I think about this a lot, in terms of how people perform, right? If you give someone a task that is way below their ability, like, that’s too rudimentary for them, they’re not gonna perform well. If you give people a task that’s way above their ability, they’re gonna sink, right? They’re just gonna, they’re gonna drown.
And so you wanna do it right at the edge plus of that. And so, how can you, as the design leader, be at that intersection of the organization and the team? And then just a little, just a, a smidge beyond it, kind of pulling both of those where they’re at and pulling them forward from that spot as opposed to trying to be at the end goal and, dragging them to wherever you are.
Jesse: Yeah. Again, I think that it’s about breaking the cycle of reactivity, creating the space to establish for yourself your own point of view. But also, you know it is about having a growth mindset for yourself as a leader. I talk to a lot of leaders; when I talk to them about growth, they talk about developing their teams, and they talk about, you know, providing support and resources for people to build up their skills and to move in the directions that they want to move.
And then when I ask them about those same things for themselves, they draw a blank. Because honestly, when you get to this executive level, there’s nobody looking out for you anymore in this respect.
If you are a Chief Design Officer reporting to a CEO, you are not having these kinds of performance conversations. The assumption is that you have the level of self-awareness.
Peter: Even if you’re reporting to a Chief Product Officer or somewhere into the C-suite. Yeah.
Jesse: Yeah. The assumption is that once you’ve gotten to this level, you’ve developed the self-awareness to be able to choose your own development paths. And there aren’t gonna be people looking out for you in this same way. But for a lot of these leaders, they are not used to taking that on for themselves, and they haven’t really defined how they see themselves growing.
And so defining for yourself your own path forward, the continuing expansion of your own potential has to be part of the equation.
Peter: No notes.
Jesse: No notes.
Peter: I’m just like, yeah, totally. Yeah.
How much design in design leadership?
Jesse: I think that this is somewhat connected to another theme that has come up, which is the notion of how much do you stay a designer once you become a design leader, and how, and in what ways, do you carry forward the skillset of design, the methodology of design, the mindset of design into your work.
And I think that that often creates some dissonance for people because they think there are things that they need to hang onto that they actually don’t, and vice versa.
Peter: And I think it’s also very much a function of those three lines of trajectory. But, in particular, the two that are a less in your full control, where the organization is at, and where the team is at. The last conversation we had was with Tim Allen, Chief Design Officer at Instacart.
It’s not his actual title, but close enough. And he was interestingly different from literally everyone else we spoke with because he remained committed to the craft and to the details of the work, even though he’s got a team of 150 or so.
And, when we spoke with him, I was kind of continually surprised as he was talking about how he approached his role. And as I reflected on it there were probably three things that arose as what enabled him to maintain that more detailed approach to design than others would likely be able to do successfully.
One, is his own perspective and agenda. It’s his own point of view. That’s just how he rolls. He trained as an industrial designer. Loves form, loves those details, likes to get in the mix. That’s why he cares about and is passionate about design. And so he was going to do what he could to protect that and enable that.
Two, he is, at least currently at Instacart, in an organization where he doesn’t have to spend a lot of time evangelizing and educating, right? We said that, that’s one of those things that many VPs of design have to do, given the state of maturity their organization’s at. By his account, his organization is actually surprisingly mature when it comes to design. His boss and the CEO, who are two different people, want him to be doing the things he’s doing and don’t need him to sell them on the power of design, and the impact of design that is understood.
And so when you take all that time that so many leaders have to spend evangelizing and educating, when you, you have that time back, it’s like, oh, well what do I do with that?
Well, he’s, he’s able to use that time in this fashion to really drive craft excellence within the organization.
And then the third thing, and he was very explicit about this, was, he has a member of his team that he referred to as his hammer who kind of runs the org for him, makes sure that all of those organizational, administrative, operational things are handled, that many design leaders themselves usually have more responsibility towards.
He’s been able to delegate a lot of that, and we talked about that we used the analogy of a director and producer, right? He’s more of the director who’s responsible for the vision and the creative output. And then he’s got a producer who’s handling all that stuff that goes on behind the scenes that enables the people who are doing the craft to just focus on, on the craft and not on all the stuff around the craft.
And so that was how he was able to be in that place where he could focus his efforts where he wanted. If he was in a different environment, he probably wouldn’t be able to do that. Or if he tried to be the craft-focused leader inside some enterprise software company that wasn’t ready for that, it would be a struggle. He would be unhappy. They would be unhappy, and it probably wouldn’t last. But he, he was able to find a context and do a little bit of work to shape it in terms of bringing on this hammer that enabled him to really focus on what he was passionate about.
Jesse: Yeah, well, but importantly, he wasn’t just focusing on what he was passionate about. He talked about how he strategically chose where he engaged to be on the things that would be highest visibility to the business. So he is not chasing design perfection down every possible path for the business. What he’s doing is he’s choosing the things that he knows the CEO is gonna be taking a close look at.
He’s choosing the things that he knows, that he’s got partners who are really deeply invested in, and he wants to be sure that he’s conversant with all of the details of that. And the way that he does that is by engaging with the team.
Peter: Yeah. And that said, that might not be the best approach for everybody, right? I’ve never led a team that large, but when I was a design executive, I recognized my strength was organizational and operational. And I would delegate creative leadership to my design directors because I knew they could do that better than I could.
I could situate the organization really well on their behalf, right? And so, I have this presentation that I give called The Evolving Design Leader. And one of the things that I stress towards the end of it is, too often we expect our design executives to be these design saviors, right? That they’re the creative visionary and they’re really good at leading and getting people excited. And they’re good at organizational building, and they’re good at the relationships with cross-functional and you can’t do, no one person is gonna be good at all of those things even.
And so, so I talk about, I call it teamifying leadership, right? How can you reflect on what you are good at, passionate about, but then also what you lack, where your gaps are, and then put around you in your leadership team, not just, like, the people that you’re delegating to, but, create a team of folks, two or three people whom you can spread all of this leadership activity across?
Your leadership complement
Jesse: The term that I have been using for this recently is I call this finding your leadership complement.
What are the resources around you that support you in the task of leadership? And in some cases that can be just having that right hand, just having that hammer. In some cases it’s about having that team of leaders of different people that you know, that you can delegate or partner with. But having an awareness, to your point, having an awareness of where your strengths are and where it’s necessary for you to provide your individual focus and attention, and then having a strategy for that leadership complement around you that’s going to support you with the rest of what leadership actually entails.
So, speaking of that high level executive engagement I’ve heard you talk about a couple of times now the notion of social contagion in organizations and the implications of that for the design leader, and I’d love to hear you kind of unpack that idea a little bit.
Social contagion
Peter: Sure. And I can’t say I’ve thought about it in this context all that deeply, but at the beginning of the year, there was an article that got some virality, around how the layoffs that we’re seeing all these companies do is more than anything a social contagion. It’s not actually a reflection of good business practices. There is some type of research or study that had been done that showed that layoffs most of the time are actually bad for business.
Businesses don’t end up healthier, a year later or whatever, because they did layoffs, than those who didn’t. And so why are they happening if they’re not good business practice and they make everybody miserable?
And the finding in this research is that it’s a social contagion. Once some people start laying people off, other companies are looking at that and like, should we be doing that? I guess we should maybe be doing that. Is that what we’re doing now is laying off? And boards are telling people to lay people off because that’s what’s happening right now in the market.
And now the thing to recognize about that concept is that literally every human behavior is a social contagion. That is how we operate.
Jesse: Mm.
Peter: And so all the hiring that happened a year and a half ago was a social contagion, right? And now we’re just kind of seeing the flip side of that, that hiring clearly was not done with real business savvy driving it. It was, “Wait, oh, that company’s hiring. We, we gotta hire, we gotta ramp up, we gotta…”, you know, it was, it was just looking around and doing what others do.
And so I’ve been thinking about that because, even in the face of all of these layoffs, I am seeing companies, many companies, hiring, for the first time, senior design executives.
So on one hand they’re laying people off, and on the other hand, they’re hiring their first ever SVP of design or VP of Design or Chief Design Officer.
The same companies are doing this. When I saw that happening, I’m like, oh, I think design executives have hit this kind of social contagion layer, where companies are seeing, well, that company… Microsoft, for example, just hired four VPs or above, of design. John Maeda, Liz Danzico, Mike Davidson, and Justin Maguire. All within the couple months.
And so companies are seeing like, well, if Microsoft, this very big important company is doing that, should we be hiring our chief design officers and stuff?
And so I think we’re seeing that. And one of the implications of that, and this gets back to the trajectories, is that these companies that are doing it are likely immature in their awareness and understanding of design, right? They’re doing it because they’re seeing other people do it, but not because they understand necessarily what it will mean for them.
And so as design leaders, we need to be quite conscious, conscientious, aware, as we’re going into these environments, what precipitated hiring at that level? What was the, what was the realization? What was that understanding? And to just go into these situations eyes wide open.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a really huge thing. There are a lot of different models of the value proposition of design out there. And each design leader is carrying with them their own model of the value proposition of design.
When you’re stepping into a new organization and especially an organization that is creating an executive level role for the first time, you’ve got to be asking where is this coming from? What is the promise that they hope gets fulfilled, ’cause it’s a huge, it is a huge organizational commitment to create an executive level role. it Is the kind of thing that is not easily undone. It has huge, deep, broad, long-lasting organizational implications. So when an organization engages in it, it’s because they see some promise there and they want to see that promise actualized.
But if you, as the leader stepping into that, don’t have a really clear idea of what that is, you are running a high risk for a mismatch that is going to create some grief for you down the road.
Peter: Yeah. And on that note, especially in this market where I think there’s a lot of anxiety about work and getting jobs, people might lower their own barrier to entry to a new job. And if you’re looking at a, a role like this, you need to be as, if not even more, particular about the environment that you’re stepping into, that it is ready for someone like you, that it can set you up to succeed.
Too often what I see is designers are brought in to an environment like this, but they’re not set up for success. And so you need to be the one to figure out, to ask the questions.
Jesse: You can’t assume that you’re being set up for success. You can’t.
Peter: No. And not, with any ill will…
Jesse: No, no, no malicious intent there.
Peter: They’re obviously, they want this, they wouldn’t put this role together if they didn’t want it to succeed.
But, many companies just have no idea what they’re getting when they’re getting design. They still think, primarily, I’m getting someone who can help make my design engine go. And if you have designs that are more impactful, more strategic, more cultural, more organizational, and you step into an environment where the expectation is creating a wireframe engine, that mismatch is going to be difficult.
You should feel comfortable you should feel, I dunno, in the right, in asking hard questions of your perspective employer to, to make sure that you feel like they are setting you up for success. You should be able to ask for things like headcount before you get hired. Like, okay, you’re hiring me at this level. What is the team? What are the expectations? As a condition of hiring, I am gonna need five more head count, 10 more head count.
Like that kind of stuff is totally reasonable and will demonstrate their willingness to commit to you and the role in the function.
And if they’re not willing to do that, that’s a red flag. That’s a warning sign that they don’t necessarily understand what it is they’re asking for.
Jesse: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And of course you have to make the case for that headcount, but…
Peter: Sure. Sure. But, and, and that might mean doing the diligence to understand enough about their organization, hopefully you’re doing that diligence as you’re considering a job like this somewhere, because you do have some responsibility to set yourself up for success.
But it reminds me a little bit of that conversation we had with Denise Jacobs around creativity. And one of the things that she’s often frustrated with, from designers, is designers don’t do the work coaching the people they’re showing their work to, for the nature of the feedback they need.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: And it’s not up to the non-designers to know how to give you good feedback. That’s, they, they don’t know how that, that’s not their, you know, and so you as the designer have to say, “this is the kind of thing that’s gonna help me make this design better, give me this kind of feedback.” You can do that in your role as a design leader as well.
They’re not gonna know the role as well as you will.
Communication in all forms
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. You know, so much of this, I think, when designers look at design leaders and ask what those people do all day, I notice how much of it is just trying to figure out what to say to whom and in what context. You know, so much of the job is planning your communications, executing your communications, getting feedback on your communications.
Whether that is in conversation… I would say the primary medium of leadership is conversation. You’re spending way more time talking to people than you are preparing any kind of presentations or reports or deliverables or anything like that. But there are all of these other kinds of vehicles that are available to you too. We heard this from a couple of the folks that we talked with about the importance of creating communication strategies that address the needs of all of your different audiences.
How do you communicate a vision amongst your business stakeholders? How do you communicate about your value proposition and your mandate with your product and your engineering partners? You know, how do you communicate where you’re going as a team with your team in a way that they can engage with and understand? You’re spending so much of your time just thinking about your language and just finding the right, the right moment in the right vehicle to get the right message across.
Peter: Yeah, that was one of my biggest kind of surprises after the first five conversations we had, and I wrote this post around design leadership as change management, was how all of those design leaders, the degree to which they were intentional in their communication strategies. Because this was not something…
Like, I would talk about the importance of relationships, and I would work with my clients or in the classes I teach around how design leadership is more talking than doing. And I would talk about the importance of evangelizing, but what I heard from these leaders was the work they did, the effort they did around having an almost overarching intentional communication strategy, right? And so you had Greg Petroff, having a quote “shadow comms team,” you know, one or two folks, a content designer that would help him write the newsletters or whatever that would go out there to make sure that he was on message.
You would have Kaaren Hansen doing the pre-work with her leadership before they would present to others to make sure that the messaging was right, that it was focused, that it was right for that audience. Rachel Kobetz talking about how you are never not done with that communication and how she would just, every channel she had, she used.
And what I think also tied them together, because you’re right, much of this happens in conversation, and so what you need to have, this is something I’ve started to stress in my classes and with my clients, are talking points. What are 2, 3, 4 messages…
Jesse: yep.
Peter: Kinda like in politics, what are the two or three, four messages that you’re just banging away on?
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: …just banging away on them in every situation you have.
And you’re gonna get tired of hearing yourself saying these same things over and over again. but you know it’s working when you start hearing it back, and you’re gonna realize that it’s gonna take months if not years, to hear it back.
In one of the classes I taught recently I had someone who’d been at a company, a big entertainment company that you’ve heard of, but I don’t want to say too much ’cause you know, it’s that person’s story. But they’d been there three years, four years. And in every session that they would lead, they would put the double diamond in there as a way to reflect on like what, where we are in the process, and to highlight the first part of that diamond.
Like, the work we’re doing is, around discovery, is around definition. It’s around the strategy, right. To continue to orient people. And literally in every conversation for two years, she would do it and it wouldn’t get much notice. But then in the third year, she started seeing the stuff coming back to her in terms of people using that as a frame for talking about their work, right?
And she, and she realized like she had been incepting this company with this thinking and it finally had worked. And so having that, you know, I think you mentioned earlier, persistence if not, you should have. This is part of that persistence. It’s just…
Jesse: yeah.
Peter: …banging away on that message.
Jesse: And that tolerance for repeating yourself, right. To just be willing to say the same thing over and over and over and over again. It’s very, very much analogous to the way that a political campaign is run.
Peter: And, it works, right? The people that we interviewed have achieved their success because they’ve employed these strategies. Thinking of talking points in politics and something else that I’ve been talking a lot about, and I wonder how you’ve approached this in your practice. I now in my masterclass on design leadership fundamentals talk about playing politics. I just call it out. You are playing politics. In order to succeed as a design leader, you have to be willing to play politics. That means some quid pro quo, some horse trading, some diplomacy, some talking points, like whatever you think of when you think of politics, bringing those to bear because your colleagues are doing that and they are, going to succeed through the politics they play.
Playing politics
Peter: If you’re not playing politics, if you somehow think that the value of the work should be evident in its quality, and just by doing the right thing, you’re going to succeed, you will not, you will fail. You need to do the work to play politics around it.
Jesse: Yes. Yeah. There is no rising above it. There’s only going through it, you know? I really think that’s true.
Peter: I think too often design leaders have this sense of purity around the nature of the work. And because it’s backed in research and we have this evidence, and if we just do the things that are obviously the right things to do it’ll succeed.
And when you start talking about playing politics, there’s this concern that you’re gonna be disingenuous or something. And that’s not what we’re talking about at all. It’s not about somehow hiding things or being someone that you’re not. It’s about recognizing the tactics that work that enable you to advance your agenda, right? Which, when we talk about, that’s why we started with talking about vision, that vision is your agenda. The politics is what allows you to realize that agenda.
Jesse: Right, right, right. I think that for a lot of leaders, they don’t realize where their effectiveness is hampered by their own sense of what design is and what design offers.
I think too few design leaders know what’s truly worth fighting for in terms of design outcomes. And they put the emphasis in the wrong places and drive things that don’t really matter.
Peter: So as you’re saying that, I’m reminded of Erika Hall, right. Kind of yelling at designers who worry about the alignment of elements on a page when she’s trying to get them to think that the business model is the grid, right? Like, is, is that the kind of thing you’re talking about? Like design leaders should be aiming for something more fundamental within the organizations they’re operating in and their ability to affect that and not just the presentation layer?
Jesse: Well, it’s that, but also I simply think that there is a degree of pragmatism that is required at the executive level that designers haven’t necessarily cultivated within themselves until they get to that point.
Peter: Yeah. Okay. No, that’s fair. But yes, ’cause one of the reasons people get into design is, there’s an idealistic bent. You’re trying to be an idealistic design executive, like you need some of that, for the passion, for the fire, for the North Star to keep you oriented.
Well, this is a story I tell around politics. I supported an idealistic design leader who, basically, he wanted to bring human-centered design practices into this large healthcare organization. And he’d had some success doing that at another healthcare organization. And he came to this new healthcare organization and he’s like, I’m gonna bring HCD, true blue…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: … you know, human and patient-centered design practices into this organization.
Now the issue was he’d been hired by an IT function within this organization. And so there was some expectation when he joined, that the team that he was leading would continue to look at Innovation with a technological lens, or at least through some of the work that technology was part of it.
And he was such a purist. He’s like, no, technology is a means to the end. If you’re having me start with technology that’s sacrificing my dearest principles around the nature of the work I do.
And he didn’t, he barely lasted a year at this organization because he could not approach it pragmatically. He had let his idealism get in the way of his ability to have, ’cause he likely could have, ultimately had that impact he wanted.
This is the playing politics thing. By playing a little politics, given them a little bit of what they want, which wasn’t wrong, it just wasn’t what he was passionate about, but it wasn’t a bad thing. Give them a little bit of what they wanted, build that social capital internally. He could have within three years to five years been advancing a true human-centered agenda. He would’ve demonstrated his commitment to the organization, to the business and those types of things.
But he just could not get over himself…
Jesse: right.
Peter: and, he, he ended up having no impact.
Jesse: Yeah.
This is a great example of exactly what I’m talking about. There are strategic design compromises that are sometimes necessary in order to create the momentum to get where you ultimately want to go as a design leader. But if you take every step as an all-or-nothing step, you’re never gonna get there.
Peter: Right. Right.
Jesse: So as we are winding this season up and you know, we’ll be back with more sometime soon but as we are looking back, I wanna look forward a little bit too and ask you, how are you feeling about the prospects for design and design leadership these days in the spring of 2023?
Peter: I am feeling decidedly mixed, which is surprising me, ’cause usually when we have this moment of reflection and, and then looking forward, I feel like I’m pretty positive. Like, I have, I often see opportunity on the horizon. And so I want to be more hopeful and positive in my outlook, but, like, I haven’t done the work to unpack why I’m not more hopeful.
So I’m teaching these Design Leadership Masterclasses. I’m also doing a bunch of work with specific companies. And one of the areas of focus I’ve had recently is at this level, not at the executive level, but at this design director level, kind of the middle management layer of design.
The struggle of the UX Director
Peter: I jokingly put a meme a few weeks ago on LinkedIn and it was a UX director who was being drawn and quartered, like this old woodcut drawing of somebody being drawn and quartered. You know, pulled apart by four horses and the UX director was that person, because this is what I’m hearing from that population.
They’re having to cover for inadequate product partners who don’t understand their job. They’re not being given the staff they need to build out a team. So they’re having to do more of the hands-on work. Many of them are the senior-most designer in their organization. I, I do work with heads of design who are director level, who are not executive level, and so they have to show up with executives many layers in the hierarchy above them. But they have to be able to play in that realm. And they’re getting pulled in all these directions and it’s causing frustration, anxiety, burnout, and many of these folks are, are leaving the field.
They’re just saying, you know what, I guess this isn’t where I want to be.
Jesse: Well, who’s holding the ropes on this poor soul being drawn and quartered here?
Peter: That’s a good question. In the cartoon I had, you know, your product partner pulling you in one direction, your team pulling you in another direction, your engineering partner pulling you in another direction. The business is this kind of shapeless entity pulling you in another direction. Those were the four, you know, HR in the background.
And this is maybe why I’m, I’m having some trouble with hope right now. It’s a function of a lot of systemic factors. I mean, we can start with capitalism, right? But, one of the challenges, and I think Erika actually just posted something about this on LinkedIn recently, one of the issues we have is that the core values of people in UX and the core values of late-stage capitalism are at odds.
And so the companies we work for, which practice late-stage capitalism, and then the UX kind of mindset that we’re bringing to it, are at odds. And I think trying to figure out how to square that is one of those forces.
This wave of layoffs where middle management is targeted is one of these forces because the work of middle management’s not appreciated. And so these folks are getting pulled in more directions because there’s fewer people around them now. Whereas before they used to help coordinate and orchestrate the work, they’re now having to do it because they’re who’s left.
So I think there’s these systemic forces at play that are doing the pulling and why I’m trying to figure out like how do I get to a place of hope in terms of, where is evidence of realization of frankly what Katrina said and when we talked to her, right? That design, when woven into business in an appropriate level, things are better.
And there’s still so few examples of that. Even though, we have the obvious, almost textbook, examples now of Apple or whatever that like, if you embrace it the right way, you could realize a lot of success.
But companies are still so resistant, kind of deeply, fundamentally at their core, resistant to not just the value that design has to bring, the approach design brings in order to realize that value. And I don’t know where it’s getting unlocked or, where it’s being integrated more successfully.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. You know, this comes back to some of the stuff that we’ve been talking about really since we started this podcast. Having to do with the leader’s role in creating kind of a bubble within which the design team can thrive and reconciling the need for a distinct culture within the design team that is not the same as the larger culture that they’re a part of.
And the design leader kind of having to serve as the partition, bouncer, semi-permeable membrane that keeps the cell intact.
Peter: And I still use that metaphor, I use it all the time. And I think it’s just like, I dunno, at some point that cell wall dissolves under the onslaught of, all that effort, all that heat that gets applied to it from both sides, right? The designers who want to operate in one way, the rest of the organization trying to operate in another way. And, and this design leader just kind of like that friction that’s being created.
Jesse: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Like the design leader is sort of the WD-40 that has been, squirted into the, squeaky hinge.
Peter: Right? And then it’s all used up. And that’s, I think, what’s leading to this, to, to this burnout.
I think there are, you know, the opportunities, so, when you mentioned pragmatism, right? I think pragmatism is a helpful concept to rest on.
A better recognition of one’s own power in these dynamics. I think design leaders in particular, maybe because they’re so new to it, don’t recognize that they actually do have power and they can set boundaries.
‘Cause a lot of, you know, burnout is, often a function of just an inability to set boundaries. And design leaders have trouble with that because they’re afraid if they set boundaries, if they say no, if they don’t take it all on, then they will be seen as not a team player.
Someone that’s difficult. And that might be true, but then do you really wanna work in the company that expects to just, like, wring you dry?
Like that’s not sustainable, right?
Jesse: Yeah. Well, again, if you are being forced into this continually reactive stance you are not being set up for success as a leader. You are being set up for burnout.
Peter: Right. how are you helping your charges? I guess they’re not your charges. How are you helping your clients? I’m assuming many of yours navigate some of these challenges and you talked about resilience and you talked about pragmatism. How do you guide them towards an ability to stick with the program, maintain that vision, maintain that passion, but in a way that doesn’t allow them to get taken advantage of?
The future we want for design leaders
Jesse: Yes, it’s absolutely true that a lot of design leaders need some practice in setting boundaries and in setting priorities for themselves because they’re used to other people driving their priorities because that has been their career experience. So yeah, definitely a big part of it is just helping leaders come into every situation with a little bit more intentionality, knowing what your point of view is, knowing what your desired outcome is, knowing what’s authentic for you, separate from what’s right for the organization and separate from what’s right for your team.
What I see a lot of design leaders do is they so completely over-identify with their team, that they lose a sense of who they are in the mix and what they bring and what their strengths are that will enable the organization to go farther and to expand that value proposition.
So for me, in my work with my clients, it’s always coming back to what’s really true for you and what does your insight, your acumen, your experience, your wisdom as a designer and as a design leader, where does that point you? Where does that take you? What direction does that suggest for you in bringing that into how you set your priorities, how you set your boundaries, how you focus your attention?
Peter: Yeah, I think if, more of the people I worked with had a firmer sense of that for themselves in general, like, I think that could have like a multiplier effect. It would be interesting, like, if, leaders were more actualized across all of these organizations. That, that could be like, interestingly powerful.
Jesse: You just described why I do what I do.
Peter: I want that future. Let’s get to that future.
Jesse: I agree with you.
One last thing that I wanted to throw out there. We’re gonna take a break for a little while and then we’ll be back with more episodes of Finding Our Way. We’ve had this wonderful series of conversations with executive level design leaders. We would love to have more, but we don’t know the people that we don’t know, and we don’t know what stories there are out there that might really be worth hearing.
So if you, listener to this podcast are working for a really awesome design leader that you feel like would have a lot to contribute to a conversation like these conversations you’ve been hearing on this show, we would love to talk to that person. We would love for you to nominate your design leader, to be a guest on Finding Our Way. So please go to our website at findingourway.design, hit the contact form and let us know who we should be talking to. We would love to hear from you.
Peter: Yes. Excited to see who comes in, who we’re introduced to and looking forward to having those conversations in the future.
Jesse: Peter. It’s been a pleasure as always. Thank you so much.
Peter: Oh uh, the pleasure is all mine, Jesse, thank you. And to those who have stuck with us both this long into the season and this long into this episode, thank you for your attention. You can always find us whether at findingourway.design or on LinkedIn and see you around.
Jesse: Thanks everybody. Take care.
Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
38: The Craft-led Design Executive (ft. Tim Allen)
Apr 12, 2023
Transcript
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
And we’re finding our way
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, we are talking with Tim Allen, Global Head of Design and Research for Instacart, about the leader’s relationship to the craft of design, the balance between creative and operational leadership, and how growing up as a Black child in rural Japan has shaped his thinking about inclusion in design.
Peter: Well, Tim, we’re so excited to have you with us today to talk about all kinds of things to do with design, design leadership. I think where it’ll be great to start, though, is just to get a sense of like, who you are today. What do you do? What’s your role, what are you accountable for? Set some context for us here.
Tim: I mean, well, first, thanks for having me Peter, Jesse, it’s great to be here. My name’s Tim Allen. I, I lead design and research at Instacart. And I spend my entire day looking after a community of designers, researchers, writers, operations folks, and specialists focused on providing access to food that people love, and hopefully giving them back time so that they can enjoy that food as well.
Peter: You mentioned looking after a community. One of the things that we’ve been probing in these conversations with design executives, and I’m curious your take on it, is how much time is spent with your team, managing this organization of however many folks, and how much time is spent being an executive, being with the “first team”, being with the C-suite, and your cross-functional peers?
How do you navigate?
Figuring out where to focus time and energy
Tim: Yeah, I think, well it varies according to the time, the fiscal calendar, as well as the development cycle of any one of our, like four, we’re a four-sided marketplace. You have four product ecosystems.
One is, you know, our Instacart consumer app, which, you know, most people are aware of. But most, a lot of people don’t understand that there’s a whole product and service ecosystem around shoppers fulfilling these these orders as well. So there’s a ecosystem designed for them as well.
Then you have our retailer segment as well, which is, you know, how do we empower retailers and provide a technology platform for them. And then we have an advertising ecosystem as well. So brands that would like to showcase, you know, what they have for, for customers as well on the platform.
So yeah, so depending on where we’re at within each one of those segments, I could be spending more time at the C-suite just in terms of, like, strategic conversations, setting visions roadmapping and so forth, down into like, where I like to spend a lot of my time, which is inspiring–…
You know, we mentioned the word community a bit. I try to reserve the lion’s share of my time in empowering the community, setting the conditions for the design team, especially to do the best design work they possibly can. And, you know, be a part in their development and transformation into, you know, wherever they, they want to be.
Of course that involves the product as well. So, you know, my approach to the product is to be down, you know, have hands on and eyes on, like down to the pixel, down to the comma, as much as possible. So very sort of detail-oriented there without, you know, micromanaging. But I do want to understand insights that led to decisions that led to pixels moving, that led to, you know, commas being placed and so forth.
Jesse: How do you walk that line with people that you want to give, you know, authority and autonomy to, to dig into those design problems, understand them deeply and make the best possible choices there, while also providing an appropriate level of oversight over those detail-level decisions from your perspective as an executive?
Leading through craft
Tim: Yeah, it involves, like, setting expectations of —we’re all peers before the object. And we’re all trying to make it as best as it can possibly be, and so we’re all on the same team. And sometimes that involves and necessitates a lot of autonomy, especially when, you know, there’s domain expertise involved and there’s you know, a keen understanding of the customer involved and so forth.
And then at a, at a certain level, especially during reviews and crit, there’s just craft involved and typically that’s where I want to get involved the most, along with you know, sort of envisioning and setting the vision of things. So like I’ll, I’ll come in, usually it’s, you know, you have this sort of divergence and convergence across the development cycle and I set the expectation that I’ll probably be most hands-on when we’re diverging.
And then sort of definitely as we start to make the final convergence towards the end.
Peter: I’m curious and, and Jesse actually just wrote something about this on LinkedIn, because you’re mentioning craft and you mentioned the pixel or the comma. How selective do you have to be in terms of your attention? ‘Cause I’m assuming you can’t be at that level of detail across all four sides of the marketplace and all the experiences you’re offering each of them.
And so how do you navigate that? So that you’re not, I don’t know, overwhelmed or that you’re spending all your time in these details, like there’s so much surface area…
Tim: Yeah, definitely. I make those decisions based on just business priority. So, you know, in one quarter I may solely be focused on shoppers and fulfillment. And, and another quarter may be sort of like distributed across all four segments. It’s based on business priorities, what I would say.
And usually that forces a level of focus.
Peter: I’m looking at Jesse ’cause one of the contentions in his article, and it’s something I’m aligned with, is, as you grow in your career, right, as you develop in your career, as you become more senior, it becomes less about craft and those details, and more about setting up an organization that can execute on the details.
And so, but it sounds like you consider it important to maintain a pretty tight connection with details as needed. And so how do you navigate, like building the engine, focusing on, on the mechanics that enable success versus knowing when to dive in and get to those specific points.
Tim: Yeah, well, one, and you know, there’s a light and a shadow to this.
One, I can’t help myself. I love design and I love the craft of design. And so early on in my career traditionally you have this paradigm where the higher you go, the farther you get from the craft. And I never enjoyed that so much so that I almost wanted to stunt my own sort of career growth. And RGA was one place where the closer you got to the craft and the client and the work and the better that work became, and, and, and the more you use that work to influence the team and so forth, to empower them, like through the work, the, the more you are rewarded and the business thrives and so forth.
So I really, really clung to that. And what was the icing on the cake? Just most recently was, you know, and at Airbnb where, you know, the CEO is a designer as well, and he is directly related to, you know, the pixels and, and the commas at the highest level of, of the company. That where I was like, oh, okay, this is, it’s rare, definitely, but this is the type of leadership that I want to emulate.
I’m not saying that one way is better than the other. I think there’s pros and cons each way, but I, I can’t help myself from doing that. And I was just like, is that okay to do? And like, how can I mitigate the issues and concerns that that does raise?
Jesse: Yeah. I think that question of is it okay to do is an important one because I think a lot of it, you mentioned RGA, you mentioned Airbnb. These are companies that have very design-centric cultures historically. And… there is a question of, like, how much cultural permission you get to go deep on craft.
And I wonder about how you manage the expectations of your cross-functional peers when you decide to go deep on design. Do they feel… are they okay with that? Do you have to negotiate something to create that space, to get that permission to go deep?
Tim: Well, at some point it just all comes down to, like, output. I’ve been in situations, I, I maybe even dare to say recently where, you know, that approach wasn’t expected. And people like you could see the, like, why, why are you doing this? Like, you were very close. And, and as the output evolves you know, the design community in, in addition to cross-functional partners, start to understand, oh, this is a different way of approaching it, but like, I see the value. Where it’s not based on like control or power or anything like that.
It’s truly based on like contribution to making…
Jesse: mm.
Tim: … better products and just different levels of, of contribution.
Learning through making mistakes
Peter: When you were mentioning your, your leadership approach, you used the word “mitigate” to suggest that in order for you to have this detail orientation, at least at times you recognize that there needs to be something to kind of balance that out.
And I’m, I’m curious, over your career, what have those mitigations been? How, what have you done as you’ve established your leadership practices and as you’ve built teams, what have you found you’ve needed to do, organizationally, to support your desire to get into those details?
Tim: Yeah. Yes. Mainly just made a lot of mistakes,
Peter: That’s how we learn!
Tim: And learn… exactly, and learn from them, which is, you know, leaning in too hard. You know, I’ve leaned in too hard at some times and I’ve also pulled back too far at times. And so I’ve had to understand, like, as I’m giving direction, how can I give it in a way that allows people the flexibility to interpret it and also bring their own creative spirit to it and, and make that direction better. You know, I, early on, I must say I was probably spoiled by so much talent at like, places like RGA where just a little bit of direction comes back with a ton of improvement. And, you know, as I got into other spaces where that wasn’t necessarily the case, it was really about refining that approach.
Refining, like, reviews and crits and like, I feel like, you know, workshops or crits of work are where the magic kind of really happens, I think. And, and really setting those up so people feel accountable for one, but then also like fearless and creative too.
Jesse: How do you avoid being a bottleneck as you are engaging in these processes? Are people automatically expecting you to be engaged, or are you negotiating a different scale of engagement with that process of critique?
Tim: Yeah. I think it’s easy to become a bottleneck. Yeah. And that’s, and that’s also one of the mistakes that I’ve made in the past as well at least for priority projects. And, you know I think the team’s only as fast as, like, their leader. So that is very front of mind, we talked about mitigation, but concern, I’m, I’m always having, like, am I responding quick enough so that I am not a bottleneck?
I do in high priority business programs want to be a part of decisions and understanding like what insights are coming in, how are we interpreting data, how is that translating into design decisions, and so forth. And so I, what I’m trying to do is like limit, you know, speaking, speaking tactically, limit the amount of preparation needed for my involvement, too.
So, you know, in some cases what I’ve learned in the past through my own, again, mistakes is not understanding that some people can interpret presenting to people at my level as like, “Hey, we gotta circle the wagons and, and put as much thought into this presentation as we did into the work.”
And then sometimes more. And so that’s completely not the case. So I’m, I’m, I’m setting the expectation of, yes, we’re talking about sausage-making. So show the appropriate level of fidelity for the moment in time we are in the development cycle.
The importance of safety in creative work
Jesse: So it seems like a lot of this is about the expectations that you’re setting and the relationship that you’re creating with your team to get them to trust you, that it’s okay to be messy, and for the work to be a little unrefined and a little unpolished. What are some of the ways in which you create permission within your team for people to be messy when they know that you’re gonna be looking at their work?
Tim: Well, I think that’s where the safety comes in, I, I relate safety to like, fearlessness. You know, I think, like, we do best work when we’re not afraid. And, and that’s just hopefully establishing that, like, great ideas are just great ideas no matter what the fidelity is.
Jesse: Hmm.
Tim: So what’s the least amount of fidelity you can give to an idea that allows people to understand that it’s a great idea, you know? And, and in some cases it’s gonna be a functional prototype, so you’re gonna have to spend a lot of time on it because like, you can talk about, I don’t know, like swipe gestures and so forth and, you know, 10 different people will interpret that 10 different ways. Or it could be like a whiteboard sketch or, you know or maybe even a document.
So I think the expression of ideas is what I try to encourage the, the team to understand. Like, the tool set is very varied that you can use to express in an idea, and it’s up to you on, on how to do it.
Peter: How do you set expectations for quality? How do folks understand what you’re expecting of them in terms of what the quality bar is? What have you done to define that?
Tim: Principally, in terms of, like, principles, like we need you to do the best work of your life, like just straight up. So, but that can be interpreted a couple different ways, but that’s the, in, in terms of principles, that’s, like, what we’re trying to do, and it’s on us or, myself as a leader, to set those conditions so that that can happen.
But the expectation is for you to be doing the best work of your career. And so, so what does that actually mean? I think it means just being world class at solving customers problems, and that that means falling in love with the customers and their goals and their needs, you know, thinking deeply about them. And, you know, I interpret falling in love with problems as also thinking orthogonally about the solutions as well, right? So, you know, going down blind alleys which, you know, sometimes can be dangerous. Again, connecting disparate thoughts. And also because you’ve fallen in love with so many different people, with different contexts and so forth, you can start connecting them in different ways as well.
I had the privilege of working with Jonny Ive at Airbnb and I, there’s many things fascinating about that individual, but one of the things I was completely blown away with was, like, the connections he was making, just like organically between, cultures and ways of seeing the world and perspectives, because he’s fallen in love, literally, with so many different types of people and contexts and so forth.
And so he has this like library he’s drawing on to make these connections. Just really truly stepping outside of yourself into other contexts.
Making space for a design
Peter: Airbnb and Apple are often held up as paragons of good design, but they’re also really weird companies, in part because of this. Because of this willingness to embrace design in, in such a elevated, robust, exploratory fashion. You’ve operated in environments, you’re possibly in one now, where design wasn’t that highest order bit the way it was at a place like Apple and Airbnb.
And I’m wondering what you’ve had to do to make space, say at a place like Instacart, for your team to take this really rich approach to practicing design in a context that maybe before you were there, didn’t necessarily enable it, right?
I look at the people I work with in other types of product-led, maybe even engineering-led organizations, sometimes design is a battle. Even when it’s not, and it’s seen as a partner, it’s still work on the part of the design leader to make space for design to really demonstrate that richness.
But it feels like that’s crucial in your world. And so what have you done to help your partners understand, in an environment where design isn’t the highest order bit, what have you done to help your partners understand just what it takes to deliver on truly great design?
Tim: Wow. I could talk about this for a while because I’ve not, I’ve, I’ve made some huge errors here. And then I think with Instacart I found a path that is, is proving to be successful. So if you, if you look at my career, it’s sort of like RGA, a couple of like huge legacy companies that like aren’t sort of like design-driven and then Airbnb.
I sort of call that my Goldilocks era of like, hey, I reached a level, almost terminal level at RGA. Like, what’s the next challenge? Right? And I would say there’s a mixture of like hubris mix in there along with curiosity of like, hmm, Microsoft needs a new design system. It would be great at that scale to kind of, like, be a part of transforming a company through design and,like, thinking, sure. I’m up with that challenge. That does take a, a bit of hubris.
And I would say, like, I mistakenly, I think, used a bit of brute force in that, just ’cause it’s, like, early on in my career I’m, like, I don’t really understand all of the layers of legacy and culture and so forth that turned out to make that very, very difficult task to do.
But, you know, sort of through that same, you know, I, I won’t speak in specifics with Amazon as well, but like, same thing sort of there, it’s like, yeah, like, why not? Let’s give this a try. Like, how can you take the utility of an Amazon and, like, the sheer, like, usefulness of it, but then also make it, like, lovable.
In my opinion, the Achilles heel with some of these, like, utility-based behemoths are, like, the moment there’s another utility that comes along that is, like, people slightly love a little bit more, or maybe it’s not quite as useful, but people love a lot more, you’re yesterday’s news, right? So in my mind, I think design plays a big role in that.
So, my whole thing was, like, how do you take visceral emotion and, and love for a brand and a product and an experience mixed that with utility and then just have, like, make it, you know, obviously almost unstoppable.
And that’s what Fluent design was designed for. That’s what, like, the Alexa platform and some of the work I, I was doing with Amazon was about, but getting back to your question in, you know, non-design led companies, how do you bring design to the table?
I learned from those companies that it’s not through brute force. It’s not through how much you know about design. There’s a quote that, you know, people will never care how much you know until they know how much you care. And so what I did with Airbnb and what I’m doing with Instacart is allowing people to understand that I care deeply about the mission and our shared belief in this mission.
That’s, like, the most, I think, critical common ground across functions we can ever have. And let me show you how the design community and the design function can bring that to life in addition to, like, the trust and respect we have for your function as well. And, like, showing how that happens leads to, I think, inspiration. And where I’ve seen the lights turn on, like, almost physically in, in rooms at Instacart is when they see that connection and they see what they believe in being upleveled and, and inspired through design.
Developing a culture of curiosity
Jesse: I love the way that you described, the way that you went after these challenges as a mix of hubris and curiosity. And curiosity, well, cause I think that’s essential for a leader to continue to grow. They have to continue to believe that there are new challenges out there that are, you know, worthy of what they have to offer. Right?
But curiosity especially is something that I tend to think of as being one of the kind of the core values of design as a practice. And you know, when I think about hubris and curiosity in organizations that are not design-led or do not have a strong design culture, what I think of is a whole lot of hubris and maybe not so much curiosity.
And I wonder what your experiences have been in trying to drive a culture of curiosity in organizations that may not be all that interested in it to start.
Tim: Yeah. I’ve got war stories there, but I can’t say like, I’ve cracked that at all. \ What I was looking for and found at Instacart was a CEO that understood the power of design and wanted to be inspired by design and understood the gaps in the business as it related to design very, very well.
And so it was the fertile soil. The, the gap was there. But it could be cultivated into something great. So that’s when, like, you have curiosity, no longer hubris, right? ‘Cause it’s, like, no, you know you know, we did Nike, you know, we did blah, blah, blah. So, like it, Microsoft, whatever, right? It’s more, like, courage, I’m curious about this.
I know there’s a gap. It seems like there’s a way to fill the gap and, like, like, let’s approach this with courage. That’s the difference at Instacart.
Peter: You mentioned the CEO, are you reporting to the CEO or through? Through what teams do you report up to? The C-suite.
Tim: Yeah. So I report to the Chief Operating Officer Asha, who reports to the CEO.
Peter: That’s interesting. How is operations defined then at Instacart? You know, cause usually operations, you know, you don’t think of design reporting up through operations. It might report it through product or marketing. So what’s the…
Tim: well, yeah.
Well.
Peter: …logic behind operations?
Tim: Well, it’s probably a different approach in terms of operations, but the Chief Product Officer reports to Asha, the COO, the, the Chief Marketing Officer the CMO, reports also through operations. And yeah, like me sort of standing in as Chief Design Officer as well. That kind of makes sense.
Peter: And to what is she holding you accountable for, right? You’re, you’re peers now with the head of product, a Chief Product Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, they probably have very clear accountabilities, very clear numbers and metrics that they’re expected to deliver. Do you have something similar that she’s looking for you to bring or how, how is that accountability handled?
Tim: Yeah. It’s couple different ways. Attract higher, retain, best design talent possible and uplevel talent and craft across the board. Bring a level of strategic insight that’s design- and research-based into strategic conversations and help us deliver against our mission. Bring our mission, which is like human-centered. It’s like one of the most human-centered missions you can have. It’s food, right? Like, access to food front and center, and inspire us with that. You know and then help us grow awareness and love for the brand and, and product.
Peter: Are those measured or are those just understood?
Tim: Well, I think we are in the process of understanding how to measure those to be, to be honest. But they’re, yeah, they’re, they’re definitely understood. And that was like the, the, the process of me being recruited and, and, and vetted for the role was, like, okay, like, do you understand the challenges?
And all four of those things. I think there’s four, four things I mentioned. Have like great challenges, and then also, like, and some of them are easily measured. A lot of them definitely aren’t, and I, I actually really like that.
Maintaining visibility to keep others informed
Jesse: It seems to me that the challenge with some of these things that are potentially quite subjective is ensuring that what you’re doing is visible to people in a way that they can see the value that you’re providing, even if it is in a subjective way. How do you keep people in the loop with what’s going on for you and your team?
How do you maintain the level of visibility for your work necessary for people to reach that subjective consensus that you’re doing a good job?
Tim: That’s, a good question. It’s mainly through interrogating the work. So I think there’s a couple things that happens weekly. So just tactically speaking, weekly, we have, yeah, basically design and research workshops on Thursdays where all of the highest priority work for… the entire day is dedicated to reviewing work in, like, 45 minute to 90 minute sessions.
And so all of the highest priority work across all those segments is getting reviewed. I host that, sort of, I, I’m, I’m the main contributor, but it’s cross-functional. So depending on what phase of the cycle the project is in, you know, you could have like the full cross-functional team across, like, data science, engineering, product management, business, so forth, even business development in, in those reviews or workshops. Or you would just have, like, the design team, sometimes even just, like, special, like, motion team, maybe even. And so I think that allows people to, like, see work, for one, see how work transforms as well, contribute to that transformation, you know, and then, you know…
I don’t send out a weekly newsletter. We’re thinking about doing… I’ve done that in the past. I do send out a weekly note to the team, just like top of mind things. It’s not really, like, status or anything, it’s just, like, literally it’s meant to be inspirational. I think that helps my… and I copy my leadership team on that.
Peter: Your approach to leading a team at this size is different than the other people we’ve talked to and, and often the people I work with. You place a lot of value and importance on craft and practice, right? Whereas I think a lot of the leaders that I’ve worked with delegate that to their directors or even their managers because they have other things they need to be concerned with.
A long time ago, I thought there was a model, and I’m sounding this out with you, for design leadership, that was kind of like filmmaking, where you have director and a producer, right? You don’t get Ron Howard if you don’t have Brian Glazer, right? And, and I’m wondering if that resonates with you, if you’re able to really focus on creative leadership, because you partner with operational production-like leadership who you know you can trust to keep things running so that you can be a bit more of that visionary than we often see with people in design executive roles.
The “Hammer”
Tim: Yes, that’s a very, very good point. So, I talked to my wife about the role you’re talking about as my hammer, and I didn’t know I needed a hammer until just like understanding former roles. And so for me it’s the chief of staff and also, frankly, coming into Airbnb, my initial role was to sort of be the foil of Alex Schleifer at Airbnb.
Alex Schleifer was the Chief Design Officer at Airbnb during my tenure, and I was the VP of Design. Alex loved doing the approach that we’re talking about and needed someone, and was less concerned and less, like, honestly, probably enthused about the other facets of leadership that are needed as well.
And so I was playing that role just in terms of like operations, cultural, management, so forth, team morale, blah, blah, blah. And so now , I’ve sort of like reversed that a bit. And like my, I have an excellent chief of staff and along with the senior leadership team that helps out like evening out those more operational, administrative tasks of senior leadership too.
Peter: Is that, is that Taylor?
Tim: That is Tay– How do you…? That is Taylor.
Peter: Taylor, who will probably be listening to this, is a friend and an active member of the Design Ops community. And, she is your hammer. So that’s almost like, like Rahm Emanuel was for President Obama. Someone who does some of the work to make sure the things that you are wanting to see done can get operationalized and implemented. Is that similar to how you’re imagining it?
Tim: Indeed. Indeed, yes.
Peter: Hopefully with less swearing.
Inclusive Design
Jesse: So, I know that you worked at Microsoft on their inclusive design initiative, and I know that inclusion in design has been a bit of a theme for you through your career, and I know that that has a lot of different facets to it. For us as an industry, you know, the way that we approach inclusion in user research, the way that we approach inclusion in the design process the way that we approach inclusion in hiring and promoting people, I’m curious about what are the aspects of it that you feel like are the most interesting opportunities for design as an industry to level up around inclusion?
Tim: Yeah. Yeah. I, I’ll start out by saying I think the people that are most interested, and have moved inclusion forward the most are typically the people that have experienced the most exclusion. And so for me, exclusion has just been a part of my existence since day one. So I, I mean, I talk about the impetus first, which is, you know, I, I grew up in rural Japan.
My father was in the military, so Okinawa and, and Iwa Kuni. And, you know, back then, I dare to say even now, growing up as a black child in rural Japan is like a very
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Tim: isolating experience. And so, you know, my, my parents helped me through that. And so at a very young age, I understood like, yeah, I, I looked different.
My hair is different. And it was quite a spectacle back then. And, and they just, my parents worked me through that. And you know, if you think about design school as well, I came into design school. No one looked like me. No one spoke like me. It was hard to relate to, to folks.
I didn’t know what design was. I came into design school through a fine arts scholarship, and I’d never known what design was. I was a painter and like had my own like airbrush business in high school.
I just like literally used that as my portfolio and, you know, landed in design school. Didn’t feel like I belonged. And then again, in the same way my parents helped me get through that, I had like a really great staff of instructors that helped me get through that too, which was like basically, hey, all the fear and uncertainty that you feel, and also the way you look at the world is extremely valuable. And like, we need that and it’s very valuable for you to get that out.
And so it’s just flipped my mind into like all of that being a superpower rather than a disability. And so then now you talk about the word disability and what that means and so forth. And my focus is on how do you unlock and harness the breadth of human diversity through design and, and research to allow people to shine.
And also not only altruistically, but you know, it’s been proven, but just in my experience, just to make like really, really kickass, like, products as well that are this magic combination of, like, viscerally, culturally compelling and, and emotionally engaging as well as, like, useful utility.
Peter: I mean, It feels like we’re still so early days, so many companies are not approaching design with an inclusive kind of mindset or approach. Is that still where we’re at is like foundational or are you finding a better conversation happening farther along that curve?
Tim: Yeah, I mean, shout out to like folks like Kat Holmes and like people that have like really, really dug into this wholeheartedly. But I do think we are in some of the beginning stages. I think the biggest challenge right now in my opinion, is moving from this, like, state of altruism and, you know, being a savior and things that kind of connote power dynamics into a very powerful strategic business tool. If you wanna talk about MAU and DAU and, you know, daily active users and, like, expanding the amount of people that use your product, thus expanding the financial impact into your business, then yes, you want to appeal to different types of people with different levels of ability and, and different cultural, you know, aspects.
It just makes sense. For me, it’s turning the corner from like, oh, it’s so nice to like, understand these people’s point of view and like how our product is hampering people with mobility issues and like, and isn’t it so great that we can allow them to use our great product? In terms of like, what do these people need? What are their pain points? And like, how do we solve them in a way that makes our product better for everyone? It’s a different lens and also, like, we probably will make more money as, as well.
Peter: This is interesting cause I think the history of design craft is somewhat ableist, right? The the things that have often been lauded are that which have served people who are able, and I’m wondering, you’ve talked a lot about craft and the importance of craft and practice, but those crafts and practices, a lot of those were developed for a pre-inclusive, let’s say, kind of approach to thinking about design.
And I’m wondering how you’ve seen design evolve the practice and the craft of design evolve to incorporate inclusivity, where it’s not about the grid necessarily anymore, and visual hierarchy or whatever the concerns we might have had 20 years ago, but, it’s something else. How are you embracing, like, that fundamental change that is necessary? What does it mean to fundamentally change to embrace inclusivity honestly and authentically?
Tim: Right. Well, I have a background in industrial design. And I think because that and architecture, for instance, are established practices that have to legally, and, you know, to a certain extent, yes, digital design as well, incorporate accessibility and inclusion into the very practice itself in a way that isn’t altruistic, that is in a way that is, like, crucial to just creating a product that is deemed successful at all.
Product design, experience design, digital product design, I would say as a whole, and research, it’s just nascent, it’s not proactive. It’s very reactive for the most part. And it is based on, Hey, we made something. Oh, and a few people have missed out on it. So, like, let’s, like, accommodate them to, like, what we made as opposed to including everyone.
Peter: You’re leading design and you’re an executive during what is a difficult time, in some ways, for many people, particularly our industry, layoffs, you know, those kinds of uncertainties.
And I’m wondering what you found that you’ve needed to do, that you’ve needed to change? How have you been handling being a leader? What have you been doing to kind of help lead your team through these challenging and uncertain times?
Managing through uncertainty
Tim: Yeah, that’s a really great, great question. I have yet to experience an aha moment or any moment of like, really, really critical success that hasn’t been preceded by overcoming some level of hardship, difficulty, uncertainty, and fear.
So you can go back, I, I talked about the design school thing I’ve talked about like just living, trying to like be a child in Japan. You know, coming into some of these legacy companies and so forth. So for me it’s just a growth mindset. And going back to that advice from design school of like this fear and certainty is where all the opportunity is.
Peter: Hmm.
Tim: Like literally. And, to me, that’s just the way I think, but I saw it be proved out before my eyes and was a part of it. At Airbnb when overnight we went from a business that was going warp speed, light speed to like zero miles an hour standstill overnight through the pandemic.
Peter: Right.
Tim: And the way that the leadership team led through that uncertainty making tough decisions, like, yeah, we did have to cut and reduce the workforce. But we approached it like a design challenge. What do people need right now? What are the pain points? What are the opportunities in this space?
We just embraced the uncertainty and, and then we doubled down on the shared belief. And by, by the way, these are the steps I’m using right now as well. Embrace the uncertainty. It’s, it’s there. But just because it’s cold outside it doesn’t prevent us from, like, eating soup, right?
Alright and what’s that shared belief? What’s the soup? For us right now, it’s the access to the food that you love and time to enjoy it with yourself, with your family. So with your loved ones. Once you focus on that belief, then visions start to, like, I think creativity just, like, abounds and that’s what allows you to adapt and I think disrupt.
Jesse: So you have, over the course of your career, you have seen design go through any number of evolutions and transformations. How design is practiced now is very different from how design was practiced 10 years ago, which is even more different from how it was practiced when you started your career back in the nineties.
So I find myself wondering from your perspective, what’s got you excited about the next stage in the evolution of design practice?
Tim: That’s a really good question. I, I would definitely say the topic of inclusion. Not only product inclusion, but team inclusion as well. I feel like, you know, homogenous teams make homogenous products, for homogenous audiences using homogenous strategies, right? So…
Jesse: yeah.
Tim: …the output comes from the input. Enabling and having a priority to bring other voices to the table to not create homogenous teams and thus make less homogenous products and so forth and address that more diverse customer audience is what I’m super excited about.
Working with a leadership team that believes in that as well. And, you know I won’t say that Having a female COO and CEO was not a part of my decision as well coming into Instacart. I think that’s, that’s been incredible for me. So yeah, that’s, the biggest thing for me.
I mean, you can’t have a conversation like this without mentioning machine learning and AI as well. I think that’s fascinating and we’re starting to understand how to, like, incorporate that even more at Instacart. So stay tuned there. But yeah, that’s that’s amazing.
Jesse: Tim, this has been great. Thank you so much.
Tim: Thank you,
Peter: Yes. Thank you.
Tim: Thanks Peter.
Peter: So Tim, where can people find you on the internet? Do you, do you write, do you publish? Where can people follow up with you?
Tim: I’m active on LinkedIn probably the most. So yeah, just you could search for Tim Allen there. Tim Allen.
Peter: Not that Tim Allen. The other Tim
Tim: Exactly. Yeah. And you know, on the Gram and Twitter @TimAllenDesign.
Jesse: Fantastic.
Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
I can’t believe we got through the whole hour before we finally got around to the Tim Allen joke.
Peter: I’m sure it never happens.
Tim: I knew it was coming.
Jesse: Yeah.
37: From Design Leadership to Product Leadership (ft. Che Douglas)
Mar 20, 2023
Transcript
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
And we’re finding our way
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, Booking.com’s VP of Product and former VP of Design Che Douglas joins us to talk about the cultural and functional relationship between product and design, what it’s like to lead both as an integrated team, and the necessity of driving alignment in order to drive change as a leader.
Peter: Well, hi, Che. Thank you for joining us today. Jesse and I have been talking to a bunch of design leaders over the last well, five or six months, and so we’re excited to have you join us. In particular, we’re excited to have you join because, at least looking at your LinkedIn profile, you’re not simply a design leader. And so I’d love to learn just, like, what your role is, what you do, and how did you end up there?
From VP Design to VP Product
Che: Great question. So right now I’m working with Booking.com as their Vice President of Product. I joined Booking in end of late 2019 just before the pandemic started. Good time to join a travel company, during a pandemic.
Um, I joined as their first Vice President of Design. They’d had kind of director-level designers previously, but no one at the executive level overseeing the community.
And with about 300 designers across the organization at the time, they were very interested in bringing someone in that could kind of make sense of all of that and define a strategy globally for the company and set a vision and help point everyone in the right direction. So I came in as a VP of Design.
My role transitioned through the pandemic into also running product development. Whole host of reasons for that. I had previously led part of products with The Wall Street Journal towards the end of my role there in New York. So I had experience, and then previous to the Wall Street Journal, I ran a business in Australia doing brand and digital work for about 10 years.
So I think my experience of building products, you know, physical and digital environments, branding, all of those things combined, and running the company that I’d started, I think gave me a fairly good grounding to move into what we call product development or software development these days.
So, you know, the people that I employed in my business before I joined The Wall Street Journal came from all sorts of disciplines. And, and that’s kind of how you needed to make up a company to do any kind of digital product development or branding work. So, that experience kept following me through my career when I moved to New York, work for The Wall Street Journal and also into the role with Booking as a first Vice President of Design.
And, and that evolved quite quickly into, like I said, running product and, and parts of it anyway. The time I joined there was a Chief Product Officer. He was my boss. And he was running basically the program to start building what we call the connected trip, which has been there since even before I joined.
So we were still three years into that mission, recently bringing in all of the other things that Booking Holdings has. So supply of flights, everything outside of hotels, so you know, ground transportation, insurance, attractions, you name it, and, and building them into our existing app and website.
And I was leading the design side. Through the pandemic our CPO left. I also ended up picking up a lot of the pieces of the product organization as a result of that. We’re a two-sided marketplace, so there’s another VP of Product. The partner and supply side, which is more commercial. I would, I would say, to try and keep it simple for our audience.
And I look at all of the traveler side, so all of the traveler touchpoints, customer-facing in that sense. Particularly our web and our app platform, which is where all of our bookings come through and all of our travelers come and book on our platform. So now I look after that, you know, it’s a big team.
It’s around 500-plus, 550 people, 50-plus product teams that look after that on the experience and platform side from software engineers, data scientists, researchers, UX writers, designers product managers, and everything in between. So that’s where I am today and that’s what I look after. And yeah, hopefully that helps give a bit of context.
Peter: Yeah. Correct me if I’m wrong, my assumption is that as VP of Design, you were responsible for overseeing all designers on both sides of the marketplace. But it sounds like as you’ve become a product leader, you’re responsible for only one side of the marketplace. So are you still responsible for the designers, all the designers, or did that change?
Che: Great question. So that’s still the case. So we, through the, also through the kind of pandemic and some of the changes that we needed to make, and looking at how we wanted to set the business up for the future, there was a big push for the, what we call crafts disciplines, whatever you want to call ’em, so a designer, a researcher, a writer, to report to someone of their craft rather than up into technology or up into product. So I worked with our VP of Engineering to basically orchestrate that with our works councils and all the different labor laws in the Netherlands and everything else, and put together a big plan, that took, you know, the best part of a year to roll out, functional reporting for all of our crafts. So all of design, research, writers across the entire organization, except for a couple of small pockets in marketing, still report up into a UX leader, a senior director that reports to me. So that’s kind of the structure of everything.
Engineering reports into our VP of Engineering and, and vice versa. So we have, you know, a data leader similarly for the data and analyst crafts as well. So very much now in functional reporting mode. There’s still some pain points, growing pains and things like that as we mature and we’ve rolled it out, ’cause we’ve always been quite siloed in the way that we’ve done work in terms of product teams and everyone being embedded, now with the craft management structure.
That’s kind of a view of both ways of looking at it, right? So, there’s a few things that we need to kind of iron out over time, but the response has been great and the feedback’s been great to date, from, particularly the smaller crafts in design, writing, and research, so being managed by someone of their own craft.
We also opened a bunch of director and senior manager roles and more principal level roles at the same time as we scaled that all, ’cause there wasn’t enough in the senior kind of management levels to kind of make that structure work. So we actually had to open and fill those roles before we could actually roll out functional craft reporting too, because they were typically kind of getting stuck at the director level when rolling into either directors of tech or product at that point.
Jesse: I think there’s an interesting intersection between culture and craft, in that you can have groups within an organization, practitioners of the same craft that will develop their own culture around that craft, around the implicit values of that craft. I wonder what the implications of that are for your entire organization as you have these distinct crafts within it, with their own distinct cultures, that you are also trying to integrate with a product organization as well.
Che: Yeah, there’s so many ways you can slice this. The one that comes to mind, maybe it’s a little bit off track, but it’s kind of the information knowledge transfer in an enterprise company is, is quite challenging. We have over a hundred product teams across the entire landscape. Designers and writers and all of those research and stuff are still embedded. So those crafts now report up into their craft managers. I think it’s, you know, there’s overlaying strategies. There might be a design strategy, a writing strategy, a product strategy for, even for a particular area. Some of them need to more global.
So connecting the dots, as a lot of people probably like to say it, from a UX point of view is actually incredibly important. But how you do that through the lens of each of the crafts and execute on it with, in our case, a product-led organization that is moving from being transactional to very much traveler, partner-centric in the way that we think, all the way up.
So we are also going through a cultural shift that I think gives more of a voice to that UX community that hasn’t felt like they’ve had much of a seat at the table because it’s been very data, transactional, product-led to date.
So I think we’re moving to more of a, much more kind of cross-functional. The voices are there, the, the right leaders are kind of in place to be able to bring that information and knowledge transfer and collaboration together to build great products.
I mean, I think, I hate the idea of any of them doing anything in isolation. I, it is always feel like the best things that you make, particularly in big companies, are when you get the right people together and give ’em the space to go and do it. Whatever their skillsets might be that are needed for that particular thing. So yeah, the craft bit kind of, it’s, it’s unlocking it, right?
It’s finding the best way to not feel like they’re stifled or cornered or aren’t able to bring all of their knowledge and skills and the information, like I said, to the right places and make the right decisions.
From Transaction to Experiential
Peter: So I’m familiar with Booking.com because I was supporting OpenTable when Booking or Priceline Holdings acquired them. And I remember hearing about Booking having these very of atomized product teams. It was very A/B oriented and very transactional, very kind of inspired by Amazon or Spotify.
It sounds like there’s an evolution though now happening. I don’t know if it’s away from that transactional model, but let’s say towards something that’s rooted in customer types and their experience. What was the impetus for that? Is, is that something that was happening before you joined and you were brought on to help make that happen? Was that something that you recognized and were able to help others realize the opportunities? What was the, yeah, the instigation for, for that shift?
Che: I was certainly kind of one of the voices. It felt like one of the few when I joined— a, a smaller group. But I think that has kind of grown over time. It’s certainly from repeating the same messages. I also, you know, I’m senior enough in the organization to get the attention of the right people and have trust with the right leaders to be able to build that. The statement of transactional to traveler-centric or, and partner centric is not necessarily… it’s not black and white either, because everything we’ll do, we’ll still have data that we look at behind it. But I think it’s that we want to actually put some kind of standards and quality around some of the things that we’ve done in the past and be able to do mid- and longer term thinking.
Everything has been much more short-term driven. So when we look at you know, what people will talk about lifetime value, metrics, equity, how you measure that of a customer, all those things over a much longer period of time so that the things that we are doing and shipping to travelers , more in the mid and long term thinking, not just the short term.
So it’s basically expanding the way our toolkit and the way that we build product. That’s the best way that I could probably articulate it. And then how we instrument things and measure them is not purely based on how many bookings per day we get, but a whole range of other metrics, like that lifetime value, but also based on priority actions and behaviors of customers through different journeys of our products rather than based on like small parts of a screen or a screen itself.
So that’s, you know, that’s a huge collaboration, a huge shift in the way that I would say we work. We’re still on that journey, but it’s gonna be, it’s a long way, too. We’ve also articulated a product vision around how we will develop what we’ve talked about for three-plus years, the connected trip, and how that will then come together over a period of time, the commercial side, but particularly from the traveler side.
Peter: Did you have to make a business case? Like how did you, you mentioned building trust and because of your seniority, you, you had the relationships. But in a, in a company that can be so data-driven or metrics-driven, what was the language you needed to frame this evolution in, such that others would be receptive to it?
Che: Right… So very early on there’s a whole host of things that I did and other people did as well, but the things that I did that I had control over, so when we were looking at, let’s say, let’s just take something design and kind of engineering-centric, like a design system. So as we’d scaled some of our new products, like flights and things into the Booking app and website, we’d basically done that intentionally quickly to validate where the customers wanted those products within the Booking.com brand and Booking.com products.
But at the same time, the teams that went and did that built them in different ways. So different technology stacks, different front-end frameworks, new design systems emerge. ‘Cause it’s just such a big company and everyone’s moving so quickly.
But we didn’t have a strategy to pull those things back. So I think one of the things that I did early on was actually a presentation to Glenn, our CEO and a few senior leaders, and said basically, here are all of our supply verticals. But there’s a bunch of horizontal things like the customer experience that you want to get to this connected trip. If you look at each of these verticals, within each one of them, you can see that we’ve built a whole bunch of things in different ways.
Now that was great to get us to market really quickly, but now as we scale ’em, we’re gonna have to unwind a lot of that. There’s a lot of technical debt. It’s stopping us from like, our velocity is reducing, we are having to maintain five different design systems, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So then I was able to, through the way that the company operates, through planning, you know, get into the practicality of it and the planning cycle, which has a financial component that is the kind of key driver of the cadence and timelines built. You know, I listened to the kind of motions of the business, so to speak, and then came in at the right times and said, here’s what we need to do. Basically put objectives with senior leaders across the entire company that were outside of my remit, to wind back some of the design systems and consolidate them into one.
And we did that with a number of different programs. So it was kind of multi-pronged. You know, some other examples, and now as we roll out, example, kind of a much more kind of inclusive design. ‘Cause we, you know, our mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, needs to be more accessible, all of our product landscape.
There’s a compliance side of that with our holdings company. So we’re roll– rolling out a big accessibility program at the moment, which is around not just kind of making things compliant, but also doing the right thing and the way that we build that into the DNA of the organization going forward.
It’s not a program that someone’s running, it’s actually just the way we do product development as a whole. So, those things are changes in the way that people develop. It feels like another thing on their backlog to do, but like, you’ve actually gotta build it in a way that everyone understands it, values it, and then it becomes part of the way that they work going forward.
So that’s changing the way that we work as well.
Jesse: I’d love to hear more about going back to that transition that you made from leading design to leading both design and product. And I wonder, although you had clearly had previous experiences that prepared you, qualified you for the role, I wonder what surprised you when you came into the role? What was the biggest shift or adjustment you had to make as you were transitioning from being a design leader to being a hybrid design and product leader?
Che: I think knowing in a product, more product-led company that whatever I ended up articulating as a vision or a mission, direction, strategy, it was actually, there was a lot less fighting. It was like, oh, that’s it, okay!
Let’s all go and…
Jesse: do you think that is?
Che: Because we’re already kind of product-led. Like that was the way that everyone worked.
They followed what product did. So if you laid out a roadmap and you worked with your technology partners and things, then, whereas if you’re design, you kind of constantly felt like you were always trying to convince someone to, to get something done and build it into a plan. So that was a big shift in terms of the way I had to think about things.
Almost, you have to be careful kind of what you’re doing, more deliberate and you kind of end up wielding a bit more power in that regard. So as a shift I think, yeah, it’s an interesting one. I guess I didn’t feel like I operated too much differently.
I, I felt like I probably had to be less biased to my design roots as well. Because I’m a very visual person. What I mean by that is when I joined Booking everything that I received in my inbox was financial reports. And I was like, don’t we have like 200 product teams? What are we shipping to customers? What do we ship? Everyone’s like, I’ll go into the experiment so you can kind of see things. And I was like, but that, like, I don’t even know what’s changed between that A and that B test. Like, like what? I was like, and we’ll probably run a thousand experiences.
I was like, but what are all the kind of like big moments of like a big release or this or that, and it was very hard to make sense of that. So I really like what design brings when you look at something through the interface. And so I’ve always been very big on seeing that. So when we’ve articulated a product vision and things, even though it’s not super prescriptive, it’s enough of a north star for people to kind of lock onto and have something tangible to work towards rather than you just get lost in conversations and people debating words.
And I’m like, but we’re building software. Like what’s the actual end interface? Like, what’s the experience that we’re even talking about? and I think that was a change for me as well, is like, how can I bring that lens to product without everyone thinking I’m the designer wearing a product hat.
So that’s what I was getting to and, and I think that that’s been a bit of a shift for me is how I can make sure that
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Che: I’m still visible as the product guy, but then there’s a component I , think of my background in design that I think is very useful. You know, I run a business too, so you know, the different components of my experience I think help kind of, I guess help me in my current role, so to speak.
And I also think I bring something different to building product that is certainly kind of probably more tangible. You know, there’s a data component, the kind of business component. But then, yeah, I, I think it’s a super valuable trait to be building products is to have that kind of design view anyway.
Peter: Well, of course. Who, Who do you report to? Are you reporting straight into the CEO or somewhere else in the C-suite?
Che: So I report to James Waters, who runs our accommodation business, which is, you know, basically most of the company. And he reports the CEO.
Peter: Okay,
Che: So he’s a, he’s kind of our business leader. Yeah.
Peter: Got it. Even though you support other businesses…
Che: Correct. Yeah. So we have other obviously smaller products that we’re integrating in. What happens to the organizational landscape over time, and how you would do that is kind of, certainly not up to me. But the, that’s kind of where we’re at the moment. There’s kind of the incubator of like bringing in the flights, attractions, ground transportation, insurance, et cetera.
And my teams, all the designers, research, and everything are embedded in all of those teams that report up to me. And we have a product vision that we articulated this year that I drove forward, which looks at the entire traveler experience to build the connected trip. So I work for the biggest business unit, logic being that it’s already got huge scale, right? Like, you know, we nearly got to a billion bookings pre-pandemic. So through that lens it’s accommodations plus the others, right? And that’s how you kind of get to get to a point where you build a connected trip.
Peter: And was James your boss before or was it the Chief Product Officer?
Che: Chief Product Officer before, and he was basically the incubator for the other product verticals.
Earning Credibility as a Product Leader
Peter: I’m curious… to go from being the head of design to now being the head of product with design is still a significant part of your remit, how did you earn the credibility or demonstrate the credibility? What was that thing that allowed them, especially such a product-oriented company like Booking, to say, you know what, Che yes, you are ready to be in charge of product. ‘Cause that’s, that’s a pretty big shift.
Che: Right. I think, I think it’s that I just generally have a kind of liking for, and I guess common sense for like, that I work for something bigger. So that, what I mean by that is that there is a business, there are shareholders. It’s listed, it’s the biggest, you know, online travel company in the world. So I have that kind of grounded reality, I guess. And I think I always brought that to every conversation I had.
So, and I think designers typically, and I’m generalizing obviously, but will really just care about the design piece. And I always cared about every other role in the company, whether I could help the people department with something around employee experience and onboarding or service design for our customer service team and all the different, like, things that make up the business and help it run in a healthy way, but also like what should that look like in the future?
What are the things that might disrupt it? So I, I guess I, for me, that’s been a designer, but I think once people are in an organization at a certain level as a designer, they’re very much focused on their area and kind of us versus them like design versus product or engineering.
And I’m like, we’re all in it together. We’ve gotta build this whole thing. I think it’s just my mindset is different. And I ground everything back to like, we’re all just working for Booking.com. I was like, calm down. Like it’s, we’re not like this team versus that team or whatever it might be. It’s, and I know that’s hard because, you know, that that can come down to different relationships with managers and, and you kind of, like I said, your mindset going in.
And that doesn’t downplay struggles and things that people have within organizations at all. That’s just my experience and I think that’s the thing that has allowed me to transition into product quite seamlessly is that I looked at everything from different points of view and I saw, like, what product had struggles with or where they could evolve a bit more and what technology needed from a product partner that I could maybe bring that was different.
And, you know, design and engineering play a really close, tight-knit role. And I think for engineering, having a design leader come into a product role can actually be quite powerful to strengthen that relationship. Same with kind of bringing research in that might have been kind of more central and on the outer and bringing insights and things into how you plan and build roadmaps.
All of those things I think sometimes just get a little bit lost when you’re just driving a product. So they, they were the things and the signals that I was, messages I was probably sending that allowed me to move pretty easily into it.
Jesse: You mentioned that on moving into that role, you found yourself wielding more power or maybe wielding power differently than you did when you were in a pure design role. And I think that for a lot of design leaders, there’s a certain amount of envy of the product leader that sets in, this sense that uh, we just kind of have our noses pressed to the glass and, and are, on the sidelines watching all the big decisions get made.
Understanding the value you bring
Jesse: What advice do you have for a design leader who wants to be on the other side of that glass?
Che: Who wants to move into product or just wants to have…
Jesse: well, is it who just wants to be in those…
Peter: …in those conversations. Yeah, I, I, I hear this all the time as well.
Che: I think until product, whoever their product and tech counterparts are, understand what value they can bring, it’s hard, and it doesn’t mean going and proving it. That just means finding the time with them and working through their problems with them, asking, asking them kind of what motivates them, all of those things.
So, and that can be very much like just a core designer and a PM relationship as well. Some of the best products I’ve built have been in that vein at that level of the organization as well in my past experience. So I think, yeah, that’s my advice is just, just build those relationships.
They’re not always gonna work though. You have to have kind of lower expectations, ’cause someone might just like the way they’re doing things, it’s not always a guarantee, and then you kind of have to go on. But depending on how big the company is, you can go and find other people that are doing great things within the organization and product or tech and go and talk to them about what they’re doing.
And maybe, you know, if there’s good internal mobility, then you can kind of start positioning yourself to go and work on something elsewhere. And, and work through that point of view.
Figuring out where to work
Peter: I wonder how you chose these companies to work for, and if that played a factor, right? Like…
Che: Yeah, yeah.
Peter: As you were looking for opportunities, you know, new roles or whatever,
Che: Mm-hmm.
Peter: How did you navigate those opportunities? And did you have conversations with companies where you’re like, oh, this isn’t gonna work for me because they want to put me in my little design box. They want me to wear the black turtleneck, and I want to be more involved. Or like, were there signals like that that you were able to pick up such that you’ve been able to choose companies that had this more inclusive, broader view of how product and design could work together?
Or did you have to create those conditions once you came into these organizations?
Che: I’m smiling ’cause it’s the right question. So I, I certainly was intentional. I like the cultural challenges ’cause I feel like that’s the first step to then making a great product. So I kind of saw products that I wouldn’t want to share with my family and friends, so to speak. And I felt like there’s obviously some underlying cultural things that you’d need to change before you could make them great.
‘Cause there’d be a lot of, you know, whether it’s empire -building silos, politically charged landscape, all of that stuff. Right. And that’s what I enjoy, I guess. ‘Cause I think I have the depth of experience in design and kind of patience to be able to go and do those things. So what I mean by that, with Booking all of the interviews and everything I had were all about data. How many experiences I ran, how data-driven they were, and I thought I’d failed it all. ‘Cause I basically was saying the opposite things and challenge them on everything. And I think that’s what they were looking for. They were looking for someone to come in and maybe balance their viewpoint a little bit.
And not from a kind of one-size-fits-all, or black-and-white approach, but, you know, I don’t think data and design or product are at odds with each other. I think they work really, really well in harmony, but it can take a while to get that humming along nicely. So I saw a lot of cultural challenges, lot of opportunity.
I spoke to Airbnb and Apple, you know, places I’d probably wanted to work. Particularly Apple. And had amazing opportunities at both, arguably even bigger potentially. And both were, yeah, probably a little bit boxed in. And I was like, so what do you want me to do ? I was like, I don’t think that’s a challenge.
I think that’s just like doing beautiful design. I’m like, you got it. You’ve already got it. So I think there’s an opportunity. That’s what I saw in both the other, my previous roles where New York Times is an example against, you know, The Wall Street Journal. You know, there, there was kind of already the, it was established in that sense.
Peter: An opportunity for change, but also, uh, interest in changing, right? ‘Cause I end up working with design leaders who find themselves in organizations where they want to make change, but the organization isn’t accommodating to that. Right, and so it’s…
Che: That’s it. But that was it. It’s both, right? So I, I found, like, the organization didn’t, so like, they might say they do, but they never do because when change actually starts to happen, everyone starts rejecting it and that it, it’s a kind of a groundswell and then you give up. But I like not giving up and, and I think also in that process you learn a lot.
So I’m also one to, like, change if I need to. I might have come in and particularly with Booking, like I’ve learned so much where I’ve reverted some of my original kind of blanket statements around all sorts of things that work from doing, whether it’s A/B, multi-variant testing and the designers and things might balk at.
But I, what I’ve learned in going through that process is there’s a lot of knowledge that’s been built up over a period of time and, there’s a ton of stuff there that’s super valuable, and now I’ve kind of been able to add that to my toolkit alongside other things that I’ve built up over time. So it’s, it’s, it’s been super valuable.
So it’s, I didn’t just come in and change everything. I also like changed a lot, is probably the biggest takeaway. As much as I felt like I’ve made an impact, it’s probably had an even bigger impact on me and all the people that have done amazing stuff there for a really long time. So it wasn’t terrible when I got there at all.
It was working incredibly well and for good reason. I just looked at it through a different lens.
Cultural change
Jesse: To what extent do you see creating that kind of change as the leader’s role?
Che: I, yeah, I think it’s obviously easier particularly when you have direct control, so to speak, with hierarchy and structure. I think cultural change needs to come from leaders ’cause they’re the ones that send the messages throughout the organization. If it doesn’t come from the top, those behaviors, the kind of authenticity of it, then people pick up on it very quickly.
Jesse: Well, I guess I wonder about, you know, you called out the distinction between taking on a real challenge and simply stepping into a role where you’re running the design delivery machine.
Che: Yeah.
Jesse: And I wonder If there’s an element in how you define leadership, that involves questioning the way that things are done, re-engineering things, re-imagining the way that things are done.
Che: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a huge role to play. I would just argue that you need to be really open with how you do that. So my philosophy is you, you don’t do that in isolation. You can kind of build your theories on things, but then start testing them with people you trust in the organization. You know, preferably your counterparts in product and tech and other things.
And then that’s what I’ve always done. I haven’t kind of been a single player. I’ve kind of managed to get a lot of people on board before I start driving anything significant. And make it as much as possible if you’re okay with not getting credit, make it feel like other people’s idea.
Jesse: What’s your favorite go-to method for driving that kind of broad alignment?
Che: I, there’s kind of probably two phases, maybe the first one is just really talking it through with people you trust that you know have influence. And really listening to their feedback. So taking that on board, but not losing sight of things. So if there’s kind of a crisp idea that you want to drive, but there’s some feedback you can take that doesn’t kind of dismantle it, so to speak, then, and you can keep the integrity of it.
And you can get them on board and there’s a very explicit, explicit ask for them to help and what they would do and when they would do it, and all of those kind of things. And then the next phase is kind of going through, not just being the kind of messaging of it through an organization, but like making it real for people, like I said before, like understanding the kind of rhythm of an organization through financial planning and objective setting, roadmaps, whatever it might be.
Make sure that you have a very clear tie into that process. You work with whoever’s driving that process through the organization. You find all of the moments you’re in, all of the meetings, you drop everything else you’re doing to get the, the work, that… the idea kind of seeded and then baked into plans.
And then depending on what you’re doing, whether it’s proof of concepts, whatever, iterations, learnings, yeah, that, that’s kind of where I would typically kind of drive things through.
Driving change throughout the organization
Peter: I’ve seen some attempts at change from on high, particularly around new ways of developing product, and what I’ve seen is the leadership articulating a vision for how they want things to work. And then as change starts rippling, kind of, deeper and deeper into the organization, it becomes more and more diffuse.
And at the point where the work is actually happening, the change doesn’t hit them. And they continue to work the way they always have. And I’m wondering what you’ve put in place to try to really, kind of, get change to make it something that happens at the, the, those points of delivery and not just something that’s talked to. “Look, we have this journey map and we have a North Star, and isn’t that exciting everyone?” But then when you find out designers are still being just kind of told what to do and everyone’s just moving tickets on a Jira board and they’re working the way they always have. What were those mechanisms to really drive change it at a detailed level?
Che: Well, typically there’s like an incentive structure in any organization, so I guess you need to understand how that operates, whether it’s tied to bonuses and equity and pay rises and performance. So that cycle’s typically deeply tied to planning and performance reviews. So I think you have to understand that and the mechanisms that drive it and what people are motivated by.
And if you understand that, then you can show value to different layers of the organization. Design systems, like the early kind of piece that we drove through and were able to consolidate, that felt like it was an impossible thing to do. Where we were able to basically set objectives across other business units that I didn’t have direct control over through leaders getting on board with the plan and understanding the value and doing it, and then driving that through the organization.
And at the same time, the design community were kind of talking about how they could do it, working with engineering. And working through pain points and problems in parallel so that it didn’t just get stuck and engineering said, no, this is, doesn’t make sense. So you know, obviously there’s a lot of depth and detail to the hands-on approach of how that works, but yeah, there was kind of two layers to it.
It, it doesn’t always have to be top-down either. I think a lot of these things can feed both ways. So in that case, it was a bit of both ways. Like there were problems and pain points and things that needed to be surfaced and resolved. But it didn’t mean that we couldn’t kind of have a very crisp vision, which was like one design system for all of Booking.com that expressed the brand identity worked for the engineering community on the, you know, stacks, frameworks and everything that they were moving, technologies they were moving towards across the board. So it took into account kind of a multitude of all those different things and had the right things in place to be able to do it. And then we drove it through the planning process and had it in people’s objectives.
So it was incentivized, it wasn’t like a separate thing that if something were to happen with their top priorities, that, that they would drop. It became one of their top priorities. And that’s always key. That’s hard. That doesn’t always work. ’cause I think depending on kind of what level you’re at and where your influence is to drive what the business cares about and what the kind of top strategic priorities are, if it doesn’t fit within one of those, then you’re still gonna struggle for that year or period of years.
So, I think it’s always important and it depends on how the company runs, but you know, if we have five strategic priorities for the business, if it doesn’t ladder up to that, you are gonna really struggle where, you know, if you have attrition throughout the year or whatever it might be, the one team that was driving it has some people out for a while, stuff that’s naturally gonna get dropped ’cause it’s newer, it’s not as tangible.
So yeah, there’s no guarantee, but I think that’s, that’s all you can do is kind of really bake it into that process. Then performance planning cycles, et cetera.
Jesse: You have this whole big diverse group of people under your care. These different crafts within design, each with their own areas of focus and their own, you know, values associated with those crafts, cultures associated with those crafts. You also have a product organization that has its own culture.
Balancing autonomy and cohesion
Jesse: Everybody is running in a million different directions, doing a million different things. How do you create a sense of cohesion in an environment like this? How do you make it actually feel like we’re all on the same team? When people are focused on different things, using different language, working in different areas?
Che: I think we’re still on that journey, to be honest. Like it’s really hard in such a big company and they’ve been able to be autonomous and there’s been a lot of value in these autonomous teams to date, but there’s also a level of autonomy that’s still good, and there’s another layer, which I believe and other folks believe that you can do kind of big coordinated efforts around that. So as a business, we released last year an articulated product vision that’s really tangible, that gets broken down to journeys, customer problem statements, you know, all based on data that we have in research that we’ve done.
So we have now something that everyone can ladder up to, and that’s been tried in the past and it’s failed. But this time there’s very, there’s very little to no pushback from any part of the organization. Everyone’s really inspired by it. Everyone’s really engaged with it. It’s actually motivated a lot of people, teams have come forward to say, how can we contribute? How can we help?
So some of it’s organic, but then there’s also now a need of like, if we want to do these big coordinated efforts and we do want to have more of a portfolio view, how do we go about doing that? So we have a north star, we have some tangible concrete work around it.
And the next step for us is, I think laying out a set of kind of principles. Like you could argue that different product teams still have different ways of how they would make decisions and trade offs. I think we’re kind of at a point where we need to be able to say, look, this is how, you know, our ways of working principles from a technology point of view, from a product point of view, end up all laddering up to a set of like consistent principles in the way that we want to work and how we make decisions, how we make trade offs, and then give people a lot more space.
I think there’s still a bit of that still going on in, in kind of the microcosm and people making their own principles, you know? But I think this is kind of a cultural thing, like people, like teams. So is your team Booking.com or is it like a level down, or is it at a group level, like product area? Is it a single team?
You know, with so many teams, it’s like, at what point do you kind of, and kind of ladder it up and say, that’s the team that I’m part of. I’ve always struggled a bit with this and it, and like teams create their own brands. Like in a, in a blank canvas world, I’m like, maybe we can just have like 150 teams and it’s like, Team one through to 150.
And then, like, as a leadership team, we can be, like, here are the strategic priorities of the business. And then everyone can kind of, we understand the skillsets and we can pivot and we can be like, we’re gonna go after that this year. And everyone can, but you know, these are theoretical. And, but I think some people want a sense of belonging in that.
But I also think those things are dangerous ’cause people get stuck on the thing that they care about, that they’re delivering at a certain part of the organization. That if the strategy changes the environment, the business landscape, the travel market, they’re kind of stuck. And, and that can be really hard.
And so to pivot or create more mobility and go after certain topics and things that are more coordinated, then, that’s where I think is a big challenge, like for, for us, but also a lot of companies do that, and I, I think that’s just a natural way that people work. They want to feel part of something and they go over and work for team, you know, ABC and that’s the one that kind of is, it’s the thing they care about at that particular time.
Jesse: Right. And as much as you want to give people a sense of identifying with their work and identifying with the particular piece of it that they are delivering, at the same time, there is still this need to raise their awareness of what’s going on outside of their individual tunnel vision within their teams.
How do you do that?
Che: There’s lots of mechanisms. I mean, there’s just like the standard kind of communications and all hands, and we use, you know, Facebook’s Workplace. Groups have open channels that they share updates and all sorts of things. There’s not a consistent way that we do it, so everyone kind of communicates differently in different layers.
But that, that, that kind of works. Maybe as a leader you’d probably like sifting through a few things to figure it out. Cause it’s not as standardized, so it could be possibly a bit better. Yeah, but I, I also kind of, back to the other point, there’s, there’s domains and there’s capabilities and services and things that people also still need to really own.
So you want that institutional knowledge for those kind of things to be, to be really, really well looked after and platforms, et cetera as well. So there’s that part. But yeah, I don’t think there’s like a specific way to kind of communicate out and get everyone on the same page when there’s so much going on. The planning cycle helps a bit and that kind of opens up at a company level all the different things that are going on and how people are prioritizing things. And a lot of those things are continuations from years prior, so you can kind of see that’s where things start to come together and glue and ladder up, and you get a better view.
Through the year, you typically don’t get that as well, depending on kind of mailing lists and, and your activity on Workplace or all hands or…
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Che: …or whatnot.
Jesse: Mm-hmm. I’ve heard you talk a lot about aligning people to a vision that kind of comes down from above, so to speak, but you’ve also talked about the importance of giving your teams and the leaders of those teams autonomy. How do you maintain that balance between the directive from above and giving people the freedom to explore and come up with solutions creatively at a lower level?
Che: Yeah. So I think people need that kind of tangible vision of the future. I think it’s then how you articulate how you get there and that it doesn’t necessarily need to look like that at the end of it. So it’s okay. There’s gonna be things that change along the way. That’s the nature of it. So this thing that they’re working towards they have all of the opportunity to shape that or completely change it and throw it out the window.
But you need something to start, and that’s the starting point. . And then through particularly our culture, it’s a way of releasing things, trying things, experimenting, iterating, getting feedback, talking to customers, partners, et cetera, and, and building on it over time. So all of the good stuff comes from the teams making it, not the leaders kind of defining a direction.
Peter: I’m now thinking about feedback loops. What, if any, mechanism is there from the learnings that’s happening on the ground that might feed back and inform the vision and actually change that north star, or does that happen? Or once a north star’s created, it’s, it’s set and then maybe five years from now you’ll go back and change it in a, in a big push?
Or is that, is a north star something you can iterate on?
Che: No, north star’s absolutely something you should iterate on. Cause I think that’s where companies can go to the graveyard if they get too fixated. I think, you know, you always need to be looking at the future and the entire landscape and being really conscious of what’s happening and being okay to pivot and adjust.
So I think, yeah, those learnings need to come back into product and the business and, and all the teams in between that need to actually understand it. You know, like I said, we’re kind of very much on that journey. We’ve done this with lots of other things in the past, but we’re now on it for the entire, entire company. So we’re, we’re in that process. I think it’s at the right levels. It’s now what things you measure, how you measure them, what metrics from the different proof of concepts and things like that. Now we’re kind of biting off chunks and driving forward with, with pieces of it. So we can kind of start understanding how we build certain things and if they’re valuable.
‘Cause if we go all in on building a capability for a year or two and the functionality to then be able to build experiences on top, and by the time we get there, the whole thing’s changed. That’s very dangerous. So there’s certainly an iterative approach because our products are alive and, and operating really, really well.
We kind of have to be, we have to tread fairly gently, but it doesn’t mean we can’t kind of make those learnings, consolidate them to release larger than life features that we’ve struggled a bit with, I guess, in the past. It’s more smaller improvements, and I think we’re getting to a point where we’re able to actually do some bigger shifts.
Peter: You mentioned earlier about how you have changed, particularly in the last, what is it, I guess a couple years, year and a half since you’ve been in this role. But I don’t think you shared some specifics. So I’m curious, like what were some of your preconceptions or, you know, tenets that you used to hold, that now in this role, with a broader mandate, you’ve had to let go of and embrace new, new ways of, of thinking, new mindsets.
Che: Probably the main one is that I felt like, with all my experience, I was probably a little bit of over the top in terms of what I would think and how confident I would be with what would work with running certain experiments or making certain changes. And the data can often tell you otherwise, and it’s, it’s just a really interesting thing and, and sometimes you want to be bullish and be like, no, no.
That’s just a kind of like, that’s part of the pain of like the initial change. It’ll kind of get better over time, but maybe it doesn’t get better over time. So it, it is actually, the main thing I’ve learned is, you know, I, I think you should measure everything. I don’t necessarily, I, I wouldn’t have come into Booking thinking that you do.
But we literally measure absolutely everything because it, it’s, it surprises you more often than not. And that feeds into how you make decisions. People can obviously, depending on how you set up, kind of game that a little bit in terms of what they do. But I think the more disciplined you are, the more you kind of look at it and as a team understand it and try more things and iterate.
It’s, it’s incredibly valuable. I just, I never thought I would be quite in that head space. I probably came in more leaning on my experience of what has worked in the past, and now I’m a little bit more balanced. I would say Booking was probably over the top. It was like if it hasn’t been proven at Booking, like even if you’ve done it at Amazon or whatever, you still had to come and prove it at Booking. That was kind of the mindset. I’m not, I’m not fully there at all. I think I’m still in between. I think there’s some things that you can apply that certainly work from other, other places that have learned a lot as well.
Peter: You haven’t let go of design. It’s just less of your, it’s less of your focus, given that you have these product responsibilities, and as you’ve embraced these product responsibilities, I’m wondering what did you see, if such a thing exists, standard issue product management practice, that you’re, like, stop doing that.
Like, we have, you know, maybe we have five product managers listening to this podcast ’cause it’s primarily a design podcast, but for those five product managers, what would you say to that audience? That community, like, you all seem to keep doing things this way and I’m here to tell you now that I’ve seen more, like, stop doing that.
What are, what are some product management practices that maybe should be sunsetted or that could be informed by smart designerly approaches?
Che: Right… Can I start with one thought that’s somewhat on topic of, and then I’ll, I’ll jump.
Peter: Take it where you will…
Product needs to bust their siloes
Che: So the thing that I’ve observed that’s worked well, I’m kind of flipping it a little bit. It feels like a very obvious one, but as a product manager, really lean on the other skillsets around you.
So don’t think that as a product manager, you know everything and you just go out and gather data from the research team, the data scientists, and then the designers help you kind of build that. Like, and it’s, it’s leaning on everyone’s, if you’re building plans and I mean that like, in detail and really listen to them.
So that’s kind of, I, I think that’s the key thing that makes PM successful is, is gathering all of that and being the kind of orchestrator of it. And having all of that at their disposal, but also just it should really feel like a team at equal, kind of, seat at the table. So the PM, while they might make the final call on the roadmap to be able to do that, I think they have to operate as a team and listen to everyone really well.
Then they can push back on certain things and be the decider. So I’m kind of flipping it. In terms of like standard stuff, I think it’s that PMs typically look at their area and just drive that and struggle a bit more with how they can actually open up to things going on elsewhere in the organization and make sense of it. So if they’re doing something in their particular area, it’s like how could that affect something maybe in a more negative way, in a different area?
I see that a lot in, in big organizations. So, and there’s concrete examples where the experience can really take a big hit because one team’s going down one path and that’s just the way they operate. So it’s, it’s, it’s towards that kind of silo thing where I think you get a lot out of the lens of UX and design from thinking about how everything works together as a system and all the different touchpoints and experiences that people have.
So, as a PM, that’s the one thing I would kind of upskill is how you work. You know, whether it’s more horizontally, whether it’s how you contribute to the larger strategy and always kind of be thinking about how you do that. And if there’s technologies that are kind of more centralized and standardized across the company, how can you embrace those so that the whole thing runs more smoothly?
‘Cause at some point they’re gonna rely on them whether they like it or not. And there’s just too many independent decisions would be my way of putting it. And I think to kind of release that a little bit and look to kind of how you make more joint decisions as a PM.
Peter: Research is going through an evolution. You have UX research aligned with design or UX teams. You have market research in marketing. You have data and analytics. You’ve got customer service and what they’re learning. And I’m curious what your best guess is in terms of how organizations can best take advantage of research. And now that you’ve shifted from a design to a product role, where I’m guessing you’re exposed perhaps to a wider array of information and, and evidence that you’re now making decisions on, how, how has your thinking about research maybe changed over these last few years?
Che: Yeah. So many of these things are people dependent, like a lot. Everything I think about in the conversation we’ve had really depends on the people I’ve worked with a lot. So it’s just like a caveat for everything I’ve said. You know, I’ve worked with some great people. I’ve worked with some difficult people and everyone…
Peter: Who, who are the difficult people by name?
Che: No, no, no.
We’re all friends now, so it’s fine. It’s more just to start that kind of grounding in the reality that it’s, it’s, it’s so people dependent and they obviously drive the culture, too. But in the kind of theoretical space, and what I’ve seen work and not work, you know, I think research in particular, like design, needs to be at a certain level in the organization that it can look at everything and be able to not have control over it necessarily, but at least influence it.
And so I don’t think you need a Chief Design Officer, a Chief Research Officer, a Chief UX Writing Officer. Like I, I think at some point everyone has to understand that it’s still a business and there’s kind of certain levels and then where you can have influence is kind of at what level the, the most important then aspect.
And it also comes down to the person a bit. So in that leadership role where I think research plays a big role in the future for us particularly, is bringing in those insights at the right moments. There’s two layers. One at the kind of planning phase for the medium long-term stuff that I talked about that is kind of coordinated and strategic and helps inform the whole company strategy.
It’s one of the components. It’s not the thing that does it, but it’s one of the components. And then the other layer is, I think it needs to be embedded in product teams and at certain levels if there’s groupings of teams. But I think you have to then have really good workforce planning because there’s times you might not need it in one area and the macro view says you need it in another area and you don’t want teams hoarding people that they don’t need and then having decision making power, it’s to switch a research role to an engineer or whatever, ’cause their roadmap dictates it.
You need a holistic view. Workforce planning needs to be in the hands of those particular disciplines or crafts. So research or design or writing. But I think particularly in, in, in research that’s super important. Particularly because of the size. So if you look at the size of an engineering organization versus product versus design versus writing versus research versus data, you often, like, you’re talking about research and writing, probably being, in particularly our case, the smaller ones where there’s like 60 to 80 people versus thousands.
So if engineers are yelling really loudly, they’re probably gonna get what they want. If the research 80 researchers are yelling really loudly, they’re gonna have to yell really loudly. And that’s kind of the, the, the way a lot of software development works now, right? And it’s, it is very engineering focused.
Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s not, who am I to say? But I think the smaller crafts, like research, need to have that voice. So they need to have a point of influence in the organization. They need to be embedded, but they need to be in control of their workforce planning and they need to understand the company’s strategy deeply enough to be able to align the right people against the right things.
That’s my kind of common sense view of it. And that’s where they can have the most bang for their buck. And that’s certainly where we are now. It’s taken us a while to get there. There’s a bit of stuff to still continually do. And Molly Stevens, who joined us from Uber, kind of similar time that I joined, she was director of research there is now our Senior Director of UX.
So we have all of design, writing, and research reporting in to Molly. And she’s been fantastic. Shout out to her in kind of instrumenting that and having a voice at the right senior level. So I think we’re, I think we’re in a really good spot, to be honest. But that’s, that’s how I would, that’s my experience from where I am now.
And it might change over time, but that’s what I think works well.
Jesse: I have one last question for you because I know that this is a question that a lot of design leaders have on their minds as they are sitting across the table from their counterparts in product. Che, is the grass actually greener on the other side?
Che: Uh, No? I, I, I don’t, no. Um, um, I want to, I, I, It’s so early. Like I feel like our industry’s so young, you know, software engineers have been doing it for a little longer. But it’s so young. I think we need people to kind of also not, not just do what I’ve done, but like a mix of both.
So don’t feel like you have to move to product. That organically happened for me. It wasn’t an intentional thing. Like I’d almost happily kind of run all design again, or, or what, like it’s not a so I don’t think it’s a one or the other if I’m me. Um, But it’s a, yeah, look, it’s a super exciting space right now.
I just think there’s still a lot of maturity and evolution that needs to happen. Peter, you talk a lot about this and yeah, I think we need, there’s still a long way to go and so I think there’s a lot of stuff that we can still shape it. The whole industry’s still young in my opinion. We need to kind of be aware of that and be conscious of it, be okay with it.
I think sometimes we’re trying to find, fight something that doesn’t even exist and that people that they’re fighting against don’t even care about. So it, it’s kind of almost a lost cause from the beginning. You’re wasting energy instead of just kind of going about it.
Jesse: Che, this has been great. Thank you so much.
Che: That’s okay. I loved it too. I enjoy talking about it. Nice to have my brain picked occasionally.
Peter: Is there any way that you like people to keep up with you out there on the internet? So are you writing or speaking or whatever, or do you have channels that you’d like folks to engage with you?
Che: I, once I start at businesses and I’m doing these big, what I feel like changes, I’m so all in that I’m absolutely useless on every social media platform known to man. But if anyone wants to reach out, LinkedIn’s probably the best way if they want to connect me. But yeah, I’m, I’m sadly a bit useless on them.
Peter: It’s all good. That’s why, that’s why we’re here to fill those voids.
Che: Thank you for helping I appreciate it.
Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
36: The Chief Design Officer as Corporate Executive (ft. Jehad Affoneh)
Mar 06, 2023
Transcript
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
And we’re finding our way
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, Jehad Affoneh, Chief Design Officer for the restaurant point of sales system Toast, joins us to talk about driving an experience strategy across functions beyond design, dealing with tricky executive stakeholders, and how his background in engineering informs his work now as a design leader.
Peter: Hi Jehad, great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us today. As you know, we’ve been talking to folks who have a title of Chief Design Officer, SVP of Design, SVP of UX trying to better understand just what this role and responsibilities entails. So that’s what we’ll be digging in with you today.
So thank you for joining us.
Jehad: Thanks for having me.
Peter: Awesome. So the first question we’ve been asking everybody, and we’ll ask you, might as well start on the top rope: How do you define the role of Chief Design Officer? That is your current title at Toast, I believe that was your title at Splunk. What, what does that mean? What are the responsibilities? How are you held accountable? What does your leadership want from you? All of that.
Defining the Chief Design Officer role
Jehad: So first of all, thanks for having me. I’m excited to chat with both of you.
If you think of the role of any kind of executive team member, there are three main things you’re doing.
One is your discipline’s contribution to the business. So if you’re the chief, you know, technology officer, you’re leading technology for the company. If you’re the chief people officer, you’re taking care of culture for the company. So your discipline’s contribution to the company.
The other one is how you’re building your team and how you’re building that organization that drives that work, and bringing talent, hiring, growing talent, setting up the right culture for that team to, to bring the right culture into the company.
And then how are you uplevelling that discipline or the contribution of that discipline to the, to the company continuously? You can track that with metrics, you can track that qualitatively with, with feedback. You can track, you know, there are multiple ways to track that, but that’s, that’s a third piece.
So if you think about it that way, and obviously any executive team member is looking at strategy, helping define strategy for the company on, on vision, feedback from customers and so on. But that’s really just comes with the role. Like, if you’re at an exec role you’re helping drive strategy and execution for the company.
But if you think of these three areas, the role of a Chief Design Officer is to build, hire, and grow talented designers, user researchers, design ops folks, roles and disciplines required to operate a healthy organization. Build that culture where around, you know, skills and, high quality work and hold customers feedback and voice of customer as, as core to that story, they’re responsible for upleveling that conversation at the executive level and having conversations not just about customers in general, but about the way experiences help shape the product strategy.
And then provide language for the executive team to talk about design and user experience. So internally for a team, it’s easy for us to get stuck into, you know, the details of how user research operates and how design operates, and all the language and words that we can use in order to understand how our work is happening externally.
Externally, meaning within the rest of the company, outside of the design team. The role of a, whether it’s a CDO or VP of design, is to provide that language where the company can now talk about experience in an intelligent way that helps the company deliver more to it.
And this is, by the way, where the conversation, I don’t know if we’re gonna get there, but this is where like most conversation gets stuck on design metrics, but design metrics or experience metrics end up being a shortcut to, we don’t really understand what you do, so could you please, you know, translate it to the way the business operates.
But it’s really common language of the business.
Peter: You mentioned operating at an executive level. To whom are you reporting? Are you reporting straight into the CEO, into someone else in the C-suite? What’s your relationship with that highest level of leadership in the organization?
Jehad: At Toast, we’re still, you know, founder led to some extent.
We, we have a CEO, but we have two key founders that lead R&D and Go-to-market. So I report on the product side of the R&D organization. And I’m part of the, what we call the RD exec team, which is the triad CTO, CDO, and the Head of Product. In addition to, you know Chief Security Officer, you know, and other disciplines that are related to R&D, but we operate as that key triad of CTO, CDO, and head of product or SVP product.
Peter: Last organizational question, how, what is your responsibility, if any, for like marketing or brand design? Obviously you’re working on product design and UX research. Are you also working on the marketing and brand design, or is that handled separately?
Jehad: No, we collaborated very closely with them, but that’s handled as part of the marketing org reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer.
Jesse: And are you the first Chief Design Officer they’ve had.
Jehad: Yeah, the first Chief Design Officer. They’ve had design leaders in the organization before at different levels.
Jesse: Right. What led to the leveling up of design to a C-level function for Toast?
Jehad: Yeah, that’s a good question. I obviously have a different part of that story having, having been on the other side, but I think a couple things.
One, which usually is the case in organizations, there is usually a believer on the C-Suite that believes in, okay, we, we’ve gotten this organization as far as we can, and sometimes by the way that CDO, sometimes even CTO or other disciplines, but we’ve gotten this organization far enough with what we have.
It’s now a moment for us to uplevel that discipline and both bring someone, either, either promote someone internally or bring someone externally to make a clear point about where design now stands or where engineering and other discipline stands. And two, it’s, it’s oftentimes driven by, and I, I think that probably was the case of Toast, too, driven by the market change.
Like if you want that level of talent, there is now a, a specific expectations of, that level of talent on what the role will be in the organization. That’s somewhat taken for granted in other disciplines. Like having a CTO is kind of pretty typical thing to have.
That change is happening in design now, which is why like, it’s, it’s a novelty to have a CDO in some companies, but it’s, you know, you wouldn’t be surprised that a company is hiring a CTO, for example,
Peter: I’m curious what the difference though is between a Chief Design Officer and a VP of Design, who is the senior most design leader, whose boss is the head of product, who reports into the CEO it sounds like you’re in a very similar context as quote, VP of Design. Is Chief Design Officer simply kind of, like, good branding for otherwise a VP of Design or do you see it as actually, “No, they’re asking me to do something interestingly different than if I were called a VP of design?”
Jehad: Yeah, it’s actually interesting. It, it really depends on the company. So like, there are times where it’s branding and, and you hear about different roles, by the way, at the C level that have C-level, like chief I don’t know. I, I don’t wanna mention specific roles, but like, I was at a hospital the…
Peter: Chief Customer Officer, Chief Data Officer. Every, I mean, there’s chief everything now.
Jehad: Exactly, and obviously not everybody can report to the CEO and by the way, sometimes that’s not what you want either. Depending on the maturity of the org that you’re leading, and the, your place in the organization and so on.
But I do think– so, so there are places where, hey, chief is a way to, to attract talent. It’s only one part of the equation. If we give that title, we’re able to bring someone in. But really it’s, it’s, it’s internally not a big change.
Partnering with other “C”-level leaders
Jehad: And there are times when it’s actually not the case. It’s actually, part of the senior leadership team. Part of the executive team. Only people at that level have that, you know, being part of that team.
And that means you have, you have responsibilities to the company, owning the actual end-to-end experience and, and sometimes customer experience end-to-end. You are actually accountable to metrics, company-wide metrics, that’s the case at Toast. Accountable to company-wide metrics around experience, around product satisfaction, around customer satisfaction and so on.
And the other piece is we, we have been working a lot at Toast to drive, which is part of the hiring of this role, to drive the partnership in R&D around design, engineering, and product. So this role was not just about a single person, but about having triads from the top-down across the whole organization, starting with CTO, CDO, or you can think of it by the way, if you remove C titles, SVP of Engineering, SVP of design, and SVP of product, down to product teams that are operating at a designer, product person and, and an engineer.
I think that there’s a lot of debate in design about who reports to who and how reporting works. My opinion is that debate is sometimes misguided around, to do a hot take, to be controversial about, around more about ego of the person versus the actual value that the role can bring to the org.
I think the most, most important thing is, are you a partner to your product and engineering partners, or are you or are you a member of one of their teams? Like, are you a true partner to the engineering and product org, and obviously other orgs, and marketing and customer success and so on.
Two, do you have the autonomy to actually execute for your org things that might not be popular at the time, but you believe are true? Do you have the autonomy to execute alongside product and engineering versus for product and, and, and/or engineering?
And three, are you accountable for true company-wide metrics or, or, or outcomes? Or is that accountability held by someone else? Like are you actually accountable to the company? Obviously everybody’s accountable to the company, but is part of the company’s key experiences or metrics part of your accountability, or are you, you know, delegated that accountability through someone else?
As long as you have those three, then where you report to, what your title is, obviously, you know you know, you, you get different access points, having these different areas, and there are extremes, like if you’re reporting 16 levels down, but you have these things, obviously autonomy is not there.
But in my mind, it’s less about that and more about do you have these three pieces that make you a true leader in the org.
Jesse: The first of those you mentioned is being a true partner with product and with engineering. It’s interesting because we hear so much about the need for better partnership there. And I think that in a lot of cases, the elevation of design to the C-level is intended to kind of enforce that partnership because a lot of people really, they don’t know what a good true partnership actually looks like here because nobody in the room has had that experience.
What do you think makes for a good true partnership between product, design, and engineering?
Jehad: Yeah, I think obviously every discipline brings something else to the room, but I think a true partnership means true ownership of the overall outcomes of that triad. So, you know, if, if you’re a, if you’re a partner in that team, you’re involved in and, and you have ownership over, how do we come up with the strategy?
So, like, what are we gonna go actually achieve next year at any level, by the way, even if you’re leading a team, what ways in which we’re gonna actually go and measure the success of that strategy, and then owning the outcomes of the execution of that strategy, even when it’s not necessarily the execution of your team.
So, like, if you’re having a conversation that says design has shipped, but engineering hasn’t, you’re not really a true partner. ‘Cause at the end of the day, yes, you might not be the head of engineering, but you have responsibility as a true partner to figuring out how do the three of us sit in the room and, and drive that level of accountability.
In my mind, shared outcomes and shared metrics is, is, is the north star way you materialize true partnership. ‘Cause if you’re responsible for, Hey, look, your metrics as the head of design or leader of the design team or the design discipline is, you know, as long as you ship these three metrics, you ship on time, you deliver a great experience, whatever that means, and you, your team is happy, you’re good if those are the metrics you’re tracking.
Notice that none of these metrics talks about actually shipping the product. None of those metrics talk about product market fit. None of those metrics talk about revenue. None of those metrics talk about you’re staying in business.
So if, if you don’t really feel accountable for the other metrics or quote unquote other metrics that truly form triad accountability, then you’re not really a true partner. The, the opposite is true if, if, if your engineering and PM partners don’t feel accountability towards experience metrics, they’re, they’re not true partners.
True partnership is often formed, together. It’s a partnership. So like if you’re not coming up with the metrics together, if you’re not building the metrics together, if you’re not building the strategy together, if you’re not accountable together, if your rituals are separate, then you know, you might be a great collaborator, but that’s not necessarily the same as a great partner.
Jesse: Mm-hmm. That makes so much sense to me. And at the same time, I also hear from design leaders that they want unique metrics for design because they need to provide pro of of design’s unique contribution to the organization and that these blended or shared metrics actually make it easier for design’s contribution to be kind of swept under the rug.
Metrics and organizational maturity
Jehad: Yeah. And it’s very fair, and it depends on the kind of maturity of the org, but the way I think about it, and I’ve been there too, there are metrics that prove your worth and there are metrics that are actually valuable. And those two are not always the same.
Sometimes they are, but they’re not always the same. So as an example, if you’re early on in your design leadership role and the company is early on in their design maturity, maybe the metric that proves your worth is the opinion of engineering and product of you. And that’s not gonna stay the same. And I know that like to many designers or design leaders who are hearing this conversation, this might be like an allergic reaction to that statement.
Peter: Let me interrupt ’cause I’m curious if that’s something you’ve had in prior jobs. You’ve worked in very engineering heavy companies, very tech driven companies. Was that something you needed to do to build that maturity muscle? Is that, is this born of your experience?
Jehad: Yeah, it is. And, and sometimes if you step aside and say, let’s say it’s not a mature design team and not a mature organization from the way design is viewed, if you step out and say, I gotta invent my own experience metrics, that I’m now gonna build the whole thing around them to measure them and I’m gonna report on them, but the organization’s not even ready to talk, to have that conversation, instead of proving your worth, you’re seen as like, you know, vanity conversations around things that we don’t care about. So like, you’re spending so much time building these metrics that we don’t even care about versus, I’m actually gonna work very closely with my engineering and PM partner.
Doesn’t matter if they see me as one yet, but I’m gonna work very closely with them, have ownership over what we’re shipping and not shipping, talk the language of that team, which by the way, could be, most teams have an experience language that is not up to our standards in design maybe, but most teams talk about experience in one way or another. They talk about it in adoption. They talk about it in customer qualitative feedback. They talk about it in NPSs.
So there is a bunch of different language in the business that exists. How do you capitalize on the existing language and say, I understand it. I’m accountable to it. I’m gonna help you get there. Could be a great starting point for someone in engineering and PM to say, I could have not gone in there if this, if, if it wasn’t for this person or if it wasn’t for this team.
And then capitalizing on saying, now that we’ve had that credibility, let me tell you how we can do this better. Like, let me tell you this one other metric that if we track, we can provide such a, you know, a much better experience there. But taking the leap of faith from, you know, we don’t know what design does to let me tell you the exact metrics I’m gonna invent and then hold myself accountable to is sometimes too, too big of a gap to be effective. Again, depending on the org. That’s by the way, not the story at Toast, for example, but that was the story in previous roles earlier on.
Jesse: You’ve touched on organizational maturity a couple of times, and I wonder how you see that tracking with the age of the company. ‘Cause you’ve worked for some older, much more sort of established companies, as well as companies that were much, much earlier in their life cycles. And I’m curious how you see the organizational life cycle affecting the way the design is received and the way that design is done in these organizations.
Jehad: I think it plays a factor, but I think structure of the team you’re immediately having an impact on is likely far more important. So like, if you think about, you know, our roles in different organizations, there is probably a role you don’t understand. Like, we talk about design a lot because we’re designers and that’s our thing. But like, if, if I ask you what do you think a business analyst does and what is their value to the organization? And there…
Peter: They analyze business.
Jehad: It’s, I mean, it’s very clear. I understand, but uh, but you know, like there are so many roles in every organization and, and there are roles within roles, right?
Like in design, in, in the, in the big umbrella of design, there is product designer and user researcher and design ops and blah, blah, blah. And two things are true. Not everybody needs to understand these roles. Like it’s just impossible for, for like a CEO, for example, as the top of the umbrella, or the board, to understand every single role that makes this organization tick.
And not every role deserves a full discipline and team and, you know, a large umbrella of a C-level role or, or something like that. It’s just, just not scalable as an organization. So if, if you think about it from that perspective, and then think about the next step of, okay, and then how do we make the decision for what gets a larger umbrella versus what doesn’t? There are two paths to that.
There is the path of advocating for, I’m gonna start at the C-level and I’m gonna convince every single executive in the organization that design is the most important thing under the sun. Or there is the path of saying, I’m gonna actually make impact in a circle that I can actually influence.
Depending where you are in the org, that could be media team, that could be the VP team, that could be you know, the engineering team. You know, it depends where the org is and what’s the center of influence. And a lot of the time the center of influence is not where you think it is.
Like if you’re an engineering-heavy organization, individual contributor senior engineers hold a lot of weight. So collaborating closely with architects ends up being such a huge impact on how design is seen across the org. One, because they’re thinking at a high level. They’re not bogged down by the daily details of what they need to ship every day. Two, they have systems thinking already. They apply it differently, but they’re actually very close to the way we, we operate in design. And three, they’re generally at the level of maturity where they have the company’s hat on, versus their individual team, even though they’re attached to a specific team, but they’re still thinking, how can I make this company better? And they have a ton of influence. They have influence on the executive leadership team.
They have influence, and this is just an example, not saying always start there, but if you’re an engineering-heavy organization collaborating with these senior engineers may be a far more effective path, than let’s build design metrics across the org that’s gonna convince the CEO that C-level role is needed.
And then how you deliver in collaborating with these architects on, you know, whatever their goals are, ends up being a huge ticket to, ” Wow. Like imagine if every architect in this organization had a, had a designer working with them. Now imagine if every engineer in this organization had a designer working with them. Now imagine if every team had a senior level person working with them. And then take it from there into, into, you know, into that story.
But that, but you have to understand the organization and the way it operates. And that’s less about the age of the team or company and more about like what tools and, what does the environment give you.
Peter: I wanna kind of follow this thread, but specific to Toast, where you’ve been there, if LinkedIn is accurate, about seven months. So still pretty new.
Jehad: Six months. Yeah.
Peter: Six months. Yeah. And I’m curious what you found when you joined, how much was already set in place? I.e., your product peer and your engineering peer, had they been there, had they developed a relationship that you now had to find your way into, or was everyone new and you were all figuring it out together?
You know, as you’re talking about relationships and navigating organizations to understand how to situate yourself to be effective, what was that experience like for you six months ago as you assumed this, this role at Toast?
Jehad: Yeah. So it, it’s kind of mixed. As an example for my triad, like the immediate triad, the SVP product has been there for a few years– two, three years. But my partner in engineering, our CTO, joined I think a month after me, if I’m not mistaken. So we, we had like a chance to set up the triad together.
Two of three members of the key triad joined recently. The person, Steve, who leads R&D, is one of the co-founders. So he has been there since the early days of the first line of code. So there is a mix of that.
Managing change
Jehad: But on that note, which kind of gives me just quick something to think about, there is no organization that’s not changing. I think one of the key things a design leader can do is figure out what change that’s happening and how you tie in the change you wanna drive into it. Like in my case, for example, a new CTO joined, the product leader was there, and he was, he’s, he’s an awesome partner to work with, working together and, okay, what, how do we wanna shape this relationship, was, was the change that you can tie a lot of stuff into. We want to build triads across the org. We want to drive change across the org. Here’s how it’s going to work. In other organizations, the change could be, people have been there for a very long time, but the team is going through, I don’t know, some change management process around… process. We want to change planning. Okay, let’s change planning together. Let me tell you how I can help change planning. Whatever it is, there is always something to tie into.
Jesse: And when you think of the change that you see yourself driving, as a design leader, the change that you want to weave into the change that’s already unfolding in the organization, what guides your choices?
Jehad: Yeah. That’s a good question. I think like looking six months back, like maybe three or four things that influence this.
One is conversations with a team. So spending time and the listening tour, and I, I use team as a larger kind of umbrella. It’s not just the design team, the, the, the R&D organization. Spending time with the team to understand, first of all, how do we see the quality of what we’re shipping? Like, are we happy with the experience we’re shipping? And if not, why not? Obviously you develop your own opinion, but listening from the organization tells you a lot about how much bar raising you need to do.
Listening to, How is designing versus shipping? Many good experiences die in Figma graveyards where like, you know, “yeah, yeah, let me tell you this experience that we’ve designed six months ago that never shipped and never will ship because, you know, because,” and sometimes it’s not because of engineering. Sometimes it’s because it was designed in a way that cannot be shipped. Sometimes it’s engineering is not shipping and sometimes product doesn’t believe in it, but listening to these stories is really helpful. So that listening piece is one piece.
The corporate strategy and company strategy is the other piece. Where do we actually want to go? And most companies have a three-year strategy at a minimum. So understanding that longer term strategy, not just next year.
There’s the piece of digging deeper into the team dynamics for design in particular. Do we have the right talent? Do we have the right people? Do we have the right skill sets? Do we have the right organizational structures that enable that to happen?
And then the last piece is process. Do we have, you know, is this, hey, we actually have the tools in the toolbox and we’re just not using them effectively, or we are using them effectively and can use them better. Or is this like, actually, there is more change management to happen process-wise? Understanding those four were the key pieces to kind of setting up, but okay, here’s our experience strategy.
Developing an experience strategy
Peter: And when you set up an experience strategy, is this your own n-month plan? 12 month plan, 18 month plan? Like you mentioned the three year strategy. Are you doing kind of your own version, probably not with this distance to horizon line, that you start to work towards? How, how explicit does that become? How broadly shared? Is it, does everyone understand it?
Explain kind of how that strategy gets operationalized or manifest.
Jehad: So about three to four months in, so two, three months ago we kind of developed that experience strategy working with the design leadership team, our general managers of each one of the lines of businesses that we have, as well as the R&D executive team.
I own the experience strategy, so I’m the single threaded owner that’s accountable for that, for delivering on that strategy. And the strategy has two pieces to it.
Here is how we think of experience as Toast, which impacts every single person’s job in R&D. So for example here’s how we’re gonna measure our experiences before we ship them. Here’s the level of quality we expect from every product that ships across the organization. Here is how we’re gonna work closely with support on our customer experience. So this is every single team, here’s the framework by which experience is gonna work at Toast.
So that’s one piece.
And the other piece, and here are very specific projects that I’m accountable for that will lead experience on product, customer, and end-to-end experience.
So on, on customer experience, here’s the work that specifically Design will own in working with our customer success team to improve our customer experience on product. Here are the specific two or three product leverages that we think our experience is a very important piece and we’re gonna own the metrics on.
And, you know, I’m accountable for both, I’m accountable for experience metrics across the org. But obviously you can’t be accountable for every product experience. Your, your teams are and your triads are. But personally that, that’s not the role. But accountable for that framework being implemented, measured, tracked, and part of our quarterly business reviews.
And then on the other side, here are specific projects that design will be the, someone from design will be the single threaded owner in, in driving. Obviously also tracked by metrics, but specific outcomes that we’re gonna drive next year. And that timeline is 2023.
Peter: So what you’re explaining feels quite mature, quite robust. And my sense is most of the design leaders that I know and work with wouldn’t know how to build a strategy like this, right? Because they’re not thinking about things always from that business lens or have that understanding.
And so I’m curious how, how much of this was something that you created, that you said, this is my playbook, this is, this is how I make sense of things. How much was asked of by the head of R&D and your peers? Like how did you know that this was the shape for this strategy to take?
Jehad: Yeah. That’s a good question. I think it’s a kind of combination. So we, we, the product team and, by product I’m using the bigger umbrella of product, you know design, engineering and product. The product team is accountable to deliver a strategy for, like, the way it works at Toast before we do planning. Like, here’s what we wanna go do next.
And the expectation was, and that’s part of the work we did as a triad, the expectation was there are product strategy pieces that cross everybody’s work. Like, how are we gonna go ship Product X and product Y is, is a combination and triads in that product area need to go and tell us what they wanna do.
There are pieces though that are horizontal across the org or pieces where we wanna lean in more on either engineering or design in particular. So on engineering, think about scalability, reliability, engineering effectiveness, so on, so forth. On design, think specific rethinking of, of areas of the experience.
You can think of design system and other things, but there are areas where, hey, we’re gonna take a lead on reshaping this specific experience.
Trying my best to say it without giving the specific example for 2023, not giving away strategy. But, that design saying we wanna do horizontally. That ends up being for, for engineering and design, what, what we’re sharing that are specifics, and then a point of view on how we’re gonna track across all of these different products, how we’re gonna track that we’re delivering good experiences in a reliable, scalable, secure, et cetera way.
So it’s, it’s a combination. Like there was an expectation that the triad would deliver that product strategy with specific horizontal deliveries, but also that expectation was more of, we need an experience strategy. There wasn’t really an expectation and here’s how it’s gonna look like. And I think that’s the role of a CDO, like that’s, that’s a huge part of the role of the CDO.
And by the way, that’s shared. Like it starts with, you know, we presented it to the executive team, the whole executive team. Tons of great feedback because the marketing team looks at it from their perspective. And if that’s good enough, the customer experience team looks at customer care. Service team looks at it from their perspective. The CEO looks at it from their perspective. We took that feedback, shared it with the rest of the organization. We shared it with the R&D team first, and then with all of Toast, as this is Toast’s experience strategy. This is not the design team experience strategy.
And by the way, we call it experience strategy on purpose. This is not a design strategy. This is Toast’s experience strategy. This is how experience is gonna happen at Toast moving forward.
A big part of that strategy is, is the frameworks by which we know we’re gonna, we, we will, and we, we will ship a good experience and we know we’ve shipped a good experience. Calling it design strategy, in my mind, limits it to, here’s what the design team wants to do, or here’s the, you know, it’s like saying you know, here’s our…
We use business analysts, but like, “here’s the business analysts’ strategy.” If, if I tell you that’s true and then I tell you, here’s a 30 minute of it, my reaction at least would be like, “good for them. Glad they have a strategy, but I don’t really need to know,” versus here’s our Toast analytics strategy. I’m like, oh, okay. I need to, I need to learn a little bit more about that because I, I need to understand how the metrics I’m driving are gonna fall into that.
So experience is the ownership of everyone. Design is the team or discipline.
Jesse: So then you are carving out a space for design within these conversations.
Jehad: Yeah.
Jesse: Yeah.
Jehad: Yeah. Design has specific ownership over key deliveries, both in terms of the frameworks, how we deliver, operationalize these frameworks. But also actually, you know, like we, we proposed and got funded for specific deliveries that will enhance our experience in, in 2023, that design owns.
By the way, these happen across the org, so like the engineering… teams that will deliver these experiences report to engineering, but design actually owns the, the, the budget and, and, and metrics for actually having these deliver and actually impacting the experience.
Handling company founders
Jesse: You were talking about engaging people across the org, and there’s one relationship within that that I’m curious about because in my experience, there is a particular kind of senior executive that needs special handling in this kind of process, and that is the company founder. And I should know because I’ve been one. So I’m curious about, as you’re doing all of this strategy work and all of this visioning work, how does that work when you’re engaging with the people who came up with the idea for the thing in the first place?
Jehad: Yeah, that’s, that’s a very good question. I, I think I mean, obviously it depends on the company and the founders, but at least at Toast we’re lucky that both founders are still very deeply involved and deeply care, but also recognize the scale at which the company operates now, that, that, that might not be the scale at which the company operated, you know, 10 years ago or, or, or even five years ago.
That said, I think founders hold a lot of keys to not just the product or strategy, they hold a lot of keys to culture. A lot of culture gets formed by the founders and, and what they care about. And most founders, at not just Toast, most founders, you know, I’ve worked with, have deep care for experience.
They might materialize those words differently, but they have, they deeply, deeply care. And they, partially, deeply care because they’ve been in the trenches selling the product, hearing from customers, getting the customer support call late at night to do something early on in their career. And that’s in, in, you know, imprinted in their, in their brains of how like, you know, the empathy is, is core to building a company.
You can’t really build a company without talking to customers. And that’s really powerful because it’s also, you know, it’s also important to translate that empathy into why you’re doing the things you’re doing. So I worked closely with our founders on the experience strategy, but one of the first things I shared as an example in the experience strategy, when we went through it, the first 10 minutes out of the hour or 10, 15 minutes were three specific customer stories.
Like we ran through, here’s a restaurant, the name of the restaurant, here’s the problem they’re facing. You know, Kate at the following restaurant, not to mention a restaurant name on here, but Kate at the following restaurant, here’s what happened when she used Product X, here’s how that product looks like.
It is a real story of what happened. And by the way, that story represents X percent of our customers. So like, this is not an anecdote but starting with these stories was really powerful in bringing back that, you know, this is about people. This is about restaurants, this is about the, the people we care about and you care about and we all deeply care about.
And these are statistically significant things for us to be, you know, paying attention to. But those stories, I think working with founders resonates a lot because again, it, it brings back the deep empathy they have for customers and the deep care they have for, for individual, you know, customers they’ve worked with, and by the way, some still Toast customers or many are still Toast customers that, you know, call the founders by name.
Bridging that empathy they have to, okay, and here’s how that translates into business and here’s how that business translates into action or what we’re gonna do about it becomes really important. Like that, telling that story in that perspective.
Peter: So you’re now hip deep, neck deep in restaurants and your prior jobs were much more technical. VMware, Splunk, your audience were developers and engineers, and now your audience are people like me who like to order from Cholita Linda down the block and the people who run those…
Peter: and the people who run Cholita Linda, and I’m just gonna keep saying their name ’cause they’re, they provide my favorite both fish tacos and Cubano sandwich in the Bay Area, but I worked at Groupon and I know that the people who run restaurants are terrible business people who don’t have I.T. Functions, right. And so, so you’re, you’re dealing with a very different audience now in terms of level of savvy, the challenges they’re facing, the role the technology plays in their lives. And I’m wondering how you’ve had to change, if at all, how you approach your job as a Chief Design Officer serving these very different audiences than the very technical, very savvy ones that you might have worked with before.
Jehad: Yeah, I think so. I wouldn’t call them very terrible business people. I would call them very passionate, hospitality oriented people who need to figure out the business to continue to provide that service…
Peter: They might be naive business people, right? That’s not what they’re getting into it for, right? They didn’t get into it to run a business. They got into it to serve food. They recognize that in order to do so, they need a business that survives, but they don’t have MBAs. They don’t understand a lot of kind of core business stuff, that, that’s not their passion.
I was being a little facetious, so that aside, how, is it just transferable, like how you led at Splunk is how you lead it Toast? Or are you having to change how you show up in the things you’re doing to accommodate now a different audience that, that your products are serving?
B2B vs B2C; tech-savvy vs tech-naive
Jehad: Yeah, a lot of the lessons you learn are transferable.
So, you know, for example starting from how you lead your team, how you hold yourself accountable, your team accountable, how do you build processes that enable teams to execute these things? And, and they don’t look the same at every company, but these things become lessons. You learn about what could work and what might not work.
But I think you know, moving to B2B2C and specifically around small businesses at Toast, there are a lot of, lot of lessons that I’ve learned over the last six months. And a lot of advantages that you can start applying previous lessons faster to. So for example, like, speaking to customers.
I’m now the guy at a restaurant, at dinner with my wife who like, you know, just gimme a few minutes and walk to the kitchen and talk to the people in the kitchen and talk to the GM of the restaurant.
And, you know and when a waiter comes in, the weirdo who says, “Do you like, do you like this device? What do you like about it? What could be improved?” for five minutes. So access to customers is a lot, is very different. When I worked at VMware, Splunk, you know, you’re working with an admin who’s at a company who you have to get access to who you, you need to plan an hour of their busy day to be able to talk to them.
So it’s, it’s a lot different. So getting a pulse is a lot easier than it was before. But also the audience you design for is very different. So how you think about the experience you’re delivering and the quality, the experience is very different.
In enterprise, people are willing to go through walls to get to the value. Like, as long as you’re delivering value to some extent, and that value is entrenched into how people operate, you can get away with a lot. That’s not obviously true for, you know, someone who’s trying to operate their business effectively and they’re run a small business and they’re run on thin margins and they have to get things done quickly.
Like, that’s a very different set of expectations that you have to design for or, or guests or consumers that have a different, you know expectations of the consumer experience. But I think the muscle of how you deliver good experience, the intuition and muscle of how do you build a good team that can deliver these good experiences, the muscle of taking ownership of the customer experience that’s delivered, that muscle is very transferable, even if the toolbox is different.
So, you know, like I think about it, if, if you’re, if you’re, I don’t know, I’m not into gardening, but if you think of gardening, planting different trees takes different types of work, but a lot of what you learn from gardening in general applies. Like, you don’t just water all your plants the same way. You don’t all, you don’t plant all of them the same way. You don’t cut the leafs in the same, you know, different seasons require you to do different things, but if you get into gardening, you know, once you’re, once you’ve learned the basics, the, the foundations and you’ve gotten good at it, then learning how to plant a new tree is a lot easier than if it’s your first.
And, and every company, every role, even by the way, VMware versus Splunk, even though they’re both in enterprise, was, was a very different role.
Jesse: Speaking of those roles and what you learned from them, you’re a little bit unusual among the heads of design that we’ve spoken to in that you really sort of came out of this world of design systems and firsthand experience in spinning them up and building them from scratch. And I wonder how you feel that experience has informed you as a design leader.
Background in design systems
Jehad: Yeah. So I started my career in engineering and I know most, by the way, most design leaders I know started their career elsewhere, like in, in a different function. Doesn’t have to be engineering, but somewhere else. And I think by the way, if used correctly, that’s very powerful.
Like being bilingual in two things is, is like I, I joke that I’m bilingual in engineering and design. It’s a very powerful way of being able to empathize with someone else in the org but also push on them in certain ways. I think working on design systems, when we set up uh, Clarity, which is the design system for VMware, we started with, I think, at the time, two, three people, or three, four people including the engineering team.
And we, we grew Clarity from nothing to the design system for VMware across 35,000 people and, and, you know, 130, 140 products. That journey teaches you a lot about what’s possible with a small team. What’s possible, you know, having to actually, and you can learn the journey in different ways by the way, but selling teams on owning a piece of their work with very little influence over that work.
So you’re owning their UI layer, you’re owning their engineering implementation components. You’re, you know, without a top-down mandate. So that was, that was very interesting. But it also teaches you a lot on, on, on the, on the challenges of the details, like things that may seem very obvious, you now understand how difficult they may be, but also you understand how to balance them.
Just an example, every designer at a certain point in their career implements a date picker or is around a team that implements a date picker. And you know, date pickers are very simple. If you think about it, like just from a consumer experience, like you, you go pick your flight. It’s very simple. You, you choose the date, you choose the time you’re good to go. Like if you go to, I dunno, Kayak or, or Expedia or something, but they’re actually quite complicated. Making them accessible is very hard. Ensuring that they’re easy to use for the use case you’re looking for is very difficult. The balance of that though is, you know, you hear stories about teams that have been, that spent eight weeks building a date picker from scratch.
Even though their product includes like two date pickers in a workflow that like 1% of users visit. And it teaches you about value, like what matters to spend time on versus not. And you also hear about teams where, you know, if you’re a travel site, that’s actually very important piece of your business and every small improvement makes a huge difference.
But that systematic thinking about the layer of who uses it, how do you build it in ways that different use cases can use it? And how do you build it in a way where engineering teams can actually use it? Like engineering productivity matters a lot. It changes your perspective about how organizations operate.
‘Cause it exposes you to all these layers of different choices you have to make on, on such a simple thing as a, you know, quote unquote simple thing as a date picker.
Peter: What led to your shift from engineer to designer to design leader. Why? Why that path?
Jehad: I don’t know if you have time on, this podcast, but, but I, I really wanted to be a journalist by the way. Like that was my dream growing up and that’s what I really wanted to do.
Peter: Well, now you’re talking Jesse’s language.
Jehad: Yeah. So when I started kind of reporting on news stories, I’m originally from Palestine, so I started reporting on news stories there.
This is very, a long time ago. It was a time where you had to set up your own website. You had to set up your own thing and you have to, you know, we used to rent servers from Softlayer and you had a server every time few thousand users show up. That got me from like, oh, actually as much as I love writing, I also love writing code.
So I really enjoyed the process of building that, that experience. And then I really loved being able to analyze consumer behavior and build that experience around it. Like the ability to have data very, I don’t know if you remember the, like server data. You, you actually get what the servers logging exactly, like, you, you, you’re really analyzing what server data is giving you and you’re trying to understand why people are going to this, this thing versus this other thing.
That was real helpful. So as, as I started as an engineer, I always kind of stayed close to customers and that was really, was really powerful to me. And that translated into, okay, how can I better write better code to do it design systems? Before design systems I worked on a product, I was, you know, this ui slash ux role where you lead both teams.
And that was kind of a transition point to me. If actually, you know, there is a ton of impact to do when you systematically improve the experience, which was through design systems and then from there, okay, like I actually really enjoy the, the impacting experiences at scale role, which is how I think about my role. Still a journalist at heart.
Not a career though.
Leading in difficult times
Peter: So you, you started at Toast six, seven months ago. The past six, seven months have been strange, to say the least, in any number of vectors. And I’m wondering what it’s meant for you, in terms of how you show up as a leader, given both the uncertainty that we’re seeing inside companies with the economic conditions and companies having layoffs and stock prices going mostly down, but also sideways.
But then also with your customers, particularly the restaurants who are probably also feeling a lot of anxiety and concern and, and yeah, because of the uncertainty. And just like, what, how, how do you help? I mean, you’ve gotta figure out your own way of navigating through it, but then how do you help the people that you’re responsible to on both sides, both in-house and externally? How do you see your responsibility helping them all navigate through this?
Jehad: Yeah. we’re, we’re lucky in a couple ways to Toast. Restaurants are surprisingly resilient to, to, you know, I don’t want to say the word recession, so I’m trying to think about a different word. So I don’t jinx this call, but, you know, recession related things. And obviously that doesn’t remove the uncertainty and it doesn’t remove the, like, nobody could have predicted a pandemic two years ago.
So, you know, like, you never know what happens. But I think the one thing that stuck with me early on in my career, I, I worked with a leader who, who was a very transparent about sharing what they’re able to share. Like, there are obviously always things that you can’t share, like, you know, financial numbers or something.
But they were very transparent. And you always knew that you had all the information that you needed to have, good or bad. And it really resonated with me that there was never, like, if there was, if there was bad news, it’s not because they knew it and I didn’t. It’s because they didn’t, which is fine.
Like there’s always uncertainty in any job, any time, any place. And that really resonated with me and I try to do it at work where, for example, as part of our rituals, I have a weekly all hands we call T G I T, Thank God it’s Thursday. Where we, you know, we have half an hour where I do top of mind and update the team.
I do Friday thoughts every single week on Slack. What I publish here is what I’ve done in my week on Friday. Here are thoughts on things happening around the economy, the business, the, the team experience. This is, you know, where I share my thoughts, but also updates happening around the team. I have an anonymous feedback form in my email signature and Slack signature that says any question, all questions are okay.
And then I answer them on Slack publicly. But basically it’s the goal of here’s all the information I know. And that that still might not be enough, by the way. Doesn’t mean I know everything or I know what’s gonna happen next week, but I know as much I’m telling you as much as I, I know. And I think navigating it with the team, versus navigating it for the team makes a huge difference.
Like the team feeling involved in that, Hey, we’re navigating this together. Nobody can predict what’s gonna happen in three months, but I’m gonna tell you what I know and how we’re thinking about it makes a huge difference in folks feeling like, okay, I’m included in this journey. And being transparent about the good and the bad.
Like, I’m, I’m not a fan of the term, you know, being a, I don’t know what we can say or not say on the podcast, but like an s-h-i-t
Peter: You can swear,
Jehad: umbrella. Yeah.
Peter: if that’s what you’re wondering.
Jehad: You know, I’m not, I’m not a huge fan of being a shit umbrella. I’m a big fan of, helping shield the team from distractions. That’s totally fair.
But I think sometimes by being a shit umbrella, we hide the reality of how things operate. Which in my mind does two things: prevents a lot of good people who have good ideas from being part of that conversation; does not prepare leaders for the next step.
Because all of a sudden, once that umbrella is removed in their new role, they realize like, holy crap. Wow, okay. Like, I gotta learn this from scratch. And the team feels like, oh, you know, I’m, I’m learning. ‘Cause once you leave the umbrella, there is always more information elsewhere. So I’m learning these things not from my leader, but I’m learning it from the rest of the organization or maybe the external market.
So I’m a fan of like, shielding your team, but also telling them what you’re shielding them from. If, if you are, and then being transparent just about what you know.
But for customers, I think it’s very similar, like being transparent with customers, with, with what you can, but also thinking about, you know, like, we think a lot about how Toast is gonna help you be more profitable. How Toast is gonna help you increase your margin, how Toast is gonna help you, like, we impact real people’s lives, and real, real people’s businesses and we take it very seriously.
And I think having that sense of urgency always to put, you know, their businesses first is, is really, really important. Internally, we talk about it at least, you know, one of the principles for design is customer, business, team, self in that order. Every decision you make, customer, business, team, self in that order. So we talk a lot about the impact to customers and every decision we make, whatever that decision is.
Design executives are here to stay
Jesse: So you’ve worked in a bunch of different kinds of organizations and you’ve touched several times on the notion of maturity, and I wonder, as you have seen everything becoming more mature in recent years, I wonder where you see all of this going.
Jehad: That’s a very fun, that’s like the meaning of life. So, I think you’ll start seeing more design leadership positions and more design leaders for two reasons. One, you know, every CDO position now, or every VP of design or SVP whatever, you know, your choice of design position, when that person leaves, if they’ve done a good job, it’s very hard for the organization to go backwards.
So you’ve just created a new role. And, if you think three years with movements, you’ve, you’ve now have a ton of organizations that might have had their first VP, their first CDO, their first SVP, but now they will have their second and third as that person goes, opens, hopefully a door elsewhere. So you’ll see more design leadership roles.
But I think you’ll see more design leadership roles than design leaders. So like the funnel will open up where companies start realizing, okay, like if I’m a competitor to, I don’t know this other company, I’m a competitor to Toast and Toast has a CDO, maybe we should start thinking about it and like, you know, what does that mean for us?
So even though it’s one role in some place, it starts opening it up. And growing design leaders to get there is gonna be a, a big deal. And, and then I think you’re gonna start seeing a lot more companies go back to basics of like, how do we make customers happy, and make, keep them engaged and have them, you know, stick on the whatever platform that you have.
You know, we had a, I dunno, was it a 10 year run of infinite VC money and infinite, you know, stock growth, where you could have experimented with a ton of stuff and enjoyed your, you know, having 70, 80 people on the problem that, you know, to its essence is, is, is 15 people, now you’re gonna get back to like, how do we do this effectively? How do we do this efficiently? How do we do this well?
Where design can contribute a lot in how we de-risk experiences before they ship. How we dis- risk experiences after they ship. I think that’s gonna be a huge part of the conversation. And then overall I think, like, the flip side of that is if you look a little bit farther, you’re gonna have a lot more CTOs and heads of product and product directors who have a lot more experience in design.
So, you know, a lot of, a lot of us been in areas where design thinking or the way design works or whatever is our specialty. I don’t think that’s gonna be good enough anymore because the product leader you’re working with will probably now know the basics to get by and knows, knows them well, or worked with a designer or design leader that was really good and they’ve learned a ton from them.
You know, the bar will go higher, in my opinion, for what a designer needs to bring to the table, which is a good thing in my, but, but also means for designers just simply coming in and saying, I can help you figure out the workflow as an exam– oversimplifying, but as an example is, is not gonna be good enough.
And that would change the dynamics.
Peter: Yeah, I hadn’t thought about it this way, but the, the late nineties to early two thousands were great for establishing whatever user experience became, before the bust happened, like we had gotten enough of a foothold that through the bust we were able to to emerge.
And perhaps these last two or three years, we’ve seen something similar now at the highest end of design leadership, where these companies, as they scaled and started hiring CDOs and SVPs of design over the last two or three years, ’cause they were, every company has a team of 60 to 80 designers.
That’s a little bit of an overstatement, but way more. And, that’s provided an opportunity of figuring out what this role is and maybe introduce this role to peers that hadn’t been exposed to it. That even if we’re retrenching, which I’m seeing across the board with my various relationships, there’s some, some flavor of retrenching happening, but there’s a general elevation of, of savvy and awareness because of what’s happened the last couple years.
Jehad: Yeah. A– as an example, this is, this is a slightly, like, exaggeration on purpose or going the extreme and purpose. But if you’re a design leader, like the moment of maturity for a design leader, in my mind at any level is when you have a conversation that says, I’d rather have an engineer more than I want one more designer.
‘Cause I care so much about what we ship, that I’d rather, like, I’ll take one designer away from my funding and give it to the engineering team. ‘Cause I feel like that’s where we can make impact.
Or I wanna be involved in an interview for the UI engineer, you know, and I’m gonna care that about, I’m gonna care about that as if it’s my top hire this year. ‘Cause I know that the quality of the shipping is actually handled by the code, not just by the Figma.
These conversations where you’re starting to think about, and I think they will happen more, they will be forced to happen more often in, in a bad economy, because, you know, it used to be, oh, no, no, you don’t have to say, I’d rather have, an engineer, we’ll have both. We’ll have a designer and an engineer.
That goes away now, like, we can have one. What do you wanna do? And if you’re part of that triad or part of that team, and you’re not thinking, I’d rather have an engineer because you know, I wanna ship more, I wanna like, I’ll figure out how to optimize my team, then, then if you’ve never had that conversation as a design leader and by leader I mean, you know, manager, IC leader then you should think about it.
Like, you should think about why not? Because then you’re, maybe, you’re still thinking downwards on your team versus across and above on, on how can I help this product mature and especially in an economy like this.
Jesse: This has been great. Thank you so much.
Jehad: Thanks for having me. Love the conversation.
Peter: Thank you. This has been awesome. How can people engage with you across the Internets?
Jehad: I’m on Twitter, kind of interesting to say that now, but , It’s @jaffoneh on Twitter. Or if you search for my name and on LinkedIn as well. Those are the two places I hang out the most.
Peter: I, I’m gonna give you a plug, I’m trying to remember the name of your website is, my name is Jehad
Jehad: Yep. mynameisjehad.com.
Peter: Okay, we’ll make sure that’s clear. I’m gonna plug that just because I’ve found it as a, a helpful resource. The writings you’ve had, not just around design leadership, but design organizations, design operations, in particular, I think you wrote about chief of staff once, that when I was doing some research, so we’ll point people to that as well. Thank you so much for your contribution today. This was great.
Jehad: Thank you so much for having me.
Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on Apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
35—The Actualized Design Executive (ft. Daniela Jorge)
Dec 19, 2022
Transcript
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
And we’re finding our way
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, Chief Design Officer for PayPal, Daniela Jorge joins us to talk about leveraging the superpowers of a designer to tackle the challenges of a leader, the leader’s role in developing the skills of their team, and leadership lessons from her time spent, both inside and outside Silicon Valley.
Peter: Daniela, welcome to our show. Thank you so much for being here.
Daniela: Thank you for having me here. I’m really, really excited. It’s lovely to see you both as well.
Peter: Jesse and I have been talking with a bunch of what I sometimes label true design executives, meaning senior, board- facing, hundreds of people in their organization, because we’re getting more and more of them in industry. There’s still not a lot, but there are more and more, and it’s definitely a trend that we’re seeing as these design organizations evolve and as companies continue to understand the impact that design can have.
At PayPal, your role is, at least according to LinkedIn, Chief Design Officer, I’m wondering how do you define that role? What are the responsibilities of the role? How are you held accountable? How do you spend your time? Just what does a Chief Design Officer at PayPal, at least, what do they do?
Daniela: It’s probably not too different, I think, than some of my other colleagues who are chief design officers, right? First and foremost, I’m responsible for the holistic experience of our customers, and at PayPal we have many segments that we serve, so that also spans all of the segments. Consumers, small businesses, large enterprises, developers. We even work on some employee experiences too.
So, and really thinking about those experiences from acquisition to obviously using our products all the way to online customer support and, you know, as the functional leader, for design or ux, I’m responsible obviously for the craft for how we’re delivering on all of these experiences with cross-functional teams.
And then equally as important, nurturing the culture, right? And making sure that we have an environment where folks can do their best work and where they feel like they’re growing and learning. So that’s what I’m, you know, largely responsible for, in terms of where I spend my time. It maps, you know, closely to those responsibilities.
The Four Components of Daniela’s Role
Daniela: So the first thing is on the strategic end, is really working with partners and with the team on defining vision. So we do quite a bit of, you know, where possible, like, working backwards exercises where we get everyone in a room and we think about what could the experience be for a PayPal developer? What could it be for a PayPal consumer? And then helping to shape that and visualize that so that it can help drive alignment and excitement for what it is that we’ll be delivering for customers.
So that’s number one is, almost that sort of facilitation of vision, right? Vision in my mind is a team sport. So we spend a lot of time facilitating those types of workshops. We have a few actually happening this week.
The other piece, which was something that we started two years ago, our customer experience reviews. So I’m part of a two- person customer experience council, and we review almost every experience that goes in front of our customers.
There are weeks when we have two or three sessions a day, where we’re looking at all of these customer- facing experiences. We’ve done, I think, over a thousand since we started.
So, and our role is, is twofold. One is to bring in that, that sort of fresh perspective, right? We, we obviously know what the company’s trying to do, we know what the customer needs are, but we’re not too close to the actual work product. So we’re coming in somewhat with fresh eyes.
But more importantly is also connecting dots. Right, Right. So we, we might observe areas where perhaps we’re showing up, like our org chart, which we all know is something that I, I think design is oftentimes trying, trying to address. So we connect those dots, we mind those seams in between teams and solutions. And then also connect teams that should be talking to each other, for various reasons, either because they’re creating redundant work, or again, not necessarily thinking of how one plus one can equals three, if they join forces and how they’re thinking about a customer problem.
Then obviously I spend a lot of time, you know, focused on growth and development of the team, so, so running the organization, investing on individuals and their growth and, you know, spending time with my direct reports.
And then the last thing is just non-UX or product work. So for instance, I’m one of the co-executive sponsors for Aliados, which is our employee resource group for Latinx, and allies. I participate also in the employee resource group for, for women at PayPal. I’m an ambassador for PayPal’s leadership principles. I do quite a bit of mentoring outside of just UX as well. So these are things that, I spend time on that are outside of what you might think a chief design officer might be doing.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Where Design sits organizationally
Peter: There’s a lot there. A lot to unpack. I think we might just be spending our time going through each of these and understanding it. An organizational situational question. And then a metrics question. The organizational situation question is like, where are you in this organization? Right?
A lot of even senior design leaders report up through some product function. Is that true of you or do you have a different organization? And then given all of these areas that where you spend your time, what does your leadership hold you accountable for? Are there metrics or numbers or outcomes that they’re expecting you to drive towards?
Daniela: Yep. We sit in the CPO organization at PayPal and CPO at PayPal includes product, engineering, design. So it’s, you know, more expansive than just product management. So part of that three legged stool. Though, we, and then we also work very closely with legal and risk and compliance. But we sit in the CPO organization in terms of metrics.
We don’t have necessarily hard metrics that I own from an experience standpoint, but we define those per project, right? So if we have a specific project that’s around helping customers achieve a specific goal, those are defined at the initiative level. That’s where more of the hard metrics live.
So for us, it’s just really the quality of our experiences. Are we seeing customers call into customer support because perhaps things are not as clear as they should be? How are these experiences testing with our customers? And then are we able to influence roadmaps to make sure that those are being prioritized and that are part of, of a team’s delivery plan.
So it’s a bit more qualitative in that regard. And then organizationally, of course, there are metrics, right? Things like attrition and whether or not we’re hiring within a specific timeline. Engagement scores for annual surveys, et cetera. So, in the people area, I would say I obviously have hard metrics. On the UX area, they sit more at the initiative level. And then I think that there’s always that qualitative feeling of whether or not right, the experiences are where they need to be.
Vision
Jesse: I noticed there’s just a lot of vision work in the description that you laid out. And it’s interesting because I see a real challenge for leaders as they get more and more removed from the roll-up-your-sleeves, do-the-design-work kind of work. Product vision starts to get to be kind of a distant thing for those leaders as their concerns become more business-oriented, more operational, more around the orchestration of the design engine, rather than being oriented around the outcome. To what extent is this an element of your style that product vision is so central to how you perform this role?
Daniela: That’s a really good question. You know, as you’ve probably experienced yourselves, I think that there’s always this separation of, of design leaders who are either visionary or operational. And I actually consider myself much more on the operational side, right? What I’ve done is like, I’ve really figured out how to lead at scale, how to work well within, within large companies.
I don’t consider consider myself a visionary leader, however where I think I, my strength is, is on the people side. How do you drive alignment?
Jesse: Mm.
Daniela: How do you drive excitement? And, and to me that’s where vision is really helpful. It doesn’t mean that I’m the one crafting the vision or even that design is the one completely defining the vision, but it’s about how do you get everyone together in a room on calls you know, whatever the, the forum might be, and then have a framework that helps to tease out that vision and package it in a way that’s accessible to everyone, right?
That whether we’re showing it to the person who might be leading customer support, to someone in sales, I think that that’s where design has a real strength. And, and where we can really help is to drive that alignment and to also make it feel real so that everyone can get aligned around that same outcome and that same end state in terms of this is the North Star, it may not be, again, that detailed execution plan, but then teams can come up with their own execution plan aligned to, to that north star.
Peter: What degree were you the initiator of the importance of vision? Was that something that you helped others around you realize that vision can be a tool for alignment? Or was that something that was realized prior to you, and you’ve been delivering on that? ‘Cause I’ve seen design leaders want to do vision work, but their, their partners are like, we don’t need that. We just need to ship things.
And so I’m, I’m just, I’m wondering where the impetus for vision is generated…
Jesse: The cultural permission almost.
Peter: Yeah, yeah.
Daniela: Yeah, it, you know, it, it varies and I would say that it’s probably varied for each situation and also depending on the altitude of the vision that, that we’re driving. Sometimes it might be that there’s a product area, and I might notice that teams are swirling. And people are coming in and it feels like they’re at odds, right?
Or, or maybe the team is aiming too low and you’re like, ah, if we could just get in a room and think a little bit bigger and that’s where, not that that I think, you know, workshops, design sprints, whatever it is you wanna call it, not that those are always the silver bullet, but that’s where I found it’s really easy to convince people to just dedicate like three days, five days, to get in a room to, to go dream little bit bigger and to get to that alignment. And every time we’ve been able to then convince people to do that, they’re sold, right? They never wanna want to work another way. They don’t want to kick off planning a different way.
So, so that, that’s what’s worked mostly, especially when it’s like at the, that product level, that initiative level. And then of course there have been times, you know, maybe there’s a very senior executive who has a vision and who comes to us saying, “Hey, can you just help us visualize this?” And through that process, you kind of influence the, you know, it a little bit more so that we’re not just the, the ones coloring in between the lines, but again, we bring in an approach where we can also help shape that narrative and, and shape it a little bit more, bring in that customer lens into the thinking. And then of course, help visualize it, right. Since that is a, a key skill that we have.
Jesse: Mm-hmm. .
Peter: And then how, how do you operationalize a vision, right? One of the concerns around visions is you get these very pretty concept cars. You get these very pretty imagery and videos of some future state experience that then people lose sight of over time and they just go back to doing whatever they were doing.
Do you have mechanisms to turn these, this vision work into something that gets metabolized within these teams.
Daniela: Yes. And, and again, it, it’s, it’s varied over time. So one of the things that, even though I’ve participated and, and driven even exercises where it was like a five year vision, I, I much prefer to drive shorter term vision activities. I feel like those are, right, much more achievable to, to the point that you’re making.
I, I have found that five-year visions are very inspirational, but don’t always translate into action. So one is just picking the right timeframe for, for defining that vision.
And then the other piece, which I think is really critical and important is your vision is a rough blueprint. so then you can actually work backwards from it and actually saying, if this, if these are the outcomes that we want to achieve or what we want to eventually deliver for customers, right, what’s the first step? What’s the first version of, of what we’re building, right? Are we going to build a living room, a kitchen, maybe one bedroom and one bathroom, even though eventually we want to have this amazing mansion? So, so I think it’s then that, that discipline of being able to work backwards from that vision and having that first step defined.
And then to add to it also not being super precious about the vision, because I think one of the beauties of, of the work that we do is, is what you learn in the process, right. So I think it’s helpful to have that north star, but you also need to leave that open, as for learning as you go and, and for having customer input shape where, where it should go because, and what you may end up in version three may not be exactly what you had figured out and, you know, for that full vision two years ago.
So I think it’s about then working backwards for the V1 and then iterating your way towards that end state.
Jesse: You said earlier that defining that vision is a team sport. I’m interested in who the players are. And how you call those players to the table when, you know, sometimes the, the interest isn’t there, sometimes the motivation isn’t there sometimes the belief in what you’re doing isn’t there. How do you bring the right team together to create a successful product vision?
Daniela: You know, at PayPal we’re really lucky that, that I feel like everyone wants to be included and participate and when, I mean everyone, right, we’ll have legal in the room. We’ll have risk and compliance in the room and, and it’s, those are always the best, in my opinion is when you actually have, not only in terms of what comes out at the end of that five day session, but in terms of then how the project itself plays out, right?
Because people were included upfront and they actually have that, that sort of buy-in and that motivation and they understand who the customer is, they understand what, what we’re going to be delivering, what the outcomes are. And then they’re part of solutioning throughout because they were part of, of that inception phase.
So, so to me, the more cross-functional, the better, and at PayPal it hasn’t really been a challenge in terms of, of engaging others. When I think about other companies where perhaps that, that has been more of a challenge we’ve been really thoughtful about thinking about the activities and then figuring out, like what’s, you know, how can you make it more accessible so that someone can maybe come in for, like, two hour kickoff on, you know, immersion on customer insights, and then maybe they just come in for like a couple of checkpoints so that they’re not from the get-go saying, “Oh yeah, I have to commit five days” to something that, you know, feels very fuzzy and feels like a, a big time commitment. So, so that really helps.
It’s just really thinking about your audience and thinking about how do you close that gap between where they are and where you are. So that has worked well in, in other contexts.
Facilitation and customer-centricity as design leader superpowers
Jesse: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. As you were talking, I noticed that it’s hard for me to imagine a different C-level role in most organizations, being someone who claims workshop facilitation as a core part of their skill set and their value. And I’m curious about how that plays out, how your designerly sensibility plays out among the other senior executives that you have to engage with.
Daniela: So first of all, I think that that’s awesome, right? That we can claim that I think that those differentiators or, like, superpowers and things that you should lean into. So, so I think that’s a great observation. And if anything, again, I think that that’s something that we should highlight.
And I think that that’s how it’s viewed by my counterparts. They appreciate that, that we actually have that skill. I’ll give you an example. We sometimes do these workshops for contexts that are entirely outside of, of product. We’ve done it with, done it with finance, we’ve done workshops around like pricing strategy, right?
So, so I actually think that they see it as a very unique skill that most people actually don’t have naturally. And, and, and they, you know, it’s, it’s usually welcomed and sought after. And, and perhaps, design thinking aside, right, but perhaps it is a unique skill that we haven’t necessarily always leveraged and celebrated ourselves to, to position ourselves differently from, from our counterparts in, in senior executive roles.
Jesse: What are some of the other design superpowers that you think are especially important that especially come into play at the executive leadership level?
Daniela: One of them is obviously, you know, this will sound very obvious, but I think it’s being customer-centric. One of the things that, that I often hear is that everyone knows that I’m always acting on behalf of the customer. So they see me as being very neutral. So when you have teams that might be at odds or have conflict, they feel like if they bring me into the conversation, I’m going to be there with no agenda other than doing what’s right for the customer and the business, of course. But I’m a neutral party.
I think being a horizontal leader also helps in that regard. You know, I’m not claiming that this is just a design thing. I think that there’s other functions that, that might be horizontal, that have a similar leverage.
So, so I think that that’s a key one, is I always bring the conversation back to the customer. It’s how I’m wired. It’s how many on my team are wired, right? So we think that way and we can bring the conversation back to that. And oftentimes, I think, cut through things. that perhaps, you know, would be a little harder if you weren’t centering the conversation around the customers. If, if folks are just more concerned about ownership or what their specific products are, what their specific, you know areas of responsibilities are.
So, so I think that that’s a, a key, a key strength. Connecting dots. We talked about this already, right? I think most designers and design leaders are able to zoom in and zoom out. So we’re able to zoom out, zoom way out, and figure out how to connect dots and think about the, the holistic experience that others may perhaps not be, be able to do so easily.
And then the zooming in part, which is like you’re able to do that and yet you’re able to zoom in and talk about a word or a pixel on the screen, right, And care equally about the craft and the fit and finish.
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: Given what I assume to be the size of your organization and the, and the surface area that design covers across PayPal, customer experiences, merchant experiences, you mentioned internal employee experiences, all that, just how detail oriented can you get? Or do you, do you have like themes, like, this quarter I’m all about this audience and I’m gonna kind of dig deep and I’m gonna let the other one slide.
Just because one of my concerns and, and let me, let me pose it as a little bit of a provocation. Daniela shows up at my meeting and swoops and poops about something that she doesn’t actually have a lot of context. I’m trying to figure out how do you not overstep, not claim that you understand something that you don’t in an area, but still maintain that level of depth that you need to provide credible meaningful context and feedback to these teams. Without working 120 hours a week to try to keep on top of everything.
Daniela: Yeah. Which I don’t do by the way. I, PayPal is really good that way and I’ve also learned that over time. So, so in a couple of ways, and you alluded to one of them first, they’re every quarter or so and timeframe may vary, I do have a couple of priorities that I’m closer to, right, that I’m involved much more beginning to end.
And then myself and my leadership team, we sort of also look across to figure out like, you know, who’s focusing on what, so that we have coverage on, on the highest priorities. And, and that seems to work really well. And then the experience reviews that I mentioned are really helpful. So that is how I then look at everything else, which is these daily, you know, sometimes two, three times a day, we have different project teams coming in and sharing work, and they’re doing it at different phase in, in their project. So we’re seeing it again, also beginning to end. And in those sessions we sometimes do get it, you know, we, we go all the way to discussing product strategy policy all the way to, to a pixel on the screen. And it’s, you know, it’s helpful in the sense that we have a dedicated forum where we can do that.
So, so teams are coming into these sessions expecting to get feedback at varying levels. And as we know, right, that that can be sometimes hard for teams because you’re right, I don’t have all of the context. So they do have to spend some time usually giving us context. Even if it’s a team that we’ve seen before, if three months have gone by, right, they have to reset context oftentimes, or even remind us about all of the details and intricacies of, of their specific project.
But hopefully we still, you know, add enough value in terms of, not being so close to it, that, where I think that’s one of our values is that we’re not so close to it. That, that we don’t, you know, we’ve all been in teams when we were designers and, and you’ll make trade offs and you’ll make decisions because you’re so close to it and sometimes you miss that you’re doing that when you’re so close to it.
So we’re able to challenge some of those things. We’re able to remove roadblocks for teams. That’s another benefit of, of these forums. And then again, just look at how, how is everything coming together? Right? How are all of these experiences hanging together because we’re looking at, at so many touchpoints.
The CX Council
Peter: Let’s unpack the CX Council. You, you mentioned it as part one of your core areas at the outset, and I’m, I’m very intrigued by it. Who’s on it? You know, what, what’s the, makeup of it? What,
Jesse: Who’s the other person on it?
Peter: Right. I think you said it was only two people. And then, what teeth does this council have? Is it, is it more like, so I have behind me the book, Creativity, Inc. By Ed Catmull from Pixar, right? And they talk about the brain trust, where there’s this group of people who know a lot and give you notes, but it’s up to you, in this case as the director, to take those notes or not. But you probably, you should probably listen to the, you know, some of the best directors who’ve ever done this work, if they’re giving you feedback.
Are you giving it in in more of this spirit of mentorship and guidance and hey, did you think about or is it a bit more directive? So help, help unpack this CX Council for us.
Daniela: Sure. So, So the CX Council, John Kunze, who is my manager now, wasn’t when the CX Council got set up. So when, when the CX Council was established, John was responsible for our consumer segment, and I was running design. So we were asked to, to form the CX Council by, by the CPO at the time. And then John was, John’s role became, essentially to look after CX for PayPal.
So he now is in a different role that’s much more dedicated to this notion of actually looking at CX horizontally. And, I report to him now.
So, so we’re the CX Council, if we will, if you, you know, had the chance to meet John and, how I am, like we, we don’t carry that label around. I’m not like big on hierarchy and labels. So, but so we’re the, the ones who were always in these sessions and the consistent sort of reviewers, right, in, in the experience reviews. And then we bring in all of my direct reports. My peer in the CX group who, who runs project enablement is also part of, of these and you’re right, 99% of the time, we’re primarily giving suggestions.
If there’s something that we think is a absolute showstopper, we’ll call that out and actually say, Wow, no, we have to, to reconsider this. That rarely happens. It’s maybe, you know, only happened a couple of times, so it’s usually much more suggestions and we’re very clear with the teams that it’s up to them to actually figure out how they want to prioritize the feedback and, and what they want to take away versus not.
Peter: I think the most obvious question is, what’s the difference between CX and UX? What, what does CX encompass that UX maybe doesn’t?
Daniela: That’s a really good question. You know, so in John’s remit, his team works with customer support. For instance, looking at things like top call drivers and you know, how should we be thinking about prioritizing experiences to address those. So it’s, it goes beyond I think, some of the pro–, and not that we’re not involved, of course, UX is involved then in doing things in the product that might, might help with, with customers having to call because they’re having issues. But, but it will include things like policy and, you know, it’s, it’s a bit broader than, than just UX.
Working end-to-end
Peter: I’m trying to understand the, end-to-end here in terms of engaging with the customer experience, right. You know, you’ve got, if you look at a standard customer lifecycle from, let’s start at the beginning, marketing, customer acquisition, there’s some conversion experience, you’ve got the product experience that your teams are probably most responsible for, and then there might be some type of service and support experience. Sales might be involved there, I suppose. Given your, your enterprise orientation, do you and John cover most of that end-to-end customer experience? Are there others that get brought in?
Daniela: It varies per segment. So, so let’s talk about the consumer segment ’cause that’s probably the, the easier example to follow through.
And before I, I do that, I’m also responsible for our paypal.com website as an acquisition channel. Not just from a design perspective. So I am actually, I have a team of product managers. We’re responsible for the platform, the channel. We work very closely with marketing on, on that and also SEO. So not something perhaps you would typically find under a chief design officer. But it was an expansion of my role a couple of years ago and I have really enjoyed taking that on.
So on consumer, we’re responsible for SEO. We’re responsible for all of, you know, for the pages that a, a customer might land on when deciding whether or not to sign up for PayPal. Then once they sign up, or if they’re logging in, that’s where all of the product experiences start and we work on with all of the teams that, that are responsible for those logged in experiences, if you will.
And then we work with our customer support platform team that is responsible for online help, chat, etc. So we work also on, on those experiences and some agent experiences. So if someone calls in the tools that the agents are using, we also work on, on those experiences. So it is fairly end-to-end in, in terms of how we work.
And then of course, there’s, you know, differences if you’re looking at large enterprises primarily where the experience might be a little bit different because obviously there’s a big sales component on the acquisition.
Jesse: You know, you have so many different experiences that you’re responsible for, this whole diverse array, and I wonder where you choose to personally invest yourself. Where do you get hands-on in all of this, versus having a group of trusted lieutenants that you give guidance to, but otherwise really let them have autonomy over some segment of that vision.
Daniela: So it’s probably not a versus, right. I, I’m very fortunate that I have a group of trusted lieutenants that hopefully have autonomy and, and who are, who are driving the work and partner with, with others. So it’s really much more around key initiatives that, that are high priority for the business that where, you know, it’s helpful for me to be involved, for our VP of Design to be involved and to stay close to it. Just, just because of its importance and because it might require, for instance, a little bit more orchestration between the acquisition part of the journey or the support part of the journey where, we can be that glue and provide that level of, strategic input, if you will.
So, so it really varies. It’s usually not like one area where I would say in this area, I’m always spending my time. It changes, you know, pretty much on a quarterly basis I would say.
Driving alignment when you’re not there
Jesse: You talked earlier about the importance of driving alignment. And these kinds of interventions and course corrections are a great way for you to be able to drive alignment across your teams as a design leader. But it is very hands-on and very intensive. And I’m curious about the mechanisms that you’ve developed for driving alignment when you can’t personally be the one to provide the guidance to every team.
Daniela: That’s a, a, a great question. I think, I mean, part of it is just having an awesome team, right? That I, that I know that they’re going to be there asking the right questions, setting the right goals with, with their partners, et cetera. So I think that that’s number one. Without that, there’s no way that I would be able to scale myself or trust that, that we were doing the right things as, as a UX organization.
We’ve talked about the, the customer experience reviews. We encourage teams to come in as early as possible into those…
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Daniela: …right, because it’s much easier for us to figure out if teams are thinking about the right customer problems, are they considering other aspects of the experience, other teams that they need to be engaging if they come in earlier than, than if we’re already at the sort of like, here’s the solution.
And then, then now we’re saying, Wow, you really need to go talk to this other team because it’s really important that what you’re doing works with, with what, you know, this experience that, that they may be responsible for. So, so some of it is just figuring out these channels for having visibility at the right point in the process on our most critical initiatives.
Leadership skills
Peter: In your job as kind of bringing up this team and helping them be their fullest selves, what are the kinds of things that you find that you often need to help them better understand now that they’re operating perhaps at a level that they hadn’t operated before?
Daniela: They’re probably, they are a lot more, I think, around just leadership skills, right? And so, for instance knowing that, yes, we may have a vision, but we may have to make tradeoffs in terms of what we’re able to do in the short term. And that that doesn’t mean that you still can’t be pushing and challenging the team to continue to deliver more, more better experiences for the customer.
So, so a lot of it is that we talk about is perspective, patience, right? Figuring out how you’re influencing, figuring out how you can sometimes measure progress in small increments. Because I, because the job that we do is hard, right? And especially because I think we are able to see what it should be and what it could be. And that isn’t always what is happening in that moment or in the short term. So, So a lot of the time that we spend is actually, I think just talking like regaining perspective so that folks don’t get discouraged. And so that we, you know, so that everyone collectively as a leadership team can do the same for our teams.
And, and have them feel excited and, and sort of get the perspective that like, yeah, but if we look at where things were six months from now, look at how much we have actually achieved, then yes, yes, maybe there’s like, you know, so much more that we could be doing, but do we feel like we’re marching in that direction and do we feel like what we’re doing today, if we look at it six months from now, we’ll be like, Wow, that was pretty awesome, right?
So, so I think a lot of it is just, like, perspective, patience, having a bit more of an optimistic, in terms of how we are having impact and, and not necessarily, I think getting discouraged if it doesn’t feel like you’re not getting to the end state overnight. It feels like a lot of conversations are centered, you know, much more on that. And, and, and just using each other, I think, as sounding boards and then recognizing the progress and impact.
Peter: There’s this concept that comes from executive team dynamics around the first team. And typically the first team is not your or your functional organization, right? It’s your peers. And I’m wondering, one, does PayPal practice first team, do you consider product and engineering and customer experience, your, peers?
And then, two, you know, this, this sharing that you’re talking about that happens amongst your leadership team, is that similar to maybe conversations you’re having with your peers or, or is the tenor of those discussions different?
Daniela: So I love that you brought that up. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is my very favorite leadership book. Highly recommend it. I bring it out at every leadership offsite I have, and talk about that concept with, the team, especially because in design I feel like we have two first teams, which, which just makes things a bit more complicated.
We’ll get to that in a minute. I think PayPal is very cross-functional and very collaborative. So even though we don’t necessarily use that term of a first team, we behave that way. And then I certainly behave that way, right? I spend just as my much time with my cross-functional counterparts and building those relationships potentially even more time than, than with my direct team.
And I do believe that it’s critically important for, the, you know, the UX team to lean on each other. When I was at Intuit, which was when I was first introduced to this book, I had a manager that actually said that he would consider it a success if he found out that we were all meeting without him.
And that really stuck with me,
Jesse: Hmm.
Daniela: and that that’s been one of my goals, right? It’s always to get to that point where my direct reports are meeting with each other and excluding me from conversations. I think that that’s a really good sign of a healthy first. So, so, yes, a hundred percent, subscribe to that. Peter.
Peter: And then you mentioned the dual first teams, right? And is there something different about design, maybe from other functions, where we can’t let go of our design first team the way maybe other functional leaders can?
Daniela: I think that that’s true for most functional…
Peter: Okay.
Daniela: …organizations. I’ve, I’ve never double-checked this with product management, but I would assume it’s the same, but I, but I definitely know talking to engineering, marketing, et cetera, it’s true, right? Which is you have to balance the fact that you have your functional first team and then you have your cross-functional first team.
So, so for instance, when a designer introduces themselves on a team, they may say, I’m a Venmo designer. They’re leading with usually, right, the cross-functional team that they’re part of, and then like their functional team that they’re part of. And you have to balance the two. And I think, you know, in a centralized partnership model for, for that to work well, the reality is you’re actually spending a lot more of your time with your cross-functional team. I use this, I hate to use family analogies in the context of business or work, but I, I do use one that I think is quite effective, which is, right, you’re, you’re sort of born into design, but then you marry into the cross-functional team. So that means you’re spending most of your time with that family, but you’re still having Sunday dinners and your DNA is part of the family that you were born.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Daniela: And that, that usually is what I’ve seen, you know, be more effective is when you can strike that balance.
Compare and contrast Silicon Valley with more traditional companies
Jesse: To take a step back from PayPal for a moment. You’ve been a designer for a very long time. You’ve been a design leader for a very long time. And almost all of that experience, as far as I know, has been in Silicon Valley, which has its own unique culture, which people outside far and wide look at and speculate about and have their curiosities and their envies and often try to emulate.
And I wonder, in your experiences of Silicon Valley culture, what are the aspects that people should seek to emulate and maybe not seek to emulate based on your experience?
Daniela: You know, it’s actually interesting. I’ve worked in some very traditional companies as well. So I started my career at Kodak. I worked at Kaiser Permanente, and then I worked at AT&T.
So I have had, I think almost like the two sides, right? Very tech, Silicon Valley companies, and then some companies that have been around for you know, more than a hundred years.
So, what was interesting to me, and AT&T just being the more recent one, was that yes, AT&T wanted to emulate and learn about, like what was the, you know, the magic secret sauce that that was happening in Silicon Valley.
And, and when I got into the company, I, aside from obviously the sheer size and scale of the company, there were many more similarities than differences in how we approached product development. Between the two companies, there were many more similarities in terms of the caliber of the talent. So, so I found more similarities than differences.
There were some things, obviously, right, being in these companies, I think the thing that always was the most different was that the core of the business isn’t necessarily, right, the digital products that you might be working on. So that’s a significant difference in terms of just the level of importance given to it and the fact that not everything revolves around those experiences. Like there’s a whole other business that, that the company is, running, right, And that, that at the end of the day is, is most important.
So it’s more of a support function in some ways. And even the way that you work, it might be that you might be in the CTO or CIO organization and the BUs have to actually fund those digital projects and you don’t get started on projects until they’re funded. So those things are obviously fundamentally different than when you’re in a company like PayPal or others where software is the business.
The other thing though, that was remarkable at AT&T and then at Kodak and at Kaiser was the caliber of leadership. So in Silicon Valley, I think functional background is really important, right? And that’s how all of us rise through the ranks. It’s like you’re an amazing engineer and then one day you’re a VP of Engineering.
Jesse: Right.
Daniela: Same for design.
And in these larger companies, that’s not the case, right? They usually groom people to become GMs. And the way that you do that is that by actually rotating through a bunch of different functions and, and you don’t necessarily have like a very clear, functional background. So, so what was interesting there is that perhaps that functional background in some cases was missing and, and should have been there, depending on the role that they were doing.
But on the other hand, they were amazing leaders, because they had been selected and groomed to be amazing leaders.
Jesse: Mm-hmm. And what did you feel that they brought as leaders?
Daniela: Some of it was just, you know, obviously on the, on the sort of like running a business side. It was just the rigor and the discipline and the structure…
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Daniela: …right, of, how you run a business, like the operating mechanisms and, and, and I think the clarity, et cetera, it was just, I think that there was just a lot more rigor and discipline.
I think the, the people side, I was perhaps for- fortunate enough where I think that they, they also just had much more experience in training in how to lead people, how to lead large organizations, how to motivate people, how to communicate, how to ensure alignment of, of you know, large groups of people, where I think if you’ve only done, like, if you’re an amazing designer and all of a sudden you became a leader, like you’ve got no training in how to do that, right?
It was just because you were really good at your craft.
Jesse: Yeah. That’s definitely a recurring theme that I’ve been hearing among my coaching clients for sure.
I’m curious about how you’ve seen the relationship between design and other functions evolve over the course of your career. Because as we’ve been talking to other design leaders and we’ve been hearing about the march toward the executive level, that design has been undergoing over the course of the last 20 years.
What is the most dramatic difference between being a design leader now versus when you started out as a design leader some number of years ago.
Daniela: You know, it’s funny, I, was really fortunate. Where I feel like in the companies that I worked at Design had an opportunity to work across a broad set of, of areas in the company. So for instance, you know, working closely with marketing, working closely with product, working closely with engineering and, and other areas.
But I feel like that if I just look, more broadly, I feel like that that’s probably the biggest difference is more than just the traditional sort of product and engineering functions. Realizing the power of design and how to partner with design and design realizing how to partner, right, with, with more functions than the typicals, product and engineering functions.
So as I talk to other leaders as well, many of us get involved in designing office spaces back when the world was very, you know office space focused. Or we might again get pulled into HR programs. So I think it’s that expansion of, of where design can play a role that, that I have observed, that, is a great, great thing to see so that we’re not just boxed into, we’re the people who design screens on the product, and that’s the only place where we add value.
So, and I think it’s, it’s both ways, by the way. I, you know, my advice to people is always be curious about every function in the company and figure out, like, how they operate, what matters to them, how you can add value, how partnering with them can add value in terms of our agenda of delivering better experiences for customers or employees.
leadership growth and development
Peter: You mentioned one of your areas of focus was the growth and development of your team, and then we were talking also about developing leadership skills, the, the conversations you’ve had with your leaders and helping them reflect, but then also what you saw when you were outside of Silicon Valley in these, in these contexts where leadership is seen, you know, almost as a function in and of itself, distinct from your delivery functions of product or engineering or design. What have you instituted to really help the development of the people in your organization? How much have you had to do on your own versus maybe aligning with HR, you know, firm-wide learning and development function? You know, how, how have you invested in it? What kinds of things have you done that you found are effective, maybe more effective than, than people might realize? Just kind of curious how you think about that, that growth and development activity for your organizations.
Daniela: Yep. So on, on the more formal side, right, of HR programs, we do get access to, to things like coaching and development 360 programs and make use of all of those, right. I find those hugely helpful, so that folks can be getting feedback and actually getting feedback from, from coaches that, that, like, that’s their, their expertise and their full-time jobs.
So we have that in place for, for most of, of the leaders on, on my direct team. And, and then as possible also for, for other levels. Aside from that, I, I’m definitely someone who, you know, coaches much more in the moment. So I find that it’s really important to actually have those direct conversations about what I’m observing or seeing, and then also creating the space for them to bring in, here’s a challenge that I’m encountering, how, how might you go about it?
So those conversations are always part of every interaction that we have. and they’re happening at all times. And again, I think that it’s that sounding board, you know, model that we were talking about or, or approach, which is part of it.
I go to them as well for advice on things. So, so just creating that safe space, I think for having these conversations. Being really open and, and clear about, like, what each of us are working on, including what I’m working on. And then we support each other, right? So if someone might be working on, I dunno, presentation skills, to senior stakeholders, right?
I’m– they’re presenting, I’m in Slack and being like, Wow, the way you just said that thing, that was amazing. Do more of that going forward, right? So that, it’s that sort of like real time feedback loop. And so that it’s also not like this big thing or like once a year thing where you’re coming in with like a list of things that they should be working on and, you know, and, and, and you don’t wanna be surprising.
So it, it happens, I think, much more ad hoc, but also much more regularly throughout the week, I’m having these, these conversations with, with folks on my team.
Peter: How much do you stress that, kind of, at all levels of the organization? Like, do you make sure that all of your managers are coaches as well, and how do you help everybody tap into that kind of coaching awareness so that when you’re not in the room , you feel confident that people are getting that kind of helpful feedback.
Daniela: We’ve done a number of things. I would say this is a focus area for us now, just because we have scaled so much and also have a lot of new managers, and we have fantastic managers, but we also have folks that are new to being managers.
One of the things that, that we’re hoping to bring back was something that when Dorelle Rabinowitz was on the team, she introduced this and it was really effective, which was manager circles. So we created these manager circles where managers were co-coaching each other, if you will. So folks would come in and they would speak about different challenges that they had and, and it would be a safe space with folks that, you know, of the same level, a couple who were more experienced. And these, these were just a great way of, of ensuring that folks were getting support from each. And as, as they were getting into managers, sharing best practices, et cetera. So shout out to Dorelle ’cause that was a really effective program and something that we’re, we’re looking to, to bring back as well.
Jesse: As all of these practices and processes continue to evolve the challenges that we’re taking on are evolving as well, as you touched on. And I’m curious about what you’re excited about for the future, for the future of design broadly but also for the future of design and its ability to have a meaningful impact on business.
Daniela: The first one we already touched on, which is right, how can we help businesses center decisions on the customer?
Jesse: Hm mm-hmm.
Daniela: And I’m someone who, perhaps because of my time at Intuit, I, I truly believe that you don’t have to, you know, make a tradeoff between business results and delivering for the customer, right?
If you put the customer at the center of business, results will generally follow. So, so that’s what always gets me excited. What’s, it’s what gets me, me out of bed in the morning. The other piece is product inclusion or responsible design.
So this is a program that we started at PayPal, believe it was early last year.
Benjamin Evans joined us to, who had been leading similar programs at Airbnb, joined us to, to lead this at PayPal. And, and to me, maybe it’s more of a duty, right? I feel like it’s, it’s truly important for us to make sure that we’re putting our powers to action for good and that we’re not necessarily overlooking how we might be creating experiences that may exclude certain groups of people that may actually cause harm intentionally or unintentionally in, in many ways.
And again, making sure that, that that’s front and center for how we actually deliver product and, and create solutions. So that’s something else that I personally am, am very excited about,
Leading through difficult times
Peter: Following a little bit on what you were just mentioning around matters of inclusion, and not just in the United States, but, but globally, things have been fraught for at least a couple years, pandemics, et cetera.
And there’ve been some challenging times to, to lead through. And more specifically, there’s a lot of news around layoffs and so folks are starting to get anxious, right? Either they’ve lost their job or they’re wondering if they’re gonna lose their job. What have you found that works to help the people that you’re responsible to, see forward and acknowledge the very real challenges they’re facing, but also maybe be able to, I don’t wanna say move past them, but, not allow them to overwhelm them. How do you do that at your level? Keep a whole org buoyant, when things can get challenging.
Daniela: It’s a, it’s a really good question, right? And I don’t think that any of us had playbooks to that, that helped us figure out how to lead through a pandemic or lead through, you know, high inflation. I think all of the challenges that, that are part of, of just being a human. In the world right now. But I think that there’s definitely certain things that as, as a leader, you can do to, to help. The first one is just acknowledge what is happening, right? And acknowledge that things are difficult. Acknowledge what, what, what is happening externally. None of us can completely like just section that off and say, Well, I’m leaving that all behind and now I’m in this meeting and none of that is impacting how I’m doing my work, how I’m showing up as a human.
So acknowledging it, being transparent whenever possible, and, and that’s something that I always aim to do as a leader, is providing as much transparency and context, right? It’s, I think it’s very easy when, when you’re in a leadership position to forget that you have access to a lot more information and context that a designer on the team might not.
So even if you have to deliver difficult news or difficult updates, I find that people can process that much better if they actually have context about why that decision was made, right? And why we have to, to take a certain direction. So providing context, being transparent. And then lastly, providing safe spaces for people to share how they’re feeling, how they’re doing, how that’s impacting them, whether it’s at work or at home.
So those are three things that throughout. I, I would say the last two, three years we’ve really aimed to do, I have aimed to do as a leader and we have aimed to do as a leadership team. And that I think are also very true for how PayPal is and the kind of company we are.
Jesse: Daniela and thank you so much.
Peter: This has been great. Thank you.
Daniela: Absolutely. Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s peterme and I’m JJG. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
34: Design leadership to support organizational transformation (ft. Rachel Kobetz)
Oct 09, 2022
Transcript
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
And we’re finding our way
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, Global Head of Design for Expedia Group Rachel Kobetz joins us to talk about staying connected to the work while keeping sight of the big picture, getting past zero sum thinking in building partnerships, and the importance of intentionality in leadership.
Peter: So Rachel, thank you so much for joining us today. Jesse and I are talking to a lot of truly senior design leaders. And even though we don’t know you directly all that well, you’re working with my co-author Kristen, who Jesse worked with extensively at Adaptive Path.
Defining the role of Global Head of Design
Peter: You’ve been building a really impressive design organization at Expedia, and we wanted to learn more about that process and unpack that. So thank you for joining us. The question that we’re asking everybody to start, the conversation with, we’re just diving right into the deep end, you’re an SVP and global head of design at Expedia. How do you define that role? Like, what are the responsibilities, to what are you held accountable? What’s that job?
Rachel: All right. Well, thanks for having me first off. And you know, the role is rather interesting. It’s a transformation role. So if I think about, you know, setting the vision and the organizational leadership for getting us to become an experience-led company, that’s essentially the bulk of what I do and that’s across three areas.
So my charter is to transform the experiences, transform the function, and transform the company, small task, you know.
Jesse: Mm.
Peter: No, no, no big thing. How– so. So that’s a big definition of the role, how well did they understand that when they brought you in ,that, that this is what they were looking for, was someone to do this kind of transformation, versus you, through engaging them as they were looking maybe just for some design leader, through some engagement with them, you helped them identify this transformation opportunity?
Where was that conversation when you started? And I guess now almost two years in, where is that conversation now?
Rachel: Yeah, I think it was both, right? So, in conversations I had, even when I was, you know, starting to explore the opportunity, talking to our C-level, our, our CEO and, and all the leadership across the company, there was a hunger, right. To… what is the type of company we’re gonna be on the other side of this thing, right.
You think about COVID and all the stuff that was happening at the time, and space for innovation. And space to define what is the DNA of the company, what is gonna be the culture of the company? And there was an understanding that customer experience is our competitive advantage or should be our competitive advantage.
And in order to get there, you have to become an experience-led company. Some people call it design-led, but you know, I, I definitely go out the door, calling it experience-led. And in those conversations, when someone says, I wanna become this thing, they have to understand what that takes, right?
It’s not just something that you kind of like slap on a poster. It requires transformation of the culture of the company and the way that you work and the way that you operate to get to that point. And so that’s the type of conversations I started having. And so part of it was them having an understanding and a growth mindset of what they wanted to become and how they wanted to transform as a company, moving from transactions to relationships and what that takes.
And then the other piece was me having conversations, starting to talk about what that could look like. And so for me, it’s very important, no matter what environment I’m in, that people know what they signed up for. Number One.
And, and, Two, that we’re creating the environment for strategic design and we’re setting up the role for success.
And so there was a lot of conversations about, well, what does it take to do that? Because just bringing in an executive in itself, if you don’t create the conditions for that executive to be successful, you’re not gonna have the outcomes that you’re looking for. You’re gonna have kind of the, the hero mentality where this one person is going to change the world, versus being able to have the entire environment foster and nurture that type of strategic design culture, essentially.
Peter: How long were you talking to them before you joined? Was this over many months, were, how many conversations were there? It sounds like, and, and this is something I encourage, but rarely happens, it sounds like there was a long kind of courtship to make sure this was the right fit.
Just, you know, practically what did that involve?
Rachel: It was over the span of a couple months, because, you know, I had to make, you know, we all wanted to make sure that it was the right thing, right. Bringing in the right person, making sure the environment was right and making sure that you’re setting the role up for success, as I mentioned.
And because the charter is, it’s a large charter, but it’s also for the first time ever, it was to build a centralized function for the entire company. And I’ll, I can talk a little bit about what that looked like, because we were separate brands for the longest time and we were operating that way.
And it was the first time ever, they were bringing all the design groups underneath one leader, right. So that’s a major shift. So there was a bunch of conversations we were having. And what that allowed me to do, though, is to get to know everybody, right, to understand what you’re walking into and who are gonna be your partners, and then to also set the stage and create the runway.
So the leadership at the company was setting the runway for people to understand what’s the charter of this person coming in, in the role, what are they here to do and how can we best support them and partner with them. And so that, that amplifies or accelerates the level of impact you can have in the first year, cuz as you know, the first year is usually foundational work.
And so that accelerated the amount of impact I was able to make in the first year in that foundational work. Stuff that would’ve taken probably a year or a year and a half was like the first six months. And so that, that to me was major. That sets the, you know, sets the ground for awesomeness in my, in my mind.
And because this, this centralized function works across the entire company that is, you know, you know, creating and defining experiences for travelers, partners, agents, developers, and employees. And so there has to be this, this galvanized support or this, this, this like coalition of the willing, right, across the company that is, you know, not just interested but aligned to what that means.
Establishing relationships with your existing leadership team
Jesse: It seems to me that one of the most crucial groups of partners for you to recruit, to achieve these kinds of outcomes so quickly, are the people who would be your direct reports, the people who were the leads of these individual brands, who previously had, you know, their own domains entirely, never had to think about anybody else’s problems.
And I’m curious about how you went about establishing those relationships and establishing a way of engaging them, engaging with them and engaging them with each other at this larger scale.
Rachel: Great question. So definitely, when you wanna build a world– world class organization, it starts with bringing in world class talent. It, it’s a mix at my table of people that are subject matter experts and have been in the company for a while, and, you know, kind of people that have been there a couple years and people that are net new.
And I think that’s a great mix to bring in so that you’re not just like completely flipping over the table, but you’re bringing the, the best-in-class individuals for the specific roles that you need.
And so I did a couple things. I identified what are the needs for each of the roles to be successful? These are pivot roles, right? To your, to your point. Like these are crucial roles and they have to operate as a first team, right? They cannot operate… they can no longer operate just in their domain and just their group. They have to actually operate as a first team, together, in order to get the best possible outcomes, and also to be able to work across and up, across the company.
And so that was really important to me. So it, part of it is the dynamics at play, of, like, the expertise, the personality, how they show up, what is their, you know, what is their presence? Who are they gonna face off with in the company and how are they gonna be successful in those environments?
And then what are the embedded capabilities that I needed to build? What do we have today versus where do we need to get to, to be strategic design, right? As far as like, what, what, we didn’t have design operations, right? So that was one of the first things I went after to build. We didn’t have service design, you know, you think about all these different capabilities.
We had to be able to build them and, and start those practices from scratch, the ones that we didn’t have. So it was very important for me to bring in the right leaders, bring them together and have them start to have the mindset and behaviors of operating as a team, not just a bunch of high performance individuals that happen to work together.
Jesse: Mm-hmm mm-hmm.
Peter: While all these designers now are reporting up through a single centralized design organization, have you maintained teams that are brand by brand, or did that all get kind of shaken up as well? Let me start with that question. Like what are are, because, well, actually let me not start with that, just that question, because you mentioned service design, right? And so I’m wondering with service design, is that looking across brands, like in some broader holistic experience, what is the interplay with some of these more strategic, centralized design functions and what I would imagine in a company like Expedia, and you have Expedia, and you have VRBO and you have all these distinct brands that I would imagine there’s teams specific to them.
How does, how does that interplay work?
Organizing by customer and their journey
Rachel: Yeah, that evolved. So, we instead organized by customer. So, when you think about the traveler, you think about the journeys for the traveler. There’s a lot of similarities across those journeys and you’re designing for those journeys, right? So instead of just having a VRBO team and just having a brand Expedia team, even though we’re building out those brand experiences, we’re actually looking at it more holistically.
So we’re looking at the end-to-end across the different phases of the journey. And those things are very similar, right? You think of, you know, I am in discovery mode, I’m in dream mode. I am shopping and I’m booking, right. You’re working across those journeys. And so it was it was a shift in mindset to be able to then look at things crosscutting and look at things more holistically instead of looking at them either only by brand or only by specific function or feature, which was a, which was a shift in the company.
And so being able to start having conversations about end-to-end, allowed us to start to shift that mindset from product roadmaps to experience roadmaps. And, and that makes it so that we’re talking about, well, what are we delivering? What value are we delivering for our customers or for our travelers? And, and then what are the things that need to be true? What are the services and capabilities that need to be able to light up that experience? And that’s a different way of working.
Jesse: Mm-hmm..
Peter: Is is that end-to-end specific to design or did product and engineering also adopt this structure?
Rachel: They’re looking at it the same way. And I think, I think that’s required. None of this stuff is done in isolation. It’s so important to have very strong partners in the different functions so that you can be doing this together. You know, we, we talk about it as not just three in the box, talk four, box– four in the box, sometimes five in the box to be able to get this done, ’cause we’re working with, you know, data science. We’re working with ML, we’re working with marketing and brand, right? So they’re at the table as well, not just product, design, and engineering. And so being able to look at things more holistically, everyone’s at the table and caring about the quality of the experience. And I think that’s where you get success.
Jesse: So in engaging these partners, it seems that you must have gone through a process of some education, some evangelism, some reframing of design, its role, its value to shift it toward this more strategic emphasis. Tell us a little bit about how that went for you.
Rachel: Yeah, sure. You mean the road show?
Jesse: Yeah, sure.
Rachel: yeah,
Peter: If that was part of it, yeah.
Rachel: Yeah. I mean, it depends on the level of maturity in organization, right? So if you have an environment like like Expedia, where you had a world where there were multitude of brands underneath one umbrella, and they were all operating as separate companies. You could imagine that when you bring all of that together and you’re looking at it and delivering as one company, you’re gonna have different levels of maturity throughout the organization.
And so we had some parts of the organization that were already operating, like, operating like mini Frogs and IDEOs, right. And then we had other parts of the organization where design was an execution arm, right. Or operating a completely different way. And so because of that, it was a– it’s, it’s mixed. I always talk about when you’re going through change management, it’s gonna be mixed maturity across the board.
You’re gonna have some people that just get it and wanna drive with you and, and they’re ready to roll. And then other people have to be educated and brought along in order to get to that place. And so, it was a mix. It was a mix of finding the people, when I mentioned coalition of the willing, it was a mix of finding those people, and those people that could be champions with me, those people that could be the, the beacons.
It’s really important to find, not just the individuals, but the projects or programs that can be the beacons to showcase how a new way of working yields better outcomes. And so that’s part of what I did.
So part of it was a little bit of a road show talking about, like, what does being experience-led mean? And what does that mean for the company and how does that translate to how all of us show up every single day to deliver a better customer experience? And then part of that was bringing people along and using programs themselves to then become those, those proof points or those case studies of this new way of working.
And then you get to a point where you’re leaning into operating models, right. And, and codifying those operating models. And then, you know, part of my job is delivering for the business, right. And so becomes a measure what you’re doing. So benchmarking what you did before, and then measuring the, how you’re moving the needle is critical to be able to also then bring up people along that don’t have that same mindset initially, where they’re already in it. Like they already get it. They, they actually need to be convinced. Usually the data is what can do that.
Communication strategies and tactics
Jesse: Hmm. You mentioned creating these beacons that showcase what’s possible and kind of can lead the way for the organization, and one of the challenges in an organization of your scale and of your complexity is just getting the message out about your successes, especially in these environments where people have historically been isolated, blinders on, focused on their own sort of corner of the kingdom.
How did you make sure that people knew about these– how did you make sure that these beacons got in front of people?
Rachel: I used any vehicle possible.
Jesse: Hmm.
Rachel: So, you know, and it, it’s not, it’s not, I’m definitely not always looking for perfection, I’m looking for that progress, right. So you know, you think you’ve said something a couple times, you think you’ve talked to people and they understand, but you have to overcommunicate so that the, the, the essence of it is just overcommunication.
So all the different vehicles at my disposal, leveraging every single one. So whether that is in a conversation with another executive in a meeting, and being able to have that moment to talk about the great work that the team is doing, or that our two teams are doing together, right. Being able to highlight that.
Creating a newsletter. Doing my own writing and, and pushing it out across the company. Whether it’s in town halls or, you know, showcases, quarterly events, all of the different avenues you can take, you have to use those as opportunities to get the word out.
And, and, because also people absorb information differently, right? Some people are gonna love watching the town hall on video, or being there in person. Some people are gonna love being in the process with you and learning by doing. And then some people are gonna love seeing that, that readout of the impact that’s been created and they like the newsletter. So it just depends.
But it’s, you’re essentially, you know, you have to develop a communication strategy, and I’m still going, we’re still going through it as a team, like as an organization, it never ends, because you can have created, you know, the best possible thing that went out the door for the company, and it has huge impact, and the very next day you’re like, okay, what’s next? So you’re not, you know, you’re never done with that communication.
Peter: As you’re trying to make this transformation, as you’re trying to shift people’s mindsets towards one, that’s more experience-led, experience-driven, what are the stories that you find are compelling, that, that help people understand what it is that you’re trying to achieve?
Rachel: Yeah, there’s a couple. So you know, telling a narrative about a person, right. Telling someone’s story, right. And bringing people in and bringing them close to the customer so they can understand. And you, you bring those insights that you glean through research to life, right? We’re very comfortable doing that.
But the piece that actually connects the dots for the business is when you’re aligning on shared outcomes. So the narrative that you’re telling is aligned to the outcomes that the business is trying to achieve and not just for, you know, the bottom line, but also for our customers. So, in this case, travelers, partners, developers, et cetera.
And so the way that I found it’s most successful is, instead of being in our own heads, in our own kind of black box of magic sometimes, that design can be in, where people don’t quite know what’s going on in there, you instead open up that box and you create transparency in the process. You bring people in, you make them part of that process from day one, but then when you’re telling the story of it, you’re starting off on the foot of, we’re all aligned to shared outcomes. Like, meaning, like, what are the metrics for success? How are we measuring this? If we do this or, or what’s the goal we’re trying to go after, and then working backwards from that, what has to be true leading up to that, to know that we’re on the right path.
And then you have kind of, like, milestones or checkpoints of, of progression throughout that. So you’re not just at the very end talking about the success in the case study, people are feeling the progress. They’re seeing the progress over time cause they know what to look for. And so then when you get to the point of, you’re talking about the case study, you kind of wrap it up and that becomes your proof-point of, like, here’s the beacon program that we did and look at the great outcomes.
Everyone was already aligned to what success looks like. And so when you then blow the doors off of whatever those metrics are, everyone is like shouting from the rooftops of how awesome that was, how they felt completely engaged. They’re excited. Why are we not doing this everywhere? You, you, you create this environment that people get excited about, versus having to try to convince them that this process—and, and I think that’s the thing, don’t, don’t harp on the process itself. Actually focus on the outcomes, and when you have shared outcomes together, you’re gonna be set up for success.
So the case studies in my mind always need to talk about, like, who are we designing for? What do we know about them? What are the goals and the outcomes we’re looking for? And then you are telling the story of how you got there and that it’s, that’s, in its essence, the simplest way to do it from my perspective.
Managing change
Jesse: I’d like to go back a little bit and ask about this wholesale reshuffling of design away from your brands and your products and toward journeys, because when you described it to me, it sounded to me like a recipe for just an army of unhappy designers who previously had their own sandboxes and their own toys that they played with, and their own rules that they played by, and now kind of having this new structure foisted upon them that is forcing them to let go of some of the things that they held close. And for you, potentially, you’re a couple of levels removed from them in the organizations.
How did you reach out to and engage that population as part of this change management process?
Rachel: Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s, it wasn’t just happening to design, right? This was happening across the whole company. So if we think about how the, the organization was evolving and shifting, and we moved from a world where individual brands were siloed and kind of optimized for that system itself and vertically integrated, we moved to a world where everyone is working together and thinking more holistically about the work.
And so it wasn’t something that I was off in my corner or in my function saying it’s just happening for design. This was something that was happening across. We were all going through this change together. And yeah, to your point, people can associate an identity with a brand, right? So you have that piece.
But I had less of that. And more of, how do we take the goodness of what we learned working in this space for so long? And how do we translate it and cross-pollinate it across the whole company to, like, raise the waterline for other parts of the organization.
So it was less about like, worried about, like, well, this is who I used to be and, and, and how we used to function, and I don’t really know what this looks like. It was more of a, how do, in this new environment, how do I become successful, and how can I con- contribute so that all of the work gets better?
So I didn’t find that that we had people that were unhappy in that way. In in fact, they were more galvanized to our vision of where we’re trying to head to become an experience-led company.
And so that, that becomes that ignition of, of awesomeness, right. But, but I did, but there was, as part of that change management, there is an evolution that had to happen with designers, right, in, in the, every day of like, well, how does that change? How you think, like, how does it change when you move from designing for one feature on a specific brand, to having to have a more platform mindset, right? That’s a complete shift for a designer on a, on a daily basis.
So not just myself, you know, my entire leadership team, their, their directs. We were all having those type of conversations. I even set up some, you know, round tables. I tried to keep, we have every quarter, we have like a more formal town hall, but then monthly, we do what’s called, like, a monthly meetup.
And it’s almost, like, a very, like, lowkey Q and A, where we talk about, like, what’s going on? What questions do they have? I have some updates and things like that. And so that time, that type of format or forum, I find works really well to get people to talk. You know, what’s on their mind, what are they thinking about?
And you’re very accessible. You’re very approachable. So I did everything from, like, skip levels to, you know, having, like, you know, mini, like, fireside chats to, you know, roundtable discussions, any kind of forum to make people understand that we’re all in it together and we’re all creating this thing.
And I, you know Doug says this all the time. Doug Powell, as, well, like, it’s a prototype, right? We’re creating a prototype together and we’re gonna iterate on it. We’re gonna make it better. And so, so yeah, I didn’t find, I didn’t find that people were just, like, not into that evolution. It was more of, like, trying to understand their place in what that evolution looks like.
Jesse: Mm-hmm. What role does brand play now in your design organization?
Rachel: Oh, a huge, a huge portion, because even though we’re thinking holistically about the experience, there are, we still have brands, right. And so we’re still thinking about those branded moments across those experiences, high brand and low brand moments. And so we have a very strong partnership with brand because we wanna translate the essence of the brand into the product experience.
Right?
Jesse: Mm-hmm
Rachel: So that’s an, that’s an everyday conversation. So, earlier, when I mentioned that it’s not just three in a box, it’s like four and five in a box, it’s ’cause brand’s at the table, too. And so we never, we never lost that thread.
Peter: Are the brand designers in your org or are they in a separate organization?
Rachel: They’re in the brand organization, but we do have some designers in our world that are part of the design systems team that are thinking about what is that brand expression in the product experience. So there’s a really nice symbiotic relationship between myself and the brand organiza– or our organization and the brand organization to be able to create that cohesion across all of those different touchpoints. So we didn’t forget about the brand. Not at all. We just work, we work at it from a different angle in order to be able to have more– to make, to make the work extensible, right. To build once and then be able to use it across.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: Following up on Jesse’s last question, and you mentioned these town halls and kind of a, almost like an Ask Me Anything. I’m curious, what are some of the, the themes that emerged through those conversations over the last year and a half or so, coming from the design organization?
What’s working, what’s not, and I’m also curious, what’s surprised you coming out of those conversations. Were there things that you didn’t foresee or didn’t realize that started to emerge that you needed to address?
Rachel: Yeah, ironically one of the biggest themes that always comes out of these conversations or, or that I’ve noticed a pattern is that we’re talking about operating models. And so one of the things I noticed was when we would talk about like, well, how do we work in this new way? How do you know, how are we evolving and what do you need? What do we need to unblock?
A lot of times it was because parts of the organization, as we’re all transforming together, We’re still, maybe, operating in silos, right. And you have to break down those silos to be able to orchestrate an experience end-to-end. And so when other people are still getting their mindset around, or their head– headspace around what that means, usually the things that you have to enable for the groups are new operating models.
And, you know that became a theme that came up pretty early because you’re operating across, like, what used to be eight teams to be able to get one experience done. And this is in any, you know, any complex organization, any matrixed organization, you have to work across multiple teams, there’s interdependencies.
But to the customer, it’s all one experience. And so you have to break down those, those barriers or those walls for the designers, for the researchers, for the content designers, so that they can do the best work that they can, right? And so in those town halls, one of the things that came up was like, how do we evolve our operating model?
How do we, you know, evolve our practice, or our process for a world where we want to increase quality, increase velocity, and be experience-led. And so those, those are some of, like, the deep conversations we had.
Some of the other conversations are just about change management, right. You know, people handle change or evolution much differently. Like, you know, you have some people that are, like, this feels awesome. I love it. You have other people, you know, they think– those are the people that say, like, change is the only thing that’s constant, right. And then you have other people that are like, wait, hold on, you moved my cheese, what happened here?
Like, you know, I was used to a certain way of working or evolving. What does that look like? How do I show up? And that goes back to my earlier comment. Helping people manage through that.
The other thing that came up, which was surprising, to answer that question, is that– and, and I thought it was a actually awesome, a lot of our principals felt like they were becoming unleashed by operating in a strategic design environment, right?
So they were used to focusing on one feature or one domain or one area, but by, by being able to look crosscutting and looking more end-to-end, more holistically, they could actually have much more impact. And so that’s, that was a, an upside benefit of this new way of working, was to be able to leverage their talents and their skillset, a lot of our ICs across the board in new ways.
And so they didn’t feel necessarily, like, you know, sometimes people talk about being, like, I’m in a box, I’m in a category. I only can do this thing. It actually unleashed people to be able to say, you know, to really stretch themselves and to unleash their talents. So it, it fostered, I think a lot more of an education and mentorship across the organization as well. Going deep with everybody.
Playing nice between strategic design and product management
Peter: However much, we want to think a rising tide lifts all boats, the reality of humans is that there’s, there can be a perception of zero sum. Your benefit is my deficit, and I’ve noticed this in between, as design teams get more strategic, product managers start getting nervous. They start getting anxious ’cause they’re like, wait, that was my job. I used to be responsible for product strategy. I was responsible for that vision. Now, now, you, a designer who doesn’t have an MBA and who draws pictures all day, are trying, you know, is coming into my realm.
I’m, I’m being hyperbolic here but I’m wondering how, as your organization has gotten more strategic, how you’ve handled that relationship with product, because that’s usually like that’s, that’s where magic happens or where like implosion happens, is, is at that, yeah, is at that relationship, and I’m so I’m wondering kind of how, how that’s and, and as these product folks who maybe in the past were in charge, ’cause a lot of organizations, product kind of had that authority. It sounds like you’re shifting to a model, this operating model where there’s probably more there’s meant to be more partnership.
And so how, how is that playing out?
Rachel: Yeah, that’s all– that’s always the thing, right? Because it’s a change in power dynamics essentially, when you’re going through this type of process and, and some are more open to it than others, I think. I think we use the term running buddies, which I think is a very good term to use, to have the right mindset of like what we’re trying to achieve together.
To your point though, I, I think that it, it requires relationships and trust, and in order to be successful, to have true partnership, right. You have to trust each other and respect each other’s expertise. I definitely follow suit with the, the, the way that Apple is set up, where experts are leading experts, and they hold decision rights for their specific function, right.
And so if you were in a world where in past lives, or in an environment where design didn’t actually hold the decision, right, on design, it’s, it’s a different type of world when you’re trying to then change those dynamics to then have an even playing field where product, engineering, design are showing up together as, as partners.
And so, that requires time, and, and going, you know, going deep on what that means, figuring it out together. And also building strong relationships and earning that trust because otherwise, if people do not look at it as assuming positive intent, to your point, they look at it as, like you’re coming in on my territory versus instead, wow, all of us are coming from different perspectives and bringing different expertise and together we’re actually awesome together, right. Versus looking at it as like, oh, you leaning in on that thing takes away some something from me. Instead it’s more of like a 10x, right. You’re more amplifying each other.
And so it’s all about, from my perspective, it’s all about the, the way you show up. The, the relationships that you have with others, the way you build those partnerships and the way that you earn and keep that trust with each other. I think that that is the biggest thing.
Like, the most pro– the most problems that I see happen with teams or individuals is, is usually due to two things, communication and trust. And when you don’t have those two things, you’re not gonna get very far. So, so what I– I really take the time to communicate. I take the time to stay, like, to get in sync with people and then sit, like, stay in sync.
And then I also take the time to build those relationships. And I encourage all of my leaders, not even just people at my table, like throughout the whole organization. I talk about, you are your actions, how you show up every single day sets the environment. It sets the culture. It, it determines how people treat you, and how they interact with you. You, every single moment you have, whether it’s in a conversation, a meeting, a presentation, you have an opportunity to change that environment.
And so by being that way, then when you show up with, you know, whether it’s engineering, product, brand, et cetera, if they understand why you’re there and what you’re trying to achieve, and you’re aligned on shared outcomes, they’re going to be much more receptive and open to a new way of working versus you just come in and say, everything you’re doing is wrong, and this is how we’re gonna do it, right? Like that’s, that’s not gonna get you very far.
And I think, I think sometimes leaders, they kind of come in with that kind of bravado and you’re not gonna get what you, you’re not gonna get the results you’re looking for if you’re coming to the table with that, with that perspective.
Relationship dynamics with peers and executives
Jesse: It seems to me, there’s an element in that of, trying to influence the culture of your partner organization from the outside. So that, you know, all of your product partners throughout the organization are engaging with design in similar ways. And to my mind that comes back to the relationship that you have with your peer on the product side.
And, and I’m curious about the negotiation that is involved when you are elevating design to, that executive level where, you know, now there’s a new seat at the table and you’re in it. And, and they’re trying to figure out how to engage you in the conversations that they’re used to having. What did you do to establish those relationships and establish those dynamics?
Rachel: Yeah, I kind of love where this conversation is going and how deep we’re getting in this area. I think it’s so important. ‘Cause I don’t think a lot of people talk about this stuff. So in, in that regard it, I, I take, you know, I take my own advice, right. You know, I, I lead by example.
So the same thing I just mentioned about, like, what are the expectations I would have of anyone at my table or leadership in my organization about, you know, earning trust, building relationships, having, you know, clear communication. I’m very direct. I’m a very direct leader, like, as far as, far as communication goes. I, I don’t, I don’t waste words in that way.
By the same token, you know, every moment in every interaction is a moment that you could have of influence, right. And it– but you have to have a foundation. And so it, it was very important for me to build relationships with the other functions and the other leaders across the company. And then we’re talking, you know, not just in one part of the organization, we’re talking about leaders across the organization.
And, and I look at that as– there’s a term teaming, right? You’re not just, it’s not just your first team, that’s in your direct vicinity, but it’s also, how are you teaming across the company to get to specific outcomes, right? You have different teams that you have to interact with and work with. And so for me, it wasn’t just the relationship of the people in my immediate vicinity, but it was also those relationships and how I’m building team, like actually teaming with others or becoming a running buddy with others across the organization.
So those, those relationships are critical, because that’s where it starts. So if you’re not aligned, so let’s just give an example. If product and, and design together, as leaders, are not aligned, that dysfunction flows throughout the entire organization because that, because the product organization is hearing one message and the design organization is hearing another, but if you’re spending the time to get in, like joined at the hip and you’re getting, you know, getting together and having alignment in what you’re trying to achieve, how you’re gonna get there, then the communication that happens throughout the organization is, is aligned.
And so you can go deeper in the organization. You can ask that same question and they’re going to pretty much respond very similar, whether they’re in design or product. So, and that’s not easy, that takes time. Because again, you have to earn the trust. You have to build the relationship and you also have to influence others to a new way of working together which does take, you know, effort. And, and it is kind of an evolution that happens over time that doesn’t happen overnight.
And then from that base, that solid base and foundation, you can then push that communication. And that, that, this is how we show up. This is how you should show up. And kind of people are seeing that from their leaders, they’re gonna start to emulate that. That’s, that’s how I’ve approached it. So I, I definitely am one of those people. I’m like, you know, I wouldn’t say I don’t tell my team to do something that I wouldn’t do.
And so when I’m talking about the importance of the relationships, it’s where I spend a lot of my time. So I spend a lot of my time, you know, working across and working up across the, the whole company to make sure that there’s clear communication, there’s trust and, and we’re building relationships so that people understand what we’re doing.
You cannot explain to people enough what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
Peter: When I teach design leadership, one of the things that’s both true, but in some ways, unsatisfying, is, what I say over and over again is: it’s about relationships. And I just find different ways of saying it’s about relationships for four hours.
But that’s the reality. You use the term running buddies. I tend to think of it as, I get more mammalian, and I think of it as like primates picking nits and grooming, right. There’s just something very primal. Well, there’s something, there’s something very primal about the, the nature of, of how we relate and, and that affects our work.
And we, we, we lose sight of that, especially I think working in, I wouldn’t even just say design, but like product development, ’cause I’m sure this happens in engineering too, where for so long, your value was in your ability to craft and make, and then at some point, as you become a leader, your taste, your discernment is important, but what becomes more important is now this ability to engage and relate with others towards some, some common goal.
You, you mentioned directness and I’m wondering, you know, I, too am a direct communicator and that has not served me well inside organizations.
Rachel: You don’t say, Peter.
How to communicate directly without upsetting or pissing people off
Peter: And, and, and so it’s not simple enough to be direct, right. And so how have you learned, how have you developed a communication style that allows your directness, but that doesn’t come across as, I don’t wanna say attacking, but like too assertive or aggressive, right. ‘Cause that’s been criticism I’ve received, is that when I’m direct in feedback or engaging with someone, it can feel like, oh, like overwhelming and, was that a challenge that you had in your directness and what have you learned in terms of how to communicate, so you can maintain, be authentic in, in your direct style, but not deflate people with what might be seen as criticism or something.
Rachel: Yeah, Jesse, we’re going a little deep on Peter today. Maybe he should tell us how he really feels. So yeah, so for me it there’s a couple pieces there just because I’m direct does not mean I’m directive. So I can be very forthright. I can be very transparent, but it doesn’t mean that I have to come in with a hammer,
Jesse: Mm,
Rachel: or be prescriptive, right. And so my approach has always been explaining the why behind something. If people have the why behind something, they don’t feel like it’s happening to them.
Number one, they don’t feel like it’s being prescribed. They don’t feel like you’re just telling them what to do, instead you are giving them transparency. And I think that they appreciate that. I’ve been told throughout my career, how, how much people appreciate my transparency and my directness in that way, maybe I can help you, Peter. Maybe we should talk offline.
But, but, but and that’s because of the delivery, right? You can say the same thing, like the same sentence you can see on paper and how you say it, how you deliver it, or the nuance of it can be received completely different and you can be direct in your communication and people can walk away smiling, or they can walk away pissed, right.
So, so I think for, you know, my, my perspective is that it’s, it’s definitely about being transparent and it’s definitely about making it so that people have the information. They need to be able to make informed decisions, because I, you know, I don’t wanna be the person that’s making decisions for them.
I want them to come to those conclusions on their own, but I wanna inform, like, I wanna give them the context that I may have or the why behind something and why it’s happening so that then they understand it before they then go and, and, and go off and do something about it. So that’s how I’ve approached it.
I think it is, I think it’s empathetic. It’s a directness that’s sympathetic is, is kind of how I, how I approach it. Instead of one, that’s more like, more of like a top down mentality of like the hammer, the golden hammer approach or a prescriptive mentality. So it’s a little bit different.
The qualities of a good design leader
Jesse: You’ve talked a bit about the mindset or frame for the work that you try to instill in your teams, and a big part of making that happen are the leaders within your teams and your, the philosophy of leadership that you establish for your organization.
What are your thoughts on what makes a good design leader at every level?
Rachel: Oh, this is… how much time do we have?
Peter: Yeah.
Rachel: This is, this is a meaty one. So it starts with, for me, they need to be able to have vision. They need to be able to understand what operational leadership is, meaning ’cause they have to work through others to get things accomplished. They’re not gonna be able to do it all on their own and they need to be able to show up in a way that carries the torch for the culture.
And I know that sounds a little cheesy, but that’s, that’s definitely something that I look for. Meaning someone that’s going to be in a room with other people. Are they carrying the torch for our craft for our culture? Are they, are they helping others see the, why are they helping others see the strategy? Are they helping them understand what great looks like and how to get there? What is their definition of success?
So for leaders to be successful or my, my perspective is it’s three things. You’re, you’re managing people, you’re managing process, but you’re also, you’re you’re also managing operations, operational leadership in order to galvanize things and bring them together, to be able to get to specific outcomes.
And I think that where, where leaders can fail is if they over index in one area and ignore others. And so an example of that is someone who has high craft, but does not like building relationships and, and actually working across the organization to get things done. They’re not gonna be successful in an executive role or in a senior leadership role. They’re only gonna get to a certain point because they’re kind of antisocial. That, that, definitely is a, is a blocker or a derailer for people, right? So I, I look for leaders that have all three that they can manage the people, they can manage the, the process and the craft and, and the quality of the thing.
And they can also galvanize the support and, and kind of rally the resources to get things done, because you’re not like, like it’s not the Superman complex of like, you just do everything on your own. You have, you, you have to work through others to get the outcomes you want. So that’s, those are the three areas I look for.
Jesse: So you talked a bit about stepping to this role at this level in the organization, this centralizing force that didn’t exist before and the need to build out a different layer of support functions to enable that organization to gel. I’m curious though, about the support functions that you found yourself needing in order to support yourself as a design executive and like, do you have an executive branch sort of underneath you or what have you created around yourself to support yourself and your success?
Rachel: Well first off, I have my partner in crime, Kristin, who the listeners will know as Kristen Skinner. You mentioned her earlier, Peter. All right. So let’s see, if we imagine the org chart, the, the left hand side of the org chart would be practices and horizontals, things that work across the entire organization and in the right hand side would be customer types. The ones I mentioned before, where it’s like traveler partner, agent, et cetera, employee.
And on the left hand side you have things like design, operations, practice management. You have, you know, research and exploration. You have our experience platform and, and mainly the design operations function, the practice management function, and my phenomenal executive assistant slash strategic program manager, become the support structure for the organization.
There are other pieces when you talk about embedded capabilities, things like experience architects that become ,you know, I think Peter has written an article about the secret strategy team
Peter: strategy team.
Rachel: Shadow. Yeah. Uh-huh that also becomes a support function.
But for myself you know, I, in order for me to scale, the design operations team, practice management and my EA are, are my lifeblood because they, they can be– talk about proxies. They, they can be in all, all of the conversations. You know, our design program managers are in every single meeting, every single presentation, every single crit.
They know, they are the eyes and ears and they know what’s happening throughout the entire organization. And they can bring all of that to me. Right. Not just updates on how programs are going, but like hotspots, things that are, you know, happening, you asked earlier, like things you’re hearing in the organization, things we need to go after and fix.
Those parts of the organization really help me. I don’t have like some special office of the, you know, chief executive. Like, no, I don’t have, I don’t have that, but I have an implied version of that. That’s kind of embedded throughout the organization and, and I’ve been lucky, you know, I would say blessed with the, the leadership team that I have and how they show up and how they they are also my support structure.
So they look at themselves as a first team and they, they make it so that I don’t have to be everywhere at once. And so that allows me to be in more of the higher level conversations about, you know, what’s the trajectory of where this thing needs to go versus having to be in the weeds on every single conversation.
The thing I would mention though, and, and I don’t know what you’ve experienced with some of the other people you’ve been talking with. You know, you have to move from macro to micro though, right? And for me, there’s certain, when I mentioned like beacon programs or beacon projects, there’s some programs I stay very close to extremely close to where I’m actually in those reviews, I’m in those crits for some of that work and I’m looking at it and I’m helping and it’s not to, it’s not to have, oh, Rachel’s in this meeting.
It’s not that, it’s more of a, how can I champion the work for the organization? Well, the way that I can do that is intimately knowing it and, and helping in some ways connect the dots between the conversations in the boardroom and the strategy of the company to how it needs to manifest in our experiences and creating that direct connection for the team, so they can get that context. They can get the why, they understand the expectations and they, they actually could be more successful by doing that.
So there are certain programs. I, I went a little bit deeper. But there are certain programs I stay very close to. Even though you’re getting in the weeds, because I know the importance of that program and the high, the visibility of it, the transparency that’s needed there and the level of quality that’s needed there.
And so so I think that, that, that is something, when I talked about transforming, you know, the experiences transforming the function, transforming the company, transforming the company is really transforming the culture. Transforming the function is creating the space and the actual capabilities for strategic design, but transforming the experiences, you can’t lose sight of that. Right?
Sometimes, you know, leaders, they are charting the vision for tomorrow without delivering for today. And so I have to, I have to move, you know, in that context to be able to go deep, to be able to make sure that we’re building for today. There’s my soapbox. I gave you a little soapbox.
Incubating new design practices
Peter: It’s a good soapbox. You mentioned this phrase, practice management, and I would appreciate a definition. I think I know what it means, but it’s not a common term. And so how do you define practice management within your organization?
Rachel: Right. It’s not, it’s not the version we’re familiar with in the medical industry. But, but yeah, so take the perspective of a helix management model, right? And so when I talked about Apple and their innovation model of, like, experts leading experts. One of the ways that you can nurture and grow new practices or new embedded capabilities is by centralizing them first, before you federate. Right?
So we’re a centralized partnership. But by that same token, we have some new practices that are getting off the ground. Right. So we have things like design and research, and we have content design as well, which are more robust and more, I would say more on that maturity model.
But then we have new ones, like I mentioned, service design, right. You know, we have communication design, we have experience architecture. We have other disciplines that are really at their very beginning. You’re planting the seeds for those things.
And so the practice management team does a couple things. They are the champions and stewards of what we call traveler-centered design, which is our flavor of human-centered design.
And so they codify the practice and the methodology. They are the ones that are teaching across the organization, not just to XD, which is the experience design organization, but across the company, right. And educating and bringing everybody along. So we’re all having that, those mindsets and behaviors. That what also lives there are things like these, embedded capabilities or these disciplines underneath one leader, so that they’re all in a, they have a sense of community. They have almost like a COE for those practices.
So that’s what practice management is. It’s a way of, you know, it’s, it’s the practice of design. It’s the methodology that we use. It’s also the different disciplines and practices within it.
Peter: Excellent. And that was something I’d noticed when I was just looking at your profile on LinkedIn was the degree to which your team goes beyond product design, UX research, and content design to embrace, as you said, experience architecture, exploration, service design, and these other areas. And so it sounds like practice management is the space by which you can develop these newer disciplines within design.
How were these new practices identified? There’s, like, edges, I guess, of design practice that you’re trying to push at. And how are you finding those edges and how are you putting shape to those edges and figuring out, oh, experience architecture’s a thing ,we should hire some people to do that.
Wait, what is it again? Like, I’m just, you know, there’s like, how are you even understanding what these edges.
Rachel: Yeah. Couple different… I like to triangulate data. And so, you know, some of it is understanding what’s happening across industries and what the needs are. And there’s other… example of, I’ll give you an example of this, in other parts of the world, there’s more advanced practice. In things like service design, let’s, let’s say it that way, where they’re at a higher level of maturity than we are here in the United States. And it’s used, it’s utilized in a different way.
And so I’ve learned from best practices and, and other, other environments, other companies around the world of like, what did it take to transform that company? What were the different disciplines or different capabilities that were needed in order to infuse that, that thinking and that, I would say, mindset behaviors throughout that company and to get to better outcomes.
And so you can go down the list of case studies of like how they got there and you start to pull apart what were the different things that were needed to be able, like to make that true. And, and what I found was things like service design were one of the key, like linchpins in order to get to that level of success in those companies.
And it was because people needed to look at things more holistically and see the interdependency of things in the cause and effect of their actions. Meaning if you’re just working in product design, you can think you’re creating the best product ever. And you release it to the world and all of a sudden call volume goes up. But if you’re only the product design team that doesn’t pay attention or care about the end-to-end experience or what that’s full service is, you’re like, not my problem. You’re like, you’re not even looking at that, right?
And so I, I was looking at ways to have a more interconnected view on what it takes to make impact for the business and to transform the business.
And so you need to have kind of, those threads pulled together. You need to be the dot connector essentially, and identify what capabilities are needed for the future. And service design was definitely one of them. Experience architecture is another because what, what I find there, and that’s, that’s a more, that’s definitely a newer discipline, but you have fragments of it in what we used to call information architecture.
You have fragments of it in what we, you know, what we have as like an architect in development or in, in the engineering function. And what this role can do is it can bridge all of those gaps, the things that fall between the cracks, the things that no one really feels like that’s kind of their job.
And this role can actually bring all those things together in a way that they connect all of those different pieces to show what is the architecture of the experience system and how does it actually need to manifest and how do we actually make it happen? Understanding the technical constraints, right, and things like that.
And so those are, I can nerd out on that one for a little while, I saw you smile. So, but like, those are the types of disciplines that are, that are new. They may be nascent for some people. But that I saw as like, where you, when you think about where the puck is going, that are needed to be able to make the whole company or the whole group successful.
And so I started to invest in those and not, not largely, like, not like, okay, all of a sudden we have a team of 50. It’s bringing in some key, like, planting the seeds of that discipline by bringing in some key individuals that have done this in other environments and then building around them.
Focusing your time and energy
Peter: You know, it’s clear, you’re looking at the future and, and where all of this could be headed. And, and as I imagine myself in your shoes, I get very tired, because I am, I’m imagining that, like, it’s just, there’s a lot of work. There’s a lot to be done. How do you figure out how to focus your time and energy, given all the things that you could be engaging with? All of which sounds super compelling.
Like everything you’re talking about, I would, if I were in your shoes, I’d want to do it all. And I know I can’t, or I wouldn’t be able to. So how are you, figuring out where to spend that time and energy for yourself.
Rachel: Yeah. I mean, you, you pick up a rock, you find an opportunity, right. And so you kind of, you, you have to put the blinders on. I use what is called a, a framework it’s, it’s called Ruthless Priorities. And I literally have a, you know, and I, I didn’t make this up. There there’s an awesome executive coach Patty Azzarello who has a book called Rise and she talks about this.
But, ruthless priorities are like, these are the things that have to happen, right? And I am going to focus on these things. And when I accomplish these things, then I will move on to other things. I don’t put everything on my plate at the same time. So I literally have a list that’s, these are the things I’m focused on, these are the things you think I’m focused on that I’m not, and these are the things I’m not doing. And I, and I have that list and I, I, I curate it like a constant gardener, so that I’m always focused on the three most important things right now. And, and I get those things accomplished before I move on.
So the reason I say this is you can’t do everything. You have to be focused. And if you’re not focused as a leader, your organization will not be focused as well. So what I do is I work very diligently to make sure that I’m aligned with the focus of the company, and what are the, gonna be the most important things that can create impact for where we’re trying to head as a company.
And then I translate those into the things that I’m going after and that I’m focused on. And to your point of like, you know, you get overwhelmed, ’cause there’s so much opportunity. There is, there are so many awesome things you can do, but you can’t do all of them and you b- you would burn out, like if you tried to do everything, you wouldn’t do it well and you would burn yourself out.
And so I find that being very very intentional about what I’m gonna focus on and what I’m not gonna focus on, gives me the space to be able to be successful.
And I do that even with my, my calendar. If I have my top three things that I’m focused on for the quarter or for this half of the year, I analyze and do an audit of my entire calendar. And I wanna make sure that every single meeting, every single work session, every, every single thing I’m involved in is moving the, that agenda forward is moving those, those goals and those outcomes forward. And if it’s not, I will decline meetings. Like it’s my… literally we’ll be like, I’m, I’m not gonna go to that meeting. It’s probably not the best use of my time. Let me send somebody else. Or is there something we could do offline? I’d love to work async, right.
But that’s, that’s how I save myself from like, imploding essentially, or like a supernova. I wanna make sure that I’m keeping my resilience and my stamina up and my energy up and I’m focused on the right thing so that I can then be there as, like, a servant leader for the rest of the organization. And if I’m, if I’m kind of like scatterbrained and running after, like, what’s the next shiny object, I’m not doing any service to the, to the rest of the organization. So that’s how I handle it.
Jesse: Rachel, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much.
Rachel: Thanks for having me, Jesse and Peter.
Peter: How can folks keep up with you, connect with you? Well, one of the things I’ve seen is you’ve been doing a lot of writing and tweeting and stuff. How would you appreciate folks engage with, with the thinking you’re putting out there?
Rachel: Oh let’s see. So on Twitter @kobewan, so that’s the easiest way to find me. And yeah, I’ve been trying to build a writing practice. So let me know like what topics you wanna hear more of. So I’m trying to do it daily. I’m trying to ship daily. We’ll see. Yeah, I know.
But that’s like the main way to get in touch. And then I also have a, a newsletter that I, that I push out intermittently on some of that thinking as well. And that’s on substack, same name, kobewan.
Peter: Excellent. Well, thank you.
Rachel: Thanks again.
Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s peterme and I’m JJG. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on Apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
33: Leading Design in a Product World (ft. Greg Petroff)
Sep 18, 2022
Transcript
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
And we’re finding our way
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show veteran design executive Greg Petroff, formerly of GE, and now head of design for Cisco Security, joins us to talk about how to be the first design executive in an organization, the role of design in defining products and transforming organizations, and some reasons for hope in the evolving relationship between design and engineering.
Peter: So we have with us today Greg Petroff and Greg, the reason we wanted to have you join us is Jesse and I are pursuing a topic in particular around what does it mean to be a design executive, like a true design executive, not a make-believe design executive that I think a lot of folks are, but like real deal, very senior, in board meetings, access-to-C-suites kind of design executive.
And when we were thinking about who to have on to address this type of topic we thought of you. You’ve done this role in a few different firms. You and I, when we’ve…. just over lunches and, and whatnot, I found you to be very reflective in thinking about what it means to be a design executive.
So that’s why we wanted you on, so thank you for joining us.
Greg: Thanks for inviting me. I’m happy to be here.
Peter: It’s an interesting time for you, ’cause you’re about to start a new design executive role and I’m wondering, and, and you’ve had a moment or an opportunity to reflect, I think on just what it means to be a chief design officer, an SVP of design. I don’t know if you have a favorite title, even we can get into that, but like what is, what, what was that journey of considering a new role?
Like and how did it inform kind of your definition of what it is that you do.
Greg: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. I had an opportunity this summer to take some time off and spend a little bit more time entertaining offers than I, I probably normally have in my career. That I think helped me get the right kind of perspective about what would be the right next role for me.
And, you know, if you remember Peter, you and I actually met in, in Berkeley and talked a little bit about this a couple months ago, you know, in that early part of that thinking. And I think it comes to a couple things. One, there’s sort of what I’d like to do, but there’s also what I’m good at. And, you know, you kind of have to recognize the two and you know, there’s one thing that, you know, I’ve done successfully over the last few years is create balance teams that perform well.
And, you know, I sort of see my role as being someone whose design problem is the practice of design in the organization I’m in. And and as much as I love being in the details of the individual design decisions, which I like doing, you know, my, my strength is more in empowering other people to, to be successful.
And of the opportunities that were sitting in front of me there were, there were sort of small, medium and large. And you know, I was really intrigued with the role that I am taking, which is I’m gonna be the Chief Design Officer for Cisco Secure, which is the secure business at Cisco. Very large organization, actually fairly mature with a lot of strong design leaders already in place.
But also some challenges from a transformation perspective, you know, Cisco went through a whole bunch of acquisitions over the last five years. They’re, they’re, they’re struggling with coherency. Some parts of the business are, are really effectively managed really well from what I can tell, and other areas, you know, need some TLC and, and some nurturing to help them get better. And at this point in my career, you know, I feel like that’s a good spot for me, like an environment where I can be an advocate for the other design leaders in the organization and, and hopefully set them up for success.
Defining the role of Chief Design Officer
Peter: Well, what does it mean to be a chief design officer? Was that something that they said they were looking for? Was that how you kind of shaped the role? What, what, what is that?
Greg: Wow. I, I think we’re early in trying to figure that out. They defined the role as chief design officer, so that was interesting to me because they, they had thought through a, a certain, you know, executive leadership level. The CDO has sort of three interfaces, you know, they have the interface up, which means that they’re spend time in relationship with senior leadership and an organization all the way up to the CEO and board and are advocating for design to, you know, people in the organization who may not actually understand the value of design as much as they could. And, and if they understood it better, you know, the organization probably would be more successful.
And then there’s a second interface level, which is, you know, you’re sort of leadership peers. So you know, your head of product, head of engineering, research, the, the marketing team, but people who are, you know, the SVP and VP level in the organization, and working with them to, to recognize how to successfully, you know, implement and empower their design team so that they’re getting real value and impact out of them.
And then the last interface is really about creating the conditions for the design team to be successful. And, you know, and that’s really connected to making sure that, you know, people’s incentives are aligned, right, that you’re, you know, growing your people and your talent, that you’re empowering them, that you’re finding ways to give them agency and, and you’re kind of building a growth mindset culture.
And I, I think a big part of a CDO’s role is to be actively engaged with the whole product life cycle. So not just design’s role in the product life cycle, but, you know, co-creating that with your product and engineering peers, so that there’s a shared understanding of everybody’s role in creating great product and, and, and really trying to, not build a us versus them culture, but you know, a product culture that really wants to drive impact. And, you know, CDO’s job, I think, is really to kind of wear that hat as a, you know, a partner in the organization towards, you know, really try to make impact.
Being an organization’s first true design executive
Jesse: I have the impression from the work that you’ve done, that you’ve often been the first person in these organizations with that level of executive responsibility over design. Is that accurate?
Greg: Yeah, that has actually sort of been my M.O. You know, when I joined GE which was 11 years ago, which is amazing, you know, I became a chief experience officer at GE Digital and, and there definitely was a vacuum in terms of the understanding of design and, and it was the first time for that role.
You know, I think along the path, it’s similarly, you know, ServiceNow, my time period there was a new role. They consolidated a couple of different design groups under one leader. I was the global head of design for that team and, and started build a, you know, a singular culture for the design organization. Compass, where I was most recently had a leader before I arrived, but not an executive level support leader. So it was sort of, again, a new role. And at the, in Cisco again, yeah, this is the first time that they’ve actually are building a CDO into the role. So who knows. We’ll see what happens.
Jesse: What are some of the challenges for being the first one to step into that executive level leadership of design?
Greg: I, I, yeah. Wow. I, I’ve certainly made lots of mistakes. Yeah. So, I think you need to build trust with the team, right? So the folks that are working for you, have to feel that. The things that they’ve brought to date are, are valid, that you know, that you’re not gonna rock the boat too much. You may shift things or change focus on areas, but you know, you need to gain trust of your design colleagues and the design organization as a whole. So that’s kind of a first step.
I think selling the story of design, the narrative, and getting that story, you know, so that people understand the value is something that every senior leader has to take great care at, and it’s a balance because design— the impact of design can take time. Yet senior executive attention span can be quite short. And so you have to find ways to show demonstrable quick wins and benefit, while leaving room for the things that, you know, that are actually more substantive and impact-driven, that are gonna take more time. And, and in a way, like you have to move chess pieces before you can actually get to the, you know, the outcome that you’re looking at.
And the, one of the things I’ve learned is that you have to make sure everyone understands each time you move a chess piece on the board. And you can’t just do that in a vacuum. I, I made that mistake where I’m like, you know, I’m responsible for the outcome. They got me here. I don’t have to tell ’em everything we’re doing as long as I deliver. And the reality is no, you really do need to spend time and say, “Hey, we’re gonna do this. And here’s why we’re going to do it.”
Peter: Who, who do you need to spend that time with? Are you, is that your leadership? Is that your team…
Greg: That’s with leader. That’s that’s with leadership. Yeah. Specifically, you know, I think it’s, it’s, multi-level. One, it’s with the, your direct. So, the person that you, you know, report to you know, and in, in every instance I’ve always been reporting to a chief product, you know, officer in, in the relationships I’ve been in.
So, making sure that the relationship between you and that person is airtight, that you are communicating regularly, that you’re aligned, that you understand their objectives very clearly. And that the things that you’re going to do are going to connect to their objectives. And at the same time, you have the, hopefully, the transparency and trust with that individual to bend those objectives if you feel that it would benefit the outcome that they’re looking for, like to, to sort of say, I understand what you’re trying to accomplish, and to get there, maybe we take this path because, you know, my experience says that this might get us there in a more fast or, or effective way. So that’s, that’s, it’s really important to be crystal clear at that level.
And then at some point early in your tenure, you have to sort of set a vision for your team. Because design teams in general have to feel like they’re connected to something. They have to have a sense of purpose. And, and that adds clarity, actually gives them autonomy because they can see how they might contribute to that broader perspective.
And so it, you know, at some point in, you know, as I’m imagining myself going into to my new role, which starts next week, you know, I don’t know, will, it’ll be six months or nine months, but some point in we’ll come out with a picture of what the future might look like. And we’ll, co-create that. It’s not gonna just be, it’s not coming from me. I’m gonna actually have the team help us build it. But then we be very transparent about that so that people can identify with it and align themselves towards it and say, okay, here’s how I can contribute towards that.
Setting a Vision for your team
Peter: And when you say vision is this, like a literal envisionment, some future state experience, or is it more a direction we’re heading in and desired outcomes and impact, something kind of a little more, maybe a little less specific, a little more vague, but that allows folks to fill in the picture.
Greg: It’s a little bit of both. You know, I’m a big fan of north stars. I don’t think you actually execute on a north star. You use north star to drive the art of the possible and to, and to scratch the itch on like, tough questions. And you know, words are valuable, but artifacts are more tangible and easier for people to, especially our community who are visually oriented to, you know, identify with. But you have to do them, you know, in a way where people have permission to break them and, and change them and, you know, and, and, and, and challenge them and say, you know, we’re gonna come up with something different based on, you know, the results that we have.
And then I think there’s a fair amount of of brand work. I think, you know, working with the marketing team is actually really important to sort of understand how they want to sell the product, how they want to pitch products. What’s the, what’s the, what’s the onboarding process for customers?
I mean, it’s not enough anymore just to design great product. You have to actually understand how people learn about the product, how the product is sold to them. What’s their first set of experiences using it? What happens, you know, after they’ve used it for a period of time? And a lot of that connects to the overall narrative, the story you’re telling as a company, not just from the, you know, the UX perspective, but the brand perspective and a big part of what I will work with you know, with my marketing colleagues is understanding how they’re positioning, you know, the security business at Cisco and, and making sure that the work that we’re doing aligns with that as part of that strategy. And, and so we’ll probably have a, a, you know, a couple of documents, one that sort of like a brand house with very descriptive kind of levels to it that, that describe the kind of experience and the principles around that experience that we’re trying to deliver that’s connected to how we’re gonna tell the story and the narrative, and then we’ll have some future looking artifacts that tell a story about what it could be. And then, you know, we’ll look at the period in between that and start working towards it.
Peter: At GE, Beth Comstock– it was, my understanding was Beth was a, a main advocate for building out this design and UX center of excellence. And I also believe she was a chief marketing officer. Were you, what was that? Were you in her org? Were you reporting up to her?
Greg: Yes. When I joined GE, I reported to Linda Boff who worked for Beth. And I had a very direct relationship with Beth. She was one of the great mentors in my career. She, there’s a really funny thing. My very first day at GE, I met her in, you know, GE’s corporate offices in, at the time were in Connecticut in this just sort of, you know, massive complex.
And she had one of those offices that, you know, was just enormous. And, I walked in, I had the temerity to ask her this, uh question. I said you know, “on a scale of playing it safe or getting fired, you know, like where do you want me playing in this role?” And she said, “as close to getting fired as possible. And I will give you a couple of get out of jail cards.”
Um, and uh, it was awesome. It was like a really, you know, empowering thing for a leader to say. And, you know, we, we, we did some things in the first two years when I was there that were difficult to do and, you know, were sort of courageous acts, but were the right things and, and it was really great having a leader who really supported you in terms of doing that.
Peter: You mentioned you’ve been, I guess, more recently reporting up through a chief product officer, but there you were in marketing. And I think that’s a different experience than a lot of design leaders have. The ones at least that we engage with, right, ’cause we tend— typically are talking with UX and product designers who are, are reporting up through product.
What, what, what, what was that experience like? I know that’s a weird question, but, to report up through marketing, but, you were also responsible for creating product and doing user experience work. Was that a, a happy and healthy relationship? Was it weird and, and kind of fractious, because there were different masters that you were trying to serve or how did that all shake out?
Greg: Yeah, well, it did shake out. And you know, the history of GE was kind of interesting when they did made the decision to, know, become a software company, which they already were. You know, when I joined in 2011, they were like the 14th largest software company in the world and didn’t know it, because they had so many conglomerates in different divisions, but if you looked at just the headcount of engineering it was enormous.
And so they, they recognized that they had to build in a more platform approach and and the way they started it is they built a, a software center of excellence and a user experience center of excellence. And the software center of excellence reported to GE Research and the UX center of excellence reported to global marketing.
And we were supposed to work together, hand in hand and, and we did but we had some independence at that level that you know, was one of the first early friction points, but I think ended up being a good thing for everybody. In that what we ended up doing at that point was there was, it was a really interesting role building the role at GE.
Building design systems before they were cool
Greg: There was no way for us to hire enough designers to do all the work. And so the position that we took was, all right, we are going to make the engineering teams have a toolkit that allows them to at least do reasonably good design. And so we built, you know, a design system. This is early days in design systems. You know, now design systems, everybody builds one, but in 2011 there were, you know, maybe a few out there and you really didn’t see internal houses having their own.
And we we built a design system, but we didn’t build it for designers. We built it for engineering and we built a site for engineering that was really kind of snarky and inside baseball and very GE and, and we, we built full reference design. So it wasn’t just components, but all the way to like, Hey, you’re building an analytics application, you can download this entire kit of software and just connect your APIs to it and build a key software.
And, and then we launched it in a very open source model inside of GE. So there was no perm— you know, that you didn’t have to check in if you used it. There was no review process. It was just intended to like, you know, use it, if you want to, you know, don’t, if you don’t. And early friction point for us was the software center of excellence was trying to build a platform and they were trying to get the rest of GE to use the platform. And they wanted us to only allow people to use the design system with the new platform, which I thought was a silly idea because GE had many platforms in all of its different businesses and it would benefit from having more cohesive user experience across all of its applications, and then they could fix the platform later.
And so that was a little bit of early conflict. We actually resolved it. The, the head of product who later became my boss, ’cause of consolidation of the two centers of excellence into GE Digital recognized that it was actually a good strategy for the company and it was really successful and like it grew like fire in the company.
And you know, we had all kinds of really interesting metrics. We saved the company a ton of money just in speed of development and the quality of the experience that GE customers were getting improved, you know, remarkably. Even without designers being involved. And then one benefit out of it was that teams started to recognize that, Hey, if we have this system, it would be good to have some additional designers on board.
So the organization started hiring more and more UX people because of the work that we did.
Changing the organization itself
Jesse: I’m noticing with that story, the way in which vision that you were pursuing for a particular product offering or thing that you guys are putting out in the world led to a shift in the organization itself into how it organized itself and approached its work.
Greg: Yeah.
Jesse: How much of that do you feel is necessary in order for design to be successful in organizations in terms of…
Greg: Oh, I, I, I think it’s critical. Yeah. I think you know, one of the things I think’s really interesting right now is the tools have changed so much in the last five years that the roles in software are all open for some degree of redefinition. And, and so that conversation, you know, for instance, for me, I only wanna work in organizations where leadership is willing to, to not stand on its laurels, but really is willing to look at how it works and is continuously sort searching for how it can be better.
And and that goes for how product managers work. It’s how engineering works, how design works and that they’re in constant conversation with each other. Defining that relationship and are willing to explore the boundaries where they overlap a bit and define what makes most sense for them in terms of who owns what, and, you know, one of the things I think we’re seeing more and more of is the framing of the actual outcome or the project that we’re, you– you’re trying to solve.
Design is showing up more and more in that inception moment, whereas they didn’t used to, there used to be, you know, product managers would kind of go out, canvass the market, figure out a, a product outcome, figure out like the business model for it, might even do some early kind of thinking about what it might be, and then they bring their design partners in and ask them to kind of start working on it.
And you know, what we’re seeing now is that you know, the design teams don’t have all the answers, but we have a set of tools in our toolkit that are really good at framing outcomes. And. If we’re involved early, then we can co-create, you know, together more effectively.
And so I think a big part of any of these kinds of things is transformation. It’s about helping organizations grow. It’s about changing hearts and minds, ’cause sometimes you have people who have been really successful and, and there’s, and, and, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And yet the knowledge that they have may not be what they need to move forward in an organization.
And, and so you have to be open to both listening, to like, how our profession should change. But also promoting how, what we do could help others be more successful in, in their roles. And, and that’s that’s not an easy task. Sometimes you have to be a little on the, down low to do that.
And sometimes you have to be very open and public about it, but you know, it depends on the culture of the organization and, and it’s maturity and, and sometimes it’s not, sometimes parts of the organization are great and others aren’t, right? You know, and like, you know, in GE one of the things we did at the beginning was we only worked with two kinds of, of teams in GE.
It would change later, but at the very beginning was either they totally got us and they totally understood design, and they were all in, or they had tried everything and were failing and the business was about to die. And, and, and, and those are the two teams we work with, right.
And if you’re in the middle, we didn’t have the time for you. We were sorry.
We, you know, we were growing the team. We only could work on certain sets of things, but our reasoning behind that was if we could take a, a business that was, like, struggling and make it successful, that had currency in that culture. Like, people would go, oh, I want that too, you know? Wow, can you replicate that?
And so and, and we did that a couple of times. And so, and then, because we had success, we promoted the heck out of it, and that gave us currency inside the organization. And then the net promoters, the people from the beginning, they were our friends, they were the ones who like, you know, if things were kind of tough, they could kind of support us in a moment.
So we were always, you know, willing to help them be successful. And, and there were a couple of really great people early on you know, specifically a guy named Tom Gentile who I think no longer is at GE, but he was a very senior executive in the company and had no design background, but went to school to learn it and then was all in with us.
And so, you know, like that was fantastic to have, you know, like a, a customer inside of that organization that you could have a trusting relationship with.
Building trust as an executive
Jesse: Trusting relationships I feel are such a critical part of what you do at the executive level more than anything else. Just working and maintaining those relationships and that foundation of trust. Especially early on when a design leader steps into an organization for the first time, it can be slow going to build that level of trust, to be able to do some of the things that you want to do. How do you approach that stepping into an organization for the first time building trust with your peers and with the senior executives?
Greg: Well, some of it’s just breaking bread, right. You know, like, Hey, let’s go have a beer or, you know, a meal and learn about, you know, what’s important to each other. Sometimes it’s listening to what challenges they have and offering help, even if it’s not in your alley. And, and, and, you know, supporting it.
And then, you know, obviously trust is earned. So, you know, you’ve gotta do some work and your early work has to be, you know, you know, clear and smart and you know, people have to attribute impact to it. Right? So, you know, it’s a combination of things.
I think, you know, you always wanna make sure that the, your partner is the one who gets the attention, right. So, you know, at GE, one of the things we did very early on is, you know, we, we celebrated the wins, but the win was not us. The win was the business unit. Um, And the team that made the decision to work with the UX COE.
When I was at ServiceNow, you know, I built a, a, a shadow comms team inside my org. I, I hired a young woman straight out of college with an English degree into our content design practice. But really what she did in the beginning was she wrote a monthly newsletter about all the things that we were doing. And it was always a story about, you know, someone else in the organization that we promoted, you know, SVP of product does this, you know, and, and, and here’s the decisions that they made that were great around design work, because you want to celebrate them, too.
They want to feel like they’re getting value, but they also want to feel like you’re supporting their career objectives. And so, you do it in a sincere way, an authentic way. It’s not, you know, you’re not trying to pump up somebody who doesn’t deserve it. You’re really just trying to recognize that, you know, the good decisions are happening at every level and not just within the design team that impact how the design team can work. And if you have good partnerships, you wanna celebrate that in some way.
Peter: So earlier today, I gave an internal design leadership workshop for one of my clients and one of the activities I encourage of design leaders is evangelism, is, is celebrating your team’s success. And what you said is not that, right, you’re saying we wanna celebrate our partner’s success.
And so I guess my question is, When is it appropriate to crow about yourself, to shine the light on yourself? ‘Cause if no one else is doing it, the, the risk in only celebrating partner success is people don’t realize the role that your team in, in making that successful and, and it might get lost in the organization.
So how do you make sure that your team’s work is recognized and celebrated it?
How Design’s ‘voice’ can best be heard
Greg: Yeah, absolutely. And, and by the way, I mean, the answer to Jesse’s first question was how I communicate. What I try to do with my organization is the organization communicates its role authentically at every level. Right. And so you know, one of the things I always encourage, you know, an IC 2 designer is take your engineering and product partners out to lunch, like get to know ’em well, you know we should have a really strong design culture, but it shouldn’t be so strong that it alienates the rest of the organization.
We really should have a really strong product culture of which design is a member of. And that’s what I’m really interested in, is building really great, you know, cross-functional relationships and make sure those are solid at every level. Like that’s it from a career perspective inside the team, you know constantly be celebrating the work.
So, you know, you have an all-hands meeting. It’s not about me getting in front of talking about people. Take a, a team and have ’em show their work to the rest of the organization as a whole. If there’s a product meeting where you’re showing the product to product, engineering, and design, make sure that the cross functional team is represented when they present that work, so every member of that team has a moment in front of everyone to describe what it is that they’re doing.
And you celebrate that as a, you know, a, a, a group of equals or, you know, a triad that’s solving a problem for a customer together. And you know, I made the mistake earlier in my career of, of over amplifying the design culture and alienating some of my cross-functional peers.
Like you guys are so strong, but you, you know, you don’t let us into your house. Right. And, and so, you know, for me I want to be able to build a design culture that is… people feel a part of, they feel purpose connected to it. They feel like their careers are growing in it. They feel like they’re doing great work and everyone else is invited to the party too.
And, and we’re members of a bigger party, which is the product culture that celebrates engineering success and product success and design success. Because if you start building you know, silos in the, in the roles, you know, when you have adversity or challenges or things that happen, people fall back into that versus coming together and solving the problem together.
So you know, I think for me, I’m really a, a big fan of, of, you know product as the category. And then we each have a role in it. That’s really important towards a successful outcome and, and we should celebrate everybody’s contribution.
Creating culture for your teams
Jesse: I think for a lot of leaders, especially when they get to that senior executive level, it can feel challenging to influence culture when you’re not sort of in the weeds with people. And it can feel like you’re kind of trying to send culture down from on high, you know? And I wonder, how has that gone for you?
What has been effective for you in feeling like you actually are connected to creating culture for your teams?
Greg: Yeah. That’s a great question. ‘Cause it can be very lonely sometimes in leadership roles. I, I think there, I think you have to give autonomy to your team to do grassroots thinking. Right. And and then you can build opportunities for you to have connection with your team.
So, you know, as an example, and I may do this in my new role, I don’t know, but in my previous role at Compass, I used to do a couple of things. I had this thing called Leadership Club and it was IC-4 and above and all managers except my direct reports, and we would meet once a month and they could ask me anything and they would set the agenda and we might read a book or we might, or we might invite an outside speaker and ask them questions.
But it was an opportunity for people to just sort of have a question about, you know, what does influence mean? Because you don’t have to be a manager to be an influencer. And in fact, for me, the definition of like uh IC-5 or IC-6 designer, someone is not managing people, but is very senior in their role, is that they are a massive influencer in the organization, that they have, you know, networks of people and impact.
And so that’s one vehicle that I’ve done before. You know, I’ve always supported, you know, culture initiatives where, you know, we give a budget and a team and we ask the team to, to come up with ideas. I certainly have some, but at this point I try to stay out of that and and just be a catalyst when they come up with something that sounds like a good idea.
And, and, and we can do that. You know, other things, when I was at ServiceNow, we, brought in an outside group to bring a lecture series in for us and workshops. So we had Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf you know put together, you know, kind of a 10, eight or 10 episode, you know, thing, which was open to design and product and engineering, by the way, right. So we had topics that were about, you know, about design mostly, but they were set in a way that we could include, you know, others into it.
And I’ve done other things. I– one year at GE I took our education budget and I spent it on the product managers. So I told the design team that we weren’t gonna go to conferences and we weren’t gonna do training. But it was gonna benefit them if we sent our product managers to design thinking bootcamp and they would actually understand us better and therefore ask for more of us or, or ask better questions of us or work better with us and…
Peter: How did that… what were the results of that initiative?
Greg: Totally worked. It was awesome. Yeah. It, it, you know, and it wasn’t that expensive. We did a couple of different workshops. There were half day or one day events and, and I’m sort of joking. We didn’t, I mean, I still had some money for education for my team, but I took a, a big chunk of our education budget and spent it on the PM community.
‘Cause they wouldn’t, it was ridiculous, but they wouldn’t. But we convinced them to come. And then after that, had sort of, you know, these A-ha! moments where they were oh, that’s why you do research, right? Like, you know, like, oh, okay. There’s an insight there. And, and, you know, that was the biggest thing we were trying to get into GE’s culture was, we had a lot of experts, and they had a lot of expertise, but they might miss a key insight if they hadn’t actually talked to their users.
And we wanted their product partners to be curious about, you know, that aspect of their world. And we wanted them to do that kind of work, but they also wanted, we also wanted them to recognize that there were people, you know UX designers and professional researchers on our team that could help them do it even better.
And, and my hypothesis was at the time that if we sort of democratize some of that process, internally inside the company, it would actually drive the need for more expertise, because as people would recognize the value of it, they would say, oh, I’m okay at this. But you know, I actually want someone who’s really good at it to do this work. Let’s hire somebody.
So, and I’ve kind of used that a version of that trick ever since, you know, at some level is to try to, you know, bring people cross functionally into these kind of a-ha moments that allow them to recognize, you know, the value of, of, of certain things.
Defining outcomes with cross-functional peers
Greg: Like right now, I’m, I’m all about co-defining outcomes. I think that’s like a missing gap in software development. And I think a lot of product teams start without actually having a lot of clarity about what they’re trying to accomplish and they feel like the agile process will help them get there and it’s just nuts. And so you know, I am, I’m all about working with product teams early on to do things like, Lean UX canvas work, or, or trying to understand, like, what are the things we know and what are the things we don’t know and what are we gonna do about learning the things we don’t know, so we can know better so that we can make better decisions. Because if you do that then your design team’s gonna be much more successful.
You know, designers need a box, they need clarity. You know, it’s, it’s funny. Like, I used to, used to say, I love ambiguity. I can surf with ambiguity. It’s no problem. But, and ambiguity sometimes can be your friend, but if you design the box, then the designer can design outside of the box or inside the box. But that frame allows them to use their time productively and really solve a problem, versus sort of meandering around lots of different solutions and wasting time. And it’s the product and design team’s responsibility, and engineering at some level, too, because engineering may have an impact on that to have as much clarity at the beginning of a project as you can possibly get because then you’ll move faster and, and the outcome will be better and it’s something you can test for. And, you know, there’s all these things that kind of benefits from doing that.
So right now, I think if I was thinking about my soapbox, it’s really about properly defined product outcomes before you, you know, invest too much time and then they, this can always change as you learn. But that’s the one thing I think that helps teams be more successful.
Peter: I hear this from the design leaders I work with, they would love to be co-defining outcomes, but they’re quote, not invited to the meeting. Things are happening before they even realize what’s going on. And by the time it gets to them, some definition has happened. It’s often not super rigorous, but, but some, some work has been done.
And I’m, I’m wondering you, you mentioned earlier, you used the word transformation. I’m assuming you’ve had similar experiences where your teams weren’t necessarily at the outset of your time there in those upfront meetings.
Greg: Yeah.
Peter: And so what, what strategies did you use to help encourage your team to, to get involved earlier that worked, and maybe what didn’t, like, did you try stuff that you thought would work and it didn’t work at all, primarily what are those things that actually get your team in the room when they should?
Greg: That’s a Peter, that’s a really hard question to answer.
Peter: I– I always default to like, complain to your boss, right? Because like elevate it, right? Because your boss, theoretically, the bosses are bought into three in a box and all this, but that always feels like running to your parents or something. Right. It’s not, it’s not a satisfying solution.
Greg: No, I think, I think this is why I think I’m… defining the PLC, the product life cycle, is super, super important for a senior design leader to be actively involved with their partners on planning, on looking at the ratios in an organization of the different roles very carefully, defining budgets together instead of in silos, right?
Instead of saying, Hey, engineering gets this budget and design gets this budget and, you know product gets this budget. What you really should say is, this outcome gets this budget and design, product, and engineering get together and figure out how you wanna spend your budget towards that outcome, ’cause you’re co-responsible for delivering that outcome.
So the first thing I’m always trying to do is get triad leadership in an organization aligned, meaning that there are three co-owners of the outcome and they have equal voting rights. It’s not easy. It’s a big cultural change. We did this at Compass. It was really difficult. But I think it made a lot of sense.
And, and, and it wasn’t like a two against one, like all three leaders have to agree and if they couldn’t agree, then they could escalate it up to the next level of a triad. And usually the next level would just push it right back down and say, well…
Peter: figure it out.
Greg: figure it out, right? And, and then, and then when you’re looking at your budget and staffing, you’d be like, okay, seems like you don’t have enough design to do this, or you don’t have enough product to do this, or you don’t have enough engineering to do this. So, you know, like what are you gonna do with the resources that you have and how are you gonna allocate against it?
And you know, that’s why I talk about like whole product teams is really important for that kind of conversation. And, yes, it’s new for design to be in that conversation. But it’s also, I, I feel like there’s a generation of product and engineering people, now, who are, they wanted to work that way because they’re tired of the, the handoffs that don’t work or you know, the finger pointing that can happen in an organization if something doesn’t happen, like design isn’t delivering on time, or engineering’s taking too long, or product doesn’t know what they’re doing, you know, and those are kind of common memes that happen in large organizations.
And, and, and then what invariably happens when you don’t have that co -ownership model, if a problem does arise, the reporting goes back up the food chain in the individual roles.
And so all of a sudden you get an, you know, an email or a phone call from, you know, the CTO, this isn’t going right? What’s going on? You know, we need to make dramatic action, right, or something. And it gets escalated and then the partners lose trust with each other because they ask their dad to get involved or their mom to get involved versus working it out together in the triad model.
You’re co-owners like, you’re responsible for an outcome and if you don’t do it, you know… So that’s a big part. So a big part for me is like making sure the incentives are aligned. And it’s really hard because each of our roles has different incentive structures.
Developing common objectives across functions
Greg: You know, designers are incented by doing great work. Product is incented usually by scope. Meaning that the more scope you have, the more seniority you have in an organization. So that can be very challenging because people from a career perspective could be just acquiring scope to grow their influence when maybe some of that scope is irrelevant or not necessary for an outcome that you’re trying to drive.
And then engineering gets measured on all kinds of metrics of like, you know, how many lines of code are written and, you know, quality defects and you know, a bunch of other things, right? And so when the, if the three sides are measured by different outcomes, then you’re gonna have challenges.
And so the conversation that I’m always trying to have in an organization is, how can we move towards a common set of objectives for every product that we’re working on? And can we organize our teams around an outcome, not a feature and not cross functional features, where I have to depend on two, three different teams to, to kind of pull things together so I can be successful. I own everything I need and we’re all on the hook. And if we deliver it great, if we don’t, we’re, you know, we’re accountable.
And it’s, it’s uh… it’s not easy. And, you know, we’ll see. I mean, I think every culture’s different. And I’m super curious, you know, when I enter into my new role, what that new culture will be like.
And, you know, I, I, at this point in my career, I probably won’t shut up about like getting ratios right. And, and getting teams their work the right way, because it creates the conditions for success. It really does. Like, it creates the moment where you can say, you know, and, and everybody wants it. Right. And everybody is keenly aware now, that the outcome of your, the, the, your product’s success in the market is connected to the outcome it delivers. And, and if there’s a comparable product in the market, how effectively and beautifully and delightfully it does it.
And so now, not everyone knows how to get there, but if you can tell the story about, well, these are the steps we need to take as an organization, and, and these steps will give us the highest probability of landing that outcome, then let’s go do that, right. And if you have skeptics, then what you do is you say, okay, let’s take a part of the organization and try it.
Jesse: mm-hmm
Greg: And then if it works, you demonstrate it and then you bring it back and, you know, kind of tell a story to everybody else about like, Hey, this is cool.
Jesse: it seems to me that driving the scale of impact that you’re talking about requires a great deal of oversight, much more oversight than you personally can provide to these processes that you’re orchestrating.
Greg: Yeah.
Building your leadership team
Jesse: And this is a, this is a topic that comes up with my coaching clients, building an effective bench at that… at that next level down below you as a leader. What are some of your thoughts about getting that team together that you can trust to run the big machine that you’re orchestrating?
Greg: Yeah. I think that, well, first of all, there’s a couple things. One, you still need to kind of know what’s going on. And so you know, I, I need to see work, and you know, I will try to find a way in this new role to continue to see work. I used to spend all day Tuesdays looking at work and it wasn’t a design review by the way, it was just so I could see everything, so if someone asked me a question, I could, I could make connections between things, but also if I saw two teams doing something similar, I might say, Hey, team A talk to team B.
Jesse: Mm-hmm
Greg: And in that role I never critiqued the work. If there was something I saw I might talk to the design leader, you know, in the background, after a meeting. And it was always about supporting the ICs, asking what was fun about what they were working on, what was exciting, pumping them up, being really celebratory in that conversation. But, you know, the meeting was really, for me, it was for me to have kind of a picture at the leadership level.
I think there’s a couple things. One you want to give your leaders as much autonomy as possible and ownership of the area that they have. And you wanna hire people who are smarter than you. You know, you know, a couple of people that I hired at GE all, you know, my first two hires could have easily had the job that I had you know, that Andrew Crow and then Dave Cronin ,you know, Dave later took over the team and Andrew later kept, stayed in marketing at GE for a period of time and took on brand for GE, which was an awesome opportunity for him.
The team I had at Compass was one of the best teams I’ve ever built. It was just phenomenal group of people. And we just look for really smart, you know, folks. I am now and, you know, kind of at this point in my career, trying to find people who don’t think like I do. And so I have some diversity of opinion and also some people who can kind of push back and, and challenge.
And so that’s one. And then I think the role that you have as a senior leader to those leaders, is mostly as a coach. And what you’re trying to do is unblock them. If they have any blocks, walk them through, you know, their strategy hold them accountable for delivering, you know, what they say they’re gonna deliver.
And as I said earlier, you know, give them as much autonomy to do whatever they need to do, including getting in a little bit of trouble, like, you know, that’s okay. Right. You know ’cause you don’t learn otherwise, you know how to do that. How to move things forward.
Peter: Kind of related to Jesse’s question, something I noticed, or reflected on, as I was thinking about the roles you’ve had over the years, is that there’s an intent in how you compose teams and I, I find you are also building particular, like, within the realm of design or user experience, cross- functional teams.
So…
Greg: mm-hmm
The composition of design orgs, and when to roll out what functions
Peter: Not just design, but research, content teams, you’ve led content teams, not every design team has content teams, but you seem to have made that part. You mentioned design systems earlier, maybe design operations. I’m kind of, I’m wondering how you think about the functions within the, this organization that you’re building and what— what’s important to you to, to establish.
As you look out, what, what are new roles or new functions that we should be considering, or just kind of curious how you, how you think about the intentionality of those practices within your org.
Greg: Yeah, some of it has to do with the size of the organization, too, right? So if, you know, you know, you’re zero to 50, it’s pretty hard to make an argument for a content practice. You can have a content designer designer on your team, but you know, it may not be a practice. If you’re a hundred then, yeah, absolutely. Have a content design team, you know, hire uh… first leader and maybe one or two people who can do that.
It also depends on the content, you know? So, you know, like if you think about Compass you know, it was a real estate technology platform that had a very specific audience and a very specific way, way of talking and a very strong brand yet the brand’s voice wasn’t in the product. So the argument for content design was incredibly important. And so, you know, we hired Morgan Quinn out of ServiceNow. Someone I had worked with before, who helped build a content design practice and, and she did an amazing job and, you know, Morgan’s now at Google and you know, thankfully she was with us for, you know, the time I was at Compass and did a amazing job, you know, building that practice.
I think you have to be careful, you know, I think you need to look at the culture of the organization, like roles, like the design ops role. You know, there are other roles in organizations like technical product manager, TPMs, PMMs, et cetera. And you wanna make sure that you’re not overlapping in responsibilities and you don’t wanna make, you wanna make sure you’re not having, like, design needs an interface to work with engineering’s interface.
It has to have an interface that works with product’s interface, like that’s… that, that, that becomes a little nuts. Right? So what you want is, you wanna look at your organization, look at the needs, look at your leaders and say, what are the set of tools that we need in place that will allow us to use our resources most effectively, right?
So I’m a big fan of design ops, but I think it needs to be about resource allocation, about visibility, and how fast the team’s working. So that when an executive comes with a, “and I need you to do this,” you have the ability to say, well, then what would you like us to stop doing? Because we’re at capacity, right?
And historically designers get screwed because they don’t have that information. So they end up saying yes, and then they try to do everything. And you know, you have to actually have the discipline to be able to say, what should we take off the board? If there’s a new thing we need to drive into because there’s a customer issue or, or, or a new marketing thing that, or, or new business outcome that you need to get to market quickly, for whatever reason you know, you gotta have that ability.
So it’s a little bit dependent. Some of it depends on, you know, are your other cross-functional partners, is the brand and marketing team really strong. If so, then, you know, you don’t have to lean in there. If they’re not so strong, you might have to build, you know, a little bit of a practice inside of your own practice that works with them to help their message show up in product.
So and then, you know, certainly in design systems, you know, I’ve managed design systems teams where I’ve had the engineering on my team and it’s been in the engineering organization. I think that there’s models that work in both. But you know, getting, getting that right, you have the right, have, you have to have the right kinds of people to do DS work, right?
You have to have designers who understand tech, and engineering who understand design and, and they have to be, they have to love working together. And, you know, the reporting doesn’t really matter as much as long as you figure that part out.
Lessons learned on the path to design executive
Jesse: So you’ve been working at this executive level for a long time now across a number of different organizations. So this question might be, might be a little hard for you to reach back and remember what it was. Before you took on these kinds of roles…
Greg: hmm.
Jesse: What did you get totally wrong about what this job actually is and what it entails?
Greg: Okay. So I, I think there’s a couple things that happen. I, I think as you grow in design leadership from a manager to a senior manager, to a director, to senior director, there’s this feeling that you get to direct the outcome and the design work and, and that you’re dictating to your design team, like, how to do the work. And there’s some truth to that.
Like, you know, if you’re in the earlier parts of your, you know, your more a player/coach, you’re in the work, you’re doing the work. And then you hold onto that for a really long time. And that can be unnerving to your own leadership. Meaning like you’re, you’re in their work, when they own it, you know, or you want them to own it, but you’re in their work. So that’s a mistake I’ve made, which is not given my, my, you know, they might do it differently than the way I would do something, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It just means it’s different. And, and it still might satisfy the outcome that we’re trying to address. So learning to have that ability to detach from the work is really, it’s, it’s hard because, you know, I, I, I like designing work. I like designing things. I have lots of ideas. I have, you know, plenty of things to do, but I don’t have enough bandwidth to see most of that through so I can nudge, I can course correct, I can encourage, I can offer things to look at. But you know, you don’t want me in your Figma files. Right. So , so that’s, that’s something I’ve had to learn.
And I think one of the things I learned in my last role was to really get out of my director’s way and let them have ownership and, and, and, and let them have those relationships and let them be the person who presents that to senior leadership and and talk less.
You know, and, and that’s hard, hard, hard to do. So that’s one thing.
The other thing that I’m trying, and I don’t know if I’ll be successful at this, I have, you know, I’m very stubborn about sometimes with the way I think things should go and and I hold onto it. And and you know, you have to recognize that you have product and engineering leadership that you have to work with that may not always align with that.
I think at this point, my career’s super important for me to have like a really tight relationship with the person I report to, his peers and my peers at the leadership level, and to be really aligned with them about what they’re trying to accomplish, even if that’s challenging for the rest of my team. Because if you’re not aligned there, I can’t help my team.
And and so and, and I think that’s a hard thing because, you know, sometimes, if you’re only talking about design in those leadership meetings, you know, what you really want to have happen is you want your peer to talk about design and you want me to talk about a product outcome or an engineering issue, and you want engineering to talk about design, right?
You want to have that kind of relationship where, you know, together, you’re kind of sorting things out. And you know, and, and, and that’s hard because you know, there’s so much work to be done to, to empower designers that you feel like any opportunity in any moment that you can tell the story you should. But if you overtell that story, then you just become kind of like a, a, a parrot, right? Like people think you’re just, you know, they, they, they tune out.
And so that’s something I’m… I had to learn the hard way, you know, at some point I, I actually remember being in a meeting where someone, just out in front of me and the leadership, said, you only talk about design, you know, stop.
Balancing cross-functional peer and team needs
Peter: Stop it. But you mentioned something as part of that, you said it’s important for you develop those relationships with your peers, your boss, their peers, even when it could be challenging for your team. How would it be challenging?
Greg: Well, I mean, one of the challenges in leadership is you can’t always tell people everything that’s going on, right. You know, organizations make decisions that take time to mature. Leadership is fallible. It makes mistakes and course corrects and, and sometimes those things have to be orchestrated carefully to you know, protect the business and to support the objectives.
And sometimes those narratives don’t feel like, to everybody, like you’re really pushing the design, you know, like we’re gonna do A+ design all the time, right. And, you know, and you know, one of the conversations I’ve, you know, I have with people, which is, is, is a really hard one, but it’s like, it’s in the knowing of the project that you’re working on.
Like, are we, are we trying to hit, like, this is a bad baseball analogy, but are we hitting singles? Are we trying to get a home run? Right.
Jesse: Mm-hmm
Greg: This is a project where we’re hitting singles and it’s gonna take us two to three years to, to score a bunch of points. And that can be, for early career designer, like, horrible, right, because they’re just like, you know, I know this sucks and we’re making it incrementally better when we could really make it really better if we really, really tore it apart and, and built it the right way and did a home run. But the organization may not have the resources or the institution to, to execute on that, right. And so it’s in the knowing. Right.
And, and so you have to be able to sometimes present information in the organization to say, here’s where we’re putting a lot of attention and here’s where we’re placing good intention and good attention, but it’s, you know, we know it’s incremental in nature and, and that that’s okay too, you know, I mean, engineering makes compromises, product makes compromises, design has to make compromises sometimes.
And you know, the important part about doing that is that that’s not a consistent part of your culture and that you’re transparent about that decision making with your people, to the extent that you can be. So I don’t know. It sounds sounds that sounds completely underwhelming at the moment. Cause I’m always trying to push for us to do amazing work.
Peter: That’s kind of the challenge between idealism and pragmatism, right? I tend to be a very pragmatic leader. And so when I’ve been in situations, like what you’ve talked about, I’ve pissed off my design team because what engineering built was better than what was currently out there, but didn’t meet the specs of whatever was on the design files that, that we had created. And I’m like, well, it would be irresponsible for us not to ship something that is better than what’s out there, even if it hasn’t hit this ideal. And so, but yeah, you also want a culture of greatness and so, so trying to figure out how do you navigate pragmatism and idealism…
Greg: Yeah. And you know, and the, but there are some weird things happening right now. I mean I don’t think people have quite figured out the impact that Figma is making in our community, but engineering gets incredibly perfect specifications for pixel accurate location of every aspect of their build from their Figma files. So it’s almost impossible for them to come back and say, I did it a different way.
Jesse: Mm.
Greg: You know, if they did, you kinda go, dude, check this out, it’s right here. It tells you, you know, two point, you know, two pixels here, bup bup bup bup bup, you know and it’s even got code enabling built in it, if you built it the right way, right?
Like, there’s like a one to one to your design system, like, boom. And so some of the, the quality outcome issues that, you know, you experience with engineering teams are starting to disappear because the tooling is getting better.
And then there’s another aspect, which is we all experience great software every day. All of us do, regardless of role. And so, you know, I, I personally find engineering teams want to deliver really awesome stuff. And so, you know, like in my mind, you know, the partnership that you… that’s super important is, you know, it all three are really important, but have a great relationship with your engineering team. Like make sure that you know them, you understand what pressure they’re under and how they work. And you know, they’re just trying to do great stuff and you know, if you make their life easier, they’ll love you for it.
To your point though, sometimes there are compromises along the way and you know, that’s and you know, and those compromises invariably happen when you have legacy platforms that you have to munge together to deliver a new outcome and refactoring and rebuilding.
Some of that technology is just too hard, or there’s not an economic viability to do that. And so you put together the best possible solution you can, and it’s useful for customers, but it may not be as delightful as you would like it to be. But you do your best.
An optimistic view of where things are heading
Jesse: I’ve noticed a couple of times through this conversation that, unlike a lot of folks in the design industry, the ways in which things are changing are giving you reason to hope and reason for optimism. I wonder, what’s got you feeling the most optimistic about the future of this work.
Greg: Wow. That’s a great question. Well, I’m always half-full person. Glass is half full. And I think you have to come to the table that way with your partners.
Personally, I think some of the stuff I’m a big fan of Jeff and, and, and Josh you know, the Lean UX canvas, because I think it’s a really great model for very early on at the inception of a project of defining everybody’s insights and understanding of the program and what you’re trying to accomplish and what you don’t know and what, how you might go about learning what you need to know. And I just find that if we do more of that, then everybody’s job is more fun. Product’s job is more fun. Engineering’s job is more fun, design’s job is more fun.
And so you know, I spent a lot of my attention on trying to teach that practice, whether I bring those two guys in to do workshops, or I teach them in times of organizations. But I think that that sets the foundation for curiosity amongst the team and and builds trust. And so if you can do that, then you have a chance of doing great product and, you know, we all wanna work someplace where we have good working relationships with the people that we’re working with and that we’re proud of the work that we’re doing.
And the other thing that that activity does is it, if you define your work the right way, it also creates boundaries. Like it, it… the more clarity you can drive into a project means that you can actually deliver on timelines, right?
And the more ambiguity you have, the more likely that you’re gonna be spending weekends working on stuff, because you still have, you know, an executive has publicly said, this is gonna be delivered on, you know, June 1st. And you know, we’re ready and, you know, teams burn midnight oil trying to, to get it done.
And, and you know, sometimes you have to do that, but, but you don’t wanna do that all the time. Right. You know? And, and so I that’s, what I’m optimistic about is I think the tooling is helping. And I think that, the conversation around how we work together is changing. I do think, you know, and this may sound a little controversial, but I think that Product’s role is changing.
Jesse: Mm,
Greg: A lot of product people like to figure out how a product worked.
Jesse: mm.
Greg: I think personally Product should let Design figure out how a product should work and Product should figure out the business and the outcome and the, the value that it creates for their customer. And then orchestrate and understand what are the minimal set of things that you need to deliver that outcome, you know?
And, and that’s their role and and they should do it together. And, the, the, the Product people who understand that are a delight to work with and the people, Product people, who, uh, struggle with that are harder to work with.
Balancing clarity and partnership
Peter: Earlier, you talked about co-defining outcomes and the importance of that kind of co-ownership, that kind of three in the box ownership of product, design, and engineering,
Greg: Yeah.
Peter: and, just now you kind of distinguish between what, at least product and design, we could talk about engineering, if you wanted to add, each of them owns, because you also talked about clarity…
Greg: yeah.
Peter: … clarity of like role, clarity of function. But I find that in organizations, when you’re building something, there’s a desire for a single owner, right? ‘Cause that’s clarity, right?
The one throat to choke, which is a terrible metaphor, but often spoken. But you see it in other contexts, filmmaking, there’s a director, there’s not multiple directors, there’s a director. You are trained as an architect, there’s an architect. They, they decide ultimately what it is. How, how do you achieve clarity when you have multiple owners who might not necessarily agree?
Do you actually need, is one of them the real, even if they’re a shadow, leader, is one of them the shadow…?
Greg: Lead? I, I, I don’t know how to answer that question, Peter. I think it’s cultural, you know I understand the need for SPOA right. You know, that’s, single person of AOR accountability.
Um, you know, uh, I think that’s the, the acronym.
Yeah, right. Yeah, that’s right. There’s and I understand that. And, and certainly historically product has been the, the, the, the owner of that. So I, I think the way I think about it is, I think probably it’s still Product, but the best Product leaders share it, right. And, and they say, Hey, we’re a triad, and we’re gonna work this out together, and, and you have an equal voice.
One of the challenges you have is that, you know, historically we haven’t been in that conversation. And so learning how to be in that conversation for designers is hard. And, and including the compromise, right? It’s easy, if someone else says we’re not gonna do something, but if you say I agree to not do something, and then you gotta go back to your team and say, you know, you can’t blame anyone else but yourself in front of your team, whereas in the past you say, oh, Product, they made this really bad decision, right? But we’ll get through it. Right.
No, you have to say, collectively we came to this conclusion and here’s how we’re gonna deal it. And we’re gonna roll up our sleeves and figure out how to work with it. And you know, some of it’s hierarchical, right? So I think one of the challenges in our industry is that we are under-leveled across our, against our peers. So, you know, a director in design is usually working with a senior director in product or a VP in product, right? And, um,
Peter: and you, you are reporting up through product,
Greg: I am I report to the CPO…
Peter: That shows, right. Product is… the, the head of design is reporting to the head of product.
Greg: Yeah, that’s right. But I, I, I personally, I think that you can create the conditions for that. And then, you know, if there needs to be a, a, a, a decider I guess that’s okay.
Peter: When, when will design be ready to report to the CEO? I mean, you’ve had a lot of opportunities probably, or, I mean, you’ve been at that, that near that level for a decade now, right? Since you started at GE, you’ve been really damn close, keeps not quite happening. How do you think about that?
Greg: I, I don’t know the answers. I think it has to do the size of the organization. You know organization like Cisco, which is a hundred thousand people with, you know, sales organization and a marketing function and accounting and you know, all the other different functions that happen.
There’s a part of the organization that builds product, right. And then, and so the, the, in my mental model, it’s sort of like, you know, I report to the CEO of product and, and, you know, and, and so in a very large organization, I think the CPO is probably the right leader. I think, there, I do think there will be CPOs that were CDOs, right?
So chief design officers who become chief product officers, right. That they become, they own, they own the whole thing. I think there’s evidence of that. I mean, you look at Airbnb, you know, that pro– that’s a company that was created by a designer, right?
So I do think that you’ll start to see product, the ownership of product be there, but ultimately product has to have a leader for it. And whether that’s the product or the designer, you know, I think it’s situational as a whole.
It could be in some future incarnation that there’s a role for a CDO who is kind of, you know, looking at next level down CDOs that are working in different business units. And that person reports to a CEO. I haven’t seen that model yet. Maybe that’ll happen. I, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not that worried about that kind of stuff.
Like, you know, I think my biggest thing is just make sure you make great product and the way you do that is, you know, work as hard as you can to influence the organization to practice good practices.
Jesse: Greg, thank you so much for being with us. This has been fantastic.
Greg: Hey, I appreciate it. I was really fun. I I was like thinking like, what would I talk about? And you guys asked a lot of great questions, so you got me yaking away, I’m sure. You know, all the people in my new organization are gonna be listening to this to try to figure out, figure me out. Don’t worry, guys. I don’t bite. Um, And um, uh, thanks again for hosting me today.
Peter: Thanks for joining us. Do you keep a public presence? Is there a way that people can engage with you out there in the world, on the internets, et
Greg: well, on Twitter, I’m at @gpetroff, and I’m on LinkedIn. And so those are my two kind of spots that you can kind of see me. Sometimes I’m active, sometimes I’m not. But you know, I’m out there. If you want to get ahold of me, you can just, ping me in one of those two platforms.
Peter: Excellent. Well, thank you so much.
Greg: Thank you.
Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s peterme and I’m JJG. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on Apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show Kaaren Hanson, chief design officer for Chase offers her perspective on what she had to learn and unlearn on the way to the C-suite, how the leadership challenge changes as you move up, and creating design teams that leave a lasting impact on their organizations.
Peter: Hi, Kaaren, thanks for joining us. I’ve been working with you now for couple of years, almost a few years in a couple of different contexts, and I’ve seen how you are leading these sizable teams, particularly inside a couple of banks, and Jesse and I are pursuing a thread right now, which is What does it mean to be a true design executive?
There’s a lot of people with design leadership roles and titles, but there’s not a lot of people who are operating at an altitude that I would consider errr… Being a real executive. And, and you’re definitely one, given the size and scope and scale of, of the operations that you’re responsible for. You’re currently the chief design officer at Chase.
Is that right? Am I getting that right?
Kaaren: Yep.
Defining the role of Chief Design Officer
Peter: Okay. So what, what is that role? What does it even mean to be a chief design officer at Chase? What do you, what, what are the responsibilities? What do you do? How are you held accountable?
Kaaren: Yeah, those are good questions. So, you know, it’s interesting ’cause I think about this as the role evolves over time. So right now, what I’ve really been focused on is: first, how do we create a truly strong and robust design team? One that has strong leadership, one that has strong craft. One that is appropriately resourced. And one that is integrated into the business yet is also able to go up an altitude, so they– we can look at the end-to-end experience.
So that’s been a big push of mine for probably the last year and a quarter or so. And I’ve been there for about a year and a quarter. And just in that time, for example, we’ve grown from about 300 people on our team to about 800 today will be about 850 by the end of the year.
And by the end of the next year, we’re gonna be about a thousand. Which is a lot of growth. Um, so you can imagine I was spending a ton of my time hiring, but also a ton of my time working with leaders across the business, including, like, the CEO of consumer bank or the CEO of connected commerce or the CEO of wealth management, to ensure that design is sitting at their table, and that the operating mechanisms are supportive of us being customer- focused, customer- first and really starting to hold a bar.
The other area that I’ve been focused on is metrics. So any executive knows like metrics fricking matter, right? You manage what you can measure and we can measure customer experience. We’ve all been doing this for years. Sometimes just more systematically than others. So one of the first things that I did when I joined was to connect with our data science team and to really work with them, they are very excited about customer experience metrics, and they were thrilled that someone else was excited about them and championing them.
And so as you just need two different voices in the org to really make something happen more quickly. And so we aligned on three key metrics that we’re using for our customer experience. And then it was all about how do we make sure every single team has customer experience metrics that ladder to the bigger OKRs of the company.
So for example, one of the OKRs that we have is Net Promoter Score of at least 70, right, which is a, a reasonably high bar. And then we can look at well, what impacts that net promoter score and some very basic areas. Customer success rates, right? If you’re not successful, you’re unlikely to be very happy, right? It seems super obvious. We can easily empower teams to go after that success rate.
We’re using something called a customer experience gap. This is something the research team started before I joined. And essentially what it does is the lead researcher, lead designer, lead product manager, do a heuristic evaluation of the five most common tasks. And they note all of the gaps that are present. And then we figure out, What severity are they, one to five. Five actually prevents you from accomplishing your task in some cases. And one is more like, you know, padding this size, that size. And so once we’ve got those in board, then it’s about how do we start to change the way that the company views our products?
So now I’ve been working with the people who operate the bank to make sure these customer experience metrics are part of the business reviews. They’re part of the quarterly business reviews. The CEO is asking about them. They’re part of monthly updates. And this helps the teams to focus on them.
While at the same time, we’re really building this muscle of strong design-research-content, et cetera, that is able to help the teams on the ground become much more customer focused and rigorous in that way. And then at the same time, what I’ve started to do in the last three to six months is focus on how our design, product, engineering, and data working together.
And toward that end, we’ve been bringing in Silicon Valley Product Group. They do a really good job really helping teams to understand that together, they are collectively there to understand the customer problem, to solve, to figure out how the heck they’re gonna measure if they made any difference, and to just go fast.
So I’m looking at it as you know, there’s this system that’s in place at Chase. And my job is to figure out how to use whatever judo moves I can to make it a system, you know, that supports the customer and creates conditions in which our teams can do the best work of their lives. And when I think about our teams, our teams are not our design team. Our teams are our product managers, engineers, data, and design.
Peter: So you’re, you’ve clearly thought about this, ’cause ’cause you had these four bullet points ready to go: team building relationships, metrics, product management. You’ve been a reflective leader. I’m wondering when you stepped into the role, did you know that’s what the job was? Is there a, are you working from a playbook or had you so, so, so you, so you’re, you’re shaking your head uh, which the, audience wouldn’t be able to see.
So how did you, what, what– did you have a playbook coming in? What did that look like? And then how did you unpack that these were the four kind of initiatives to engage in? And it sounds like in roughly this order, like how did that come about?
Kaaren: I mean, well, like, you know, anytime you start a new job, your first thing to do is to just listen and learn, right? And to figure out what’s going really well. What are the points that you can really shine and amplify, right? Like those CX gaps, huge point of light, all you have to do is help amplify it, right?
And then also what’s not working as well. And what doesn’t make sense. And then, you know, I took a lot of notes and I thought about, wait, what’s going on? Where’s this? And I thought, okay, which of these could I make progress on quickly versus more slowly?
I have tried a lot of different things, some of which were taken up like this, and some of which were not. So those customer experience metrics, that was a huge surprise to me how quickly it happened. I thought it would take two to three years. So I got started and I was like, all right, we’re gonna go, we’re gonna try this. And literally, yeah, within six months it was present in 70% of the dashboards that teams were working towards, like blew my mind.
I couldn’t believe how quickly this company moved. If I had my plan, I would’ve said I was gonna do that for the next three years. So that was a nice surprise. There’s some other things though, that we’re still working on, like the ratios, the ratios of designers to product managers, to engineers. They’re not where we should be.
And I’m trying to hire as fast I can, right. While still holding a high bar for talent. And I am not making enough of a dent on these ratios. Right. And so that is something maybe I thought would happen more quickly and it’s happening more slowly because we continue to hire all over the place.
And so, you know, so I, I think a part of it is also just seeing, well, where is the organization? What is going to get traction, right? There are probably 10 levers to pull that will make a difference. Let’s try one. If the org is ready to go with it, awesome. If they’re not ready yet, that’s okay. We got nine others. And so I’m very, yeah, I don’t necessarily have a playbook, but I do feel very strongly, the first job as a design leader coming in is to create a strong, robust team. Because if your team isn’t robust, there’s no way you can push for change.
Jesse: Mm-hmm , I’m curious about where they were when you started, what was their approach or attitude toward design when you came to be the face of design to the leadership there?
Kaaren: Yeah, I think it’s hard when you have organizations of this size, because it’s so, it’s so variable depending upon where you are, and depending upon the people. I will say what really impresses me at this company is the people are incredibly smart, but they’re also so darn open. And in fact, when I first joined, I was like, really? Are people really this nice? Like, hmm, is this just an act? You know, like when am I gonna learn that it’s not true. And I still haven’t learned that it’s not true, right? Which is astonishing.
So really smart people open to trying new things. Maybe they just under didn’t understand the rationale for why this mattered. So a lot of what I’m trying to do is articulate the rationale for why I’m doing something and why the team is doing something.
And one of the trainings we’ve brought in, we’ve brought in two really important trainings for the design team, meaning design, research, content strategy, et cetera. But one of them is Articulating Design Rationale with Tom Greever, right? And what that’s all about is, how do we help our team to better articulate why they’re doing something and why they think it’s important? Because usually if people have the same information, they come to the same conclusion, right? It just helps the overall broader team operate more seamlessly.
And the second one is Facilitative Leadership. A woman named Wendy Castleman has been helping us with that. And it’s really about how do we help everybody on the team drive alignment if there isn’t alignment and particularly that alignment on the customer, right? And again, like we’re getting better in pockets, you know, it’s faster in pockets, but overall it’s just a foundational skills we expect everybody to have. And sometimes I’ll talk to people and they’ll say, wait, I thought that was product management’s job. And I’m like, yeah, it is. And if the team you’re on, isn’t aligned, well, you go fix it, right? And it is so important. That’s why everybody needs to do it.
The need for prioritization
Peter: You mentioned going your team growing from 300 to 800. Was that real– was that a realization that had occurred before you joined and, and they wanted to bring you in as part of this expansion, or was that part of your listening tour? Where, in looking around and reflecting, you’re like, wait a moment, I see one of– a way forward is we need to grow the team in order to address the challenges that I’m hearing about.
Kaaren: I would say it’s yes, and. So I think when I joined my charge was to grow us from like 300 to 500. Right. Which was sizeable. And then it became clear that, you know, that wasn’t nearly enough. And now, by the way, I’m the one that’s saying we’re not growing to more… by more than a thousand. Like we’re not, and I’m getting all of this pressure, yeah, but we want 60 more people and I’m like, get in line. Because everybody wants 60 more people and, and no! Right?
So, but then that forces the question of, well, then what’s the prioritization? And I will say I have, I’ve had two amazing bosses since I’ve been there. One hired me and she’s such a high flyer that after five months she became the CEO of Card and also the CEO of Connected Commerce. So, the biggest business and the most strategic business, which just gives you a sense for how freaking smart she is. So she’s lovely. And then my second boss used to be the chief technology officer, and now he’s in charge of product, design, data, et cetera.
And and he has been fabulous because I said to him, look, one of the issues we’re running into is what is the prioritization? What is the prioritization across these lines of business? Because everybody thinks their stuff is most important. So he has been driving some really tough conversations about what actually is most important. Because we don’t have unlimited resources. Even if we have money, it doesn’t mean we have unlimited resources. And so again, like he’s been hugely helpful. And the amount– the amount of impact that had on me and the team was tremendous.
And we also, you know, he’s also been incredibly helpful just to make sure that we are having every design leader that sits within a line of business sits at that CEO table, right? One design leader per, which is critical.
And, though, I’ll tell you this, just ’cause you get a design leader up there, then they have to figure out how to act when they’re there. So there is someone I was hiring and you know, we were doing some feedback. I give everybody feedback after 90 days or. And some of the feedback was, Hey, you need to step up more and have a louder voice. And this person said, “Okay. Yeah. I mean, like I’ve always been fighting. We need to get at the table, but I’ve never actually been at the table. So like, so, so now that I’m there, I kinda don’t know what I’m doing.” And I’m like, that’s okay, well, figure it out together.
Stop fighting, start partnering
Peter: So many design leaders, and you’ve probably had this experience as well, you know, your posture is one of fighting, it’s fighting for your team. It’s fighting to be understood. It’s fighting for resources. It’s, there’s, there’s a kind of struggle that happens.
And, but, when you get to be at this, what I think of as true executive level, if you come across as a fighter, you’re… That, that becomes a problem. Yeah.
Kaaren: You are junior. If you come across as a fighter, if you’re not looking at the bigger team, if you’re not looking at the bigger business and if you’re not respecting, like, you know what? You are the best player in that role. So, you know, just let me know what you come to. I’m gonna run with it. I trust you.
Peter: So, how do you, what is that coaching that you’re providing to help people kind of flip from that fighter mindset into… So I have the Patrick Lencioni book behind me and he talks about “the first team,” right? And, and to reflect like, as a design executive, your first team, isn’t your design org, it’s these other executives that you’re now partnered with. What have you done to help people kind of shift that thinking?
Kaaren: Well, you know, it’s funny ’cause one of the things that I do deliberately is I’ll ask people, you know, who is it that you’re …whatever, whatever tool you use, right? So in our case we use Symphony, but great. Who are you Symphony-ing with the most, right? And if it’s not your product, eng, and data partner, then what are you doing? Right? Then you’re spending the wrong amount of time with them.
And so I think that there are some little ways that you can reflect on how are you spending your time. I think the other bit is to figure out… what I realized is I often ask the exact same types of questions in every room that I’m in, and I’m asking those questions because usually other people are not, and they’re very important, right, to me. And I believe they’re important to the success of us as a bigger company.
And so what I’ll often do is I’ll coach the people that report to me, I’ll be like, okay, so let’s go through this business. Let’s talk about this business. What comes to mind? What questions do you have? What do you think might be important? What might not be being talked about? Let’s get your point of view on that. Let me help you to strengthen your point of view on that. You can bounce it off of me and then you’re ready to go, right? So it’s almost like you do the practice before you get in the room, because sometimes people feel like they’re a little bit caught flatfooted as like, well, Is this really important? Should I really say this? Is it really my place to say this? You know, what is my role? And the other thing I would say also that I got, which was great coaching from an executive coach many, many years ago, is that you don’t know where the edges are until you run into ’em.
Jesse: Mm.
Kaaren: Right? So have a point of view on things that maybe you are like, well, that’s not really about design stuff, yeah. But you better have a point of view and someone will give you feedback if they’re like, can you stop talking about security? ‘Cause you know nothing about security. Like, okay, fair.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Kaaren: But I think a lot of it is just, is just prepping and then being kind to yourself and realizing that, you know, it’s an experiment.
How to successfully make change
Jesse: I think a lot of leaders get caught up in that fighting mindset in part because they see it as necessary to what they see as their role in the organization, which is as change maker, driving the organization toward some different kind of culture and more innovative culture, more human-centered culture, more design-led culture.
What do you see as, as the role of design in making organizational change, and how do you navigate that… between making change in gentle ways that can be more successful versus digging in and fighting?
Kaaren: Yeah. So I think about it as, you know, I’m also, when I join a company, I look for points of light, right. Or goodness to highlight. And so you know, I’m always looking for a, wait, so who are the product managers that are really killing it? You know, that you guys are working with? Who are the engineers that are really killing it, which data people are really involved in the customer problem?
And then I make sure to highlight them and to bring them into, you know, broader presentations to the org or to leadership. So we’re really highlighting those points of light because a) it reinforces what they’re doing as well, and then b) it’s a model for other people.
And that way you’re not always telling people don’t do this, right? ‘Cause if you just say to somebody don’t do this, they don’t know what to do. That’s not helpful. It’s more helpful if you help me figure out what to do.
And then the other thing that I’m working on is, how do we pair people? So you’ve got a product manager with a designer that they’re working together so closely with that they really start to trust each other, right? And then it’s easier to move people along.
Now, the downside to this is it’s not a fast change, right. It takes time. On the other hand, it’s more likely to last, right? And I think if anybody tells you they’re gonna change in org like a year, they’re just absolute liars. Unless the org is like three people, you know, it’s just not gonna happen, right? ‘Cause we have such habits, and organizations have habits and then they all reinforce each other. And those operating mechanisms usually reinforce the old habits. And especially if you’re at a successful company, and Chase has been unbelievably successful for like over a hundred years, right?
And so yeah, we can get better, but we’re gonna do it by, by having people see that it’s more fun and more impactful as opposed to feeling like what they’re doing now doesn’t work.
The other thing is, I am not a fan of perfection. Like I don’t seek perfection. I know things aren’t gonna work. I know teams aren’t gonna move as fast as we’d like, you know, and that’s okay.
But what I don’t have a lot of patience for is you know, when people are rude about it or disrespectful. So there have been instances when I have heard about someone being disrespectful, and we’ve gone after that right away, ’cause it’s not okay. And part of it is going after and making sure that person gets clear feedback and that person’s not rewarded for it. But part of it is also helping our team to say, okay, I’m gonna have this hard conversation. It’s not okay for you to treat me like that, which can also be really scary for designers to do.
Jesse: Mm.
Kaaren: We actually just piloted a class on that Peter yesterday in Ohio.
Peter: A class on…
Kaaren: On hard
Peter: …respectful hard conversations.
Kaaren: Yeah. How to have a hard, how to say it to somebody, you know what, when you did this, it’s demotivating and it feels bad…
Jesse: mm-hmm
Kaaren: and I I’m sure your goal is not to have me be demotivated and feel bad. Yeah. So let’s talk about what’s going on.
Peter: Chase, you know, in some ways is a Wall Street banking firm. Not known for being a touchy-feely enterprise though, as you said, you’ve experienced a lot of niceness and…
Kaaren: Oh. So much kind people.
Peter: And kindness. And I do wonder how this language of, de-motivation, you know, like you could, you could imagine maybe in another company with a more, “suck it up, buttercup” mindset. Like, this is work, we’re all here to, to succeed and you know, I don’t have time to coddle you and your concerns. ‘Cause this is a, a newer way of approaching these types of interpersonal dynamics within a business to, to be a little vulnerable, to, to, to acknowledge feelings. I mean, business is a place where we’re often taught, historically, legacy, not to acknowledge emotions and feelings to focus on “it’s just business,” to focus on the problem at hand. And so maybe, maybe that I, this is a long way into the question, but maybe the question is around, how do we acknowledge and accept these are humans with feelings and emotions and motivations in this context in a way that doesn’t turn into one giant like therapy session, right? You also don’t want it to just kind of bog everything down.
Kaaren: Mm-hmm
Peter: But you don’t wanna ignore it. How, how have you managed that?
Kaaren: Well, and what I would say is, again, like it has to do with what is the culture that you’re joining and Chase has that good culture where people are valued, right? And so by and large, this is very much a part of how people operate. And what I’ve found is I dug into some of these issues sometimes it’s that the designer maybe approached it more as a fight, right? And then there was a fight back, that everybody felt bad and it was all a mess.
And so again, it’s part of how do we both change how we’re operating, right? And how do we have these conversations, but also recognize how might we approach it differently. But one of the things I find really helpful is there’s a woman named, uh, Teresa Amabile. She wrote a book about like I think it’s called the power of purpose and this was probably back about 10 years ago or so, but she was at Harvard and she did a whole bunch of research on organizations and people and what makes them effective. And essentially there are three things that matter.
It matters, do you have people that you feel good around that you trust. Right. Do you have a clear purpose that you care about? And then do you have evidence you’re making progress? And if you have those three things and you have to have all three of them, you’re gonna be pretty darn happy and pretty darn productive at work.
And so, you know, I think that people part is a big part of it. Are you being treated respectfully and whatnot, and then the purpose, it goes back to what is your company’s purpose and how are you living it? And so I work really hard to tie everything we do to our purpose, which is help people make the most of their money so they can make the most of their lives, right? Like I am happy to get up every day and go after that.
And then the progress again goes back to those CX metrics. So I also think a lot of framing about this is why we’re doing what we’re doing, but I will say that at Chase, you know, it is very much expected. There’s a high bar for people interacting with others. Well, and really operating in accordance to the values of the company as they get more senior. And in fact, they won’t get more senior if they’re not operating according to those values.
Now of course, anytime, a very big company or there’s some people that sneak through, of course, but not, not very often in my experience, in fact, almost never.
Jesse: I’m curious about some of your previous roles in design leadership before taking on this challenge at Chase and how they prepared you for this and maybe how they didn’t.
Kaaren: Hm. Good question. So what I would say is, you know, when I was at Intuit for the longest, I was there for almost 12 years and I worked very closely with Scott Cook, who was one of the founders. And I also worked with Brad Smith, who at the time was the CEO and, and a bunch of other people, and yeah, we went after design for delight and we went after upping the craft and we went after upping design leadership, right. And changing the ladder, so they went all the way to VP and I spent a lot of time on compensation and all that good stuff.
And you know, there were, there were cadre of us who got the crap beat out of us again and again and again and again, well, we tried things that failed and tried other things that failed and tried other things that failed, but eventually it succeeded.
And I feel like what I learned there was a lot about how do you stop talking and get people to do, right. So how do you make it easy for them to take action? And so that’s been a big part of how I look at the world.
Then I went to a startup and that was just a ton of fun. And there were like four designers and me and I got to do hands-on design, which I hadn’t done long time and it was exhilarating. It was great. And it was also chaotic ’cause startups are. And then, so I think from there, I just, I laughed the most I’ve ever laughed in my entire life. Like literally every day would just be busting out laughing. It was amazing.
And then I went to Facebook and what I learned at Facebook was really this relentless focus on a metric. And how, if you get teams that are super driven, focus on a metric, they will run fast. Now obviously there are downsides if all you’re doing is running fast towards a metric. And we can see those downsides all over the place. Right. But it really did teach me the power of metric. And I was astonished by how much time was spent, figuring out really what is the right metric that we’re going after.
So that was really interesting. And then when I went to Wells Fargo, you know, they’re under consent order and they were super candid with me that they were under a consent order when I went, I didn’t actually know what that meant. You know, it just like, you know, I, who knows? What it actually means is that there’s a whole bunch of scrutiny from regulatory perspective, which means that the amount of fun, impact you can have is very little, because almost all your resources are going to, you know, help with regulatory issues that need to be solved. Right. But I would say that at Wells Fargo, I learned more about the banking business. Right. And so I learned more what the lingo was and how that worked, which I think made it easier for me to go to Chase and step in quickly because I already understood the words people used.
And then it was more about what are the patterns that I’m seeing.
Jesse: Mm-hmm hm mm.
Kaaren: But I mean, honestly, like, I feel like throughout my career, I’ve been so lucky because I’ve worked with so many smart people that have taught me so much. And that really is, I think how you learn the most is just on the job.
Jesse: Yeah.
The leadership skills needed to develop
Peter: Reflecting on that and what you’ve learned and you, you just shared some, kind of bullet points or not bullet points, but, but experiences you’ve had that have kind of stepped you up, but I’m wondering, you know, what are things that you, in order to become an effective leader, what are the things you needed to work on?
What are the things that, that, that, that folks pointed out to you as like, Hey, this isn’t going so well, you might need to try a little bit less of this, a little bit more of that, whatever that was. And so, yeah. What are the things you needed to work on? And then what were those skills that you had to, to develop, to become an effective leader?
Kaaren: So, so I remember three things pretty clearly. So one is being transparent, right? So if you’re not transparent about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, it’s easy for people to read all kinds of other things into what you’re doing. And they may assume you have nefarious intent. And so like having to be super transparent about what I’m doing and why it didn’t come naturally to me, because it’s so obvious to me what I’m doing and why, right? And, or maybe I’ll have said it once. And I just think, of course, everybody remembers, right? And they don’t. And so now I’ll often use words, I’ll be like, okay, right, “just to be transparent about what I’m doing,” right. I literally say that. And then I’ll unpack why I’m doing what I’m doing. And that has been incredibly helpful.
I think another item that I had to work on was judgment. So judgment is toxic. Like being judgmental is toxic. On the other hand, as someone who’s been in this field, we are incredibly critical of things. We are like, nobody is more critical. That’s our job is to be critical, right?
Jesse: Right.
Kaaren: But that’s not helpful when you’re working with other people, and you’re trying to drive change in an organization, because if you’re judgemental, it’s almost like you’re adding toxicity to relationship. So I’ve had to rein that way back. And I, I worked on that, I think for like five years before I felt like I had actually made enough difference, but now I’m, I feel like I’m pretty good at that. But it was a lot of hard work.
And then the third one was, you know, I still remember the first time I went into the CEO staff meeting and this was at Intuit. And this is way back when, when we, you know, Intuit was seen as really intuitive and such a good experience. And it turns out we weren’t and we had done some benchmarking.
And if you looked at the success rates of people using TurboTax versus using our competitors, or, you know, QuickBooks versus our competitors, or Quicken, whatever, we were basically maybe a little bit better, maybe a little bit worse, or maybe the same. And so I got to bring this data to the CEO staff meeting and, you know, my boss was there with me and he was like, okay, you know, here’s how it’s kind of gonna go. And I was like, okay, okay. Okay.
I was so focused on sharing the information that I wasn’t reading the signals around the room, because I think my brain was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t do both. And so it was interesting that when we then walked away, he was like, okay, well, the feedback for you is you talked a little bit too much. You didn’t listen quite enough to this person or this person. ‘Cause I thought my job was to share the information and yes, my job was to share the information, but I would’ve been even more effective if I had been listening in and navigating to where the conversation wanted to go.
And that’s not to say I did it terribly, like it was totally fine, but that’s where I could have been better. And so there’s always like what’s actually happening in the room versus what are you sharing, right? There’s just those different altitudes to be aware of in the context. And so that’s also something that I’ve, I’ve gotten much better at, and now it’s natural for me, but the first few times you’re in that situation, it’s not, ’cause you’re like, oh my God, what’s going on, I’m so nervous, you know?
And, and then I also remember just to make it better. So when I shared the data, they were like, that’s not right. We’re Intuit. And I was like, no, the data’s right.
Peter: The data’s the data. Yeah.
Kaaren: Right. Like, this is, this is real. Like, we’re not. So that was also this like awkward conversation. But it did prompt us to start to look at things more deeply, right. Which was great. And the other learning there is, you know, eventually when our CEO put together a tiger team for what’s beyond ease, right, I was a part of that tiger team, as were a couple of other people in the, in a couple general managers, the chief strategy officer. He did that in part, because he knew it had to come from everybody involved, which again goes back to, if you want everybody to solve the problem together, they’d all better understand the customer and the problem together all the way through solutions, right? So again, like, you know, he was teaching me so darned much, he wasn’t necessarily being explicit that he was teaching me, but I just learned a ton.
Coaching your leaders
Jesse: Yeah. Speaking of teaching, I wonder what role that plays in your sense of your relationship to the leaders underneath you in the organization, as well as, you know, the whole downstream design organization.
Kaaren: So one of the things I do spend time focusing on is I will help our designers think about how they’re gonna share their information. Right. And so I will spend time saying, okay, you’re gonna share this. And I think this is gonna be a story that we’re gonna wanna share. It has to be really good. So I’ll be like, great, why don’t you share it with me? Okay. Here’s some feedback. This seems most important. This, you know, this is one of your most salient points. How do you make it more clear? And we’ll kind of go through stuff, do it again, come back tomorrow. Right. And so I’m very positive, but I want them to walk through it because once they learn how to do this, well, they’ll do it well again and again, or at least better again and again. And they’ll have those short stories and snippets that they can share with their executives in the elevator.
Jesse: Mm-hmm
Kaaren: Right. And so I feel like that’s something really important and useful.
And then I make sure the organization is sharing across the board. So we’ve been doing some teardowns, you know, of various experiences. And we’ve been sharing those with the broader team, not the 800-person team, but like the, you know, 80-person leaders, so that everybody starts to have the same expectations for what they’re going to teach with their teams. Right.
And then the work that Peter’s been helping us with on career pathways has been incredibly important because this, again, helps you to understand here’s what I need to go from here to here, right. But it really is all about how are we all upleveling our game together and doing it in a way that’s transparent enough that the rest of the org will, you know, kind of pull us in as opposed to trying to push us away, okay.
Jesse: One of the things that I hear about from people who are in executive leadership roles is that there’s a qualitative difference in the job when the people that you are managing are also themselves managers, when you have people who have pretty large chunks of their own responsibility and their own needs for autonomy associated with that. And you know, the potential for competition and you know, friction across the various teams. And I’m curious about what you see as the as the difference between managing leaders versus managing individual contributors or design talent.
Kaaren: Yeah. It’s interesting. So, I mean, I guess I think about it in some ways it’s sort of the same. It’s just that they’re gonna play different roles. I’ve hired, like, a number of very, very, very senior people who have run large orgs already themselves. And that’s great because I can plug ’em in with a CEO and they’re gonna figure out what the hell is going on.
And they’re gonna say, here’s what we need and we’re just gonna make it happen. Right. And so they have enough space that they can do that, but they’re also aligned to the broader goals of the organization. So we can do it across, right, more synchronously, which is going to be more helpful for the overall org.
Jesse: How do you drive that alignment?
Kaaren: How do I drive that alignment? Well, it’s, we bring it back to, we’re creating one experience,
Jesse: Mmm…
Kaaren: Like there’s, whatever, 800 people, it’s one freaking experience. And so we start to look at, you know, what are, what is the experience as you go across these 25 products in one journey.
Jesse: Mm-hmm
Kaaren: And yes, it might touch Michelle’s team and it might touch Ryan’s team and it might touch Will’s team. So let’s look at it all together. And the good news is I’ve hired people that are senior enough that they they don’t have a big ego in that. Right. They’re like, great, let’s figure out how to make this happen.
And there’s enough work to do that. You know, you can take that on. Oh, thank God, because I’ve got these 20 fires over here.
Jesse: Mm-hmm
Kaaren: And I do think that’s a difference is that when there’s a lot of meaty work, people get less territorial. It’s when there’s only one bit of interesting work or like a handful of interesting work that everybody’s trying to get into the interesting work.
Jesse: Mmmm.
Kaaren: Right. And that’s when you have usually not good behaviors. And to be honest, I also hire for people that are focused on the bigger team.
Jesse: Mm-hmm
Kaaren: Yeah. But with individual contributors, I think it’s the same. You have to give them a meaty role that they’re likely to be successful at. You have to coach them to make sure that they are successful.
You have to make sure they’ve got the connection to the other people that they’re, you know, dependent upon. Right. Or they’re going to benefit from. And you also have to assume that these are smart people and they’re gonna figure out how to work together well, and if they’re not, well, then you deal with it. Right. And like, that’s cool.
The “Vision” Thing
Peter: You, you mentioned one experience, and it made me wonder, when it comes to design leadership, the word vision is a common word in that context and… but vision means different things at different altitudes of, of an organization. And so what does it mean for you? To have, to hold, to communicate a vision. What’s your responsibility around that idea of a vision? I’ll leave it at that.
Kaaren: Yeah. So I would say that it is my responsibility to drive a shared vision around the experiences that we want our customers to have. That doesn’t mean it’s like a picture of a thing that we’re gonna build, ’cause that thing may shift over time, but it’s much more around, you know, it should be concrete, it should be measurable. It should be aspirational. Right.
And so what is that vision? That vision is that our customers are, you know, I mean, I just adopt and go, “making the most of their money so they can make the most of their lives.” Okay. What does that mean? What does that look like? So that means like we have a Net Promoter Score of 70 plus, that means that we have measurable benefits that we know customers are getting more benefit from us than they are from others. So how are we gonna make that true? Right.
And then what does it mean when we’re starting to operate more by journeys as opposed to by products? Right. So if you look at a customer journey, you often would cross many quote unquote products, which sometimes are maybe features. And so that is what we need to start to look at. I feel like a lot of the work though has been done and sometimes I think leaders make mistakes by thinking I have to make this all my own. I have to do it all my own. And it’s like, no, no, no. What’s good you can just run with, and go do that.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: It sounds like you entered into an environment that was a little more mature. I think a lot of design leaders find themselves in a less mature environment where they’re– what’s expected of them is to be a visionary…
Kaaren: mm-hmm
Peter: which the people around them don’t even know exactly what they mean by that, but they, they have some vision of Jony Ive and, and brilliance.
Kaaren: Yes, but they would kick Jony Ive out, if you were in that, in the organization they’re in, right?
Peter: Right. But they don’t know that. Right. And so kind of navigating that, but, but to the, kind of, to this vision point, you mentioned the NPS of 70, you mentioned earlier that change doesn’t happen in a year, right. That, that you recognize that there’s, there’s a longevity to this.
Managing and Leading when Things Keep Changing
Peter: How does that square? So one of the things I’ve been poking at, I actually wrote a blog post about recently, what I called the management carousel. Right. Because people come in and out of organizations every two or three years, it’s pretty typical. I did a poll of designers and found out on average designers have a manager for about a year.
Some, they might have two or three managers in a year, some maybe longer, you know, when you were at Intuit, you mentioned 12 years. And you mentioned that like, there was a relentlessness you needed to bring in order to see some of these ideas through. And because you were there so long, you could kind of do that.
What does it mean to make change in a context, in a reality where things are shifting so much?
Kaaren: Well, and that’s where those operating mechanisms count so damn much. Right. ‘Cause it doesn’t matter, who’s in position. If you’re having to report out on your CX metrics and the CEO is gonna read it, even if the CEO changes that helps to hold it all together. Right. So I feel like that’s
Peter: Incept these…
variables, these…
Kaaren: Yes!
That is like, that is like this secret judo move, right? You can build the best damn design team in the world. If you’re not changing the operating mechanisms, it doesn’t matter. And it’s not gonna last long. And the worst thing that happens if you’re a design leader is you do something, you walk away, in six months, it’s gone.
Jesse: Right.
Kaaren: Because that meant you didn’t build it for durability, but to build it for durability, you have to get into the operations of the company and companies have like a, heartbeat…
Jesse: Right.
Kaaren: … which goes back to, what are the expectations for designers? What are the expectations for product managers? How are we bonusing people on this stuff? Like, those are all the operating mechanisms you have to, you have to infiltrate.
And at, Intuit, we, we did it. I didn’t have the idea to do it, but fortunately someone was like, oh, you need to bring this into blah, blah, blah, and so we did, you know, but it was like our fast path program, our rising star program. Right. All of a sudden we indoctrinated them with design thinking and that became, here’s how successful people operate here, which again, helped, you know, change the culture and make it last.
And I actually saw Scott Cook at someone’s retirement party, not that long ago. And he was, I’ve been out of Intuit since ah, seven years or so. And he was like, we’re still doing design for delight. We’re still training every new hire on it. Do you wanna come? And you know, it was really sweet and thoughtful. Right. And I was like, oh, maybe but you know, it was great ’cause it had lasted that long because it was, it was in the DNA of the company.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Kaaren: And that’s what takes a while. And that’s where you’re persistent. And you say, well, can it work in here? Can I get in here? Can I get in here? Okay. These doors all shut, but this one’s open. I’m going in here. And then another couple, you know, months, I’m gonna go back to these three, ’cause by the way, the characters might have changed in there. Or I might have new information that might make me more, you know, compelling.
Your job is to make your partners successful
Jesse: So you’re describing this kind of constant cycle of relationship building and almost like relationship renewal as you’re re-engaging with people with a new perspective, as the context has shifted around around you. What advice would you have for people who are getting into that partnership-building routine for the first time?
Kaaren: I think part of it is also that…. I mean, you guys know this too, ’cause once you’ve been around long enough, when, early on you think, oh, that person just doesn’t like me or oh, that person just doesn’t get it, and later on, you know, you’re like, you know what, maybe their kid is in the hospital. Maybe their dog vomited on their shoe this morning. Maybe they’re late to a flight. But maybe this just isn’t the right time. And that’s cool. Right.
And so it doesn’t matter if I go back in three months, not at all. Right. And how can I help them in the meantime? And again, you take the assumption that you assume positive intent is so important. They’re trying to do the best they can. Right. They’re working with what they got. If you’re asking them to take a risk and operate in a new way, but they’re under the same damn deadline, it’s not a good time for them.
Jesse: Mm mm-hmm.
Kaaren: If it is, you’re there to make them so darn successful. And that’s something, actually, Joe O’Sullivan was really good at when we were at Intuit.
He and I have worked together a few places now. And you know, When we started the innovation catalyst, the role of the innovation catalyst was to make whatever team they joined incredibly successful. It was not about let’s get them to do X practice or Y practice, but it was like, we are gonna make them more successful than they ever would’ve been without us.
And as part of that, we’re gonna use some different tools because it’s gonna make them more successful. Right. But it was all about making them successful. And so if we go into it from that mentality, my job is to make you more successful. And I may not even say that explicitly, but that is absolutely how I operate.
So you say, oh, thank God. Kaaren came by. That’s the win. Right. And then if I start to ask you like, oh, Hey, what would you think about tracking these metrics? You’ll probably be like, yeah, okay, fine. Yeah. I’ll give it a try for her, ’cause she helped me do this thing really quick and fast.
How to hit the ground running
Kaaren: The other thing that I’ll say that was interesting for me, that I suspect people may run into when they join a new company is…. This happened when I was, when I joined Chase, is we were launching something, something was coming out and it wasn’t good. And I had been there like six weeks and my boss said to me, what do you think of this? And I was like, eh, yeah. It’s, it’s not very good. Right. Something hard to say that when you’ve been there six weeks, but I was like, yeah, you know, it could be better.
And she’s like, yeah. So fix it. And I was like, oh fuck. And so, sorry, language.
Peter: It’s all good.
Kaaren: And so, and so I was like, okay, what am I gonna do? And I thought I’m gonna do my best facilitative leadership. And so I found all the characters that were involved. Right. And I made sure that we all were saying the same stuff. Right.
And like, well, what’s the value and how are proud of this? Are we? And what about this? And you know, then I pushed on some of the assumptions, one of the assumptions is that it had to go out in June because, you know, name drop person wanted it. And then we came up, people got comfortable with the idea of, well, no, we’ll do it in August because it’s better ship something good in August instead to ship something not so great in June.
And the conversation was had with that senior leader and the senior leader said, great. So there had been all of this concern that this particular woman wanted something by a certain date. She didn’t care. And if you ask an executive, would you rather ship something kind of not, not that good or two months later, would you rather ship something pretty damn good. It, 90% of the time, they’re gonna say pretty damn good.
Jesse: Yeah.
Kaaren: Right. You just have to figure out how to share that in a way that people understand, but there’s a lot of that type of navigation, right? Of how do you align people? How do you help them see what you are seeing? Sometimes they have information that you don’t know,
Jesse: Mm.
Kaaren: and which case do you, you change your mind, too? It’s really fun though. It’s so fun.
Peter: You mentioned facilitative leadership as, as kind of the, the means by which you helped realize this change. And led me to wonder, is facilitative leadership kind of distinct to design, because of the posture that design has in organizations. Often a synthetic function bringing kind of all kinds of different things together and trying to make sense of it. Like, I’m looking to unpack this idea of design and facilitation, ’cause you see it over and over again, not just facilitative leadership, you mentioned design thinking and I’m assuming kind of back at Intuit, the D the design for delight program, there was a lot of facilitation going on. Is that something specific to design? Should other functions be also facilitating or is it not authentic to their postures? And it is authentic to ours. I’m I’m curious if you’ve, your, just your thoughts on, on facilitation as a thing designers do, but not others.
Kaaren: I mean, I think there are certain practices, like being transparent, focus on outcomes, facilitation. Those are just good practices as a person. Right. And I think about this, like I use those on my kids all the time. Right? So like one of my, one of my sons, he was you know, he was not spending much time doing his homework, just put it that way.
And I was like, you know, that’s it, I’m like, you don’t get more A’s than B’s, you’re not mountain biking. And he was like, what? He’s like, you’re terrible. You’re one of those moms that only cares about achievement and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, well, you know, if you were working three hours a day, and you were not doing well fine, but you’re not at that point. So we’ll talk about it later.
But it was just really interesting that I, you know, he had this conversation, I was like, I’m managing you to outcomes, not activities. Right. And he was like, oh my God. Right. And then, you know, at other times I have been like, okay, so what do you think is the right path? Here’s what I see, what do you see? Right. And so then we’ll kind of come together. And I find it incredibly helpful. So when I think about us teaching these skills to people, it shouldn’t just be design, but we’re not teaching them for people to be successful at work only. Right. It’s just to be successful in life. And I just, it made me super happy later on like two years later, my son was like, I was so mad at you, but you know, he’s like, that was actually probably the right call. I was like, wow. I’m like writing that on a piece of paper. You are signing it. It’s like. Okay. It’s going in a vault.
Peter: Yeah.
Kaaren: The one time.
Jesse: Entered into the record.
Kaaren: But I, but I do think design has a special ability to do that because we are customer-focused, because we are human-focused and a lot of that facilitation is being attuned to your partners and really figuring out, well, wait, what do you know? What do you think? What if we did this? How might we align? And that becomes almost like a, it was like a game to play, right? Like, oh, did that work? Oh, that didn’t work. Okay. Let’s try this play.
Jesse: Yeah, well that gets me wondering, what are the design skills that you feel you are still using in your role these days?
Kaaren: Wow. Gosh. It’s hard to know. What’s a design skill and what’s not a design skill, right?
Jesse: Yeah, your call.
Kaaren: Mean, holy cow Peter, I’m looking at you with our career pathways. What’s a design skill versus not? I mean, I think about it more as I’m trying to design the organization, I’m trying to design the system. Right?
So trying to design the design organization for sure. Trying to design the broader organization and how we interact, and then trying to design the system and the mechanisms that they support doing great customer centered work. So I feel like that’s what I’m designing now.
Jesse: Hmm.
Kaaren: And then I am a, I’m a social psychologist by training.
And so there are also some, you know, I was telling Peter this, there are some, you know, techniques in social psychology, you learn. So for example, basics, and I tell these to people all the time. If you send an email to 40 people, you’re gonna get very little response. If you send 40 individual emails to people with their name on it, you are gonna get a much higher response. And so when I need feedback on someone for midyear reviews, I write individual emails to everybody. Right. Because I know I’m gonna get greater response. So, you know, am, am I using that training? Yeah, I am.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Peter: So one of the things I’ve learned when it comes to organization design, at least the way I approach it, is that I tap into my background as an information architect to think about the design of these systems and structures. And I’m wondering if, like, just curious kind of whether it’s the social psychology or, as you started in user experience, what are those design habits or patterns that you practiced many years ago, I won’t say how many, um, that, that you are now, that you are now reapplying, as you’re thinking about organizations, right? Because it’s different to draw a set of wire, you know, draw, draw a flow diagram and a set of wire frames for a software interaction than it is to be thinking about org charts and business models and connecting people to strategy or whatever.
Kaaren: Yeah.
Bringing your design practice to your leadership practice
Peter: But there might be some, some things that you’re bringing forward, just in terms of your practice, if you even think of it as a practice,
Kaaren: it’s interesting, I think a lot about what is most prominent, what is most important, what is second most important and how are we making what’s most important, most prominent and how are we getting rid of the noise? Right. That would just be distracting. So I do think a lot…
Peter: almost like a visual hierarchy or something..
Kaaren: It’s a visual hierarchy. It’s kind of in my head, but yeah. It’s like, okay, wait, what really matters here? What doesn’t —get fricking rid of it. Right. And then I also think about, okay, well, if we’re gonna do, you know over time, we’re going to unveil more, right? What is most important to unveil now? then do progressive disclosure, right. And at what point do we do progressively disclose versus not? Right.
So I do think a lot about that. But I also think it’s interesting ’cause you guys know this. I mean, when you’ve been in the design world for 20 some years, it’s just how you see the world, too. Right. So I, I don’t know how I would operate if I didn’t see the world this way.
Peter: In terms of how you see the world, I wonder… you’re working now with peers who probably see the world differently…
Kaaren: Oh yeah.
Peter: And how cognizant are you of your different way of seeing the world from them? How cognizant do you find them to be? How reflective of their own like, like when you get, you know, this is kind of, I, and I’m, I’m thinking about this, especially as you are in the position you’re in, right?
You’re the lead designer, the people around you are not designers. How are you, how are you understanding them and their perspectives? How are they understanding you and your perspective and how are you making sure that you’re working well together instead of talking past each other or somehow at odds.
Kaaren: Well, you know, one of the things I, I think about when I’m meeting people and I’m working with them, I’m like, wait, what’s most important to them, right? Like I’m literally noting that and I’ll be like, oh, this language has come up twice. Now this is clearly an important construct through which they’re viewing the world. Right.
And so I’ll note that, so that I understand where they’re coming from. And then it also helps me better understand where I’m coming from, which again goes back to, I ask a lot of the same fricking questions, right? Like, oh, what’s the impact to the customer? How are we gonna know what the impact of the customer is. Right. You know, what is success gonna look like?
You know, like, so it’s basic questions that we ask again and again and again, and when I ask those questions, it also gives clues to everybody as to where I’m coming from. And then they start to expect me to ask it, right. Or if someone else asks it, I let ’em, I’ll be like, I love that you ask that about the customer. Right. And I’m always, not always, I try to, to give praise to things that I see that I really like again, ’cause then people tend to do them more.
Jesse: So you are part of a r ising wave of design leaders who have been elevated to this executive level to engage, in these conversations, bringing that design lens or mindset…
Kaaren: Yeah.
Jesse: …that you’ve developed over the course of your career to these conversations. And there are other people just like you…
Kaaren: Mm-hmm…
Jesse: …who have similarly been elevated all over the world.
Now, what do you think that represents in terms of the opportunity for design as a whole? Now that we have design leaders engaging at this strategic level.
Kaaren: I mean, I think it’s never been a better time to be in this field. Like I can’t, I mean, I cannot believe how lucky we are to be in here. I have no qualms at all, when I talk to people about being, oh, you should totally go into this field, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s fun. You know, it’s impactful, you have great purpose. And the growth is tremendous, right? And so lucky for us.
But I also feel like now we have a real responsibility to actually make these experiences much better and much better for all people. Right. And so, you know, I, I feel like we’re very lucky, but frankly, there’s also a tremendous responsibility for those of us who are in these positions, because if we don’t do a good job, that can harm people that come behind us for years.
Jesse: Hmm.
Kaaren: Right. And you’ve seen that, you’ve seen companies where someone’s come in and they’ve burned out and they’ve, you know, burned some bridges and all of a sudden design is nothing.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, I am seeing a lot of leaders these days who are the ones who came in after all of that went down and they are having to repair those relationships and rebuild the credibility of design inside these organizations in some cases.
Kaaren: Yeah. Yeah. Which is why, I think, a lot of our job because we’re not as understood as engineering is, is about helping to teach people and understand what we do and what we’re about. And frankly, that we’re on the same team, right. Because I think sometimes when people don’t succeed it’s because it is more of an us-them mentality. Right. Where it’s like, no, no, it’s just us.
Jesse: Hmm.
Making a space for design in a business+tech context
Peter: So for design, design, as a practice, right, is, is different than engineering and different than businessing, right? Design is generative and creative and can be even playful. Whereas, you know, stereotypically at least, you know, a bank is going to be risk-averse and quantitative and metrics-driven and analytical, and those can be seen to be at odds.
And I’m wondering what you’ve done inside organizations to allow that space for that generativity and the uncertainty that you need for design to actually have its full impact, but that kind of runs contrary to maybe the existing business culture of certainty and, and kind of analytical rigor or whatever. That, like, how do, how do we hold these two things in one space and allow both to thrive?
Kaaren: Well, and I think that’s a really good question. And so I have, I have two parts to that.
One is that I think of it as a portfolio approach. So if you come in and you say, we’re just gonna do everything big, wide open space, and we’re gonna slow everything down, you are gonna fail. Right. But you can look at your portfolio and be like, okay, when we look at this portfolio of initiatives, these we’re just gonna put points on the board, move ’em out.
These two seem ripe for really having a bigger impact by being much more focused on discovery and definition and whatnot. And so we’re gonna put our points here. Hope like hell at least one of them works, right. And if it doesn’t whatever, but like at least one of the two, and then that’s a story we can share.
So I think about it as a portfolio approach across the board and that way you’re hedging your bets.
The other thing that I found really helpful, and even in terms of with our data partners, is talking a lot about how there’s inspiration and there’s rigor, and inspiration can come from anywhere, right? It can come from your own experience. It can come from, you know, looking out at the universe. It can come from big data sets, right? Big data sets can give you ideas for inspiration. It literally comes from anywhere.
And so part of this is, as we’re doing these broader explorations, we’re looking for inspiration and then you go into the phase where, okay, now let’s be a rigorous. Now let’s test the hell out of it. This is a hypothesis. Is it true? I don’t know. Let’s find out. Right. And so that also, I think gives people comfort because I think when there is discomfort, it’s like, oh my God, these designers, they just want nine months, they’re gonna go do this stuff, they’re gonna make a bunch of slides, it’s not gonna ever work. And then we’re gonna waste some more time. You know, we did that five years ago. Right?
So you run into those stories. And this way it’s much more balanced and the notion of like, yeah, and then we’re gonna test the hell out of those ideas and see which ones have legs just gives people comfort.
And again, you’re doing it on a few as opposed to on everything. And then over time you start to do it more, which goes back again to this is a long-term play building. An effective design org is not gonna happen in a year, but every year we’re gonna get more and more and more and more effective. And the way I measure my success is do I have a happy and engaged team, are Net Promoter Scores getting up to the seventies, you know, are the leaders being credible and are they respected? Right.
And then are the processes changing in a way that they will durably reinforce these conditions that are needed to create great experiences.
And like, those are the only four types of metrics that matter. And every day that’s what I’m thinking about. And that’s what I hold my leaders accountable. I’m like here, what, how are you doing on people? How are you doing on partners? How are you doing a process? And how are you doing on products and experiences? It makes it simple. And then it’s just hard to actually do it.
Peter: Easy to say.
Kaaren: Yeah, but it also makes it easy to be transparent. Right. So when I hire in a new leader to sit at CEO table, have a conversation with CEO and I’ll be like, great. Let’s talk about your expectations for this person coming in.
Here are my expectations. This is generally what I would expect of them in the first 60 days. Here’s what I’d expect them to be within six months. What do you think? And they’ll be like, oh, okay. And they’ll read through. And they’ll be like, yeah, that makes sense. I’ll be like, okay, so here’s how we’re gonna measure their success. And that way we’re aligned from the beginning. Right.
Because the worst thing I could do to this person that I hire is to stick ’em on a CEO table, have the CEO think they’re gonna do something other than what they’re actually gonna do. Right. ‘Cause that’s just gonna create awkward conversations and unhappiness. Yeah. So a lot of it is just thinking about how do we set up the leaders’ experiences so that they’re set up for success. And that’s my job. My job is to set up people on my team for success.
Navigating idealism and pragmatism
Peter: A theme that I think might be emerging for me in design leadership. Jesse and I, we have themes that emerge from conversations that we have. And one that’s emerging for me in the last few months is, the balance of, or navigating, idealism and pragmatism. I think a lot of designers get into this work because there’s an idealistic sense of making the world a better place through understanding our users and delivering them amazing experiences.
And then as they become leaders, inevitably they get, they hit some walls and then they have to figure out a pragmatic… how to be a pragmatist towards that goal. And some fail somehow, or that might be strong, but have real struggles figuring out how to be both at the same time. Yeah. I’m wondering what has your experience been trying to navigate idealism and pragmatism?
Kaaren: Again, I think it depends upon the context in which you’re in. Like there was a leader, Ginny Lee, who’s lovely. She was at Intuit, and then she went to the Khan Academy and now she’s retired. But she was all on board with saying, look, if it doesn’t make people proud, we’re not shipping it. Right. And so she would ask the team, are you proud of what we would release to customers?
And if people on the team were like, well, no, just wait until you’re proud. So there are gonna be some leaders that are more willing to try that out. And then our job is to make d arn sure that those teams are incredibly successful. Right. So I feel like I’m always looking for opportunities and then you go, and again, we’re working with a lot of different people in a lot of different areas.
So if we’re idealistic on everything, we’re gonna get nowhere. But if we find a few choice areas, yeah. Then we can do it. And if we find out our results are not very good as a result of being idealistic, well, we better be ready to say, yeah, and that didn’t work.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
Kaaren: That’s cool. You know, not everything works, but you have to be confident enough to say that. Right. And sometimes I think that designers get stuck in feeling like they have to say it’s working, even if it’s not, because so much effort was put towards it, or they start to blame, oh, well, this would’ve been great, except the engineering team, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, you’re all one team. Didn’t work. Move on.
If you’re going into design leadership, like, you know, your, your ass is gonna get kicked periodically, you’re just gonna dust yourself off. You’re just gonna keep going. Right. I mean, like that is reality. So if you feel like you’re alone, if you feel like you screwed up yeah. You probably did. Yeah. You probably are. You know, like, and, and that’s okay. Right. You just, you just get up and you just dust yourself off and you just keep trying and you try something else ’cause whatever you did, didn’t work. Right. And that’s okay.
Managing the loneliness of leadership
Kaaren: I had a, a CEO one point and he was great. And he talked about how, you know, it was kind of lonesome to be him, right. Because he’s a CEO and who the heck does he talk to? And if you’re the design leader, well, it’s kind of lonesome for you too, because who do you talk to? I, I don’t know. I talked to my cats sometimes. Right. I don’t know. Um, And uh, I shouldn’t say that.
I mean, I actually talked to a bunch of people that are lovely. People like Daniela Jorge. I’m not sure if you’ve spoken with her, but I stay touch with Daniela and Sara Khoury, and a whole bunch of others.
But it is interesting that, you know, he would say that he’d get the crap beat out of him by the board. And then, you know, his staff would be angry with him and that managers would be yet mad at him for whatever reason. And he had all these problems and legal’d be on him. And, you know, he’d wake up in the morning and he’d, he’d look in the mirror and he’d comb his hair and he’d say, hello, handsome. And then he’d go to work. ‘Cause someone had to give him positive feedback and so.
Peter: We all need the attaboy.
Kaaren: We do. And so, you know, there are gonna be times that it’s like the best job in the world and there are gonna be times that it’s so damn hard. And then I just remember that story and I’m like, yeah, guess what? It’s part of the job. And it’s also part of how we get smarter and better and, and frankly have more empathy.
Peter: You referred to a network of people outside of the organization that you’re connected with. And I’m wondering how, how you think about how as that leader, where you are lonely, yes, you need to kind of psych yourself up or, or, or get yourself into a good spot, but almost practically, what are the means by which, what, what, what have you put around yourself to kind of help you maintain your positivity, maintain your energy, maintain that, that engagement and passion that can very easily be leeched away if you’re feeling stuck and alone on an island where nobody understands you.
Kaaren: Okay. I’d say first. So like just myself, I’m relentlessly optimistic, right? Like probably like more optimistic than I should be. So that’s like not a…
Peter: Just like a personality trait?
Kaaren: Exactly. Just a personality trait, like whatever. But I think also, you know, I mean, I do reach out, you know, I was just, I literally was just saying Daniela, ’cause I text with her, you know, a couple times a month you know, just about, oh, do you have five minutes?
Yeah, I’ve got five minutes. What about this? Right. And I’ve got a, you know, a small group of other, probably four other people that I do that with as well. And it’s just helpful to have somebody else who is in the exact same damn position, you know, is either dealing with it today or dealt with it three months ago or is gonna deal with it three months from now.
And it’s so darn useful. Right. And again, that makes you feel like, well, actually you’re not alone. We’re all just doing the same thing, in different companies, but we’re really doing by and large the same thing. We’re just doing it with different players in different contexts and we have different leverage to pull.
Jesse: Kaaren. Thank you so much. This has been great.
Kaaren: Oh, it was so much fun. Thank you for having me. And Peter, I finally got to meet Jesse and hang out with him almost as much as I hung out with you, today.
Peter: How public are you on the internets and interwebs? How can people follow you, engage with you? Are you, do you, are you writing or like what’s how, how would you like people to…
Kaaren: oh, that’s good
Peter: think about connecting with you in a professional fashion?
Kaaren: Well, they should connect with me on LinkedIn, and they should just ping me questions anytime they have them. And I love that, you know, I think that I’ve just been trying to get my head around, what is this organization? Right. And I’ve been trying to ground myself and I’ve been feeling like yeah, I purposely stopped speaking because I just had to get my act together.
And now that I feel like we’re getting stronger and more robust and I’m gonna be able to have more time to spend writing and being out there which I’m really looking forward to.
Peter: Excellent.
Kaaren: Yeah. But ping me on LinkedIn. That’s probably the easiest. Yes. I might get back to you quickly. It might be a little while.
Peter: Well, thank you so much for, for sharing your, your experiences with us.
Kaaren: A pleasure. All right. Take care. Bye bye.
Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s @peterme and I’m @JJG. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
31: Sustaining yourself as a design executive (ft. Katrina Alcorn, GM IBM Design)
Aug 25, 2022
Transcript
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Together: And we’re finding our way…
Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, What’s it like to lead design for IBM? Katrina Alcorn knows. She’ll share with us a bit of the view from the top of one of the world’s largest design organizations. We’ll also talk about the role of design leader as organizational change maker, how to keep reserving space for creativity and play and avoiding burnout along the way.
Defining “Design Executive”
Peter: Hi, Katrina. The reason Jesse and I wanted to talk to you is we’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a true, a true design executive.
I think there’s a lot of design leaders who are being. Given executive-ish titles, but aren’t true executives. And so we’re interested in what it means to be a true design executive. And when we thought about who we knew who qualified, you were pretty much at the top of that call sheet. Looking at LinkedIn, your title is general manager of design at IBM. What is that role? And is it as grand as that title suggests it is?
Katrina: I, I know everyone, no one’s ever heard of a general manager. You know, I work now for one of the biggest companies in the world and one of the oldest ones. So this, I think, I guess, was the title we had in the fifties and we have it at IBM, but it’s very meaningful. So, so the way maybe, maybe it helps if I explain a little about the hierarchy at our company.
So the, the way we’re structured is obviously we have a CEO, Arvin, and then the CEO staff, you know, he has an operation staff and then he’s got these senior vice presidents. So there’s the SVP layer that, that run the different parts of the business: software, consulting. We have a huge consulting arm. Infrastructure. We still make mainframes. We’re now making this really cool thing called quantum computers. That’s an infrastructure.
And so then so you’ve got the SVPs and then you have general managers and the general managers run the different business units. So I happen to, I have a weird role because I happen to sit in software, but I play two roles and I, it probably helps if I explain this, even though I, it doesn’t, it probably doesn’t apply to other companies.
So my peers, where I sit in the company run, you know, multibillion dollar businesses in automation, in data and artificial intelligence in security software, things like that. I’m unique and special because I run design. So when I took the role, when I accepted the role last year, originally, it was positioned as general manager of design.
There’s only one at IBM. It’s, you know, it was positioned to me as the most senior design role in the company, which it is, very exciting. And I was meant to basically be the steward for the design practice for IBM. So the design system, all the accessibility, tooling, all of the work we do around design career paths, which maybe we can get into.
It’s very interesting and very well thought through at IBM. So that’s cross company, but right before I took the role, there was a little reorg and they moved all of the product design onto my team. So I find myself in this really interesting place where, on one hand, I’m sort of leading a, you know, a smallish team of about 70 folks who do this cross company, really what I think you mean when you say design executive, is how design is gonna work at this company, is about how design will help transform this company to be more innovative and be a leader in, in our field, in hybrid, cloud, and AI. But then I also have this job where I lead through authority because I have all of this software designers on my team.
And so, that’s a different type of design executive where, you know, you’re, you’re kind of getting sometimes to get into the nitty gritty of the products and how, kind of, how, how are you optimizing design to ensure that we are making the progress we need to make specifically within our software business. So, so that was a lot of words in summary. I get confused sometimes by my two roles. One is leading design as a practice for the whole company and I have a team that does that. And then I have a much bigger team where we’re, we’re just actually doing the design work for all of software. And that’s about 700 designers.
Peter: You, you mentioned you had peers, like literally, I’m assuming other general managers who are running multi-billion dollar businesses.
Katrina: Yeah…
Peter: And that leads me to wonder, what are you accountable for? Do you have a P and L? Are you, you know, how, how does that work?
Katrina: You know, I’m still figuring that out, honestly. It’s— I am different. My role is different than the other GMs. You know, they’re, they are on the hook for P and L. They have to make money and they get to spend money. I have a, I have one budget for our design practice that, you know, is a, a fraction of my team, but the rest of the funding for our group comes from those other GMs.
Funding models for Design
Katrina: So I’ve talked with my peers at other companies because I haven’t decided if this is the right way. If this is the right funding model, I don’t think there’s one right funding model.
So, so the pros and cons of how we do it now. I get funding from all the GMs to fund our, our designers. And, you know, we do a lot of puts and takes, and I have vice presidents of design representing those different businesses who are in the day-to-day on those leadership teams kind of negotiating.
The good and bad of that is that when we get funding from the businesses to expand design it’s because they are bought in, they are a hundred percent invested in what we’re doing. The downside is it’s a lot of negotiation. it’s a lot of tin cupping. And it’s, you know, I… there’s a reason I’m no longer a documentary filmmaker.
I don’t like doing fundraising so, you know, I, I don’t wanna be spending, I don’t think it’s the best use of, of me and, and my role. The flip side is, you know, the other extreme would be, there’s some kind of tax where we say “design is part of the cost of doing business.” And I haven’t figured out what that perfect formula would be, but I believe there, you could come up with a magic formula that says, you know, if design to development ratio is this, this is what the percentage of the budget should be.
And as the businesses expand, design expands, and as they contract, design contracts, and then we are in charge of figuring out how to best deploy our design resources and work with the businesses on that. The downside is in my, my peers who run teams this way, they say the businesses, when they pay that tax, they feel like they paid.
” I paid for design.” So if there’s a need to invest more in design, it’s like, well, why should I do that? I already paid, I paid my tax. So as much as I don’t like fundraising, I– I’m really starting to value the, the hard work that goes into getting people on board with paying for design.
Jesse: Katrina, how long have you been in this role at IBM?
Katrina: A year, a, a year and a month. Yeah.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. So 13 months into it, I’m curious about what that experience was like for you stepping into this situation, having this shift in your mandate, and then, obviously, getting to know a whole bunch of players very quickly, to be able to start having those conversations about budget and stuff.
And I’m curious what that experience was like for you and how you approached getting to know a whole bunch of new people all at once and starting to build those bridges.
The trajectory of design at IBM
Katrina: Yeah, I, I did this massive listening tour when I took on the role. And so I joined IBM in July of last year. And there was a week where we were starting to open up from the pandemic, and suddenly planes were flying again and they had people on them. And this was right before the Delta variant hit.
And so I spent my first week on the job in Austin, Texas. It’s probably the most exhausting week I’ve ever had because our flagship studio is in Austin. So we have designers all over the world, but we have the most designers concentrated in one place in Austin. And, the designers put on this incredible pageant for me, I, you know, all day long, I felt like I was sitting through one TED talk after another of all the amazing things that our design teams were doing around sustainability and artificial intelligence and, you know, really deep technical stuff and, and some really cool purpose-driven stuff. We have this racial equity in design program.
So all just getting my head full of these things. And then I went back home and the Delta variant hit, and I didn’t see anyone for months and months and months. But I, it was very helpful, I think to get that infusion of facetime. I then spent the next few months doing a virtual listening tour where I think I did one-on-ones with more than a hundred people, not just in design, but of course our cross-functional partners and our senior executives around the company, just listening for: Where’s the opportunity? What, what are we doing well? And where is the room to improve? You know, what, what should my mandate be?
And I should, at some point I should probably explain the trajectory we’ve been on. ‘Cause it’s really interesting. I mean, IBM had almost no design happening in the c— I mean, no designers in the company, 10 years ago, we had this rich history of design from the sixties, then that fell away, no designers.
And then we had this new CEO 10 years ago, who said, let’s, let’s do this again. Design is gonna be the thing that, you know, helps us differentiate. And so Phil Gilbert was anointed as general manager and he built the practice from a few dozen people to 3000 and he built all the, you know, he and his team put all the foundation in place for design.
So when I came in, Phil’s retiring, he brought me in. I’m listening for, okay, we, we did all these things, right? I mean, that’s what I saw. Like we hired the designers, we put them in all the right places throughout the whole business, not just in software. We had all these amazing programs running, but I’m also looking for, What’s not working, you know, where can we move the needle or where did we maybe take a wrong turn, where we can course-correct.
And it took probably four or five months to really have a, a pretty clear informed point of view about that. And then I worked with my team on articulating that into a vision and that was a really fun and exciting process. So that was the first six months. And then the next six months was about socializing the vision and starting to put it into practice.
And, and creating real programs and, and having real measurable, you know, goals around making these improvements.
Peter: Can, can you share what this vision is? Is there a public face to it at least?
Katrina: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ve been blogging about it actually, so, and I’ve never worked this way before, you know, in previous jobs. I don’t know. It was always more internal, but I think because the IBM Design program is so external-facing it’s, it’s really well known. And I decided to just start blogging about what I was learning and getting feedback both from our designers in the company, but also folks outside of design.
So I’ll, I’ll try not to go into my total stump speech cause I’ve done this a hundred times, but here’s the big ideas. Okay. So we had almost no designers at the company 10 years ago. Phil Gilbert, who is a legend, the, the former GM, led this incredible revolution to reinvigorate design at IBM. And when he was recruiting me for the role, I asked him, “How are we doing? How are we doing with design?”
And, you know, he told me about all the cool stuff. And I was like, “Yeah, but how are we really doing, how’s it transforming the business?” And he said, “Well, we have pockets of excellence, but we don’t yet have pervasive excellence.” And I, he said that, right, even before I took the job and it was, I had this ideas list of every time I talked with someone, I would like hear an idea between the lines and then I would capture on the list.
And that was one of the first things I captured. And it was the thing I kept going back to because I really think that’s the job now for all of us is how do we take this incredible foundation that’s been laid, this investment and kind of supercharge it so that we’re scaling excellence that is happening pervasively across the company.
After many, many, many conversations and roundtables and all the, all the things we do as designers to learn what, where we landed was on three areas. And I, in my head, I have a multi-year roadmap around these three areas, but we’re, we’re going agile. So , we’re taking ’em off one piece at a time.
So the three areas are around customer insights. I think there is a lot of opportunity for us to do for, you know, user research, design research, what we’ve already done for the core discipline of design. So a lot of things happening there.
The next area is around teams. And you know, you you’ve talked with other design leaders about this. I’ve listened to your podcast and we, we can’t be successful in design when it’s just design. To really, really be successful, you know, whether you believe in the statement of everyone as a designer, everyone has to care, they have to care about the people they’re serving and really be thinking critically about what that means. What can we do from our perch in design to ignite that and make sure we have strong cross-functional relationships. So there’s a whole body of work we’re doing around that.
And then the last piece is around learning. And one of the things that is so exciting to me about this role at IBM is we operate at scale. So, you know, Peter, when you and I first met 20 years ago you all were running Adaptive Path. I was working at a rival agency that was about the same size. You know, we, neither of us had more than a hundred employees, and designer education for us then was you send your designer to a conference once a year or, or you sent them to go speak at one, and then you don’t have to pay for it.
That was pretty much the extent of it. So now, you know, we’ve got 3000 designers and they’re actually thought leaders in the type of, you know, work that IBM is trying to do around things like artificial intelligence. So we’re really trying to unlock that learning to create this, these kind of training programs inside our company to kind of harness that knowledge and help our developers or help our designers kind of grow from each other.
Where to focus time, effort, and energy
Peter: I’m wondering, particularly in these last six months, and as you look forward to maybe your next year, one of the questions that I get a lot, one of, one of the challenges that I think a lot of design executives have is knowing where, and how, and with whom to spend their time, because time is a finite resource. Time is the only finite resource.
And it would be very easy for someone in your position to just work 120 hours a week, because there’s enough stuff to do that you could do that, but I, you, you would burn out you’ve in fact, written a book about burning out. We can get into that. You have a life outside of work. You recognize the value, even if you weren’t a working parent, even if you weren’t any of those things, you would also just recognize, like, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a point at which you, you just can’t give anymore and it’s not healthy to, to keep working.
So what have you, particularly now that you’re operating at this even newer scale, right? Your last job at Autodesk, you probably had a couple hundred people in your team. Now you’ve got 700 that you’re kind of directly responsible for in another 3000 that you’re somehow responsible for. , how are you, how are you figuring out where to focus your effort and energy?
Katrina: Yeah. It, well, first of all, yes, we, none of us can do everything. And there’s never enough time in the day. And one thing I’ve learned about work is work will take every ounce of energy you are willing to give it and then some. So we all have to draw these boundaries no matter what kind of personal life we have, no matter what kind of job we have.
It helps by the way to know there’s been a lot of research on this. I, I read a lot of the research on just, like, how much work is too much. And in fact, I think IBM even sponsored some of these studies in the fifties and what they found with knowledge workers was, you know, there’s diminishing returns when people become chronically overworked and that the limit seems to be about 40 hours a week.
So not only do, do you become less productive at a certain point when you cross that threshold continually week after week, but you start to create new problems at work because you’re not thinking clearly you’re not making good decisions. So I, I try to remember that and I try to remind my teams that because I think sometimes people feel guilty about trying to set boundaries, but actually your company needs you to set some boundaries.
So where do, where do I spend my time? There, there is not a one size fits all formula from what I’ve seen. And I, Peter, I think you’ve, I feel like I saw a talk you gave or blog post or something about like time you know, your pie chart of where you should…
Peter: You orient your relationships and as you get more senior, you tend to orient differently. Yes.
Katrina: That’s right. And in general, I agree with that, that said. You’re also a parent, you know, that sometimes there’s a crisis your kid is going through and that week it’s all about your kid. And you know, sometimes your kid is fine and you spend more on work.
And it’s sort of the same, even at work where I find there are weeks when I just need to be heads down with the designers. And, you know, at my level, a lot of people don’t do that, but I kind of respond to where, where I think I can add the most value or where the most, the biggest need is. And then there are other times of course, where I kind of have to actively pull back, ’cause it, it is very easy to work with designers. We think alike and they’re really fun but what I, what I keep telling design teams, ’cause people were disappointed, when I took the role, I didn’t move to Austin, which is where Phil was. I actually moved to New York, but the point of me moving to New York, and Phil was part of this decision, was this is where, this is where the senior executives are at IBM. And one of the most valuable things I can do is have really strong trusting relationships with those folks, because those are the people who will set design up for success in their parts of the business.
Jesse: One of the challenges that I hear about from people in my coaching practice is they realize that their priorities need to shift, but everybody around them has their own opinions about what their priorities ought to be. And claiming that sort of autonomous authority to set your own priorities is often a challenge for people.
How do you manage the expectations of other people when you realize that your priorities need to shift and you need to shift your focus, the way that you’re describing?
Katrina: That’s so interesting because I don’t, I don’t think I’m running into that problem. I want you to, I, I would love to hear an example of that.
Peter: Have you run into that problem in the past? I mean, you’ve worked so GE and Autodesk before IBM, big corporations, where there would be a lot of potential for politics and people telling you how to do your job.
Katrina: Well, there, the politics is, politics is real and that’s at every company and we can talk about that. But in terms of people telling me where I should spend my time, I maybe I’ve been lucky that I’ve, I’ve mostly worked for people who, who respected my authori-tay, you know, they gave me my autonomy and, and the challenge I’ve had is I’ve, I see the need everywhere. And I, I want to be part of a solution, but you can’t be involved in everything.
Jesse: I think that, you know, it’s not, it’s not so much do you have somebody micromanaging your time as it is, you have peers who are noticing where your focus and your attention lie, and often they feel like the top of your priority list ought to be whatever’s at the top of their priority list.
And I… sounds like the arrangement that you have at IBM allows you more flexibility than that.
Katrina: Yeah. I, and again, I, I may just be lucky in this role at this company, the, the, you know, in terms of getting invited to lead initiatives, or, I mean, there’s too much of that. So. I think as, as I’ve moved up in my career, I’ve had to develop kind of a black belt in different ways to say no, or deflect, or say not yet.
And I think we all need that. It’s you know, that whole thing of what you say… You can’t say yes, unless you can say no. If you say yes to everything, nothing gets done.
Jesse: mm-hmm
Peter: I hear, I hear from design leaders that they are, like literally unable to say no,
Katrina: Yeah.
Peter: In many of the contexts that they operate in and I, I try to get them to “no” for the, for these reasons, but I think a lot of design leaders, and it sounds like you’ve been fortunate not to have the situation, a lot of design leaders feel subject to forces, kind of, outside of their control, and don’t quite know how to, how to overcome them, right? They, the, the wave is crashing on them as opposed to them riding the wave.
Katrina: Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I’m not, I’m not trying to say that doesn’t happen. It certainly happens. I think just my experience of it is more the, the need for design and design leadership is everywhere, but it’s less about someone saying I expected you to focus on this and it, to me, it’s more about, well, if I turn my attention away from that thing, I’m afraid it’s gonna fall flat, but there’s only so many things I, or my team can do at once.
Um, there’s a lot of, you know, this is something Phil Gilbert said to me a while back, he said, you have to know which balls are rubber and which our glass. And I’d like to think I’ve figured out the difference. So we’re all juggling , but some things can drop and they won’t break and some things will break and it’s gonna be bad.
So get really honing our instinct around that is important.
Jesse: There are a couple of other factors that come into play when leaders feel like they can’t set those boundaries and they can’t say no to keep their focus on the glass balls and let the rubber ones bounce. One of them being that sometimes organizations just don’t have a culture of saying no, you know, they’re just, throughout the organization, outside of design, there’s just this sort of thing that we are all going to listen to the priorities of the people above us.
But there’s also the thing where I think a lot of leaders, especially as this level of design executive leadership is relatively new in a lot of organizations. They still feel like they have something to prove to the organization, to prove that design belongs there. And that leads them to kind of be more willing to give, more willing to say yes to, to everybody else’s priorities in order to try to kind of prove themselves.
Katrina: I think that what you just outlined Jesse is absolutely real. I think a lot of us in this type of role, see the opportunity in front of us. You know, design is still maturing. We’ve come a long way since the three of us started practicing design, but there are still many people who think, you know, and senior executives who think design are the people who put the pretty colors in at the end.
And we all know it so much more than that. So I think we all have this great responsibility to constantly be up-leveling the practice and, and seizing the opportunities as they come before us. And, and when you’re really looking for those opportunities at a big, big organization, there’s, there’s actually a lot of them.
You know, I, what would be an example for my life right now? I mean, one, so one of the things my team is working on right now, we have the design thinking program, which is core to how we kind of try to teach a design-centered or a human-centered mindset to the rest of the company. It’s less about the designers. It’s more about anyone who works with designers. And, we made a decision. You know, after we kind of started unveiling the, the vision, to have one of our first pieces of work be to revamp our training for executives. And it’s very intentional that we’re doing this.
So these are not design executives. These are other general managers and even SVPs of different parts of the IBM businesses. Well guess what, we were successful with, get- getting people to start signing up and now we have to deliver on that. And so, so to me that is one of the glass balls where, and my team knows this, that, that, that one is so important because it’s so high profile and it unlocks opportunities for our whole design practice if we get it right.
So some other things may need to get put on the back burner while we make sure we really nail it on this one. But yeah, I, I, I hear what you’re saying. A lot of the job of being a design leader at a company like this is not in the job description. It’s, it’s the seizing the opportunity.
It’s the listening in between the lines for what what’s really being said and the kind of proactively going after that and being a change agent, and you could do that all day and all night never sleep.
Jesse: Yeah. You mentioned being a change agent, and that is something you’ve mentioned a couple of times about design and its potential to transform the business. And this is something that Peter and I have talked a little bit about, about how much do you see being a change agent as a necessary part of that unwritten job description of the design executive.
Katrina: Well, I think if design was fully understood and recognized and invested in and respected, the way for example development is…
Jesse: mm-hmm
Katrina: we would not need to be change agents. We would need to be good stewards. You know, we would need to do the, the main part of our job description, which…
Jesse: mm-hmm
Katrina: You know, drive human-centered processes, that’s, you know, collaboratively solve complex problems and solve them well and that went in the market.
Jesse: Yeah.
Katrina: I think we’re change agents because all of us doing this are still part of a movement to kind of change how businesses work, how they run.
Jesse: Mm-hmm.
How are Design executives different from other executives?
Peter: I was just having a conversation today with head of design. He’s got a team of about 70 and he, he was thinking about getting an executive coach and, and there’s value in getting executive coaches, but his challenge was, he sees, and, and this is something I’m hearing from a lot of design leaders that being a design executive is, is different than being other flavors of executive. Not to say that we’re special, but we’re at this, we’re still at an evolving stage in our evolution of what it means for design to play at this level. And what, what might work for any executive won’t necessarily work for us. And I’m wondering kind of, ’cause I believe you’ve gotten, I’m sure you’ve gotten executive coaching, Katrina and, and that kind of wisdom, and I’m, I’m wondering how you, apart from maybe being a change agent, what are those qualities of being a design executive that are interestingly distinct from being just any other, any old executive .
Katrina: Yeah. I think a lot, it is a really good question. So what, what is required of a design executive, that’s different from a business executive?
Jesse: Mm.
Katrina: A few things come to mind. You know, the, obviously what we’ve just talked about, about being a change agent. You know, being a general manager of a software business, where you have a P and L and you know, certain client relationships you have to lead and certain numbers you have to hit, that is very well understood at most companies.
Whereas what, you know, even how you measure success as a design leader is not as well understood. And maybe we don’t even all agree on, on what that means. So I do think there’s just some, something about being, you know, I think we have to be incredibly creative, resourceful people to work in environments where, where we’re constantly educating folks on what’s possible when it’s, it, when it’s unexpected and not necessarily even wanted, if that makes sense.
That said, I think being a successful design executive actually does have a lot in common with being a successful business executive in that we need to learn how, how to think and talk like the other business executives we work with. But we always do that knowing where we come from and what, what kind of change we’re trying to drive? I think the mistake I’ve seen with a lot of design leaders is they kind of dig their heels in on being a design leader. It’s the, the diva design leader and that just never plays well. You know, I, I…
Jesse: yeah.
Katrina: … we talk a lot about relationships as executives, whether you’re a design executive or someone else. Our relationships are so important. And if you’re taking the stance of like, I know things you don’t know, and I’m gonna be smug about it, and there’s no way you could possibly be as smart as me about it, well, guess what? You’re probably not gonna be very successful there.
Jesse: Right.
Katrina: Yeah.
From Designer to Design Leader
Jesse: Yeah. I think that one thing that happens with these design leaders is that their identity as designers has been so important to them throughout their careers, that they don’t necessarily recognize that they’ve gotten to the place where that identity needs to shift. to start thinking themselves as a design leader, as something distinct from being a designer.
And it has different implications and a different skill set that’s associated with it. I’m curious about, like, when was it for you that you kind of shifted your mindset and started shifting your, your sense of who you were and kind of letting go of the nuts and bolts of design and starting to pivot toward developing these other skill sets.
Katrina: Well, I, I have a confession for you. I never felt like I belonged as a, you know, I always felt like I was an outsider in the design community. Even though I worked in the center of, you know, the design mecca in the world, even though I was friends with folks like you, Peter, I, I always, my identity came from my first career, which was journalism.
So I always felt like I was code switching from, from, you know, being a newspaper reporter and a documentary filmmaker, and then working with all these designers who, you know, went to RISD and had all these fancy degrees and knew the whole canon of amazing designers. And so I, maybe that’s just something I haven’t had, I haven’t had to shed that baggage because I never had it to begin with. Yeah,
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: I mean, that’s something Jesse and I have talked about. So Jesse also started in journalism. My one, my one degree is in anthropology. And I think there’s the, the fact that we might not have identified as designers, or as part of that… kind of, taken on that identity has given us a perspective that has allowed for whatever success we have had because we weren’t as caught up in, in, in the identity game of, of being a designer.
And I’m wondering if that’s something you’ve, you believe to be true, if you found to be true. I mean, there’s clearly people with design backgrounds who’ve become successful design leaders, but how, how has not being as wedded to the identity of design, how, how has that affected your path?
Katrina: Yeah. Yeah. That’s so interesting. We’re all, we all look like insiders. Who’ve all, all felt like we don’t belong.
Peter: We’re lizard people, right? We, we
Katrina: Right, right. This…
Peter: right?
Katrina: That’s so funny. So how’s that affected my path. I think, I, I’m guessing, but, and my guess is this is true of all of us. I would think that that’s perhaps made us a little more open-minded about, you know, where creative solutions come from or what good ideas really look like?
One thing I found with some design leaders who get kind of hung up on their identity as designers is there’s this, I, I have a pet peeve about people using the word craft and design. I think that word has been weaponized. So I, I think that there’s a way that, I’m not saying everyone, I’m not saying can never use the word, but I think that sometimes the design community over-indexes on what is called craft, what it really means is, I like how this looks and I think it’s great for my portfolio.
And what gets lost is, What’s the problem you’re solving? Who are you solving it for? You know, I, an analogy would be from architecture. You know, there’s some modern architects who you know, may, I don’t know if you’re gonna follow this analogy, maybe I should skip this one. It’s too, it’s too far afield, but it’s this idea where you can get so insular in your discipline that you kind of lose sight of what it’s for.
And I think those of us who maybe, our whole identity is not hanging on the idea of being the best designer. We’re maybe a little more open to what is it we’re really trying to do. And maybe it’s not all about me.
Jesse: mm-hmm.
Peter: You mentioned earlier Phil’s comment around pockets of excellence, but not pervasive excellence. And when I’ve worked with design leaders who were in a similar situation to you leading very large teams, and they’ve often seen something similar, their, a way that they are addressing it is actually through craft.
And by which I mean, one of their– something as part of their assessment, what they see is a lack of craft in many of these locations. And there’s a responsibility to try to bring the craft up. And I’m wondering if you’ve seen that, if that’s been an experience you’ve had, or if you think maybe there’s, there’s something else going on and craft is, is an easy solution to identify, but not, not actually the real problem.
I’m wondering how, if, if you’ve ever had that kind of experience,
Katrina: There, yeah, so there’s definitely design quality. I will call it that. You know, there’s, we, we all know them. There are certain heuristics and rules and, and you know, you, you know, those of us who’ve been practicing design for a while, can pretty quickly see when something has not been, well, when it’s breaking those rules and it’s just not gonna work, right. I’m, I’m not discounting that.
What I’m talking about is, I’m not gonna name the company, but I’ll give you an example. So I have worked with, you know, I was in consulting, so I’ve worked with a lot of different kinds of companies. And I have seen companies where you’ve got this centralized design team and a team of designers who are, you know, thrilled and very self-congratulatory, frankly, about their craft and what they put together looks great.
I’m not gonna argue about that. And it follows a grid and it’s a system and, but no one can use it because they’re too disconnected from the problem they’re solving. And you know, when I, I work in a space, we’re not making cat videos. We’re, we’re not making ads. We’re making really complex software and workflows and machines that have a very specific and sophisticated context and, it’s… doing great design is gonna have to go way beyond, you know, something we learned in a class at RISD, and it’s gonna be much more about how is this thing gonna be used, and what really matters to people and what are the constraints we’re working in. And then how will we work with that? Now you might say that that’s craft, but I, that’s not how I see a lot of designers use that term.
Peter: Yeah, I think, I mean, there’s, there’s a, there can be a tendency, I think, for the word craft to be kind of like a tribal indicator. Are you in or out of my club because of your fealty to this concept of craft?
Katrina: That’s right.
When “Design Thinking” succeeds
Peter: Well and that, so that ties to another thing I was thinking about earlier, you were mentioning the design thinking practice at IBM, which is I mean, established 10 years ago with IBM Design.
It was always, I think part of the, the plan. It’s not for designers so much as it’s for the non-designers who can work with, not just work with your designers, but work with your customers and clients.
A lot of companies have tried design thinking and most have failed in creating any lasting design thinking program or impact. IBM has succeeded. And I’m wondering to what you attribute that success for bringing kind of design practices to non-designers and bringing non-designers into, yeah, design work. Why, why, IBM has succeeded, where in, in so many companies, they can’t even say design thinking ’cause it was a failed kind of attempt at like, it was a failed management fad from five years ago, that a lot of people ran through some week-long of training and, you know, we’d spent a lot of money and nothing happened.
What, what was different or what have you seen are, are the conditions ’cause I think you’ve seen success with bringing design thinking to other environments. What are the conditions that actually allow that kind of engagement or initiative to succeed?
Katrina: Yeah. Yeah. I, and by the way, I completely get why there’s been a backlash against design thinking because you know, it’s like design thinking is just a, a mindset and a methodology. And it’s a set of tools that that we use to collaboratively solve really hard problems that usually can’t be solved by just one person.
So design thinking gives us very specific frameworks and ways of working together on complex things that often lead to better, more creative solutions. And they get us there faster and I’ve seen over and over and over the power of that.
But I think in some companies, design thinking has turned into this superficial thing. You know, it’s like seeing a great painting and saying, well, see, you just need these paints. And it’s like, well, yeah, okay. You need the methods, but ,you need not know how to use them. Right? You need the mindset behind the methods. It’s not a check the box activity. It requires a lot of critical thinking.
I think it’s been, so far, successful at IBM in part because it gave everyone a common language. And at a company like IBM, I cannot overstate how important that is. You know, 300,000 employees are, I, I don’t know exactly what our employee count is after the spinoff of Kyndryl, but it’s a whole lot of people who have to work together and act and behave like one company.
And so if everyone has a different idea of what it means to innovate or to, you know, to solve problems, just kind of getting, getting started is this enormous overwhelming challenge. So what enterprise design thinking, EDT, our program gave us is not only the methodology, but just the words around the methodology.
So, and hats off to, you know, the, the team that was, I, I don’t get any credit for this, unfortunately, ’cause this was built before I came in, but the team, many of who are now on my team, you know, came up with the IBM loop, and the, the way we talk about observe, reflect, make, and just, these aren’t, it’s not rocket science, but it’s giving words that a lot of people in the company now understand way beyond just the designers.
So you’ll hear product managers talk about their Hills and you know, this is a way we talk about at IBM, what challenge you’re trying, what problem you’re trying to solve. Now, I’ve worked at other companies where all kinds of projects fail. And when you do the diagnostic afterwards, you find out, well, no one agreed on what problem they were solving.
So the idea that we can have a starting point here, everyone understands what hill is. They understand they need to have a hill. They need to agree on what that hill is. That gets us a great starting point. I, that said, I think we have a lot of work to do even at IBM, even with the success of this program, to make sure that it’s continually infusing our work, and that, that we’re using it in the right ways.
So, you know, like I mentioned before, right now, we’re in the process of kind of reinvigorating the program. And we started with our executive, senior executive training. And my hope is that, you know, we’re really successful with that piece. And then it starts to, then we start to kind of move down the chain so that I don’t know, so that we, we continue to have a common understanding of how to do this work.
Maintaining culture and cohesion at scale
Jesse: I’m curious about some of the, some of the issues along those lines that come into play. When you start dealing with scale at the scale that you’re talking about, where, you know, you’ve got, you’re at the top of this pyramid of design that has, you know, these layers and layers to it, of people in pockets here and there.
And it’s very easy for an organization like that to feel very disconnected and, and for it to just kind of dissolve into a bunch of little islands of design. How do you create a sense of unity for a group that big? How do you create a sense of common culture for a group that big?
Katrina: I’m so lucky to be stepping into this role because I don’t know any other company that’s in this situation that we’re in. So, you know, there are very few companies with this many designers. The ones that have those designers kind of hired them over time and it happened organically.
And then organically people form their little fiefdoms and I’ve seen it in a million different ways in different companies. What’s unique about our experience at IBM is we only had a few dozen designers 10 years ago. So, you know, three, these 3000 designers in our practice kind of came up together at IBM.
They, they, a lot of them were core in developing the program that is now become ubiquitous at the company. And so initially they were hired in a centralized group. But then we dispersed that group because you know, Phil really believed, and I agree with this, that to make design sustainable, the businesses have to invest in design.
We need to have people embedded all around the company, but those people embedded have this core DNA from those early years in the program, they helped create the program. So my challenge now coming into this is how do I keep that alive?
Because people are quitting, new people are getting hired. They don’t know the history. And one of the things that I’ve done as a newcomer to IBM is I keep reiterating the legend of IBM Design. I, you know, and in a lot of the town halls and the talks that I give I’m often referencing, or even retelling that ten-year history story, because I do think it’s so important that people kind of understand how we got to where we are, and that they feel connected to that.
And then there’s a bunch of other things I do. Like, I made a bunch of hires and promotions and executive changes when I came in. And one of the things I really looked at was making sure we were bringing designers together from different parts of the business that there’s like a cross pollination that’s happening. So for example Joni Saylor is now really running the design program office on my team. And she’s amazing, shout out to Joni, but she she’s a long time IBMer, she worked in infrastructure and she also worked in consulting. And then she also had roots in the, she had spent time with the design program earlier in her career.
So she’s got these connections with design leaders in different parts of the business that I think are really important for people to just feel that connection to the program that is really meant to serve everyone.
Peter: Do you have a song? Doesn’t, doesn’t IBM use songs anymore to try to encourage, uh, culture
Katrina: Do you know about…
Peter: and spirit? Does design have a song?
Katrina: You’re uh, not that I know of, but I, I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but the truth is when I was researching IBM, before I came on board and actually my mom was, this is so funny. My mom was researching IBM. She used to teach some management courses and she was like, you know, this company has a rich history, you should read about it.
And she sent me this story that… It was about like going way back to the early days of IBM, that Thomas Watson Sr., and then Thomas Watson Jr. Who ran the company, between the son and the dad, between them for, I don’t know, 40 years or something, they were social engineers and they, they had a hymn book. IBM employees would get together in the twenties or thirties and sing songs together.
They had, I think there was like a Muppet involvement at one point. And, if you, if you do some deep link. Yeah. It’s really interesting. But no, that’s, that’s a good idea. We should work on our songbook again.
Peter: Uh, Jim Henson, I believe did do, I dunno if it was Muppets, but Jim Henson was involved in a, in a, some corporate film around the concept of “THINK” when that was the IBM kind of, mantra of THINK um,
Katrina: Yeah.
Peter: People think, uh computers don’t ,and how do we like, yeah. That was a detour…
Katrina: Yeah. Unexpected. I didn’t know I was gonna go there.
Peter: I’m well, let, let, let me lean into that a little bit.
‘Cause we were just being silly, and design benefits from silliness and play and you, Katrina, have worked at engineering-driven corporations like GE, Autodesk, and now IBM, which are not known for and play. They’re serious. They’re reductive, they’re analytical. They’re quantitative. They’re very, they don’t like uncertainty. They, they want to, like, know how things are gonna work out 20 years from now to the nth decimal point.
You’re coming in as a, you’ve been a design leader. You’re now coming into IBM as a design leader. And, and you recognize the value of play and weirdness, and creating a space for generativity and creativity that runs contrary to these corporate cultures, at least kind of the dominant aspects of the corporate cultures.
How do you, how do you make that space? How do you protect that space? What, what are some of the strategies or, and, or tactics that you’ve employed to enable designers to be designers in the context of a dominant culture that might not be so forgiving of, of that kind of behavior?
Katrina: Yeah, yeah. I’m, it’s a good question. And honestly, I feel like with the pandemic it’s been extra hard. You know, it was, it was easier to make that space when we had physical spaces and when I was able to visit offices and, you know, when I getting together in person just feels so different than being on a screen all day.
That said, quick detour, but there’s some interesting things we did when I was at Autodesk, when the pandemic first hit, to try to keep that connection and play and creativity going. And one of my favorites was my team, you know, all these creative designers, right, came up with this idea.
We, so I, I spontaneously, when we first went into lockdown, I had posted a selfie on Slack to all the designers. And I said, you know, I miss you guys. None of us realized we weren’t gonna see each other for a while. This is me in my new office. I’d love to, I miss your faces. If you feel like it, send, you know, add a picture. And all these people posted these photos of them working at home. And, you know, some of them had babies in the background and cats, and it was kind of this sweet little moment.
And then one of our designers, when it was holiday time and we were still in lockdown, she worked with my design ops, one of my design ops folks to create this calendar that we mailed to everyone. And it was, she was a great illustrator, and she basically took these little details from those photos that people had posted in the beginning of the pandemic and somehow worked it into this like group photo.
So it was, it gives me goosebumps, actually, telling you this story, but it was like such a lovely thing. It was like, we’re separate, but we’re together. And so I, I do think there’s things like that, that we can do. One thing, you know, I will say it’s a little different in my role at IBM because I’m not working day-to-day with the, on-the-ground designers.
I’ve got a team of extremely senior design executives reporting to me and they’re running a lot of these programs for their teams and we talk about it and share. I feel like there’s an element of play missing in that group that, you know, I, I haven’t figured out how to unlock that yet. I mean, in an ideal world, we, I would just take everyone out for a great offsite and, you know, we’re all in different places and we just need that time together and we haven’t been able to get it.
One thing that I think we have been really successful at keeping going is our design jams. So different groups in design, like design sprints, I think Google calls it a design sprint. We call it a design jam, but you know, it’s like a design hackathon where we’ll structure a problem, we’ll frame a problem. The most recent one we did was around sustainability and then we kind of create the space for people to come up with really creative ideas to solve this problem. And then those get showcased to leadership and there’s prize and it’s, you know, it’s very, it’s, it’s a nice break from, you know, some folks working day to day on problems that maybe they’re not as excited about.
We try to make those opportunities where, Hey, this is a problem that affects everyone, many of us care deeply about it. And we’re just gonna carve out a little space to come up with some stuff and even get you some visibility in front of senior leaders. If you come up with a great idea, now, sometimes these ideas turn into products at IBM.
So when you talk about how do you get permission to do this? Well, sometimes they’re money-making ideas and you know, that’s a good win.
Peter: Right, right, right. Demonstrate, you know, small, it, it’s kind of classic change management, right? Small, small effort, quick win, demonstrate some success, kind of, can, can lead to permission for the next thing. And, and the next thing.
Katrina: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Burnout, and Katrina’s book
Jesse: I think that a lot of people, even other heads of design, would see you as being in something of an enviable position, given the setup that you have and, and the circumstances that you’re in. But it’s also clear that there’s no way you could manage this without the skills that you’ve developed in avoiding burnout personally, and the experiences you’ve, you’ve come through with that.
And I’m curious about what you would share with your fellow heads of design, about how to manage and avoid burnout themselves.
Katrina: Yeah.
Jesse: You say the, the role will eat you alive.
Katrina: Yeah, if you let it. So I’ll, I’ll give the quick, the two minute backstory, ’cause a lot of folks probably don’t know. I have three kids. My youngest is 15. Before he was born, I was really proud of myself for being, you know, the supermom working full time. Husband worked full time. My job was growing, my family was growing, and then I had a, another kid and long story short, it fell apart.
I mean, the truth is there really is a limit on how much energy we can put out in the world. And whether you’re adding another direct report or another kid in your family or what, whatever the thing is at a certain point, it breaks. And you know, I was younger. I was in my thirties and I was still naive enough to think that hard work would get me where I needed to go.
And it turned out that hard work just ran me into the ground. So long story short, I stopped working for a year. And I, actually, because I can’t just stop, I, I wrote the book in that year and then it took a few more years to edit it and get it published and eventually it was published and that was really exciting.
But what I learned from this, well, it’s funny, ’cause I, when I was, when the first book first came out in 2013, I did a ton of book publicity and I did a ton of interviews and some of them were really big, you know, like I did this MSNBC live-by-satellite and I, you know, I did stuff like that. And what was always funny to me is I was treated like the expert and you know, so what should moms do or what should women do?
And I was like, dude, did you read the book? I just told you what not to do. You know, like I, basically, my, my message was, my message was, this is not just on the individual. We have a system that is set up for people to fail. And so I’m gonna specifically talk about working parents, but I know this is not only working parents, however, working parents, caregivers, are on the front lines, because the expectation today, is you’re supposed to do your job, as if you don’t have a family. On the other hand, you’re supposed to raise your family as if you don’t have a job.
So parents today, women today spend more time with their kids than they did in the sixties when most women didn’t work. Right? So that, that is just a recipe for insanity. And what made me crazy is people would say, what should people do? And I was like, this is not just an individual problem. Can we be system thinkers for a moment?
This is societal problem. It’s a cultural problem. This is not on women. Women are doing too much. Let’s get everyone else to chip in, start valuing caregiving, start accommodating people, having other responsibilities in the workplace. You know, there’s a lot of things we could talk about. Okay. So that, so I just got that outta my system.
I, that’s all still true and it’s even more true now than it was then because the pandemic and we’re seeing it in the workforce. For the first time we saw women’s, you know, for several decades, we were seeing the number of women going up, up, up in terms of women in the labor force. And then we saw this dip for the first time in the pandemic.
And now there’s all this concern that we’re losing ground. And in some ways I think we are, so what are women supposed to do? What are parents supposed to do? What is anyone supposed to do when your job can just eat up your life? And, you know, there’s all kinds of self-help advice out there. The truth is what I’ve learned is it’s not just about saying no to things.
It’s not just about having boundaries. Really. I think the biggest thing I’ve had to learn is about having compassion for myself, which is a mindset. And that’s different from having rules about like, I only work these hours and I only do these things. That, that’s an output of a mindset, the mindset that I was missing when I was 37 and I burned out. The mindset that I’m still struggling to cultivate ’cause I’m still the person I always was.
So this is, I’m a people pleaser. The mindset is I have to have compassion for myself, just as much as I have for my team, for my kids, for, you know, for everyone else in my life. I need to matter in my life. And that would be my advice for anyone who’s struggling with burnout. What does it look like to start mattering in your own life? How does that change your behavior? How does it change your relationships? How does that change what you say yes and no to? How does that change about how you feel? Because sometimes there is too much to do and it has to get done and I’ve been there, but when we put guilt on top of the stress, because we think we’re failing, that’s where, you know, that’s where a lot of people get in trouble. So what would it look like to just have compassion?
Peter: Interesting. Yeah. It’s resonant with the conversation we had with Abby Covert, who wrote a blog post called “I choose me,” in talking about her journey where she left working in companies and became independent and focused on writing and teaching ’cause that’s what mattered to her, instead of playing a part that she felt like others were expecting of her, but wasn’t necessarily what, what she was about. And, and it’s hard because one, it can feel selfish, right? To… Compassion for yourself. Oh, you’re a struggling middle aged white lady with a remarkable executive job.
Katrina: Oh, Boohoo. Yes. Your life is so hard. It turns out that all kinds of people can suffer. So there’s no contest. No one needs to enter it.
Peter: Totally, totally. But, but I could see that, I could see you having that challenge for yourself, like who am I to warrant this compassion when there’s people with real struggles in the world, et cetera…
Katrina: That’s right.
Peter: But, but she made the, you know, she used the analogy, you gotta put your mask on before you put the mask on the others, you know, when the, when the plane is going down, like you gotta, you can’t take care of others if you’re not taking care of yourself, right? And, and I think that’s kind of at the heart of this. But I’m wondering though, because you’re right. It is a systemic problem. And it’s a problem that we have working in the United States, in an environment that doesn’t take care of caregivers, that doesn’t take care of women, that lauds a kind of rapacious capitalism that also, that, that feeds this, this hamster wheel as well. And I’m wondering then if you, if you are aware of systemic interventions that like, if someone were wanting to, to spend some of this energy in a systemically productive way, do you have suggestions or pointers for, for ways to do that, that might actually have a broader impact.
Katrina: Yeah. So, so there’s two ways I could take that question. So one is changing the systems that, you know, kind of oppress workers, right? And what, what do we do there? Like how do we
Peter: I am so happy. We’re getting an IBMer to talk Marxist.
Katrina: That’s okay. My book was already out when they hired me, they know who they got. But then, but then there’s, then there’s, I don’t hide from it, but then there’s well, so, well, let me put it this way. So when I was writing the end of my book, I was thinking about, okay, so everyone’s gonna say, what’s your advice for women? ‘Cause that’s what they always ask. And I, so I’m like, well, how do I answer that question? ‘Cause at the end of the day, it’s a big thorny problem, but you gotta do something.
And so I, I have this chapter at the end where I just structure like 10 things you can do. And it’s, it’s a concentric circle. So it starts with personal things you can do in your own life. And it starts with things like self-compassion, but then it moves out to, What can you do in the workplace? And that’s where we really start to get into systemic stuff. There’s a lot that we can do in the workplace around everything from just as, you know, as people leaders, creating an environment where people really do feel like they can bring up some of these issues and, and come up with better solutions with their, with their manager, instead of feeling like they have to pretend everything’s fine. To actually structuring the work week differently, which I’m really excited every time I hear about four, four-day work weeks as like a structural thing, I think there’s a lot to talk about there.
But then even moving beyond that to government policies. And I mean, if we just focus on the US for a moment, it’s such an embarrassment, we are one of the most hostile countries for working parents. We are, you know, one of, I think three countries, the number keeps changing, but very few that do not guarantee paid parental leave for mothers, let alone fathers. And I’m a strong proponent in having both. We are one of the only countries that does not protect sick time for workers. And I believe that’s still true, even with everything we’ve gone through with the pandemic.
So, I mean, just those two things, just changing that would change so many millions of people’s lives. But also there would be a signal about what we value and what we care about. So there are, so I, I don’t know that I really answered your question, Peter, but there are organizations that are working on those policies.
Moms Rising is one. I donated a bunch of profits from my book to Moms Rising. Momsrising.org. They’re still doing this work. These are the people who co-founded moveon.org during the Clinton years. And, and then one of those co-founders pivoted and started leading this movement. So they do a lot of lobbying for these types of policies.
But then also, you know, I, there’s a lot of people leaders who listen to your podcasts, and I think that there’s things we can do around how we, you know, how we structure the work week, how we structure our HR processes, how we lead as humans in the workplace that can at least make a difference in, in, in this impossible bind that so many people find themselves in that can actually acknowledge and accommodate people having real lives outside of work.
Jesse: I love that vision.
Katrina, thank you so much. For those who are interested in following your journey, as it continues to unfold, is there anywhere they can find you in the world on the webs?
Katrina: Yeah. Yeah. I’m a kind of a lame tweeter, but I am on @kalcorn on Twitter. And I’ve been blogging about the IBM design journey. So maybe that’s the best place, is to go to Medium IBM design all, all the blogs that I’ve written about this process are there.
Jesse: Fantastic. Thank you so much.
This’s been great.
Peter: Yeah. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for sharing your, your wisdom and, and experience. This has been great.
Katrina: I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.
Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s @peterme and I’m @JJG. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
30— Mailbag: UX maturity, conflict fatigue, and getting past imposter syndrome
May 25, 2022
Transcript
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
And we’re finding our way
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, Peter and I take a break from interviewing guests to ask each other some questions and answer a few of yours as well. Along the way we get into topics like organizational maturity, career trajectories, the role of diplomacy and leadership and connecting leaders to their true sense of purpose. That’s right. It’s time for the mailbag.
Peter: Hey, Jesse. So today I thought we do something a little different. Instead of a conversation with a friend of ours, have you and I converse. I think it’s, you know, it’s been a little while since you and I have had an opportunity just to chat. We didn’t want to do this in a, as… a navel-gazing fashion. So we’ve, we’ve elicited questions from the community through various channels: LinkedIn, Twitter, and email. And we have some questions that we’ll get to, but I, taking my co-host prerogative, do want to ask the first question and it’s a question of you. And it’s… I realized, I don’t know, kind of where… what your perspective is right now on matters of design and design leadership.
Like what, what your point of view is. And I’m curious what patterns have emerged in the conversations you’re having with design leaders in your coaching practice.
Improving UX maturity in an organization
Jesse: So for those of you who don’t know I’ve been away from my leadership coaching practice for a bit as I’ve been dealing with some health issues. Last year I was in treatment for cancer all year long, but I’m happy to say that I’m feeling much better and I’m back at it now. And so I’ve been back into the swing of coaching for the last few months, and it’s been interesting to return to it with this perspective, having taken a year off and noticing the conversations that I’m having with folks now.
And you know, one of the interesting themes over and over again, that’s coming up in my coaching conversations, revolves around something that you I’m sure have a strong perspective on, Peter, which is organizational maturity. What I’m finding is that a lot of these leaders, the biggest struggles that they have are the fact that they are embedded within organizations that are not as mature in their UX practices, as these leaders feel they need to be in order for them in their teams to be successful. So over and over again, what I’m seeing is the main question that these leaders are dealing with is the question of, do I stick it out here and try to push this organization toward a level of maturity where it can deliver on the promise and potential of design?
Or do I cut my losses, get out, and go find another organization that’s already operating at that level of maturity? And it’s a difficult thing for individuals to find their way through because that task of pushing the maturity of the organization forwar,. It asks something very different of you than simply jumping in and operating in a, in an… in a situation where you were already sort of set up for success.
Peter: A clarifying question: when you’re talking about maturity, are you talking about maturity of the UX organization, the UX team, or are you talking about maturity of the broader organization to embrace user experience or…?
Jesse: It’s the well, it’s mostly the the maturity of the broader organization. Although I will note that along the lines of our conversation with Tim Kieschnick, the maturity of the larger organization ends up strongly influencing how mature your UX team can.
Peter: Right, right. And so. That’s interesting. I mean, this… I’m reminded of when I joined Groupon 10 years ago and there was a lot of interest in being design-driven. And so if we use the leadership ceiling kind of framing, there was actually a pretty high purpose ceiling in, in that regard. And, but when I, so I inherited a team and what I saw was that, that it was the team that was immature much more than the broader organization.
Not that the broader organization was all that mature, but it didn’t matter how mature or immature the broader organization was because the team was evidently immature. And that’s actually what led to writing the book, was this realization that we need to first mature our design organizations before we can then start trying to mature design within the broader organization. And I’m wondering if you’re, if, if that is a pattern you’re seeing. Whether or not these design leaders, you don’t, I, you know, I, I guess, I guess it might be hard for you to diagnose just how mature somebody’s design organization is. But let me, let me just say that I’ve seen too often design leaders, rail…they get frustrated by what they feel is the immaturity and the constraints the broader organization is putting on them, but they don’t accept responsibility for the fact that their organization isn’t, isn’t even measuring up to the ceiling that that broader organization is, is affording. That they’re not doing that initial work…
Jesse: right.
Peter: …to mature their teams.
Jesse: Right, right, right. Well, and. It becomes a question of what kind of maturity you’re talking about because there is a level of maturity of team structure, of process, of governance that are the kinds of things that I think you’re exactly right, that if a UX team isn’t, it doesn’t have that stuff in place, there’s no point in asking for a broader mandate because you haven’t demonstrated that you can deliver value at that scale yet. But the, I think the, the kind of maturity that these leaders are running up against that I’m hearing about has to do with a maturity of understanding of expectations, of design, of appreciation of the value of design that they’re seeing doesn’t really exist in these organizations around them, or doesn’t exist at the level that allows them to really do what they feel like they’re there to do.
Peter: And that pain is real and I see it all the time. And, and Yeah, so then it becomes this question of, it’s funny, a lot of this is going back to our conversation with Tim, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re going to operate below the organization’s maturity ceiling. And so as he pointed out, you have kind of two options.
You can bide your time or you can bail. And that’s, that’s individual to the person in terms of what, what, what path they choose based on what else is happening in their relationship to that organization? I say, I think primarily around their commitment to the mission or purpose of that organization.
And if it’s an organization that they feel strongly committed to and they want it to succeed, then I would say, and then it’s your job to, then, as Tim pointed out with the letter C, change the ceiling and that’s, as he said, it’s not for the faint of heart, but this is the real work of design leadership.
And I think one of those things, that when people ask why, how, is being a VP of design different than being a VP of marketing, it’s– it’s this immaturity question, companies are mature much more mature in thinking about marketing, thinking about engineering, thinking about sales. And so your VP doesn’t need to keep evangelizing and educating everybody as to what it means to do it, right?
Companies are immature about thinking about design. So part of the job of that design leader is education and evangelism. That’s just… that’s… that, you can’t get away from that. I mean, the last thing I’ll say is, on at least in this front, is I have been surprised… so I’m, I’m currently supporting an organization where this type of maturity, in- increasing the maturity is, is, is a goal that the design team has. And so they’re having to communicate how design works to a broader, primarily product, organization. And this is a big company. These are, you know, billions of dollars; very senior leaders. And what surprises me is how rudimentary the conversation is that the design leaders are having with the broader organization to educate them. I mean, I’m working with design leaders with 25 years experience who are rolling out the double diamond at its most basic to communicate, This is what design is, and who are leaning on the DMI index of how design-centered companies do better in the stock market, like reports from 5, 10, 15 years ago.
Jesse: These are old tools that have been used for a long time to evangelize design.
Peter: And they’re still working and they’re still working. And so I think one of the things that we have to recognize as design leaders, who, because we’re experts in it and might think that this stuff is not all that valuable, they’re not all that useful or, or too basic. What’s basic to us is mind- expanding to others and, and to not shy away from, from returning to those rudiments in, in starting that process of maturing the organization.
Because if you’re trying to meet them at your level of maturity, they’re not going to get there. They’re not going to get there. The delta is too big. So you have to kind of get to where they are at their level of maturity and then grow them.
The reality of conflict fatigue
Jesse: I wonder about the psychological toll on leaders of taking on this role that you described, where you are inevitably, constantly putting yourself in situations where you have to su—… you have to have arguments with, you know, you, ….changing people’s minds means getting them to let go of their old ideas. And that is hard work. It’s difficult work. It is also, it means plunging yourself into conflict over and over and over again.
And it’s this conflict fatigue that I see setting in with design leaders that they’re just like, it sounds like the way that you’re describing it, taking this job means signing up to be sort of a crusading holy warrior. And not everybody who wants to run a design team wants that mantle put upon themselves, you know?
Peter: I think so. So yes. And a couple of thoughts in this design team I’m supporting, they’re hiring amazing design leaders from other organizations. Design leaders… so, so this, this team has 500 some designers on the way to 700, by the end of the year. It’s just, I’m saying that to reflect on scale. And they’re bringing in design leaders who are leading teams at other companies of say 500. And…but bringing them in to lead a team of 50, a 100, 150. And it’s because those leaders are done fighting that holy war. And they want to be part of an organization where someone else is above them. Who’s waging… waging those battles as it were and they get to focus on the work. And so that’s a decision for design leaders is do… I’ve… I’ve had in my conversations with, with the leaders I work with, there’s another one in particular, he was a head of design for one company, 40-ish person team, moved, became a head of design at another company, 50ish person team. Both of them, there was this jockeying and evangelizing, educating. He was actually really good at education.
He was really strong at connecting business value with UX metrics. And so his leadership tend to really like him, but the, the, the, the, the more recent company he had been working for, they had their fortunes turn a bit and the job changed. And he’s like this isn’t the job that I signed up for.
And he realized, “You know what? I don’t want to be the guy. I don’t want to be the guy. I want to be a guy.” And so he found a job at a ginormous tech company to run a team that’s the same size, maybe even larger than what he ran before, but in such a bigger context that he’s, he doesn’t have to wage those battles and fight those fights.
Playing politics instead of fighting battles
Peter: ‘Cause he just doesn’t have the energy for it. So that’s one thought. The second thought is there’s probably, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. And I think leaders, and I’m wondering, kind of, in the conversations you have, the strategies you’re developing for these leaders in terms of figuring out how to address that, does it have to be waging a holy war or can it be more political?
Is there a Realpolitik approach to this?
And I think about this in light of, one of the things I did in this past year was watched The Wire. I’d never watched The Wire before. And the first season of The Wire is filled wiith grist for leadership conversations. In particular, Lieutenant Daniels ,I’m spacing on the actor’s name, Lance Reddick, Lance Reddick, the bald one who’s kind of running the group. And there’s an amazing scene, I forget which episode, where he’s, he’s got his kind of gang of misfits that are, they’re trying to, he’s trying to stand up this group to do this investigation and he needs something from somebody and it shows him very slowly and purposefully escalating his ladder, to his leader, talking to his leader’s leader, all the kind of background stuff that needs to happen in order for him to secure the resources that his team needs in order to succeed, that his team doesn’t realize he’s doing, right? This is that thankless work that design– that leaders do ,not just design leaders.
But he’s not fighting. It’s not conflict. It’s politics. It’s, it’s diplomacy. It’s, What do you want that I can provide in exchange for what you have that I want? And it’s, and it’s, and it’s working a system. Now, that’s also tiring, but it doesn’t have to be as conflict-driven as perhaps more just like, more, you know, in the context of designing leaders, it’s like, okay, I don’t want to fight about it. I don’t want to argue about it. I just, I want the thing I want. So what do you need from me, so that you’ll give me the thing I want and just trust me that the thing I want is right for all of us?
And I’m wondering if there’s a strategy there that design leaders could be employing more. I think we seek education and evangelism as the one tool we have to influence an organization, and don’t recognize there’s other means of influencing the organization. And then when we get what we want, by whatever means, and our team does great work, then we can evangelize and educate. I think we try to do too much ahead of the output, and instead don’t rely, don’t, don’t use the good work that the team is doing to then get what we kind of want further down the chain.
Why does design leadership always feel like a fight?
Jesse: I like the metaphor of diplomacy. I like the idea of engaging in this conversation from a place of, we’re going to sit down at a table as equals and talk about how we work together toward the common good.
You know, one of the questions that we got in the mailbag was this question from Dimitris Niavis on LinkedIn. “If you had magic and a time machine, what would you do differently as a design leader?”
And honestly, this thing for me, as I reflect on my career, I think that this framing of our work as a fight is something that I have indulged in much too much over the years that I, as a consultant, engaged with our clients with an eye toward who’s on your side in the organization, who’s not on your side in the organization.
What are the, what are our tactics for you know, winning those battles. And I don’t think I encourage my clients to take enough of a diplomatic approach to these things. I did see it as a battle to be won, and I don’t think that that served the work. And I think that a lot of people throughout the industry have taken on that framing.
And I don’t think it’s serving them as creative professionals either to be constantly on the lookout for enemies and not to engage people from a position of mutual trust and good will.
Peter: And, and, kind of, common, common goals. And I I’ve been guilty of similar stuff and I, and, and I still am, I suppose, in that I teach, when I teach my design leadership workshop, I use this framing of the four archetypes, the coach managing down, the diplomat managing across and the champion managing up .
And the champion, is, I’m drawing upon kind of medieval, if not earlier, right, kind of models of the champion, that person who is fighting in your stead, who is representing you and fighting in your stead. And, and I use the champion framing when talking about managing up and out primarily, which is this mode, right? How do we, how do we engage stakeholders and executives?
And I actually say “fight for your function.”
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: And I, and I’ve, and I’ve been wondering about that language and I haven’t dropped it because there’s still, I guess it’s not as an aggressive fight, right? I’m not saying like, it’s our job to, like, land grab and claim somebody else’s territory. But there, there is a shielding that often– that design leaders I think need to employ, to protect, for lack of a better phrase, their team from the slings and arrows of executives and stakeholders who are doing everything they can to kind of get to your team, for their, whatever they perceive as their specific needs.
And there’s a role that the design leader plays, too, to shield their team from that kind of randomization in terms of how they spend their time and their effort, to shield their team from the executive swoop and poop, right? When, when someone shows up at a meeting well along in the process and craps all over the work.
And, you know, ‘ cause what I’ve seen is a design leader who doesn’t shield the team from that unhelpful commentary by an executive, if they back off and just let the poop land on the team, then the team is like, okay, so you don’t have my back. Like, you’re not there to help me. And they feel exposed and at risk.
And so, you know, maybe fighting isn’t quite right. “Protector” sounds a little, um, paternalistic or, or like, oh, my team can’t handle it themselves. So I have to protect..
Jesse: Like they’re
Peter: …them. I like champion and there was a certain advocacy and agency to it. So, so I guess my point there is, like, there’s still some of that aspect to the role that we do need to have a little bit of fight, but we probably, it’s probably not a helpful place to start from. And, and I guess the, the, the other thing would be for these design leaders to really be thinking about, kind of, what does success look like? What is, what is their goal? Because I sometimes think we fight for fight’s sake, or mature for maturing sake, as opposed to, like, are you trying to just ship some better software?
Let’s focus on that. What is it going to take for your team to ship some better software? Let’s focus our leadership efforts on that. And then you might realize, oh, there’s a diplomacy aspect. I don’t need to fight. I need to coordinate. I need to cajole. I need to… one for you, one for me, whatever it is, the politicking that enables that, instead of just this kind of diffusely expressed energy around design needs to be given more, more better, more access, seat at the table, et cetera, et cetera, oriented on, on something more specific.
A mature product management practice
Jesse: Well, it’s interesting, too, because I feel like in some of these questions, you’re starting to stray into product management territory. Like I wonder how much of the executive swoop and poop is mitigated by having a mature product management practice, right? Shouldn’t those, shouldn’t that be your buffer with the executive suite?
Am I wrong? You’re laughing, but what am I missing?
Peter: I’m laughing, as you said, ’cause you said the phrase “mature product management practice”, which is kind of an oxymoron, at least in any in any context I’ve ever been in. And I’m sure there are mature product management practices out there. But the companies that bring me in are often the companies that don’t have those and they’re trying to stand up a mature UX practice.
And one of the challenges they face is figuring out how to also mature product management. There’s probably something to be said for an immature design org is more likely to be found in the same context as an immature product org. There’s probably a a shared…
Jesse: There’s a correlation there,
Peter: Whatever’s led to that immaturity is a root cause that has led both of these organizations to be immature. And so, no, you can’t
Jesse: Which yeah,
Peter: You can’t hope that that product management practice is going to, to drive the maturity you’re seeking.
Jesse: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause it comes back around to the maturity wall that I’m hearing about from leaders, which is not a maturity of you know, organizational understanding of how to deliver design, it is a lack of maturity in the organization’s overall mindset and culture of what constitutes quality delivery, period.
And that is not just, it doesn’t just affect design. It, it, it affects all of their practices. You know, I’m really struck by, along these lines, one thing that Tim said when we were talking with him, which, he said, you know, the world needs more design than we are ever going to have trained designers.
And I’ve really been sitting with that because, to my mind, the implication of that is that most of the organizations, statistically, that employ designers are going to be immature in the ways that we’re describing, because they’re not ready for professional designers, because there aren’t enough professional designers to go around. And so everybody’s improvising, then you bring professional designers into an environment like that and ask them to professionalize it. And that is…
The potential of design thinking and design sprints
Peter: Yeah. Yeah, though, that speaks to another lever of trying to mature an organization, is through the use of what have now been oft-ridiculed, within the design community, approaches like design thinking or design sprints, and these, these ways of enabling teaching, enabling non-designers to embrace some design in their practice, much like designers, you know, have to embrace some non-design in their practice, right? And instead of resisting that, like, that is a lever and I, and I, I don’t have enough. I wish I had more amazing stories. And maybe people listening to this can tell us of amazing stories of how, when they worked on bringing, like, using design thinking and other design facilitation, and bringing that to non-designers in an organization, how that helped mature the organization’s view of design in such a way that primed those professional designers to do even better work, ’cause the rest of the organization was ready to receive it. I have a few stories and they’re not all mine to tell.
Jesse: Right. But far and away, the, the more common story that you hear is we taught the executive team design. The executive team decided great, we know everything we now need to know about design. So we’ll take it from here. Thanks design team. And the design team doesn’t see an increase in their mandate.
They don’t see an expansion or a deepening of their scope. They don’t see a broadening of their influence. They they get a pat on the head and then sent out of the boardroom.
Peter: Well, and I think that’s interesting because I suspect the leverage point is not the executive team when it comes to this, but the teams doing the work and finding a way to weave design thinking and, and sprints and that kind of practice into almost like a learning and development curriculum at the point where people are, are actually doing the work.
Because executives don’t do anything. So, so teaching them design thinking, isn’t going to get you very far. But well, in the executive thing, sorry, I’m, I’m now free associating a bit, but part of this conversation, I was reminded of a, a interview I witnessed Marty Cagan taking part in, talking about product transformations, and this ties back to what we were saying earlier about the issue isn’t just design immaturity, it’s kind of product development immaturity, right?
Product management practices are immature and possibly our engineering practices are, are immature though, those, I think it becomes so standardized that you can have a mature engineering practice within an immature product development practice. And, and so you can decouple it. Whereas I don’t think you can have mature design and immature product management. One is immature and one is mature, like they’re like they can only be as so mature as the least mature partner.
Jesse: It’s a ceiling of sorts.
Peter: Yeah. it is. It’s a bit of a
Jesse: LIke a partnership ceiling. Yeah.
The secret to successful product transformations
Peter: Yeah.
And so what Marty pointed out in this conversation with respect to this, and this gets back to the executive thing as well. He had an insight that I really liked.
He’s like, you know what? We know, we know how to structure high-performing product teams and product development organizations, and, however hard that is, that’s not the hardest part of this because we can get our product people and our designers and our engineers working better together, doing discovery, doing delivery the right. way.
But the issue is he has never seen a product transformation succeed that didn’t have CEO involvement. Not because the CEO needed to understand how product transformation worked, but because the CEO needed to make connections or clear obstacles with the teams outside of product development that ended up being this constraint on the ability of product development to transform in the ways that it needs to.
And this interview was in the context of banking. You understand this inform your time at Capital One. Funding models are a huge force within how product gets developed. I have a bag of money. I give this bag of money to people in exchange for some output and CFOs love those funding models. CFOs love this idea of this org spent $10 million on product development and should receive $10 million in value for it.
And what Marty points out is that the CEO needs to work with the CFO to change how they think about funding, that they can’t fund based on projects, that they have to start funding products or programs, things that are ongoing, and that it’s not this transactional relationship anymore, $10 million for a project to ship a thing that realizes some gain, and instead it’s more of this long-term commitment of just continuing to fund some group on, in an ongoing fashion to continually deliver value.
And, and what he sees is the issue is, is if you don’t have the CEO involvement, you can transform product development, they’ll start to operate in these new ways, but then these other forces like funding don’t change. And so the product transformation stalls, because it now has to respond to the…
Jesse: right, right.
Peter: immaturity,
Jesse: right, right..
Peter: …to use that word, of the rest of the organization and how it thinks about product development. And so you need the CEO to tell the finance folks to change how they’re operating, to tell HR to change how they’re operating, how they recruit and hire people, how they level folks, how they bring them up in the organization, potentially to change sales and marketing in terms of how they relate to product development.
And, and because if you just do it within product development, your ability to transform is constrained. And so I’m saying this from a maturity standpoint to suggest like all the different levels that you’re
Jesse: yeah. Right.
Peter: And that, and that need to get aligned in order for design to be mature. And this is part of the reason why I advocate, like, your head of design can’t be more than two levels from the CEO. Because your head of design needs to be able to talk to all the people that report to the CEO.
Jesse: right, right,
Peter: And so if, if, if you report to somebody who reports to the CEO, not only can you talk to your boss, your boss can now connect you with all those other functions that report to the CEO. But if you’re lower than that, there’s no way you’re going to talk to anyone in HR at a high enough level. There’s no way you’re going to talk to anyone in finance at a high enough level.
And you, as the head of design, need to have access to the CFO and the head of HR and the head of marketing for, for these exact reasons.
So who does the Head of Design report to?
Jesse: So again, like, how would you fit a head of product into a structure like you’re describing? Because again, in a lot of organizations, for anything to do with product development, maturity, a CEO is going to have a head of product increasingly who would be tasked with that stuff.
How does that fit into the mix of you know, the executive product and design?
Peter: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know, in my experience, it fits pretty easily in that I’ve reported up through a head of product who reported to the CEO. And so through my product leader, I had access to the…
Jesse: So as long as you can be, you know, it’s okay to be two levels away from the CEO. As long as the level between you is a head of product.
Peter: It doesn’t have to be ahead of product. I don’t think necessar ily. It often is.
Jesse: What you were saying. Yeah, go ahead…
Peter: Yeah, it often is. And we’re starting to see design leaders advocate for being direct, direct lined to the CEO so that they’re, they are seen as true peers to product and engineering. There’s any number of reasons why that’s not happening.
The two primary ones are scale, design teams are just smaller, usually, and maturity of our industry in that there’s not that many design leaders who could really deliver value to contribute at a true reporting-into-the-CEO kind of executive level. They just don’t know what that job is. More and more will over time, but we’re still not there yet.
Jesse: So your sense is that we don’t yet have enough design leaders operating at the level of maturity to qualify for that seat at the right hand of the executives.
Peter: No, we haven’t, and, that’s changing, but it takes time. I mean, we’re, that’s the other thing to always remember about this stuff is that we’re still, that design is still a much more nascent function in most of these companies compared to any of the other ones. So it’s going to take us time to build our bench, build our leadership profiles.
I mean, this comes back to the conversation we had with Gordon around chief design officers. right? ‘Cause there’s that point at which, and this is where the fighting becomes an issue.
I was talking with the CEO who wanted to hire a head of design and the biggest issue he had with the candidates who were coming through is that they saw themselves as design leaders first and executives second, like, stewards of the business second.
And he’s like, that’s exactly backwards. If you’re going to report to me, and I’m the CEO, I need you to be as an executive first, your first team is the executive team, your peers and product and engineering and marketing, et cetera. Yes, you have a design background. That’s great. You’re bringing that perspective to this conversation, but I need you to not be fighting for design.
I need you to be fighting for the company, fighting for the organization, fighting for our successes as a, as a business. And secondarily to be the function lead for that thing that you’re responsible for. But if you approach it with, I’m fighting for design, you’re never going to cross that chasm, that Rubicon into being seen as a true organizational leader.
Jesse: That’s such an interesting thing too, because of, again, that evangelism role that people often have to take on in order to become design leaders, they have to demonstrate that they’re good at beating the drum and arguing for the value and, and pushing the notion of design forward. That’s often how you end up getting that job, and then to have gotten to that point and then have to let go of that evangelist identity that got you there, I think it’s very challenging. It it’s actually…
Peter: I mean, it reminds me…
Jesse: yeah,
Peter: Oh, I was just going to say, it reminds me of the same challenge that you have when you go from being a designer to a design leader and you have to let go of your identity as a maker. Now you’re a leader right now. We’re saying, as you go from being the design leader to an executive, you have to let go of your identity as a design leader, to being a business leader.
Do you think Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb thinks of himself as a design leader?
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: At some point you just let go of that stuff. You know, he’s got a design degree, but that’s not his job.
The legitimacy of imposter syndrome
Jesse: Right, right. Well, and this is connected actually to another question that we got this question from Matt Bouchard by email about imposter syndrome among design leaders because, you know, every time you go through one of these transitions of identity, right, from designer to design leader, and then from design leader to design executive there is a certain amount of letting go of the old identity and welcoming in the new identity and the new identity may not fit at first.
So there’s inevitably going to be a little bit somewhere in there of imposter syndrome, if you’re actually taking on something that is genuinely new for you, the challenge is that imposter syndrome frequently, kind of, the way that it manifests in people’s minds is in these, the sense of the expectations that are being put upon you in the new role and the, and the, the question of, well, do I, am I going to be able to measure up to these expectations?
Am I qualified to do these things that are being asked of me? And in a lot of cases, I feel like design leaders sense of themselves as imposters is entirely legitimate for exactly the reasons that you’re describing. They, they are imposters because they are being asked to do things that they actually are not qualified for, that they have not been trained to do, that they don’t know how to do, that they’ve never done.
So it’s very, very natural to feel like you’re an imposter in that situation. The question is, can you trust yourself enough to improvise and navigate your way through a situation that you’ve never faced before? And that again, requires letting go of a lot of your sense of identity that is tied to your expertise and your experience stepping into something new.
Peter: I well, yes. So I suppose, Hm, imposter syndrome is real, but it also kind of doesn’t matter. Or it matters only, it matters only to the degree to which it is in your mind and it’s holding you back.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: And, and I think, I’m trying to think, like, you know, just suck it up. Like unfortunately, any thoughts I have about it are you kind of don’t feel all that helpful.
Just like, stop letting it hold you back.
Jesse: Well, I will say that there is an element of this that it’s very easy for us to say as…
Peter: as middle-aged white men?
Jesse: …precisely, I mean, imposter syndrome, and I see this with my clients, it takes on a whole different dimension when you are the first or only woman leader in your organization, when you are the first or only person of color in a leadership role in your organization, those kinds of things.
And even if you’re not, you’re still going to be carrying over the experiences that you’ve had throughout your entire life of being told that you’re not right for this, you’re not right for that. You’re not enough. And so there are layers and layers to that that are not adequately addressed by simply sucking it up.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess… trying to think how many of the leaders I’m working with demonstrate some form of imposter syndrome. It doesn’t come up in the conversations that I have with my thought partners as much. I think there’s something to be said with, yes, you are an imposter, but kind of assume that almost everyone around you is as well.
Like no one has it figured out, we’re all making it up as we go.
Jesse: That part is very important that I think a lot of people, especially younger designers tend to, you know, receive all the, all the wisdom of method and process and deliverable and assume that this stuff has all been buttoned up in advance for them. And it’s not the case at all.
Peter: And I think kind of related to that, you know, it’s still burgeoning, but there is a growing corpus of material around design leaders and, and, and becoming a design leader, and what that path was like. I’m thinking back to the Leading Design conference I was at a month and a half ago in New York, and people telling their stories of becoming design leaders and you realizing like, oh, they were, all of the people that you hold up as, as models were imposters once.
You know, kind of recognizing, the distinct value you have in terms of your perspective, right? You are in that position because you bring something that no one else in that organization does and, and really drawing from that value that distinct value that you have.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
The power of self-reflection
Peter: If I’m reflecting on this, I don’t think we do enough to prepare, literally prepare, people to assume these leadership roles.
And that’s true across, across the organization and not just in design, but for designers, the responsibility then is when you are in a leadership role to like to do your homework. You know, I follow Abi Jones on Twitter and she is a very reflective leader.
She reads books. She, she tweets about her experiences, reading these books. She thinks about how those experiences she’s reading in the books aligns with the experiences that she’s had as a leader. And, and I don’t think enough leaders are doing that. Doing the homework.
To take it from a totally different space, Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors. You know, you might not have known, but now, you know, you see that I’m going to bring a basketball analogy. And before he was coach of the Golden State Warriors, he was never a head coach. And in his rookie season as a head coach, he wins a championship.
Now he probably felt some degree of imposter syndrome stepping into that role. The, the prior coach had been successful taking them to the playoff two years. Who’s this guy, who’s never had this coaching job before, think he is that he can somehow do it better and he’s never done it before?
Now. He had some success, he worked for two amazing head coaches as a player :Gregg Popovich and Phil Jackson. So he saw what good coaching looked like. But he didn’t just see it. He was reflective on it. He took, like, took it and like broke down those principles of what he saw and built them back up into his own philosophy of coaching.
So he was very explicit and intentional about how he was going to coach. And then part of the reason he got the job is he had a binder, you know, an inch and a half thick of what he would do if he were to coach the Warriors, how he would change things, the plays he would run, like he had gone through that process of really being, of being thoughtful about what it would mean to be a coach.
And, you know, that’s a different kind of job than what we’re talking about. The money is different. The opportunities are different. I’m not saying you know, before you become a head of design, you need to have a binder an inch and a half thick about what you would do, but you need to think a little bit, right. Like, like, and I wonder how many leaders are doing that work to take time out and reflect on what it means for them to be a leader and how they will perform in that role as opposed to, they’re promoted or they’re hired, and they show up one day and maybe they’ve read The First 90 Days. And that’s the extent of, of, of their thinking about management.
Jesse: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I definitely hear the need for leaders to continue to invest in their own growth as leaders and not just be crank turners, doing the job, because if you are, if you don’t have a point of view, about the work, if you don’t have a philosophy about the work, what that means is that other people’s philosophies can run roughshod over everything that you’re doing.
So I think that leaders do need to have a point of view. I will say that I can definitely hear, as you’re talking about taking the time to read the books and listen to the podcasts and, and do the the reflection and research. I can hear the voices of those leaders saying, Hey man, I’m already putting in 50 to 60 hours a week just trying to hold this thing together.
The last thing I need is homework right now. And that part of it is real too. So yes…
Peter: Can I push back on that a little?
Jesse: Well, sure. Yeah, go ahead.
Peter: I’m thinking measure twice, cut once. I suspect, if you do some of that homework, some of that 50 to 60 hours a week might reduce, ’cause you’ll learn where to focus your energies, right, Those 50, 60 hours a week, who’s saying you need to do all that work? And, and what, what are you doing as a, as a, as a leader to be responsible for your own time?
And, and, and when I hear 50, 60 hours a week, that’s me hearing leaders who don’t have a philosophy and don’t have a perspective letting others drive their labor, their, their, their activity, instead of being self-determined.
Jesse: Yeah, yeah. So it sounds like the, the way that you break this chicken and egg cycle to your mind is for the leader to invest some extra time in themselves and their growth in order to be able to show up differently in the organization and reduce their workload.
Peter: I mean, it’s, it’s, you know, the Steve Kerr story, or or, we’re thinking about actors and rehearsal, right? You go through a lot of work and you do a lot of rehearsing and, and you might do research if you’re a method actor, this, that the other thing, so that when you show up, you’re prepared.
It’s still going to change. There’s going to be circumstances that you didn’t account for that you’re going to need to adjust for. But I, I, and I hadn’t quite had this thought before. I’m actually enjoying this part of the conversation because it’s kind of a new notion for me that like…
Part of our, there’s a role that senior-most leaders have, with the leaders in their orgs that they’re trying to bring up, in making sure they’re prepared. There’s a role that people like you and I, and others who are kind of operating in this independent consultant coaching ecosystem have in helping prepare leaders for the work that they’re doing.
But I don’t hear a lot about preparation about, about the work before the work…
Jesse: yeah.
Peter: …that you do in order so that when you show up, you are ready to do that work. And I think we too often are just thrown into or throw others into a situation without any preparation and context.
And then no one benefits, no one gains. And so making, making this idea of preparation, a real practice that, that we encourage that we ,yeah, we encourage the people who are listening to us to, to be part of whether it’s for themselves or for the people they are responsible for within their organizations.
Your practice and purpose as a leader
Jesse: Yeah. You use the word practice, and I think that’s a really important one. It’s definitely a big theme in my work with my coaching clients. Because my sense is that because of the, the nature of the role, the nature of the work being something that requires a lot of adaptation, you know, you talked about Steve Kerr and his binder full of plans, and I don’t think this is a role where you can show up with a binder full of plans and be successful, actually, because you probably have made a bunch of assumptions about the situation that you’re stepping into that are not going to hold true, because this is, to your point, a less mature practice than coaching a basketball team.
So you’re going to have to adapt more and again, I feel that once you’ve got the job, you know, your experience and your expertise may have gotten you the job, but they’re not going to be what makes you successful at the job. What makes you successful at the job is going to be your ability to adapt and roll with things and surf the situation.
And it’s your practices, your day to day, week to week ways that you keep yourself sharp as an individual, as a leader, that are going to make the difference more than your knowledge or your expertise.
Peter: I would say your practices and I would include, and I don’t quite know the right word for this, but, but whatever your true north is.
Jesse: Oh
Peter: Right, So, so I agree, right,
You’re going to, you’re going to need to adapt. You’re gonna need to ride the wave, but if you don’t have a compass bearing on what, what is true to you and in how you operate, you’re going to get buffeted by those waves and thrown around.
But if you have a true north, you’ll always kind of tack back toward it and you’ll be able to make decisions based on it. And, and folks will, we’ll have a sense of who you are.
Jesse: RIght. right.
Peter: We’ve talked about trust in the past. You’ll, you’ll show up in a consistent fashion so that folks know what to expect from you.
So, so even if you’re not doing preparation in. A binder full of design process that you want to Institute within this organization, and if they just follow these processes, they’ll put out better design, you can do preparation in terms of taking that time to identify your, your principles and your purpose and, and your, your, your values as a leader.
But much as we talked about a couple of years ago on, on for a design team, you know, the, the, the, the the importance and the utility of, of a clear purpose, clear values, clear norms, how you, how you behave, those are true for you in your leadership. And shouldn’t take days, you should be able to do that and hours if not hour.
And with that, just making that explicit, I would think would help guide you through the uncertainty that is definitely going to be par for the course in whatever you’re doing.
Jesse: Yes. Yes. Well, I will say that with my coaching clients it takes more than an hour to articulate somebody’s philosophy of design and,
Peter: Did you, is that a, is that a practice you work with them on? Do you, do you have kind of tools for helping them get at purpose and vision and values for themselves?
Jesse: It is central, to your point, it is central to what I do. Because a leader who is not engaged with their own authentic sense of purpose of what they’re doing in the world again, their decision-making is going to be more easily influenced by the, by the factors around them.
They also are not going to be showing up with that level of passion for the work that is often necessary to drive through those difficult situations and get through to the other side. So yeah, every single client that I work with, we have extended ongoing conversations about their values, about their purpose, what they want to create in the world.
Because if they’re not connected to that, they’re going to be miserable no matter what their role is.
Peter: Uh, do you see how that clarity of purpose and personal mission helps them act? And I don’t know if you’re, if there’s anything you can share in that regard.
Jesse: it’s more about practices than it is about, like, I’m going to write up a self manifesto and create a deliverable, that’s going to encapsulate my philosophy for the world. That’s…
Peter: oh, that’s just what I do.
Jesse: As well. I mean, it’s, it’s fine. If that’s, if articulating it to yourself at that level of detail is what is what you need, but people often get lost in the weeds of trying to pin down exactly the thing that they can sign their name to and say, I’m going to live by these values all the time.
It’s more of how are you incorporating that inquiry into your practices on an ongoing basis. And how are you continuing to ask yourself how your approach needs to evolve based on your evolving understanding of what you’re doing and the best way to accomplish what you want to accomplish in the world.
Peter: I think that reminder for folks to, to, to kind of engage in that reflection and inquiry and making that part of a personal practice this, this is as good a place for us to end this conversation…
Jesse: terrific.
Peter: …as any. Well, thank you, Jesse, for taking time with me to grapple with some stuff that allowed me to have some realizations that hadn’t at least been as clear for me.
Jesse: This has been fun.
Peter: I appreciate the time and the engagement.
Jesse: Apologies to everybody whose questions we didn’t get to. We ended up running off on some of our own tangents says we like to do, but…
Peter: …that’s how it goes. Well, take care and be well.
Jesse: Thanks.
Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s @peterme and I’m @jjg. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com. You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on Apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
29: Listening with Intent (ft. Indi Young)
May 14, 2022
Transcript
[This transcript lacks the polish of some of our others. Please forgive!]
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
And we’re finding our way
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, Adaptive Path co-founder and author of the forthcoming book, Time to Listen, Indi Young joins us. She’ll share some of what she’s learned from her career, giving organizations tools for empathy with their users and individuals, the skills to listen deeply to each other.
Origins of Indi’s methods
Peter: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. So I, we’re just going to dive right in. We’ve known you, we’ve known each other for well, over 20 years. We started Adaptive Path together. I knew you, I think, through the Miller Freeman web conferences even before then. And I’d love…. So we, when we were working together at Adaptive Path early on, you introduced me to your pro… process, in particular the mental model process, and then you ended up writing a book on mental models, and then you’ve written a book on practical empathy. And now you’ve about to, and you can tell us kind of the details, release a book called Time to Listen.
And this is a big question and take as much time as you want answering it.
But I’m curious about this trajectory that you were on and how you’ve seen kind of your progress or your evolution from when we first started working together, building mental model diagrams, to kind of your, where, where your head is today in, in, in how you approach your work.
Indi: I could take like the whole hour answering that one question,
Peter: Well,
Indi: you guys will, but, but in with other clarifications yeah, the and yeah, I, I was trying to think back, like how, how did we meet? And I only remember meeting Mike from Adaptive Path on the ski lift at Sugar Bowl. So I can’t remember all the other origins story, but anyway trajectory, I started off, trying to embrace and adapt the the business, or rather the engineering approach of writing functional specs. This was long, long, long ago, Jesse had written, he, he wrote that book. Uh, What was the one? I can’t remember the title of it. It has
Jesse: My book, you’re talking about my book. Yeah.
Indi: yeah. Your book. Yeah. And that that’s it.
Yes, the layers one.
Peter: right.
Indi: But that came out like after I had given up on the func spec and it reminded me a lot of the func spec, the functional spec is just kind of like writing out everything that the thing has to do. And that is very much about understanding how a process works, how a standard operating procedure works.
And, and in coding it and how do we encode it? And then, you know, w- how do we make an interface on it? And so that was very much about processes, methods, procedures, all of these things have different contexts, where there are edge cases where like, okay, in this context, the method doesn’t work quite this way.
This is how it is done, or how other people have done workarounds. And so we need to encode those work arounds or those other contexts, and those are called edge cases. And what was happening when we started Adaptive Path was that we were no longer focusing only on engineering and science as things to encode or business processes to encode.
Right. We, we were starting to encode things that had more of more of a service aspect to it. We, what did we do? The NPR site or something, right.
Peter: NPR, PeopleSoft. Yeah.
Indi: Yeah. W- it was not a process. I mean, sure. Sell PeopleSoft. We were working with a sales group and sales could sort of be said to have a process, but it’s the closest thing to listening deeply, actually.
So So we were w- w- that shift had happened. And along with it, we pull a little bit of the functional spec with us. And we also pulled that word edge case. And the edge case was now a word that was applied to people. And this is where I started going, like, okay, there’s friction there. That’s not right.
So that was my personal response. And because you don’t call a person an edge case, no person is an edge case. No human mind is an edge case. There are communities and groups and ways of thinking. Yes, but nobody’s an edge case. The edge case belongs to the process. Anyway that was my personal sort of issue with it.
And the rest, the rest of the evolution is really all about me learning from the people who are working with me, or me learning from the people who are learning from me about how. How to, how to make a clear guide, a clear method you might say for working at understanding people’s minds so that we can create support for different thinking styles for different approaches to the same purpose.
Evolving mental models
Peter: How so, you know, in 2001, we worked together building mental models, right? You’re, you, you talk to folks, you listen deeply, you take a lot of notes and then you kind of decompose and recompose what you heard to create these structures that help you better understand how folks think about how they solve problems and then also go about solving those problems.
Right? There’s almost that it’s almost kind of two layers to it and you call it that mental model diagrams, a book about that. I’m curious because that’s where you and I kind of diverge is, is you, you know, you left Adaptive Path and continued to develop your practice. And you’re mentioning how you developed it in response to collaborating with I’m guessing people within various organizations.
I’m wondering if you’ve had kind of, if you have a stories to tell of kind of a clear aha moment where you thought things should be one way or behaved one way or where you used to practice one way, and then based on an experience you had in collaborating with someone you’re like, oh, wait a moment.
This is, I have a better idea of a better way of approaching it, given this kind of experience I’m having. How, how has, what were some of those steps… step changes been.
Indi: The there, yeah, there were a lot of step changes. Probably too many for us to cover or from even to remember what his step changes was that aspect of taking notes, lots of notes. I, when I started trying to teach her, I think our team members at adaptive path, right, how to do this, it’s like, Ooh, paying attention to what a person is saying and, and writing things down about what they were saying.
I’m a light, just let it be a transcript. It has to be a transcript cause otherwise you’re going to be doing too much thinking and not hearing. And, and and this happened even after I, I left Adaptive Path as that people would want to write notes and they would say writing notes is how I make sense of the state is writing notes is helping me analyze this data so I can come away with insights. And that was a huge aha moment for me because, and of course this is layered. First of all, I don’t want the insights to happen while you’re listening to someone. When you’re listening to someone, you have to pay rapt attention and that’s it.
You’re going to follow that person. And that’s it. You’re not going to bring up topics. You’re only going to follow their topics. The thing that you do as sort of a background process in your own mind is making sure that they are getting to their interior cognition and helping them there, or helping them clarify points that their interior cognition for each topic.
So there’s a lot to unpack here. So the first aha moment was okay, no notes. This is at the time you know, we, we would sometimes be bringing recording devices in. We would sometimes be doing this by conference call and sometimes just doing video recordings or whatever. Right. But we’re recording, so we’re not taking notes.
And that was a huge, aha. I think that really helped people understand that in a listening session, it’s not, it’s not where you’re trying to forge insights. You not trying to do your work there. Your work happens later. What you’re trying to do in a listening session is understand another person’s perspective, another person’s approach to the purpose, another person’s, you know, if you’re not spending that time, understanding them, you’re not going to get their perspective.
What insights you’re going to pull out of this are going to be your own insights. Not understanding someone else’s way of thinking. And this is why we continue to have software and services that, that don’t support anyone. That’s very different thinker than the team themselves, because we automatically, we feel like if we’re going into a listening session, we have to work.
We have to do some thinking and come out of it with insights. And in, in, if we’re going to understand somebody else’s way of approaching this purpose, what we have to do is let go of… we are not an employee at that point. And so this was an early on thing I would say, you’re not an employee, you’re just a person you’re just listening.
And then later on, I ki– you know, and no notes, right? You can, if you think they’re bringing up a topic that they may want to unpack later, and you both may forget about it, you can jot down that topic, but that’s all, you’re not going to write notes. And then later what happened was this idea that the rapt attention and the following and the topics really help people or give them sort of a guideline for paying attention to the other person.
Being able to recognize that you’re not allowed to bring up a topic. You’re not going to bring a question into this that you invented outside of that. You’re only going to be asking people about their interior cognition, their inner thinking which includes, you know, all sorts of inner thinking, their emotional reactions and their guiding principles, which are kind of the rules that they use to make decisions or how to act or react.
Types of empathy
Indi: So so those are the interior cognition things and that’s so I was sitting at breakfast with Lou Rosenfeld. I really wanted to write this next book. We were, it was like a perfect day and we were at this restaurant that was on the water and there were sailboats going by and we’re both like, oh my gosh, this is like, how did we end up here?
It was beautiful. And so I’m trying to explain to him what this is. And he finally goes, he says, well, so what you’re talking about is kind of a practical empathy, right. And um, Okay, that works. And that’s when and so, and then he finally agreed to let me write the book. And and that’s when I started researching, well, what is it the mean anyway?
Cause like the way people use it as varied and it turns out that there’s so many different types of empathy in the psychology world and they’re all totally valid. And there are books written by particular professors of Yale um, who um, who take one definition of empathy, which is the def– the type of empathy called emotional contagion.
And then they’re all like I’m against empathy. And and the kind of empathy. I meant that when I’m paying rapt attention, what I’m trying to do is get my head inside their mind and understand their perspective and see their perspective. And that kind of empathy is called cognitive empathy. It’s just a different kind of empathy.
There’s a third kind of type of empathy that this very popular, Dr. Brene Brown speaks about it. And that is what the psychologists call empathic listening. So it’s an in the moment, empathy, cognitive empathy is building an understanding of somebody. It can, it can happen over time trying to get their way of thinking their interior cognition and empathic listening is noticing something’s going on for some.
And it’s normally introduced as an emotion going on for someone normally a negative emotion going on, but it can be anything, it could be interior cognition, which includes inner thinking. It can includes like a, a pause, like so normally my guiding principles to do this. And normally I would decide that, and you know, you’re not thinking that consciously, but you’re pausing.
And if you notice somebody pausing or you notice somebody having something going on, then what you can do is offered, listen, and that’s called empathic listening. And so in the moment, what happens is that the end of it, the other person feels heard and maybe their pause or the something going on is a little easier for them to deal with.
But that’s a, in the moment thing, whereas cognitive empathy is long-term thing. It, it gathers information for us to be able to understand what those groups and communities of thinking are so that we can start writing support. services for those different communities of thinking. And those are what I call thinking styles.
So there’s another, there’s another a day. But I tell you about when Christina was talking to me about thinking styles, but um,
Peter: Christina Wodtke
Indi: yeah. Do you want to insert anything first?
Peter: uh, Jesse, Jesse looks like he’s got a
Jesse: I, I am going to change direction here a tiny bit.
Seeking the intangibles
Jesse: I curious about this turn that you described in your thinking and not just in your thinking, but I think in the thinking of a lot of people at that same time, from a process oriented approach, to thinking about how we structure the requirements that will ultimately drive design decisions toward an approach that looks at more of the intangibles, right?
Less of the things that you can measure with a stopwatch in the old fashioned industrial style And ended up curious about what you went through in bringing organizations around to this kind of thinking as someone who was working most of the time as an independent consultant, just one person coming into an organization as you have over and over again, over the years, and helping people see a different way of doing things.
And and I wonder what you learned about about helping to create that shift of mindset inside organizations over the years.
Indi: THat’s a really good question. That’s the thing that I have had the hardest time with because I’m I’m naturally an introvert, so I’m like, I don’t want to get in other people’s business, you know, they can do things the way they do, but I was so on fire about this and I actually caught fire. Stronger after we have sort of this populist political scenario happening in the mid 2010s. So the, the fire pushed me past being an introvert. Um, And I utterly did, I, I’m not naturally gonna go there, but, but this had to be done because, and I did not do it well, I didn’t know how to do it.
I still am struggling to do it, but I’m getting a lot better at it, which is taking this idea. So I’ll, I’ll, I’ll sort of lay it out as a, before and after, before what would happen is that the. Methodological-ness of it. The, the way that a an opportunity map, which is another change that we did looks, it’s a mental model diagram on top with the capabilities aligned beneath, it looks like a city skyline in that that sort of like solidity attracted people to to this approach because you’re right.
We’re trying to, we’re trying to understand the intangibles and having a tangible method for doing that was really reassuring,
Jesse: so you think it was the visualization itself that helped make it feel real?
Indi: yes. I think it was. And then my confidence in being able to build that visualization based on cognitive empathy. So to, to make that intangible, tangible, I think is what made people reach out in the beginning.
And so for many, many years, that’s all I was doing was I was relying on an individual to get interested in the way of looking at it, that city skyline kind of thing, and interested in how it is built and then to hire me to build it. And I would do that. And then I would work with them with the, with what we’ve got, okay, what are we going to do with this?
How are we going to approach it? How are we going to find you know, a solution? And in the beginning I knew these things would last for decades and it wasn’t about a solution. It was about many solutions, but it was very hard to convince people of that now Now I speak about it in an entirely different way that that bring that starts there.
This is a, this is a way for us to go forward over the next 50 or a hundred years. We’re going to find little areas that we’re interested in right now as an organization or as a team. And we’re going to dive into that. What I call it is we’re, we’re looking at gaps between how we support some thinking in the mental model, part of the opportunity map and how we support the thinking styles there. what we can also do is, well, we’ll find a gap that we’re really interested in right now. Let’s say, Hey, we’re not supporting people who are hard of hearing or are deaf. And in this one particular area, now that is not a thinking style. That is a demographic lens on a thinking style. So what we get to do is we get to look at thinking styles who are both deaf and not, they have the same thinking style, but what extra things do we need to add in with this extra lens?
So we’ve got a tiny sandbox and we’ve got this information in the sandbox, but we can also put other information in the sandbox, pull other toys into the sandbox, other data from secondary research, other data from institutions, other you know, quant data that we’ve collected ourselves. Survey data.
What have you, right? We can put all that information into the sandbox work on that one small thing at once and create something that is different, something that is specific or, or in a way bespoke for that community of that. With that demographic lens and be more intentional about it rather than say, oh, you know, we can just, you know hire or use AI or something to make the captions and it’ll be done.
And that does not work very well for someone who is deaf. And so we’re paying more intentional attention in this way. And this, now I want to go back to this idea of measuring the intangibles. Is it in the first few? Probably the first decade, maybe that I was doing this half the time we would get this information, we would set out to do something.
And then, and then somebody, that person who was leading the team would either leave that company or would get changed positions or get vetoed or something by someone higher up. And so we didn’t get a lot of traction. We didn’t get the things we did every once in a while, like PeopleSoft was a good example.
Or we got something out of it and it kept that project kept going. And indeed, that’s actually a good example because the person who hired us, they’re moved to a different company and hired us again. Right. So that’s how it was like sort of the, the Tinker’s cart, like clanking along, down the road the beginning.
Jesse: Yeah.
Indi: Yeah.
Problem space and strategy space
Indi: But, but now it’s much more the idea that I speak about, Hey, we need to create support more equitably, and we all agree on this. And yet we’re spinning so fast through our processes of development that we need to understand that there is a different space, a strategy space. There’s a problem space to.
Where we understand a person’s approach to the purpose. And there’s a strategy space where we’re collecting. I mean, we’ve already the strategy space exists right now, but it isn’t, it isn’t cohesive. It’s just kind of like held by a couple of leaders and the leaders aren’t all that intentional necessarily about it.
At least in my experience. But if we have an intentional space that we call the strategy space and in that we have all this knowledge that we’re building and all this knowledge from past places that we built knowledge, all this knowledge from that is coming out of the services that we’re providing right now.
And if we can then look at those with relationship to where we want to S you know, exit a gap or move, I’ve got these help and harm graphs now that you can actually do with numbers, where you can measure this benchmark is. And then see yourself getting better over time moving the, moving the marker up.
So so that’s now I think that’s a whole different way. That’s a much less tinkers cart kind of approach, and I’m still, I’m still trying to get better at it, but yeah.
Long-term thinking
Jesse: Yeah. I’m interested in what you said about the idea that this kind of work can guide an organization strategy over the span of decades, 50 years, a hundred years. What is it about this? Because you don’t often hear people talk about deliverables that have that kind of staying power. What is it about this work that enables it in your opinion, to be the foundation for that kind of longterm thinking and longterm strategy on the part of an organization?
Indi: THis opens up a whole other book, which is to say there is a lot when Silicon Valley started developing, it was, it was making Silicon chips, right as a totally different game. And then the game changed and a lot of money could be made at places like Google and Facebook and Google and Facebook are not necessarily for the long-term they’re in it for the money, right? They’re not in it to be a business that is going to sustain its employees for a hundred years or a business that’s going to sustain its employees and the people that is trying to support because it does such a good job supporting those people that is going to be around in a hundred years.
So many businesses right now are like, oh, I’m going to like spin something up and then get bought by Google or whatever. And that’s a totally different mindset. Now you can still use deep listening and mental model diagrams and opportunity maps and gap analysis and the help and the harm diagrams to help you get bought by Google.
But so like venture capital is about return. It’s not about sustainability necessarily. At least at its outset, I think there are VC firms that are about sustainability and there are lots of people across the entire world who are in it to be sustainable, who are spinning up their own businesses without venture capital, because they’re running a small business.
So in a way, that’s, that’s the difference between like a startup and a small business is that VC is involved in the former and not the latter in a way. And I think that this small business mindset, this idea that I’m going to run something that not only supports me in my employees, but also really does an amazing thing in the world for people, not for me, not getting me famous and rich, but for people then that.
So that’s, that’s kind of that whole water that we’re swimming in.
Jesse: yeah.
Indi: So the the idea of being able to… to have a way to think longterm to think, and especially for culture here in, in the us, we tend to think short-term, I don’t think all of us think short term, I think all of us at least think individually within with respect to the next generation, but not a couple of generations.
Right. At least in terms of popular culture. And there are certainly a lot of cultures and communities in the United States who do think farther, but this is a way of, of giving you permission to bring that kind of thinking into your organization. Long-term thing. It gives you a way to use it in the near term.
And also it is usable in the long-term.
Finding users’ purpose
Indi: So one of the, one of the things I say is like, we are listening to people about a purpose that they have, and purpose can be defined in any way you want a goal. I think that you need done now, or thing that you’re doing over the course of 10 years. It can be anything.
And if we frame each study by a purpose or a sub purpose or something uh, it can be it, you know, many levels of granularity, but we frame it by that purpose. And people talk to us about their interior cognition as they address that purpose in the past, then we can see patterns. And the neat thing is, is that that purpose is not the solution. That we create the service that we create. The neat thing is, is that that purpose is something that they’re trying to get done no matter which tools they’re using. And I remember in the early days, Peter, I would call it like agnostic of your of your solution. And Peter used to give me a little bad time about agnostic of the solution.
Cause, cause this is, this is what we’re trying to do is like, let’s say the solution is insurance and insurance. Wasn’t a solution a hundred years ago, but you could get in a time machine and go back in time and talk to people about certain purposes that you could talk to people today about like how did you recover from this injury where, you know, you were, you know, you couldn’t work for a year, right?
You couldn’t earn anything for your family for a year. How did you deal with. The the time that your husband who was a minor died in an accident, and now you have, you know, your six kids and you have to leave that town. Right. Nowadays we might have a tool called insurance to help with that. They didn’t then, but it’s the same purpose.
And so if we did get into a time machine and go back and collect that information about what went through people’s minds, it would still be useful today.
Peter: um,
Indi: The, yeah, go ahead.
Peter: Oh, so I am wanting to unpack the word purpose. It’s, it’s one of those words that I think can have a lot of, not just definitions, but valences, and it’s also very bound in perspective. So I think about purpose typically in my work with the design teams that I’m supporting and what is the purpose of that design team?
Cause I see purpose as essential for any team to have a thing to rally around. And what I say in my workshops as a team, without a purpose is just a group of individuals. um, so.
Indi: a mission
Peter: Yeah. So you have, you have teams having purpose, you have businesses having purpose or purposes.
Indi: and those,
Peter: I think, let me just finish this thought though. You’re not talking,I think more on the side of the person. The customer or user of whatever the business is providing and you’re using purpose in a singular way, but I don’t think you mean it that way. Cause cause you might talk to 20 different people and around what you think is the same purpose.
But, but you know, you were talking about healthcare, right? So I want to, I want to be, you know, I have, you might have some higher order purpose of, of feeling confident in your long-term health, but as you talk to 20 different people that might be interpreted, maybe not in 20 different ways, maybe through your analysis, you realize four or five different purposes that have emerged.
And I’m, I’m just wondering kind of how, like how you unpack purpose cause so that it becomes something you can really work with.
Indi: So the, I told you that it was at any level of granularity and what you’ve been talking about is the super broad umbrella level. I have be healthy. Right. I did do very early on a study where it was like, how do I cope with my health? And it was too broad, no patterns come from it because everybody has different approach to different aspect of it.
So a study where we looked at people who have three chronic issues, medical issues at a time, and how do you cope with those three chronic medical conditions that kind of narrowed it down a little bit. So it’s like, you know, you can, you can narrow it down further and I prefer narrow or purposes. It because of the patterns, you’re not going to get patterns enough patterns or, or you would have to do listening sessions to get patterns with like, 55 times as many people.
And I tend to make very small studies. So the purpose is very compact. You can think of it like the Goldilocks, right, kind of thing. It’s like a small purpose, very small. It’s just an aspect of, of this taking care of my three chronic conditions. And it’s only the aspect of say changing doctors. Okay. You could take that with the insurance thing and only talk about the aspect of when you are when your co family income earner dies and you have to go on and you have dependents, right? So you. Think of it in this very small, very well-defined way. And still the beauty is, is that people think about it differently.
And we can then find patterns with a smaller set of people. We can do listening sessions with say 15, 25, people instead of 50 or 75 people. So the idea of purpose can be quite grand, but it is granular. I used to call it intent. And something that Jared Spool said made me dissuaded me from using intent.
Purpose is not the greatest word to use, but it gives me it’s like language is going to evolve. And so at some point that word is going to change swell. It gives me a place though, to actually react and say, Hey, this. Can be a very small thing. It can be a very large thing. It can be a thing that you do in a couple of hours.
It can be a thing that you do over the course of years. But if you’re going to do a study with the big thing, like it could be a very small thing that you do over the course of years. And that could be a very well-defined purpose, which could be something like develop a way to not get so stressed.
When I am in front of a person who behaves in a certain way, and it could be a certain person, it could be any type of that representative of that person. But it’s like over time, I’m developing a way to handle that situation for myself better. So I don’t get stressed. and that’s over time. Right.
But it’s still a very small purpose. So the idea that. Purpose can be any level of granularity. It can be a goal, it can be anything.
From insights to solutions
Peter: It feels like,
Indi: the thing, the thing that it is not is the use of the service or the
Peter: is the solution, right? That’s that’s what I think I’m kind of getting, getting to here is that you’re you’re you’re you were being. If, if if there’s any rigidity in kind of how you’re approaching this or thinking it’s to distinguish between an insight and the solution, and I’m sure we’ve all seen this where especially working in software folks want to get to solutions very quickly there.
We want to solve problems and they don’t spend the time, provide the focus or attention to really understand the insights, the, what you’re calling purposes, all the they’re… they don’t sit with that long enough to then better understand what solutions are best given this whole range of purposes and insights and stuff that, that that’s in front of them.
They instead to quickly jump on a solution and kind of drive to that. And so you’re really trying to distinguish between purpose and solution. How much in your work then though, do you stop at the identification of purposes? You know, or are you working with the, your who, your collaborators to turn that corner and identify solutions?
Where, how, how directed do you end up getting there?
Indi: it depends on the teams that I’m working with. So a team that I just worked with is extremely experienced, but also stretched extremely thin. They wanted me and my team to help them. Develop thinking styles in, for employees who have the purpose of getting through a very particular intensity or a couple of months of intensity or a year of intensity in their work.
We called it a challenge. And sometimes that challenge was this manager and I do not get along. Sometimes that challenge was I’m not getting the attention or the, the, the what’s the word, the promotion that I want. Sometimes the intensity was, oh my God. There’s layoffs. Okay. And so the purpose was to get through whatever that thing was for employees and that team knew what they were doing.
They just didn’t have the time to do it. And, and that’s very typical. So you’re right. Everybody. So much weighted. I like go off camera entirely because there were weighted way over there on the solution land. And we don’t spend enough time over here. And this is, this is the way it doesn’t give you permission to spend some time over here.
Cause it’s actually very very well laid out. There’s a very strong framework, a trustable framework. But the, so we stick around with some teams like that team to help them get that first sandbox designed like which out of all. So the insights don’t happen with the listening sessions. The insights happen all the way down after we’ve got the opportunity to map and we see the gaps, the gaps or the insights, and there’s going to be a plenty of them.
There’s going to be like 50 to 199 sandboxes that we could play in with various you know, Layers to them. So like maybe this sandbox, but that thinking style or the sandbar, same sandbox with the other thinking style or with that demographic lens on it. Okay. So, so we help them figure out what set first sandbox that we’re going to play in.
We can help them with playing in it, finding other toys to bring into it. Other knowledge that got built as what I call toys to put in the sandbox so that we have more toys to play with. We have more understanding as we’re developing some solutions out of that sandbox.
Aligning team culture to user purpose
Jesse: It seems to me that part of what that requires is a culture of a cultivation of these insights and of this knowledge and a, and a culture of knowledge stewardship in the organization that looks beyond the immediate project. Because most of the time, what you see is insights that are generated for the context of a specific product problem that’s been defined. And then they work backward from the context of the proposed product to to populate the insights. And then as a result, those don’t get used in any other context. And I’m curious about what you’ve seen in terms of organizations that do that ongoing cultivation of their insights really well and, and separating them from solutions the way you’re doing.
Indi: Yeah, exactly. There are a few and they’re they’re growing. So I mentioned insurance because oddly enough, several insurance companies are very good at this. Eh, they, I think most of them have a central kind of team that works with different divisions, right? In terms of, Hey, we’ve got this knowledge, we’re building this knowledge.
What knowledge do you need? What are we missing here? Maybe we don’t need to do a study because we’ve got all the, all the knowledge we need in this sandbox. Maybe we need to extend our. Mental model diagram. One of the things I did with the airline project was we worked on it. We did eight studies one after the other and just kept extending it so that we had some sort of framework for people to work with in the future.
It, isn’t going to be complete in the future. You may need to add a little study here and there to build knowledge. That’s very specific to the thing that you’re trying to solve for, for the gap that you’re trying to solve for. But but the idea, so, and a certain financial companies are doing it as well.
There’s one, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to mention company
Jesse: I don’t need names. I was really, it was really just more curious about methods and approaches.
Indi: yeah, yeah. They’re the one that’s doing it without a centralized office actually has. Baked into its very founding day, the idea that we’re supporting a person trying to accomplish a purpose. So they’re very much focused on the people’s purpose. And that makes it a lot easier for them to be, to not have like a centralized team that is helping other teams build knowledge or use the knowledge
Jesse: interesting. So there’s already a larger culture in place. That’s keeping them all aligned toward common purpose. So you don’t need these mechanisms to do.
Indi: It may not work a hundred percent in every case. They do try to share knowledge with each other quite a bit. There’s a lot of work done internally. So it’s not. If nothing is perfect yet we have not made the perfect shift, but there are companies and you’re right. It is definitely a culture.
And I like this idea of cultivating to the whole idea of growing something new part of, part of what attracted people to the tinkers cart in the beginning was it, it felt so right. And I think most practitioners out there who aren’t like already drunk on the Kool-Aid of going fast, this feels so right to have to have.
And this is how it works mostly is it? You’ve got your solution space and that’s where everything’s spinning really quickly. And that’s fine. Keep it spinning quickly. I’m not asking you to slow that down, but you’re adding the strategy space and to fill that strategy space. The things we need to make better decisions to support more people, to be more equitable.
We need to understand people’s thinking, and that’s the problem space. That’s where we go and understand different purposes. People have. We try to s– skill, scope them down so that we can get patterns. But there’s other data too, from different sources, not just listening sessions that go into the strategy space.
And I think that that just feels amazing. It’s like, yes, that’s, what’s missing. I get that phrase all the time that this is what’s missing. You have a way of thinking about it. That’s very clear and feels trustable. And what happens normally is that teams will will do work in the solution space in the strategy space. with their work in the solution space. Okay. It doesn’t, it isn’t a vacation from the solution space. There are some companies where they can take a vacation from the solution space and go and do this. The airline for one, it was merging, there was this space where all of a sudden we had time because during the merging of the two airlines, there was that space.
And so they paid, they put their team a hundred percent into the problem space. But most of the time there isn’t that vacation space. And so it’s done interleaved like when you do a listening session, you only do one a day and you may only do two a week. Or with respect to the one that we just finished with the employees, looking at the employees handling that intense period. I don’t think they did more than they had different team members. Maybe one team member was doing one a week. It took us probably 26 weeks to finish that. There was another startup. I was doing this with and we, we reached 38 weeks. Before we came up with our final gap analysis. Just because it’s interleaved, that’s how it works.
It’s okay. Because we’re not in a hurry. It’s okay. Because we want to spend time with our data. One of the things is that when you’re paying rapt attention in a listening session, it’s only that one person and it’s only that one person for the day. And when you’re done with the listening session, you still pay rapt attention to that person.
You still let it dwell within you. You may jot down a couple of concept types that they said little concept summaries. Just to help you meditate on that person. And, and it’s not a race to like do six or eight interviews in one day. It’s a totally different animal.
Peter: now like how we used to do it.
Indi: I never did listening sessions that way.
Peter: Well, and I mean, I, I guess it speaks to one of the probably a difference between being a con consulting firm, doing this stuff where you don’t usually have 38 weeks to ease into it, versus it sounds like you’re operating in almost more of a coaching and then somewhat embedded realm with an, with a, with an established team so that you can ha you can operate with this.
Interleaving, as you’re talking about it, it’s not chunk projects that are chunked up with clear, like um, Gantt charts and, deliverables.
Indi: well, sometimes there are Gantt charts, but they always get blown out of the water.
Peter: Yeah. Um,
Indi: To be, to be honest, though, there are teams that do want to do this and we try to get it done in 14 weeks or 16 weeks or something. And they have a little bit more time, but yeah.
Designing for inclusion
Peter: So I’m looking at the cover of your new book and I’m thinking about the conversation we had around making time and space for the insights, understanding the problems and purposes distinct from trying to solve them and the cover of your book, time to listen.
And it seems to have, I guess it’s the subtitle though. It’s above the title on the on the image of the book I have, how giving peoples, how giving people space to speak. Invention and inclusion and the, the word inclusion is what I’m picking up on, because the last few months, like many of us, I mean, probably for the last couple of years, like many of us, but in the last few months in particular, I found myself taking part a bit more actively in some of the conversations around inclusion and true well and, and issues of equity and kind of thinking more and harder about how we do our work and also paying more attention to the work of folks in diversity and equity and inclusion kind of practices. And one of the things I’ve learned that runs contrary to my own behaviors is… my behavior is… diversity, equity inclusion is a problem. Let’s solve it. Let’s, let’s, let’s fix it. If it’s a problem, we should be fixing it. And what I hear from people who know better than I, who operate in this space is, is, is to not rush to solutions, to actually there is value in sitting with the discomfort, sitting with the… sitting in that problem space and not, not, not, not to get comfortable with it, but I guess to better understand it.
And, and I’m wondering how, if I, you know, given, given the new book, given, given your continued evolution as a listener, given the, the use of the word inclusion and giving people space, it feels like you’re also embracing, this mindset around in, in your practice. And I’m, I’m wondering kind of just, yeah.
What your thoughts are as in your continued evolution in your work and how it aligns with what we’re hearing about being truly human centered and about kind of how we adjust our practices to be much more equitable and inclusive than, than they have been.
Indi: this is what drives me. This is, this is the singular thing that drives me. Inclusion. We have been running roughshod over, I’d say 95% of the people that we’re developing for. This is why I use this, the listening is the basis of it. So when you talk, I’ve talked to a lot of people who run diversity and inclusion to one extent or another, and whole point is to listen.
The whole point is to give a person a chance to on the one side, feel heard. And on the other side, start to explore what their inner cognition is. What is their inner thinking? What was their emotional reaction? Why was that their emotional reaction? Where did it come from? What were the roots? Right. So the, the idea of taking time is so, so, so important.
The idea of letting us. ‘ cause I mean, Jesse said measure the intangibles, right? What, what intangibles did he mean? He meant our interior worlds. Our reactions to things are, are our guiding principles for how to handle situations and how those shift and change over time and how they maybe get crusted up with worse and worse reactions because of the situations that we’re in. And we can’t find our way through the crust, right? So if we, if we are developing support for people and again, developing support for people is not necessarily something. Every business is about. A lot of them are only about making money for themselves, but if you’re developing support for. You have to understand that those people have different approaches than you.
I think that, I think that we, we can, we can speak to this. Yeah. Okay. They have different approaches. Okay. So now let’s go off into the solution land, got to solve it without understanding what those differences are and without truly dwelling in it’s doing in it, I used to call it, simmering yourself in it.
So to understand it, somebody at the Lousanne conference years back made a little badge that had a pot that was simmering. And this is like our, our brains, our teams, if we truly want to support people and you might not be working in an org where that’s the goal, and it’s important to recognize the difference.
Okay. But if you are in the team who desire to support people, spending that time is so important. You’re, you’re not gonna understand it in one year. You’re not gonna understand it in two years, you’re going to keep understanding it and it is going to be your practice, right? It is an ongoing thing of trying to, to help another person’s perspective, be discovered and supported. And we do this for communities of thinking for thinking styles. I’ve been calling them. Other people have called them mindsets or mind states. There’s, there’s a variety of ways of thinking about this. We’re still building it, but there’s very much a desire, a yearning. This is what, what is missing amongst leaders and practitioners.
The value of slowing down
Jesse: I noticed very much throughout what you were saying here. A theme of making the argument for slowness in the face of a culture of speed. And I wonder what advice you might have for folks out there who are trying to make that argument inside their own cultures of speed to get the people around them, to slow down, take a breath connect, take the time. Listen.
Indi: Our world is full of other examples of other fields that have slowed down to great benefit. One obvious example is slow food, food. Has you, you take your time to prepare it. Sure. But it’s been grown locally and not covered with chemicals not being fed chemicals, if it’s an animal to make it grow big, faster, To take a natural approach. We’re doing this with respect to unfortunately being very slow with respect to our transition to green energy. But green energy is another way of like let’s, let’s produce energy in a slower way. There’s authors who write about the idea of bringing back sailing ships and bringing back dirigibles as a way of traveling where you’re slowing down, you’re getting your, your movement of your body and your mind from one place to another.
And during that transition, you’re able to think more clearly. And you’re able to produce and be more creative. And so there’s a lot of other fields that are using this idea of slowness that you can point to, but you’re not going to be able to persuade anybody. So one of the things is and I talked to Erica Hall about this, cause she’s on fire about you can’t persuade people. In fact, I think she referred, she talked to you in one of your podcasts earlier about this idea. But you can’t persuade people. There are people who once they latch on to the way things work in the solution space and that’s speedy methodology, those cycles spinning they feel like it has to be a way that applies to everything. And yet they have their own life and they in their own life probably has have something that they practice that takes. Anyway, you don’t persuade people. But what you do is you listen to them and if you listened to them, you can find out where that came from, find out why they’re thinking this, what were those experiences?
How did that opinion or preference form, where does it come from? What are their guiding principles and help them as you are listening, explain what their guiding principles are, help them get familiar with their own guiding principles. We are not therapists though, just, just to have that communication is so missing.
One of the things that I’ve been doing lately is offering a workshop to people who are having trouble with a different team, for example, maybe writers versus product owners. And they just can’t see. Communicate. And so what I do is I ask them to bring a, a typical conversation. And I break down that conversation into the parts, because there are parts when that’s what the whole book is about is it’s going to teach you what the parts are.
And I break it down. I’m like, look, you are lobbing commands at each other. You’re loving opinions at each other. And you’re not talking about your interior cognition with one another at all. And so no wonder you can’t communicate, no wonder, nothing works, no wonder there’s distressed. And so as soon as they see it, every time this happens, like, there’s this like hush.
And then like, that’s what that, I see what, cause I teach them how to recognize it and they see it. And then there’s like this huge round of applause. It’s like, oh my God. So that’s not the solution, but it’s the aware. And the solution is to start listening and start that practice of getting to the interior cognition.
Where did it come from? What were the roots? How do you think? And maybe, maybe, and here’s the, maybe, maybe that person will do the same for you
Wrap up
Jesse: That’s fantastic. Indi, thank you so much. Where can people find you on the internet?.
Indi: Indiyoung.com is the website. And I’m Indi Young on LinkedIn and Twitter and on Medium, I am the, in Indi Young Inclusive Software Design. So those are places I am right now. I think that’s going to shift a little bit and expand but who knows? Launching this new book as a self-published book.
So that should be its own interesting journey. That book should be out. Like we have it, we’re figuring out the table of contents, it’s that close. Uh,
Peter: Written the manuscript
Indi: Oh God. Yes. That was done in January. And it’s been all. So one of the other things is that this has taken a long time because I met a person who’s really intentional about things and she’s doing the layout and she’s fantastic. And the life happens, you know, there were, there were a lot of things that happened where she had to take a week out or two weeks out or this or that. Right. And that’s what I accessed. I am not in a race to get this book published because it’s becoming a better book because of the time we’re spending and the time we’re able to breathe around it and let it sort of trickle into our bones.
They’re like, oh, you know what? Not only is there like more typos than you could ever imagine coming out of the woodwork, but there, but there’s like, wait a minute. What if we use this word instead of that word? And now the sentence is way more clear kind of thing. So that book should be out by the end of April.
I am counting on it
Jesse: very
Indi: we are at the point where we’re just tweaking the last bits. Yeah. It was super exciting.
Jesse: Well, congratulations. And thank you again.
Indi: Yeah. Thank you.
Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s @peterme and I’m @JJG. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on Apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
28: The Leadership Ceiling (ft. Tim Kieschnick)
Apr 29, 2022
Transcript
Tim: So the first piece is to align around the shared purpose and you cannot have any successful change of any kind if you don’t have something about shared purpose.
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Together: And we’re finding our way…
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, recently retired design leader Tim Kieschnick offers insights from his 30 year career in design and innovation at the health care giant Kaiser Permanente. He also shares with us his insights into the ways leaders hold back their teams through a model he calls The Leadership Ceiling, and what to do about it.
Introduction to Tim Kieschnick
Peter: So hi Tim, hi Jesse. Tim Kieschnick is someone I worked with for about a year, when I was supporting Kaiser Permanente a few years ago and he brought me into his team. And what I, I, I learned a lot from just that year that I spent working with Tim, Tim had worked at Kaiser for 30 years, he can correct me with anything that I’m wrong with in, in what I’m about to say, he worked at Kaiser for 30 years, helped establish their website, kp.org, their UX practice 25 years ago. And then when I was working with him was focused on this kind of combination of service design work to help the business think about omni-channel, cross-channel more strategic design challenges, as well as a human-centered design kind of workshop, facilitation, think Google Design sprint-type style work with different parts of the business.
And so, he and I, over lunches and coffees had a lot of conversations about design, design practice, leadership. And so I wanted to have him on the show and in particular, and we’ll, we’ll dive into this soon, he has this concept that he calls The Leadership Ceiling, and it’s a framework and I love frameworks.
And so we’re, we’re going to have him unpack his framework for thinking about how leadership works. So thank you, Tim, for joining us. Anything I miss, any, any high points about your time at Kaiser or outside Kaiser as a designer and design leader that we should know about?
Tim: Oh, no, that that’s pretty good in terms of the, the Kaiser years. I’ve– I would just augment it to say that, to me, design, human-centered design, et cetera, all of these methodologies for getting good things done quickly and well, and at scale, really go beyond any particular job or contexts. So I feel like I was doing design work before I knew it was design work.
And I feel like, you know, now that I’m retired, you know, banging around my house with hammer and screwdriver, I feel like I’m doing a, I’m doing design, I’m doing human-centered design. I’m doing agile. I’m doing all of that in my everyday life too. So I’m very much a design-your-life kind of person and approach everything as a design problem because you’re, you’re more likely to come out with a decent outcome faster.
“Everyone is a Designer”
Peter: I actually want to dig into that a little bit. One of the controversies within the UX design field is this phrase, “everyone is a designer.” A lot of people with the title Designer feel that commoditizes or minimizes their work and impact. If anyone can do it, why do you need to hire people with degrees in it and all that kind of stuff?
And I just wonder, again, given your, the arc of your career at Kaiser, you probably saw a lot of different shades of this, and your take on this controversy such as it is, is everyone a designer? Are some designers designer-er than others? Like how, how should, how, how did you end up thinking about it?
Tim: Oh gosh, everyone is not a designer. Unfortunately. The first thing is that if design is limited to the people who graduated from RISD with a degree in design, then we’re going to have a whole bunch of unsolved design problems. There aren’t enough professional designers to address the number of design problems that we have.
You just, we have to have people using the principles and some of the methods of design all over the place up, you know, just up and down the board. So there’s absolutely a place for the pros and the people who have formal training and the people who have experience and the people who geek out about this over several shots of espresso.
There’s absolutely a place for that. But as soon as we start to confine it to them, we’ve just really, really limited the ability of the world to solve the problems that we need. So I feel really strongly about that. It’s, it’s, you know what, let’s use those professional designers very strategically when really when we need them, but let’s get as many other people familiar with the, the mindsets and the methods of design as possible.
You know, for one thing, it’s, it’s a lot easier to work if I’m a professional designer, which I’m not, it’s going to be a lot easier for me to work with, with people who are not professional designers, if they have some sense of the mindset and some sense of the methods. Okay. So that’s the first thing it’s good for, for people to have, you know, have the, some of the mindset and methodologies, but then the other piece is just, I want everybody approaching problem solving in, in creative and methodical ways that, that explore the possibilities and that pay attention to the, the really the underlying needs and all that kind of stuff.
And it… I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve got a real chip on my shoulder for a prima donna designers who don’t want other people to talk about design, don’t want other people to try to do it, because really this is me, you know, it’s like I’m saying, you know, really, you know, professional musicians are the ones who know what they’re doing.
You know, we don’t want, we don’t want these amateurs around here, you know, strumming their guitar and singing “Blowing with the Wind.” And I think we really, really want as many amateur musicians as possible, you know?
I’m… we were talking just before we started recording about how I retired a year and a half ago, and I haven’t been in the business world except in my interactions with bureaucracies in Vermont, which… bureaucracies in Vermont is a really new thing for me. It’s great by the way, the bureaucracies in Vermont all have people attached to them. It’s just amazing. They’ve got these really nice people who pick up the phone and know my name after I’ve called them once before. It’s, it’s, it’s a really amazing thing.
They don’t have any computers. But they have telephones, and they have people, but anyway, so I’m banging around…. Yes. So I’m banging around my house and banging around the yard and, you know, I’m, I’m planting stuff in, in, in my yard. I am not a professional landscape designer. I’m not a professional gardener. I’m really glad there are people who can do that.
But if we have to leave that stuff to the professional landscapers and professional gardens, we’re going to have most of the, most of the, you know, yards and gardens in the world are going to be crap. And that’s kind of the way we are with experiences that, that companies, that software development, you know, the, that we provide, is most of them are crap because there aren’t enough designers to come in and the people who are there just don’t have enough clues.
So I, I, I’ve got a real chip on my shoulder about that. And I think as many people as possible who have some sense of this, the better.
Jesse: I’m curious about your experiences over the course of 30 years with the same organization, having these kinds of conversations with people about design, about its impact, about its influence, about how you bring people into those processes and how those conversations changed for you over the course of those 30 years? How was it different by the time you got out than it was when you started having these conversations about design and what it can do for organizations?
Tim: Oh, that’s– it’s a lot in there. One of the pieces is that some important changes happen really fast and a lot of important changes take a long, long time. And the ones that happen really fast, sometimes it didn’t happen as fast as it seemed like they did. We just don’t, we don’t hear about them until, boom, this thing gets implemented and you don’t see all of the slow stuff that built up to that. And so I’ve, I found it really, I don’t know if rewarding is quite the- quite the word, but meaningful to stick with something for a long, long, long time. And I know it’s, it’s, you know, it’s out of fashion, I’m a dinosaur, there’ll be nobody who works for the same company for 30 years ever, again, much less, 50 years.
And we don’t even use gold watches anymore. But there’s something about having a long-term intent and sticking with it throughout. And then the, the key to sticking it with throughout is, as you’re saying, Jesse is, is to be able to morph as I go so that I’m not in, you know, 2022, fighting the 1992 battles. And that’s really, that’s really interesting, but I really– it’s interesting, very interesting to, and, and rewarding to see, to take the long view and to see where we are now, relative to where we were, whether it’s with, you know, a corporation or whether it’s with you know, the you know, w- w- with the country or anything that has, you know, that has the stamina, the staying power to last long.
And one of the big things about that is this, this interplay between culture and leadership. So you see, and, you know, culture of course is more permanent than leadership and harder to change, but they’re, they’re very, very interrelated. And some of that led to, you know, my, my thinking about the leadership ceiling, which we’ll talk, talk about, I’m sure.
As you see the leaders, not just the, the, the people in positions of leadership changing, but as you also see the individuals changing and morphing over time, to be able to adapt to that, to be able to fight, to be able to be very intentional about choosing, Which battle am I working on right now? You know, which, which aspect of the culture am I working on and who am I working that with?
So when just before, Peter, you joined us, we had made a very– my small team had made, made a very intentional choice about which part of the organization to focus on. And it was interesting because, you know, we were trying to change the culture, to move the culture, to be more human-centric and more innovative and more designing and et cetera, et cetera.
And we didn’t go to the most high profile or the mo- the biggest bang for the buck. We went to the place that we thought would give us the best shot at creating the germ that would grow into the, into the large crop. And, and so it’s always again picking, you know, which, which piece are we going after at any time and being really intentional about that?
The other thing I want to say about that though, is, is in, in terms of the culture and there’s this theme at Kaiser Permanente around organizational structure, that is always the thing that is the best and the worst. The best and the worst of Kaiser Permanente all come from its organizational structure.
And so whether you are inheriting an organizational structure or you’re creating an organizational structure, it’s critical that you understand what is embodied in that structure. So Kaiser, Kaiser has th- this you know, really interesting organizational structure that most people don’t know about and that they shouldn’t have to know about.
But you have the physician, and the physicians, you’ve got primary care and you’ve got specialty care and then they’re all, you’ve got inpatient and outpatient physicians there. They’re all in, you know, like in a single physician group more or less. And then you’ve got the hospitals and then you’ve got the health plan, you know, sort of the the insurance side of the business and all of those three things come together and they include the pharmacies and they include the labs and they include the hospitals and they include the radiology of all of these different pieces that all have the potential to be integrated.
And because of that, you can do things you can’t do other places because of that integration. And because of that, the incentives of the organization are fundamentally aligned with the incentives of the patient. So it’s fundamentally for, for decades, it’s been in the Kaiser’s best interest as an organization to do what’s best for the patient.
Because of the organizational structure. And there are other places where the organizational structure is clearly set up, that what’s best for the organization is not necessarily best for the customer. And so how do you, how do you, you know, bake intentionality into the org structure. And Peter and I have talked about that a lot is, you know, how, how do you know it?
You know, part of it is the hierarchies and part of it is, you know, anything from the metrics to the physical plant, to whatever it is, but how do you, how do you systematize intentions? it’s just a fabulously interesting area.
The Leadership Ceiling
Peter: Well, we’ll see how, how, how we impact that. We’ve been alluding to the leadership ceiling and I feel that we should unpack that now. So the leadership ceiling, Tim, I’ll let you define it, but just kind of i- it’s, it’s a tool. Here’s, here’s my little tease. It’s a tool that you’ve not really shared with the world.
I’ve seen, you know, early writings about it. And I use it one-on-one with, you know, some of the design leaders I work with to help them think through their challenges. I found it remarkably valuable. So yeah. What is it, do you have a, you know, the, the elevator pitch on the leadership ceiling, and I’d also be curious, like how you arrived at it.
What, what was it that got you to realize this framework?
Tim: Okay. I’ll, I’ll start with the last question. So this, like many of my stories that goes back, goes back quite a while. So it, my, my son is 23 now, 23 years old. So– when he was four or five years old, my wife and I were shopping for where’s he going to go to elementary school?
You know, you’re going to go to the local public school, there are a number of private schools. So we did some shopping around. We found a private school that we liked almost everything about. For one thing it was cheaper than any of the other private, private schools around. We loved the teachers. We liked that the building was great. They had a fabulous approach to an integrated curriculum, that a great afterschool program that supported people who were, you know, we had two working parents, et cetera.
Just loved that,almost everything about the school, but we hated the principal. The principal was really problematic. So I called my dad because my dad was in schools and he was, he was a teacher and a principal and a school superintendent. He was, he coached principals. He was in schools his whole life, his whole career.
And I said, you know, “Dad, how important really is the principal? You know, my kid may never even interact with the principal. My kid’s going to be with the teachers.” And dad, he didn’t, he didn’t skip a beat. He said a school can never rise above its principal. So we ignored his advice. He was basically saying, no, you know, if you don’t like the principal that it; we ignored him, we went to that school.
And the short answer is by the time our son was in seventh grade, the school had gone bankrupt. And before that, most of the good teachers had left and the teachers that were still there were cynical and struggling, and it was a mess, the afterschool program when it was just, oh, you know, it was defaulting on the loans for the physical plant.
It was just a total mess. So he was right. You know, remember note to self, you know, dad is usually right. Even when he seems wrong, even when you know better. But then what happened was I, I started looking at this in my professional life and I was seeing places where I was either really frustrated and felt like it was not getting anywhere or places where I… I had thought I was getting somewhere, but then everything back-slid, and it turns out we weren’t getting there.
And I just felt like I was banging my head against the wall. And what I realized was I wasn’t banging my head against a wall. I was banging my head against a ceiling. And, and it was, and so I started calling that the leadership ceiling and basically every leader sets a ceiling above which the organization cannot rise.
Now, it might be a ceiling of, of people where, How well do we treat our people? It might be a ceiling of process. How good are we at being efficient and effective? How good are our processes? And it might be a ceiling of purpose. Why are we here? What are we trying to accomplish as an organization? Any three of those, it it could be any of those three kinds of, of ceilings.
Okay. Wherever the leader sets the ceiling, it doesn’t mean that the organization will go that high. It just means that the organization cannot go above it. So you can have a leader, a great leader, setting a high ceiling, and the organization below can be crap and not get anywhere. Or it can be a, a fantastic excelling organization, or it can be anywhere in between.
But if that leadership ceiling is low, there’s a very small bandwidth whi– within which that organization can operate. So that’s what I mean by leadership ceiling. And then the point is, what do you do about that? So I’m mostly not thinking about, you know, you know, I’m mostly not talking to leaders. I’m talking to the people who are working below leaders, which is pretty much everybody in the world.
And so for those of us who work under leaders, when that ceiling is lower than we want it to be, we have three choices.
A: we can try to work on, work Above the ceilings. That’s where I spent most of my career. And that’s where I got the most bruises on the top of my head. Because it’s just, it never works. You’re never successful trying to work above it in the long-term. Okay. So, A, work– try to work above it, not going to happen.
B: you can try to work Below it. Okay. So you can say, okay, that’s where the ceiling is. What am I going to do about that in terms of how I work? And it could be that your just biding your time waiting for leadership to change, waiting until your kid is out of diapers waiting until you’re out of grad school, you know, whatever it might be, or it could be that working under it, you just realize, you know, this is not the organization for me, my aspirations, what I want for myself in my job or in this organization is, is never going to happen with this set of leaders. I’m tired of biding my time. I’m going to bail. Okay.
And then there’s also a possibility that we can talk about later, if you want, about kind of creating a little bubble in the leadership ceiling, where I’m going to work in this little space where we’re going to be better than the, than the rest of the organization. Just the key is just don’t think that you’re actually, that you can get too far with that. You can get a little, you can make a little bit of a bubble, but what, what, what for me, what I usually would try to do is I would make that, try to make that bubble bigger and bigger and bigger and think that I could go further than I could with it.
So A, you can work above it. B, you can work below it, or a C: you can try to change the ceiling.
So that’s not for the faint of heart, but that’s gets you into the space of how do you influence, how do you influence up how do you drive change? And it’s an interesting approach to change, because it’s really about how do you change a leadership ceiling in which, and, and you know, which leaders are you after, you know, what kind of ceiling we trying to raise? How will we know when it’s higher? How was that, you know, as we were talking before, how do I w– my, my strategies and my tactics to morph over time to change that ceiling to make it higher. So that’s kind of in a rather large nutshell, maybe not in an acorn, what’s a large, not maybe, maybe in a coconut shell (laughs) leadership ceiling.
Peter: So you mentioned, uh, people, process, and purpose, and I think in our prior discussions about this, the leadership ceiling is only as high as the lowest of those three, right? So at Kaiser, Kaiser has a really high purpose. Right? Very patient-centered, very mission-driven. From what I saw, I wasn’t an employee, but it seems also very people-oriented, by and large good to the employees, a strong kind of ethical work environment.
But process was low, right? It was big. It was bureaucratic. It was difficult to get people aligned on projects. They would operate in a waterfall way when they would try to introduce new ways of working. They would, those new ways would end up getting kind of ground down in the machine of, of kind of legacy process. And so what I, what I saw was this disconnect between the talk of purpose and potential of the people, but the reality of the process and that process ended up lowering the ceiling, such that even if you, like, you couldn’t realize the purpose that was being laid in front of you, because the process was– wasn’t being raised as well. And so I’m wondering, kind of, is that, is that how it works, where, like you can only go as high as the lowest of those three?
Or do you, are those three different leverage points or like, how do you fiddle with those three Ps to try to engage?
Tim: Yeah, well, I, yeah, I think you’re right, you know, for an organization to really be all it can be to it gets to have all three, and you have to raise them all. That, that said, you know, if I were in a, in an organization that, you know, had a high purpose ceiling and a low process ceiling and a medium people ceiling, it might be that the people ceiling was more important to me. And that that’s the one I really cared about. So, you know, it’s really what I’m about with the Leadership Ceiling work is, is helping people figure out, you know, what’s it gonna take for me to be happy and satisfied and fulfilled and be meaningful in, in, in, in my work or in what, even if it’s not work, you know, in my organization.
And maybe I don’t want to work, you know, maybe I don’t, I’m just not a process guy. And, you know, and maybe, you know, the bad processes, you know, they bug me, but what really bugs me is when you know, somebody who’s not treated. Then I’ll go work out and I’ll try to raise that from medium to high or something like that.
Or maybe I’ll just lean into, you know, the leadership. Maybe the leaders have set a really high people ceiling, but that has not permeated the organization. So I’m going to try to raise the organization up to where that ceiling is, because remember it’s just, just because the leaders are setting a high ceiling doesn’t mean that the organization is getting there.
So it could be that, you know, they’ve set a high purpose ceiling and they’re saying, you know, we want to, you know, we want to change the way that people will use windows, not Microsoft Windows. They would, you know, the way that people look out their windows. We want to change that. And maybe I love that idea. I’m working for our window company and it’s not just about producing, you know, the same old windows as before we want to really revolutionize the world of windows. I may think, well, yeah, but you know what, w- w- we’re we’re really focused on just turning out the same window. So I want to help the organization rise to the level of what the leader is saying about who we are.
So you really have a lot of different choices on how you go and it’s about, you know, what’s important to you at this point in your life.
Jesse: I’m interested in these terms that you’re using high and low, to describe these ceilings and something in my brain just keeps asking the question: High and low. What is it? Potential? Is it performance? Is it scope of impact? What is being limited by the leadership?
Tim: Hmm. Maybe that’s best done by example. So let’s take an example of equity, inclusion, and diversity. So that would be a- a people ceiling. Let’s say you have leaders who are talking the talk they’re walking the talk, they’re baking it into their systems. You have a high leadership ceiling. You can still have an organization that’s not there where there are all kinds of problems, okay. But you’ve got a high ceiling.
You have high po– you might might just think of it as the potential. And what constraints is the leader putting on, on, in term, on it in terms of potential? And so what I like to do is look at this, think about well, what would it look like? If we were, if this organization were really rocking and rolling on that, what would, what, what would we be saying?
What will we be doing, how it would be baked in our systems and what actual results would we be seeing, measurable and qualitative, what results would we be seeing? And that’s the good and you want, and then you want to look at, you know, how far are, how close are we to that? If we’re not there, is… and if I don’t feel like that’s happening in my space, is that because I’m limited? Is it because it’s just a really hard problem to solve? Is it because the CEO is setting a ceiling or is it, or maybe the CEO is setting a high ceiling, but you know, a vice-president someplace below them is, is, is lowering it. So it’s all about kind of analyzing, what’s keeping us from being the best we can be in all of those places. And to do about it? How will I engage or not?
Jesse: Right, right. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And the reason I ask is because you know, you have these three Ps of people, process, and purpose, but as I think of my experiences working with leaders, or observing teams working with leaders and the ways in which leaders constrained the potential of the teams underneath them, a lot of those examples, at least off the top of my head, don’t fall into these three categories, but rather it was a shortcoming of imagination on the part of the leadership, a shortcoming of bravery on the part of the leadership, that kept the team in check. So I feel like potentially that these things that you’re describing, certainly organizationally, when you’re looking at organizational structures, people, process, purpose are great top-line things that you’ve got to hit, but I wonder about the subtler things, the ways in which from day to day, the ways that leaders show up squelch people and shut people down. And I think that I, and I wonder how much of that comes actually back to the character of the leader themselves and why they have such low expectations in some areas for themselves and for their teams, you know?
Tim: Yeah, I wouldn’t get too– I’m not too hung up on the three P’s there. It’s just, so it’s a way to, to think about them and I’ve, I could probably try to shoehorn, bravery and imagination into one of those, but, but you could feel free to say this leader is setting an imagination ceiling and then you would still do the same thing: you would say, “Well, what would it look like if we had a really high imagination ceiling in this organization?” Well, it would, you know, and it would look like there were new ideas coming from all levels of the organization on at least a weekly basis. You would, you could label behaviors that would be showing up in meetings and group interactions.
You would look at how metrics and project management support that. And then you’d also look at what would it look like if the leader set a higher imagination ceiling, you know, what would she be saying? What would she be doing? What would she be baking into the structure? And what results would we be seen as an organization?
And, and then some, because what happens if you follow that, that pathway of, of saying, doing, baking it in and results, if you follow that pathway, you might find out that the leader is saying all the right things about imagination. What they’re saying, all the right things about imagination, then maybe this is a place where you could actually help with some change by helping them understand how their actions are, are, are blocking something that they actually want, or maybe they’re saying the right things and their actions are right, but they’re still measuring the wrong things, you know, or, you know, the, the performance reward system is still, you know, rewarding the wrong things, or maybe, you know, the core software that the company uses to run, it has lack of imagination baked into it. And so it’s, so then there were, you know, th- then you start to get that, that gives you a lot of ammunition, or not ammuniation, it, it gives you a lot of, of, of grist for figuring out How are we going to influence this? You know?
Or you might look at it and you can, and you might say, you know what? I am not in a position to ever change or influence change in this organization for imagination. This… I’m just not in an imaginative organization and this organization over the next 10 years, I just can’t see it happening.
Okay. Then you, then you say, okay, well, I’m a, I’m not going to try to work above the ceiling and try to be super imaginative. I’m just, that’s going to be so frustrating. I’m going to be just humiliated. I’m going to be discouraged. I’m going to turn cynical instead. I’m going to say, okay, this is reality. I am in an unimaginative organization for as long as I’m here.
That means I’m going to work below that imagination ceiling. And I’m going to decide, how am I gonna approach that? You know? And as I said, you know, it might be that I’ll bail. Okay, good to know. I’m not going to try and try to be something that the organization won’t let me be here, or it might be I’m going to wait because you know what we are in the industry of windows and the whole windows industry has changed. And in another two years, it’s going to be so unavoidable that all the leaders in this company are going to realize the windows don’t mean what they used to mean. So I’m going to wait two years and I’m going to be ready so that when they say, “Hey, we need to c–, be more imaginative about windows,” I’m going to have my portfolio ready for them.
The potential power of Biding your time
Peter: Well, yeah. I, I’m terrible at biding my time. I’m a bailer which is why I’ve not lasted anywhere more than two years. But I think about at Kaiser, let’s take the Kaiser example, right. There were probably folks biding their time in some flavor of tele-health for decades. And then the world changed in March 2020, and they were ready to fill that void.
And I, and I– you were, you were still at Kaiser when, when the pandemic happened. I don’t know how long you had, what did you see in terms of that kind of massive context shift that maybe enabled some of this change to happen that, that people like you had been stumping for for probably at least a decade, if not longer?
Tim: The first telehealth projects that I was a part of were in, 1996, no, 1995.
Tim: This was, this was, this was face-to-face with a patient and a doctor doing intake for psychotherapy as well as, as well as some similar things that we had.
We had some things going on with dermatology, with some things going on with home health nurses back in the late nineties, okay. And this is one of these changes that takes a long time because so many pieces need to be in place. And what we were doing during this biding our time is we’re biding our time un- until the world was ready for it. And a critical mass of physicians was ready for it. A critical, massive patients was ready for it. And the technology, both internal to Kaiser and the tech, the consumer technology was ready for it.
So biding your time, doesn’t have to mean give up and just forget about it. You know, in the early days we were flying really low under the radar and it used to be in, in those early days, like when we’re you doing this kind of stuff, when we’re doing the web stuff, our mantra was don’t do anything that will impact healthcare operations because then people will notice us, we’ll get in trouble, and the whole thing will, will be shut down. Okay.
But what we could do is we could figure out, well, what does it take? You know, what does it take to make this work for the doctor and the patient? What’s the minimum amount of technology you need for it? How would this impact the scheduling systems? Because scheduling is a big deal. So the, all of these different pieces came together. So for instance, Kaiser way back when decades ago was, was really working on scheduling systems that included being able to schedule a phone, a phone visit with the doctor.
Well, if you can schedule a phone visit, then you can schedule a phone visit with video in it. So all of these things were getting set up along with, you know, the policies and the legal stuff in addition to the technology. So when the pandemic hit and we needed to scale from a fairly small number of video visits to a huge number of video visits, there was some scrambling to be done, but that scrambling could be done.
And it could be done, you know, you know, let’s get, you know, let’s ramp up this server base and ramp up this bandwidth and blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be. But the fundamentals were there because so many people have been biding their time waiting for this moment, but they weren’t just sitting in a corner, hoping that someday happened.
They were saying, while we bide our time, we’re going to be ready because one of these days it’s going to be the time. We didn’t know it was going to be a pandemic that was going to make it happen, but we knew sooner or later this dam is going to burst, you know, in a burst in March of what was it, March of 2020, and boom, here we are.
So the, the biding your time, it can, it can feel like you’re just copping out and just settling, or it can just be a really realistic way to make progress.
“C”hanging the Ceiling.
Jesse: If you are in the position of having to engage with a leader, whose ceiling you are trying to change, I’m curious about how you do that. Especially, as a lot of these things, I feel like, are kind of inherent sometimes personality traits of these leaders. How much is asking a leader to change their ceiling, really asking the leader to change themselves. And how do you do that?
Tim: That’s what you want me to answer? How do I change human behavior in 10 seconds or less?
Jesse: I mean,
Peter: You have, you have at least up to a minute,
Tim: So the point there is, is, as I said before, it’s not for the faint of heart. And it’s not like, oh, instead of biding my time, I’m going to change the leadership ceiling, boom, boom, boom. It’s like, if you’re going to change that ceiling, you got to commit to it. You have to say, okay, I really want to do this and I’m really going to lean into it.
And then there are all kinds of things, you know, from collecting your allies, to understanding your targets, to coming up with an influence plan, to all of this kind of stuff. I’ll sort of start from, from the point of view of a leader. And then from the point of view of the person trying to change it from the point of the view of the leader, the first thing he’s got to understand, well, which leader is causing the, is creating the ceiling and what’s important to them.
So it could be, I’ve been in situations where I thought my boss was setting a ceiling, but it turned out she wasn’t the one setting the ceiling, it was her boss or her boss’s boss setting the ceiling and she couldn’t move beyond. So then what happens there is my boss is– is now an ally rather than the target of my, of my, my influence plan.
And, and I try to engage with her around that because she’s going to have a lot more insight and and influence in this process than I am. And if I can’t get her engaged in it, then I should probably try an entirely different route because if she’s not engaged, you know, that’s my biggest you know, that’s my biggest ally there.
So first, and, you know, and I’ve also been in situations where, so that was in that situation, in that example is I thought it was my boss, but it was really like, you know, say the CEO, you could also be in a situation where you think it’s the CEO, but CEO is when you look more deeply, no, the CEO is really right up there, but it’s at a level below.
I often find that, by the way, in, in large organizations, this isn’t just Kaiser, but a lot of large organizations I’ve looked at, the CEO can be setting a really high ceiling and the, you, you get like two levels below, and the two levels below, these are like, you know, division heads or department heads.
Those people are a lot less focused on raising the ceiling and a lot more focused on raising the floor. So they don’t want to have the organization be all it can be. They want to make sure that the organization is not as bad as it could be. And so they want to find the, the, the outliers that aren’t as good, and let’s just, you know, raise that floor. And there are times when that’s absolutely the right thing for an organization to be doing. The problem comes when you think that’s that, that means you can’t be doing the other end too, you know? I mean, “No, we, we can’t think big until we fixed all the small things. We can’t do any major enhancements until we fixed all the bugs,” that kind of stuff. But then when you get into the, you know, so then you, you, you, you need to, you know, there are all kinds of approaches to influencing leadership. They all start with understanding the target.
And then I would add if I’m going to be an agent of change in an organization, I need to, I need to be legitimate. I need to be perceived as legitimate. And Helen Bevan from, from the UK health system used to do something called healthcare school for healthcare radicals, great program on how to, how to drive radical change in healthcare. And she talked about different kinds of disruptors and, you know, the sort of the, the disruptors who are just breaking things and actually not being effective and the disruptors who are really effective.
Competence, Relationships, and Initiative (another framework!)
Tim: And the difference, what she would say is that one of them is really the, the loner and is driving people apart. And then the other one is collecting people around them. And so when I collect, if I’m trying to collect people around me, I like to think that there are three things that I need to do. I need to, and those three things I need to do that I need to attend to are: competence, relationships, and initiative, and I need to attend to those in that order, because if I start with my initiative to change things before I have any relationships, I’m just, you know, some guy over there who’s causing trouble.
I’ve got to have the relationships. Okay. Even if this is a four person organization, I’ve got to have relationships. Okay. And then if I’m trying to make relationships, but I am not perceived at being competent in my day job, I’m going to have trouble. So I have to start by, even if I think my day job is not what I really should be doing because I am a much more aspirational and inspired and just, I’m such an amazing person in this job is I’m so much more than this job.
I still have to be good at this job. Once I’m good at this job, then I can do other things, but I get good at this job that puts me in a position to get to collect relationships and to be established so that I have allies. And then that puts me in a position to take initiative. So I really believe competence, relationships, initiative in that order will get me to the place where I can understand the leaders and work with other people to drive change.
Peter: And then that speaks again to one of my, one of my failings when I’m working internally, but one of the things I can help the leaders that I work with when I’m their external partner, which is taking that long view. And I think, I think a lot of design leaders struggle with understanding the role that politics play in… the role that politics plays in, in achieving that long view. And my case study is actually from Kaiser, a different group that I was working with, where they brought in a really talented design leader, human-centered design and innovations kind of guy, and placed him in an organization where they were asking him to do some of that innovation work, but also to assess emerging technologies, you know, how are we going to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to tell– to mental health chatbots or something, you know, imagine these kinds of… there’s all these companies building all this software that they’re trying to sell into Kaiser.
And someone needs to say like, yeah, this is pretty good. Or actually not, this is this isn’t good. And this leader could not get over being seen as, essentially an IT assessor, even though, that was part of the job. And if he could do that, if he could like create, a quarter of his time, a third of his time for that, he could be building… building, his case, demonstrating competence, showing that he has the interest of the organization at heart, and then slowly start making the kind of change and, and having the kind of initiative that you’re referring to.
But he, it was so… he was so idealistic and I think this is true of a lot of designers. Their idealism gets in the way of their pragmatism and then they just make no change because it’s either all or nothing. And so something I work with leaders on is trying to figure out what is the “one for them, and one for me” approach that allows you to eventually get to the kind of change you want.
But recognizing, especially in a company like Kaiser, I mean, what 300,000 employees, it’s been around for 80 years, like you’re not going to come in with your, you know, wearing a cape and, and, you know, whipping into shape in, in a week. So anyway…
Tim: Yeah. Yeah. And, and they, it gets it’s… that actually reminds me of our conversation about, about professional designers, because there are a lot of professional designers who just want to work with the design team. And everybody in the design team is golden. Everybody outside of the design team is, is other. tThose design teams can come up with some fantastic, beautiful solutions, and, it’s really hard for them to get those solutions adopted, or adopted at scale, you know, can maybe get them adopted with the people that they used for, for co-design as they went along. But for, for them to be successful, you have to have the great dynamics within the team.
You have to have great interactions between this team and all these other teams, you know, what’s in, you have to have great, great interactions between my scope and everybody else’s scope. And then you have to have great interactions with leaders, the problem is you see so many people, especially in a large organization whose primary, you see so many, uh, mid-level managers whose primary orientation is toward their leaders, so that they aren’t paying enough attention to the interactions with other teams, their interaction with their team, that it’s like, well, I don’t want to be like that where I’m just, you know, sucking up to the leaders that I’m giving, you know, I’m spending every Thursday, I’m giving them another 60 page PowerPoint, you know, status update. Okay. You also don’t want them to spend, you don’t want to just spend all your time interacting with the other team. So all you’re ever doing is project updates and having these endless meetings of everybody updating everybody else.
So that’s, you know, you, you got to come up with some sort of a way, and I think this is actually an open design question. I don’t think that even the world of scaled agile has really solved this yet, that I’ve seen is, is really optimizing all three of those pieces. Working together within the team, across teams, and between teams and leadership.
I think that’s was one of our big, next levels to reach just in terms of as, as, as designers, as people trying to make the world a better place. People trying to create better organizations is how do we get, you know, what are some ways to do that, to do all three of those at the same time.
Peter: Yeah. You either get all or nothing. You, you…, I talked to companies that either are all independent autonomous teams, working kind of essentially in isolation from each other and maybe doing good work in very small areas, but then when you bring it together, it’s a mess. Or you get this push to a over-engineered top-down or, you know, coordination and orchestration, but then the teams don’t feel like– the teams are, are simply being told what to do. They don’t feel like they have agency and that centralized planning doesn’t actually understand what’s necessary at all the little leafs, all those little end points.
Tim: Yeah. And, and it creates all these artifacts for, for the customer that the customer doesn’t understand why they’re doing such a stupid way. I’ll tell you right now, it’s because they spend all their time doing PowerPoint updates or it’s because they didn’t spend any time doing updates with the other teams.
So this team didn’t know that team was doing it or it’s because the leader just kept telling them what to do. And they could just kept doing that. So you can see it in the customer experience. And it’s so frustrating. It seems like such a simple thing once it hits the customer, but it’s very complicated behind that.
And I, I think it’s a very exciting place to see new models emerging. I don’t know what those models are.
Peter: I haven’t seen them yet, but if anybody listening to this…
Tim: I was hoping maybe they were in your book, Peter.
Okay.
Peter: Not yet. Not yet. Version two.
Tim: Next book.
Jesse: Peter, do you have something to announce today?
The importance of shared purpose
Peter: Sadly, no. Um,um, I want to get back to this theme of change. So, so you, you mentioned the challenges of changing the ceiling and working with those leaders and, and, and helping them figure out change. I’m wondering a little bit about organizational change and, and circling back around to the work that you’ve done, recognizing that not all …that we’ll, we will never have enough designers to do all the design work needed. How do we help in the case of a health care concern, right? How do we help, the people making policy plans or how do we help nurses and how do we help the folks doing intake? Or how do we help all those folks embrace design as, as a mindset and maybe some light set of practices in their work?
And I’m wondering what, if any change you saw in that regard on, on that part of your effort at Kaiser to, to get people, get more people more comfortable with these designerly like practices, right? We’ve seen a lot of corporations, try to take on design thinking, do it at scale, it gets its flavor of the month.
It, it, it works for a year and then two years later, no, one’s doing those things again. People vaguely remember that there was this thing called design thinking, and it’s just like nothing happened. And I’m wondering if you were party to anything that felt more lasting in terms of the kind of change, with, with that type of effort.
Tim: I would say yes, though not yet at scale. The challenge is to get it at scale, and what it’s making me think of is what we’re talking about a little while ago about the interaction between ceilings of people, process and purpose. So if I want to work with a bunch of frontline people at the call center, or nurses, or physicians, or who, whoever, you know, or, or, you know, developers, and I’m just jumping in to say, here’s some process stuff, we’re going to use this process, especially if I’ve, you know, if they don’t know me, like why would I, why would I ever expect that to be successful?
So there is something about finding a foothold and at Kaiser, the foothold was always purpose. So as I alluded to this before, because of the way Kaiser is structured, I think that that has enabled a, a lasting culture that really, really cares about Kaiser’s members. Really cares about the patients.
And you’ll see this in… it doesn’t have to be in a healthcare organization, caring about its patients. You know, you’ll see this in a software company that totally cares about its users or a grocery store that really cares about the shoppers. So the first piece is to align around the shared purpose and you cannot have any successful change of any kind if you don’t have something about shared purpose Bevan was also really, really strong on that.
Now it could be that you have a shared purpose, but it hasn’t been articulated well yet, okay. Kaiser Permanente, a really amazing thing happened through the marketing department several years ago when the, the, the Thrive campaign, thrive marketing and advertising came, came out, came out because what happened was people said, oh, trying to help people thrive, as opposed to trying to give people the correct surgery without errors, or trying to give them the right blood testing, or give them, you know, immunizations. They– they’ve, they suddenly coalesced around something that they already had, but didn’t have words for it. “Was off– what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,’ it was, we are here to help these people thrive.
And by getting that language, then now I can go to a bunch of call center agents who have difficult, grueling, low paid jobs, and I can align with them that we are all trying to do the same thing here. If I haven’t and um– and that that’s the first step to doing some design work with them. The second thing is if I’m trying to do design work with them, and they’re just coming off of a 12 hour shift where someone, where some, you know, foreman was standing over them watching to make sure they coded every interaction correctly and then, you know, corrected them, and dinged them because their calls were too long and blah blah, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I’m trying to do design work with them, not going to work.
There’s a people ceiling there. So you have to get– the people have to be treated a certain way. You know, you have to get to some level of people being treated decently before they’re in shape to do design work with you.
And, you know, and in many places, in my, in my world, they, they were getting to that place. They were in that place. They’re moving toward that place. And those became greater opportunities, even if it was like, you know, they’re, you know, it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough now that I can actually think about it. Or in some cases we did things where we, w- we had buy, buy in from leadership. We could pull people out of their daily grind enough, that it was actually a break from that, for them to get, for them to do some design work. But if you’re just trying to throw it on top of everything else that they’re supposed to do, and then, you know, at the end of your, at the end of every day of your five day design sprint, they have to go in and do four hours of work to catch up with the emails that they missed during the day, we’re not going to do very effective design work.
So I really think all those things fit together. Start with what’s, what’s our shared purpose. You make sure they’re treated well enough to have some energy, to have skin in the game. And then, then it becomes all about process. Then, then you get into all, you know, what, for me is the fun stuff about co-design process and you know how to bring out the best in them.
And how do you help them feel like,how do you help them realize just how much expertise they have and how do you not only respect their ideas, but, you know, help them grow and nurture those ideas and flesh them out. And how do you give them some confidence that something’s actually going to happen from this, so that’ll, that it’ll be implemented afterwards. And then how do you do the thing that you, Peter, and I will never do, but that fortunately there are many more people in the world who are much better than you and I, this which is stick with it and still be there two and a half years later, you know, and, and that gets to, you know, how do you get the leaders to understand not just the words that are needed, but the actions and the structures that are needed, so this thing is going to keep going, so that it’s baked– so that design thinking is baked, not just into a five day design sprint, but design thinking is baked into the structure of how we do project management and how we, you know, do performance measurement and how we do budgeting and how, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Jesse: I feel like inherent in so much of what you’re saying here is the ability to root out your natural allies in an organization and rally them to the cause and bring them in and bring them in around you. What recommendations do you have for folks to find their allies within the organization?
Tim: Oh boy. Well, the first thing is to watch the YouTube video, “How to start a movement,” which is really fun TED talk. And the, the main point out of that is that the first le– the people, the first leaders of a movement tend to, just like early innovators, tend to think that more is essential than what really is. So I have this idea for a new product. I’m going to make this new kind of shoe box. It’s going to change how shoes are stored and delivered. And I, and I’m trying to get the entire world now to buy into this new shoe box. And I think that the co– you know, and it’s it, it’s blue, it’s a certain color of a certain shade of blue, you know, and it’s, and it’s, it’s, it’s measured in centimeters rather than inches, which is so important because of how shoe si–, blah, blah, blah.
And I’m going to think that so many things about the shoe box that are critical. When really it’s just these two things, you know, it’s the material it’s made out of and it’s that it’s oval. Those are the only two things. Same thing with a movement. I think we need– I’m trying to do a movement now to turn this entire software development structure into agile.
And I think that it means that we have to use, you know, this tool for tracking all of our–see how long I’ve been out? I can’t even remember what the tools are the– and what do they call, what are the tasks? What are the tasks called? None of this. See, I think, I, I think I’ve, I’ve, it’s, I’m trying to drive agile.
We have to use this tool every, you know, every time we have a retrospective, it needs to follow this exact methodology and the, the, the what’s the agile leader person called? The…
Peter: I– Scrum master.
Jesse: Yeah.
Tim: Let me tell you, it feels… for those of you who have not yet retired, it feels great to To have forgotten the word scrum master in just 18 months. I’d be like I’m I’m, I’m I’m really rocking retirement. No, I hadn’t thought that it was wrong last January.
Peter: But you probably know you could probably distinguish between four or five different types of mulch.
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. But my point here is that if I’m trying to find those allies, I don’t need to find allies who agree with me in every detail. I need…and my shared purpose needs to be pretty high level. So that’s the first step to finding an ally. So if I’m like, if I’m trying to do to drive to user centricity, I’m, like, looking for people who really care about the user experience.
I’m not looking for, to, for people who call it human-centered design versus calling it innovation, innovation versus calling it CX, like whatever. I’m looking for people who really care about the customer. So go up a level to that. And then the second piece, which is just basic to any design work is, don’t get all people who are like me.
And so the people who I know best will probably be the people who are closest to me, who– people who think the most like me, know the same things as me. And so I have to find people who are not like me. I just have to find people like w- whether, whether, you know, across all aspects, whether it’s, you know, work background, cultural background, gender identity, work experience, personal hobbies, approach to project management, methodologies, the, the diversity there just becomes critical.
And since I’m really bad at that, because I don’t like to meet new people, it’s hard. And I’d rather stay safe with the people who are like me. That means that I need to hang out with people like Peter. I don’t know you well enough, Jesse, but you’re probably more like this, too. Peter, like people who will walk into any room and start talking to somebody they don’t know and be okay with that.
So I, you know, and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve intentionally recruited people onto my teams who are just really good at, you know, I remember a woman who just, who just moved on from the team that I was part of. It was her, I, I, had this whole orientation plan for, for our first two weeks. And we got into the sec, you know, the day five, and it was time for me to start telling, okay, now I need you to really need to set up conversations. And I’ve got a list of 15 people that I want you to just reach out, to, to get to know. And went to these 15 people, 10 of them, she had already, you know, gone for a walk with them, had lunch. She had just found them on her own.
So I, since I don’t do this to myself, I need people on my team who will, who will constantly be interacting with people who they aren’t working with on a project right now.
Jesse: So It’s almost recruiting evangelists for the cause.
Tim: Yes, it’s recruiting evangelists. And it’s importantly also recruiting listeners as those people are go– they’re going to be hearing things that I’m not hearing and it’s, it’s, it’s it’s evangelists and it’s influencers because if you’re going to make a change, especially a change that involves, changing we’re, you know, thoughts, words, actions of, of leaders, you need a whole network of influencers to come at this from a wide variety of angles. I need to find that, that link between someone I can influence and the person who I have no relationship with, I’m trying, if I’m trying to influence uh, a VP or a CEO who I don’t really know, I need to find somebody who I can ask, you know, what does Betty really care about? You know, when she wakes up in the morning morning, what is she excited about? What she worried about, what drives her nuts? I need that information. And then I need to know, and who has Betty’s ear? And it’s sometimes it’s her boss. And sometimes it’s this person that she plays tennis with and like, oh, Betty plays tennis with Rick. Oh, well, you know, Jesse knows Rick and, and I know Jesse, you know, so it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s politics. It’s absolutely politics. That is politics for a good cause. And it, you can call it politics or you can call it relationship building and networking.
Yeah. But it’s gotta be
Peter: We talk a lot about relationship.
Tim: Yeah. Yeah.
Peter: I wanted to ask you a question. Kind of rooted in the fact that you were, were at Kaiser for 30 years, which is uncommon… it’s it’s I, you know, it’s like being on a sports team, your entire career, like no one does that anymore either.
Right. Everyone’s always moving around. Yeah, we’ll see with Steph, uh, and I’m wondering how intentional your career choices were, how… the degree to which you fell into them. I’m asking because you might not have listened to our prior conversation was with a friend of Jesse’s and mine, Abby Covert, who made a choice to kind of remove herself from the kind of typical employment game and is now focused– she’s independent, she’s a writer. She’s made a choice to make a lot less money, but to do what she loves. And I suspect you were given opportunities to be an executive that you might’ve turned down because that wasn’t what you wanted or something that like, how did you, you know, figure out your path forward and what was, what were the, what were the decision points and the, and the influences and just, how did you arrive kind of at, at, at where you landed and now you’re retired, which is also a choice.
Um, I’m just kinda curious. Yeah. What, what w- what led to those decisions in, in your career path?
Tim: Boy, I might have more perspective on that in another year and a half.
Peter: Were you ever a striver? Were you ambitious or did– were you someone who just always found themselves in a situation like, I guess this is what I’m doing now?
Tim: Well, it’s not, certainly not the first and not quite the second. I do want to clear up that nobody ever wanted me to be an executive. Nobody ever offered me a position as an executive. I think that they, they knew better than that. And had they offered it, I would not have taken it. It just, just too much trouble, too much of a certain kind of responsibility, too much HR bullshit, et cetera, et cetera.
That said, I’ve always, just asked what’s the next step. And you know, I– I don’t know that I’ve, there may have been times when I thought about my own position more than a year out, but mostly not. Mostly, I’m like, where do I want to be a year from now? And I never interviewed for a– I’ve never taken– in the last 35 years, I never took a job that I interviewed for. So I always started, I started as a temporary secretary and turned that into being a you know, office manager turned that into being a network administrator and database manager, and then turned that into being a technology prognosticator, which then turned into e-health stuff, right.
And which then turned into UX. So it was always starting by being as competent as I possibly could be at my current job, as I was saying before, really starting with that and then having relationships with interesting people and then asking myself, what’s my purpose? So it really, I mean, for me, it really resonates.
I don’t know if it resonates for anybody else, but for me that has really worked. I’m going to be good at my job. I’m going to get together with people and get people to respect me and know people and enjoy working with them. And then I’m going to ask, what do I want? And I personally, I know it’s probably, you know, very, almost certainly a function of my privilege in that, you know, I always, we weren’t rich growing up, but we always had meals and we always had a roof.
There was never a doubt about that. If there was, my parents didn’t let us know. So I, you know, that privilege puts me in a position where I wasn’t concerned about that. So that got me to a place where it’s like, well, what’s really important to me right now. And at one point what was really important and what I was really learning about, what I really loved, was learning DBase3. And how do you, how do you program a database so that it’ll spit out the address labels you want. At one point, that was just really, really interesting to me. It wasn’t part of my job, but that’s what I did, right.
So always, you know, and another point, what was really interesting to me was um, uh, user experience and user experience methodologies and baking that into development methodologies.
And so that, wasn’t my job, but that’s what I did. And then, you know, you get to a point where, you know, I frequently, I would go to my boss and say, “Hey, I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m doing a different job than you hired me to do. And by the way, this job gets… the job I’m doing now should be paid better than the job that I was doing before.” But my, my, my path has always been, do my current job well, and then start doing my next job.
Jesse: So now you have moved on to your next job, the job of being retired.
Tim: I have moved on to my next job. Yup.
I think it’s it’s still evolving as it goes. I’ll be really curious to find out what my perspective on it is in another year and a half, because honestly I’ve been doing more about, poring into my new life in the woods in Vermont than I have been kind of poring over my, my, my work life. I will say that I feel, I feel a lot of pride in having stuck with something for so long. And the long, in the long view, you can really see progress. And in the short view, progress can be so, so frustrating. And the other piece of perspective is really using the leadership ceiling construct as an explanation.
You know, we’re, all of us, I think who are… all of us who are at all introspective and reflective about our lives are trying to make sense of what happened and what didn’t happen. How come, I never got that thing going, how come that didn’t work? How come that project that I just put my entire, well, how come that fell apart two years later, how come I never got off the ground? And the leadership ceiling has really helped me understand it, not just because, and I want to make clear, not just because, oh, you know, every time I got squashed, it was because of a leader, but it’s also because looking back and saying, you know what? I approached that situation with an inadequate assessment of where the leadership ceiling was, or invalid assumptions about what was important to the leaders so that I was ineffective at influencing them. So it’s really helped me make sense of when things worked and when things didn’t work, which things did I, where did I do things that got me where I was trying to go? And where did I do things that were, that were less effective for me?
Jesse: Fantastic, Tim. Thank you so much. This has been great.
Peter: Yes. Thank you.
Tim: My pleasure.
Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s @peterme and I’m @jjg. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on Apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find us too.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
27: Choose Yourself—Making up your career path as you go (ft. Abby Covert)
Mar 20, 2022
Transcript
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Together: And we’re finding our way
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show information architect and author Abby Covert joins us. We’ll hear about her journey from consulting to in-house and back out again, what she’s learned along the way about burnout and work-life balance and her forthcoming book on the power of diagrams as tools for thinking.
Peter: Abby, Jesse, and I asked you here, actually, your involvement in this conversation, unbeknownst to yourself started about a year and a half ago. Well, it was, it was, it was, it was after you wrote, I choose me and Jesse and I were recording the podcast back in those– at that time. But then we ended up taking a year- long hiatus and we never got around to asking you.
So it’s now a year- plus later and you’re here. And just to make it clear for anyone listening, there was a post you wrote called, “I choose me” that talked about your kind of journey as a, I’m trying to think of the right way to frame it, journey as a practitioner, journey as a professional, trying to figure out your space within corporations and within organizations and what you learned and what you took away from that. And it resonates with a lot of the conversations that Jesse and I had had, both between ourselves, and others that had been on that we talked to in the kind of year prior. So it’s great to have you here to now finally talk about it.
Well, I guess just to kind of ground ourselves, we don’t, you don’t need to do a recapitulation of the piece, but I’m kind of curious what spurred it for you? Why, why write that? Why put that out there? What were you, what was, what was the demon that you were trying to unleash or let go of that, that got you to, I mean, there’s like 3000 words or 4,000 words…
Abby: Yeah,
Peter: It’s not short. So what was that process like?
Abby: So I think it really came down to needing to close a chapter and open a new one. And I took that really literally. Like I just, I really needed to move on from a period of time where I had very much been in flux. And my position in that company was very in flux. My relationship with myself was very in flux.
I was moving across the country. I was trying to get pregnant. Like there was just so many things going on in my life that I had sort of lost the love of writing along the way. Like I did a lot of writing as a part of my job at Etsy, but ultimately I wasn’t writing for myself anymore. And I felt like in the days after I, I left, which that piece came out about 10 days after I left, I kind of locked myself in my office and just went to town on it.
I just really needed to write the story for myself. And then I happened to be teaching a– and one of the, like people who asked questions at the end of the workshop, like thanked me for being authentic about my experience with something they had asked me about. And that was the push, that was the push that was like, okay, I’m actually going to, like, make this a piece that goes out into the world.
And isn’t just for me, ’cause I would say 80% of what I write never sees the light of day. But that piece felt like it…
Peter: So, you originally just wrote that almost like a diary entry or journal entry, just something for you to process what you thought. I see.
Abby: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And then once I knew that I was going to share it, that’s where the like drawing out of specific lessons came from and like kind of formulating it into more of like a piece for others.
But yeah, no that started from, I just have a really strong journaling practice. So I create a lot of words is whether or not I use them for other people is sort of up to the context. So yeah, that, that piece really it meant a lot to me. To sort of like put a final point on something that was very ambiguous for myself and for my team as well.
But also for like people that don’t know me that well, but know me a little bit, like, it just seemed like, okay, we’re in the middle of this, like, global catastrophe, you’re at the super staff senior level. You just had a kid, what’s happening? Like where, what are you doing? You know, like what’s the story there.
And it was a really easy way for me to kind of get that out in my own words so that people could kind of take it as they would. And I got a lot of feedback from, from folks saying that it was a really helpful thing to hear and that my experience very much reflected other people’s so yeah.
Happy to, happy to be that model, I guess.
Peter: I remember blogging.
Abby: Yeah,
Do you Peter, do you remember blogging?
Jesse: Never heard of it.
So you find yourself in this circumstance where you were going through a lot of transition, a lot of change. But I get the sense that something was changing inside of you as well in this. What was changing about your view of yourself, your relationship to your career, your, your relationship to the world in this time that you were trying to capture.
Abby: Oh man, I’m going to put it real simple. I was a workaholic. It’s not the only -aholic that I was. And I am deeply in recovery from that at this point. For the first 10 years of my career, as an IA, I burned at both ends. And I wasn’t taking care of myself, like not even a little bit. And as I started to make the decision to start a family and bring another person into the world, I knew that that wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to be as a parent.
And yeah, I started to clean myself. And in that process, I realized that a lot of the way that I was practicing, the way that I spoke about IA, the sort of attitude that I had about it was very much tied to my self-esteem and the way that I felt about myself and and the workaholism was all just the place to hide it.
You know, just if I work really, really hard, no one will notice that I also don’t know what the fuck is going on around here, just like everybody else. So yeah, I would say that’s the biggest thing is I like consciously reduced my working hours. That was like the first big decision was, as an independent consultant, can I do way fewer hours and still make enough money that I can live?
And that became a really interesting challenge for me. I had a couple- year period where I like heavily focused on time as sort of a material in my life. Because I, I figured that was the, that was the way forward. That was the thing that I had, was I had the time, I, you know, I wasn’t committed to raising a family yet. I was free. I lived in New York City and could do what I wanted with my 24 hours. And I really used that to figure out like, what do I actually want to do? And writing my first book came out of that. Like I stopped burning both ends for other people, and I continued to burn at both ends for myself.
So it was sort of like, step one, learn that when you remove other people, all your problems are still there. Step two: actually deal with yourself. So yeah, why did I write a book called How to Make Sense of any Mess? Spoiler alert! I was the mess, you know, I was the one that I fun and that book, like, I, it did it, it made sense of my mess.
And yeah, that’s, that’s kind of how we got to where we are now.
Jesse: And so you have, as part of this, you made the choice to step away. So I guess you, as, did you choose to step away from a full-time in-house role in order to create this space for yourself? Or was it the other way around that having stepped away, you discovered the potential there for you.
Abby: I think that all of the work I had done on myself still did not keep me from recognizing until it was very, very late in the burnout cycle. That something was very bad for me, in terms of my position. I had a lot of factors that had nothing to do with the actual output of my role, that was the emotional weight of that job and that organization.
And that was all kind of mixed up in the emotional weight of everything that was going on in, in 2020. So I think ultimately, I needed the skills I had already learned about myself and this tendency to put other people first to put the work above my, my own needs. I needed that skillset to finally recognize it.
But ultimately like I needed– I hired a coach to help me to leave that job. Because that was a huge decision for me to sort of like jump into this expansive, just space for myself to figure out what was next, instead of go find another job and jump to the next thing, which was my tendency before.
So yeah, it was a lot of, a lot of careful preparation that could not keep it from still being a bit of a firestorm at the end. So it was, yeah, it was a fun, dramatic moment in the arc of my life, for sure.
Peter: I’m wondering what it’s meant for you to put, to do what can appear selfish in terms of putting yourself first, but doing it… well, in what appears to put yourself first in order that you can actually show up for others again, but in a way that you want to. And I’m wondering kind of how you, how, how you’ve navigated that.
Abby: Oh gosh. Well, okay. First of all, the word selfish being a bad thing, I think is like a cultural problem. I also think that selfless is a real cultural problem. So there’s something about being like full of oneself that like I’m getting comfortable with. And I feel like, um, making decisions for your own interests is not selfish.
It’s not a way to please everybody, that’s for damn sure, but it’s not actually selfish. What’s selfish is hiding what you actually want from other people and slowly resenting them because you’re not getting what you want. That’s selfish. So I don’t know. I feel like there’s there’s a lot to unpack there.
You know, like I want to be full of myself. I want to make decisions in my life that are full of what myself wants and if that makes it so I can’t have a corporate job, I’m very fortunate to be able to make that decision that like, yup, that’s what it means right now. And so that’s what I’m doing right now.
Peter: Yeah, I think I’ve made a similar decision. I’ve been independent for the last three years at Jesse’s made a similar decision in his independence for the last couple of years, but I still work with a lot of design leaders who clearly feel beholden to a context that they’ve almost found themselves in.
” Oh, I can’t leave this organization. I’ve hired all. these people. They need me,” or like, “but I don’t like my job, but I don’t know what else would I would do, but I have to earn money for my family, but I have…” like, and many of these concerns are legitimate, but there’s a navigating that selfish to selflessness is a challenge I mean, clearly, that everyone has.
Abby: Yeah, those are all valid challenges, all challenges that you have to really like go deep inside of yourself about the stories you’re telling yourself about all of those things. Like, okay, you hired a team and now you don’t like the job running that team. Is it really, like, you, just by hiring those people, you’ve made a decision for your whole life that you’re going to be in a job you don’t like, like if you were to survey those people about what they wanted for their friend who was in that position, would those people give that friend that advice? Probably not. If they were in that position, would they give themselves that advice? Would their loved ones? Probably not. So, yeah. I feel like in a lot of cases, it’s, it’s stories that we’re telling ourselves that we really have to confront.
I mean, there’s, there’s valid reasons to stay in a job that you don’t like. There’s also a lot of people that are in jobs they don’t like, because they don’t think that they have the opportunity to leave. They’re either not presented with the opportunity or they’re not ready to look for it. Or they’ve been looking and they haven’t found the right thing yet. You know, those are all valid paths. It’s just which one are you?
Jesse: Yeah. I mean, I think that there is a certain amount of inertia that sets in. It’s definitely something… so, in my leadership coaching work, now I’m working with people one-on-one where they’re navigating exactly this territory of the trade-offs between where I am now, where I want to be, can I create that here? Or do I need to go somewhere else that’s going to serve me? How do I know where I draw those lines?
And I think it can be especially challenging for people in design because I think that there’s often this mindset that is this kind of service orientation. Like we do what we do in the service to users. We do what we do in service to the business. We’re always in the service in some way. And we forget that, you know, to your earlier point, sometimes the best way to be in service to others is to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves, so we can show up in our full capacity. And part of that means not getting into situations where we’re so constrained by our organizational context, that we can’t be our best selves as leaders.
And then, you know, that just is a cascade effect across the organization.
Abby: Yeah. So that whole, like saying about how you have to put on your mask before you can help other people put on their mask. Like that’s, that’s what it comes down to. Like if you’re, if you’re not meeting your own intentions and your own self in terms of your needs, you’re not really going to be able to do that for other people.
You might be able to pretend for a really long time, yeah. And also, I mean, for me, the older I got, the less I could hold on to that, you know, like I felt like in my twenties I really could burn it at both ends and pack the hours on and not sleep and skip all the stuff. And as I got older, I couldn’t do that anymore.
It’s a, it’s a natural forcing function of like, oh crap. I have to choose. I have to choose turns out. I’m not invincible. We’re all gonna die one day. God dang it. So yeah, you got to choose. And I chose me. That’s just that…
Peter: We’ll just keep hitting that chord every, every 10 to 15 minutes. We’ll we’ll…
Abby: …like a politician. That’s my, that’s my line. That’s my [garbled].
Jesse: But this wasn’t your first time going independent, right? You’d been an independent consultant before, hadn’t you?
Abby: Yeah, no, this was, I had been independent for years. Etsy was my last client. Well, it was a kind of like a, a typical, a woman meets company story. You know, she goes in as a consultant and there’s so many messes that they hire her full time. And it was, it was exactly that. I mean, I, I made sense of some of the most amazing messes of my career at Etsy, and I really enjoyed my time there.
Things just got weird at the end, you know, I became the edge case, so that’s never good, yeah.
Peter: I’m going to go… I’m here we go. We’re going in. We’re going into your time…
Abby: …do it.
Peter: So you were brought in as an information architect kind of explicitly,
Abby: Yes.
Peter: You were the only person with that title, with that role, kind of set, set, some set the stage for what it means for Abby Covert, the, the a traveling Troubadour of IA to land within an organization and, and plant your roots., And do I in this one place, what, what was that experience?
Abby: Yeah. So so like back then a big part of my business was going in and doing overall IA assessments of organizations of all shapes and sizes. And so I went in to do that for Etsy. There was 10 large-scale recommendations that came out of that. And one of them was that they had such a large information architecture problem set that they really needed somebody to own that space in house.
And that was a proposal that was for in-house without it kind of being attached to me. But once it started to be discussed that this was really going to be a job, they were really gonna hire somebody to do it. That kind of coincided with my own life choices of sort of wanting to slow down and go somewhere and really focus on collaboration with a team.
And so, yeah, kind of like all the forces came together. Once I was there the big decision was like, what level do I exist at when there are no other people that do what I do. There was no manager who did what I did, although I was brought in by Alex Wright, who is an information architect of his past, so there was a lot of, you know, understanding of that skillset. So when I got there, I was brought in at a staff level. I was basically like a, like an IA ninja for hire within the organization. So instead of doing consulting projects with clients externally, I just did them from my seat in Melbourne, full-time for Etsy. Teams from all over the organization that were coming to me and asking me for help on discreet projects. And that’s sort of how the whole thing started. After that, I got the attention of the executive team for some of my work, and I was invited to pitch a larger project, which was figuring out how Etsy could look at the voice of the customer that was coming from a whole lot of different channels.
And so I was put it into a seat of sort of like project leading that because it was a really large initiative. It was like take all of these different customer service and research and social media, all these channels from all over the world, and put them into a single list of issues that the business faced and then create a rubric that would allow us to organize that list by something meaningful for the business. So…
Peter: So that’s something internally focused. That’s that’s a tool for, for executives on a dashboard…
Abby: Yeah. Yeah, it was actually a really big Google spreadsheet. That’s the big fanciness of it. But that was a, that was really like a, a banner project for me because it, it took the idea of information architecture outside of just the interface layer internally. And so more and more, I was asked to consult on things that were about the information architecture of the business.
So I was brought onto the team that renovated the help center which “we now have one” was kind of like the, the headline there. Also like the, the tool set for sellers was something that I had quite a hand in. So yeah, it was just sort of like collecting projects that were on the end-user side for both buyers and sellers, but also trying to focus that same effort internally to kind of raise the information architecture competency, but also to use the tools to get real work done which the voice of the customer program, I think ended up being pretty cool.
Peter: should I just keep going Jesse? ‘Cause I…
Jesse: Well, I mean, so the next question is, so that all of that sounds great, but what happened next?
Abby: Well, I mean, next I, I went and got myself pregnant and was really excited about that. Went through the whole pregnancy, doing my thing. And then I went out for six months, which is a blessing. I was very fortunate to work for one of the companies in the US that does that. One of the few companies, I would say, in the US that gives that kind of benefit.
I would say the downside of such a benefit is that it was an, an organization that literally reinvents itself every three months. So I missed two cycles, is basically what happened. And when you come back into an organization with a title that no one has, a track record that proves that you need promotion, but no one has any kind of understanding of what that might mean or where to put you, it starts to create some really uncomfortable conversations.
So when I first got back, I had sort of like the greatest experience you could possibly have, which is not having a boss and being told you could work on anything you want. It turns out that’s terrible because nobody’s actually responsible for you. No one is actually green-lighting what you’re doing with your time. And so you’re just sort of like floating out there, hoping that you’re creating enough value, that you’re not going to get attention in a negative way, which is not a way to go to work day after day. So I attached myself really quickly to a project that I saw a lot of value in from an IA standpoint.
And I was able to function as an IA on that project for the first six months. And then there was a position opened up through my work on that project for a product manager. And knowing that the jobs title conversation was getting very fraught, um, I decided to take a rotation as a product manager and use my IA skills to help stand up a team.
And so I stood up a team of 10 engineers. I think it was by the time I left and we were doing a pretty high value project. But it also was like the moment that I realized that while I was a really good PM because of my IA skills, it was absolutely not the job I wanted to have. I didn’t get to actually do the work in a deep way.
I could only do it at a very high level kind of like hand-wavy way. And that wasn’t ultimately going to be fulfilling for me. So as the cycles were like kind of the, the driver of all things, there was an end of a cycle coming up with a quarter ending. And I just decided to do my team the service of saying, Hey, you should plan the next quarter without me, because I don’t think I’m going to make it.
And yeah, that was, that’s what happened.
Peter: I want to, I want to rewind,
Abby: Sure.
Peter: Something I’m trying to better understand, which is, why does it matter that the job title thing was a problem? Right? Like, like you are a capable practitioner, you know the value you were bringing. It sounded like a lot of the other people within the organization understood the value that you could deliver them.
It had gotten a little confused during your maternity leave when, when some of the sands shifted, but who gives a shit what your title is…
Abby: oh
Peter: …as long as you’re doing good work and getting well paid?
Abby: Yeah. You know, I really wanted that to be the case. And I think that for like four years, I was cool with that. I was sorta like, all right, every meeting that I go into, I’m going to have to explain what an information architect is, why I’m the only one, what it is that I do and how I’m going to be able to help you.
And I need to be able to do that in the first three and a half minutes, because look, we only got half an hour meeting and we actually have to do work in that. What I found though, Peter, is that after a few years of doing that two things happened. One, I got fucking jaded. I was just, like, so sick of explaining what I do to every single person I encounter, sometimes the same person again, that I’d have to explain it to because like cycles have changed.
They have a new boss, we’re on a new project, whatever it is. I just got, I got sick of it. I just got really, really jaded. And then two, I got really down on myself. Like I started to believe that maybe information architecture is not a real thing. Like maybe the job I do, isn’t a real thing that’s necessary.
And I’m gonna tell you right now, that’s not the case. And it especially was not the case on the teams that I was at at Etsy, but it is what my self-esteem started to tell me, because you can only go so long, fighting that hard, to be recognized for the value that you have, before you get burnt out.
And so it was just like the culmination of those two things, the jaded and the self-esteem crash. It just put me into like a, I went from being a, A-player to an, A-player that was like not wanting to get out of bed. And that’s not cool. That’s, that’s not the way that good work gets done. That’s not the way that information architecture has a chance in that organization.
So, yeah, it was, it was time for a change. So you’re you’re right though. I mean like, why does it matter that nobody knows what your job title is and that you make money. That’s cool. Like, why not just do that? And I think that works for some time, but there’s a limit,
Peter: yeah, it feels…
Abby: limit.
Peter: …it feels to me, or if I were to diagnose this, like there, there, there, there was a, failure might be too strong of a word, but the one that comes to mind, a failure, a failure of leadership, right? Your leadership didn’t quite make the, like, they made enough of a space to bring you in and they recognized the value that you could deliver, but then they didn’t continue that work to maintain that space, to inform others to weave you into their practices.
Like one of the questions I had ahead of time is like, because. And I’m sure you talk to people about this with some frequency, like what is the relationship between good IA practice and standard issue product design as as practiced in most of these companies, right?
And as I was thinking about your time there, I found myself wondering, like, how did you integrate with whatever the existing practices and processes were? But it sounds like that would have it, it sounds like it kept being one-off one-off one-off one-off it never got systematized. And, and that strikes me as like a failure. There’s some failure of recognizing that kind of ongoing sustainable value. And that, that to me is a failure of leadership to encourage it. If it’s, if it is delivering value…
Abby: right…
Peter: …to the business, which it sounds like it was.
Abby: Yeah. No. And I think that, like, if you had asked me if we’d had this conversation right after I wrote that piece, I think I would agree with you that this was like a big failure of leadership. But there’s actually, I think reflecting on it more recently, I think the part that I wrote in there about the Ship of Theseus is actually really important in this.
So the Ship of Theseus is like, if you replace all of the pieces of a ship over time, is it the same ship? Like, can you still call it the same ship? Etsy was very much like that from a leadership perspective. So like, when you say that it was a failure of leadership, who exactly is the leader that was failing because the people who were leading me at every discreet moment were part of a chain.
And the handoffs between those people were not handled great, but when are they, you know, it’s like individual people, leaving roles is almost always messy, especially if they’re leaving the organization. So I see it less as a failure of leadership and more a failure of being able to see real people in organizations as people, and understand that their resilience as people in those organizations actually do demand attention long-term that doesn’t tie to just one person staying the same in the org.
Like, I mean, we all need like a fairy godmother who is going to shepherd us through the organization. And none of us seem to get that, you know, if you’re lucky you’re going to get a manager that you’re gonna have for some time, but in my experience, not just at Etsy, but also with clients that I worked with before, that management in this industry changes over very quickly.
And so it’s really difficult, especially when you throw something like a six-month leave in the middle of it for that chain to not break. So, yeah, I don’t, I don’t have any, I don’t have any blame for any specific leaders and it’s hard for me to sort of like call it a failure of leadership since that’s like an individual person skill, as opposed to like the skill of the org.
So I think, I think it’s something else. It’s something it’s a failure of the organization, for sure. And like, in your specialty at org design, a big old failure, they just, I was like a hot potato on the org charts. Like throw her over there. She will make value, throw her over there. She makes bullion fries.
Like it was just, you know, I, and I was, I was very valuable in every position that I found myself in, but it was, I think in the piece I described it as one of my last managers there said that it was all invisible work. It’s all work that is very valued by the people that you’re doing the work for in the org, but when it gets to the, like, who gets promoted, who gets the understanding of like value in the org at that like larger place that all comes down to a totally different set of criteria that I was not properly hooked into. Simply because I did not have a job title that I shared with other people.
So, and, and like, to your point about product design, product designers were facing similar challenges to the challenges that I was facing, in that there was level issues. There was, you know, career path issues that needed to be ironed out, but there was more than one of them to consider. And so it was easier for patterns to be deduced. It was easier for reuse to be a thing in preparing those folks. You couldn’t do that with a single person.
So yeah, I, I just, I became the sore thumb in the taxonomy.
Jesse: I think that your position as an outlier in the organization is really important and it’s, and especially in smaller organizations, there are a lot of people in design roles who are the only person who does what they do and are constantly having to explain it to people and so forth. I don’t want to diminish that aspect of it, but there’s another thing here that I think is also really important, which is you’re right: it may not be a failure on any individual leader’s part, but every organization has a leadership. It has expectations of how a leader is going to show up no matter who you are. It doesn’t matter how new you are to the organization. Those expectations are going to be present. How effectively the organization and culture rates its leaders with its values of leadership is a sort of a systemic failure of leadership, I think.
And one of those breakdown points, and I have heard this from women over and over again, who did not even take six months off, was that you are, you go on family leave. You are out of sight, out of mind. And importantly, no effort is made on the other end to reintegrate you to bring you back into the organization.
And for women leaders, especially if you’ve had your leadership responsibilities sort of doled out to other people, it can be very difficult to step back in and sort of reassert the value that you bring. And again, I think that does come back to the, to the culture of leadership and the willingness of leadership to take responsibility and take active steps to reintegrate people back into the organization when they’d been on leave like that.
But I’m curious about something else because you, you, you said you had stepped into a product management role for a little while, and I’m curious about how that changed your perspective on, or maybe your relationships with product managers after that.
Abby: Oh yeah, yeah, no, I actually, when I wrote the proposal to do a, we call it a rotation because I wasn’t ready to let go of my job title fully. I just, I wanted to do another job for a little while and see what that was like. So we wrote this rotation and one of the points in the proposal was that I wanted to have more empathy for product managers in my own practice, but also as a senior leader on the design team, I wanted to bring that product manager empathy and perspective into the design community at Etsy, because there was definitely, you know, an, an us versus them thing, a-brewin’ between product and design, as is quite common.
And yeah, that was actually a really great experience for me. I mean, I mostly learned that your incentives change really quickly. Your incentive changes from as an IA, my incentive is very much clarity. Like increasing clarity is the sort of highest level metric. However you want to measure that.
But as a PM, it was much different. It wasn’t about clarity. It was definitely about like serving a lot of different needs and doing it in a certain timeframe, which is a completely different of yeah. Then when I had been working with and I think I, I thought that I could shield myself from that switch or at least kind of like maintain both incentives in mind at the same time.
But that doesn’t happen because you have the same number of hours in the day as every other PM in that org, and there’s a lot of work to actually get done. And so yeah, very quickly I started to notice like, oh wow, I’m making decisions on a completely different set of criteria now. And that was really great.
That was, I mean, I knew for years working with product people that, that they were doing that, but I had never had to do it myself. And once I had to do it myself, I had a whole new understanding of sort of the, the emotional baggage that comes along with owning something like that in an org is different than the emotional baggage of helping people make sense of the thing they own.
So yeah, I, I learned that I don’t want to be a product manager and that product manager should be better at IA ’cause, it’s a neat skill set to, to knit into an already very valuable space.
Jesse: How is the emotional baggage different for product managers? How’s their relationship to the problem different?
Abby: There’s a lot of times, at least in my experience, there’s a lot of times where the data and the kind of wants of the organization, like the data outside of the org and the data inside the org are not necessarily in alignment. And your gut really is the way that you have to go forward and taking those chances and making those bets, it’s something that I was really comfortable advising other people on doing, but having to do it yourself, like having to decide, oh, I’m going to ship that feature to these millions of users and have this thing happen potentially as a result.
Like that was just a different scale of responsibility than I’ve ever had in any of my roles. Because like I said, the person I’m usually working for is the one making those calls. I’m just an input. As we think of you take it on the RACI ind– index, I was never responsible. You know, I was always just the, an informant.
And yeah, I didn’t, I did not like it in that capital R place. No, not at all.
Jesse: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because I’ve heard people from both sides, from both the design side and the product management side, advocate for product management coming from more of a, of a, of a user-oriented user-centered lens. And I wonder, given your experiences, what advice would you have for product managers who want to, like, juice up their practice with a little bit more user-centeredness.
Abby: I mean, I hate to be self-serving with this question, but I kind of would tell them to make more diagrams. Like I found in my time at Etsy as a product manager, that like, that was the thing that made people be like, oh my gosh, she knows what she’s talking about. She has a picture of the thing and a designer didn’t have to make it for her.
Like that was very valuable. And I think a lot of product managers shy away from those kinds of methods because they belong to design or they belong to research. But I’ve, I’ve actually found a lot of value in using diagrammatic technique to, to get strategy across. And to really like anchor people on where we’re going with this whole thing.
I mean, honestly, make more Gantt charts and who, who, who are running these projects with no project plans? Like this is, this is just a thing that needs to be taken care of. It’s like, we have tools for this and they’re not just useful for making interfaces for users. They’re also useful for making projects that move people through complex challenges.
So yeah. Use ’em.
Peter: Well, I mean, it, it, that resonates…
Abby: To like the people on your team are your users as a product manager. And I don’t, I don’t think enough people kind of make that leap. You know, you have so many different users that you have to keep in mind. You have to keep the end-users in mind, obviously, but you also have to keep your, your team as your users, ’cause you’re, you’re leading them to make the thing. You’re not actually making the thing yourself. And that’s, that’s shared with IA, that, that part I was very comfortable with. But yeah, I think, I think that would be my biggest advice is like, know that your team members are your users and make them more pictures, yeah.
Peter: Well, I gave a talk a few years ago, at the last time we could all be together, IA conference about how I couldn’t have written, or the way I wrote Org Design for Design Orgs was it, was very much rested on a foundation of information architecture. And in my org design work, my ability to diagram these things gets me farther along than others, just because I can, like, I’m not afraid of sketching out kind of how it might, how it might operate in a, in a visual way.
And that that’s like this power we have that others could probably have, and this is probably what you’ve been writing about. But, but which for some reason many others are kind of hesitant to use. I had a question I wanted to go back to. I found myself, I’m trying to think just how idiosyncratic you are and it might be highly, right?
But, but the way…
Abby: high. Yeah.
Peter: Right, right. The, ’cause…
Jesse: poor Abby.
Peter: Well…
Abby: I prefer for, for the record, I prefer persnickety.
Peter: Well, no, I mean, by idiosyncratic, not persnickety, not like curmudgeonly or anything like that, what I mean is “a case of one,” right? And as I started applying my org brain to this stuff, you know, w- w- what you realize is that organizations are made of people and people are all cases of one. And that however separate or unique you felt within that structure at Etsy, there, there was probably a lens you could take where it’s like, oh, you’re just part of this team, but no one quite knew how to, how to approach it from that angle.
They were approaching it with whatever their assumption was. And then there was this thing that we’ve added to it, as opposed to, oh, if we incorporate the kinds of things that Abby is doing into this larger stew there’s another way of thinking about it, that you feel that you’re just part of the team and it just flows.
But my thought, I found myself wondering if you. So, engineering also has an architecture function and probably has some weirdos over there who, who find themselves doing the kind of work that not everyone else in engineering is doing, but is valuable and systemic in ways that you are doing work that is valuable and systemic.
And I’m wondering if you had connections with anybody like that at Etsy and what you saw about them as professionals that you either were like, why like, couldn’t I, couldn’t I be set up in my org or in my context, more like they’re set up in theirs. Was there a model there that, that you could learn from, or did you try, or just kind of curious what you saw with that?
Abby: Yeah, no, there was a lot of learning coming from the engineering org. So when I, when I got to Etsy the level that I had and the title that I had was not seen in design yet. So having staff in design had not happened. And so all of the specification about that level actually started from engineering and engineering is like the sort of like backbone of that culture.
So they have a really, really detailed way of looking at career paths and leveling. And that was something that through my entire time at Etsy, there was sort of like this want to have a similar version in design. But to be honest, it always started to fall down in that specialist versus generalist conversation of like, if you are a product designer at Etsy, but you don’t have full stack skills, what is your position?
Like, are you a specialist? Do you get traded only on to teams that have that particular need? Like how is that all kind of going to come together? And so the team that I found myself on by the time I left was the structured data team. Ripe with engineers. And you know, we didn’t even have a designer until a month before I left that project.
So it was very much kind of like finding people that were very close to my own kind. I wouldn’t call them weirdos. I call them very cool people that care about data. But it was a really messy environment where like I could, I could give them a perspective that was an additional layer on top of the perspective they already had about a pretty big move they wanted to make from a data standpoint, from traditional taxonomies to more of an ontology type of system for, for product understanding. And so there was a lot of opportunities for me to see, like, how do architects work when it is on the engineering side? And what I found was the difference really was about people understanding what they do.
People understand what a data architect does. They understand because they literally own these tables full of data that other people need to do their jobs. ‘ cause, I didn’t have that concretized thing that I own, that became like, well, what do you do if you can’t own words. That’s not a job. You can’t just own all structures. That’s not a job.
So in a culture that is very much about ownership, engineers had very clear ownership and I didn’t. Where product design actually has pretty clear ownership. They own the interface. Sometimes they even build it depending on who the product designer is. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot to learn from engineers about how to support specialty through education of the rest of the company, but also about like making it tangible, like taking the thing that somebody does and, and making it clear in a tangible way.
So people see it as something they can apply to their project or their thinking, which I was doing just like one person at a time over and over again. As opposed to like something taken from the organization. And I don’t know if it’s necessary, you know, like I think that another part of the problem space is that a lot of IA work is done by people of different functions.
So what is the challenge that comes along that is too big for an IA that is also playing product designer or product manager? That, that became a real question because it’s not like the product projects don’t have me on it don’t have IA, they all have IA. It’s just whether or not they have a need for a specialist to segment that function away from product design or partner with product design to get it done.
And I did projects in both of those camps where it’s sort of like more of a handoff because of resourcing or more of a collaboration. And, you know, both of them worked for what they were supposed to. But it’s still confusing.
Peter: I mean, think we have a model for that, pretty robust model for that, with UX research. And I dunno how it was practiced at Etsy, right? But I, I, I operate under the assumption that product designers should be doing research. But that you have, and so, so then that leads to the question, well, What do UX researchers do? And they’re doing meatier, heavier, broader, deeper research pro- programs that you– a designer, wouldn’t make sense for them to do. And those researchers are also enabling designers and others in doing better research.
Abby: Yeah, very similar..
Jesse: I think the difference is that research, researchers don’t touch shipping product. You know, you can set up huge elaborate research programs and they can go off on their own and be their own thing. Whereas an IA, if they’re going to have any impact at all, they need to be in the weeds. They need to be in your data structures, which means that they need to be more integrated with your delivery.
Abby: Yeah. Yeah. And I ended up doing a lot of my own research at Etsy but also helping to upskill the user research team on IA methods within research. I mean, card sorts, treejack, that kind of thing was just very foreign. At that point they hadn’t used that, that sort of thing.
Peter: Was there ever a thought– so I’m getting into problem solving, and you can tell me that that’s not a constructive place to be– but was there a thought that instead of Abby, the staff information architect, it’s Abby, the staff designer with an information architecture specialty where Abby, as I’m assuming staff designers, like when I, when I help companies figure out this role in other organizations, a staff or, or principal designer is still leading a design initiative, often has other designers who don’t report to them, but kind of that they direct, right? And so that it feels like you were this kind of, this, this isotope kind of bouncing around, but could you not have been a team lead on an IA heavy project?
Abby: yeah, no, absolutely. I could have been. Yeah, no, if I, I…
Peter: But that, that that didn’t come up…
Abby: The, the actual structuring of that was talked…. It was talked about in terms of like, you know, at some point or in the next year or so. And meanwhile, you know, my professional identity and self-esteem was hanging in the balance, so yeah.
That, that could have happened. But there’s also reasons I didn’t stick around to see if it would happen. A lot, a lot of like, yeah, great idea. We’ll get to that. But also knowing that like, yeah, I was like this hot potato, but I was a very small potato in the potato farm. Do you know what I mean?
There’s a lot of big, bigger things to figure out. So, so…
Jesse: A small, very hot potato.
Peter: And the ship of Theseus. I mean, I. I need to, I now need to write a blog post about the Ship of Theseus in, in, in this context because it’s, it’s, it’s real. And it means that people get lost in the cracks, right? You there’s, the people fall through. And if there’s not a good structure in place to kind of buoy them along while all that swirl is happening, you get a lot of, I’m sure you were not the only person who fell through the cracks in, in this instance.
And that’s I mean, it, it, it unpacks a whole set of issues. I was on a a conversation recently on a Twitter space where we were talking about design levels. And I said that… there was a, I don’t know, it wasn’t an argument or a debate, but there’s kind of two perspectives when it comes to an employee’s professional development. To what degree is that the manager’s responsibility, because the manager really understands the lay of the land. They understand this, the, the opportunities. They’re more experienced, they’ve been in the industry longer, et cetera. So what role do they have in guiding a direct report in navigating that and to what, to, what degree is that the responsibility of the employee?
Like, because, as your experience was, managers change, people change, like w- we need to empower the individuals to be able to make their call and, and figure out how to make their, put their paths forward. The problem with that is if we do it in most companies, at this point, we would just be, we would have all these, you know, fairly novice designers, just struggling, because there’s not a clear understanding of what that possibility is.
And that’s why you need managers, but there’s this…
Abby: yeah…
Peter: …there’s a brokenness here that we need to address, I think, somewhat kind of systemically, institutionally across companies, in- industry-wide, figuring out, how do we help people get a sense of what it means to develop themselves professionally, absent of maybe you got lucky and you got a really good manager, but most people don’t have that.
And so how do we, how do we encourage that kind of growth or support that kind of growth?
Abby: I also find myself having to tell quite a number of mid-level people that there’s two different ladders, one for management, and one for individual contribution, and that they need to pick one at different points of their career, but that like those ladders are not stacked on top of each other. It’s not like you get all the way through the individual contributor ladder, and then you start on the manager ladder. Good managers are actually not made that way. They’re… bad managers are made that way, where you get so senior in a practitioner’s sense, you start managing other practitioners. I mean, I did that for several years and I mean, I’m… for anybody listening that, that reported to me, I’m so sorry, because it just was not my skillset. I was totally set up to fail. And I feel like a lot of managers in the design space, are in exactly that position, which makes sense, because you know, is a an industry that was inventing itself as it was also making huge staffing promises to global corporations.
So yeah, we got a whole lot of designers in seats that are really talented designers, but are kind of shitty managers. And then you got newer managers learning from those people. I mean, it’s, it is a systemic problem. It absolutely is. I think it was interesting, Peter, when you were listing off, you know, what managers have, you listed a whole bunch of stuff that I’ve never had a manager that had. More experience than me that, okay, cool, I want to have that. I really want to have that lead. Somebody who has more experience doing what I do hire me and be my manager, instead of telling me that I’m my own manager and to check in with you every two weeks. You know, I mean, this is getting me hot under the collar, but seriously, like I think the management lack in this industry, yeah, it destroys people. I’ve seen many junior designers leave our industry because they can’t find a manager that can treat them like a human being. So…
Jesse: Well, and it drives people out of
Abby: too.
I’d love to see that fixed. Yeah.
Jesse: Yeah. I mean, it burns out the managers too, because to your point, they are not prepared for what they’re getting into. They have not been supported by their organizations in growing skill sets other than design. And even those skillsets usually they’ve had to invest in developing on their own.
So…
Abby: I think about imposter syndrome with, with people in those positions. ‘Cause it’s, it’s one of those unique positions where you’re like, oh no, no, no, that’s not a syndrome. You are in fact an imposter. You do not know how [garbled] that you, yeah. Oh, you’re not sleeping well at night? I completely understand that. We’ve ,we’ve all had friends in those positions, I’m sure. Over the years of just like, how the heck did I get myself in this position where I’m in charge of people instead of doing the thing I’m good at? I think that it can very easily happen.
Jesse: Yeah. So again, I think that it comes back to, for the, for the people that I coach, it comes back to like, can you change your circumstances, can you find new ones and in your case, you went out and you created new circumstances for yourself as an independent consultant once more. How is that different now for you? Different from how you were a consultant before? What, what, how has your practice evolved? Where are you now?
Abby: Well, I’m going to burst the bubble. Since I left Etsy I have done zero hours of consulting.
Jesse: Oh, wow. Okay. Nevermind then.
Abby: No, I am. I am not on the market as a consultant. If, if you were to reach out to me in my inbox and offered me a project, most likely I’m going to, I’m going to tell you, I got people I can send you to. No, I, I left, and remembered I was a writer and I started writing and I fell in love with what I was writing and I kept writing. And so, yeah, we’re, we’re 16 months into me deciding I’m a writer now…
Peter: How do you make money?
Abby: How do I make money? I make money off of the book that I wrote because of royalties, I make money from giving talks for people that want to hear what I have to say about information architecture, or more recently diagrams.
I have an Etsy shop where I sell templates of deliverables that I’ve found to be useful and thought leadership pieces that I find of value.
Peter: How does your income compare as an independent to what it was?
Abby: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Nothing.
Peter: Okay. so you are much happier, I take it, but far… Poor, far less well compensated.
Abby: Yes, far less well compensated is a great way to put it. Yeah. I defined what enough is. And I realized that the enough I was getting from the six-figure income of a high level job in tech was destroying my creative spirit and not giving me the life I wanted. So yeah. I make a whole lot less money and I…
Peter: so you’re a shitty capitalist.
Abby: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no I, yeah.
Peter: I mean you’re
Abby: Am I a shitty capitalist?
Peter: not, that’s probably not right.
Abby: I’m a really good capitalist, Peter. Right? I’ve
Peter: mean, you all of your means of production. You are.
Abby: I’ve reduced my hours and, and you know, I can, I can pay my bills, but I don’t have to go to work every day. Like what, what is bad about this capitalist situation? Absolutely nothing. So.
Jesse: So you’ve been writing about diagrams.
Abby: Yeah, I’m writing a whole book about diagramming. It’s very exciting. It’s such a skillset that has gotten done a disservice. I feel like as industries have kind of piled on the use of it, but no one is sort of zooming out and going like, Hey guys, this is a thing that we all do. Maybe we should like, talk about that and have a way that we learn to do that thing.
So yeah, I’m writing a book that I hope, hope is that way.
Peter: There’s books, like Back of the Napkin and the work of Dan roam. There’s what Christina Wodtke did a, I forget what she calls her book…
Jesse: Pencil Me In.
Peter: Pencil Me In. Oh, that’s right. That’s right. There’s, you know, th- th- there’s been attempts at li– or Linda Barry, right, has about kind of, how do we, how do we get, yeah, I, I’m wondering kind of two questions that might be related.
Hopefully they are. Like, what is your angle, kind of distinct maybe from, from any of the ones we’ve said. And I’m curious how, if, if you’ve seen, context shift over the last couple of years, particularly as companies are starting to adopt things like these digital whiteboards, your Miros and Murals, and even Figmas as a Figjams or whatever, like, like, is it, and is that aligned with kind of what you’re like this, this breath of, of energy or no, that’s a mixed metaphor, but this, this burst of energy that you have with, with writing and, and, and your approach, is it tied to some context change that we are a part of? Anyway, yeah.
Abby: Yeah, so I mean, my specific bent on diagramming is that I want to teach people to diagram. I don’t want to talk about diagrams. I don’t want to point at pretty diagrams. I don’t want to make historical references to diagrams that have done specific jobs in the past. Although I have done that in examples here and there throughout the book as interesting fodder but I really want to focus on teaching people how to diagram.
Specifically when they’re not coming from a place of learning it somewhere else, along the way. So like all of us came through information architecture. I learned to diagram from something that Jesse wrote. And so I feel like that’s, that’s something that like, we all had that gift. And I don’t know if this happens to you all, but like diagramming is my superpower.
Like not just in my professional life, but like in my life life, like people who are my friends outside of design have been in awe of diagrammatic abilities. And it’s not like big fancy diagrams. This is like little like lowercase D diagram, you know, like a little, a little sketch that you make on a piece of paper to explain something or something you jump up on the whiteboard to do.
But when I think about my students, there is this kind of like, I’m not a designer, I’m not a visual person diagramming isn’t for me. And I think books like Christina’s gave them a vocabulary of like hand drawn elements that they can use to bust out of that kind of void of not thinking they have the creative ability.
But I think that the thing that we still lack is a process that you can give to a person that they can grok all of the different pieces of making a diagram and also know when the thing is good and when it’s done and understanding that that doesn’t mean it’s pretty. And that doesn’t mean that it’s fancy or that it’s like heavily visually designed, which I think is kind of like a mistake that a lot of people make.
So yeah, I’m, I’m hoping that this is a book that actually teaches people how to diagram. It’s, it’s very much a textbook. It has a lot of really good stories of how diagrams have helped real people, which I think is also really interesting. But I think the, the commonality to your second point about like the current tool set of diagramming is that we rely a lot on templates, but the templates are not the stories that are actually out there that are blowing people’s minds about what diagrams can do.
It’s when you take the journey map and you decide to use it in this other way, that it’s interesting. It’s not necessarily always like following the letter of the law for the diagram sake or the template sake, but that is what I see a lot of in terms of thought leadership of like, here is a template of a diagram or here’s a canvas.
Here’s how you fill out this canvas. And I think that that’s super useful. Like, I think that’s useful the way that like weeknight dinner recipes are super useful, but there are times where you’re trying to do something that is unique to your circumstance and finding the template is a lot less important than just like starting the diagram.
And so that’s the main point I’m trying to get across to folks, is like diagram your own way. And see all these templates as more, you know, a box of tools that you can go to if you have easy problems, but know that like the right way is often somewhere between those recipes. So, yeah, it takes like more of a, a rigor to the craft of it as like a thing, as opposed to like, I know how to make this one kind of diagram and I just make it over and over and over again, which I see a lot of people do, you know, people were like, I learned how to make a journey diagram at a conference talk and now I make them all the time.
There’s other diagrams that might be more helpful. There’s also other things they could do to the journey that would make it maybe more helpful that they don’t know because they’ve only done it to the letter of the template that they were taught. So, yeah, that’s, that’s the fun of my life right now that and Google document comments.
Peter: Yeah, I know I it’s, as you’re saying this, like I’m, like, the diagrams that we did have in the book or that I have on my blog posts and or that I use in my talks. And I am both sheepish about them, because I’m not a good drawer and I’m not a good illustrator,
Peter: graphic designer, but I consider kind of my diagramming, like my version of outsider art, like it’s just kind of from my own brain, as opposed to like any, any, any, any grounding in how to do this stuff, but it seems to connect and resonate with an audience.
People seem to appreciate it.
Abby: Well, there’s diagrams in all of our minds, you know, all day long, we have diagrams in our minds that we’re just not putting out there and people are drawing them all the time with their hands. When they’re talking about things too. I mean, Peter, you have drawn several diagrams in this conversation where you’re like, I’ve got this thing over here and I’ve got this thing over here and there.
And it’s like, that’s a diagram. It’s whether or not you choose to get it out of your head and share it with the rest of us that sort of the… so. In the, in the book, I had to define the word diagram and that was probably the most challenging part to kind of get it started. And what I came up with was that a diagram is “a visual representation that’s helpful to someone.” And sometimes that someone is you. And I think that, like, by that definition, there’s a lot of work in this world that’s done by diagrams. But is there a lot of sharing of insights across that? Not really. We’re pretty locked up on those templates and those process standards and such.
So yeah, I’m going to unlock a little bit of that, I hope.
Jesse: Very exciting. I love the idea of using your newfound freedom to empower others with new tools.
Abby: It’s it’s the most fun and hardest thing I’ve ever done, so, yeah.
Peter: What, is there timeline for when we’ll see the fruits of your labor?
Abby: So one of the, one of the like big creative decisions, I’ll call it, that I made, was to not define a release date for this book. Because I did that my first time around and I was off by a month and I really beat myself up about it. I don’t think anybody gave a crap really, but I did. And I’ve been thinking a lot about kind of what we’ve gone through as a world and what I’ve personally been through over the last couple of years.
And like, I don’t want to set up a situation where I’m pushing myself to get this thing out by a certain time. So yeah, I- I’ve given myself permission to not know when my book will be done. But man, that Gantt chart is getting smaller and smaller every day. Like holy cow, we’re.
Peter: Like the horizon line’s coming closer and…
Abby: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s written, it’s sitting here on my desk, so I mean, it’s, it’s a book. It’s just… it needs to be, it needs to be line edited further.
It needs to be designed. It needs to be indexed, which is the most fun part. I cannot wait. I’m currently writing a lexicon for the back of the book. We’re working on the back matter. I hired a friend of mine, who’s a research librarian, Jenny Benevento, to write an academic paper for this book about the historical discourse on diagramming over time. And so we’re currently going through edits on that.
So yeah, this is a beefier book than the first book. And I’m excited about that part of it. I keep adding things to it because I’m my own publisher, so why not? So we’ll see, we’ll see, when it comes out, we’ll see how big it is. “I’ll let you know,” is the main marketing message.
You’re right. I’m a terrible capitalist. Peter. This is the worst marketing. So, when is this book we’re really excited about coming out? When can we give you our money? I have no idea. I’ll let you know.
Peter: But in the meantime, people should be following you at abbycovert.com and are there other means by which people that you encourage social media stalking?
Abby: I am fine with social media stalking, but I’m very boring on the social media. I just don’t, I don’t go there. I don’t post there. I have a mailing list that I’ve been sending out once a month about my process and what I’m thinking about and what I’m working on. So yeah, I would say that’s the number one thing if you want to stay in touch with my work and also support my my efforts, that’s the way to do it. That’s the metric that I’m paying the most attention to at the moment is…
Peter: …is a mailing list, subscribers.
Abby: And how many people care when I say something to my mailing list, once a month, is a really important number to me. Because I, I don’t know. I feel like there’s a, there’s a gap between what social media was able to provide to me as a content creator maybe five, seven years ago, and what it can provide now. And so I’m, I’m kind of grappling with what that, that gap is and how to fill it. So email, let’s go back to email everybody, but everybody likes more emails…
Peter: what’s your, what’s your ICQ?
Abby: It’s hardcore hybrid no it’s not…. That’s not true. You may…
Jesse: Thank you so much. This has been great.
Abby: This was awesome. Thank you for inviting me. This was really fun. I’m glad y’all are back to this. Cool.
Jesse: Thank you. We’re glad to.
Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s @peterme and I’m @jjg. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com.
You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design, where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of Finding Our Way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on Apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find.
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
26: Chief Design Officers and Design Executive Effectiveness (ft. Gordon Ching)
Mar 12, 2022
Transcript
¶This transcript is auto-generated. We try to clean it up, but quirks remain.
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz. ¶
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, ¶
Together: And we’re finding our way… ¶
Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. ¶
Jesse: On today’s show, recently graduated master’s student Gordon Ching joins us to share some of the highlights of his thesis work, in which he studied a number of Chief Design Officers and other senior design executives. We talk about the challenges faced by the most senior design leaders, the career experiences that made them successful and the skills that enable them to take on new challenges.
Peter: With us today is Gordon Ching, Canadian design strategist and management thinker based in San Francisco. He’s currently leading the design operations at Fast and is a founder of something called the Design Executive Council, which I want to hear more about. He graduated… just graduated with a master’s degree in design management from the Savannah College of Art and Design where he wrote a thesis on Chief Design Officers and design executive effectiveness. Try to say, “design executive effectiveness,” three times fast. ¶
Gordon: Hey. ¶
Peter: Well, and I’m the one who brought Gordon into the conversation today. He and I met months ago now on Twitter, when I found out he was doing this research on “What does it mean to be a Chief Design Officer and design executive?” I slid into his DMs and said, “Dude, you got to talk to me.” We had a conversation and then since that time we’ve stayed in touch because we’re both strangely obsessed with this role of design leadership, design executives, being a design executive. Is there actually such a thing as a Chief Design Officer? Is that just branding?
And so we, we continued to compare notes as we, as we go along. So, I think, honestly, where we want to start, Gordon, is just like, Who are you? And how did you end up getting a master’s degree in studying what does it mean to be a design executive? ¶
Gordon: How I got into this was, in the heat of the pandemic when we’re all locked at home, and I was sitting there twiddling my thumbs in my day job, wondering, I need to do something with this time. I want to learn something new. And I also wanted to tap into something I’m really passionate about. And the question here I was asking myself is just how do we make creativity work at scale. ¶
And that eventually led me to discovering, “Hey, there’s roles out there, there are people out there, who are thinking about this every day”, but there’s also programs out there that are looking at this question mark. And I love saying the word “creativity,” because I don’t think it’s just about design. It’s also about marketing. It’s also about writing. It’s all forms of creativity. And I think that the role of designers a lot of times play the central role in shepherding creativity within an organization.
So, I discovered the program at SCAD and was really delighted to see that there was an actual program focusing more on the design management angle of design and not just purely from an interaction standpoint. ¶
So that’s how I got into SCAD. And it’s just been an absolute pleasure to have met some wonderful professors there that have really been at the heart of design management before we were practicing, or at least I was practicing design. ¶
Peter: Right. I, I met one of your professors, I’m spacing on his name, but the sense I got is, through SCAD, you were able to connect kind of, not just with digital design leaders, which is the universe that Jesse and I are a part of, but you were able to connect with design leaders in marketing or physical products, like, what was the landscape of, you know, so you interviewed all these folks for this thesis, like who were you talking to, and how many, and what, what are some of the kind of attributes of, of these folks? Just, just so that, you know, the folks listening can get a sense of the shape of what it is we’re going to be talking about. ¶
Gordon: So I talked to folks, uh, it was really focused first and foremost on software. That was really my angle at first because I’m in Silicon Valley, I’m working in technology, and I knew digital design specifically was really taking a driving seat in shaping the future of the design. However, just by nature of talking to these design chiefs in software-focused companies, I also came across companies like AT&T, Logitech, folks that are outside the direct sphere of what we might go on in Silicon Valley. ¶
So that really helped me open my eyes because we’re not only talking about design from a pure digital lens, but also design companies that have a hardware angle, you know, spanning from creating computer products and electronics, to washing machines over at Electrolux. So, it’s quite a range of how creativity works at scale in different mediums and disciplines through design. ¶
So, a lot of this was thinking through creativity at scale and where are these people practicing such scale? So, the first rung of people that we really spoke to was from public companies, really large design organizations with shareholder responsibility. So, you’re thinking about design organizations that are hundreds of people, if not thousands. All the way down to more unicorn type startups, where you can be more design-centric from the very beginning.
So, it’s kind of two different questions of, What does it mean to drive design at a company where design perhaps was not there from the very beginning and has now scaled and become a legacy component of making design work, to companies that are design-first from the very beginning, and what does that look like if you were to do that from the very start, with a more blank canvas?
So that’s kind of the spread and we’re talking about. 16 different design executives representing public and private companies all at relatively large scales of design. And I think this group could represent some of the largest and most influential practitioners of our current generation. ¶
Jesse: So, what were those, you know, you talked about the, the breadth and the differences amongst all of these of all these different practitioners across all of these different fields, all these different leaders. What were some of the commonalities that you found among these leaders and the challenges that they faced?¶
Gordon: The number one was, everyone is still figuring it out. There was no textbook answer on just what we’re really doing here. But what was really interesting is because the language kind of shifts from person to person, as a researcher, I was really trying to tease out what are the patterns that we were seeing even though different languages were being used. ¶
And I think this is also where Peter also has a really interesting vantage point as a consultant, in being to see these variances but also patterns at the same time. So, one of the things I think I was really learning is there’s a very select group within the interview group that I think are at the forefront of what design leadership looks like and are really molding these new practices, new mindsets, new behaviors, and competencies of what it means to be an effective design leader at that level at the very frontier, almost like the tip of the iceberg. ¶
But there’s also folks who’ve been practicing for decades and they come also with a set of mental models of what they view as effective design leadership. So, we’re seeing some tension, actually, between what people view as effective design leadership, and the kind of two camps that I kind of saw, there was really one is leaning much heavier from a business-first angle. And, there’s another camp that I might argue is a little bit more legacy, which is taking a camp of, “We’re artists and creators first,” And we drive through that mind. So, you can see how these two forces are actually in many ways complementary but it depends also which of these camps they choose to use as the front-facing motives. ¶
Peter: I’m wondering. So, as you say, that I can imagine folks, kind of that older guard, leading through creativity, the folks who’ve been reading the Design Management Journal for the last 30 years, who, like, there’s I guess what I’m wondering is, like the, the context in which they’re operating, which is… which might be different from the context that you’re seeing from some of these more business-driven designers, right?
So, some of these folks who are a bit more legacy, in order to be a Chief Design Officer or a design executive for the last 25 years, you… that’s very rare, which means the company you’re working for was probably pretty strange to, to even kind of think that this was viable. And so what was it, was there anything you saw in terms of that, versus these more modern design leaders, where kind of now every big company realizes they need to have design executives, but they haven’t really shaped their, their company or culture necessarily to accommodate it. They’re just doing it because it’s now considered a standard, you know, if not standard practice, emerging practice. ¶
And I’m wondering if that, if those contexts, in which these Chief Design Officers were operating, what you saw in terms of, I don’t know, likelihood to succeed or, or the way that they lead kind of differing based on these different contexts. ¶
Gordon: I think one angle to think about is, is both from an angle of growth, time, and debt. And for companies who have existed a very long time without that kind of design leader at place, there’s a lot of administrative debt or political debt, organizational debt of just, how do you set up design to be effective and delivering at scale in those organizations. ¶
And those types of design leaders are a different… a different breed of design leaders who have to do different sets of responsibilities because they’re dealing with so much more debt within the organization versus organizations that might be more design native, who might not have that debt to carry on, as they’re performing as a design executive. ¶
So, both of these worlds will ask, have, very different responsibilities and the mindset of how they operate. And I think one, one example I think about is, I know we’ve used Apple as an icon for the longest time, and it’s kind of been the textbook reference point for what design leadership looks like. ¶
However, most companies are just not set up that way. It’s almost like a unicorn of its own. And I actually think it’s not healthy, particularly to use that exact example across the whole industry, because all these other companies are not shaped like that, are not competing like that. So, I think there’s a whole separation to start thinking about just what are the different layers of cultures that you’re navigating as a design executive and how do you match the conditions in which you need to perform to be effective in making design happen? ¶
Jesse: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because I think that a lot of what makes Apple a unique example in that way is really the relationship that existed between Ive and Jobs in the product development process. That tight partnership between Jobs who was effectively a head of product as CEO of that company, and Jobs and Ive kind of working in these tight creative cycles, especially early in concept development. Whereas a lot of organizations are just not set up to include design at that level. In part, you know, as you’re pointing out, it’s, it’s an organizational challenge, but also comes back to the relationships between the leaders and the credibility that those leaders have been able to gain, in order to earn themselves a C-level title. And so I’m curious about your thoughts about the C-level title and the weight that that bears and whether every organization is even necessarily ready for a C-level design person. ¶
Gordon: I think what’s interesting about that comment, is I think about when you really dissect the meaning behind the Chief Design Officer, both from a symbolic, but also from a, from a governance level, in an organization, a lot of these Chief Design Officer titles are actually quite symbolic, meaning they’re not actually directly in the, C-suite like a COO, a CFO, a CEO. ¶
They may not even be reporting to a CEO. The majority of Chief Design Officers that we see today are perhaps one degree or two degrees removed from the CEO directly. And rather they are representatives, figureheads, and the ultimate authority maker on design, but they still have some layers between the CEO. ¶
So that still shows there is some ways to go to thinking about design as an equal peer to other functions that are directly in C-suite because at this level, the design chief, and also it’s contingent on the relationships that they have on how they push through decisions on how they, you know, make something happen, and whether they have those resources to actually bring those things.
There’s a very small subset of Chief Design Officers who have a direct reporting line to the CEO and also actually interface with the board. And that demands a very different level of responsibilities of the Chief Design Officer and how much they are managing up versus how much are they managing downwards into the organization. ¶
So I think that’s a really important distinction because I think when we say Chief Design Officer, we can automatically assume it’s a C-level role. But I think as Peter has also highlighted in my conversation with him, is that you have CMOs, you have Chief Privacy Officers, you have Chief Legal Officers who might not sit at that level, but they are still representing the most senior authority figure on that function and decision-making. ¶
Peter: I’m curious though, as you, you mentioned, you did engage with a few of these Chief Design Officers who were legit C-suite members and that it felt like that job was significantly different, even from a design executive role, like a VP or SVP of design. What, what behaviors or activities or mindsets, what was the, that quantum leap from being a design executive to actually being a true Chief Design Officer?¶
Gordon: One thing I think about is, when you start to enter the C-suite, what are those duties in that world? Who are you really accountable to at that point? And I think about when you’re applying a, let’s say, a customer centric or design lens, let’s say in a board meeting, how does that actually unfold? What’s the type of language? What’s the type of financial literacy and business acumen that you need to exercise to even be credible in those spaces? Are you showing up to talk about craft or actually showing up to talk about trade-offs in business decision-making?
So, I think there’s a really important leap here where design chiefs have established a team that they trust to take care of a lot of the downwards responsibilities so that they can make time and effort to influence upwards at the highest levels of business decision making. ¶
And so I think there’s an important leap there of just from both a mindset level, but also, can you read financial statements? Can you understand how those decisions are made and how to work around that and actually push for your investment? So there is a definite leap there from both a skillset perspective. ¶
And I think what’s interesting for us as designers, as we’re not coming from any sort of training from an education standpoint, to learn how to do that stuff. So we almost have to do double duty to learn these skills and to adapt as we’re leading at the same time. So I think there’s a very prime and difficult challenge actually for design chiefs to make that jump, if you haven’t had those trainings and skills, ¶
Jesse: I work at now as a leadership coach and this kind of skills development is very much part of the conversations that I’m having with folks all the time. You mentioned that there were some of the leaders that you surveyed, who really represented what you described as the tip of the iceberg, the folks who were kind of at the forefront of, of practice and I’m wondering about their skills and what skills they might be bringing, that the folks who are not quite out there on the frontier, as you put it, might not yet have developed that they might need to develop if they want to be out there on that. ¶
Gordon: One of the areas I highlight is the word ownership. And how close is that executive to owning a business? So, one example of this is one of the Chief Design Officers I talked to. She owns a P&L responsibility. That’s quite rare. Most design leaders do not own a P&L responsibility. So I think in my head, what does it mean when a designer actually owns that? How much more accountability do they have under that decision-making scope and the type of influence that they can exert on the organization? So, when I think about that lens from a financial and accountability and ownership perspective, that’s one of the tips that we started to see.
Another tip that we’ve seen, I think is connected to that is understanding from a financial scope point of view. How are you influencing decision-making at the C-suite level when they’re reviewing these types of pieces of information that delve very deep into financial areas, but at the same time, what’s interesting is some Chief Design Officers have said, I’m almost like a spiritual or human counterweight to the more analytical function of executives.
So, you can see that there is a financial acumen part of some design chiefs that are at this tip of the spear. But at the same time, when you ask them, how are you evaluated on your effectiveness? A lot of it is still very subjective. A lot of it is seeking their unique opinions and points of view on also how they bring that customer centric mindset at the highest levels of the business. ¶
And to keep that customer mindset intact, even while decisions might be made from an analytical reasoning point of view. So, I think of it this, from this perspective where you’re not really letting go of design thinking as a mindset, rather you’re reinterpreting how to use that in a language that makes sense to executives in the C-suite. ¶
Jesse: This is interesting because I think one of the challenges that leaders are facing these days is the tendency to want to cast themselves in the role of user advocate or user defender or the voice of the user in, in decision-making and while as noble and well-intentioned as all of that is, it leads to UX leaders, design leaders, walking into the room and creating conflict that doesn’t need to be there, creating division that doesn’t need to be there. ¶
And so I’m curious about how this plays out for these high performing leaders that you studied, who do have to be that voice of advocacy, but also somehow you know, not create strife and division within the decision, I think. ¶
Gordon: I think what’s interesting about that, one is, I think about what is one of the key skills that these execs are utilizing to drive influence and change. And I think about, yes, there is that analytical part of their jobs that is now more forefront. But I also think about something very simple and human, which is how they involve these executives. ¶
One example I was given is sometimes it’s really hard to see the value of a given design change or something that happened in design, unless you see it and feel it. So what I find happening is that yes, there is that financial and analytical part of your job that has grown so much, but there’s this other part of the job that hasn’t really changed, which is how do you facilitate, how do you invite, how do you cooperate with people who may not be as familiar, but at the end of the day, they’re still human beings who can understand and explore. ¶
So, I see this playing out with folks at this altitude where they’re still exercising their facilitation skills, but perhaps in a way that is more friendly to an executive audience and keeping those objectives and targets in mind. So that, that was a really big surprise to me of seeing that kind of friendliness, building that trust, building that relationship, so that you can be almost like a yin and yang to your executive counterpart to bring in that customer point of view while keeping the context of the business in mind and not overtly, just purely focusing on the user, but keeping all those two facets in mind while you’re walking them through this experience in a facilitator. ¶
Peter: So many thoughts. So, so as, as these design leaders grow and they’re figuring out how to take the skills they have, like you just mentioned with facilitation and, and reshape it in that context, one thing I’m wondering about is, I guess there’s kind of two related questions I have.
How… so something that I hear posed is, well, How different is Design executive from any other executive, aren’t they just another executive? Why, why are we so focused on VP of design as something different than VP of marketing, VP of engineering, et cetera. And I think what you just addressed kind of answers one of those things, but something else that I’ve seen as well is people still don’t really understand design and all that it can deliver. ¶
And there continues to be an evangelism and education aspect, even at that highest level, which their peers don’t have to spend a lot of time doing. Their peers, that’s, there’s, there’s an assumption of the value of marketing and how it works and the value of engineering and sales and HR and how they operate. But they’re still not yet in most of these organizations an assumption of the value of design and an understanding of how it works.
And so I’m wondering, kind of, what you saw in terms of like, if that’s true, right? If, if, if the design leaders, you talked to still feel like they are having to evangelize it, or maybe when you get to that kind of level that they’re at, there is this recognition that, okay, we get it. You don’t have, because, because if you have to still make all that, if you still have to engage in all that effort in evangelizing design and educating folks, that’s time taken away from these other executive functions that we want these leaders to do, in terms of informing vision and strategy, the facilitation work you were talking about in terms of bringing people together as they think about solving problems. ¶
So I’m wondering just how you saw, yeah, how you, how you saw that in the conversations you had.¶
Gordon: What I saw was there’s a, I think there’s a definite sea change in corporate understanding and value of design as a discipline. We’ve seen that change, and that’s also why we’re seeing more designers at the table at the highest levels. However, the specifics of what they do, how they do it is still very mysterious. ¶
And so what I find is design executives, yes, they, they have to play that role, but someone said very clearly, “I like to show, not tell.” And I think there’s a very clear difference between those two exercises of how our taking the best of the work that’s occurring in your organization and demonstrating that and its links to business success, it’s links to cross-functional excellence across the board.
And I think about this because it’s like, there’s a lot of showing, but not telling. And I think the better you can tell, sorry, you need to do more showing, not telling because that raises the credibility and evidence of how design links to various aspects of business success. So, I think that importance has increased, but the specifics and the evidence has to continually be drummed up. So I think there is still that kind of theater exercise that’s going on, but more concretely and not just from a, from a, you know, “I’m just showing you how I’m just telling you how important design is, but rather I’m showing you directly how important design is.” ¶
Peter: And, and when they’re showing, when they’re showing, are they showing, “Here’s this thing that the team launched and it has evidently beautiful design and we should feel good about it,” or are they showing. Numbers and metrics and “Here’s this thing we launched and it downloads went down, went up by 48% or revenue was increased by 25%.” ¶
Like, what is the mechanism of showing? Is it showing results that feel quantified and, and in a spreadsheet? Or is it shown? Cause when I think of design and showing, I’m thinking, showing the work, showing the product, showing the reveal. So, so how, how does “show” work in this regard? ¶
Gordon: I think if you’re just showing it, that’s only one level of showing, I think you have to drill much deeper. So, an example I would think about is if, let’s say market share is a really important. How are you connecting the dots between the activities and investment in design with the objectives of the business, and basically building that bridge between potentially the mystery of what design is and what it does and the material impact it has on the business. ¶
So, I don’t think you were just walking into the room, showing an experience, but which can be felt at a human level, but to a business executive it’s like, how did this move the needle on these targets that we’ve set ourselves to for this quarter, for this year? What is the direct link between design? ¶
But I think what’s interesting here and you’ve highlighted this before is that design is only realized through collaboration. So, I don’t think it’s just designers, just showing just purely from a design point of view, but there’s a cross-functional effort. And I’ve heard many times over with these executives is that from a product-design-engineering standpoint, there’s oftentimes joint ownership of how this piece comes together to demonstrate the evidence for design’s impact across the function and across the business. ¶
Jesse: I’m curious because for so many organizations, all of this, the, the level of power and engagement and influence that design has as a function within the organization, all of that can feel really out of reach for a lot of organizations. I would say even most organizations probably because it, it’s not clear how to get from where they are to toward that vision. ¶
And I’m curious about some of those smaller scale stuff that you saw, that people who are working. Younger organizations, smaller teams who are still able to wield that influence without having to like build an empire to get there. I don’t know. Did I actually ask a question in there? I meant to, like, so, so it, it it’s like the, what’s the, what’s the what are some of the factors that come into play, that that are particular to working at a smaller scale in a smaller organization, on a younger team? ¶
Gordon: One direct example that I heard a couple of times actually at smaller companies, but also was reflected in larger companies, was shifting that mindset of being design-led versus experience-led. And this was a big shift in thinking through, hey, as design, we’re not just the total owners and the only owners of the end experience, rather as the design chief, I’m shepherding through multiple functions of how to really bring design excellence to life. ¶
And it’s changing this kind of mindset of being a little bit more territorial, to one that is actually much more facilitated in how you guide that end result. And so I saw this both in large and small companies have a mindset shift of rethinking your role and how you use that power and how that affects your peers and the trust they have in design and how they think about when to go to you, how much should they rely on you for? ¶
And so there’s this major mindset shift. I found that shifting that mindset from design to experience thinking allows the designer to even at a small company, think more cooperatively, think that any good design happens through collaboration. And you have to nail that because whether you’re a small company or a large company, if you can’t nail that collaboration piece, there’s not going to be any sort of quality product coming out of the train, right? And only going to get worse if you don’t master this skill early, because imagine now you’re dealing with thousands of stakeholders. It’s just going to blow up in your face. So I think that, that, that key piece on collaboration and just reframing how you think about how to exercise your role as a designer is really important on the result of the inexperience.¶
Jesse: I’m curious. Did you explore the backgrounds of these design leaders at all in terms of their career trajectories that brought them to design leadership? ¶
Gordon: I dug into a little bit, but it wasn’t like an extensive initiative. However, most of these folks that have this current generation of, of design executives are pretty much like they went to design school and ended up as a design executive and has held that for, for, for basically the track of their career. ¶
What I think we’re seeing though in the industry today though, is there’s a shift because of the open access to design education and much more roles available. We’re going to see a multidisciplinary mix like myself. I, I didn’t start in design. I started in marketing. So how does that shape the future of design leadership, when you start to have people from different functions enter into design and they can bring that acumen and language to help bridge design to other things. ¶
Peter: I’m wondering, even within design, something that, that comes up, you mentioned creativity earlier and I, and one of the challenges that I’ve had is, is the frame of the word “design,” because when you say “design” people have a sense of what they think it is, and it’s usually smaller than what it is that I’m trying to get at. ¶
Even creativity isn’t quite right, because I think about the role that user research, experience research plays in these functions. And I don’t want to suggest that researchers aren’t creative, but, but the, the role that they’re playing within this context is, is to inform, develop evidence, elucidate. ¶
And so I’m wondering what you saw from this leadership perspective, and I’m kind of thinking about it from this path perspective, just like, was there anything in terms of where you started that would presuppose or predict where you were ending up or is it really like folks are coming from anywhere and in, in this next generation could end up as that, that head of design. ¶
Let me say, let me be more specific. Like, I, I hear concern from folks who practice user research that they’re not ever going to get to be a Chief Design Officer. And it’s like, they’re not, they’re not sure how do they get to be that executive? Though, you know, we both know Kaaren Hanson, I’m, I’m currently working with her, and her background is she has a PhD in social science.
So, so some of these folks are there, but there seems to be this almost bias towards a certain kind of designer becoming a certain kind of design leader. And I’m wondering if, if that is a legacy that you’re seeing change in the conversations that you’ve had, ¶
Gordon: That’s a good question. It makes me wonder, is it so much more of the background of it individual to more so which disciplines hold the power to make those things happen and what they demand of that profile. So for example, we see design chiefs, but I think back then R & D used to be some sort of executive role up there, uh, what has happened. ¶
I’m not entirely sure. Do we see, ¶
Peter: You don’t hear about R & D much anymore. ¶
Gordon: So I think there’s kind of been a breakdown of these general business functions into more specialized routes and certain disciplines have had much more air time and weight around how to position themselves. So in some ways you can almost see it’s a, there’s a bit of jostling here. It’s actually not very clear of what is that? ¶
Is it a Chief Experience Officer and who would come from that? I don’t really know. But I do think that timelessness of the skill set of being able to think through at the basic level or respect of a function, what does it even mean to be an executive? What are those, then where does the layer of the functional and disciplinary area come in to intersect those executive skills? ¶
‘Cause I think sometimes we’re asking ourselves what makes a great design executive. I think the first question is what is a great executive, layered then with design. And when you cross those together, you start to see where does design differentiate versus any other function under still the umbrella of executive? I think that’s really important to think about. ¶
Jesse: And I would add to that, that even within design, you know, as you pointed out, there were a couple of different flavors of that, that you have people who hold more of the creative vision for a product who are like, they are the, their tastes and their judgment helps determine what ships and what doesn’t. Whereas you have a kind of design leader for whom their tastes and their judgment is not relevant to what ships or what doesn’t. They are there to build systems and processes for the delivery of solid creative work on an ongoing basis. And it’s that kind of aspect of it that they’ve really taken on. ¶
I would argue there’s a third type that is a more of a kind of mentorship-oriented leader that is more oriented around talent development within their organization as a, as a primary orientation. These are some of the patterns that I’ve seen. I’m curious about some of the patterns that you might have seen in the study as well, in terms of that orientation or stance that a leader takes. ¶
Gordon: I guess in some ways it could almost be a self-preservation exercise sometimes or either you’re looking at it from almost an assembly point of view of like the talent tree. Sometimes, you know, you might be, you might not be the most proficient designer who ends up as the design chief, and that happens because they trust you for another aspect of your skills and strength. ¶
However, if you don’t complement what you you’re lacking from a, from a function and also responsibility point of view, and to have those leaders with you, then you can fail to deliver the whole value proposition of design. So I think of it from that perspective, like, hey, as an individual, as an executive, you need to be super self-aware of strengths and weaknesses and those gaps, how to place people around you that fill those gaps. ¶
But I think to your question, though, it, you can see where the political and social part of this comes into play because not all the time, the most creative designer ends up in those seats. Actually, sometimes they do. ¶
Jesse: Right. ¶
Gordon: But you can see where the people and social aspect of the nature of executive jobs coming into play and how those roles get opened, how they hire, how they land, how they evaluate and who ends up in those roles and what they do to staff around those competencies that they may or may not have. ¶
Peter: Did you, I think about this a lot, and I’m wondering if you saw this pattern, like did Chief Design Officers tend to be more creative and so they staffed around themselves operational leadership and business leaders, or did they tend to be better executives? And so they had to staff around themselves, creative leaders and operations people. Like, was there any pattern, or, or is it kind of you know not enough data to discern any, any specific. ¶
Gordon: I don’t have a direct pattern on that, but what I can comment on is I think there’s an increasing pattern around operating models of how they staff those organizations. So when I see the, the kind of line of command within the design organization, what that looks like, and you’re starting to see who’s placed in those, and the, the types of disciplines that they hold. There is some pattern there, like the fact that we’re starting to see design operations as a right hand to the design chief to, to execute the vision. But at the same time, as Peter we talked about, is like, there’s also roles for super senior creative designers to hold a non-people management role. ¶
But I think it really depends, but I think the majority of design executives are not actually staffed as the hyper creative, you know, super creative kind of person. It’s actually more from a, a business angle of what they represent and they work with those creatives to continue to shape the product and design direction. ¶
But I think because given the nature of an executive role and how much it deals with managing upwards, also from a financial and governance standpoint, there isn’t a lot of time to actually exercise that creative muscle from a creative director, but more so from a framework and governance perspective of you infuse the organization with your, your vision of design. ¶
Peter: Were you, so, so you mentioned earlier, as, as, as you’re saying this, I was thinking back on, you know, the folks who have these roles, didn’t go to school for them, to put to put it mildly. And I’m wondering what you saw in terms of how folks developed these skills. Did they just learn on the job? Was it sink or swim? ¶
Did you tend to, did you get a sense that they were, that they got executive MBAs? That they spent their week at Harvard learning what it means to be a, an executive? Did, did they work at companies that were supporting them along the way? Like any, anything that emerged there, just in terms of how these folks figured out what the job was? ¶
Gordon: That’s a great question. I did not see any MBA types. What I did see though, was each one of them being just hyper curious, hyper sharp individuals who are always asking the question of How do I improve? How do I change, how do I evolve? And I think that is such an important lesson that I found with these executives is in that role, that the amount of change you have to go through is so constant and so frequent that you have to think through just how do I continue to grow myself? ¶
Because if your company has gone from a hundred designers to 500 designers, and if you’re remaining in the executive job, your scope and your mindset and your skills are completely different. And there was one thing that really stuck out to me was if you look at when you first start your design career, you’re faced with the challenge of how to think beyond oneself. ¶
And as you go higher and higher into the kind hierarchy, every design executive I talked to they’re like, well, now the challenge is how to not lose oneself. And so you get this flip because you’re so burdened with the weight of the responsibility and the question now, because you’re, you’re a design chief, not an HR chief, is what is your specific point of view and how do you continue to express that to really push the boundaries of what design means at that company? ¶
I think that’s, that’s been an interesting, interesting area of just from a personal standpoint of how you continue to find your voice as an executive at that level of responsibility and, and commitment. ¶
Jesse: Well, it’s interesting too, because I think that a lot of people think of a Chief Design Officer type role as being, you know, it doesn’t get any higher than that. It’s the best. And that, that would be sort of like the culmination of one’s career, right? And I, what I’m hearing in what you’re saying is that the people who make it to that place, make it to that place because that’s not the culmination of anything for them, that they are on a path to continue to grow and evolve and advance their own skills. ¶
Gordon: What is true about that is you’re also seeing though a sliver of a trend where designers are assuming also product leadership roles, right? And that’s an interesting move that I started to see was, you know, traditionally, you might see a head of product design from a product management. But now there’s the reverse also with designers becoming more fluent in business, they’re also taking on the product role with design. ¶
So what does that mean from a design standpoint of just the trends and where our careers are going and what skills and expectations are asked of us? I think there’s a really interesting question of just, What does the future of that trio look like as designers become more business savvy and more capable of defending their work and, and, and justifying the investment and what kind of career opportunities that’s going to open for, for, you know, people like us as designers. ¶
Jesse: What do you think the implications of this are for leadership development? As Peter pointed out, you know, they’re all, most of the people who have these leadership roles now were never trained for leadership and some of them were never even trained for design. And so it seems to me that organizations going forward have have a responsibility to figure out how they groom their leaders and how they bring people up through the organization, and then how to help support leaders in developing those skills. What do you think are, are some of the ways that organizations are going to have to address this in order to cultivate leadership talent within their organizations? ¶
Gordon: I think one of the things that’s interesting that we’re starting to see is because we have this large enough wave of design, executive visibility, and also knowledge sharing that’s happening in public, I think there’s now, third-party design executive education that has sprung up and executives are taking these kinds of vehicles to up-level close gaps, as they prepare to become an executive, or if they’re already an executive to take various courses offered by educational institutions. ¶
But I think what the thing here is, is because what’s happening is what we’re seeing is the modernization of design management education that I think has been so behind for some time. And even through my degree, I’ve realized that it is quite behind because some of the content is still rooted in a physical world. ¶
Whereas all of these kinds of business decisions that we’re thinking from a creativity standpoint from a cost standpoint are now occurring in a digital format with different infrastructures and systems to make the best decisions. So I think we’re going to see, at least over this decade is a revolution and design management education. ¶
As the importance of design has increased, as funding for design and investment has increased. And now educators and providers are trying to catch up to, to meet this need. Cause we’re going to see just more design executives. I only talked to 16, but I imagine there’s going to be dozens and dozens more as of Chief Design Officers appearing over the next decade. ¶
Peter: What I was wondering on that note though, is there’s this assumption among digital designers that designed, you know, started when they, in what, with whatever medium they are practicing design. And so for Jesse and I, you know, it started with the web in 1995, that was the beginning of design, or maybe more recent designers started with mobile with the iPhone in 2007, but there is a legacy and a history of design that we could be learning from. ¶
And so while, kind of to, to the point you were saying, while what transpired in the, what, what while design education might feel, design executive education might feel a little backwards looking, right, steeped in brand design management or physical product design management, I’m wondering if there’s stuff that you saw those design leaders, ‘cause I know you spoke with a few and maybe other research you’ve done, that we would be foolish to let go of, right, in our desire to like make it all new and throw out everything that ever happened before, and its all has to be new.
What are those qualities that we should maintain a connection with from prior generations of design leadership that you think would be helpful moving forward that maybe we are losing sight of because we’ve gotten so full of ourselves in thinking that all that matters is, is design for kind of a software context?¶
Gordon: Yeah, there’s actually a key word, me and my professors were brainstorming on and we call it “design acuity.” And the way we talk about this is the depth of design understanding. And if you read to a lot of the books in the 1980s, or even before that about design management, I was reading those again. I was like, all of these lessons are still relevant, the way they thought about design and its connection to business is still true.
It’s just, there’s a new formats and modalities around the software context that hasn’t been fully bridged yet. It’s so new. That means for the last two decades, really. So when I think about, it’s not so much throwing away, but it’s really like entering this new chapter of where we think about design education and it’s complements to software because at the end of the day, the user experience is still physical and digital at the same time. ¶
So I don’t think we should disregard any of that, but I do think because design education has become so much lighter. Like you have a lot of people in design now with, you know, maybe six months of formal training and a lot of is on the job. So there’s a lot of trial and error. And I think that’s actually going to cause a whole different array of consequences to when you lack the depth of design understanding, but that’s not to say you can’t learn on the job, but it’s just not as perhaps structured or formatted against, you know, a common curriculum that can use as a foundation for how we talk and, and understand design. ¶
Jesse: What have you been inspired to research now? Based on what you discovered here, what questions are you most curious to know the answers to? ¶
Gordon: I think there’s two, one of them, one of the Chief Design Officers asked me is, “Gordon. What is my job?” And how do you do it really well?” I’ll never forget that because it was so simple. And I do think we’re still missing a lot of that knowledge. Especially when we think about operating at this scale. Is what’s what, what is the guidance or playbook around this? ¶
Because there is a lack of knowledge right now. But to another question I pose to design chief was like, where does the brand element come into play here? Because when you’re thinking about design excellence, it’s not just the product, there’s also the brand side of the product. So I think about the, some of the frameworks I learned and also looking back into historical frameworks, the brand side doesn’t go away. There’s the brand side, there’s the customer side. And then the business side and how design uses these factors to reflect and mirror. What are the values of the business and what are the values of the customer and how to construct brands that are enduring and lasting and inspiring and constructing products that deliver those experiences. ¶
So I don’t think that road has been fully crossed by actually many of these design chiefs. They are largely in a product development standard. But I think what’s going to be interesting in the next generation is what does that bridge to cross from a brand development standpoint to bridge product and design and brand to create this unified and cohesive thing. ¶
Peter: Yeah. When you, when you mentioned brand, it’s funny because I think, you know, the practice of user experience design that Jesse and I kind of grew up within and, and have done and written about and thought about, in many ways we were kind of running as fast as we could away from brand practices because brand practices felt inauthentic, right? User experience design reflects user desires and needs, whereas brand always felt imposed.
But I think what you’re saying, I, I like, I, I’ve kind of come around to recognize there’s a, there’s a way that brand and the language of brand and the application of brand can be authentic and can connect with these user experience needs and, and could make what we’re doing that much more powerful, so that it doesn’t just feel functional.
But there’s, there’s some other quality to it and something you and I have talked about prior, and I’m wondering how it relates to this. And maybe it relates to that question of like the perspective of the Chief Design Officer, right? They almost get lost. ¶
Their point of view gets lost as they’re running these very large organizations, especially if they’re from a user-centered design background, ‘cause they’re taking, they’re taking in so much from others that they don’t know where they exist anymore. And something you’ve mentioned in our prior conversations is this concept of taste, and taste can feel very ephemeral and subjective and lightweight.
But I think you and I agree that there’s actually a lot of value there. And I’m wondering as you think about taste, and I know you’ve had some of those conversations with design leaders, like what is, how does taste play a role as a Chief Design Officer or design executive? Like what, how, how should we be thinking about it? How should we, how should design leaders be thinking about developing their sense of taste or sharpening their taste or their discussion of taste? Or how do we, how do we turn this into something that doesn’t feel untethered and feels explicit? Kind of a tool in, in someone’s tool chest? ¶
Gordon: I think one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about this, it’s almost like somewhat philosophical, but I’m sure if you ask certain practitioners of brand, it’s not potentially as subjective as we perceive it to be. When I, you know, when I worked with Tom Hardy who’s a professor at SCAD, he was the corporate design director at IBM in the eighties and nineties, and he showed me this framework of how he evaluates brand attributes in making these types of decisions. I’m like there are common frameworks similar to how we apply somewhat of a rigor and analytical framework to user-centered decisions in making the subjective, not so subjective. And when I think about that, I think about looking at the landscape of software today, and this is where some of the more artistic design chiefs will say, “Oh God, it’s become so commodified, everything looks the same. Everything feels the same.”
Is that good? Is that bad? Where is this taking us? If everything is becoming so similar, everywhere and everywhere. And so this, I think this interesting notion of the taste factor is interesting because it’s kind of, what is the percentage of taste implied amongst the system. ¶
And I think about design systems in which how it’s become pervasive in almost every company omplements standardization, but also allows some expression of taste at scale. And so I think about these brands of what they’re trying to construct here is how do you apply and know where to make these special cases of expression at various levels to, to make something original, to make something enduring, to make something memorable to consumers and in society. ¶
And not just as another thing that has come out of an assembly line but something that is, you know, something we really want to treasure as a, both as an artifact and also as something we use every day. So I think there’s an interesting line to straddle here, thinking through both the brand and product exercise. ¶
And I think the ultimate form of design excellence is considering both to bring it to life. And I don’t know if many practitioners have fully crossed this road of both the brand and product side to create this unified vision. ¶
Jesse: Gordon. Thank you so much for being with us. It’s been really great to have you on this. ¶
Gordon: Thank you.¶
Peter: I think this is an excellent,that’s an excellent point to end on. I couldn’t actually ask for a better capper. But before you go, is there anything you want to promote? Anything, that you’re, anything you want to plug or promote? ¶
Gordon: Well, since I’m ending this research and really, I don’t want to end it, but formally it was ended through my graduation. One questions every design executive asked me is, “Hey, what’s next? Like how do we continue to help and push this conversation?” And one of the things I started to noodle on with many of these execs is co-creating, it is what we now call the Design Executive Council. And it’s a body that represents the interests of design executives to advance the state of design. This I believe is the inception of a new group that could really push this conversation through active practitioners and really going through the same questions that we asked on this podcast and having the space to do so and contribute to various missions that would push the boundaries on things like, can we finally define the job definition of the Chief Design Officer the playbook of how to do it how to negotiate board rules for design officers. ¶
And so there’s a whole area of opportunity, I think for the CDO area that is just starting to unfold. And actually Peter, you’ve done so much great work in laying the bricks here. But I think potentially this group could be a really exciting place to, to drive more missions around this space and do it in a program. ¶
Peter: Excellent. Two more things. First. I’m curious. So you did this research, I’m curious, separate from the conversations. It sounds like you did some like book learning in, you know, old books, magazines, et cetera. Was there any single resource that you uncovered in your research that is not, well-known, not, not, not appreciated that you would want to make sure, like, if you were all to just read one book or one magazine article for those who are listening to the recording….he’s actually gone off to get whatever this one resource is. ¶
Jesse: He just walked away. He’s bringing something back. Maybe he’s just…¶
Peter: Yeah… ¶
Gordon: Um, right here. ¶
Peter: Design Management by Brigitte, I can’t see the bottom, Borja de Mozota. Well, we’ll put that in show notes. ¶
Gordon: So this was really one of the first books, if not the first book on design management that considers the full scope of both the brand side and how this connects to corporate innovation. And if you read through this, all the evidence we needed for justifying design, investment and business, I’m like she’s done the homework. ¶
Uh, There were academic studies done many years ago before I was even probably born on showing the evidence. But what I think hasn’t happened is like this evidence somehow wasn’t surfaced to the world and we’re in the software world, still jostling with a lot of like question marks. So I’ve gone through this book a couple of times, and it’s continually been a really important textbook for just the fundamentals of design value and corporations. ¶
Peter: Interesting. And I’m, I did a quick Googling and it’s available as an ebook for less than 20 bucks. So it’s, I’ve found that oftentimes these academic textbooks end up costing like $180 or something, but this one is affordable. So thank you for that. We will make sure that that gets reflected. Last thing. ¶
Where can people find you out on the internets? ¶
Gordon: On Twitter, they can find me at gordoncching or you can just find me directly on my website, gordon-ching.com. ¶
Peter: Excellent. ¶
Jesse: Fantastic, Gordon, thank you again. This has been great. ¶
Gordon: Thank you so much. And design executives were starting this council, so hit me up. ¶
Jesse: Of course the conversation doesn’t end here. Reach out to us. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can find both of us, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where he’s @peterme and I’m @jjg. If you want to know more about us, check out our websites, petermerholz.com and jessjamesgarrett.com. ¶
You can also contact us on our show website, findingourway.design, where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode of finding our way, which we also recommend you subscribe to on apple, Google, or wherever fine podcasts are heard. If you do subscribe and you like what we’re doing, throw us a star rating on your favorite service to make it easier for other folks to find. ¶
As always, thanks for everything you do for all of us. And thanks so much for listening.
25—The Reckoning
Jan 22, 2021
Transcript
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Together: And we’re finding our way
Peter: Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: Here we are at episode 25. We have had a whole bunch of interesting conversations that were just the two of us. We have had a whole bunch of interesting conversations that involved some other folks as well. We’ve definitely been chasing some threads. We have been following some emergent themes. And we’ve each had different things, I think, that have come out of these conversations that have resonated with us.
And so, I thought it would be a great way to wrap up the year here on episode 25 with a little bit of reflection and kind of riffing a bit on those emergent themes, and those big, outstanding questions that we still have about all of this stuff—the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership.
Peter: I’ve heard about those.
I did my homework, and I came up with, like, probably 25 new truisms that I think I’ve got, well, I was just writing shit as it occurred to me. I basically went back over every episode, going back to episode one, and try to plug new truisms, that weren’t the same as the ones that I already had in my design leadership truisms thing. And then I did some filtering and prioritization and I’ve got, oh, eight to 10 that actually bubbled up.
Jesse: Hm. Wow. Well, you approach this task with a great deal more rigor than I did. I have…
Peter: You were always that kid who skated by in class, didn’t you? You’re like, “I’m smart. I don’t need to try that hard.”
Jesse: I’ll just wing it in the moment. Yes.
Peter: Did you also have heavy metal T-shirts? ‘Cause the kid in my school who did that was a total metalhead.
Jesse: I had the punk rock t-shirt. It’s not the heavy metal t-shirts but yes, yes, I was that kid.
Well, why don’t you kick us off with something that has bubbled to the top for you?
Peter: For me, I think if we have one piece of settled law, when it comes to the conversations we are having, it is that “Leadership is relationship.”
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: So often, I think leadership is thought of as vision. Leadership is thought of as something galvanizing or high and mighty.
And when we were exploring these concepts one-on-one earlier, and then as we’ve involved others in the conversations these last few months, it just keeps coming back for me that the medium in which leadership exists is relationships. Yeah. That was new for me.
I gave talks and workshops on leadership and never talked about relationships. I talked about elements of relationships, communication, or managing down, managing across, managing up, diplomacy. But I never actually used the word relationship, I don’t think. Or if I did, I didn’t bubble it up to the top in a way that I would going forward, to focus on, in order to lead, you need to manage your relationships.
Jesse: Yeah. I actually just realized that I have the notebook here where I first wrote that phrase down. I was doing a brainstorm just trying to figure out, “What’s my territory? What’s my sweet spot? What do I really care about? What are the areas of challenge that I see myself focusing on?” and, man, this has gotta be at least two years old, maybe two and a half years.
Peter: Oh, no shit.
Jesse: Yeah, this is where it started. I did this brainstorm of the big topics that were floating around in my brain. And then I did some IA to those and that kind of boiled down to this big idea. So, yeah, yeah, totally, totally agree with that one.
And I think some interesting things have come out of that, that when I first wrote this down, I didn’t really appreciate at the time, that I’ve discovered through our conversation. Part of it having to do with trust, and trust being the foundation of those relationships, and the craft of leadership being in some ways, the craft of creating trusting relationships and being trustworthy and fostering and facilitating trustworthiness in your environment.
Peter: Yeah. 100%, we talked a lot about trust. It’s funny that you talk about that as a craft. ‘Cause one of my new truisms, related to a couple of things you just said, is, I wrote, “The crafts of (design) leadership are communication and information architecture.”
Jesse: Hm. Interesting.
Peter: And I, I did…
Jesse: I agree with that. I mean, yes.
Peter: Obviously, communication, you can’t relate without communicating and communicating here means all kinds of things, including as a means towards building those trusting relationships.
The information architecture piece though came about… It’s funny though, ‘cause you said you applied IA to your thinking. One of the words that I’m thinking about, it was spurred by some work I did with a client recently, is the word “enduring,” that which lasts, that which stands the test of time. And I think information architecture supports leadership that endures, and I use information architecture because I think, and maybe it’s been exacerbated by operating distributed and remotely through a pandemic, if leadership is about communication, leadership is then about information, and you need to be able to manage and structure and capture and make accessible that information that is your leadership. And you need to think about it intentionally. And that’s I think what led me to that architectural frame.
Jesse: I think also leaders are, of necessity, orchestrators of systems, and systems instantiate knowledge as information architecture within them. So, the IA that gets embedded and coded, baked into your systems, becomes the way that the organization understands the world. And so, it is on the leader to imbue, infuse, enrich that IA with as complex and nuanced and understanding as they possibly can. On that systems note, this brings me to something tangentially related which is the note that I’ve written down here as organizations eat design for lunch. And what I mean by that is that there is this constant pressure to take the wild messiness of the creative process, and standardize, componentize, compartmentalize that process into that which is predictable and repeatable. And this is going to be the natural tendency of all organizations. And it’s like gravity that design leaders are going to continue to have to pull against because that is what organizations do. They take these complex functions and digest them, break them down into…
Peter: Metabolize them…
Jesse: Yeah, there you go. Metabolize them. Absolutely. And, in order to preserve that wild spark of the creative process, the design leader has to find ways to prevent it from being digested and to prevent it from being standardized, componentized, rationalized.
Peter: So, number one was Leadership is relationship. Number two is, Your job is to help people cope with uncertainty.
Jesse: Very true. Very true.
Peter: And I was addressing exactly what you’re talking about in order for design to succeed.
You have to play in an uncertain space for a while, and that makes other people very uncomfortable. And so, a design leader needs to have ways of helping others live with that uncertainty, manage that uncertainty, be okay with that uncertainty, thrive in that uncertainty, whatever it is, because that’s the reality.
Jesse: …And to resist definitions of design that drive out uncertainty. To have design turned into a function that becomes all about certainty, it diminishes the value you get from design, because you aren’t doing that experimentation out at the edges. And it’s interesting, too, because you know, we’ve talked about the path of the individual leader and the way that when you are an individual contributor at a senior level, your credibility often is tied to your expertise and your depth of knowledge. And then you move into a leadership position, and the role is often asking you to weigh in in places where not only do you not have the expertise, no one has the expertise. And in fact, it’s on you to manage the dynamic that comes out of that. And it can lead to this undermining of confidence because we don’t know where our own credibility comes from as leaders anymore, if we have previously completely attached that to craft and haven’t attached it to the relationship building, the trust building and so forth.
Peter: Yeah, there was one that is related to what you were just saying. It is, “Design leaders should not lead as others do.”
Figuring out your leadership style is important. And that’s true for any leader, not just design leaders, but I think there could be an unfortunate tendency for design leaders to see, as models, other leaders Who lead toward certainty, and that would be harmful for design. So, we need to chart our own leadership path that embraces that which makes design interesting.
And there aren’t really many, if any, models of how to do that successfully,
Jesse: Yeah. Yes. And I think it’s on the design leader to be aware of the culture that they’re situated in, and its willingness to embrace or support multiple models of leadership. Because I think often design leaders get forced into, they get pushed into… this shape, according to what’s made leaders successful in other functions in the organization that are nothing like design, that have nothing to do with design, but have established the template for leadership in the organization as a whole. And so, this is part of what I mean about having to fight against those expectations of the organization as a whole. And I hate to frame it as a fight. There’s so much I noticed reflecting on the season, there’s so much, us versus them
Peter: Yeah, there’s an antagonism.
Jesse: Yeah. You know, the best stories that we’ve heard from folks in these conversations have been the stories of partnership. It hasn’t been about how I slapped down the head of engineering and put them in their place, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like that. Doesn’t get you there.
Peter: Well, one of the ones related to this is, Success requires shared ownership. And I think that came out in our recent conversation with Jen. It’s actually come out in some work that I’m doing. But to what you’re saying, and this is, I think, one of the hopefully temporary challenges of design leadership, is these two modes of needing to fight, to protect the space for the uncertainty of design in order for it to operate as impactfully as it can; while recognizing that ultimately in order to succeed, it’s not about a fight to protect, it’s about a way to partner and share and collaborate. And we’re caught between these two modes and I think design leaders find themselves vacillating in between them.
And I think that’s a particular struggle. I think more mature functions, particularly when you think about senior leadership, they become less and less about the function and they become more and more about a joint understanding of success.
But design has trouble committing to that joint understanding of success because there’s still work to be done to clarify the opportunity, and the role, and the potential impact design can have. And if you get too shared too soon, you blunt that. Design feels like it starts to accommodate to a dominant mode.
Jesse: Yeah. I think that’s true. and so much of this, it feels like comes back to. How do I, as a design leader, get permission to take some more chances and not be adhering to a script that was written for me by somebody else? But how do I get the space to explore around those edges and try some stuff that might not work?
Peter: Yeah, I think something that I’m not good at, and I suspect other design leaders have trouble with, is playing a long game.
We want to make the kind of change we desire immediately once given some authority to do so. And then I think often get rejected as being incompatible. When I was doing the work supporting Kaiser Permanente, the guy I was working with, who’d been there 30 years, had this model for, How do you get permission, essentially?
And in that organization, it didn’t matter what you did before you joined Kaiser Permanente. You could have run a big design team, even at another healthcare company, but it wasn’t Kaiser Permanente. And so when you joined Kaiser Permanente, the first thing you needed to do was demonstrate competence with what was expected of you.
Only after you demonstrated competence, then that allowed you to build relationships. There’s that word. Build relationships to develop the social capital. And only once you had that, could you then exhibit initiative, right?
And the issue that this guy saw was that people would try to get to initiative out of the gate, ‘cause they’re like, “What, I was super successful in these other contexts. I know what I’m doing. Things are not working as they should here. I want to do things in a new way for Kaiser, thus, I want to take initiative,” and those folks would inevitably get slapped back, slapped back, slapped back, and the people who succeeded were those who spent a couple years chopping wood and carrying water within the context, but not going native, not just becoming part of the machine. always maintaining that understanding of the long view, but realizing you have to build toward it.
Jesse: Yeah. So it sounds like even with the politics, you want to engage with them intentionally with your own ends in mind, and not allow the politics to take over what drives all of your choices, but to maintain a certain healthy distance from it as you’re playing that long game.
Music break 1
Jesse: Thematically, I feel like this quest for credibility is a recurring theme that I’ve heard in conversation with a lot of design leaders and it manifests in a lot of different ways. Often I feel once you find your way into that leadership position, your credibility is your currency among your peers. That credibility is what allows your peers to either align with you around the next crazy thing that you want to do, or at least to be able to say, “I don’t understand this, but you seem to, so I’m gonna step back and be hands off.” If you don’t have that credibility, then you aren’t able to get that broad web of support among that peer group. That web of personal trust among a group of empowered peers allows for the flexibility and permission to break all of the rules. Any kind of systemic intervention can be overridden by the choices made by that group of trusting empowered peers. They decide the rules of the game. They can do whatever they want.
Peter: Right, another item that bubbled up, was “Even leaders need cover.”
So yes, you need credibility. That credibility can often be enabled or enhanced, or even just simply established, by your leader. And that relationship that you have with your leader and,
Jesse: Well, leaders have the ability to bestow or convey credibility upon the leaders underneath them in the organization.
Peter: And I think a challenge for these heads of design is they often don’t get the cover from their leader, because their leader doesn’t understand what they do. Their leader often feels obligated to bring on someone in that role, but doesn’t necessarily appreciate what that role takes.
And so that design leader then isn’t awarded organizational credibility from their leader to then behave as they see fit. And that creates this constraint for this design leader’s ability to make the kind of change they want, because their peers are, like, “Your boss doesn’t quite know what to do with you. So why should we’d expect to know what to do with you?”
Jesse: Yeah. This goes back to a lot of what we talked about in the charter two-parter. For design leaders who haven’t done that charter work, they don’t know what their message is, they don’t know what their story is. They don’t know what their value proposition is.
And so, they’re not in a position to set their leaders up to be effective evangelists for them, effective salespeople for them, effective partners for them. If you consider the value of design to be totally apparent on its surface, then you’re going to have challenges as a leader because you are going to need to be able to articulate that at a deeper level than you have before.
Peter: Yes. this kind of relates to something else I wrote.
“Design’s true superpower is to make the intangible tangible.”
Jesse: Hmm.
Peter: This is one that I came to perhaps thinking a bit about our conversation with Erica and how “the business model is the new grid.”
A lot of times the challenge with models, business models, et cetera, is they are intangible, and there’s a role that design plays in putting shape to that which others are advocating, to help everybody understand the implications.
That ability to provide some something concrete to that which can otherwise feel very abstract, just brings so much clarity into an organization. And I don’t think we as designers and design leaders embrace that nearly enough.
We seem to think our superpower is in our craft of delivery. That is a power, but I think our superpower is that ability to take something fuzzy and uncertain and vague and nebulous and give it shape so that it can then be discussed.
Jesse: Yeah. I like this because it ties together what I’ve seen as this growing divergence in design practice across these different problem domains. As we’ve talked about, the way design is practiced in house is starting to look pretty different from how design is practiced in agencies. And the way that design is practiced when you are working on a product that is central to the revenue engine of an organization is a very different story from what design looks like when you’re working on value-adds or ancillary functions of the organization. And I do see that what they all have in common is this process of making the intangible tangible. But I think that the untapped value of design that we hear a lot of folks yearning to see realized is that process of making the intangible, tangible as a mode of inquiry, as a way of eliciting answers to deeper questions rather than shallower ones.
Peter: Hm.
Jesse: And in what I have thought of as the production UX world, where UX roles are really reduced to prototypers, Figma jockeys, the nature of the questions that are getting answered through that design work are pretty shallow. And meanwhile, you’ve got the agencies which are potentially doing concept development work, or other kinds of ideation work where they’re asking much deeper questions. But not a lot of organizations are synthesizing those. Not a lot of organizations are creating a holistic sense of design. Everybody is looking at design in terms of these narrow slices of value that it can deliver.
Peter: There’s this missing layer of strategic design as a practice that I think was emerging 15, 10 years ago through practices such as ours and IDEO’s and Frog’s and other companies.
Much of design was happening within agencies and consulting companies. And then as design shifted in house, that strategic engagement has fallen off in favor of production because that’s the obvious value.
And there’s what we talked about with Jorge. There’s green shoots of recognition that this has been missing, but it’s, you know, it’s green shoots in a desert.
There needs to be a concerted effort to try to reinvigorate, go back to what Erica talked about, that critical role that design can play in thinking about futures and opportunities.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, if I think about the original dream of UX, the dream was that these practices would enable product strategy, product definition, product decisions to be made with experiential outcomes as the primary criteria for whether or not something shipped. And the idea implicit in that, being that value would naturally flow from optimizing for experiential outcomes, that has not really happened. The designers have been sort of sent back to their desks to make more screens. A few of the business consulting types have picked up some design language and maybe a little bit of design philosophy and stirred it into their practices to make their clients feel more creative somehow, yeah. And the promise hasn’t been realized. And there are a lot of the UX old school folks like ourselves who feel like something has been lost along the way, okay, and are getting pretty discouraged about what it’s going to take to recapture that or to fulfill that promise. But my question is, Was that promise one worth investing in, in the first place? Like was the dream of UX, really just a dream?
Peter: My short answer is no.
My slightly longer answer is, if we look back on the state of user experiences in 2001, when we started Adaptive Path, and we look at the state of user experiences, essentially 20 years later, I would say that on the whole things have improved, primarily with digital user experiences
Much has been done to allay the confusion and consternation and various obstacles that people faced trying to use tools to do things in their lives. And I think, on the whole, things are better. What I think we didn’t appreciate was a little bit of the, “then what?” part of that. Okay. Now you’ve made it easier to do your banking or pay bills or buy shit.
I think one of the things, as we’re getting towards the end of what for many people is quite possibly the single most difficult year, probably in my lifetime, is a feeling like, “Then what, what next, to what end?” Okay. So we’ve raised the floor for user experiences to enable more and more people to manage basic functions in their lives, but it feels like we did that with the sense, that as you said, simply by doing that, that was value in and of itself.
Jesse: Well, definitely experience design work needs to be a lot more contextual than it was 20 years ago. It needs to be more contextual than it is now, in taking into account the second order, third order effects of our design choices, the systemic effects of our design choices, looking beyond the individual user experience to the impact that has on experiences of families, communities, societies.
Additionally, a huge piece of the context that’s been missing, you know, thinking about that dream of UX as I described it, that was actually a dream of organizational change, a dream of changing the way that organizations make decisions to put humans at the center and to put human experience and human experiential outcomes at the center. And that organizational change is a deeper challenge to realize than simply getting better at turning metrics into design choices, into shipped product.
Peter: Jared Spool still has that dream. I was listening in on a talk he was giving yesterday, about agile practices and user experience. And, basically, what he was arguing for is, if you do not have literally the entire team operating as a UX team, and that includes product management and engineering and data folks, you will always be less effective in delivering on quality user experiences.
And as he was saying this, I’m like, “Oh my God, it just feels like a fairy tale. how am I going to get all these engineers, all these data scientists, all these other folks operating in a design way?”
You take what are considered many of the most design forward organizations, they don’t begin to do that.
Jesse: Well, I think that one thing that happened is that as design was removed from strategy and shunted toward production, it was also severed from research. And that partnership between research and design, I think, was such a powerful driver, especially those predesign insights. The research function, as related to design, that these production-oriented organizations have held on to have been quantitative analytics, metrics-oriented research, or evaluative post-design research. But that deeper research that asks the questions that can really inform strategy from a design perspective is lost. So you see, in organizations like Jen’s organization where they have, we have, a robust research function with its own mandate. They are driving a lot of that kind of questioning that a design group could be driving, but in most cases isn’t because they don’t have the connection to that research capability.
If you want to see that mode of inquiry come into play, there isn’t anybody else that you can really rely on who’s going to bring that.
Peter: Well, right. I think the role that design plays in that regard is going back to making the intangible tangible. These research insights are going to be intangible, they are going to be ideas. They’re going to be notions rooted in something tangible. There’s nothing more tangible than good thick data from ethnographic research.
But then you abstract that to realize insights, opportunities. And then to bring that back into the tangible, a role that design plays. And I think the point you’re making, so much of design within organizations though, wouldn’t know how to handle making research insights tangible.
There’s just too much distance between that kind of insight and the practice of UI design. and we’ve lost comfort with more conceptual forms of design internally, at least, because they’re not shipping. Design is valued to the degree to which it ships.
Jesse: Again, I think it comes back to the credibility of the leader. If you’ve got leader with high credibility, high trust among their peers, cross-functionally they can get the permission to do different things.
I think that it is challenging for designers to have the credibility, to step into those strategic conversations, if they don’t have strong pre-design qualitative research function to support them in that work.
It’s okay to just verbally agree with me. No, you refuse to do it verbally. You’re just going to nod at me. Yes. I agree with you. Yeah, that’s fine.
You’re allowed to agree.
Music break 2
Peter: You had said something earlier that was a little bit around the dream of UX, around the frustrations that maybe old school UXers are having, as that dream seems to be evaporating. There’s also, you introduced me to some of the thinking of younger designers and their frustration of having been sold what feels like a bill of goods, in terms of the potential of that dream of UX, and then they go in-house and they’re just turning your crank
There was a, I think it was a TikTok video that had gotten, pushed to Twitter…
Jesse: Oh, I saw it..
Peter: Of a young designer screaming about, Why did she think that UX design was going to allow her…
Jesse: …to fulfill her life’s purpose. Yeah.
Peter: Yeah, like “What the hell was wrong with me?” is kind of how she was phrasing it. Which, as I’m watching that, as someone who’s been doing this for 25 years, it just broke my heart.
Because I want UX design to feel like a purpose-driven practice.
Jesse: Well, because it is, and has been for so many people, but again, these other folks they are not having that experience.
Peter: Well, and that connects to the conversation with Vivianne, and probably my single biggest takeaway from that discussion, We do not take things seriously enough. We are not taking seriously the impact that our work has. We are not taking seriously enough our ethical responsibility to our users and customers, whether it’s indirectly through the product of our work, or directly when we engage them in user research conversations and those types of things. That was something Vivianne made very clear that I just had never really sat with.
And also what Vivianne made clear is, we’re not taking ourselves seriously. The effect that our work is having on who we are, and how we’re behaving in how we’re operating. Thus, it leads to things like this video of a young designer screaming, ‘cause that is like the only way that they can kind of handle the cognitive dissonance that they are operating within.
It’s just, this… what is it? The barbaric yawp, right? Like it’s just, What the fuck?!
The word reckoning has been used a lot in the last couple of weeks, and there’s some type of conversation to be had, coming to grips with our role, our practice, our context, our impact that we’ve just continued to kick that can down the road, just, like, make that somebody else’s problem.
Thinking about conversations around certification, conversations around professionalism, how do we establish a practice of what we’re doing, such that we can institutionalize some of these issues, so that not everyone is approaching them uniquely and individually, but there’s a collective understanding and response that people can lean on, can scaffold them, can support them with these different tensions
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah.
Peter: And it’s weird for me, cause I’m someone who tries very hard not to take myself seriously. Because you know, the world doesn’t need more of that.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, I think it’s a question of genuinely owning the responsibility that we have. The responsibility that we have for the experiences of our users, the responsibility that we have for the folks on our teams. You know, one of the most important things that has come to the fore for me, has been that leaders cannot simply turn their backs on the trauma that is rippling through their organizations. You can’t just look the other way and hope that that stuff all resolves itself. You have to take ownership, you have to take responsibility for the emotional experiences of the people on your teams. And that responsibility is one that people in all functions of business have been avoiding for way too long.
Peter: You mean forever? Like literally forever.
It was interesting to hear Vivianne talk about the counseling background, I forget what she called, the human services work, essentially social work…
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: …not corporatist. And has a whole legacy and a foundation and a context of values and practices that have emerged to support the people working in that field. But it’s clear, as I think you just articulated, all of us would benefit from engaging with that understanding, regardless of the work we’re doing.
And there’s this, it’s not quite sociopathy. I’m trying to think of the right word for it, but there’s this thing that happens when we engage in more business contexts, where we’re just supposed to remove that part of ourselves.
Jesse: The machine is trying to dehumanize you as a leader. It needs to. And so all of the cultural pressure that you’re going to get is going to be to cut those pieces of your brain out and to bury it and not think about it. And that’s why it’s extra important for the leader, personally, to keep those things alive for themselves in how they interact with those around them and how they conduct themselves, in how they orchestrate the systems that they’re responsible for creating, because those systems can become mechanisms of harm on an ongoing basis. As you were talking about those systems are how leaders leave lasting legacies.
Peter: I like the alliteration. That’s good. That’s good. How do design leaders pursue an authentic rehumanization in their role, without it becoming the focus of their efforts. ‘Cause there’s still a job to do.
The work to be done feels daunting to me. When I start going down this path, it feels like you almost have to stop everything else for a while. This is where the reckoning concept comes from. Like, literally have to stop everything else for a while, and come to grips with all this shit, make that space to deal with it. And then once we’ve developed some new understanding, only then can we start to reengage with our work practices from this position of heightened awareness.
Jesse: Yeah, but you’re never going to get that. You’re never going to get that break. So, so then it’s a question of, How do you weave these things into your existing practices day by day, and start making incremental improvement, because you’re not going to get a chance to rethink the whole system. And even if you did, very few design leaders have the backing of their senior leadership to the extent that they can change all of the systems around them as well, because whatever systems you create as a design leader, you have to be able to interface with the culture that you’re situated in.
Peter: Right. What were your questions? You said you had some questions.
Jesse: I did have that question about the lost dream of UX. it sounds like it still exists in pockets, but as a larger cultural force within the industry, it’s been lost. Moreover, for UX doesn’t seem to have a cultural center, so to speak in the way that it did when there were really, there were three conferences that you could go to. And the community does not have that level of focus anymore, the work does not have that level of focus anymore. And the dispersion of UX across these different contexts and therefore different models, I wonder at what point speciation occurs. And you’re now talking about an evolutionary path that’s so divergent that you’re really talking about an entirely different job, a different role. I think we’re getting closer to that all the time.
Peter: Well, what did you say? Speciation? Which I think is probably in this case, specialization.
Jesse: I’m not sure that’s true. I mean, I’m not sure that I would frame it that way, unless you consider startups a specialty, because startups have their own way of doing UX, which looks nothing like the way that agencies do it, which looks nothing like the way that large established organizations do it. And again, the way that you do it, when you’re working on something that is really core and central to the business, is going to look very different from somebody who is working on some kind of support system around the edges.
Peter: Or someone who is explicitly been tasked with charting new territory.
Jesse: Yeah. If you’re fortunate to have folks who have that mandate.
Jesse: So, in short, we’re under-prepared, under-skilled, under-resourced, blind spots all over the place. Got more enemies than allies. The challenge in front of us is daunting in its scale. What could go wrong?
Peter: The funny thing about all of that? Is, “And it’s never been better.”
Jesse: I couldn’t agree more.
Peter: I think that’s where we, I don’t think we can uh, end any better than that.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: Thank you, Jesse. Thank you for a year of eye-opening mind-bending thought-provoking conversations.
Jesse: Thank you. It has been a really edifying and satisfying journey for me as well. And I look forward to more in 2021, as we continue Finding our way.
Peter: So, yeah. So, this’ll be the last episode for this season
Jesse: All kinds of new things in 2021 for all of us.
Peter: Exactly. So keep watching the skies. In the meantime you can find us on Twitter. I’m @Peterme. He’s @JJG. And even though we won’t be posting new episodes for a while, you can always reach out to us through our website at https://findingourway.design/ Use the contact form there.
We read everything that comes through. And something we haven’t asked for that I’m going to ask for, is for you to rate us on various podcasting platforms. I think that would be helpful for us. If you like the show please give us a rating, whether it’s Apple or Spotify or whatever these services are.
Jesse: Seven out of five stars.
Peter: All the stars, whatever, whatever the stars is, all of them. Help people find us help us stand out amidst what is a just immense ocean of material out there. And even during this break, we would love to hear from you. So don’t hesitate to reach out.
Jesse: All right. Thanks Peter. This has been great.
Peter: Thank you, Jesse.
24: Delving into digital design—craft, teaching, lessons from architecture, standards and certification (ft. Jorge Arango)
Jan 05, 2021
Transcript
Jorge: If you only think of your work as trying to make whatever you’re working on more engaging, or more usable, or more user friendly first and foremost, you are likely not taking in enough of the picture to do something that is going to be ultimately good for the world.
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
And we’re Finding Our Way
Peter: navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, author of the book Living in Information, host of the podcast The Informed Life, UX consultant, and educator, Jorge Arango joins us for a freewheeling conversation covering topics such as how his work is informed by his background in architecture, balancing craft and intellectual inquiry in design education, professional certification for designers once again, and a whole lot more.
Peter: I’ve been intrigued seeing my children embrace Chromebook because of school, and it’s funny when I sit down to use it, and I have to learn how it works, and they have no trouble with going from keyboard to screen and back and forth and all that. It’s trivial
But also, they have no idea how the computer works. They don’t know where files are stored or anything like that. And it doesn’t matter. It just works. They tap things, things show up, they type things. And that’s what this next generation is growing up within.
So it’ll be interesting to see what carries forward from that context.
Jorge: A lot of it has to do with the mental models that you bring to the technology. And if you don’t have a mental model already established, you are learning these things for the first time. This idea of computing in the cloud, when you say Chromebook, well, you’re doing computing without local file support. Like, everything that you’re doing there is hosted in the cloud, right? Like that’s the whole point of those things.
You’re taking so much for granted as to what user’s mental models are when they’re trying to use the thing, and it’s not until you actually sit down with people and see them interacting with the thing that you’ve designed, that you discover, “No, wait,” you as a designer have a much more elaborate understanding of the underpinnings of this thing. And it’s very hard for you to break free of that understanding and to put yourself in the shoes of whoever’s going to be using this thing.
So I feel fortunate to have had that experience early on, because it taught me to not take for granted the fact that everyone would understand the basic workings of these things. And I think we’ve seen as digital experiences become a bigger part of our lives, more and more people are going to be doing more and more basic things there. And we can’t assume that they are savvy or that they have the entirety of the mental model that we bring to it as designers, or as people who are passionate about technology or what have you.
Jesse: I’ve heard from a number of people, stories of that light-bulb, “aha!” moment of realizing that users have different mental models than those of us who are closer to the work of creating these technology products. And that’s often the moment where people get the user-centered religion, and they start getting really interested in research methods and things like that. Was that your experience?
Jorge: I think it took me longer than others. My background is in architecture…
Peter: So, you know better already. [laughing]
Jorge: Yeah, absolutely. [laughing] I remember seeing, I think it’s the third matrix movie where they have the architect, or is it the second…?
Peter: I didn’t–I’ve only seen the first.
Jorge: It’s been a long time, but I remember the architect dressed in his white three-piece suit, right, and knowing everything, and that type of mindset is one of the risks, I think, of an architectural education, in that you study the history of architecture and a lot of it focuses on the architects and what they’ve done, right? And so much of architecture has been done by people who are setting up these structures.
Obviously, they don’t do it alone. Only the smallest buildings can be done by a single individual or a small group. The bigger ones are large group efforts and much like moviemaking, there has to be someone to bring coherence to the effort, and I think an architectural education emphasizes the role of director of the architect, the person who is there to bring coherence to the effort.
And I think that it can do so at the expense of understanding the contextual conditions, the needs of the users. That was my experience. I went to university and found myself just worshiping the work of folks like Le Corbusier and Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, and these people who I saw as bringing coherence and order. A beautiful order. And in the case of someone like Mies van der Rohe, this very minimalistic and elegant order to environments, free of the intrusions of, you know, human usage. You see photos of some of those works, I’m thinking of, like, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, I don’t know if I’ve seen photos with people in that thing. And I don’t think that people in the building would make it better. I think that it’s a… I think it’s a beautiful object, right? It’s like a beautiful artifact. And I have not visited it. But I have had the opportunity to visit a few of Le Corbusier’s buildings. And in some ways those are more beautiful in the abstract than they are in reality.
If you visit some Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, I remember Fallingwater, it’s a very beautiful environment, but it’s one where I felt like the creation process had closed. And, I was not invited, as a user of that place, to, in any way, make it my own or expand it or make it better. It was an expression of an idea taken to its most interesting limits that doesn’t necessarily make it a good place to live in, I don’t think.
Peter: Something like Fallingwater, those are primarily residences. So with Frank Lloyd Wright, he would be commissioned to build something for someone. So it doesn’t matter whether or not we like it as long as the clients liked it. That was the closed loop.
So you have residential architecture where you know who the people are who are using it, but then you go another concentric circle out and you have architecture, maybe public buildings, Barcelona Pavilion that you were explaining, those types of things.
If at all, how are architects taught to distinguish between residential, commercial, industrial? Are there different approaches given these different contexts? Then to bring it closer to what we’re working in, you teach at a design school, and I don’t know if you heard the episode with Erika where she railed against the limitations of design education being around formalist structures, like the grid. All we’re preparing our designers to do is to apply the grid when in fact the real design problems are elsewhere.
And so how well are we teaching, training people to practice in different contexts, different audiences.
Jorge: There are several directions we can take this. One has to do with the function of the building, or the function of whatever you’re designing. And you called out the differences between residential and commercial and other uses, and I don’t want to be unfair to my architectural education.
I was saying that it was my own failing to gravitate towards these photogenic works and this hero worship of the architect. But a lot of the architectural education that I got had to do with process, with the approach to designing. I got exposed to a lot of different approaches to doing that, including things like contextual research and, for example, understanding the environmental conditions surrounding the project, which for a building… Buildings exist in a physical environment and you have to understand how the sun arcs over the sky, for example, and how that changes during different seasons, depending on where on the earth you are building. How you will access the building from the street, what views are accessible.
And there are assembly and manufacturing factors that you have to take into consideration. You have to understand the physical properties of materials. You have to understand the structural needs that will allow the artifact to withstand the forces of gravity, for example, or there are ergonomic factors that have to do with how people use environments. Like you have to make doors a certain width if people are to fit through them. And you get to learn all of those things.
And those things are universal whether you’re doing residential building versus a commercial building or a civic or whatever other thing. The part that is specific to each use is what in architecture is called The Program, which has to do with understanding the functions that the building must serve. There’s also a history to doing that type of building. So, people have been designing structures that will serve as their homes for a long time and whatever you do, whatever intervention you make, has to somehow address that. So there are things that you can generalize and things that are specific, and you do get to learn about those differences in architecture school.
Now there was another question in there, Peter, about whether that translates to what we’re doing in education. And you talked about my teaching. I teach at the interaction design program at California College of the Arts. So, it’s very much focused on interaction design, and CCA also has an architecture school and it has other departments, but I’m in the interaction design department.
And, I would say that we try to give students a holistic understanding of the design process. I have not heard the episode with Erika, but I think I can empathize with what she’s talking about, in that I think that a lot of what passes for design education these days, has to do with the more superficial aspects of design, maybe things like using particular tools or things that have to do with the manifestation of design work, like the craft of design, which is hugely important. I think that you have to develop mastery of craft, but there’s this other aspect to education, which has to do with teaching people to see the world in a particular way and see problems in a particular way. And I don’t see design as a way for us to make things more engaging or more usable or more user friendly.
First and foremost, I see design as a way of knowing the world and knowing the problems that we’re dealing with. And it’s a way of knowing that involves making things, putting them into the world and seeing how they function. So it’s in some ways, very empirical, which is different from other ways of knowing the world. In my own teaching. what I would like my students to get from my classes is an understanding that often in design work, there’s no right way to do things. There’s no right or wrong. There’s no true or false. There are some things that are better than others, and never are the problems you’re dealing with isolated. They’re always part of something bigger. And you are dealing with systems. You are dealing with complex environments. And if you only think of your work as trying to make whatever you’re working on more engaging, or more usable, or more user friendly, first and foremost, you are likely not taking in enough of the picture to do something that is going to be ultimately good for the world. I’ll just say it like that. It’s not going to be good for your company. It’s not going to be good for the world. It’s not going to be good for you. It’s a very narrow vision of what design work is.
Jesse: It sounds like what you’re advocating for is a way of thinking about design that looks beyond design merely as a tool for the realization of an idea, and frames design more as a mode of inquiry, a way of understanding problems, a way of understanding the world.
Peter: I’m wondering though how well that’s received in an academic context where students are paying $80,000, a hundred thousand dollars, and expect to get a job. How do you balance skills-building and learning process, with this more intellectual pursuit of inquiry and framing.
Jorge: The two cannot be separated because, like I said, what makes design unique as a way of knowing is that it is a way of knowing that that makes things and tests them in the world. I always like to say that the purpose of design is to make the possible tangible, and the making-things-tangible part is very important.
So, craft is hugely important. And this semester, I’m co-teaching two classes. And one of the classes has the students making prototypes and these prototypes are meant to be convincing. They’re prototypes of mobile apps. And one of the ways of evaluating whether they’ve done a good job or not, is whether this prototype that they’ve wired up using something like Framer or Sketch or XD convinces someone that they’re looking at an app. And there’s a lot of craft that goes into that. That’s not easy. It’s something that takes practice.
So, the analogy that I use with students is that we are there as something like a strength trainer. You hire a strength trainer to show you good form when doing exercises, and the best trainers are the ones who will know how to do the exercises themselves, who’ve been doing it for a long time, who themselves manifest the practices that they are teaching you. If you work with a strength trainer and you’re doing, for example, something like a bench press or a squat, they will come to you and they will say, “Look, you don’t have your back right, right? Like when you’re doing squats, you’re going to hurt yourself. So try doing this,” and you emulate, and then you observe them as they do the work and you give them critique.
So, it’s a fine balance between the craft and the more theoretical part of this stuff. A challenge that we face in design work is that the craft part of it is so cool. And it’s so engaging. When you make a prototype with something like Figma and it’s convincing, and it looks like the thing, you feel such a rush of energy. It’s like, “Wow, this thing is amazing. And look at what I can do.” Because we’re spending so much time using these things and now with the pandemic, literally our waking hours are consumed in these things.
And all of a sudden you find that you have this superpower where you can make these things in this world that we’re living in. And it’s not as hard maybe as you thought it was. And. it’s an incredible rush that comes being good at the craft bit of it. And, also, the tools are evolving so fast and giving us so much power.
Something like Figma an amazing design tool that allows you to do the craft bit, but it allows you to do it collaboratively in a way that was not possible before, or was possible, but much more clumsily. And that’s just the latest in a long sequence of tools that make the craft part of this so much more engaging, easier, faster, more compelling, more convincing, and, there’s this allure to the screen-level discussions of this work. It’s like, Oh man, I bet, we can get lost in discussions about accessibility and contrast and things like, Fitts’ Law, or, you know, all these things that go into making a compelling user interface.
And, it’s also a lot of fun, so much fun to do this stuff, to put a button on the screen and then see it work when you click on it. And we are drawn to these things. And the thing is we can get drawn to them at the exclusion of thinking about How, and more importantly, Why are we doing this? And that is where having some theoretical grounding is helpful. And not just theoretical grounding, like, knowledge of history. Like, I think all three of us are more or less contemporaries. And at this point our careers, we’ve seen ideas that were being discussed very fervently a while back kind of resurface with little to no acknowledgement to the previous efforts. And that is something where I also think we could do a better job as designers in just knowing that designing for digital now, well, it doesn’t have the long history that architecture has for sure, but it’s not exactly a spring chicken either, you know? And there is a history there and it’s worth knowing.
Peter: One of my favorite things is when mobile app designers discover navigation. They realize, “Oh wait, hierarchies and clear labeling.” And you see these Medium posts of folks who’ve invented navigation in whatever context they’re in.
Jorge: Funny enough, it’s apropos. Just yesterday, I was having a critique session with students and one of the students showed sketches of a UI that is meant to be organic. And we were having a discussion about what organic means in this context. And one of the silver linings to our current remote way of teaching is that you can instantly bring up your screen and share stuff, right? So, I shared the work of Kai, I think his name is pronounced Kai Krause.
Peter: Yeah, I was wondering if you were going in a Power Tools direction. Yes.
Jorge: Right. And the students hadn’t seen that work because it’s now, what, 25 years old. Maybe more. So, it’s been a couple of cycles, at least, that that work’s been out of the general discussion, but there is some precedent there.
Jesse: I once had the dubious distinction of giving a talk about our field that reviewed some history, but really kind of started in 2000. And Donald Norman was sitting in the front row and he did have some things to say to me after the talk.
Peter: At least he didn’t say them during the talk.
Jesse: So yeah, we all have our indulgences in ahistoricism.
And honestly, at the time we started, there were people who had been doing a lot of work and research and theoretical work around designing for digital, but it had been sort of locked away from practice in the halls of academia and the proceedings of the ACM SIG CHI conference.
Music break 1
Peter: I want to go back to craft. You talked, Jorge, about the importance of craft your reveling in Figma, and as you say those things, I get nervous. Now, I’m not a proper design leader anymore. I’ve become some form of management consultant, but if I were to go back and become a VP of Design, I haven’t opened a design tool in 10 to 15 years, apart from Keynote. Any design that I do, I do in Keynote.
And I’m wondering your thoughts on that relationship to craft as leaders grow, and what’s important to maintain and hang on to, and what maybe they can let go of. Thinking about it also from your vantage point at the other end of the spectrum, where you’re teaching the next generation of practitioners that will be coming into these people’s organizations and these folks are gonna be primarily steeped in craft. And how do you help leaders navigate just enough craft and maintain relevance, recognizing though that they’re not going to be Figma jockeys, likely.
Jorge: Yeah, that’s a good point. I think that the desire to have pride in your craft is something that should not diminish as you grow in your career. Perhaps the manifestations of the craft change. When you were talking about this, I was thinking is like, what is my craft—is the craft aspect of my own work?
I think that these days I devote as much time writing as I do drawing things.
I find that we are communicating so much now asynchronously using text. I wrote this blog post a couple of years ago about way that I see career progressions in design. The analogy I used is that it’s a progression from very thin markers to flat markers, in that when you start your career, you’re expected to be very focused on the details. So, you use like fine liners.
And then as you move on, you’re going to be working at a perhaps lower level of fidelity, but I’d like to think of it as a higher level of abstraction, perhaps. So, you move on through Sharpies and then eventually to whiteboard markers. And you have to have a good mix of folks in the team with different marker widths, because if it’s all theory and all abstraction and all understanding how the big parts fit together, and there’s no execution, then it’s not going to work. You need people who are passionate about the fine lines who are going to be working on that.
And at least for me, the craft that I aspire to at this stage in my career has to do with helping design leaders manifest and make tangible these very vague, hard-to-pin-down complex, abstract ideas that come with dealing with things like strategy, with organizing complex messes, the whole “wicked problem” thing.
I think that that’s where design ultimately really shines, right? Like these ill-formulated situations and no one knows how to tackle the thing and you have to start somewhere. And designers can come in and take a first stab at the thing and we know it’s going to be wrong because it’s ill-informed, but the very act of putting something in the world and testing it is going to produce data that is going to lead down this process to refining it, making it a better fit to the context and the problem at hand, because this, by the way, this is also related to writing.
When you write, I’m, again, I’m going to speak in the first person, when I write something, that helps me understand what I’m thinking, the act of having to put it into words that I expect I will be communicating to someone else, forces me to bring it down from this miasma I have up here in the meat computer and articulate it in a coherent way.
And design does that too, for these complex wicked problems. And I think that as you move up to leadership roles, you’re not going to be drawing UIs, but you’re going to be thinking about what is the problem that we’re trying to solve here. What are the resources we bring to bear on this thing? How do we best deploy those resources? Where are we falling short? What are our competitors doing? Who are our competitors?
There’s all of these questions that come to bear. And there is a craft to making those tangible too. And that’s how we should aspire to think about craft as we grow in our design careers. We shouldn’t think that we’re leaving craft behind; we should think that we’re applying our craft to a higher-level problem.
Jesse: A lot of the design leaders I’ve spoken to are getting kind of squeezed in their ability to bring that kind of abstract craft that you’re describing, because they’re getting squeezed from top and bottom into a production management orientation, because that is the value of design as the people above them in the organization understand it.
And that’s also the craft orientation that the people on their teams have, right? So, they don’t actually have any peers who want to engage with them at the fat marker level.
Jorge: Yep. I have observed that as well. We have to remember that design is still a fairly new function within organizations. I don’t think that the role of design in organizations has settled in the same way that other functions that have been around longer.
Peter: But, but I wrote a book!
Jorge: I know you did. And I think that that book represents tremendous progress towards the professionalization of design in organizations. I don’t think that most organizations are there yet. I think it’s going to take a shift in mindset as to what the role of design is.
Peter: The role of, like, the design team? Design as a practice? “Design” becomes one of those slippery words.
Jorge: Yeah. What design is for…
Jesse: As a function.
Jorge: That’s right. Design as a function of the organization. And it might be that the function that I’m calling for is not centralized in the design team. Perhaps there’s a strategy team. Perhaps there is an operations team, I don’t know.
But I’m saying it would be helpful for folks in those groups to have access to design resources, because they can help understand situations and respond to situations in a different way. It gives you a different ability as a team. I
If the only tool that you have available to understand a problem is an Excel spreadsheet, you’re going to be gravitating towards solutions that can be answered by an Excel spreadsheet.
Peter: I want to build on this, ‘cause I was thinking about the Excel spreadsheet as this analogy. Like, Excel is everywhere. Literally every function in a business, every department in a business, is using some form of a spreadsheet. And in the same way, could you argue that design as a tool, as a practice, could also be anywhere that Excel is being used, with the possible exception of actual accounting and finance.
Anywhere that Excel is being used, you could probably also use design approaches as a balance to whatever Excel is bringing to it in terms of helping you structure, organize your ideas. That’s more the convergent parts. So, what’s the divergent part? How are we opening up an opportunity space and exploring and thinking, before getting to where Excel would be helpful in terms of organizing our thinking. And to the point you were saying about the immaturity of design, you do see some organizations that have small design thinking teams that end up operating as consultants.
So as orgs grow, the bulk of the team is doing what Jesse’s talking about, which is production and delivery of design material. And then some teams have created a small design thinking, design facilitation, Google sprints, whatever it is, style practice, that works as a consultancy, sprinkling design approaches to different parts of the business that might ask for it.
Now, I think what you’re arguing is that that second function should probably become more standardized and probably bigger as a reflection of what the value is that a design function is bringing the business. It’s not just in the creation of assets for products, but a way of problem solving that could help throughout the business.
And so, it’s starting to happen. There’s these little green shoots. And another green shoot that reflects on what we were mentioning earlier, in terms of Jesse’s being squeezed, but your recognizing the role of the fat marker, is starting to see more, call them principal designers or design architects who are operating in that more abstract, strategic level, usually at the hand of a design executive who just doesn’t have time to think strategically, to think creatively, because they’re running an org, but recognizes there’s a gap.
That is just starting, but it is starting. And so, we’re seeing savvy organizations poking at these new ways or new expressions of design work that isn’t just, how do I make my product development go? Or how do I make my marketing go?
Jorge: it’s incredibly encouraging that there are shoots happening, emerging. I wonder, and this is something that is always in the back of my mind as I think about this stuff, I wonder the degree to which such teams can be effective as organs of the organization, as opposed to consultants, like you were saying.
Just because, once you are a part of the organization, you are suddenly beholden to the same environment and political forces as all the other parts of the organization. And a part of the value that this approach brings is allowing you to make connections that open up different avenues for possibility. And so much becomes closed once you are an organ of the organization. All of a sudden your incentive structures are in alignment with the incentive structures of the other teams that you’re going to be collaborating with. So, I think it’s really encouraging and really fascinating that it’s happening and that it is emerging.
And it is happening at a time when I don’t see the prevalence of external consultancies in the same way that we’ve seen in the past. I often wonder if we are overdue for a return of that kind of model to greater prominence, if in no other regard than this one.
Peter: Yeah. I mean, I think Erika’s point, when she talked about this, that, historically, design consultancies were turning the crank and doing the craft, the detailed-level craft. And now there’s this opportunity for, essentially, design-inflected management consulting to operate at that level.
But we haven’t quite seen it yet. but that seems to be where there’s potential.
Jorge: To talk a little bit about Excel, because this is something that also came to mind when you were talking about that. I use Excel a lot and I like it a lot. It’s a super useful tool. I think that the challenge comes with premature structuring of things. It’s like when you have a grid of cells, an empty grid of cells, the cells are screaming to be filled with things.
Peter: In a very specific, like, two-dimensional matrix. Yeah.
Jorge: Absolutely. Right. Was it McLuhan that talked about the tools, the tools making us, I don’t remember the exact words, but…
Jesse: “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Yes.
Jorge: Right. Which, to circle back to architecture, Churchill said the same thing about buildings, right?
And these things are true. We live in these things and they inform the way that we think about problems and that we think about the situations that we’re dealing with. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, that sort of thing.
And the particular Excel hammer is one that calls for greater precision than what is required at junctures where problems are not well formulated.
Peter: Right. When you’re in that fuzzy front end, you want an environment that enables the exploration of the fuzziness and Excel can’t handle the fuzzy.
Jorge: It can’t, that’s right.
Music break 2
Peter: You wrote a book called Living In Information. And I’m thinking about architecture, and, as any homeowner knows, the structures that we’re living in have been often quite predetermined by things like codes and standards, and there’s only so much wiggle room that an architect can bring to those codes and standards.
And I’m curious, Jorge, as someone who has thought more about living in information, living in interactivity, living in digitalia, your thoughts on the role of codes, architecture-like codes, building codes, standards within the design of the environments that we are living within.
Jorge: That’s an interesting question, and one that I think has answers in a couple of levels. One level is there are standards, and then there are regulations. And I think that those things are different. And, again, I’m going to call out the fact that the three of us are old, yeah, pointing out that I believe the three of us started in this field very early on in the history of the web specifically.
That has given me a vantage point that has allowed me to see the emergence of structural standards in a medium that was something of a blank slate. I remember making my first webpage. I think I was using Notepad on Windows. And facing this blank screen and then typing in the tags. And you could type anything into that. There was no pre-dictated structure. There was nothing that said, “The corporate logo should be in the upper left corner. And then navigation bar shall span across the top of the screen.”
In fact, there was quite a bit of experimentation there. You might recall that there was a lot of argument about whether the navbar should be on the left or on the right or at the top, or what have you. And, over time, some ways of doing that have worked better than others, and they have become standards in some way.
And, the analogy that I always think of, and I think that I heard this from our friend, Andrea Resmini is, filmmaking. The very first movies were basically, someone set a camera and pointed at a stage and recreated what you would see in a play, because that’s how they understood time-based storytelling like that to happen. And it took a while for things like jump cuts and dissolves and the narrative, the grammar of cinema to emerge.
And I don’t believe that there are regulations around what those things should be. There are standards though. And if you go to see a movie, you expect it to have three acts, and you expect certain ways for the story to unfold in the screen, even if you can’t describe it, you are now a sophisticated reader of that text, if you will. And there’s nothing inherent in the medium that dictates that.
In fact, there’s a lot of interesting movies that may be hard to watch, but they’re very interesting, that don’t follow those conventions.
And when I think about policies and standards and such, I’m much more interested in the structures that have emerged from use, and how they’ve become quantified into a sort of grammar. The logo on the upper left and the navigation bar across the top is a structural construct that we take for granted, but it’s not natural.
Policies, regulations are a completely different domain that I am not as qualified to talk about, but I see a lot of movement happening around things like GDPR, and how we deal with privacy online, which is affecting our online experience. We have all of these popups now asking us to confirm whether we accept cookies in uppercase,
and that’s the nature of responding to legal constructs.
Jesse: Building codes and regulations and so forth, exist to constrain the choices of designers and builders to keep those choices within what is perceived to be a safe context, so that people aren’t making reckless choices that hurt the users of their buildings or their websites or digital products and so forth.
And in our area, the conversation around creating that kind of safety has revolved more around professional certification for designers. That designers should have to meet some sort of standard of not just expertise, but also behavior on an ongoing basis, in order to keep doing what they’re doing.
And I wonder how you both as a practitioner and as an educator, feel about this prospect of professional certification as a way of creating more of those standards to create more of that safety for users.
Peter: And I want to add, Were you ever licensed as an architect? Fid you go through that process in architecture, or did you not get that far?
Jorge: I practiced as an architect for a very short time. I practiced for about a year and a half. And then the web happened.
Peter: But you would have needed to be licensed, then…
Jorge: Yeah, I was, I graduated… but the reason why I hesitate to answer definitively is that I was practicing in Panama, in my home country. And there is a licensing board there, which I passed, but I think it’s different from licensing.
And even in the United States, it varies from state to state,
Peter: I just, I wanted to make sure, like Jesse and I, have never been licensed.
Jesse: To do anything, ever.
Peter: You’ve had that experience of being essentially, I guess, tested to make sure that you know what you’re doing well enough, that things that you build, aren’t gonna
collapse in on the people who use them.
Jorge: It was early on in my career. But I could call myself an architect, which actually, is a thing, because in some countries you cannot call yourself an architect if you have not gone through that process. That’s the whole certification thing. And I’m of two minds about it.
It makes a lot of sense in some regards, the argument put forth by Mike Monteiro in his book, Ruined by Design. We have tremendous power in these roles, especially when so many people are using things like Facebook and Google and Twitter, the people designing those experiences are perhaps the design professionals that have the most leverage of any design professionals in human history, just because of the scale of those things, there’s so many people using them.
And, how I see the argument for certification is that certification would enforce a set of standards that would aim to keep the people who use the systems designed by certified people safer than people who are using things designed by people who are just coming at it without any kind of grounding. And I think that that works for architecture, in part, because the profession has been around for so long, and we know so much about the properties of what makes a building safe, versus what makes a building unsafe.
In designing for digital environments, even though I’ve said that there’s a couple of decades now of history, or more than that, but it’s not hundreds of years, like what we have in architecture. There’s still so much that is emergent, and I would worry about, yeah, certification is in tension to our ability to push boundaries in some way. In fact, I think that you want to certify things to keep people within boundaries so that you…
Peter: stop the boundary pushing, limit the boundary pushing?
Jorge: Right. And it feels like this field still has so much boundary pushing to do.
Jesse: I don’t know. You know, GDPR exists because there was a little bit too much boundary pushing going on.
Jorge: Yeah, for sure.
Jesse: The argument that certification is a bad thing because it may potentially constrain creative exploration, sounds like a very close cousin to a “move fast and break things” kind of mentality, which, we can see how many things that mentality has already broken. And so, at some point, you have to weigh what is the tradeoff here. Pushing the boundaries of design, exploring new possibilities, bringing new things to the table creatively, really being able to discover the potentials and the limits of the medium.
You have to weigh that against, how many people are getting trampled in the process of your creative explorations, and how many bad actors, not necessarily designers, but bad actors on the business side, bad actors all around us, can leverage our willingness to go explore and push boundaries with them toward ends that don’t serve the larger good.
Jorge: You’re absolutely right. And is what is so challenging about this that I can totally see the argument for certification. My point, though, is that we are in an industry that is moving so fast, that you may end up establishing policies that are over-determined for a particular medium or a particular implementation.
That happened within the professional experience of many folks listening to the show. They remember the world before the iPhone and then the world after the iPhone. And if you had overly specified the policies for the world before the iPhone, all of a sudden, the iPhone made at least some of them less relevant, and maybe you would end up with a situation where you would be nudged into the direction of making a mobile interface more similar to the desktop interface, you know?
I think that the things that we want to have guard rails around are things like data protection and making sure that the systems we use do not discriminate unfairly against people.
And we’ve had things like the laws that protect folks with disabilities, for example, which have been successful in encouraging companies, designers, et cetera, to create things that are more universally accessible. And I would expect that when we talk about policies and certification, we are talking about that level. And not the things like the UI level. We’re not going to demand that designers do this on the screen. We are going to demand that they take care of people’s data, for example. That would make sense.
Did you all see the demo of this Elon Musk company that is doing the brain link thing? I forget what it’s called. The essence of it is that it is a device that you implant in your skull. And it’s actually an interesting service design thing, because part of the, quote-unquote product, includes the robot that drills into your skull. So, you sit under this machine that drills a hole in your skull and places a coin sized sensor. It attaches some ways to your nervous system from which then you can connect to your phone or to another digital device and do things.
I don’t know how feasible that is, but you can imagine something like that being feasible, and they demonstrated it with pigs. And I would expect that if that is a thing in the world, the design challenges around that, and the ethical challenges around that are many ways thornier than the design challenges that we’re dealing with when we’re dealing with screen-based systems. I wonder if policies and certifications that are created in a world where the dominant means for interacting with information are screen-based, are going to serve us well in a world where we have direct connections to our nervous systems.
So this is not an easy thing to contemplate because it is a very fast moving field.
It’s awesome talking with you all.
Jesse: Jorge, this has been great. Thank you.
You can find Jorge Arango and links to all of his work on the internet, on his website at http://jarango.com. That’s J A R A N G O.com. He’s also @jarango on Twitter. You can find Peter Merholz and myself on Twitter as well. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. This podcast is not on Twitter yet, but it does have a website.
That’s http://findingourway.design, where you’ll find audio and transcripts of every episode. You’ll also find a contact form where you can share your feedback with us. We love to hear your thoughts. We’ll see you next time.
23–Make UX truly human-centered by addressing trauma, power, and other necessary and uncomfortable realities (ft. Vivianne Castillo)
Dec 10, 2020
Transcript
Vivianne: It was kind of a culture shock, honestly, to the switch into UX, this field that raves about how human-centered they are, and how little they talked about doing the personal work required to actually be human-centered.
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz,
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Together: And we’re Finding Our Way
Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, in a conversation recorded two days after the 2020 US Presidential election, as the votes were still being counted and uncertainty hung heavy in the air, we’re joined by Vivianne Castillo, UX research leader and educator, to talk about, appropriately enough, trauma. Trauma in the workplace, trauma in our lives, and trauma in society.
We’ll talk about what UXers can learn from human services professionals, and we’ll talk about acknowledging the true power of designers to not just help people, but harm them as well.
Vivianne: I guess, a little bit of context, I come from a counseling and helping service professional background. So I made a career switch into UX probably about, I don’t know, four or five years ago now, time means nothing at the moment, but a few years ago, and initially when I broke into UX, I was really excited about how this industry talked about being human-centered and empathy and I remember winning a scholarship to go to the O’Reilly Design Conference in San Francisco and super excited to be listening to these leaders in the field talk about these topics. Talk about the role of diversity and inclusion in tech and design. And at the end of the conference, I was sitting in my hotel room, just kind of reflecting on what I had heard and I was like, “Wow, like this is bullshit,” when it came to how UX professionals were talking about empathy.
And I have a different take on it. And part of that is just from my training as a counselor and a therapist. But when I started to initially speak and write within the UX field, it was about diversity, equity, and inclusion, how the way we talk about it tends to be BS within the industry.
I talked a lot about the role of shame when it comes to research and design, and really, for me, there’s a time and place for personas, journey maps, et cetera, et cetera. Those things are important, but I’m more interested in that deeper human undercurrent when it comes to our work. And I think trauma especially is a topic that we need to be talking more about.
I think when we look at 2020 in and of itself, it’s just been a year of, not necessarily stress, it’s been a year of trauma. You have the trauma of COVID and the pandemic, which also just impacts folks in the majority versus minority employees very differently. Folks in the black and Latinx community were more likely to know folks who have passed away from COVID than their white colleagues. You have the trauma of June where Corporate America kind of realized, I guess, they’re racist. And so now you have this month of June where you’re having a lot of these companies, a lot of these well-meaning colleagues try and have these conversations. And, in many ways, often, deeper traumatizing their black colleagues and underrepresented minorities.
And then you have, political trauma of this election. And in America, specifically, politics is life or death for minorities. So, it’s been a very stressful time, a very traumatic time to say the least, and that impacts the workplace. And if there’s one thing that 2020 has taught us, and has maybe reinforced probably more so for the majority, it’s that you can’t dichotomize our personal life from our professional life anymore.
Jesse: This question in my brain is being asked by Peter: What do you mean when you use the term “trauma” here?
Vivianne: In its very simplest form, trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event. Sometimes you’ll hear people talk about big-T trauma, little-T trauma. So little-T trauma is things like, you’re moving away as a kid, or a sudden disruption in maybe like a major plan you had this year, like going to a wedding or having that really big birthday party. Whereas big-T trauma, think about, like, physical assault, think about the pandemic.
And there’s different types of trauma. You have acute trauma, again, these more, like, smaller moments of emotional responses to terrible events. You have chronic trauma. These are things that are dragged out over a period of time. And then you have something that’s called secondary or vicarious drama.
Vicarious trauma comes from being repeatedly exposed to other people’s trauma and their stories of traumatic events. I mean, 2020 in a nutshell, right? the way that vicarious trauma specifically plays out is things like frustration, anxiety, irritability, uh, disturbed sleep, or like nightmares, problems managing personal boundaries, loss of connection with self or others, or a loss of sense of your own identity and your values.
It definitely runs a spectrum.
Peter: I’m wondering if you feel that all UX practice and practitioners warrant this level of depth, regardless of the problem space people are working within, or is this something that is more around, well, yeah, if you’re working in healthcare, sure, you need to understand these things, but if you’re trying to just help people listen to music, okay, you get a pass on matters of trauma. Like, how do we calibrate it, so we don’t feel like we have to be all trauma all the time, but that we are engaging appropriately with some of these deeper, heavier concerns, even in areas that might not seem like it warrants it.
Vivianne: Even if you’re designing a to-do list app, I think that if you’re going to profess to be human-centered, you need a more holistic approach to that. And part of having a more holistic approach to being human-centered is understanding things like trauma. And I get that, naturally, no one wakes up in the morning, they’re like, “Man, I really want to dive into trauma. I just want to, like, read about it all day. I want to sit in that.” That’s not the expectation nor is that the way that even folks who have to deal with these topics, how they handle it. I’ve been thinking a lot about how UX professionals in particular tend to align themselves with the product and tech industry, when in reality, I think we need to align ourselves more with the human service industry.
And when I think about what a human service professional is, I think that human service professionals are individuals who uniquely approach the objective of meeting human needs through an interdisciplinary knowledge base, focusing on prevention as well as remediation of problems, and maintaining a commitment to improving the overall quality of life of people. And so, that’s social workers, that’s counselors, public administrators, but that sounds a lot like UX professionals.
And so, when it comes to trauma, for me, it’s not even necessarily all about, How can I make sure that we aren’t making product decisions that are causing trauma? I do think that’s important topic as well, but it’s also about understanding how does trauma impact you and your work and your ability to collaborate with people, your ability to be innovative, your ability to be vulnerable enough, to know when to ask for help with your teammates and your colleagues.
So, it’s a part of just understanding how to work within a work environment that’s collaborative and it’s bringing out the best of your work as well.
Peter: If you look at the history of UX and HCI, the way that we choose to understand humans emerged from trying to figure out how people use tools. It was essentially applying that to software interfaces. So, a lot of, like, cognitive psychology was the primary means of understanding people so that we could design software that they could understand and manipulate and use.
Something that I hadn’t thought of, until you just mentioned it, is how because of the degree to which software is shot through, infuses literally every aspect of our lives now, that simple information processing approach to user research, which, again, is the foundation upon which most UX research is understood, is no longer sufficient. This is now a social, societal concern. How do we evolve this practice of UX to recognize it’s not just about behavior with software interfaces, but something deeper and more fundamental that these software interfaces are now enabling everywhere?
Vivianne: I think a part of it is just recognizing that in the beginning of UX and the development of it, if you’re looking at the founding UX forefathers, a lot of them are white able-bodied men. And so a lot of these decisions that they’ve been making, when it comes to software and products, has always been affecting, and oftentimes excluding, folks who are in marginalized communities or folks who are minorities.
So I think it’s moreso recently the reason why we’re having more conversations about this is because now you have four generations in the workplace. And Millennials and Gen Z, we’re more diverse generations, where we also grew up being able to talk more freely about these topics in the workplace and in school settings.
And so, you’re looking at what I think is a clash of different generations and different points of view on the importance and the urgency of talking about these things. And so when it comes to, how do we start to signal to the rest of the UX community, that there are deeper elements and even just consequences to our design decisions and our ability to apply our awareness of depth of humanity to our work streams, I think a couple of things need to happen.
I think, one, we need to elevate more voices within UX leadership that aren’t from the majority. I mean, my greatest fear is that there will be certain leaders in UX who will attempt to rebrand themselves for the sake of being relevant and talking on things and issues that really, they have no level of expertise or business talking about when they could be pulling a seat to the table and bringing other voices to the conversation.
And then the other thing is, I think it’s just reminding the UX community that we are not special snowflakes. There are industries, there are professions who have done very deep work on actually being holistically human-centered.
I think about the American Counseling Association and they have a code of ethics and even in their code of ethics, they talk about the importance of self-care and it being an ethical imperative. And, the importance of understanding when you are physically, emotionally, spiritually even, burnt out and it’s affecting your ability to perform. And reason why they even call that out in their code of ethics is because they recognize the ability to cause harm to people if you aren’t operating at your best self.
We need to really lean into what human service professionals are talking about, and even what they’re training their professions in school. I think UX professionals, we pride ourselves on all things empathy and advocating for people, and I think that’s right. But I also think that what comes often with roles where extending empathy is a key part of your responsibilities is compassion fatigue. And compassion fatigue, this is not a new or sexy, like, phrase or word. Again, this is something that is commonly talked about among human service professionals.
Even teachers experience this, nurses experience this, but compassion fatigue is always going to be experienced by people where extending empathy is a core aspect of what they do. And really, compassion fatigue is the profound, like, emotional and physical erosion that takes place when folks are unable to refuel and regenerate.
So imagine if UX professionals actually understood that at some point in their career, they’re going to experience compassion fatigue. This isn’t, “Oh, I’m never going to experience it.” It’s a question of when and being able to recognize those symptoms: difficulty concentrating, increase likelihood of you isolating yourself, insomnia, overeating, excessive use of alcohol and drugs.
What would our approach to being human-centered be like to other people, if we could actually be more human-centered and conscientious of ourselves.
Jesse: As you were talking about the need for UX professionals to start looking to other models for their profession and for their practices, to what human service professionals are already doing and already understand around these things, I noticed that this very much goes against what seems to be the trend in UX these days, which is toward increasing quantification, and people building these elaborate systems of metrics to support design decisions, and the whole set of issues that you’re talking about are things that can’t be captured by those quantitative methods.
So it feels like there’s this two-fold kind of thing. At first, you’ve got to pull people’s attention away from the numbers toward the qualitative and holistic view of what’s going on. And then even beyond that, then you’ve got to educate them about trauma or the potential for trauma or the potential for harm that’s created there.
And all of that is just within a product design and development process, which is separate from the whole other side of the equation for leaders, which is how do they manage their organization and how do they structure their teams? How do they work with their teams and create cultures that are aware of these issues? To your point, you can’t really separate how trauma affects us as practitioners from the role that trauma plays in product design anymore. And I am wondering, How leaders can improve their awareness of how these issues play out within their team?
Vivianne: I do think you can quantify this. In my current role, I work with C-level executives of Fortune 500 companies, so I’m often having a lot of these types of conversations where I’m leveraging primary and secondary research, both qual and quant, in order to help them be more holistically human-centered in their approach to business development and strategy and how technology and product can power that. And so, I remember one time talking to an executive and they’re like, “Yeah, all of this stuff is good, but at the end of the day, this is about data, this is about numbers.”
He’s like, “I think the whole, human-centered thing is cute. but this is about data and numbers.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s cool.”
So, like, people create data and data comes from people. So you need to talk about people and understand that it’s about both to quantify it a little bit, even, to some of the comments you’re saying.
Well, think about when it comes to trauma, and, like, burnout, when it comes to compassion fatigue. Think about the way that this impacts the business on a dollar-sign level. So for example, I am fully anticipating a spike in FMLA leave between now and probably January as well as in the summer. I think this whole year, a lot of companies, teams, UX teams have been talking about stress and burnout and they have really missed the ball by not talking about trauma. think about what that means when it comes to, now you have to spend time hopefully finding a contractor to fill in an aspect of work, because one of your employees is taking an absence of leave.
Think about the increased amount of time people are spending off, and what does that mean when it comes to workflow and production? Think about folks who are, realizing, “Hey, like, actually my workplace is… this is not conducive to my mental or emotional wellbeing. This is toxic. And I’m leaving.”
Think about the amount of money, now, these companies are spending, having to recruit to interview, and to find someone else to replace that person. So for me, a trauma-informed workplace and team is also just a part of good business when it comes to having a sustainable workforce. I’m blanking on the other question that you asked, but…
Jesse: Yeah, so my other question was, given that those things are all these untracked or relatively invisible costs to these organizations, how do leaders bring the awareness up of those impacts? How do they improve their own awareness of those impacts in order to be able to take action on it?
Vivianne: I mean first and foremost, it starts with education. It’s hard to actually understand the impact that it’s having on your team if you aren’t aware of the complexity of this and how it’s playing out, within not only the workplace, but just in general, how trauma operates.
So, one thing that I’ve been doing is really just educating leaders on trauma and the difference, too, between trauma and burnout. Also assessing their confidence level and being able to talk about these topics and lead your team through difficult times, whether that is an election, whether that is protests and riots that are happening in June, and being able to really, in many ways, do a self-assessment to understand not only your ability to talk about things like trauma, but the undercurrent things that are also driving those conversations, like racial injustice and inequity.
Especially with this election, you can’t necessarily lead your teams, and hopefully they are diverse teams, you can’t necessarily lead them without being able to talk about race and racism and hatred. That’s very much a part of that conversation. So, when I’m teaching and equipping leaders how to have these conversations, I’m also teaching them about the difference between shame and guilt, because more times than not, when you’re talking about things like racism or politics and trauma, shame and guilt are often triggered.
Guilt is, “I made a mistake,” whereas shame is, “I am the mistake.” And more times than not, especially for folks in the majority, they tend to experience shame in these conversations, these messages of, “Oh, you’re saying I’m the mistake. You’re saying that I’m the problem.” And then that’s where the defensiveness comes in. That’s where that fight-flight-or-freeze comes in when it comes to these conversations.
So, I’m often equipping people as, “Hey, physiologically, here’s what’s happening to you if you’re starting to experience shame.” And I’m also giving them tools of how do you ground yourself in that moment, so you can still be present and listen to your colleagues, listen to your team members as they’re processing and working through what’s happening, not only outside of the four walls, but within the four walls of work.
Because the other thing, too, that I’ve been teaching people about trauma is that often trauma agitates and triggers old trauma. So, I’m talking to a lot of folks right now who, yes, like, the world is a trash fire right now. But it’s also triggering former workplace trauma that people have experienced, right?
Where they may be at an old job they didn’t feel safe, where they didn’t feel heard. I didn’t feel like they could take care of themselves. And so, it’s kind of bringing up some of those old experiences and those old feelings, and people are feeling frazzled. They don’t really know what to do with it.
A lot of it is equipping people with grounding tools. How to recognize this within yourself versus other people, how to have language that you can use when confronting someone on some of these difficult topics, or if someone is saying something that is triggering, how do you actually have a productive conversation with that person?
Music break 1
Jesse: You mentioned giving leaders grounding tools to help them ride out whatever shame or other feelings of their own that might come up as they engage with these issues, because it’s much easier to run away from those things if you know, you’re going to have to face your own shit when they come up, right. What is, uh, simple way for people to get started with those grounding practices?
Vivianne: I’ve encouraged leaders to create an emotion journal. So, I have a print out of this emotion wheel. Most people can’t name, a lot of emotions, but, I’ll have them do an assignment where, hey, on Mondays, I want you to take note of the times when you felt happy, where you felt excited or exhilarated, whatever is within that slice of that emotion pie. Or Hey, Wednesday, I want you to reflect on the last 24 hours and think about the times where you felt frustrated or angry or defensive, and what caused that, what was the line of thought that led you there?
It’s an awareness exercise. I think a lot of people don’t pause long enough to learn about themselves, and so I have toolbox of different activities that I share with people of, here are some activities you can do, whether it’s a weekly or daily basis, to help you learn more about you, and help you to earn your PhD in you.
Another thing that I encourage people to do as well is, again, at the end of the day, to have time of reflection.
One particular activity I encourage someone to do was around power dynamics. And so I had them for a few days journal about the different people that they interacted with in their work and whether they had a perception of that person having more power or less power than them. In that conversation, in that relationship, and then talking about the impact that that has and how they talk to that person, their willingness to share ideas with that person and potential barriers to actually hearing from that person.
So yeah, I think some simple activities like that actually go a long, long, long way.
Jesse: It seems like just simply creating the space for reflection, regardless of what the practice is, is a key.
Vivianne: Yeah. And it, it sounds simple, but whew. I mean, even the way we’ve taught folks about UX, that’s not something we teach people. It’s, like, be human-centered, but that whole actually doing the personal work required to truly be human-centered, that’s just kind of, I guess it’s just going to happen.
It’s a given, but it’s something that we actually don’t prioritize and we don’t necessarily view as a part of our professional development or professional competencies. So I think that as a field, we could just do a lot better in recognizing that aspect and how this plays a part in our professional responsibility.
Again, something that I admire about human service professionals is that recognition that, the things that are happening from your personal life outside of the four walls from work impacts the way that you show up in your professional life. Even ethics. Within my master’s in counseling program, that was semester one of my program.
And every semester after that, we always talked about ethics. We always talked about what’s happening in our personal lives and how that impacts our relationship with our work, with our clients, with the experiences that we’re trying to craft and create. And we’re encouraged to be intentional—whether that’s accountability, whether as a counselor to go see another counselor, it’s just viewed as an ethical responsibility, as a professional imperative, actually within our work.
And so it was kind of a culture shock, honestly, to the switch into UX, this field that raves about how human-centered they are, and how little they talked about doing the personal work required to actually be human-centered.
Peter: Right. I mean, for UX it’s all around the methodologies. We learn tools to understand people that aren’t ourselves, to understand other people. I remember back, Jesse, to when you worked on Charmr, and Charmr was a kind of a vision project that Adaptive Path did around diabetes and managing your condition. And I remember the team who was trying to practice good human-centered design, coming back to the office after talking to Type 2 diabetics. And they were wrecked, hearing about the circumstances that these folks were in. And it was the first time I witnessed that, right.
Usually when you’re working in boring software context, trying to help SaaS companies SaaS better, you don’t get that kind of engagement when you’re doing user research. But, we were not set up to enable or support these folks in managing those challenges beyond kind of a generalized, humane awareness of like, “Oh, we should give that person some space to deal with this thing that they’re processing,” kind of separate almost from the work.
So I’m reflecting on how there’ve been moments in my career where I’ve seen it, but it felt like I could, I guess, isolate it on like, “Well, if you’re going to do something that obviously engages with the more challenging parts of human existence, yes. we can be more attuned to that.” And I think what you’re pointing out is, like, basically everything right now is kind of… I guess what I’m realizing is like the moment we encourage us as professionals to engage with people, customers, users, or whatever, there’s a line crossed that we haven’t been aware of where we’re inserting ourselves into somebody else’s context, if we’re doing it right, and are now exposing ourselves to all that stuff. And we have in no way equipped ourselves as a community, as a profession, to handle that even a little bit.
I mean, it’s just not even… I have never heard of… Maybe if you come at it from matters of sociology and anthropology, right? You see some people with user research backgrounds where they’re steeped in ethnography. I’m hoping that those professionals have some awareness. But if you’re coming at it from a interaction design or HCI background, not even, not even beginning to happen.
And what this leads me to wonder is, something we haven’t talked about for a while, but the sense of professionalism and certification for the kind of work we do, so that we are being responsible and making sure that when we’re asking someone to engage in these practices, that they’ve done the work to really ready themselves.
So, I guess I’m wondering, as you’ve shifted from counseling, which seems to have a degree of rigor around this understanding, to now UX and UX research, which clearly lacks it, how would you mature this profession and practice to account for this gap that you’re seeing between the world you came from to the world you’ve stepped into.
Vivianne: Yeah, that’s a great question. The rigor from counseling comes from, again, an understanding of how close we work with people and our ability to cause harm. And again, that’s just something that, when I switched into UX, I’m like, okay, like everyone’s talking about being human-centered, but do they really understand how much power they have in these relationships with people, especially as researchers.
I think that a lot of well-meaning researchers have unfortunately used empathy as a tool to exploit people. And so now, I think a silver lining to 2020, COVID, is people are having to encounter the complexity of people’s humanity, whether that’s within the workplace, outside of the workplace, society or not.
And so when it comes to, What does it look like for us to close this gap? Can I dream? I think that these HCI programs would partner more closely with the human service programs, ideally like counseling and social work.
There are practical ways to understand and increase your competencies when it comes to sensing and responding to people, like, what do you do when you are in a session with someone and they start to just cry. I’ve heard and have read materials from UX leaders who view those emotional outbursts as a badge of honor. And they viewed it as, “Oh, I’m so good at building rapport and empathy with this person. Man, like, I love those moments when participants cry with me.”
And for me, that’s, especially as someone from a counseling background, that’s a very dangerous mindset to have, or hope to affirm that you are really good at building empathy and rapport. And the reason why is, because for all you know, you have not only triggered someone into emotional distress, but you actually probably don’t have the tools or the training to usher them out of that, to ground them before they leave your presence and go back on with the rest of their day.
And we have an ethical responsibility to make sure that we are caring for our participants when they are with us and when we’re doing research sessions with them.
I do think we need to work more closely with human service professionals like counselors and social workers. I personally think that there should be some element of continuing education that comes from specifically, again, human service classes and courses around this.
I think unfortunately we do a lot of navel-gazing. We don’t lean as much on other industries and professions who have actually done deep work in being human-centered. And the other thing that can help close the gap is, especially from leaders who already have a level of recognition and sway in the industry, to step up and actually start asking those questions, do your own research, and take your own initiative and share what you’re learning.
And come from a place of humility, not a place of, “I’m a leader. And, I’m an expert in all these things,” but help us industry learn how to be humble again. ‘Cause we’re not a humble industry. I think pride is one of the greatest occupational hazards for UX professionals, because it really blinds us from doing the work that could prevent us from causing harm to other people.
Peter: You mentioned power and, power is a big factor here, something that you pointed out that I don’t think we understand is the power that we wield as designers. Because it’s a step removed, we’re like, “I don’t have power. I just make a thing.”
Human service industry folks recognize that power because they’re dealing with that person face to face, or maybe in a small group. It’s very in the moment. Maybe through user research, you have a little bit of that. You’re not actually trying to make a change, usually, with user research, you’re there to observe and take in.
And so I don’t think we recognize, one, even that context, there’s a weird power dynamic going on that probably needs to be acknowledged. But then, two, the ultimate impact of the work that proceeds and how it is a reflection of the power dynamic between the organization producing the service the people who are receiving it. So there’s that part of the power dynamic.
Something else that I was wondering was in the internal work that’s happening, something I’m sensitive to, as a leader, is if I try to facilitate conversations, because I’m the one with power, I don’t think the conversations are going to be necessarily as open and honest and good, because I fear, as a leader, people will take cues from me, even if I’m trying to be the avuncular sweater-wearing groovy guy, who’s just, like, wants to rap with you about what we’re dealing with.
People know that I’m the VP and they’re not, and I can fire them or whatever those dynamics are. And so I’m wondering what counsel you have in terms of approaching these matters internally, so that power doesn’t overwhelm honesty and authenticity when, people are trying to engage in these conversations.
Vivianne: Yeah, that’s a great question. And before I get to that, you talked about power with the researcher-participant relationship, there’s so much power there that we should talk more about. I have power, in that I know exactly where this interview, where I want it to go and where I’m going to take you. That’s power.
I have power in the types of questions I want to ask, what emotional heartstrings, emotional responses I might want to hear from you. Some personal stories. My participant is unaware of the amount of emotional labor that I might be asking them to do in my session.
Something that I tell people, too, is, Hey, when you’re doing interviews with folks, don’t wear an Apple watch, don’t wear your, like, nice, expensive jewelry or, have your, what, like $20,000 piece of artwork in the back, whatever it is. Those are power signals, ‘cause you don’t know that person, their background, what they’ve been through. So if you’re having on a call with them, whether it’s remote or, back in the day, in person, and you roll up with your Starbucks cup, you have your Apple watch on, nd, you’re just dressed to the nines, that introduces a unique power dynamic between you and that person.
I have a checklist of things that I do before my interviews. I’ll jot down, What am I bringing into this interview? What assumptions may I already have about this person in this interview and how might that influence the way I’m going to interact with them? And what ways am I going to try and mitigate the power dynamic in this interview?
So I, mentally and emotionally, walk through that so that I can try and mitigate that, or at least be aware of it as much as possible in my time with that participant.
You asked a question about, the internal approach to power, specifically with leaders and how they show up with their teams. Easier said than done, but man, one of the quickest ways to mitigate that power is to be vulnerable.
And, wow, leaders, like, it’s tough. It’s tough. And I get it, because there are written and unwritten rules of leadership, right? Things that we’ve been told of how we’re supposed to show up, how we’re supposed to lead, how we’re supposed to assure people that things are okay.
But some of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in the workplace is… I remember being on a call with an executive. This was in June. A white man. And, they’re thinking about Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and they cried. And I was, like, Whoa. This is, like, it’s a reminder of, like, Oh, okay. Like, executives are people, too. Like, there’s something, there’s a commonality that we have between us, beyond we work at the same company. So moments of vulnerability.
There are moments to acknowledge and surface other moments of connection between you and people who have less power than you. So, I have been on calls with executives where I always ask people, “How are you doing today?” ‘Cause I know it’s a day-by-day thing. And then, “How are you doing in general?” Like, that’s how I always phrase up that question with people. And I remember talking to an executive and they’re like, “Honestly, not good, not good today. This is happening, this is happening, and I’m not going to lie—I just don’t want to be at work today.” And this is someone who has more power than me. And I just told them, “Hey, I really appreciate you sharing that.” It makes me feel like I can be more real and honest, not only with leaders, but even my other colleagues, right.
Because leaders are modeling how to show up to colleagues, that we have similar power dynamics, so it’s a trickle-down effect. So I say, one, I think vulnerability is really important. Two, I think, modeling behavior that, again, shows that you are aware of others and what others might be going through.
So, I had an executive, who maybe only gave a few days’ notice, but it was like, “Hey, I need time off.” And they took a week off. Family and your wellbeing comes first, and everything else comes together. Not second. And I was like, great. Like that, for me, is a moment of mitigating power because now I’m giving myself more permission to show up in a way that’s authentic, that’s real about how I’m doing and where I’m at. And even in the midst of a project, if I need to step aside for a little bit, that’s going to help me and my teammates figure out, where to pick up the slack.
How do we continue this momentum of collaboration instead of me just operating on E and it’s stifling the project that we’re working on together.
Music break 2
Jesse: You talked about bringing people together around these issues. And one thing I think that happens within teams is people experience their own individual traumas, and then had to take them home with them, or, at best, maybe it comes up in a one-on-one with their manager at some point. And I wonder if there are ways that teams can collectively create more resilience. We talk about creating a culture for design within organizations that is a little bit of a safe space for risk, a safe place for exploring creative possibility, those kinds of safety, and my thesis is that you don’t get those kinds of safety unless you also have these other kinds of safety.
Is it entirely on the manager and their individual relationships with team members to create that? Or is there some holistic way that it can be addressed almost at the organizational level?
Vivianne: I think it’s both, I think managers play a huge role and, creating that type of environment. And really, when we talk about safety, we talk about vulnerability, we’re really talking about trust, and extending trust because you can’t have safety, vulnerability, without it. Managers play a huge role in that, how they show up, how they address teams in trying times. Even right now, with everything that’s going on in America, if you’re a manager and you haven’t addressed it, you better believe that you are creating a less safe environment for your team to talk about real things that are impacting them and might be impacting their work and work productivity. So yes, managers have a huge part to play.
I think, too, there are certain things that you can do at a team level, where everyone is contributing to also creating that space. So, an activity that I’ve done on teams, this is something that I’ve also encouraged and done within Humanity Centered, which is our online course in community for folks in UX who want to do more of this deeper work, is we do something called a “check-in check-in.”
So for example, with Humanity Centered, we have folks who go through their own self-assessment on where they are, and comfort level talking about some of these topics that we’re talking about today, when it comes to being able to have human-centered conversations and profit-centric conversations, the ability to talk about white supremacy and privilege and design, et cetera, et cetera.
So, we ended up having these small groups that, through that self-assessment, we group people accordingly, and then we’ve had them doing this activity that we call the “check-in check-in.” So, “check-in check-in.” Basically, you have three minutes, and everyone goes in this small group. I’ve even done this with teams at work. And you start off the sentence with, “If you were to truly know me,” and then you just talk about what’s on your mind, whether that’s work stuff. It’s, “If you were to truly know me, this weekend was really great. I was able to go into social distance, walk with so-and-so,” or, “I’m actually not fully present because of A, B and C going on.”
And it just a time for people just to share what’s on their mind and what’s on their heart. And, there’s three minutes and it’s… let’s say that person only wants to talk for two, then that remaining one minute is, everyone just kind of sits in silence and waits for the timer to run out.
And then we give the group two minutes to respond. So, if you want to respond to that person, then you’d throw out the sentence with, “When I heard you say, blank blank blank. It made me think about,” or “made me feel” whatever it is. And so just an activity to help people, again, foster that element of safety and trust and vulnerability.
Some people will share more, so people will share less, but it’s about creating that mutual respect for where people are at. And even just knowing how to better check up on your colleague and to show up with each other in the workplace.
In the beginning of projects, encouraging folks to create what we call an alliance, where, before you kick off this project, let’s say it’s you, another researcher, and three designers, and you’re having a meeting where you’re talking about, What are the expectations for how we each think we should show up on this project? What are the things that you should know about me in order to get the best working experience with me? What’s our role, what are the roles that we’re going to agree to? If there’s disagreement? And, how do we want to figure out how much time do we want to spend on this or not?
So we’re not spinning endlessly, my team, we have a rule. It’s called the “fucks given” rule. So, basically, like, we find ourselves on this problem, and we’re like spinning in debating it. And then we put it to a vote: Out of fucks given, where are you at? You at a hundred? Are you at zero? So, we got to figure out, can we just move us on? Is it really like a life or death thing? I’ll always say things like, “Hey, this is something I’m not willing to die on the hill on, but I do think it’s important.” So just being able to quickly suss out and agree how we want to handle conflict before a project is huge.
And that is a part of creating safe spaces and a safe environment. So, there’s a lot of things, and even rituals, activities people can do.
Jesse: Having tried to implement some vulnerability rituals inside a design organization, I found the degree of buy-in to be widely varying in terms of people’s willingness to be a part of those kinds of things, or to engage with them at more than, a superficial level.
Vivianne: For some companies and teams, that’s a culture shift. What do you mean trust? What do you mean, like, actually being more human to each other? And so some of it takes time, and one of the biggest detriments to the teams, when it comes to this type of work, is they’re, like, “What’s the easy, simple thing I can do tomorrow and everyone will be bought in?” We’re complex people. So, this takes time for some teams, it means that there needs to actually be a deeper conversation about what are the barriers to trust or humility within the team and the culture.
I’ve had teams where they bring in a third-party person to help facilitate those conversations. And I think more teams honestly, should think about doing that.
Peter: Almost every team I work with is stretched too thin, not enough people to do the work that is expected of them.
If I were to bring some of this wisdom back to other folks, the response would likely be, “We just don’t have time for that. I don’t have time to do the things that are expected of me. And now you want me to make time to do these things as well.”
Rituals is probably a way to think about this. I think too often we do events. We’re going to do a two-day workshop. We’re going to get everybody in a room. We’re going to bring in a facilitator, who’s going to help you better understand trauma, self-care, whatever it is. We’re talking about emotional honesty, et cetera.
And then that person’s going to leave, and we’re never going to talk about it again. As opposed to, thinking about it less as an event, and more like, start small, What are rituals, like the check-in check-out, that you can intersperse, and after a while it won’t feel like extra, it’ll just be the work.
Vivianne: I agree. It’s, What are the small things that you can start to implement and build habits on? If the problem is, you’ve been eating like shit, the last six months you’ve gained the COVID 30, we’re going to bring in fitness instructor and do a half-day workout session, and then you’re going to go on with your life. That’s not gonna really cause change anywhere. It’s a Band-Aid on a much larger problem.
Especially now, ‘cause I’m thinking about the context of trauma, I’m thinking about the context of compassion fatigue. Especially when you’re thinking about things like creating equitable and inclusive experiences in design. And I’m thinking about what’s happened this year, I’m thinking about June.
And the reality is, just to be blunt, that white people aren’t used to sitting and suffering in pain this long about race and racism. And so white people are tired, you are tired when it comes to talking about race and racism and caring about people. And so I’m just aware, people are tired, people are traumatized.
So, I always encourage teams, think about one or two things that you can do that start to build this muscle, because this is a muscle, right? To your point, you can’t just have a one, two-day workshop and then you don’t talk about it ever again. It’s a muscle that you have to build.
And I encourage people to build it slow, but be intentional when you’re building it. So, I’m being intentional. Make sure that the habits that you’re implementing are life giving and are actually contributing to increasing an environment of trust and vulnerability. Resist the temptation to feel like you need to study and cram for this invisible exam that I guess everyone has to go through next week. This is something that takes time. I think people really get frustrated with that because they’re, like, “Well, I just want to do everything right now and get it over with.”
But this is a lifelong process and experience as well. You may start at this company and continue with at a different one.
Especially in Corporate America, where capitalism honestly depends on the system not fully acknowledging your humanity in order to make more money. So, you have to think about, what are small habits and rituals that can start to disrupt that, and have us move towards a more holistically human-centered approach to ourselves, so that we can apply that approach to other people as well.
Peter: One of the things we didn’t quite get to is: let’s say UX Research, the profession that you are now in, should that be certified? Should you need a certification to practice UX research? Should there be unions to support UX researchers? Should there be these professional structures to address some of the things we’re talking about, because right now, UX researchers, literally anyone can call themselves that.
Vivianne: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s in the form of certification. I don’t know if it’s in the form of committees, but I do definitely think there needs to be a level of accountability in the field. Less around accountability of personas and journey maps and jobs-to-be-done, and more of, like, do you know how to not cause harm to people when you’re with them?
Jesse: Right. Yeah.
Peter: Norms no longer work. Norms are done. Norms have just proven themselves too easy to exploit, and our practice, our industry is built on norms. And, how do we start turning norms into standards, into reasonable expectations, because of the influence, the power, that our work has.
Vivianne: I agree. And I think that the voices that need to be leading that conversation or should be at least helping to shape what those norms are, should be folks who are underrepresented or marginalized. Because if you’re able to design well for marginalized, underrepresented voices in communities everyone else is going to benefit.
So if there was new UX certification, and it was being led by a bunch of white men in UX, I’d be crushed. So, it’s understanding, too, does it look like for us to actually reflect the sentiment of being inclusive and human-centered, and even our approach to designing accountability, and especially now, I think if people were more aware of trauma, then you wouldn’t have people doing things like, I don’t know, scheduling user research interviews during election week. No one cares, why are people doing that?
Peter: The information you’re going to get is not going to be… yeah, what are you going to do with that?
Jesse: Believe me. I was doing a user research study in September of 2001. I know.
Vivianne: Or even just what if, instead of paying people the typical way we pay participants, we pay them based on the level of emotional labor that we’re going to be expecting them to give to us in this time, what would it look like to reevaluate how we compensate?
There’s a lot of room growth with that. I get a lot of DMs and messages from folks who just had never had the language for trauma, for compassion fatigue, for understanding the difference between stress and traumatic stress and how you treat them very differently.
And, I’ve had folks who have left UX and they’re like, “Wow, if I knew those things, I think I would have been able to get help and, you know, maybe we had more of a sustainable career.” So, this is also about, you want to have a sustainable and long career in UX. We have to start having more conversations about this.
Jesse: I’d love to, in our last couple of minutes, just hear a little bit about Humanity Centered because, I think you’re taking an interesting approach to how you’re structuring, getting this knowledge and these skills out into the world.
Vivianne: Yeah, so Humanity Centered, so we’re a community of what I feel are some of the most supportive, growth-oriented minds in the UX field. And these folks are coming together because we want to learn how to lean into new conversations with openness and courage, and really how to transform the status quo of what it means to be human-centered in our work, our industry, and our professional lives, by doing more of personal work required to do our best professional work.
So, the way that we’ve structured this is, oftentimes when it comes to conversations about creating equitable and inclusive experiences, or influencing power in the workplace, a lot of people tend to treat those conversations and that journey as a solo one. But in reality, this, we believe in our philosophy that growth is best experienced in a shared journey. We have a five-week course that’s taught live. And we also have people split into small groups. And that way, too, we give people time to meet with other people from different countries, different journeys in their UX experience, different companies. But we design those pods to make sure that people are getting the best experience possible from this community.
So, we have people do self-assessments to better understand where they are and their confidence and ability to have conversations about, inclusive and equitable design with their colleagues to influence stakeholders, to have more human-centered conversations.
And we’re grouping them together with other folks who are in not only similar places of their journey, but with folks that are going to help them grow in their goals that they want to achieve from being a part of this community and course.
So, in this, during the modules, we talked about things like barriers and resistances to cultural humility and competencies. We get super practical when it comes to, What does it mean to be ethical? Not even from a team standpoint, from an organizational standpoint.
And we start to question current conversations in the field, like, Should we be focused more on not causing harm or focus more on causing more good? And what is that mindset shift? How does that influence the way we approach product UX? So we had our first cohort that wrapped up actually on Sunday.
We’re having our second cohort start, end of January. We’ve been really excited to have some amazing corporate partners, and sponsors to help us with this work. And for us, any partnership and corporate sponsorship money we receive, we put it back in a hundred percent into scholarships.
We are convicted about the importance of having the most diverse and inclusive community within UX, and it’s been a really hot, awesome, awesome experience. We have folks, obviously, from the States, from Canada, we have folks from Costa Rica, from Ireland, from Kenya. We have folks from all over. We have, one student who literally wakes up at 2:00 AM their time to join us. And so, we’re working on how to make it more accessible, more global as well. And it’s been, honestly, just like a gift in such a chaotic year. So that’s what we’re about.
Peter: That’s awesome.
Jesse: Wow. That sounds really great.
Vivianne: Type in humanitycentered.com, whether that’s centered spelled from UK English, or American English, it will kick you to our website so you can learn more about the courses, learn more about the community and, I’ll see you there.
Jesse: Thank you so much for being with us.
Peter: This has definitely been, I’ll say mind opening, not even eye-opening, so thank you.
Vivianne: Thank you.
Jesse: And that concludes another episode of Finding Our Way. You can find Vivianne Castillo on LinkedIn, as well as on medium. She’s also on Twitter @vcastillo360. You can find Peter and myself on Twitter as well. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. Please feel free to yell at us in public. We love it. If you prefer to yell at us in private, you can do that too. Using the feedback form on the website for this podcast, at http://findingourway.design, where you’ll find every episode and transcripts.
We’ll see you next time.
22: “Right problem, right solution, done right”—The Vanguard of User Research (ft. Jen Cardello)
Nov 17, 2020
Transcript
Jen: Dysfunction in scrum teams or in product teams starts at the very beginning. It starts when people don’t agree on the problem that they’re solving, never mind the solution that’s being designed.
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
And we’re Finding Our Way…
Peter: Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, veteran UX research leader, Jen Cardello of Fidelity Investments, joins us to talk about building teams, building relationships, building credibility, and building the case for human centered practices.
Jesse: Part of the reason why I was interested in talking with you is that, what we’ve heard and what we’ve seen, is that there are a wide variety of answers to the question of where research should sit within an organization. And we’ve heard from folks about research being more strongly aligned with product research, being more strongly aligned with the business side of things, research being, in some cases. completely separate from a design group and almost like a peer or a service to a design group.
And so I’m curious about all of these different approaches, what you’ve seen work and what you’ve seen has created challenges, in terms of just simply from an organizational perspective, where does research belong, and the different answers to that question?
Jen: Those are great questions. I guess it depends on the maturity of the organization and what outcomes it’s looking for. So, if you’re looking for research mainly to provide proof points to shore up a design group that might have a little bit of credibility issue that it’s trying to build, oftentimes you see those UX researchers living in design because they’re trying to structure an ecosystem of tests that generate evidence, that helps the designers stand behind the cases they’re trying to make, for the change they’re trying to see in the product and the experiences.
That can be really uncomfortable because it becomes very apparent very quickly to the product organization, maybe the engineers, maybe leadership, that those researchers, they may be working as hard as they can not to have bias, but purely by the way their function has been put in the organization, it becomes clear what’s happening there. So, In the organization I’m in now, research, all forms of research— which includes my partners in market research, behavioral economics, brand, and advertising research, and customer loyalty—we sit outside of marketing and outside of design. And that is to ensure that those research techniques and our work isn’t weaponized by those organizations. That’s the intent at least.
Peter: So, this is a trend I’ve been seeing, increasingly, for research to be its own group. What I would call a kind of 360-degree group, that incorporates market research, user research, I think you said analytics or data science. Some teams have, customer service and support, or a connection there at least.
I like the idea that you don’t want research to be weaponized by whatever group that it’s part of. And I’m a fan of holism. And so having one research group that has all these different modes of inquiry, methodology, interrogation, makes a lot of sense to me. But how do you avoid, then, research being seen as simply an internal consulting practice that’s not invested in the day-to-day warp and weft of these teams that are trying to deliver new value?
Jen: Yeah, so that’s part of the alignment strategy. We address that with the org design of the research organization. So I have those four peers, market research, behavioral economics, brand and advertising research, customer loyalty. My group is the largest of those and it spreads out over four business units.
We use Spotify-esque language at Fidelity, to talk about the way we’re organized, from an agile perspective. So we have, at the lowest atomic level, I guess, of organization would be the squad. A group of squads is a tribe, a group of tribes is a domain and a business unit has multiple domains.
And what we’ve tried to do is align our research pods, which would be like three or four researchers focused against a domain and a domain could be something as big as, wealth management, or it could be digitization of service. It could be financial wellness. So these are big themes. And we’ll have a small group of researchers working on that theme in that domain.
And that domain might have 50, 60 squads. We’re not embedded at the squad level, there’s not enough of us to do that. We have about a 15 to one ratio of squads to researchers, but that allows us to float at a higher altitude to see where there’s things that we might need to really understand about financial wellness from a right problem-right solution-done right aspect, which is the other piece of it. How do we classify the type of work we’re doing for the teams? We do have specialization, I guess. So it would be aligned to themes of the business and how they think about bringing themselves and representing themselves into the market.
Jesse: It sounds like you have a degree of control over your own research agenda, independent of what the teams are asking of you. It’s one of the things that you see in these organizations where there is this high level of specialization across the teams, is that any issue that doesn’t clearly fall into one of your tiny buckets doesn’t get addressed, But it sounds like you have some latitude to do some more overarching research work that touches a broader range of the experience that your customers are having.
Jen: Yeah, that is true. There’s a balance between proactive and reactive work. In my dream situation, about 80% of the work we’re doing is proactive. It’s work that we have discovered a need to be done because we’re interacting with the business leaders and product owners and the tribe leads, and figuring out what their big initiatives are that they’re going after so that we can lock arms with them and seeing them through right problem, right solution and done right. So it’s this holistic relationship of getting them from that fuzzy state of not knowing where to go and what to focus on and what unmet needs are there, and then starting to ideate and test out solutions and then to fine tune that design. So we’d like to see 80% of our work surfaced and commissioned in that sense.
And then 20% of our capacity is supposed to be reserved for reactive work because you can’t push that away. It’s going to happen. There’s going to be a team that says, “We need to present something. We actually need to get it in front of users.” You know, it’s more of a checkbox type of engagement.
But, you know, researchers can get really depressed if a hundred percent of their life is checkbox engagements, because it doesn’t really feel genuine, that people really want us there. They’re having us there as a CYA. So yeah, the ideal is that 80/20 relationship. It’s not quite there yet, but we can very crisply identify what things we’re working on that are part of those big initiatives tied to the four business units.
Jesse: Are you actively seeking out business sponsors for that work or, if it’s not originating from the teams, how do you make the case to be able to do the work?
Jen: Yeah, so there’s some work that we are actually driving and saying, this is an initiative of insights gathering and harvesting that we think could feed many teams. And we think it’s important to do, versus there’s some big initiative that already has a business sponsor.
And we’re saying, “Hey, we can help you guys. So why don’t we talk about how we might, I might be able to go, take you through an innovation swim lane or through transformation swim lane and show you what that would look like” and have them say, “Yeah, come on in, join the team.” So when we are suggesting things, for example, trying to lay out a landscape of insights by using Jobs theory, maybe even as specifically as outcome-driven-innovation, it is important for us to shop around and find the domains or business units and executives who say, “Yes, I do believe this is important and we should have some researchers working on that.”
So we’ve been able to make a couple things happen that way, particularly when we’re talking about jobs and, we call it the Atlas, which is, basically, providing a landscape to look across from a segment and jobs perspective in order to plot insights that we know, and places where there’s white space, where we really don’t know, and we could do research in those areas.
So the Atlas is a very meta thing. We had to go and get sponsorship to even do the research around creating the Atlas. Hopefully the Atlas itself will provide us with that mechanism to point to white space and say, “Hey leadership, wouldn’t it be great if we actually could turn that box green, because we knew things about that.”
There may be opportunities living in there that we haven’t surfaced before.
Peter: The map is the territory. When you’re saying “jobs,” I believe you’re referring to jobs-to-be-done jobs, and I know that…And it sounds like you’re continuing to have success with the Jobs-to-be-done framework. I’m probably going to misrepresent Jared Spool, but he’s been a bit of a jobs-to-be-done naysayer, not that he thinks there’s anything wrong with it, but he just thinks it’s old wine in new bottles. Nothing about jobs-to-be-done that hadn’t already been practiced by good user researchers in the past. I’m wondering what you’re seeing in terms of jobs-to-be-done as a framework, as interface and interpretation layer between the work of research and others, that has been particularly helpful.
Jen: There are numerous reasons based on different company pathologies, where jobs has been helpful. Outcome-driven-innovation was useful at Athena because the product owners were really struggling to establish ownership over prioritization. They were very vulnerable to having their prioritization of feature functionality and value creation, being completely upended by leadership at any given moment.
And so having something quantitative to point at, to identify where there were unmet needs, that presented opportunities for us to go after, gave them much stronger standing in and have that conviction about the prioritization they had picked. And it’s forged a very strong partnership between strategic design and product at Fidelity.
Jesse: You’ve talked a bit about the use of quantitative methods as a way of forging these relationships and strengthening the case for the business value of various initiatives, but also of research itself. And I wonder where the qualitative fits into this.
Tell me about the insights part of the equation and how’s that going in terms of making the case for people to listen to what you’re coming up with.
Jen: Yes, absolutely. So there’s the framework that we use: Right problem, right solution, done right. And right problem, we have this model, it doesn’t always get followed exactly, but it’s a model that we look to as a north star, and it’s a qual-quant-qual sandwich.
And the qual in the beginning, the first phase of qual is really starting to understand where there may be openings of opportunity. People think something’s very important, but they’re not very satisfied with this thing. So we’re trying to flesh out a job map and areas of opportunity by doing that really deep high-quality qualitative work.
We can create a job map, which would take us into a quantitative phase of running ODI or jobs-to-be-done work. So that instrument that’s generated is really well-informed and people have really listened and understood the stories of the people that we’re talking about. But that’s not the end. It’s not that you just get the data from jobs-to-be-done.
And then all of a sudden, you know what you need to go build. It’s surfacing outcome statements, which essentially are unmet needs. And then we’re going to go back in and do more qual, because we want to understand the root cause behind those things bubbling up in the opportunity scores. We really want to get at, like, where is this thing broken? Where’s the friction? So that in Right Problem is very important that you have qual bookends.
And then in Right Solution, we’ve been getting much more specific in how we utilize qual and quant, not just in UXR, but also with our market research partners to build a very strong approach to encouraging divergent thinking. Screening many ideas through quant, doing qualitative resonance testing, very thick data, high-value, qualitative interviews. And then once we’re narrowed down on some concepts, then doing market potential assessment, which is way more rigorous and way more quantitative. So, we’re increasing amount of rigor depending on the uncertainty and risk that we are facing, but we’re still having that healthy idea harvesting and idea generation that we need to see teams engaging in so that they have a higher likelihood of success.
So we’re mixing qual and quant, and we’re also partnering very intensely with the other research disciplines to do that properly.
Jesse: I’m curious about that relationship because that’s not really one that I had considered, the relationship that you might have with other research functions in the organization, which might have very different cultures of research and ways of thinking about how you tackle these kinds of problems, how’s that going in terms of the push and pull and striking a balance with your other research partners. I have worked with some market researchers that had a hard time understanding product research. Like they did not have mindset for it. And maybe the culture of your organization is different from that.
Jen: It was new to me when I came to the organization because at previous places we didn’t have strong and developed mature market research practices. So building that relationship has been a great deal Of the effort. We’ve put a lot of effort into that understanding where there’s give and take, where there’s things that they can own entirely where things that UXR can own entirely.
And where is it great for us to partner? one of our great achievements is saying like, we know how to get through right. Solution together. Yeah. It’s very exciting. but yeah, I have been learning so much about market research that I did not know. It was very enlightening to me and very humbling because I just didn’t understand, all of the techniques, like, you know, when people start talking about monadic concept tests and, Volume metrics.
I was like, aha. You know, nodding my head and then, you know, quickly Googling things. It’s just intense, in large field with very specific techniques that have been, very well honed over the years. So It’s becoming more and more of a thing that UX researchers really should understand.
And if you’re building a research org from scratch, you want market researchers on your team. The quantitative work alone is incredibly intense and valuable. But then also they have qualitative techniques and they have honed qualitative techniques that may be slightly different than the way we come at it in UXR.
So I’ve been learning a lot and they’ve been learning a lot from us. The other really important partnership, though, has been the behavioral economics group, which–wow. That is like an absolute, superpower, being able to carve out experiments from a behavioral economics perspective to test certain hypotheses and experience strategies is just absolutely mind-boggling. I have been really impressed with that partnership and whenever we have the opportunity we’re embedding our UX researchers in those projects so that they can learn.
Peter: Did this research team exist as it is before you joined, and you joined to lead part of it, or did it assemble Avengers-style once you came on the scene and there was the right, I dunno, mix of leaders and functions? What was that insight in creating this independent research team?
Jen: So, prior to my arrival, UX Research had lived in UX Design and when the first business unit went through the agile transformation process, they moved it. They moved UX research into this research and insights organization. So, when I joined the UXR org had already lived for six months in that research and insights organization.
Peter: Got it. Interesting. That’s possibly the only good thing to have ever come out of an agile transformation.
Jen: it is, it really is. And beyond my four peer groups, we live in the data organization. So we live with analytics, with AI, with measurement. Usually when you’re thinking about, like, we need data around such and such, or I need metrics, the first thing you have to figure out is how to harvest that information, how to create a system to collect that data and then to analyze it.
But more times than not that data already exists. It’s a matter of finding it and then packaging it up in the way that we need to. But because we live in that org, a superpower we have had to develop is to know what are all the types of data that we have, who are all the people that own it and manage it and play with it? How do we get access to it? So it’s definitely like a kid in a candy shop situation, when you don’t have to actually be creating all the instruments to collect the data, but you do have to get really good at networking and knowing all the players.
Music break 1
Peter: So one of the challenges a lot of design leaders face, including a company I’m working with right now, is the reduction of design to that which can move measurement. “We’re going to do AB testing, and the best design is the one that succeeds based on whatever measurement we had decided was what we were going for.”
And when that happens, when design gets reduced to moving needles, there is a qualitative, experiential component that gets lost, that I think we all recognize the value of, but it’s hard to measure. And, I’m wondering if this set-up, UXR within a data team with a lot of quantitative researchers, that happens to the qualitative research that you’re working on, because it’s looser, more nebulous, more amorphous, less easy to reduce. How you protect, you mentioned thick data, that richness of that thick data, in the possible onslaught of metrics and numbers that others are wielding?
Jen: I’m working on a project right now that is an experience transformation project. And we’ve been partnered. We created a virtual squad between all the quants and the qual researchers. So that, we could approach building a holistic measurement strategy. And one of the things that we did was, we set timeframes around measurement of the metrics.
Like when should we be able to measure this change? Because one of the things I think is very dangerous, is looking for those short-term gains like the needle moving, ‘cause I put something in the market two weeks ago. That’s really dangerous. And so building up that it’s a roadmap of measurement to see, like, we probably won’t see this needle move for another year, just to set expectations.
So don’t ask me to be measuring that next month because we don’t expect it to move, but we do expect these things to happen. One of the interesting things that I’ve seen, this is Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion who teach product management, they had this really nice webinar where they talked about three levels of metrics and they had these traction metrics, which is, “I got the person to click on the thing.” They had product metrics, which is, like, something about adoption engagement, like actually using the thing to get something done. And then business metrics, which would be those way bigger needles to move, which are like satisfaction and NPS, operating income, new money, those types of things.
And being able to really identify when should you see those things and how are they actually correlated as leading indicators of lagging outcomes? We spent, at least two months working on creating that model of how we should measure this transformation and experience.
That’s the type of attention that we need to pay. And one of our partners is the AB testing team and they’re all in on that because they don’t want to be setting up these little itty-bitty AB tests that are supposed to be showing big change, and they’re basically not detecting any statistical difference. They want to be called in when it’s significant enough to make it worth their while to work on that. So we are building these measurement models and we are using very specific words. So just a couple of weeks ago I was correcting people. They were talking about a beta test and I said, “I don’t want to use the word test here. This isn’t a test.” What we’re trying to do is collect and harvest feedback that the creators of this experience can use to fine tune the design. This is not a test. This isn’t go/no-go. It’s not, it’s good, it’s bad. It’s actually a mechanism for generating useful, articulate, guidance that we can use to make this thing better.
Jesse: I’m struck by what seems like the breadth of your mandate, which feels unusual to me, maybe not that unusual for an organization of your scale, but it still feels like it is more common for me to talk to research managers where research is really kind of boxed in to delivering a specific kind of data or insight back to the organization, and the organization is not really interested in hearing about anything that is outside that box that was whatever the box that was originally established for them. Or sometimes what happens is that a research organization will be established with a broad mandate and then that mandate will get whittled down over time to the most provable forms of research, and those are the only ones that the organization is willing to continue to fund. From the perspective of a research manager who is in that situation, how do I start trying to create some more space, to try some new things, to take some chances with what I’m doing with the research that push beyond those expectations that I’ve been boxed into.
Jen: Well, there is some things that we do as researchers that are that basic kit of parts. Take evaluative research, for example, like someone shows up to you and says, “I want to usability test.” That’s great. That’s good work. That’s interesting. But there’s a point at which, in an organization, you’ve been doing usability tests for 20 years. Could we teach some other people to do that? And if we were able to give them that capability with that, help them learn faster and would that free up some of our capacity to do those other things, like to do more Right Problem and Right Solution work. And then could we get some of that Right Problem, Right Solution work and have some wins that we can show the organization, look, this is really interesting stuff on this team. We partnered with them on right problem.
We were able to unsurface these opportunities and they were able to take that into co-creation and be hugely productive and put something in market. So you want to make space for your team so that they’re not on a hamster wheel. And you do that by multiplying their capability by giving some of it away.
And then you want to find partners, either design leaders or product leaders, who are interested in that thick data and interested in that more intense collaborative, and you lock arms and you find opportunities to show some wins. So that’s basic playbook. And I know that every organization is different, so making that happen can be difficult in some organizations that may be very adamant about their perspective as research as a lobster tank or, you know, just a shared service that they get tests from. But like I said, that word “tests” is what sets you up down that path, too. So, choosing different vocabulary to display or explain the value you can have is even a little baby step, but shifting that vocabulary can help a great deal too.
Peter: The lobster tanks suggests a certain New England frame of reference that perhaps you’re operating within. I’m also wondering if there’s something about the culture of the product or organization that you can attribute to the broader mandate that you’re realizing. What is it about Fidelity that has created this space, this opportunity for research to have this far broader than typical mandate.
Jen: Well, this was an organization that was going through a transformation, and was fully invested in change. Like change is hard, but we have to go start setting down this path to do this. And so they already in that growth mindset and wanting to do things differently than they had done them in the past.
So I’m lucky, my timing is lucky, right? Because I show up and they’re like, “We want change. Can you give us change?” And I’m like, well, if you shaped it like this, that’s dramatically different. It gets you insights versus tests versus just strictly validation. So how can we mold ourselves, create an organization that makes that happen?
So they have an appetite for change, and they’re willing to be a little uncomfortable with that for awhile. So that helps. And then the other thing is, this organization is so obsessed with learning. We actually have learning days. Every Tuesday is a learning day. They’re really adamant about people building their T-shaped skillsets.
And they’re adamant about career mobility as well. So when we propose the idea of research democratization, we didn’t have a bunch of people saying, “Uh, not my job. I don’t want to do that.” We had people queuing up. We had a backlog, we had a line, a waiting list that was months long for people to get into the program, to learn how to run evaluative studies on their own.
And then the way we were able to frame that was by talking about a measurement called learning velocity that we invented, saying, how fast is your team able to learn? If you get in our backlog, you could be waiting a month before you get some insights from that little test you want it to run, but if you can do it yourself, you can do it in three days.
And so the whole idea of like, ooh, more learning, more insights, this is a culture that is hungry for that all the time. And they’re hungry for growing their skill sets. So it’s, like, that perfect storm, but in a very positive way,
Peter: Fidelity is a large mature private company, right? So you’re not dealing with the public markets. You’re not dealing with quarterly earnings. You’re not dealing with that hamster wheel that I think so many people face and which narrows or limits the focus, I think is probably a better way to think about it.
Jen: Yeah, you end up with a lot of short, short-term focused initiatives that are looking for a fast hit oftentimes in public-held companies. In a privately held company, there is patience and persistence.
So you think of investor mindset. We are the perfect company to talk about investor mindset. It’s basically how we’ve stayed in business for 75 years. That and exceptional customer service and relationships that we build with our customers. So we’re willing to make bets on things that may not bear fruit for a year, five years, 10 years. That’s okay with a private company.
Peter: You’ve used, it’s almost a mantra, Right Problem, Right Solution, Done Right. Was this something that existed before you joined, is this something you helped generate? Is this something you used in the past?
Jen: I brought it with me and, as I’ve mentioned, in other talks that I’ve given, it’s standing on the shoulders of giants because it’s inspired by double diamond and inspired by, “build the right thing, build the thing right,” in my work with the amazing team at Athena, too.
But it was a really nice way for me to frame conversations with folks about what it was that was valuable to them and, how we, as researchers, could help them. And it had that effect of having people question whether they actually had a right problem that they were going after.
So it started to, like, probe in the direction of teams starting to have that self-awareness they feel very adamant about having that right problem defined. So it is kind of like a rallying cry for people now. And it’s very common to hear product owners and other participants in the process who aren’t researchers talking about Right Problem, Right Solution, Done Right.
Peter: You mentioned double diamond. if I understand it right, the Right Problem would be almost this diamond zero before double diamond. Is that fair or…?
Jen: Yeah, I think that’s very fair. Yeah, I mean that right problem and diamond zero, it’s one of the most important aspects of ensuring team functionality. So, like, dysfunction in scrum teams or in product teams starts at the very beginning. It starts when people don’t agree on the problem that they’re solving, never mind the solution that’s being designed.
And so you want to get really crisp, and be super articulate about that problem that we’re solving and who we’re solving for, and falling in love with that problem, because once the team moves into right solution, people feel super energized and capable, and they have agency for creating many solutions, which we know increases their likelihood of success when they put a product in market.
Music break 2
Peter: Research, done right, doesn’t fit the shape of business. So if you’ve got these domains that you referred to, people don’t neatly fit in these domains. They are likely crossing domains. And I’m wondering how research works along those journeys, and doesn’t fall into silos of the domains, and if the Atlas is a means by which you don’t get stuck, or are able to realize the fullness and richness and messiness and weirdness of your customers’ lives.
Jen: Yeah. That’s exactly what the purpose of the Atlas is. And the Atlas has two altitudes. So there’s jobs, which are really big things that are solution-agnostic, like “assess my financial situation” or, “help me transition to retirement.” Those are things that aren’t about the actions you’re taking in an environment. I’m not opening an account. I’m not, you know, transferring money, right? But those things are important, too. We call those tasks and we have an Atlas of those as well.
And the reason that the Atlas will be useful for us there, is we do find that with those tasks, those are sometimes slivers of an entire journey. And you could have 20 teams all working on a version or a piece of that task. And we’re trying to reconcile that and make sure that where there’s research that might be happening in pockets of the organization that are all focused around that task, that we’re backing up a little bit, making everyone aware of each other.
And saying like, “How can we do a body of research that serves all of you versus 20 discrete research studies?” And so awareness is part of the problem with that. And the Atlas helps us inventory, basically, who’s working on what, and it helps us address that patchy collection of research studies.
So bespoke, discrete research studies are the foundation of your insights, and starting to build structure. So imagine a grid sitting over that, and you’ve got these little patchworks, we’re starting to say there’s places on the grid, there’s longitude and latitude, so that we can start to say, “What do we already know with the bespoke and discrete research studies now, how do we structure this going forward?”
So it informs many squads and many tribes and many domains. It becomes a body of knowledge that is more universally useful versus being commissioned by one team for their purpose, and then never used by anyone else ever again.
Jesse: It sounds like an information architecture job.
Jen: It totally is like, yeah. I agree. You know, thinking about how to structure your insights. We all do it bottoms up, the first thing people do is they go into an org and they’re like, I’m going to build a repository. I’m going to dump all these things in and then I’m going to make it searchable. And I’m going to use AI and that’s going to fix everything. But we’re taking it from the wrong angle. Oftentimes that bottoms up collection of discrete research studies, they don’t click together. They are not cumulative. They don’t create a living dynamic body of knowledge because we haven’t structured it to do that at all.
Jesse: Right. Well, as with any other Enterprise IA challenge, it often becomes a matter of divergent goals leading to divergent viewpoints, and those divergent viewpoints then becoming encoded in the structures by which everybody understands the strategy going forward.
Jen: Yeah, it’s a balance. You have to figure out like, how do I structure this, so it’s somewhat agnostic to who we are and the way we deliver things now. So jobs is a way to think of that.
Jesse: Hmm, it’s interesting. I’ve never thought of it this way before, but I can see through this lens, jobs-to-be-done as a tool for defining the information architecture of a product offering.
Jen: Absolutely, It could be used for that. And the great thing about ODI in particular, not to be overly dogmatic, It’s not the only jobs theory. but I’m fond of it because it does have these two distinctions of core functional jobs. So it’s very high-level jobs and then consumption chain jobs, which we call tasks, but they could be other things. They could be journeys. There could be other types of experiences, but it gives you that leveling, so you can work at both ends of the spectrum.
Jesse: You mentioned your partnerships with the market research folks and the behavioral economics folks as things that were really invigorating for you because they had expertise and methodologies that expanded your world. How would you like to see the work of UX research evolve and expand going forward?
Jen: Hm, that’s a tough question.
I would like UX researchers to gain some of those skills. But one of the things that we’ve talked about, you know, how in design land, we talked about the T-shape and, not necessarily creating generalists, but being able to cover more of the T-shape in knowledge of expanse of things you could know as a designer and a design specialist, and then getting deep in some of those areas, the way we’re talking about that, because we don’t live in Design is, do we have a T-shape for a researcher that spans across user experience research and market research and behavioral economics and loyalty and advertising and marketing? Do we start to create generalists in that vein? So, that’s one thing that I am particularly interested in, is building out skill sets of researchers so that they can learn more of techniques from those other research disciplines.
I think that’s really important, because we’re not always going to be in a situation where there’s low risk and low uncertainty, and we can go talk to five people and then launch a product. And in many cases, if you’re at an existing company, you have lots of revenue at stake, and there’s a history, and many customers whose experiences could be upended by you making changes. And so we really do need to know a lot more about the rigor that goes into traditional research techniques. We can’t test everything in market. Which is also another area that I would love for UX researchers to understand.
And I know at a lot of startups, they do understand A/B testing. But because we can’t test everything in market, how can we build better systems to set norms and predictions and understand correlation? So some of the skillsets I’d love to see are, more quant, more understanding of stats. Yeah, you don’t have to be a statistician, but know what people are talking about and understand when you should call the expert. I think that would be wonderful to see as far as maturity in the field.
Peter: There’s been clearly parallels within design getting reduced to, at least in digital contexts, visual design and interaction design, and screens. And research has also been reduced by companies. There’s so much that it could be, but research has been thought of as interviews and maybe some analysis and we’ll call it a day. And I think what you’re pointing out is that this can be a field or an industry, a practice as varied and rich as design, as software engineering, as any number of other things. But the companies we work with tend to see research in a very limited mode.
You talk about skills building, and you’re the lead of a team. You probably have research leaders within your organization. And I’m wondering how you approach UX research leadership. And what are those skills that, as you’re looking at building the capabilities of the people on your team, what are skills that you’re paying attention to?
And what are you focused on in terms of growing the leaders within your organization?
Jen: So last year was a big growth year for us because we added that management layer in. Previous to that, UX research was more of a bunch of Lone Rangers out roaming the halls, finding squads to do work for, and we were building out the teams. So, looking for some leaders who had very specific qualities, but also things that might be a little bit more nuanced than just a skillset.
So, what we work on is, first of all, that growth mindset of coming in and saying, “I’m going to learn things here. I don’t know all the answers yet. I’m probably going to be partnered with people that I’m going to learn a great deal from.” And then also having a multiplier mindset. it can be career limiting. She’d be very territorial about what work you should be doing and what work others should not touch because it’s yours.
So we work in a very collaborative way and we encourage the democratization of research program. Ee encourage involvement with that, even if you’re not one of the instructors, you could be a buddy, you could be a coach.
You can help with that program growing because it does have such huge dividends for us. And then, some of the other things are, being really well aware of how product management works. A lot of the books that I give my team to read are product management books, they’re not so much design books, although it’s kind of expected that they would understand the design process, but I do want them to understand what good solid product management looks like, because the product owners, the squad leads, and the tribe leads are the ones that most need them.
So if we can help them see things in a way that’s helpful to get them to move forward with product initiatives and move their projects forward, then those are great friends that we want to have forever. So I want them to be able to speak their language. So that’s something that we focus on.
And, that idea that I mentioned earlier, career mobility. They’re not just research leaders, they’re leaders, and they should be able to have mobility in the organization. So for example, one of my research leaders I brought in last year just went over to the design team. So she’s going to be working on Russ Wilson’s design team now, which is awesome. I love seeing when researchers and designers move across the organizations and also move over to product because there’s nothing better than a product owner who’s been in design or research. They’re excellent partners.
So I wanna make sure that they understand that they have a personal brand. And so we’ve been talking about like, What are you known for? What do you want to be known for? What projects can we attach you to so that you can better illustrate that story? What’s your narrative? So working on that is very important to me because they’re not always gonna work for me. I might be working for them someday. they might move to a different role in Fidelity, but I want them to have a very strong identity, not just that they’re part of my team.
Peter: So at fidelity, you’ve found yourself not only leading this research team, you’re connected to other researchers, people with deep experience, really rigorous experience. One of the challenges that I’ve seen with research is that it can vacillate between one of two poles.
It’s either a little too informal, “Let’s just talk to a few users, call it a day.” Or what I’ve often seen is, people with PhDs in some form of psychology or, you know, ergonomics or whatever, who are like, “The only research that is acceptable is ones that are run by people with PhDs who understand all the highly detailed realities of doing research quote the right way, unquote.”
And I’m wondering how you navigate that, where there’s this desire to get your product teams and others to be doing research, but there’s also professionals who know how to do it, quote unquote the right way, and what are the judgment calls there around the practice of research, and how to make sure the PhDs don’t get their knickers in a twist that someone’s talking to five people in some informal way, but how also not to get bogged down by rigorous research all the time.
Jen: So we have something called learning agenda that we create with product owners, squad leads, tribe leads, that are trying to learn all the things. We come together as a team. UXR and market research and behavioral economics, if they’re involved, if they think they can help.
And we create an integrated learning agenda, what do we want to learn? And then we talk about how could we learn those things with what techniques and who’s going to take what? And so you’ll actually see, we have these nice little plans of like phase one, phase two, phase three, they’re all still sitting in Right Problem. But it’s like, who’s taking what? And then how are we orchestrating the readouts so that we’re either doing them together or they’re in an order of operations that tells the story appropriately?
And that’s where we get into the quant qual quant qual type of pattern or cadence. So we do that together with them. if you’re in a very quantitatively driven organization where there’s massive fear around risk and uncertainty, you need to partner with the quants.
You’re not going to win a battle of my five users versus your 3000 balanced-sample study, backed by third-party research company. You want to actually take those things and say, “Which questions are each of these best at answering?” And what we find is that a lot of those really intense survey work surfaces, a lot more questions that we can get at very deeply with one-on-ones or IDI is as they would call them in market research so that we can do this nice dance of back and forth and use the techniques for what they were built for. Use the right tool, to get the effect that you’re looking for. So it’s definitely a partnership. I don’t think it’s one or the other.
We can find a way through this together for sure.
Jesse: Beautiful.
Peter: Yeah, I’m imagining you as Dorothy and everyone else is one of the animals skipping down the yellow brick road, linking arms.
Jen: Thank you both so much. This is really fun.
Jesse: Jen, thank you so much.
And that wraps up another episode of finding our way. You can find Jen Cardello on the internet. She’s Jen Cardello on LinkedIn. She’s at @jencardello on Twitter. You can find this podcast on the internet as well. You can find past episodes and transcripts on our website@findingourway.design. There’s also a feedback form there.
We love to get your feedback either through our website on LinkedIn or on Twitter. I’m @jjg. He’s @peterme. We’ll see you next time.
21—Creativity, banishing inner critics, impostor syndrome, and systemic racism (ft Denise Jacobs)
Nov 05, 2020
Transcript
Denise: Feeling so full of what I was capable of, and so in love with what I was capable of that I thought, well, what else can I do? If I can accomplish this major thing, what other major things can I accomplish and can I give to the world of myself? And when I had that experience, I was like, that’s what I want to help people with.
I want to help people feel like this.
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Together: And we’re Finding our Way…
Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, author and consultant, Denise Jacobs joins us to talk about maintaining a creative culture, how leaders can keep the creative spark alive in their own work, fighting imposter syndrome, banishing the inner critic, and a lot more.
Peter: I have a question for you, Jesse.
Jesse: Yes?
Peter: Why did you invite Denise on our podcast?
Denise: He said, “I have questions.”
Jesse: I do have questions. I have questions for Denise. So, Denise Jacobs… actually, you’re going to do a better job of introducing yourself than I am. Denise Jacobs, who are you and what…
Denise: Oh, you think so?
Jesse: Do you do? I do.
Why don’t you describe the areas that you work in.
Denise: So my springboard area of expertise is creativity because I’ve been doing a lot of work on creativity since 2011 and, doing keynotes and workshops and whatnot on it, but then came out with my book, Banish Your Inner Critic in 2017, which was all around creativity.
But the interesting thing is how some piece of work starts to put you into a new direction. And so now I’m focusing a lot, not just on creativity specifically, but more around how people can do better work through silencing that voice of self-doubt, so what you are able to accomplish and what you’re able to do, whether you’re at what I call the producer level, if you’re a UX designer or a developer, but then when you get kind of more to the managerial level, or even to the leadership level, how can you do what you do better through acknowledging that inner critic and having tools to be able to combat it so that you can actually show up more powerfully.
Jesse: One thing that I love about the book, that you touched on a bit here, is that it does go broader than simply issues of creativity.
Denise: Absolutely.
Jesse: Although it definitely is through the lens of being a creative professional and has a lot to say about the specific tactics for creative professionals, the principles there are really, in a lot of ways, about self-actualization.
Denise: That’s totally it. Definitely, I feel like the true goal of my work, and actually the reason I even started working around creativity in the first place, was to get to that place of self-actualization, because I had had this experience where I had this amazing creative flow state, and I felt so empowered and I felt so like, full of myself, in the respect of being full, like not needing anything else, you know, not needing the external validation, not needing somebody else to tell me it was okay, feeling so full of what I was capable of, and so in love with what I was capable of that I thought, “Well, what else can I do? If I can accomplish this major thing. What other major things can I accomplish? And can I give to the world of myself.”
And when I had that experience, I was like, that’s what I want to help people with. I want to help people feel like this. And at the time, because what I needed was to reconcile myself and to come to terms and embrace and acknowledge and recognize my own creativity, the answer for me was creativity. But now that I’m along this path of a breadcrumb trail that led me to inner critic work it’s just like, “Oh, this applies to so much more than creativity.” And it affects people so profoundly, it’s such a universal affliction.
Jesse: So our audience is design leaders, and a lot of these folks find themselves awarded responsibility in their organizations, because they were really good at the creative part of their job, they found a way to create for themselves that creative flow and that energization that you’re talking about.
And then people looked at them said, “Wow, you’re doing so great at this. We should give you more responsibility so that you are now doing less of that. And you’re doing these other things instead.”
Denise: ”You’re doing so great at this, that we’re going to make you do something completely different, that you have no idea how to do. And of course you’ll naturally be great at that because….” What?
Jesse: People who were previously very confident in their jobs, find themselves in these new roles, and find that confidence has been taken out from underneath them because they’ve been cut off from the creative practices that connected them to that sense of power that you’re talking about.
Denise: Absolutely.
Jesse: So I wonder what thoughts you have on the challenges of keeping creativity alive in your work, when your work is no longer strictly creative work per se.
Denise: Okay. So I actually have two things that I want to say. I’ll answer that question in a moment, but before I go into that, what I want to say is, that whole process that you just described is one of the key times that the inner critic becomes so loud for people, it becomes so prominent, and it’s become so in their face and forward. And that is exactly the work that I am focusing on now is helping people with their career confidence. Because it is in that transition that all of these mechanisms go into play that trigger the inner critic. Having said that, the interesting thing is that the same tools and the same practices that you use to silence your inner critic, to unblock creativity, are the same constellation of tools that you can use to counter that feeling. And in doing so get back to your creativity.
Jesse: So, I’m an independent leadership coach now and one thing that I say to people is that leadership is a design problem.
Denise: Preach it.
Jesse: And, you’re working with different materials and often the materials that you’re working with are your relationships with other people. And it’s in relationships with other people often that this inner critic stuff gets kicked up for people.
Denise: I actually just finished reading a great book that’s going to be coming out by a friend of mine his name is Mark Pitman. And his book is called The Surprising Gift of Doubt. And it is how uncertainty can help you become an exceptional leader.
And one of the things that he talks about is the other problem with moving from a role where you were doing something really well, and it was creative and everything, to being a leader, is that you think that there’s a certain way to be a leader. And there’s not a lot of support, I think, about giving people the space to discover how they lead, and have the exploration and the journey that people have to go on to be able to discover all those things about what works for them.
Like, if you’re not extroverted, then being a loud, extroverted leader is not going to work for you. And then you’re going to feel even more out of sorts, you’re going to have even more of an inner critic dogging you, et cetera. And so, it is this design problem. And then it’s also this journey of discovery, which a design problem basically is. Solving a design problem is a journey of discovery.
But very few people contextualize it that way.
Peter: Creativity is one of those funny words.
Denise: It is a funny word.
Peter: Just to make sure that we have a common understanding of what you mean by creativity: How do you define it? How should we be thinking of creativity?
Denise: My main working definition of creativity is bringing something new into being.
Peter: I think so often creativity is associated with things like the arts or writing and those types of practices, which are clearly creative practices. What is the connection you make, if any, between those expressive forms of creativity and the kind of creativity you’re encouraging through career confidence, through designing your own future?
Denise: Because my background, as a front-end developer and somebody who used to teach HTML and CSS and work with software engineers, I’m always very careful to, very point blank, say that art and creativity are not the same thing. Making art is not the same as being creative. You can be creative in anything. You can be creative as a social organizer. You can be creative as a scientist. You could be creative as a CEO.
Creativity basically is problem solving, whatever this problem is, however it needs to be solved. If you come up with a solution to a problem, you’re exercising creativity.
So, when people are trying to cultivate their confidence, trying to step into a new position, expanding themselves, getting to self-actualization, all the things that we’ve been talking about previously, they are using creativity because, first of all, they are bringing something new into being, and second of all, they are problem-solving.
You’ve got an issue. “I’m where I am now. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to be in a different place. What do I need to do?” And then you go along the process of figuring out what you need to do and taking the steps for it. I truly believe that that is exercising creativity as well.
Peter: Thinking about working with design leaders, I don’t have a formal coaching practice, but I work with design teams and design leaders as well.
If I want to be encouraging creativity appropriately, for both them as individuals and maybe a team, what does that look like? How do we know that they are hitting enough creative cylinders? How do I look at something and go, That is appropriately creative!
Denise: That is actually an outstanding question. And I will give you an answer that probably is not substantive for you. It’s not based on metrics or anything like that, because, I feel like first of all, when you start to get into, How creative is it on the spectrum? Is it zero? Does it go to 11? Then you start getting into this judgment about creativity, and then that will set up a whole other thing that’ll trigger your inner critic. “I’m not creative enough.”
As a matter of fact, one of ways that I got to some of these forms of the inner critic that I talk about in the book, are from this exercise that I’ve done at conferences, workshops, where one of the things that people said very frequently is, “I’m not creative enough.”
What does that even mean?
If you’re creative at all, like you’re winning, right? If you’re doing anything you’re winning. So I feel like then trying to quantify it like that is dangerous and that it needs to be more of a qualitative analysis where it is, How do you feel when you’re in this process? Does it feel good or does it not feel good?
I would say that, because it feels good, then that means that you’re being quote, more creative. And I think when you’re working with teams at the end of the day, what they create is important.
But the experience of working together and everything, is going to have more longevity and more importance to the functioning of the team than the actual thing that they produced. And the dynamic within the team will also affect the quality of what they produce. So if they’re having a good experience, if they’re connecting with each other, that will be something that they can all feel and experience. And when that’s not there, they will also be able to recognize its absence.
Peter: Calling me out on my desire to reduce or, quantize things that aren’t quantized… There’s a history of that Jesse’s and my conversations. I’ve done the same with the concept of trust, trust is one of those things that the moment you try to start defining it, you kind of lose the plot, right there.
And I think that’s what you’re saying about creativity. If you try to put it in a box that you can look at and study it, then you’ve kind of lost the point of that energy, that flow, that forces that the creativity is providing.
Jesse: It’s almost by definition, if you can capture it in a box, it’s not the thing you’re looking for.
Denise: Right. And it’s also like, how do you know if you’re really in love? Because it feels good.
Peter: No, no, no, no. You write long lists of pros and cons. Isn’t that it? And then you…
Denise: You rate it on a scale of one to ten…
Jesse: You weigh them all and you build your spreadsheet.
Denise: Exactly. Does it feel good? If it feels good, then you’re in good shape. If it doesn’t, you know, you gotta leave.
Peter: Okay. I know Jesse’s probably itching, but I got to follow this one up. Because one of the challenges that design leaders, design teams face within organizations is working often with peers–engineers, product managers, marketing folks–who are highly quantified. They want everything to be metric-ized, and they want everything to be A/B tested or somehow proven.
And I’m wondering how you’ve been successful in bringing this force and energy into organizations that might not have been ready for it. Because their mindset had been so analytical, mechanistic. What have you done to make that kind of change?
Denise: The interesting thing is, if I’m in an organization, it’s because they want something different than that, what they’re looking for is that ineffable quality or thing that they can’t put their finger on, or quantify or anything.
They’re looking for the energy and the spark of creativity and flow and connection that they weren’t able to achieve through the more analytical means.
Jesse: A lot of this comes back to creating and maintaining a culture of creativity for the design organization, and then being able to hold that boundary, and shelter that creative culture from whatever the larger culture is that people find themselves in.
Denise: Yeah. Or to even, try to get the leaders on board so that they are instrumental allies and even champions of this culture.
Jesse: Right.
I think one of the challenges in creating that culture of creativity is having a culture of constructive critique rather than criticism.
It’s something that a lot of design leaders find a hard time striking the right balance, creating enough support for creative exploration on their teams, so people can try new ideas and play around at the edges, while also being able to provide constructive feedback to teams that channels that work in a way that brings it to fruition.
And in a lot of cases, I feel like our inner critics take their cues from the outer critics, the people around us and the culture of critique versus criticism in how creative work is handled.
What are the tactics, for encouraging that balance?
Denise: Yeah, I think our inner critics really are responding to outer critics, and our inner critics literally developed because of outer critics. Our inner critics developed as a psychological construct that came as a protective mechanism to help us deal with and potentially even try to subvert having any outside criticism come in. You know, you get those early on and you’re like, well, I don’t even know what I did, but I’m going to be super hypervigilant now to try to prevent something like that crap ever happening again.
Very, very few people have ever been critiqued properly. Have never been given feedback in a way that is actually supportive or good or positive. And then we learn that, and then we think that’s how you do it.
I actually had a manager at Microsoft, where… I go into my one-on-ones with my manager and he was like, “You were in that meeting, that should have like triggered your localization ear.”
And I was like, “I literally don’t know what I’m supposed to be listening for. Can you tell me what it is I need to listen for?” And he was like, “You know, Microsoft is a sink or swim environment. So either you’re gonna sink or you’re gonna swim.” I was like, “Not helpful, manager.”
When you go in to get feedback, structure the feedback as much as you can, so that you get what you need, and through doing that, you essentially train the person who’s giving you feedback, how to give you feedback.
Like you’re gathering information for a friend and then you’re trying to find specific information as much as you can. Asking for this information in a certain way, this is not about their character or whether they’re good enough. I’m trying to give them information so that they can do their job better.
Jesse: I really like this idea. I think it’s interesting from a couple of angles. One is that in critique situations, the person whose work is being critiqued, often adopts this very passive powerless stance in the meeting. And what you’re advocating is really for them to act like it’s your meeting, not their meeting, and take control of the process.
And I think broadly for design leaders, as they are often engaging in processes that they have limited influence over, wherever you can find ways to take back control of your processes from people who don’t understand your needs, those are places where you can expand your leadership, and those are leverage points where you can get farther.
Peter: Something I think I’m realizing as you talk about silencing that inner critic, if you can separate your sense of self-worth and your identity from the work you’re producing, you will, frankly, no longer feel the criticism because it’s not about you.
So much of the challenge with this fear of criticism is it feels like it’s about you as a person, an entity, your identity, your worth in the world. And helping people create a bit of healthy distance between them and what they produce, and make it about that thing that you’re producing, and anyone can criticize that all they want—is that thing achieving the goal, is that thing, based on whatever rubric, working—but it’s not about, “Am I a better or worse person because I made that thing,” and one of the challenges I’ve had throughout my career is people get so caught up in their identity with respect to their work. It becomes a reflection of themselves.
Denise: That’s been one of my own personal struggles, when I create something it’s like, “This is my baby. This is a piece of me,” and getting to the place where there is the ability to practice some of that distance.
Jesse: I want to talk a little bit about the inner critic because it can be a bit of a slippery concept and it certainly can look very different for different people.
Tell us a little bit about some of the different forms that this shapeshifter, the inner critic, might take, that people ought to be watching out for.
Denise: I feel like the inner critic does show up in a lot of different ways. And a lot of times people will talk about imposter syndrome as its own thing. I personally believe that imposter syndrome is a form of the inner critic. Perfectionism is a form of the inner critic. Being highly self-critical is a form of the inner critic.
Being afraid of being judged, comparing yourself to other people. Fear of failure and success can be a form of the inner critic, and procrastination/self-sabotage can also be a form of the inner critic.
And those fears that we have, those fears of not being enough, or those fears of being found out, are these kind of deep fears of who we are afraid that we are, they kind of get in the way. And they keep us from being who we can be.
Jesse: For leaders, I think there is this additional challenge of supporting their people in contending with their own inner critics. And what are some of the things that a design leader might want to watch out for among the folks on their team that indicate that somebody might be struggling with this and it might require the leader to step in and provide some support.
Denise: A lot of times, I feel like in creative, collaborative environments, what happens is people tone themselves down. People silence themselves. There was a great article on 99U by Matt May, that refers to “ideacide.” And I love that term, the concept that you’re killing your ideas before they have the opportunity to come out and really see the light of day, and sprout and blossom. And maybe they are kind of non-starters, but you never know until you actually give them an opportunity to come out.
And so often people will be in meetings… Talk to them one-on-one and they’re just like, “Well, I was thinking this,” and you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s a great idea.” And then there’s the meeting where the perfect opportunity for the person to share that idea, and they don’t say anything and you’re practically kicking them underneath the table.
Like, “Say the thing that we’ve talked about…!” “No, no, I don’t think, no.” And I feel like that happens so often with a lot of people that it’s become second nature. And what I think would be helpful for managers and people leaders is to recognize where that’s happening.
And the other thing too, especially in light of Black Lives Matters movement and a lot of what’s going on, people of color, women, anybody in a disenfranchised group, is going to have a stronger inner critic because society literally makes them have a stronger inner critic. And so then that self-doubt is going to be even stronger. And so, if you’ve got women on your team, if you’ve got women of color on your team, if you’ve got people in the LGBTQ community, they may not have that strong sense of self. They’re not going to share their ideas.
And, it’s also very common for white men, or men, to talk over these people, to discount their ideas to start. So this is kind of a hot mess. I think that’s the technical term.
Jesse: Well, definitely in my own coaching work, I’ve worked with number of women, and the challenges that they face, in particular of feeling like they have to adopt masculine communication styles in order to be heard, it really ends up driving them into this deep place of self-doubt about their own instincts. They stop trusting themselves.
I want to get your take on introverts though, because this is a topic that’s come up previously on the show. And my hunch is that many, maybe most, people who self-identify as introverts are actually hostages of their inner critics, who have developed a robust case of Stockholm Syndrome and have fully internalized that sense of being trapped into their own identity.
Denise: Hmm. So, I found this tweet not too long ago that was pretty profound and insightful. And it was more about imposter syndrome, but I can see this having a direct correlation with introversion as well.
And it said, “I wonder if what’s called imposter syndrome is just a way to rationalize how women and people of color have been treated all of this time.”
Oh my God. Like, just amazing, right? And I feel like that could totally be true, too, of introverts. That there is this thing that, you’ve been talked over so much.
So here’s one that says, “Maybe you don’t have imposter syndrome. Maybe you’ve been treated like an imposter your entire career.” And then here’s the one that I was looking for. “Sometimes I wonder if imposter syndrome, originating from the 1978 concept imposter phenomenon, is just another example of making racism and sexism and professional spaces appear as a psychological myth rather than a structural reality of how people get poorly treated.”
Jesse: That’s great.
Denise: It’s amazing, right?
Jesse: Whose words are those?
Denise: Tamara K. Nopper.
Jesse: Alright, thank you, Tamara.
Denise: Again, it’s like you said, this internalization of, “I think differently, I like to think before I talk, not think as I’m talking, and I actually want to find out what’s going on before I weigh in on something.” And then it’s like, “Oh, that makes me an introvert.”
Yeah, or you just haven’t had the setup and the structure for you to be able to be.
Introversion is definitely a spectrum. I like to say that I’m like 60, 40, or 40, 60, depending on the day. I would say that I’m an ambivert. But, you know, when I’m really tired and everything, everybody out of the pool. And I just want like a cup of tea and a book and like a cat on my lap, like out, I don’t want to talk to anybody.
I’ll turn the phone off. I’m like, “That’s it, it’s over, cancel Christmas.” So, what ends up happening is that if people were in an environments where they felt more comfortable, and they were given the space, that they would probably be super-talkative. They would probably be more like a typical extrovert, but they’re not given the space for it.
And extroverts take up a lot of space.
Peter: I’m reading the book Caste, that just came out, by Isabel Wilkerson. She hasn’t really addressed work contexts. It’s much more societal.
However enlightened and sensitive we’re trying to be even within our offices, and as we’re embracing matters of diversity and inclusion as companies, and as individuals, I mean, Jesse and I, as white men, have talked about this on this show, how we’re trying to practice being better, more supportive, in these regards.
In her book, she has this story of going to a conference in India, I believe, about caste, which is essentially a critical discussion. These are folks who are trying to do away with or understand it so as to repair their society. And afterwards, she approaches someone and asks them, “Are you in what would be considered the dominant caste?” and the woman that she says this to is aghast, because she’d been trying to be as woke and as sensitive to her standing as she could. And Isabel’s like, “Yeah, I could tell by the way you interacted with other people and they interacted with you that you were in a dominant caste and those other people were in a subordinate caste,” even though everyone was trying to be explicitly not caste based in this structure.
And it just shows how deep it goes. And one can only imagine this is true in the workplaces we are part of, however, again, sensitive and D&I-oriented we’re trying to be.
What approaches or strategies or tactics can be taken to allow as many voices in a room to be heard and, to be able to contribute?
Denise: Another great quote that I saw, which I spoke about it in a conference that I spoke at, the Enterprise Experience conference, and it said something to the degree of, “Racism won’t end until white people stop looking at as an issue that they need to be sympathetic towards, and look at it as something that they need to solve.” And I was like, yes, exactly. White supremacy won’t die until white people see it as a white issue they need to solve rather than a black issue they need to empathize with.
And I think that’s really true. Castes, racism, sexism, everything, it can’t be solved by the people who are the recipients of it. Or who were on the low end of it. It has to be solved by the people who put it in place.
And I think the more people see these issues as, “Oh, this is something I have to do something about,” rather than, “Oh, I feel so bad.” You know, like, “Oh, I feel so bad about that. It’s so wrong that you have to experience that.” It’s like, “Yeah, it’s really wrong that you benefit from it all the time. That’s really sad too.” And that it becomes more like everybody working together to try to address this issue, rather than “good luck with that,” right? All of the awareness and everything has been so long overdue, but as a black woman, has also been exhausting because it’s just dredged up so much.
But, you know, at least, now if I say something, it’s not going to be people being like, “That’s not an issue. That’s not a problem. I don’t— Why are you so upset? Why are you so upset? Why are you so angry?” I’m, like, “I’m angry because this is some bullshit. That’s why I’m angry.”
I’m angry because this is ridiculous and it should have gone away. It should have been, you know, I grew up in the seventies, like we were under a false sense of security that it was just going to keep getting better and better and better. And then like just crazy things just keep popping off.
We really need to do this collectively. Like you think you benefit from this, but you don’t. All the things that have been an outcome of racism and white supremacy, okay, so great, you are able to buy a house more easily and all this stuff, but then you end up going and being in suburbs that are completely, homogenized and then you don’t get the culture. You think you’re safe, but you don’t feel safe when you go into other neighborhoods.
But what if you could just be safe everywhere? What if you could just have everybody everywhere all the time didn’t have to be afraid? Like, I kinda think everybody would benefit from that. Other people don’t feel the same way, but, I’m biased.
Jesse: I think we all are. Yeah.
Denise, thank you so much for being with us. It’s been a wonderful conversation.
Do you have anything to plug? Where can people find you on the internet?
Denise: Yes, the interwebs. So you can find me at denisejacobs.com is my website. On Twitter and Instagram I’m @denisejacobs. On Facebook, you can follow me at denisejacobsdotcom all written out. On LinkedIn, I’m Denise R. Jacobs.
And actually, I am going to be launching an online course on career confidence. It’s called Amplify You: Cultivating Career Competence. And so you can go to http://amplify-u.com and check that out. And then finally, I have several courses on LinkedIn Learning, and so you can go and look for me as an instructor on LinkedIn Learning and go and check out my Banish Your Inner Critic to Unleash Creativity course, the Creative Collaboration course, the Creativity for All: Hacking Creative Brain course. And then coming out, I think in December, is going to be the Business Case for Creativity to help leaders champion their cause for creating a creative culture in their organizations.
Peter: Hmm. And there’s the book.
Denise: Oh, right. And then there’s my book, Banish Your Inner Critic, which you can buy on amazon.com. I mean, you can also probably roll into most Barnes and Nobles and find it right when you enter the store in the bargain book section. I know, but still it’s in hardback and it’s wonderful. So you can get at a Barnes and Noble. If it’s not there, you can just ask for them to order it or you can order it on Amazon.
Jesse: Wonderful. Thank you, Denise. This has been great.
Jesse: And with that, this has been episode 21 of Finding Our Way. You can find the previous 20 episodes as well as this one, as well as probably some future episodes, too, that I don’t even know about on our website at https://findingourway.design/, where you’ll find audio and transcripts for every episode. Plus, there’s a way to send us feedback on our website.
Please send us feedback. We love your feedback. You can use our website or you can just write to us on Twitter. I’m @jjg he’s @peterme, or you can find us on LinkedIn under our real names as well. We’ll see you next time.
20—The business model is the new grid, and other mindbombs (ft. Erika Hall)
Oct 27, 2020
Transcript
Erika: Most of what operates under the label of “design” right now is styling business models. It’s not actually design because you’re not making meaningful choices. The choices have been made. They’re outside your purview and designers are chasing after it, coloring in the boxes.
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Together: And we’re Finding Our Way…
Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, veteran design consultant Erika Hall of Mule Design Studio, author of the books Conversational Design, and Just Enough Research joins us to talk about whether designers are truly ready for that coveted seat at the table, how to build those crucial cross-functional relationships, and the relationship between design and capitalism.
Jesse: So let’s jump in.
Peter: You have recently said something that I want to hear more from you and hear Jesse’s take on what you’re saying. I believe the phrase is, “The business model is the new grid.” What does that mean?
Jesse: Well, that sounds great because I have no idea what that means.
Erika: Oh, fantastic. So what that means is, the important design now is interactive digital design, however you want to construe that. And we’re still drawing from the graphic design models. We still think of like, What’s the platonic ideal of this? It’s like graphic design, but now it’s in a web page or on a screen or something.
And, I think the whole field of design is working from this horseless carriage way of thinking about it. Yeah. Because the grid is not what constrains your work. It’s the underlying exchange of value. And I think when designers don’t realize this, they do all this talking about being human-centered and empathy, myah-myah-myah-myah-myah, and then they’re shocked, they’re shocked when their work is being used to exploit people or extract value or do some rent-seeking bullshit, like all these delivery companies that are vampires on local restaurants, and designers don’t have any tools to confront this situation because they are borrowing the practices of the kind of work that’s irrelevant.
And so if you think about fundamentally, What does your design snap to? It snaps to the business model.
And there’s no overcoming that. There’s no amount of empathizing with customers that will change that because ultimately your work will be deformed to, perverted to, constrained to that underlying exchange.
Peter: All right. You know, we talk about design operating within constraints. The business model is the singular constraint through which everything gets molded, regardless of…
Erika: Yeah. And the business model can be designed. And I think this is the most important work for designers, ‘cause designing business models is within the skill set of any good, like, designer. To really understand what everybody needs, how to reconcile and balance those needs, and how to create a system that creates a flow of value among all the different parties.
It is not intellectually difficult, like getting an MBA is not an exercise in stretching your intellect. So, I think the mechanics of business a designer can understand, but when they think about business, they think, “Oh, I’ve got to prove the ROI of my work. I have to think about KPIs.” And they think about like, “How do I fit my sketches into something where the people in the C-suite will care about me?”
As opposed to, “Wait a second. The people in the C-suite are fucking everything up. Chasing this weird exploiting growth engine, but I, as a designer could redesign the system and come up with something where you create a product, a service, an entity, whatever that actually adds value to the system and doesn’t extract it.”
And people are happy to pay for things. Like, people pay for stuff all the time. People pay for things that are valuable, but price is a signal has been completely obliterated by the availability of capital to subsidize services and products and make them free. Like nobody knows what, say, an Uber ride costs, what a taxi ride should cost, because the pricing signal has been completely camouflaged by subsidies from investors. So that’s what I mean by the business model being the grid.
Jesse: I’m hearing a couple of things in that statement. One is that designers need to understand business factors, the business variables, the business constraints that influence the success of their design work. And then secondarily, there’s an opportunity to do that design work or to do some system level work that resembles design at the level of the business model separate from what anybody might have considered to be their job as a designer in the past.
Erika: Yes. And I think most of what operates under the label of “design” right now is styling business models. It’s not actually design because you’re not making meaningful choices. The choices have been made. They’re outside your purview and designers are chasing after it coloring in the boxes.
Peter: I wholeheartedly agree. The challenge that I perceive, working with designers and design leaders, is how they get into that earlier framing conversation. Often design is not seen as a contributor to strategy or business direction. Even when you have very smart, strategic people in design, they’re often painting within boxes that someone else has established.
They might be doing so very intelligently and very systemically, but there’s still some barrier between wherever design lives and wherever those conversations are happening. What have you seen in terms of how design can, I don’t know, storm those gates get beyond the castle wall and influence that? What is the move to start having the conversations that you’re encouraging them to have?
Erika: Well, it’s not easy to do that. I’m not saying like all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, I just realized. Hey CEO. I just realized that if we don’t fix the business model, everything else is jacked and my work is pointless.” That’s not going to happen. So I think it is going to be very similar to, you might recall, the early days of UX, and how there were some prominent UX consultancies that shifted the conversation.
I think the same thing has to happen because it doesn’t make sense to have a strategic design agency in the same way anymore in terms of making artifacts, because that work has all been pulled in house. And that’s the other part of the conversation people haven’t been having, which is, pulling design in house fundamentally changes design.
It changes the practice. You can assess your influence as a designer by thinking about what the limits of your freedom to ask questions are. Like, if you can walk in and say, “Why are we doing this as a business?” you have a lot of influence.
If you’re not allowed to raise questions, then your design work is relatively more shallow. Jesse named two things. So the third thing that’s going on is that design being pulled in house has changed design because they’re no longer questioning from the outside.
So to answer your question, Peter, what has to happen is the new design consultancies are actually more like management consultancies, but without the baggage of a McKinsey and without the willingness to solve any problem. So I think it’s probably similar to the work you’re doing now, where some designers who are very, say, seasoned, do lead by modeling a new kind of consulting and defining a new practice area because people inside cannot set the terms of the conversation, but people outside can push on that and articulate this and do some consciousness-raising. So I think just like UX started as something from the outside that pushed business, this again is going to be a new kind of consulting agency, and a new kind of thinking and talking and discourse that’s going to push on organizations and push on people within those organizations, because you can’t change it from the inside.
And it’s particularly challenging because a lot of people are very successful doing that thing. So where’s the incentive for them to change?
Peter: So are you stating, categorically, that a VP of design within some enterprise cannot make the kind of business model change that you’re articulating. and that instead that VP might be able to help bring in some type of external consultant, recognizing a problem is occurring and say, “Hey, why don’t we approach it from this way? Here’s a group that can help us,” but that VP themselves, you’re in the system, you just can’t unmake it.
Erika: Yeah, that’s the case. There might be exceptions. The only exception I could see is if the organization were in crisis. We’ve seen this in our own work when we’ve been brought in from the outside and then something failing about the business provides an opportunity for them to change.
But if the business is functioning, according to the metrics it set for itself, you can’t change that, because what a lot of organizations are doing is shareholder-centered design. And if the shareholders are happy, that’s the only metric that matters in a business, ultimately. And I think these are maybe be like hard truths, and I’m not saying you can’t do anything good or valuable.
But I’m saying that you’re work as a designer is bounded and constrained by this. And you cannot transcend that. If you’re working for a good company with a good business model and you’re contributing into that, that’s great. But if you’re not, then I don’t care how much you go out there, and learn about people and empathize with people. That work is ultimately going to be used in support of that business model. And there’s nothing you can do about that from the inside.
Jesse: I think that whether or not people see themselves as being capable of taking on that role has a lot to do with their roots as designers and the values that they internalized about value, about the value of their work, about the value of design. I have my own biases here because I don’t have a formal design education, but I’ve worked with many people who do, and I feel I’ve seen certain patterns in how they think about their work.
I feel like I meet a lot of people who came out of formal design education with the idea that their job was to be the conduit for universal principles of design truth through their work. And their job was to go to school, absorb all these principles so fully that they could apply them in any context that they found themselves in.
And their job was to show up and be the expert on grids and typography and all of those kinds of things. And so they never really thought of themselves as designers of systems or systems thinkers. But then if you do think of yourself in that way, then the question becomes, well, What are the boundaries of your practice? If my job is to be a systems thinker, trying to humanize the systems of the world, what’s off limits for me then? And what is within the bounds of designer outside the bounds of design?
Because a lot of the strategic decisions that you’re talking about making, often, especially in a smaller company, you’ve got to go all the way up to the CEO before you have somebody who has that level of power, and designers have to be invited into those conversations, to Peter’s point, by product people, by business people. And some designers may need to reframe their understanding of themselves and their work in order to make this transition.
Erika: Absolutely. yeah, and I think a lot of design schools need to change. None of us here were educated as quote unquote designers, right?
Peter: Journalism, anthropology, and you’re philosophy…
Erika: Philosophy
Peter: …what, philosophy? So, you just like to ask questions.
Erika: Yes, I do. And teach people how to ask questions because nobody is incentivized to ask annoying questions.
Jesse: I want to ask about asking annoying questions, because Peter touched on the idea that people outside an organization have more latitude to ask questions than those inside because of the constraints of the power structure and power dynamics. To what extent do you feel it is the role of design across all contexts to be questioning the fundamentals of whatever the business context is that they’ve found themselves in?
Erika: I think that is central to the work. I think if you’re a designer, you’re a person who asks questions. I think you can be a craftsperson and not ask questions. You can be a stylist and not ask questions. You can be a maker and not ask questions, but I think if you’re a designer, that word implies a certain amount of power and influence.
And the systems we’re talking about designing now are so complex that it’s very, very rare that the designer is an auteur in the way we used to think about it. Like our idea of a designer. Oh, a Paul Rand or…
Peter: Dieter Rams or something.
Erika: I just think the things we’re designing, ‘cause they are systems, they’re beyond any one person. So I think that being the person who frames the problem, being the person who asks questions, that is core to calling yourself a designer.
Jesse: Problem framing, problem reframing, mean that any internal design leader necessarily takes up this, yeah, permanent antagonist role among the senior leaders of an organization, because they are the one who is there to question what everybody else is putting on the table.
Erika: Yeah, but is a questioner necessarily an antagonist?
Jesse: It’s very difficult not to be received as an antagonist as a questioner, I can say that from experience.
Erika: The practice of design is creation and criticism in dialogue with one another. And I think we’ve emphasized creation and completely lost the sense of criticism, even though that’s fundamental, that’s one half of that dialectic. And I think it’s necessary to do the best work, to create positive change and people have to get comfortable with it and not think of it, like an antagonist.
Peter: We’ve delegated criticism to AB testing or other forms of after-the-fact validation as opposed to the work itself. Because companies are willing to change based on metrics. But, the only criticism that happens internally is crits within a design org, but not say within that broader product development practice.
So you talked about the role of design as being creation and criticism. And I also see the role of design as humanism, we’re bringing a humanistic lens into an environment, primarily dominated by business, whatever that means, metrics-driven thinking, data-driven thinking, or technologically minded thinking. And so, I don’t even know if it’s necessarily questioning so much as it is a new or a different mode of inquiry, different mode of framing. Business is a mode of inquiry, business, MBA-ish-ness is a mode of inquiry. There’s a mindset or perspective there, that have become dominant within these organizations, and I think what you’re arguing for, Erika, is design as an additional mode of framing and inquiry.
I mean, we were making fun before we were recording of the social science stuff that you have on your bookshelf there, but it’s bringing with it potentially this whole social science and humanistic mode of understanding that has been, if not lost within organizations, it’s been relegated to a secondary or tertiary status within organizations with market research or other kinds of after-the-fact reactions to what is being done, but not before-the-fact, informers, of what is to be done.
Erika: My primary issue with the field of design right now is that the discussion is so shallow. I don’t get the sense that the field is particularly coherent because there is research and inquiry being done and it’s completely disconnected from practice.
And the practice has been completely subsumed into, like, business and engineering. And then people talk about the wish for design to have a so-called place at the table, but they don’t mean that, so often. They don’t mean, “I want design to be engaging at this deep level.” What they mean is, “I want business and engineering to listen to my ideas and tell me I’m smart.”
Jesse: Right.
Erika: Right? Because the sad truth, the bummer about confronting what it means to be a designer in our current context, is that it doesn’t have individual ownership and you can’t show it in a portfolio.
And I think a lot of people get into design because they really love and enjoy graphic design. I love and enjoy graphic design. But the part of the work that’s visible, that’s tangible, that’s a very unimportant part of the work at this point.
I think the actual work of design is invisible and complicated and not appealing to a lot of people who came into the field to work on particular parts of the process.
Music break
Jesse: We had a product management person, Melissa Perri, on the show a couple of weeks ago.
Erika: Oh yeah. I know her. I’ve been at conferences with her.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah, we had a great conversation. And one of the things that she said, from her perspective as a product manager who lives in that world all the time, is that, and I’m going to paraphrase, and I hope I don’t mischaracterize what she said, basically she said that most of the designers that she’s worked with can’t be trusted with the kinds of decisions that you’re talking about, because they will torpedo your business in the name of serving humanity, and then don’t give a shit about the consequences.
How accurate do you think that perception is? And if it’s not that accurate, what do designers need to do to change it?
Erika: I want to meet the designer, like, powerful enough to torpedo a business. I the name of humanity.
Jesse: Well, this is the reason given for why designers are not invited to the conversations that you’re talking about, is that they care too much about people. They aren’t going to look out for the needs of the business. They’re going to sink your boat.
Erika: Yeah. I agree with that because, going back to the very start of our conversation, I want designers to understand that the business model is their grid. Yeah. I think designers are ignorant about business. Because it’s never been presented to them as part of their concern. That’s my whole point.
And so, yeah. Designers will come in and because they’ve been led to understand that their work is only on the user side, they don’t understand that a healthy, functional, sustainable business is actually in the benefit to the customer because how often have we found a product or service that was amazing, great, and user-centered, and wasn’t financially sustainable. You know what happened? It goes away and something shitty and profitable comes in its place. And so what I would tell the designers is, if you are truly an advocate for humans, you will care about the business. Because only if user needs and business needs are truly deeply intertwined are you going to be serving humans.
But designers feel like, “Oh, business is dirty” and fight it. And then they end up in service of its worst aims. Because they have the special, precious identity. So I absolutely agree…
Peter: I see.
Erika: …with Melissa on this.
Peter: Yeah. most designers, without a lot of training or coaching and education, you wouldn’t want to just put them in those contexts or give them the authority to make those decisions.
Erika: It’s not even a lot, the concepts are not complicated. The fundamental concepts of business, the business models themselves are not complicated. Business models are not hard. Conceptually. And then once you understand….
Jesse: Just look at all those MBAs who make them all the time, right?
Peter: They’re geniuses!
Erika: Yeah. So this is the book I’m working on. My next book explaining business models to designers.
Peter: Are you sure you want to say this, because now you’re, beholden to it. Okay.
Erika: I’m absolutely committed, because nobody is talking to designers. Inside of business, people are not talking to them at all, or “Oh, just give me the artifacts.”
Or they keep hearing about the business value of design. Harvard Business Review has been writing… I don’t know if something changed in the publication, but in recent years, they’ve been writing some intelligent stuff about the relationship of customer experience and design and things to the business.
So it’s not conceptually hard, but it is a huge reframing and revaluing. So, from the head, very simple. From the heart and from the identity, because I think as you said earlier, Peter, being tied to the artifacts, that is hard to let go of.
The centrality of the artifact is still a part of a lot of designers’ core identity, and asking somebody to let go of the artifacts that they’ve invested their identity in, that is significant. That takes time. That’s not going to happen overnight or happen at all for some people, if your fundamental orientation is, “I make a certain set of choices and my expertise in guiding this set of choices is tied to my identity.” That’s hard.
Peter: Speaking of identity though, I think there’s flip side of that in-house, which is, if designers start reading your book, they develop confidence around understanding business and business models. They start making connections between what they’re aware of and the business. They start figuring out, “Oh, here’s ways that the research that we’re doing could actually drive different ways of thinking about exchange of value.” You know, imagine a moderately complex service system. “We can shift value from one part of it to another and satisfy customers while lowering costs,” and designers start saying this, then you’re going to get a bunch of MBAs saying, “Who the fuck are you? That’s my job.” And those MBAs are going to be like, “Yeah, but did you go to Harvard? Have you worked at McKinsey? Are your spreadsheets going out to the eighth decimal point?”
Jesse: They’regoing to Pat you on the head and say, that’s so cute. Please go back to your desk.
Peter: For the listeners at home, Erika just showed a section of her book that read, “Put an MBA out of work.” But there’s going to be a challenge for the designer, as Jesse was just referring to, even if they are right, even if they are grounded, to develop that credibility so that they are not dismissed, so that they are not marginalized because in applying their background, their understanding, their humanistic design and experience-led understanding to, authentically, honestly, rigorously, intelligently shift the conversation around business, business value, business models, inflows and outflows, they are going to be running up against a different way of considering business, that is more mechanistic. That is less humanistic.
Erika: More quantitative, all of that.
Peter: More quantitative. All of that. I mean, not that the designer’s approach won’t have quantitative in it, but there’s, much bigger, values frameworks at play now.
And, in most companies, those values frameworks are dominated by, uh, mechanistic mode.
Research is an interesting contributor to this, user research, customer research, market research. How does this all get woven together in a way that these newer frameworks, newer foundations, newer perspectives in this conversation are understood and accepted as opposed to just push back and reject it.
Erika: I have an answer for that because so much of my consulting work now is, How do we use evidence to influence decision making? And what you described is just a subcategory of that. ‘Cause I think the big blind spot that a lot of designers and researchers have is taking the tools of ethnography and turning them on the organization, ‘cause the organization is the social context of decision making. So it’s just humans in the same way that you understand humans outside the organization in order to sell products and services to them, or create products and services that fit into their lives and culture and match their mental model.
You take the exact same process and turn it internally. So you go to that MBA. If you genuinely care about your customer, your user and you want to make their life easier, you don’t go to them and say, “Hey, stupid customer. I know better than you stop doing the stupid thing.”
Yeah. That’s not how it works. You’re like, this customer already values this set of things, this set of context is meaningful to them. Let’s position our value prop in terms of what’s already meaningful to them. Exact same process, except building empathy among your coworkers is much harder cause people out in the world, you don’t have to deal with them on Zoom or whatever. I used to say, “You don’t run into them in the office kitchen.” So it’s actually much harder to build empathy among people within an organization, but this is incredibly valuable and completely within the skillset and purview of all designers.
So what you do is you go to that MBA and you say, “Hey, I want to understand your mindset.” This is the questioning, and this is why questioning is not antagonistic because you go to them in a genuine, from your heart, Dale Carnegie, making friends and influencing people, kind of way. And you sit down and you’re like, “I, as a designer, want to make you as the MBA business analyst, whatever, I want to make you feel more successful. And I need to understand your job, ‘cause I feel like I don’t understand your work at all. And I want to understand your work. Tell me about your work. Tell me about your day. Tell me about it, how you see success. Tell me about your concerns and your anxieties.”
And just by inquiring, just by setting aside your own agenda, just by openly asking questions like that, yeah, you are building rapport and you are building a bridge, and now you also know how to frame your work in terms that are meaningful to them.
It’s exactly the process of user-centered design, but internally, and people don’t do this. And if you want your ideas to be listened to, to be taken seriously, you start by inquiry. And so now you can build a partnership and work with them to say, “Hey, I know you’re concerned about business success. I know you’re concerned about quarterly reporting, but whatever. And now, because I understand your world better, I can help bring our world closer in alignment,” or, “Hey, I have a view of customer value that’s meaningful to you.” And if you understand that person, and you’ve really asked questions, you know, to not all of a sudden do this brain dump of like, “Oh, but I know better than you.”
And I’ve talked to designers and researchers who still have this idea about like, “Oh, I know better.” Then the stakeholders, the business leaders, like, we have a special kind of understanding the hardest thing for designers and researchers in this position is letting go of the idea that they’re better than the MBA.
And that is a hard mind shift to be more effective in your own work. As a designer, you have to let go of the idea that you’re better or more special, and then you will be effective and you will have more influence because people inside the organization follow the same rules of relationship building and cognition and emotion-based decision making that people outside the organization do.
Jesse: I think there are a couple of factors to making that transition for designers, that transition in mindset. Part of it is, to your earlier point, letting go of what can feel like the moral high ground as the stewards of humanism and humanity in the organization, the ones who were always there to remind people to do the right thing.
Right. And then the other part of it is letting go of the idea that your value comes from having all the right answers and embracing the idea that your value comes from having all the right questions.
Erika: Yes. Oh, thank you. Yes. That was like a gift. Exactly.
Music break 2
Jesse: So a lot of the folks who’ve listened to this show are in-house design leaders who manage teams of designers. And what we’ve heard from some of these folks is that they are able to establish these cultural values within their own design teams, but then when their folks go out and engage with their partners in other parts of the business, there’s this real culture conflict that comes up.
It reminds me a little bit of the situation that I frequently found myself in at Adaptive Path where one thing that I insisted on is every designer presents their own work. Which meant that I sometimes was putting very junior designers in front of very senior stakeholders.
And then I had to explain to the stakeholders why they needed to listen to my junior designer. And part of that was just getting them to understand that our junior designers are not like your junior designers in-house. They have a very different mindset and a very different skillset. But part of it, I think, is just opening the door to engaging with a different culture on the part of these stakeholders and the role of the design leader in this I feel is somehow to create that opening, create that space for a peer or business stakeholder or a partner to even consider what your designer has to say.
And I’m curious about your experience, especially as a consultant, where you’re engaging, I mean, you’ve been a design consultant for many, many years now, and engaging with these organizations as an outsider. How does an in-house design leader build that credibility? Not just for themselves, but for their entire team, so that all of their partners across the business take all of their designers more seriously?
Erika: It is harder. It’s a longer process coming from inside than outside because you have the mandate coming in from outside, you know, to come in and say, “Why do you do it like this?” And you won’t get fired.
Inside, it’s the same, it’s one conversation at a time, it’s coming in with a very clear agenda, and this should be easier for designers because designers have the concept in their role of understanding other cultures. So you go to them and you say, we want to understand you better so that our work serves and supports you. And you focus on the rapport building, but you can’t come in with answers, you come in with questions, but the questions that feel that they come from a genuine place of interest and support, and that is so powerful.
I do that simple exercise when I run workshops. And I’ve run a lot of, research workshops with in-house teams. And I just have them interview each other about your boring stupid job for 10 minutes. And it is so powerful. I have seen, like, all teams and organizations change after 20 minutes of, “Oh, we’re going to ask each other what you did at work,” which sounds too… everybody wants a named methodology, a technique, a silver bullet.
It’s talking to people and more importantly, it’s listening to people, which sounds so boring and cheap and like it shouldn’t work, but the most powerful way to influence somebody is to not care about looking smart.
This is every in-house, external, whatever. That’s every designer’s issue. I” have to prove how smart I am.” You have to set that aside and say, “No, I am genuinely going to value and listen to this person in front of me.” There is nothing more powerful than that. And that’s what will make you smarter. That’s what will make you more effective.
Now coming to them and saying, “Oh, I’m going to prove something to you.” I turn down every engagement where somebody comes to me and says, “Oh, I want to work with you on this so that we can prove to the CEO how smart our team is, how accomplished, how much knowledge we have.” I’m like, that’s a losing proposition. You have to listen to them like really deeply and intentionally and, and, completely seriously listen to them and that’s powerful. And then you’ll know that at some point you can come back and demonstrate that you heard them, and it’s not like fake, active listening, surface bullshit.
It’s really caring and really hearing. And if you do that, you can change people’s minds. You can change organizations. I’ve gone in and done it coming in from the outside. It’s possible from the inside. It’s not easy. It’s annoying. It’s not ego-supporting, but it works.
Google did that big two-year Project Aristotle study or whatever. And they found out what makes teams go is psychological safety. You know this from your work at Adaptive Path, you know how much fear there is, how people are just afraid of letting their guard down in front of each other. And that’s what leads to bad work and bad working experiences, and people can’t critique and criticize each other’s work unless they have that trust. Which means, if you don’t really want good things for everybody you work with, then you can’t criticize them, and then shitty stuff is going to get out into the world, because nobody’s going to stop it. ‘Cause you don’t have that kind of relationship within your organization.
Peter: You just talked about, how it’s easier to empathize with your customer than with your colleagues. What strikes me is, not what you’d expect, right? You’re working with these people, you’re collaborating with them. You’re trying to get stuff done with them.
It should be easier to empathize with them, ‘cause you have a firmer understanding of their context. But I also know what you’re saying must be true because it comes up again and again, it’s become almost a cliche to say about designers, that they have way more empathy for their users than their colleagues. And I’m curious if you have a hypothesis or even data, evidence, as to why it’s easier to empathize with the person at the other end of your product or service than someone you’re collaborating with to make that product or service.
Erika: Oh, yes. Oh yes. I have an answer because, often your interests are much more aligned with somebody out in the world because of the way organizations structurally put people in opposition to each other. And part of that is the framing of answers being more valuable than questions, individuals and teams within organizations are often in competition for whose idea wins. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes you have brainstorming meetings.
I think people should never brainstorm ideas. People should only brainstorm and prioritize questions, because when you brainstorm ideas, you’re putting a team in competition with each other for who’s smartest. because of the way the organization incentivizes people or recognizes people or funds people.
The way relationships are set up, so it’s not bananas that you would have a harder time empathizing with people, because a lot of times you’re next to each other, which means your differences are highlighted more, ‘cause the differences are tangible every day.
Whereas the customer, right, the only part of their life that you intersect with is, like you said, the 15 minutes they use your product. The rest of the time the customer could do whatever, they could listen to music you hate, they could, like, like food you don’t like, but in an organization you’re up against each other all the time.
Peter: Yeah, it’s a little bit like that Upton Sinclair quote. It doesn’t pay me to understand you, so I’m not going to learn about you because if I actually understand you, because of how things are structured, I might somehow lessen in the overall context of the organization, cause I might be enabling your success. And somehow our organization has set that up as a bit of a zero sum game. So, your success means my less success because you’re the one now getting the plaudits, the recognition, you get a promotion, et cetera.
if I help you do that, at best I’ve remained flat, but at worst now I am secondary. I am a sub to you. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that makes a lot that’s sense.
Well, we talked a lot about, cultures within corporations, within organizations. And one of the challenges that design leaders face is that, we’re all the product of decades of experiences that have acculturated us, and design leaders tend to have a different set of experiences than product management leaders and engineering leaders and marketing leaders.
And so all these different cultures are expected, now with psychological safety, to collaborate. They don’t recognize just how different perspectives and starting points are of all these folks. And very little has done to try to ameliorate that or mitigate that.
Erika: Yeah, it should be somebody’s paid job to essentially do interaction design on internal communication, but people act like that should just happen, and it won’t.
Peter: Thank you, Erika, for joining us.
Jesse: Anything you want to plug while we’re here?
Erika: Yeah. If you want me to come in and help your team make better decisions or yell at any particular subset of people, that’s what I do. I’m a consultant.
Peter: Excellent.
Jesse: Thank you so much, Erika.
Erika: Thank you. This has been fun.
Jesse: You can find Erika’s company Mule Design Studio at http://muledesign.com. You can also find me and Peter on the internet. You can find us on Twitter. You can find us on LinkedIn. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. You can find past episodes and transcripts for this podcast on our website, https://findingourway.design/. We’ll see you soon.
19 – Growth mindsets, vulnerability, sociopathy, totalitarianism… that escalated quickly (ft. Billie Mandel)
Oct 20, 2020
Transcript
Billie: The conditions that are required for a more just world line up as the same conditions that are required for a more successful, more creative, more innovative technology team.
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Both: And we’re finding our way…
Peter: …navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Peter: On today’s episode of Finding Our Way is my good friend, Billie Mandel. Billie has an illustrious career in design leadership, and team coaching and UX teaching.
Billie: So I got my start in tech in the first dot-com boom. And like many of us, I started as a refugee from academia. I was working on a PhD in political science. I was studying political behavior and comparative politics.
So I started my tech career along with 20 other people who doubled the size of Ask.com on one day. And at the time, the company had proof of concept as a search engine and suddenly corporations realized that they could pay us to make a custom that thing so that their users could ask a question on the internet and maybe not charge the company 50 bucks every time they called up.
So I was hired to be what they were calling at that point, a content editor, and to lead a team of people the way we started. So UXC, but it was not UX.
There were 20 of us who were hired on the same day to start building these things custom for enterprises. And, as things were back in the late nineties, within a year I had a team of 50.
Peter: That you were in charge of.
Jesse: Wow. I mean, talk about being thrown into the deep end of leadership. Had you ever led a team before?
Billie: Had I ever led a team before? Well, the way you lead teams, when you’re the resident assistant in a college dorm, and you’ve got your finance manager and your kitchen manager. But had I ever been trained as a manager?
No, absolutely not.
Peter: Did they provide any training or were they just like, no… Okay,yYou’re laughing. So, no…
Billie: I mean…
Peter: “You seem capable, here, just have more responsibility.”
Billie: The thing about the first.com boom, there was the work that needed to get done and whatever you were interested in doing and capable of doing, you had the opportunity to do.
Jesse: Was leadership something you raised your hand for?
Billie: Yeah.
Jesse: Why did you want it?
Billie: I’ve always gravitated towards people management, people, leadership, and maybe some of it has to do with being interested in the social sciences and believing that humans knowing themselves better and knowing each other better and being intentional about how we organize and what the rules are under which organize and what the agreements are we make. I’ve always believed that that creates the opportunity for human creativity and social change. And I found pretty early that the desire to see those connections and create those connections and help other people orient when they’re confused, and to give people guidance in combining their super powers rather than fighting it out, I think that’s something that I developed an aptitude for and an interest in pretty early on.
Jesse: One thing that we hear a lot from design leaders is the challenge of staying close to the creative work as you move into leadership. That the responsibilities of leadership start to take over your time, your attention, your energy, and so forth until those kinds of creative decisions become something that you have to really fully delegate to other people, and you aren’t really having the level of creative influence that you had when you were a designer. But it sounds to me like at least through this phase of your career, you’ve been able to maintain some connection to the creative work, even as you were moving into more and more leadership responsibility.
Billie: I definitely have stayed close to the work and the decisions that feel creative to me.
In my coaching practice, I also hear a lot of leaders saying they’re struggling to stay close to the creative work, and, well, sometimes they mean I miss just sitting down and getting into the zone and figuring out if this is the top layer, what flows come next and what flows coming back, that obsessive fun interaction design zone that is enjoyable for a lot of folks, a lot of people miss that.
I don’t necessarily miss that as much. What I’ve seen as most important in terms of staying close to the creative work is maintaining the ability to care and the ability to ask hard questions and engage without being attached to the outcome. So, I think that’s become one of my favorite things about being here. And an educator role is everybody brings me their creative problems that they’re solving. I get to engage and get my hands dirty and get my brain dirty. Understand what kind of problem are you trying to solve? How far have you gotten, where are your blind spots?
My favorite thing to do is to help fill in people’s blind spots and get a more complete picture of the problem space that they’re working on. To me, that’s one of the most fun things we can do, is use our experience and our designer brain to help add and fill in blanks and create context for other creative professionals.
Peter: Atlassian was your most recent full time job, if I understand right. You were brought on in kind of a, maybe not unique role, but not yet widespread role of design education, helping the design team do what they do better.
But you’ve also mentioned teams and team building. And I think that was something you did at Atlassian. It’s funny, you mentioned your PhD or near PhD, political science, and how do people work together to achieve, accomplish, and come back around 25 years later, thinking about how people work together to achieve and accomplish.
How do you approach teams and teaming?
Billie: Ah, this is my favorite topic. This is my favorite, favorite, favorite topic. It’s so interesting because the job that I came to Atlassian to do was design education. And when I started getting in deep with the designers and the design teams and their cross-functional collaborators in engineering and in product management, one of the things that became so clear to me is that it wasn’t, How well do they use Sketch? How consistent is their design system? You know, Are they writing good code?
Software teams aren’t limited because they don’t know how to code or they don’t know how to make wireframes. They’re limited because they are not as effective as they could be at combining their ideas and their proposals with each other. This is my big Aha! In the past three, if not five years. If teams are struggling,
it’s probably because of their teamwork more than it is about their craft skills.
Peter: One of the insights I had at some point in my career was reflecting on my degree in anthropology, which felt, for the longest time, utterly disconnected to my work, and realizing, Oh, Oh, wait a moment. That actually, was a pillar in my foundation of what became my career, later doing user-centered design, human-centered design. I’m wondering what, if anything, from your academic development and understanding, have you brought forth?
Billie: It’s amazing. Now at this point in my career, now that I, have really found my focus and the work that I want to do, the work that’s my work to do in this world feels like helping teams be more effective, helping teams hear all the voices of all the people on the teams and value them all equally and maybe have the most effective or the most valued idea not come from the person with the largest amount of bona fides in the room. And now I get to bring in everything from what I studied academically in political behavior, political sociology.
These ways of understanding human behavior are super helpful in getting us to be a little bit more critical about what do we do at work, and why, I think, right now, one of the things that’s most exciting to me is seeing our industry start to take inclusion seriously for the first time.
And one of the themes that I’m hearing more and more in the coaching work that I do, and in connecting with other folks who are doing more directly work in diversity and inclusion.
One of the things that’s most exciting to me is seeing the conditions that are required for a more just world line up as the same conditions that are required for a more successful, more creative, more innovative technology team. That, to me is what I’m on fire about right now.
What I’ve learned, is you’ve got a whole team of people and you need to hear all of them in order to make it worth everyone’s while. Wow. Amazing. Those are the same conditions that create improved inclusion. I think that gives us a big opportunity in this historical moment to make those connections. So, I’m excited.
Jesse: So to my mind, that kind of stuff often comes back to culture and the tone that leaders set in their organizations for how voices get included and how decisions get made. And I’m curious what you’ve seen, some of the struggles, some of the successes, whether from your own practice,as a leader, or other leaders that you’ve worked with, in creating that sense of inclusion within teams.
Billie: The most important thing that I’ve seen is that, just like our children, our employees and mentees will do what we do, not what we say. And the most common mistake that I see is leaders grandstanding about, “we want you to do this, and these are the values” and bla bla bla bla bla bla bla, from a perspective that’s facing outward and talking down and telling, but those same people, not walking the walk.
Music break
Peter: So, I really want to be the woke leader, but I also know that I’m a middle-aged white dude, and I’m likely going to behave in not so great ways.
How does a legitimately, authentically desiring leader, who is demonstrating these behaviors unknowingly… Who’s calling them on it? How do we set up a context internally so that they can get some reflection and be called on it?
Billie: Like any other life-sustaining habit, using your superpowers for good requires practice and requires a critical perspective. So, thing one, I’m going to say only leaders who choose to lead with vulnerability actively and regularly will be able to lead to real inclusion. And I absolutely believe that. And I don’t throw down “only”s and “never”s and “always” very often, but I absolutely believe that. I think you must have the ability and the willingness to look critically at your own behavior and to choose to be better.
Probably the most important leadership and professional book that I have is Mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck. And I reread it about once a year to see the ways in which my beliefs about my own inherent goodness, superiority, and talent are holding me back and causing me to probably be propping up systems that benefit me unfairly.
So, I think every leader, particularly a leader who is from a majority group, you need a trusted dissenter. And that person needs to be somebody who will tell you when you’re full of shit, who is keeping an eye out for what you’re missing and who has a perspective that’s different from yours. It’s a thing you and I have done in our friendship together over the years, Peter, that I really appreciate.
Peter: I’ve been fortunate that I’ve had those people in my life, professionally, who’ve been willing to call me out on my bullshit, and however defensive I am at the outset, I usually over time realize like, okay, yeah, they’re right, and I learned to take that in, but I think a lot of people don’t have that in their lives or they wouldn’t know how to find it. It’s not something you go to your HR business partner and say, “I need someone to call me out on my bullshit. Can you find me one of them?” Like, so any tips on how to develop that?
Billie: Yes. I have a few ideas. So, I do believe that any leader who wants to create an environment of inclusion and who wants to be able to make use of the team creativity that you get by having that environment, you need to create an environment of regular productive critique, and you need to participate in it yourself.
Jesse: What does that look like? Your participation. Does that mean offering your workup for critique or are you simply serving in the role as sort of arbiter
Billie: Oh, no, it absolutely means that your stuff is on the line. So, to me, one of the most important questions a person on a team can ask their teammates is, “What am I missing?” So this idea that each person on a team has a perspective, and I call this the alchemy of teams. If the three of us are on a team and one plus one plus one, there are three of us. But if we’re all like, well, Jesse’s got that bright red hair. And so he’s going to be the leader because he is, he is forceful.
So we’re all gonna follow him. We all do what he says. One plus one plus one is one. So we do what Jesse says, cause we want to impress him. And we essentially subtract the value that we could have added from the ultimate value the team creates. So the conditions that we want are one plus one plus one is more than three, when the three of us get together and combine our passion and our creative vision. We want the output of what we create together to be bigger and better than what any one of us had brought from the start. The conditions that you need in order to do that as a leader, you absolutely need to be willing to submit your own work and decisions, both to your peers and to your team, to get their perspective, and you absolutely have to do it from a place of honesty.
It can’t just be like, “Hey, what do you think? All right, great. We’re going to do what I wanted in the first place.” As soon as you do that, you’ve demonstrated to your team that you actually don’t give a shit, so the way you would do that as a leader is, you’ve got some kind of critique practice and critique practice is my jam. It’s the thing that I do the most and that I’m working on a book and I will have more tools available for folks to use.
Really, the best thing that you can do is, “Here’s what I’m working on. Here’s what my best thinking has produced. Here’s how far I’ve gotten. This is the part that I’m less than confident about.”
One of the most counterintuitive, but I hear the most high value, parts of my method is, shine a light on the ugly part. When you’re showing your work to people to get their input.
What most of us do is like what our kids do when they bring us a picture. “Do you like it?” Which is great when it’s your kid. But if you bring me something, I mean, Peter, you and I have a good friendship. If you bring me something. And you want to know what I think you don’t care if I like it. You want to hear what you’re missing.
So what I encourage folks to do is to ask, “Here’s my best thinking, shine a light on the ugly part. This is what I’m concerned about, and what I’m afraid is going to happen. Help me make sure my butt’s not hanging out in this way. What am I missing?” And you’ll find, as you ask that of the people on your team, and your peers, you will start to find who are the folks who are really going to tell you what you’re missing in a way that helps you move it forward, but you’re right.
You absolutely have to be willing to hear the answer. To me, most of the core of developing comfort with the answer has been in mindset. I’ve shown someone my work and it’s not landing. Why does that feel so crappy? Most of the answer there is because I was taught to believe that if I’m not brilliant and talented, I’m nothing. So therefore if my work is not brilliant and talented at the get-go, how does that make me a value?
Peter: The curse of the honors student.
Billie: That’s exactly right. That’s why I love Mindset so much because it gives us the best possible framework for why these beliefs have served us.
To be honest. I think one of the greatest illnesses in our industry is that while we all talk about fail fast, fail fast, fail this, fail the other. We collectively have no tolerance for failure. We collectively have very little tolerance for showing our mess.
I would bet you money, go ahead into 10 design critiques across most companies in this industry. You’re not going to see sketches. You’re not going to see wireframes. You’re not going to see user journeys. You’re going to see pretty shiny high-fidelity things that people have gone off and spent a whole bunch of time making look the way they think you want it to look. And that’s a huge problem because all the opportunity for one plus one plus one is more than three comes from showing our mess and shining a light on to the part of the problem that requires the most brain power. So if I could wave my magic wand and give all the designers in our industry something, it would be understanding the value that you get from being vulnerable and being able to do the work that we really need to do in those vulnerable spaces to improve.
But it means that we all have to be willing to improve and willing to start from a place of, It’s okay if our first cut doesn’t have all the answers because we need to figure out what the right questions are.
Peter: You were talking about vulnerability, which I don’t dispute.
Billie: Well, good, ‘cause we’d have to throw down.
Peter: Well, there is a counterfactual.
Billie: Okay. Gimme, I double dog dare you. Try and talk me out of vulnerability.
Peter: Well, well, the counterfactual, I’m not trying to talk you out of it, but the counterfactual is the number of seemingly successful leaders who exhibit sociopathy or narcissism. And I’m wondering, how do I make sense of that. Of this demonstration of an almost lack of interest in others or an actual lack of interest in others, and yet an evident ability to engender success. I’ve worked at companies, I’ve worked at…
Billie: I’m going to interrupt you, my dear. I think the variable there is your definition of success.
Peter: Making lots of money.
Billie: That’s the whole point. I think if it’s making lots of money for you, that’s your goal and you’re a sociopath heck yeah…
Peter: Well. I would say growing a business, I’ve worked for sociopathic slash narcissistic leaders, who’ve been the CEOs of businesses, of some success. There’s clearly, I….
Billie: How are those companies doing on innovation or retention or inclusion?
Peter: I don’t know, but I mean, I’m not one to, apply the DSM out of school, but you can look at wildly successful social media companies and the man-children who run them. And there’s a disconnect between that and what you’re talking about. 2.5 billion users is a measure of success.
Billie: A current measure of success for some people. If you’re talking about longevity, if you’re talking about loyalty…
Peter: I’m not trying to be a devil’s advocate, ‘cause I actually don’t like devil’s advocacy, but there is a model of leadership that is anti-vulnerable.
It seems that can succeed in certain contexts, and I want to unpack that. I don’t want to believe it.
Billie: One could also say, and for the Jewish lady to say this during the Days of Awe, I’m going to throw down and I’m going to throw down hard. One could say for his business initiatives, Hitler was pretty fucking successful.
The amount of power that was required to take that shit down. It was pretty intense. The level of execution that was possible with a machine like that. I know bad, bad metaphor. When you were talking before, it had me thinking about Hannah Arendt and the origins of totalitarianism.
There’s a thing about the division of labor in a totalitarian system that looks a lot like the division of labor in a company that has a sociopathic narcissistic leader. I think if you look at the Banality of Evil, you read Eichmann in Jerusalem, and looking systemically at what makes large-scale atrocity possible. There’s a level of a division of labor and specialization that can be incredibly effective at a large scale level.
Peter: Hmm. You basically compartmentalize the organization like you would compartmentalize emotions, Like in order to deal with this thing.
Billie: That’s absolutely right. So there’s no one person that is making the decision to press the red button. Each person is responsible for a little bit of the decision that collectively adds up to atrocity. And frankly, I do think that what we see in a lot of massive multinational corporations smells a little bit too much like that for my own comfort.
And I do see it showing up in our tech companies. You know, we’re talking about massive scale of global atrocity, but even if you bring it back down to something more tangible on the daily, I think there’s a commodification of individual skill and then leaving big decisions up to the big brains, that can work pretty effectively to generate a lot of money, a lot of product, a lot of productivity. And I think it’s problematic because nobody is responsible for the ethics of what that totality puts out. Other than the people at the top, who keep their hands clean.
If my hands are dirty as a leader, then I have skin in the game. I’m in it. I understand what the decisions mean. I’m sharing both the responsibility as well as the spoils. To me, if I’m designing a company that I still want to have exist in 50 years, if I’m designing for 150 years, if I’m designing for sustainability, if I’m designing for a different future, I don’t want everybody to have their hands clean, I want everybody to have their hands a little bit dirty.
The way this shows up in design and in technology is designers or developers who don’t have their user flows, who don’t have their user journeys, who don’t understand why they’re just delivering the screens. They’re just delivering the ones and zeros. They can’t tell you how that piece fits into the other pieces, that holds them back in their craft. And it holds them back strategically, but that’s also what enables them to participate in things that don’t really feel right. And that’s what enables a company to bring in diverse people, but not really include them and have it never really feel right.
I think we overvalue the visionary. I think we overvalue the person who can do everything on their own, and then we become dependent on that person. The company that I want to design, the future that I want to design for our industry, world, everybody’s contributing and everybody is sharing the accountability. I think it’s a different definition of success and a different measure that’s going to get us to different decisions about what we value and different decisions in what we spend our time on.
Music break 2
Last one case in point here. Why the hell is it so damn hard, after 25, 30 years of doing this work, and everybody knows your first cut of what you think the problem is and why it matters, everybody knows, everybody knows that that’s not right. Everybody knows you’ve got to do some real discovery, and really understand your customers or end-users perspective before you put in money and effort into building your product. Everybody knows that.
I have a graph you made, that I use to teach, it’s still the best possible visualization. Why you should figure out your options while it’s cheap to do that rather than expensive. But 30 years later, we’re still having the same effing conversation. And every design team in the world is still going, “They’re not giving us any time for discovery. They just tell us, make the thing and we’ll figure it out later. And we never come back to it.” Nine out of 10 teams out there are saying that. So they know they’re supposed to iterate. They’ve got their pictures of your iterative process and your one, two, three, four, five, and your arrows all day. Nine out of 10 of them don’t do it. Why? Because the definition of success and the, way we assess business value, hasn’t caught up to the way we need to be defining it for the future.
I’m not opinionated about that. Guys, this is really fantastic.
Jesse: I think…
Peter: We’re just here to help you testify.
Jesse: …when it comes to evaluating leaders and the impact of their choices and evaluating them against some success criteria, it’s often a question of your scope of reference, because we often see leaders who make choices that are right for their team, but wrong for the product; right for the product, but wrong for the organization; or right for the organization, but wrong for the users.
Or maybe even right for the users, but still wrong for society. And so as you keep sort of scoping out, you start to see these wider and wider ripples of impact of the choices that the leader makes. And so I think your point is a good one, that where that sociopathy tends to take root is often in the organizations that are most myopic about the wider impacts of the choices that their leaders make.
Billie: Yeah, I would agree with that. I would definitely agree with that.
Peter: As you were talking about the totalitarianism and the kind of atomization of activity within an organization, I realized there’s a devil’s bargain as we think about teams and team building, which is we can create highly actualized teams, and encourage them to behave in all the best ways. But that team is its own little unit and there’s dozens, if not hundreds, of them in some of these organizations and the risk is a hundred highly actualized successful teams, whose efforts when all added up lead to these societally problematic outcomes. Because we’ve broken up what each team is doing, they can feel super empowered, super positive about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, but there’s still something happening behind the curtain, where all of that effort that’s embraced with genuine idealism still can be shaped and manipulated. Ideally, it’s manipulated towards positive goals, but it’s most often manipulated towards this gestalt where the whole is so different from the sum of the parts that you don’t know, it becomes the Skynet or the monster that just gets unleashed, that even the creators, even the most senior folks, don’t realize what they’ve done, and in the worst of outcomes it can actually be steered or directed towards what we would consider nefarious ends.
How do we help folks understand that, to what Jesse was saying, those concentric circles out and out and out. Their role, however small, however seemingly focused, it’s tying into something ever larger. And, how do we provide lenses or views that allow people to get that kind of powers of 10, like in the Charles and Ray Eames movie, so that you’re always looking at kind of multiple levels.
Billie: Yeah. I always call that a funnel of abstraction, another concept that came from political science. If you’ve got the spirit of the law at the top, the letter of the law at the bottom, like the specific statute at the bottom, and the why and what social good it’s supposed to affect at the top, design problems or business problems work the same way, where you’ve got business strategy or the vision up at the top and all the way at the bottom is every specific detail decision that you would need to make.
Most of us are going to have a part of that funnel of abstraction, where we’re most comfortable. We like looking at the system and understanding the why and the big vision. And if we only lived up there, we’d never get anything done. So the way we get things done is we come all the way down. What does that vision mean for what I’m going to do today?
So when I’m teaching, particularly your junior to mids, they will, you know, they’ll start up here. Sure. And then they get down here and then it’s, “Oh, well, what’s your goal on this screen? When you click this, what happens if you don’t go all the way back up?” That’s how you ended up down the rabbit hole.
I think it’s easier to teach your junior to mids, to come up than it is to teach your leaders to effectively come all the way down and back up again, to have people at all levels, interacting in the middle and helping each other specialize, but also stay informed the real contextual details.
So this relates to what you were talking about before, in terms of leaders staying close to the creative work, so that the most effective leaders at a company like that are the ones when were able to, for example, come into a critique session, see the work that an individual designer has done, and if they’re too focused, be, like, “Alright, bring me up a level of abstraction.” It helped me understand what part of the problem have you broken out, and what are the decisions you’ve made, and which are the decisions that you need input on.
The most effective leaders, even if they’re not the ones who are making those detail-level decisions, when they see what their teams have done, can help connect the dots to that big vision and help assess, “Do we make the right call? Do we make the best call or not? How would we be able to tell?” So the idea of being able to move up and down those levels of abstraction, and share context, is how you end up counteracting that tendency for everybody to be a little bit too far away.
There were a few conversations that I think should be happening in every room where there is. Creative work being done, whether they’re physical or virtual rooms, certainly any kind of software design and development. This is another one of those things.
It seems like it’s not brain surgery. Why is it that hard? But for some reason we still haven’t figured it out. Here’s what it looks like. Let’s just talk about the tradeoffs more.
Why are we not talking about tradeoffs? Here’s what the end users need. Here’s what the technology can support now and what it would take to get it to doing another thing. Here’s what the business needs. There’s always going to be some tradeoff. Not that, What’s it going to cost us? What are the trade offs? In any business discussion, in any set of questions about what we should do and why, you’ve got the business, the customers are end users, and you’ve got the technology, and there’s always going to be a tradeoff between the three of them. And you want somebody who can effectively speak for each one, and you want to make a choice, and you want to figure out at what point will we assess, “Have we made the right choice? And when can we change our minds?”
And I see too many leaders who assumed that that’s their domain and their domain only, and they’re doing their teams a disservice because at every level you need to be having those conversations. Even the junior designer, junior PM, and junior developer who are working on fulfilling the requirements for screen X, Y, or Z. Should it go in this order or this order? I don’t know. Usually what they end up doing is, Which one do you like better? Which one have you already done? Because they don’t have the information they needed in order to say, well, okay, let’s go up a couple levels of abstraction. What does the business need?
What’s at stake? If we choose X over Y at every level, we need to empower our people to discuss risks and tradeoffs and benefits, and to be comfortable with their decision making.
I don’t see enough decision-making at the junior to mid-level. So then I see people who are new leaders suddenly have no idea how to make decisions. And they’re guessing. You shouldn’t have to guess. People are covering for too much insecurity. When, if we got comfortable at every level, let’s talk about the trade offs. Let’s put our cards on the table. If we choose X, what are we not choosing?
Jesse: This just highlights that as many things as have changed since you first joined Ask back in the late nineties with no leadership experience of any kind, and having it just put in your lap and being asked to sort it out, I think that that is still the case all these years later. That there are many, many design leaders who have not had the opportunity to really exercise the muscles they’re actually going to use as leaders before the role was given to them.
Billie: I think you’re absolutely right. This also gets into why you hear so many leaders waxing philosophical about the days that they got to do the creative work, because they become people managers where they just have to give performance reviews. If we worked decision-making and peer leadership and modeling more into our junior to mid-levels, We wouldn’t have that much of a crisis of what leaders are supposed to do.
Peter: Yeah, that’s interesting because we explicitly don’t give them authority, And I don’t think I thought about what is the progression of decision making ability that you want to encourage within people as they develop. I actually am working with a client and we have this fairly bright line between—and I’m responsible for it, so I might be guilty here—we’ve created this fairly bright line between a senior designer and a lead designer. And that bright line is one of leadership, is that ability to direct others, and there’s recognition that the senior designer is a very strong craftsperson, but doesn’t lead others.
And then the leader has that ability to see beyond themselves, and affect the work of other people. Which feels like a quantum distinction, but what I think you’re saying is that it shouldn’t be. It’s almost not fair to say, “One day, you don’t get to make decisions. And then the next day you’re responsible,” without having provided some path to that.
Billie: Absolutely. If you think about it, even the most junior designer is making decisions. You’ve got a design system and you’ve got a new design problem. Where do you apply an existing pattern and where do you choose to make something new? That’s a basic decision that even a junior has to figure out.
Are we giving them the tools that they need in order to make the decisions that are within their remit? And are we giving them effective ways to you assess what decisions did you make? Are we giving them opportunities in critique to say, “All right. Here’s as far as I’ve gotten with my best thinking, here are the decisions that I’ve made. Does anybody have issues with these things? Am I missing something?” Training people to present the right thing and to ask the right questions. That’s why we have to model it ourselves.
What I’m getting at is the definition of success. So if I want my juniors to still be working here in five years and to be leaders and to have knowledge that they’re able to disseminate, that is more valuable than somebody I would hire in off the street. How am I growing them? What am I giving them to indicate that their investment in me is as valuable as my investment in them?
Another thing that I’ve,got for you. Just my back pocket, a practice that I have found helpful, I was thinking about the thing that you said about finding a trusted dissenter. A practice that I’ve started with some of the people I’ve developed a closest peer relationship with, the people I’m working with most often, is a cadence of “more of, less of,” So, a lightweight way to offer feedback to each other, like once a month, once a week, or whatever.
“Hey, we’re working on this thing together. Can you think of anything that I could do more of, or less of in this next round of whatever to help our working relationship.”
It’s lightweight enough that if you get into a practice of it, it’s kind of like Pilates. You’ll develop that comfort with discomfort muscle a little bit.
Peter: I’ll take your word on anything having to do with Pilates.
Jesse: Pilates is great Peter, you should try it sometime
Peter: Sure.
Jesse: And that wraps up another episode of finding our way. Thank you to Billie Mandel for joining us, you can find Billie on the internet at http://billiemandel.com.
You can find me and Peter on the internet too. You can find us on LinkedIn.
You can find us on Twitter. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. This podcast has a website, https://findingourway.design/. There you’ll find every episode, every transcript, ways to contact us. Please reach out, send us your feedback. We live and die by it. We’ll see you soon.
Peter: Vulnerability and trusted dissenters…
Jesse: Totalitarianism…
Billie: Only you can get me talking about totalitarianism on a leadership podcast. I fucking love you people
Peter: You know, you gotta, you gotta get past the surface layers of that onion. You gotta keep peeling it to get at the, at the, at the real stuff.
18: How Agile and Scrum ruined product management, and other things (ft. Melissa Perri)
Oct 08, 2020
Transcript
Melissa: So, how do you learn, how do you instill a product culture when even your leadership doesn’t know what that means?
Intro
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Together: And we’re Finding Our Way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, despite some audio difficulties, product management consultant and educator Melissa Perri joins us to talk about the view of design from the product management side of the table, the true value that product managers bring to the process, and how designers can collaborate more effectively with their peers in product management.
Peter: We’ve heard from many people and we’ve had our own experiences of challenges between product and UX. I’m curious what you’ve seen in relationships where product and UX, or product and design, are working well together. What is the agreement there? How do they divide up the work, divide up decision making is often a big issue. Who has the call to make certain decisions? What actually works for a healthy relationship between people in those roles?
Melissa: You have to be partners. I’ve seen lot of bad archetypes and it comes down to being partners and seeing yourself as equals, the two halves of it. And the product managers, I try to explain, you are going to be working with designers super closely.
There are certain activities we are going to divide and conquer. Either one of you could do it, but you have to come back and talk about it together. And then there’s certain other things like wireframing, where you should just let your designer do it ‘cause that’s their job, because you need to be going to do the roadmapping and yeah, and making sure that it’s technically feasible to do things, and making sure that we have the launch plan with marketing in place, and making sure that you’re presenting up to the executives, and getting buy-in for your stuff and then scoping it into the business case and figuring out the goals.
And, the designer could be part of that too, but you have a lot of work over here, and I see that where, where product and UX start to get tense, is because the product manager is trying to do all the design work and all the wireframing and the journey mapping and everything like that. And the designer is, “That’s literally my role.” And it’s because the product manager doesn’t understand that their role is actually all this other stuff that I just listed, not necessarily just the wireframes. Like the basics of wire frames. Yeah. Important.
Just so you understand how users flow. It doesn’t mean that you should necessarily be the one doing that all the time.
So I think there’s this discrepancy between, what should I be doing? versus what should I know how to do or be aware of? A good working relationship I’ve seen on a team level is when a product manager and a UX designer are working really closely through discovery. We plan our research together. We plan our personas together. We are developing these things as partners, right? Yeah. And then as we start to move into the solutioning phase, the designer is going to lead around really understanding what that’s going to manifest as screens or experiences, where the product manager, giving input from a business perspective to say, these are how we have to think about these solutions to meet our objectives, to make sure that we could still function as a business.
But you’re also having that healthy tension where you’re like, let’s just make sure that we’re doing right by the user as well. So what can we do to solve users’ needs, that will move business goals, is always how I looked at it.
Jesse: I feel like I have had a lot of experiences with product managers who did not themselves have a clear idea of the value that they brought to the process. And, as a result, I find that I have a hard time articulating the value that product management brings to the process of creating products.
Technology’s there to build the thing and design is there to shape the thing and research is there to understand the people who are going to use the thing. And when I get to PM, I start to have a lot of question marks about exactly why that person is at the table.
Melissa: So as technology gets more and more complex, you’ve got a lot more parts of the company that you have to bring together to launch a successful product out there into the market. It’s not just about designing a great solution. How do I make sure that solution gets launched?
Well, it targets the right people. It gets marketed. Well, all that information gets carried over to how do I make sure it’s priced well, how do I make sure that it’s still sustainable over time? And then how do I prioritize the order of those things, to account for things like that. The cost of delays, scoping, moving into new markets, unlocking the potential of the revenue.
There’s all these different things that you could possibly do, but now you have to evaluate it from a perspective of, there’s money out there. How much money is there out there? Do we have the capacity to actually take that money?
Because we understand the needs of that market, we can do it as a team, and we have a good plan on how we’re going to go out and discover that, and test it, and actually get into it. So, it becomes a very business-focused role at the top. And sometimes design plays a critical role in manifesting those things.
But that strategy of, Where do you want to go? And what does it actually take to build to get there? That’s where I see product really coming into play. And then the order, in the focus of how to do it.
When I come into companies to help with a product transformation or something, the biggest issue that I see is nobody’s focused. Everybody’s trying to solve 15,000 problems at once. I always do this thing when I come in. I talk to all the teams and I’m like, What are you working on? I start to map it out. I’m like, okay, let me write down everybody’s highest priority.
And I’m like, Why are you working on it? And then I go up to the next level and I go up to the next level and go all the way to the top. And then you could see at the top will say, “This is the most important thing we can do.” And I’m like, “Cool, 10% of your people are working on that. Why? Right. Like why 10%?” Because all these things come up and nobody’s really forming that strategy of how do we tackle this market, enter this market, or just grow in general. In a disciplined way, placed with an intent. And I think what product does is bring intent into the process at every level, to keep everybody focused around what are the most important things, and product at the top looks very different than products on the team level.
And I don’t think you need, I tell companies, too, I don’t think they need 7,000 product managers. I think a lot of people honestly have too many product managers in their companies and they need more designers. I would say that in a heartbeat.
Peter: I’m laughing ‘cause we talked about this a couple of episodes ago and, I see this again and again: companies having too many product managers and they keep hiring more. And my sense is, product managers are a promise of possible new value.
If you have a product manager, they can now help you create new value. And so if we have more product managers, there’s more opportunity for new value. I don’t know if that’s why, but I can’t understand this desire to just keep hiring product.
Melissa: It’s not that. It’s agile, it’s scrum, that did it. Those companies are the ones that call me. They’re like, well, we have 2000 product managers and none of them have ever done product management before, so we need you to come train them. So, that’s, like, my email inbox literally every day.
And I’m like, so why do you have 2000 product managers? First of all, what are you building that warrants having 2000 product managers? Because you are probably spinning up stuff in solutions that don’t, actually, aren’t a product. So they were a project and he put somebody on it like a project manager. You have to spin it up. And now they moved on to the next thing. So you’ve got like a hundred products just sitting there that nobody uses, or like two people use each one of them. And this happens, especially in the enterprise, all over the place. But what happened is, when scrum came out and everybody started adopting scrum, they all had teams.
And scrum basically said, we need at least one product owner on every scrum team. So they said, okay, well we’ve got 10,000 developers, so, okay. Let’s divide that by five and seven. And that means we have to have that many product owners. But that doesn’t mean that you need somebody there just running every single user story you possibly think of. And most of the time they make those user stories up because that’s how they teach them in scrum.
This product owner role, the way they teach it, too, is very not like the way that I teach people how to do product management. ‘Cause you become, like, a backlog jockey where you’re just, like, writing stuff and handing it out to teams and I’m like, that’s useless, that’s not a product manager to me. It has no value whatsoever in it.
How do we really pull a strategy together? Where we look at it from a business perspective, a customer perspective, and a technology perspective, make sure it all works and then break it down so that we prioritize it and then enable the team to go after it. And that’s where I think the value is on having a product where I’ve seen them bring value to the team.
I think if you have a great product manager on your team, they’re critically thinking about every single aspect, they’re crazy systems thinkers. And if you are building, especially, a software product and a software company, product touches everything.
It affects the way that you make money in your financials. It affects the way that you would market it. It affects the pricing and packaging, it affects the technology, it affects the design. It’s that piece that brings it all together. And a lot of people in the other roles, or in functional silos where they’re not thinking about it holistically, Is this a thing that we can usher out, that’s going to be successful in every aspect, not just successful the way it solves user needs, but also the way it makes us money. Or the way that it’s technologically sound, where we can build on top of it for the future. And that’s where I see product managers thrive is when they do that job, not necessarily when they’re managing a backlog.
Music break
Jesse: I notice a parallel here between flavors of designers, where you have some designers who are going to be very deep in the concept development, the exploratory strategic kind of design work. And then you have other designers who are going to be very tactical and they’re going to be about crafting perfect artifacts and that kind of thing.
And it sounds like there’s a similar continuum, or tension, in product management between this, it sounds like, a product strategy kind of a function versus, as you described it, the backlog jockey, which is, frankly, the flavor of product manager that I have more often been exposed to, which is really a requirements wrangler. and not someone who really brings a point of view.
And I think that’s the thing that I’m trying to get at, is what is the perspective or the point of view that product management brings to that collaborative process. You talk about holism, and it’s great to have one person who is aware of all the different facets of a problem. How does the product manager bring that sense of holism to the entire team?
Melissa: A lot of it’s in the communication. It’s also managing their expectations of the executives. Where I see a lot of people struggle is talking them through the choices that they have to make as well from a prioritization perspective at the top.
They’re not aware of the trade-offs, and a good product manager presents that from a holistic perspective of, there’s trade-offs in pricing/packaging, there’s trade-offs in the way we market this, and trade offs in the way we design it, so they’re really taking that and speaking that language of the executives, or they’re bringing that perspective back to the teams to help them understand what needs to be done with the solution.
I see that flavor of design you’re talking about, that’s very strategic. Like, I’ve met them, I’ve worked with them, and they’ve been some of the best designers I’ve ever worked with my life. And I think those people are usually more on the strategy side things, working with the product managers.
And that’s where that relationship really comes out to play. I think when you get into the solution side of it, that’s where I still think you need some oversight around the solution and figuring out how it manifests, or how it could affect other pieces. But, from the perspective of what do our products really look like, and how does it function as a system, into like the user’s interactions and stuff like that, I think that’s pretty much the designer’s job. That’s what they’re there for.
And I encourage my product managers to just get out of some of that stuff and let the designer lead. They should be working with the developers. And you just want to make sure that it’s not going to adversely affect the business needs, or the requirements of other teams, or the dependencies that are around other parts of the organization.
The purpose of the product manager, to me, is to help scope out and prioritize what we’re working on, with intent.
And that’s the piece, the intent behind why we do things, because you could build 50,000 things if you wanted to, but what’s the right thing?
So discovering what’s the right thing to build is not necessarily a one-person job. I think it’s involving the team in it. And I think the product manager’s purpose is to be the person who can help steer that, and make sure that we’re all tracking towards it and helping represent that right thing back to the board and executives.
So, I think the view that I see product managers bring in there is, How do we unlock business value by solving customer value? And that’s the bridge that I see them bring. Whereas designers I think can definitely be in tune with the business and I’ve seen a lot of them do that. I think they get very focused into the customer value piece and I don’t believe there is any business value without customer value, but it’s what are the layers and the levers that we can pull as a business to help them lock that customer value and make it profitable for us.
The pushback I see from the product side against designers is they’re, like, well, they’re only focused on the customer value, but you know, we can’t run a business, we would have no jobs here, if we only looked at doing what’s best for the customer.
You could have the best customer value in the world, but if you’re not pricing it or packaging it correctly, it could completely kill your company.
How do we take that customer value and package it into a solution that’s also desirable for our market and feasible and viable, bringing those things back together there.
Peter: I appreciate your use of the word intent as what the product manager brings, as it connects to a definition of design, I think, that comes from Jared Spool and we used it in our book, Org Design for Design Orgs, which is that design is the rendering of intent.
In the past I had thought lot of designers being responsible for the intent as well, but I kind of like this idea that someone’s responsible for the intent, and then design is, How do we take that intent and make it manifest in some way? And you’re locating the responsibility for intent with product management.
As you were defining your ideal product management state, it reminded me of what I would consider almost more old school product. Like we’ve almost lost our way. It had been well understood 10, 15, 20 years ago, and then it’s gotten corrupted over time into these backlog jockeys and that kind of thing.
The role that you’re talking about of product manager is fairly senior. It wouldn’t make sense to have someone with that pricing and packaging, and executive presence and vision, et cetera, et cetera, on a team of eight people, you know, paired with a designer and working with five engineers. That group can make a feature. They can’t really build a product.
And so what is the relationship between the product manager, that role as you’ve defined it, and the teams doing the work? Is there one product manager working with four teams, five teams, eight teams? Are there still product people on those teams, product owners, or do we not even need that? Is it more you just call them scrum masters, in terms of what you need for a JIRA jockey? You don’t pretend there’s a product person at that level.
Melissa: If you had asked me this maybe five years ago, my answer would have been, well, there needs to be a product manager on every team. Like, would have wholeheartedly said that. I think the issue is that there does need to be a product manager on many teams right now.
And the reason is just the maturity of the way that we work together. I think if you have a mature team with software developers and designers who, given good direction and intent by a product manager, can then look at things and work together to scope out how work gets done and take the lead on it… don’t think you need a product manager.
What I think it really comes down to is the maturity of the team and the ability for the product manager to build context with the team and capacity for the team to understand that context and feel comfortable with it enough to make their own decisions.
One of the top things that product owners on the team level have told me is that, “I don’t have time to work on the strategy because all I do every day is answer questions from the developers.” And if you are answering questions from the developers that often, it means that you failed at your job to build context about what you’re building with them, so now they have nothing to really go off of. So of course, they’re going to come back to somebody and be like, “What am I supposed to work on today?” Because you haven’t given them enough of a vision.
And that’s why I think companies gravitate towards having one product manager on every team, because now the team’s like, “What do I need to work on?” And the product managers were responsible for that, in the scrum terms, and then they just start putting lists on backlogs that are not scoped. There’s no boundaries around it.
Jesse: Yeah. I think that context-setting is really important because, to your point, a checklist is not a vision and, it can be easy, for I think the product manager especially, to get into this cycle of just feeling like your role is to be the one to keep answering those little detailed questions.
But I notice that that context, I have found often, has been provided by design because design has described the various features in context with one another, in a holistic experience and experience vision that they’ve crafted and are delivering.
And I think that I find that context a little bit harder to come by for myself when it is formulated less from an experiential point of view and more from a functional point of view, and in a lot of ways that mindset hasn’t really left us, in terms of the way that a lot of folks do their jobs.
I wonder about where the experiential and the functional come together and how you see the role of a product leader versus the role of a design leader in the articulation of that context to help drive those day-to-day decisions.
Melissa: Yeah, I agree.
I always approach it from an experience perspective. Like that’s just how I figure things out, inward to outward, first taking the point of the user. I’ve seen other people in product approach things from more of a financial perspective to see how the business model works. And I’ve seen people do it from a functional perspective of what are all the requirements in this market that’s needed, or from a market perspective. So part of this, I’m saying, is biased by the way that I think, compared to the way the other product managers are thinking.
But one of the pieces I see in that is, there is a functional requirement perspective from a product brain that you would bring in, where I’m going, “Okay, this market is characterized by these types of people and this is what the needs are and here’s our product over here, and here’s the gaps of the functionality that’s needed to solve those types of needs.”
One of the things that we would do is, having one of our user researchers, super senior designer, very much in the discovery phase that you’re talking about, when companies were exploring their product strategy and figuring out where to go, should we do what she called deep insights with them, where she would go out and we’d break down your hypothesis together. And we provide the context and the direction around it, and she would go deep with the customers and come back with a synthesis of, here’s where the gaps really lie. And this is what’s not holding up.
So, we’d partner on these two things, then, to go, “Okay, you’re discovering all these gaps. I’m thinking about the financial implications of going after one thing versus another thing, and how we prioritize those gaps.” And then once we get to a good point, we start to synthesize that and then deploy it to the team so that they can surface up what are the right solutions to actually solve those problems that we’ve now prioritized at the top.
Jesse: One thing that was always a part of our practices at Adaptive Path, and has been a part of how a lot of folks have done this work, has been to use prototyping in some form as a way of validating concepts before you get to a fully-baked product strategy. Before you get to that level, where you’re ready to hand something off to a team.
I’m curious about whether that’s ever been a part of your process. And if so, how that has played out in that dynamic, how a vision gets created and held, in that partnership between product leadership and design leadership.
Melissa: Yeah, a hundred percent. For instance, one team, we’d have a director of product. I think we had three product managers underneath there. And they reported up to a VP of Product in a big corporation with many product lines.
The director of product and the VP of product we’re brainstorming, like, what can we do for our product line to introduce a new upsell or feature set? What’s the problem that we haven’t solved there’s actually a lot of money in? And the product director goes out, and research does a lot of market research first to understand if some of these potential ideas actually hold any water.
Okay, we’ve got some data saying they do. All right. Let’s bring in the design director. Both of these are now pairing together, and we were starting to say, what’s our customer research hypothesis? Are we going to go out there and talk to your existing customers or new customers to figure out if this hypothesis that we found in the market actually holds water?
Go out and do our user research, right. Come back and say, there’s something here. Cool. Now we’ve got the beginning of business case, saying that if we solve this problem, there’s money here. There’s something that we can actually upsell.
Now, how do we figure out what the solution is? To go say, I need a little bit of money to test this, from the executives.
Now we gotta figure out how to solve it. And this is where the design director might grab some designers and say, “Okay, let’s prototype, let’s start iterating around solutions and testing them out there with customers. And the product director also got four other teams they’re working with overseeing, but they’re spending half their time making sure this business case is really coming to fruition, doing some more research, really helping this side, but they’re also enabling the team on the other side.
Peter: You’ve explained the process here for product development. You’ve talked earlier about matters of scrum and agile. And I’m wondering if you ascribe to any common product development process, two week cycles, three week cycles, this, that, the other thing, ‘cause what you described, I don’t know if
I would say it’s waterfall, but you want to figure out what you’re doing before you do the next thing. And one of the challenges, I think, some UX types like myself have, is my desire to think before acting.
Melissa: I feel like anytime somebody is like, “Oh, I need a week to think,” people go, “Oh this is waterfall.” And that’s just bullshit, honestly. I hate that concept because here’s what I see when people take scrum religiously.
When I was leading a transformation at this company, we had 5,000 software developers and 350 product managers I was training who’ve never done it before. And they had adopted this really strict form of scrum. And they were like, well, we have three-times-a-year releases, and we do two-week sprints. And at the beginning, after the first release, we get a sprint zero, which is two weeks to figure out what we’re going to do for the next three months.
I was like, “How can you shove all that into two weeks?” Like, you can’t do that. And they’re like, “Oh, this is the only time that we can’t be delivering.” And I was like, “That’s dumb.” It should just be an ebb and flow where we’ve got this time; we don’t know what we should be doing.
We have higher levels of uncertainty. Okay. Let’s go make that a little bit more certain. Now let’s go test, let’s iterate on it. And then when we feel high levels of uncertainty, now we can break that down into an iterative cycle to release it. And I think agile works really well if you have some level of certainty around the solution as the right vision or direction to go after.
I think it’s all about shortening the cycles of how long these take, the mount of time that you should spend in the research phase should be proportional to the risk of what you’re actually building. So if you’re building an entire new business line, like, so you were doing the Apple iPhone, you think Steve jobs gave people two weeks to go, “You figure that out.” Like, no. Right.
Peter: It’s more like 10 years.
Melissa: Right. So it’s not that they’re spending 10 years in a, “Ooh, let me just do some market research” mode and like check the numbers out there. They’re prototyping, they’re putting it out there and they’re making sure that it’s awesome before they go spend all their money launching it and doing all these big marketing campaigns.
And I think that’s what people don’t understand. There’s things that companies do internally that you will never know about. They want you to think that it’s magic because that’s their selling point, just observing something from the outside and being like, they just do big bang releases, that’s not how that happens.
Same thing for agile. You just watched people do scrum. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re successful.
Going back to, you were saying about, Where did product management go wrong? It came out of all these companies doing a big bang, agile transformation. And they took all these subject matter experts or project managers, and they said to them, “You’re now a product owner.” And they were like, “Oh, we don’t know what that means.”
And, starting about six or seven years ago, that’s where a lot of my consulting came from. And when people now can look and say, “Oh, there’s no good product managers out there,” they’re looking at some of those places.
Never been trained. They have no product leaders to learn from. I’ve been in organizations with 2000 product managers and nobody, including senior leadership, has ever done that role before. So, how do you learn, how do you instill a product culture when even your leadership doesn’t know what that means?
And that’s where we’re getting companies, I think, misunderstanding what product management is. There is no value in a backlog jockey. I think there’s value in bringing a partner to the team to help determine what the intent is, like we were saying, it’s just that, I think companies adopted these practices, thinking that it was a holistic, and some of these agile consultancies, honestly, sell it like the panacea of the world.
They’re like, “Oh, just adopt scrum. That’s going to make everything great.” And you’re like, “No, that’s just one piece of it.” Like there’s so many other things that it takes to build great software. And you’re just looking at one piece of it and thinking it applies to everything. And that’s where I think we get into trouble with all this.
Peter: You had a quote in your book that I love, which is, “I’ve trained dozens of teams who are using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and I have never seen it work well.”
Music break
Peter: Something your question leads to, was a question that we got a little while ago where, there’s this one design leader in particular, who’s like, “I’m working with product owners who don’t know their job. They’re just essentially order takers for someone else. And so now I, as the design leader, have to figure out why we have these requirements, ‘cause I want to build something that people will use.” And this design leader found herself having to fight this internal set of expectations in order to do what she thought was the right job.
So I’m wondering, based on your experience, what have you seen that allows the conversation to change? How have you gotten companies to let go of this dogmatic view of scrum or agile in the way that you’ve been describing and embrace other approaches? In part for those who might be listening to this podcast, like things that they could try within their organizations to push back when they see that things are evidently not working out. But no one knows what else to do.
Melissa: Especially if you’re on a team, a lot of people just feel powerless. They’re like, “I’ve got no pull here. I’ve got no sway. I’ve got no authority to do anything.” I say the best thing you could do is go ask people what they expect to happen from a metric standpoint when you released that, and then measure if it really did, because now you just started a conversation about it.
Usually all it takes is that first question. What do we expect to happen when this launches? And then what timeframe like, do we expect 10,000 users to signup, do we expect to increase retention by 40%? And is that a six month thing or a two month thing? When you start having those conversations, leadership usually goes, “Oh, I never thought about that.” And then people will start asking those questions, which is great. So I think if anybody’s not managing towards those outcomes, just starting to ask, like, okay. Cool. That sounds great. No pushback. See everybody get angry. I used to be angry like this too. I just get mad at people telling me what to do. Yeah. I’d be like, I’m not going to do it. Like, you don’t even know what you’re doing. Right. And that’s not the right approach, although I’ve tried it, so I can vouch that it’s not the right approach. But your approach is more like, okay, cool, I’m on board. What is this going to do? What do you think will happen? What are your expectations? It’s just gets the conversation going that you can start roll down into those gaps and it makes people more aware of what they’re doing has a lack of intent.
It was funny. I was just talking to another professor yesterday about reframing things. ‘Cause he was teaching it from a sales perspective and he’s like, “Have you ever had to go into a sales meeting where somebody’s asking for something, and it’s not really what they need, and how do you reframe it?”
And I was like, “That’s literally my daily life.” Um, cause everybody comes to me and they’re like, we want to do a product transformation and we want to train all of our product managers and I’m like, “Great. So what have you done to enable that what they’re going to learn is sticking.”
They’re like, “Oh, what do you mean?” And I’m like, “Okay, well, what kind of product strategy do you have going on? Great. Like what’s the most important things that you could be building?” “Oh, we don’t know.” I’m like, “Okay. So I’m going to teach them that they have to look at that first to figure out how they should be scoping down their work and what they could do in line for the goals, so without that, they’re probably gonna come to you. Like I could train them, but they’re going to come to you and ask for that. So are you prepared to answer those calls?” “Oh no.” “No worries. Okay. So let’s work on that first.”
Peter: At some point, you have to wonder how these companies are in business.
Melissa: Well, it’s a lot of them found really interesting problems. It’s a problem that they’ve managed to solve somehow, that’s just good enough for the moment, that people really need it. And they’ve made a lot of money doing that.
If you’re a startup, and you’re starting this from scratch, you don’t have any runway so you are spending the time to get it right, because otherwise you never make it out of startup phase.
If you don’t do the research, if you don’t find that product market fit, you are never making it to the next phase.
But when you make it to the next phase, a lot of companies are like, “Oh, I don’t know what to do next.” So they just start spinning their wheels. And they forget to go back and do what they did in the startup mode, which is all that research to really figure out and define what comes next. Because I think they panic, and if you hit the growth stage, taking VC money, they’re like OK, you’ve got five years to IPO. And you’re like, “Oh, I’m making $5 million a year right now. How do we get to 150?” And you’re just throwing ideas at the wall, ‘cause you panic and you don’t go, “Well, how did I get to 5 million? Let me think about it. How do I get to 10 million? How do I refactor some of these things and strategically think through it,” they’re like, “Oh, we just build and we just build.” And I think a lot of people associate more features with more money.
Peter: Well, right? ‘Cause they can assign a value to it. Even if fictional, but they can put them in a spreadsheet.
Melissa: Yeah, I was talking to my students at HBS, they build teams and companies and stuff. And one of them said, “Well, we got like one beta user and I think they’re great and we’re going to build some more features for them. And we’re trying to figure that out.” And I was like, “Why more features?”
Like what – what’s that do. And they’re like, “Well, we just figured that they’d want more features,” “Well, did you ask them about the features you have? Like, are they using those right now?” They’re like, “Oh, we didn’t actually think about that. I just thought if we had more features, we could charge more money,” and I’m like, “Oh, so for like, what’s the core problem you’re solving, right.”
“Well, yeah, that’s right.” Okay.
And then they take a step back and they go look at it. But I think we kind of adopted that mentality at scale that more is better, more is more money and doubling down on your core problem that you solve and making that really awesome gets lost in the sauce.
Jesse: Yeah, it feels like if prioritization is going to be such a huge part of the value that you deliver, you have to build up your own prioritization filter for yourself. That’s what you need to be able to bring to that.
Melissa: To me, like, what you were saying, just that the prioritization framework is product strategy. And when I get a lot of product managers who go, I don’t know how to prioritize those things, because you’re missing that product strategy. And a lot of people go, “Oh, our product strategy, we know where we want to be in five years and we know what we’re doing tomorrow.” And I’m like, “Okay, but what’s in the middle of that. Product strategy is that thing that connects that longterm to what are we doing right now? And what do we have laid out for the next two months?
That’s the piece of the prioritization framewor that’s almost always missing in every company.
Jesse: You’ve mentioned research a few times now, as one of the key drivers of that prioritization for you. I mean, obviously the business concerns are there. But I’ve heard you talk about research a lot more than I think I hear most product managers talk about research informing their decisions.
And I’m curious about what you see as the ideal relationship between product management, research, and design as design and research are often very closely aligned, but it sounds like research needs to be driving product management at least as much as it’s driving design, if not more.
Melissa: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. I don’t think you can make decisions without understanding what problems your customers have or where you fall short right now. And I don’t think enough companies spend that time really getting into that. If I was going to build a team from scratch today, the first hire I would do is a user researcher.
When you’re a product leader, you don’t have time to go out and do that yourself, So you have to build that relationship into your team and that role to make sure that you’re getting the insights.
I always look at it as, you’re taking all these different inputs and synthesizing them into a direction. And it’s not necessarily synthesizing it into a solution, it’s synthesizing it into a direction. And that’s the intent.
So I’m looking at qualitative user feedback. I’m looking at usage data. I’m looking at business financials. I’m looking at revenue, cost drivers of what our current products are. Yeah. Or we’re spending money and where we may need to shift spend. I’m looking at trends in the different markets and competitor analysis, and I’m taking all of that information and I’m synthesizing it into, Where do we go next?
And that’s not, Where do we go tomorrow? That’s where do we go for the next six months? Where do we go for the next year? And that’s that missing middle piece that’s usually gone from companies, to connect the strategy back into what are the teams doing on a day to day basis.
Peter: One of the challenges I’ve seen is, as companies grow, they have product teams. How those teams are defined will vary by company. Sometimes they are actual products that they’re putting in the market. Often they’re different aspects of some larger service experience. If you’re Lyft or Uber, you’re going to have multiple quote “product teams” working on the rider experience. There’s not real products there. It’s all one product. but, you can’t have a team of 200 trying to work on one thing. So you break them up into teams that are able to kind of digest the work.
And so these product teams get siloed, they focus on what’s in front of them, their metrics, good product teams doing it the way that you would recommend, in terms that they know the outcomes they want to drive towards, they’re doing experiments to get to those outcomes, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I’ve seen the role of design to almost run contrary to that siloed product organization and have design really just live across the experience, so that designers aren’t quote “embedded” in product teams, designers are responsible for some end-to-end experience and they intersect and interact with these product teams that necessarily have to have their focus in order to do their job. I’m wondering how you see that relationship between the focus of the delivery of these teams that needs to deliver, especially as these companies grow, these end-to-end services that can get quite hairy and complex.
Melissa: Yeah. I’ve worked with companies that were that way and then I’ve seen it organized more through product lines. I think it depends on which type of products you’re building. Where you’re talking about, it seemed to work super well in the services type businesses that you’re talking about.
I’ve seen other places where it’s not a huge user journey all the way through, and you can break the teams up around jobs-to-be-done. These teams are probably not seeing super specific scope and it’s not so technically complex. The team is almost an experience team, rather than a technical team.
I find when we do org design with product managers, they typically look to put them around, major jobs-to-be-done, around different products, and if feature sets get too complex to manage, we’ll start to break those jobs up into multiple teams to solve it.
So if you go into each one of those jobs-to-be-done, are those different feature areas? And designers building for that. They’re not necessarily impacting everything across the area, but when you have a totally intertwined journey, where your products plug into that journey, that’s where I see design sitting across everything. It makes total sense.
Jesse: What do you wish design leaders understood better about the role of product management? That if they did understand it, it would improve their relationship with product managers.
Melissa: Ooh, that’s a really great question. I think one of the things is, how much the other systems come into play in making a successful solution. That it’s not just about getting the screens right and experience right for that perspective. That is a piece of building a successful company. I teach a CPO accelerator group for product leaders trying to become executives. And I was just telling them, your job is no longer just the success of your product at that position. It’s the success of the company. And I see that’s the tension that a lot of people get into with design leaders too.
I think it’s any leader who’s not seeing themselves as beholden to the company’s success, not just their individual solution or their individual feature success or their product success. And I think when both people are in that mindset, the product leaders, the design leaders, they’re both like, I know I will have to make trade-offs with parts of my design to meet the business’s needs, but I also will sit here and advocate for the customer as well, but I’m not going to be unreasonable. I’m going to work with everybody through this because I know it’s best for the company. That’s where I see these relationships work. And I say that, too, to my product managers for salespeople, because product and sales butt heads like crazy.
I’m like, okay, now you’re an executive. You gotta go sit with that VP of sales and know there may be a feature that you weren’t going to plan. But eventually you might have to bump that up just to make sure this company can survive. If that’s the thing that it really takes, we have to be willing to work with that.
We don’t get to operate in a perfect system. It would be great if everything was perfect and we didn’t have to worry about money, and we didn’t have to worry about anything. We build awesome products that people love and not have to worry about the implications. But, at the end of the day, the company has to survive. Otherwise we won’t get to build anything.
Peter: Thank you, Melissa, for joining us. This was great. I actually learned a bunch, and I suspect others will too. So we’ve talked about your book, Escaping the Build Trap. We’ll make sure that everyone knows about that. Where and how else can people find you?
Melissa: if you want to check out my website, it’s MelissaPerri.com. I run a company called Produx Labs as a consultancy, and an online school for product managers that teaches them what to do that’s not scrum, um, productinstitute.com. And I now have a new class for executives where we’re teaching them how to build great product strategies and really move it to the C suite, at cpoaccelerator.com.
Peter: When, when do you sleep?
Melissa: Never. I was up at like four, o’clock this morning. ‘Cause I was like, I have so many ideas!
Peter: I, yeah, I was just, I was getting tired, just hearing of all the activities and professional things that you’re doing. Well, that’s awesome. So again, thank you so much for joining us and, take care and see you on the internet.
Melissa: Thank you.
Jesse: As always Peter and I want to hear from you. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us on Twitter. He’s @peterme, I’m @jjg. You can also find us on our website, http://findingourway.design, where you’ll find an archive of all our past episodes and full transcripts.
Sally: Reflecting on it now, I learned so much about my relationship with anger and it really helped me. You know, cause people are trying to kill you.
Intro
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz.
Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett,
Both: And we’re Finding Our Way,
Peter: Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show, design leader Sally Carson of Duo Security joins us to talk about her path to design leadership, growing a design team inside a fast scaling startup, managing your boss, managing burnout, and a whole lot more.
Sally: So I currently lead product design and user research for Duo Security, and Cisco acquired Duo about two years ago now. So I’m now part of Cisco. Yeah.
Peter: And how long have you been at Duo?
Sally: I joined Duo five and a half years ago. Dug Song, the CEO, hired me to build out product design from scratch. They had one user experience designer at that time. But I renamed it to product design at that time, very deliberately…
Peter: From user experience?
Sally: From user experience, yeah. Part of my rationale, why I renamed user experience to product design was to recast it internally within the company, because the engineers and the product managers did have some familiarity with working with the one user experience designer. And I was coming in with a different approach and I wanted to say this isn’t the way that you’ve been operating. This is a different thing, different flavor.
Peter: What was your different approach? How did your approach differ from what they were doing?
Sally: One fundamental difference. I was just able to get resources and budget to actually staff up because I think by the time I joined, it was one designer for maybe 30 engineers and just, you know, that ratio really limits what you’re able to do. I also was intent on bringing in a user research competency and building that out.
So any expectations that had been set in the prior years about how they had operated with the single user experience designer, I wanted to make it clear to everyone that this was going to be a different way of operating, in part, just because we were going to have healthier ratios to start with. So that really changes the type of work that you’re able to engage in.
Peter: So you really wanted just a clean break from the before time to your leadership time.
Sally: Yeah. I’ve found that in general, it’s some of the most challenging work that we do. And we’re talking about driving cultural change. I find it’s easier if you’re working with someone who has no sense of what it means to work with design. It’s almost more difficult if you have someone that has a really strong preconception. They’re like, “I understand exactly what this is,” but their conception of it is different from what you’d like it to be.
Jesse: Enough knowledge to be dangerous, right.
Sally: Yeah. I’ve been interested in, sometimes you all mentioned, change management as opposed to transformation and that nuance, if I remember it’s like the way you defined it, Peter, change management is more like the end state is known and it’s just the process of getting there. Whereas transformation, the end state may not be as well understood. Is that it?
Peter: Right. Exactly. And well, has that been your experience with Duo? Like, were you continually transforming into states that people weren’t quite sure where you were headed?
Sally: It was definitely transformative. There’s an improvisational aspect to it where I sort of had a vision of what we wanted to get to, but the way that I staged it progressively, it did take some, just adapting to the environment at the time, because we were also going through hypergrowth.
So the context was changing. At least every six months, it was a different company.
Peter: Was that a vision that you established when you joined, when it was just you and that one other designer?
Sally: What I came in with was a hodgepodge of what I had seen as best practices throughout my career. Like I think at that point, I would have been about 15 years into my career. And so I had seen one particular shop had done agile really well, and had found a way to integrate design fairly well into agile.
A different shop had healthy ratios, a different shop had really strong research. So I was trying to pluck from the best that I’d experienced and put it together and basically create the design team that I always wanted to work within.
Peter: Had you primarily been in startups up to that point, what was the nature of your background before joining?
Sally: So let’s see. I’m an army brat. I moved all around. Eventually we settled in Virginia and I did go to college. I got a BFA in communication, arts and design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
Peter: So you’re a graphic designer.
Sally: Yeah, I got graphic design training. It was really a mixed bag of video, animation, illustration, graphic design, and then amazing faculty that had us reading, you know, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky, which for my 19-year-old brain was probably mostly over my head. But as I reflect back, it’s come in handy quite a lot, you know, just to make sense of, like, the changing media landscape, for example.
Jesse: How did you find your way into digital?
Sally: So I would have been at VCU in the mid-to-late nineties and there was no web component to my schooling, but I was interested in the web and yeah, I just started doing what a lot of folks at that time did, which was just view source, copy, start hacking it, and figure out FTP.
And then I got really lucky because my first job out of school was a small, educational startup In Charlottesville. And they hired me as a full time illustrator, which is pretty extraordinary. But then when I joined, they found out I knew how to code. And they were like, “Oh, you’re upgraded to multimedia developer.”
I’m really fortunate where I have this career arc, where if you trace my job titles through the years, it’s a complete parallel to what was happening at large within the industry. Like, I was a multimedia developer. I later was a web designer, interaction designer, user experience designer, product designer, like that is how we all do about our titles through the years.
Peter: Sadly those, Radford surveys that everyone has to use, in order to base industry compensation on, still refer to us as, like, web designers. Cause they’re like way out of date.
Sally: Gosh, yeah, come on, Radford. Get it together.
Jesse: Hey, taxonomy. It’s hard.
Sally: It is. Yeah.
Peter: So, how do you go from being a multimedia developer to a design leader?
Sally: I had plans to move up to New York in the summer of 2001. I rented an apartment up there. And I, found a Polish cyber cafe, and they had satellite internet and that was the only high speed in Greenpoint at the time.
And I bartered with them to get high-speed satellite internet on the roof of my Greenpoint apartment building, by redesigning their website.
Peter: Nice.
Sally: And I worked it out with my boss at the time. That startup in Charlottesville, I was like, I have high speed internet up in New York. Let me keep working remotely. And so I moved up. I lost my job within, I don’t know, three or six months.
They were just like, this remote thing is odd and it’s not really working out. And I was like, okay, that’s fair enough. And then there were no jobs. In New York City in particular, there are no jobs. I was unqualified to wait tables, to, you know, be an assistant, to do any kind of administrative work anywhere.
At the time in New York City, the job ads for anything web-related were like secretary / webmaster. Isn’t that so odd where they’re like, this is just pure administrative work and yeah, I couldn’t…
Jesse: And also, can you configure IIS for us…
Sally: Yeah. Yeah.
Peter: How well can you navigate the shell?
Sally: Yeah, very poorly.
So I became a bike messenger and did that right after 9/11 in New York for about a year.
It was such an amazing job and it’s such an amazing time to have that work, to get to see every secret pocket of the city that most people don’t have access to.
It was just an adventure.
Reflecting on it now, I learned so much about my relationship with anger and it really helped me, you know, ‘cause people are trying to kill you when you’re a bike messenger in New York. Like the taxis hate you there. They are trying to kill you. People are doing dumb things that are dangerous. They’re doing scary things that are dangerous, on purpose. And I just learned how much, the more I would engage and get angry and feed into it, it would build my anger, but if I could just let it go and let it wash over me, and not replay the bad incidents in my mind over and over, just really changed my relationship with how I can deal with difficult people or difficult moments, that was helpful for life and for my career.
Peter: For becoming a manager.
Sally: It’s not like I’m fully enlightened. I do notice now, if I’m replaying a situation that made me angry, it just feeds into it. It makes me more upset. You know, I carry that bad emotion with me. It drains me.
Peter: Right. Right. So you’re a bike messenger. At some point you must get back into design and into design leadership.
Sally: Yeah. I was doing a lot of bartering to get things that I needed, still doing design work. And then, the grand finale of my bike messenger career, I did a East Coast bike trip with two friends of mine, two girls from Virginia.
We were raising money for cancer research. And the three of us rode our bikes from the border of Canada to Miami in three weeks.
Jesse: Wow.
Sally: It was too, it was too much, it was too hard, it was nearly a century, which is a hundred miles, every day for three weeks straight. And the first day of that trip was my first century I ever did. Yeah.
That trip just taught me, How do you do a hundred miles? You really do it a mile at a time. You know, you’re like, okay, five more miles. And then five more miles. And then five more miles you’re just chopping it up into these little bits.
Thanks for indulging me on all the bike stuff.
Jesse: Well, I think that bike stuff is relevant, honestly, because I hear a lot of preparation for leadership there in your various travails on two wheels, whether it’s, shaking off the moment-to-moment bad feelings of contending with aggressive drivers in New York City, or just getting up every day and facing another hundred miles on that long ride. Those are lessons in resilience, honestly, that I think are essential for any leader to learn if they’re going to be successful.
Sally: That’s great. Yeah, it certainly gave me confidence.
As we went through the Virginia portion of that ride, some pals of ours rode that leg with us. And this one guy, Ed, was working at a company called Crutchfield at the time in Charlottesville. And I was just chatting with him, riding next to him. And he’s like, you know, we’re hiring a web designer. So call me up when you get back from this trip.
So then I became a web designer. Crutchfield is an eCommerce shop and they sell high-end audio and video equipment. And I joined right as they were transitioning away from a print catalog business into an eCommerce business.
We were borrowing a lot of ideas around qual and quant from what Amazon is doing at the time. So we were doing funnel analysis, AB testing, tracking conversion metrics.
So that was great for just learning chops around quant informing product decisions. And then we also partnered it with qual.
Music break 1
Peter: You mentioned, when you joined Duo, the ratios were out of whack. There was one designer for 30 engineers. So I’m guessing early on, you knew you needed to recruit and hire and build out a team.
That was five and a half years ago?
Sally: Yeah.
Peter: I’m wondering if there are stages of your job, stages of your team, how you evolved, how things evolved around you.
Sally: Definitely. But early on, we just needed to grow and we needed to build a team pretty quickly. And I had joined Duo at… I was four months pregnant with my first and only kiddo, so there was also an external deadline, you know, I needed to build up a little nucleus of a team quickly.
Peter: Five months before you were going to be gone for a while.
Sally: Yeah. Yeah. So I was able to make some hires and got a couple of product designers in, got a user researcher in. And really what I wanted to emphasize with the org was the power of user research. And to quickly try to get us to a place where we’re getting beyond strictly usability testing.
Peter: What was the opportunity for user research? What did you witness that was lacking that you felt user research could address?
Sally: Happily Duo was already so customer centric, they really were, so the stage was set in a really great way for me. Because when we’d bring engineers and product managers to observe the usability testing, it, like, pained them to hear the customer struggling and to watch the customer struggling, which was great.
You know, I didn’t have a team that was dismissive of that kind of feedback.
Peter: I’m curious how you framed the advocacy for user research. I think we’re seeing that it’s easy to build out design orgs because more designers means more assets. The value of user research is less clear, I think, for these organizations, because they’re not making anything, they’re not producing material…
Jesse: It’s less quantifiable at least…
Peter: Yeah. And so how were you able to advocate for user research and going beyond the expected usability, into stuff that’s more generative? What were the stories that you found that worked? What were stories that maybe you tried that didn’t work?
Sally: One thing that’s been really beneficial for us is to come and present short consumable research nuggets at all-hands meetings. What I really wanted to get away from was, user research goes off for six weeks and comes back with a 30 page PDF.
It’s very participatory. So I think that’s a high level theme. How can we make design and research as participatory as possible, and really bring people along for the ride, co-create together so that they’re truly invested in it. What that might look like for those early days of usability testing are bringing those engineers and product managers into the room and having glass on one side of the lab.
In a hallway where people are walking by, including our cofounders, so that they can see what’s happening in there, generates a lot of interest.
Jesse: So kind of raising the literal physical visibility of the work. By not having it take place off site or in a sealed off soundproofed room that nobody even knows what’s going on behind that door.
Sally: That’s right. Yep., really exposing it. And then, because we’re bringing them along for the ride, getting them excited about it as a unique differentiator for us. Like, I’m not aware of other cybersecurity companies that have this rich investment in design research. So it becomes a point of pride.
Peter: So you mentioned the CEO’s name… was it Dug? I’m curious to hear more about your relationship with him.
If you’ve listened to some of our past episodes, we talk a lot about relationships and in particular for leaders in the position you’re in, there’s a lot of need to manage up and get, maybe not just Dug, other executives also understanding what you’re doing and onboard.
How have you approached that?
Sally: I had done my own internet of things hardware startup prior to joining Duo, for about three years. And he was an advisor and a mentor to me as a first time founder. So I was learning from him directly through him mentoring me, but also just the modeling, watching how he was running Duo as a super successful startup and doing it in a way that’s so humane and customer-centric and people-centric for the employees. So that was wonderful because coming in, already having had a foundation with the CEO and a relationship there.
Chester’s my boss, and he leads engineering. And between Dug and Chester, they both are so sympathetic to what design can do, and the value of investing there. It was so helpful for me. It really set the stage where I didn’t have to work, upstream or fight gravity. You know, I was finally in company where generally they understood the value and they understood why I was there.
I had enough credibility that they trusted me to give them things that they didn’t ask for and to show them why that was valuable.
Jesse: How did you earn that credibility?
Sally: I think in part, having had that relationship with Dug prior to working together. But then, you still have to prove it out in your new organization, even if you have the relationships. It’s so key to deliver some quick wins, even if they’re small in scope compared to what you can ultimately deliver.
And if they’re resonating with your audience, whether that’s executive stakeholders or someone else within the org, really socialize the crap out of those small wins, you’re trying to build out an early portfolio of case studies where you’re delivering value to the business that’s concrete, that’s credible, that’s resonating.
Jesse: Right, right. What is the role of risk-taking for a new design leader in an organization? Because I’m imagining a leader setting out to go get those quick wins. It can be very easy to choose the safest, least disruptive things to do. So how did taking a chance play into your path at Duo?
Sally: Maybe speaking about cycling relates to this. And before cycling, I was a skateboarder, and in the past I’ve been a bit of an adrenaline junkie.
Peter: Not anymore.
Sally: Not anymore. I don’t know. There’s so much adrenaline hammering me from the outside world right now that I’m like, I just want peace.
I just want calm.
Jesse: We’re all on a mountain bike right now.
Sally: Totally. Totally. So risk was a big part of it. That’s kinda been, my M.O. is just take huge swings. I can’t imagine being successful in this role without having a big appetite for risk.
Peter: What were some of the risks that you took?
Sally: I had not gotten formal training on being a good leader, a good manager. I hadn’t had any block-and-tackling on that. And I was building out a big team. So for me, there was a lot of learning along the way, just on the basics of being a strong leader, being a good manager, and kudos again to Chester because he has done such an incredible job of building out what he and I sometimes called a “leadership factory.” When you’re in hyper-growth, you have to develop successive waves of leaders, your top talent, ICs that are interested in the management track. How are you going to develop them into managers in 18 months? And. Who are the next wave of directors that could be credible in that role and how can you set them up for success and not extend them beyond what they’re capable of now.
And we all go through the same training when you join as a manager. And, that helps because we have a shared language and understanding. There’s a shorthand when we’re using the same nomenclature, but there’s a really high investment in Duo around professional development.
I have not encountered an organization better than Duo, that’s better at helping people become first-time managers and then grow their careers from there. It’s very thoughtfully done and we put a lot of investment there ‘cause we want to retain people long-term.
Peter: What, if any, distinction do you make between management and leadership?
Sally: Yup. Oh, this is good, Peter. ‘Cause I feel like you have some thoughts on this if I, if I recall. And it’s good, ‘cause I think you’ll disagree.
Peter: Well, but I’m wondering because it sounded to me almost like you were using management and leadership interchangeably, and we’ve discussed them as distinct.
Sally: Oh, that’s so good. I do make a distinction between leadership and management. I think it’s a Venn diagram in my head. There are managers who are not leaders. There are leaders who are not managers, but there are managers who are leaders and, anybody can be a leader in a sense, there are people who are influential over the organization’s culture and they might be individual contributors who don’t have any direct reports, but the way that they carry themselves is either an embodiment of how we all want to show up organizationally, or maybe they’re highly influential over the product or other aspects of the organization.
There’s a great book that I love called Speaking as a Leader. And I kind of use it as a tuneup every six months. I’ll just listen to like 20 or 30 minutes of it to refresh myself. And it’s so handy because it talks about how, at any given time as a leader, you need to be really clear about what your current talking points are, what you’re saying.
Being thoughtful about the way you show up and being aware of your audience at any given time. It requires high emotional intelligence, but sort of a different flavor of emotional intelligence. There’s the one-on-one emotional intelligence. There’s also power in reading a room, like the one-to-many kind of emotional intelligence.
Not just being mechanistic and transactional, the way that managers who aren’t leaders can be, but really reading the room, maybe surfacing things that are going unspoken that are too dangerous for individuals to say and using your role power as a leader to go ahead and put voice to things that people who are maybe underrepresented or don’t hold that much power would be putting themselves at risk to say.
It’s easier to train people on management. Are you doing your one-on-ones? Are you building trust with your direct reports? You know, here’s how you delegate work. But it’s a great entry point into leadership at large because management is a little bit more accessible.
It’s a little more like, okay, here’s your checklist. As a first time manager with a few direct reports, make sure you’re doing these things. Just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And you’ll inevitably encounter new challenges, So there’s no real way to practice it without just doing it.
Music break 2
Peter: What are the leadership skills that have been the hardest for you to acquire and learn?
Sally: This is where I get kind of selfish. I’m like, “Ooh, maybe Peter and Jesse can teach me some things here.”
Peter: That’s fine.
Sally: Honestly, it’s been such a joy to be able to hold one position for so many years because there’s things I learned in the course of five and a half years that I wouldn’t possibly have had the opportunity to learn if I had only stayed for two or three years. You know, a product manager might make a key decision on strategy, leave the company. And I get to see how that played out over the next few years. And they didn’t get that learning cycle.
Then I notice how I’m changing, my team is changing, the context is changing right now.
What’s top of mind for me is energy management. I have days full of meetings and there might be a really important meeting at 3:00 PM where my energy is really flagging. And I’m really just like mentally fatigued because of context switching, so that afternoon slump, if that happens to collide with a really critical meeting, that’s intellectually intense or even emotionally intense, that’s one of my biggest challenges, is just like managing energy. Staying mentally sharp when I need to, right? ‘Cause it’s almost pointless for me to be there if I’m not mentally sharp for some of these conversations. So what do you got for me? You got any advice?
Jesse: Yeah. Well, ingeneral, I think design leader happiness, and day-to-day satisfaction tracks very strongly with the leader’s ability to control their own calendar.
Sally: So true. Yeah.
Jesse: And, to the extent that you are able to create space in your calendar for yourself to give yourself what you need to show up at your highest level of capability, that’s, what’s gonna make you successful.
It’s challenging, though, because in most environments, design leaders don’t have enough authority over their calendar. They are working to rhythms that are set by other departments.
Peter: I’m a fan of the 20-to-30 minute coffee nap.
Sally: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Peter: It seems silly, but if you can take it at the lunch break, if you can give yourself an hour at lunch and you spend that first half hour eating and the second half hour trying to doze, even if you close your eyes and try to ignore stimulus for half an hour and you don’t sleep, you will reset a bit.
Because I’m like you, I’m not great with intellectual energy in the afternoon. I try to do all my intellectual energy in the morning, and then in the afternoon, that’s where I’m doing more kind of administrative stuff. But if I have to do intellectual energy in the afternoon, I will take a nap. If I can get even 20 minutes to try to refill my energy cup, so I can be alert.
You know, I know people who burn out, even when things are fine, ‘cause they just keep working.
There’s a category of person who keeps working, and I think a lot of folks burn themselves out unwittingly, unknowingly.
That said, burnout is also organizational, contextual, situational, right? Certain contexts lead themselves to burnout. It sounds like Duo is actually not one of those. The prosocial culture you’ve been talking about, I’d be surprised if burnout was a problem, just because of sensitivity that the leadership has had.
Jesse: It sounds like people are really watching out for each other there, which is the big thing that leads to burnout in so many organizations. That there basically isn’t anybody watching to notice that you’re burning yourself out over there.
Sally: That’s right. I’m so lucky the culture is so healthy at Duo and I try to not take it for granted because it has been so long since I’ve been an employee elsewhere. I think Yahoo is really the last place I was an employee and that would have been 2005-6.
You’re making me think of something as you’re talking about burnout. I think I’ve experienced two flavors of burnout. I’ve experienced the one where I’m just simply overworking and maybe something like adrenal fatigue, if that’s a real thing. And some of that for me has been not appreciating my own value. What I mean is I need to over-perform, I need to overdo it, I need to overdeliver because I didn’t have the intrinsic confidence in the value that I’m bringing. And really have worked hard to try to train myself out of that and say, this is what I’m able to give today. And I understand that that’s valuable and that’s why I’m here. That’s why they’ve asked me to be here, yeah.
Jesse: I think that’s a real pitfall, especially for new leaders who are like, “I’m moving into leadership for the first time. I feel like I’ve taken on the mantle of leadership.” Right? And they put all these expectations on themselves about how they now need to show up, that is different from how they were showing up before.
And it’s true. Leadership does have its own set of requirements, but people build that up into this thing, especially that they need to be the hardest-working person on the team by every perceivable measure, in order for them to continue to earn their place at the head of the table, so to speak.
Sally: That’s so true. That’s so true. Really, they’re doing their team a disservice because they need to model to their team taking care of themselves. Taking vacation time, not sending those late night emails.
Peter: I think a lot of leaders don’t recognize the importance of modeling. They just, they tend to…
Jesse: Do, as I say, not as I do.
Peter: But people do as they do. ‘Cause that’s how we’re programmed.
Jesse: There’s another facet of this that’s related to the culture of leadership and the cultures that leaders establish for their organizations through what they model. You mentioned that you report into an engineering organization. In most contexts, I would say that if I heard from a design leader who was reporting into an engineering organization, I would assume a certain set of cultural difficulties that would come along with thatm of the differences between the way that an engineering organization wants to manage its work and the way that design work wants to be managed, and potentially really conflicting values on the part of a design leader versus an engineering leader in terms of how they make decisions, how they orchestrate the work of their teams, how they communicate.
All of those kinds of things.
So I wonder what advice you might have for other people who find themselves as design leaders reporting into engineering organizations, for how to manage that relationship effectively. What do you think makes for an effective partnership when design is situated within an engineering culture?
Sally: For me, it really comes down to the leader. So Chester, my boss, has worked with designers before. I feel like on a deep level he groks what I’m here to do. And there’s just so much trust there.
I’ve learned so much from him talking about modeling and leadership. He’s got such a learner’s mindset. He really listens deeply. He’s open to learning. He will always offer his perspective, but he granted me that autonomy and gave me the space and time that I needed to prove what I was trying to do and to build that credibility. So I think if you’re going to sit within eng, it’s really important to have the right leader as your head of eng.
Some of the benefits of being in eng, is eng tends to get budget for headcount, so that’s kinda nice. And in the early days, as we were just getting started with my team, we really did want to be in lockstep with eng because they were shipping really frequently. So we wanted to really embed with them, co-create with them. And it was helpful organizationally, so much came for free, was sitting in the same place within the organization, so much communication, there was no silo.
Then, as we built out research, then the opportunity became, Now, how do you make sure you’re also partnering in a really strong way with product management, as we kind of became more mature, became more strategic. But in those early days, when we were a little bit more delivery/execution focused, sitting within eng, was very helpful. And it hasn’t really been an impediment to us since in large part because of Chester, because of my leader.
Peter: You said you had the autonomy to run your team, as you see fit, regardless of who your leader is.
Sally: That’s right. I’m not expected to run it as though it were an eng team, which is helpful, yeah. So, we were able to demonstrate a different way of working.
Peter: It sounds like when you joined Duo, in terms of things like culture, leadership, you hit a jackpot as a new design leader in an organization where a lot of the challenges that other design leaders face in other organizations just weren’t there.
I’m wondering, though, how, if at all, that changed with the Cisco acquisition. ‘Cause now there’s a whole set of relationships that you didn’t have before, new people that you’re interacting with. How have you had to shift or change how you relate up and out, now that you’re within this much broader context?
Sally: Yeah, I guess the fundamentals are still the same, which is: build relationships, identify who your key partners need to be, and just spend the time to build that trusting partnership. And, I’m happy to say, I haven’t really encountered much in the way of politics at Cisco, which is pretty extraordinary.
‘Cause it’s a huge company. But honestly, like, I’m still learning my way. I’m still finding my way. It’s a massive org and it’s a new set of skills I’m currently developing. How do you seek and gain alignment across a broader organization where you’re not necessarily directing those resources? That’s an interesting pickle.
Peter: So what are some steps that you’re taking to realize that?
Sally: Hm, I think Duo does have a lot of credibility within Cisco. And so using our organization as a model is one. Again, same playbook, build out those case studies and socialize them to demonstrate what we do and credibility, and then really invest in one-on-one relationships with your key partners, just spending time understanding what are their needs, what’s challenging them. That’s been foundational for me. I’m sure if we talk again in a year, I’ll have new stuff.
There is something else on burnout. Can I take us back to burnout for a second? Okay. ‘Cause I’m again, selfishly, I’m curious to hear what you all have to say.
Peter: And clearly this is something you’re dealing with. I don’t know why in a pandemic, you would be considering burnout.
Sally: …the smoke-filled air. Yeah.
Peter: That’s right.
Sally: Yeah, the other flavor of burnout. So there’s the overwork burnout that I’ve certainly experienced at times. And then the other flavor, I suspect particularly as a design leader, is like a creative malaise where part of it is, how do you continue to maintain a creative practice that rejuvenates you so that you can bring your energy and your spirit into leadership? I find that there’s ebbs and flows of feeling lit up creatively, and there’s a form of burnout for me that I encounter sometimes where I’m not particularly inspired. I know I will come out of it because it’s cyclical, but it’s something like a creative malaise and it’s a real bummer when it hits.
And I always know it will resolve itself, but it’s inevitable phase that I have to go through. And it’s always a bummer when it happens. Do you all have that?
Jesse: I think, to your point, I have that less when I have creative work to do, and, as a design leader, your access to creative work is highly variable, and in some cases might be more or less nonexistent for very long stretches of time, before you ever get to offer a creative opinion, you know, move a thing around on a screen, any of that stuff.
And I think that you touched on something really important, which is that we think of burnout in general in terms of overwork, that if you’re starting to feel burned out, the thing to do is to do less, but, in fact, what it might be is that you’re just not doing the right things, that you’re not doing things that actually fill you up.
That, in fact, what you might need is a little bit less of whatever you’re considering your wind-down time, because it’s not actually replenishing you and you need to go get a hobby.
Sally: Yeah. Yeah. Like I really rely on just taking walks in the middle of the day, so it’s really regenerative for me to take a quick walk outside at least once a day, if not a few times, if I have a little pocket of time.
Music break 3
Peter: Also following on Jesse’s response, how creative are you in your work these days? You’re running a 30-person organization, product design and research, maybe… do you have content or other functions in your team as well?
Sally: Yeah, we brought in UX writing, UX eng, some design systems, design ops types.
Peter: Right. So you’ve got a team of 30. And, when I think about people in your role, I think of four sets of activities they’re doing: there’s creative leadership, managerial leadership, operational leadership and I’ve added a fourth. I used to just have those three, I’ve added a fourth, which is this executive leadership, kind of strategic. It’s related to creative, but it’s different, ‘cause you’re setting direction in some ways, or having certain kinds of relationships or conversations.
And I think a challenge that a lot of design leaders in your position face is, as Jesse pointed out, you’re not doing the creative work, and I’m wondering if that’s been true for you, how you’ve maintained access to the creative work, or if you’ve elected to delegate much of that. When you do do creative work, how do you know where to focus your creative time and your creative energy? What’s your relationship to creativity within your team? ‘Cause I’m sure it’s not what it was when you were two to five people.
Sally: Yeah. Yeah. It’s really different. Now, when we were two to five and maybe up to 15, there would be a Brew:30, Friday afternoons at 4:30. The whole company would get together for happy hour and tap the keg. And it was an extrovert’s dream and all my little tiny baby designers and me who skew more introverted would go hide in our usability testing room and do a quiet drawing hour, where we’d, like, listen to a podcast and not talk, and draw together.
And it was the cutest and it was so fun. And outside there was the hum of people talking to one another and that was kinda nice, like that added to the ambience. But I love that quietly stealing away into our little lab and just drawing quietly together. That was really sweet.
These days, as you run through those four pillars, flavors, of leadership, the operational, managerial, I’m naturally drawn less to that.
I’m more drawn to the creative and now executive strategy stuff. I have to be really careful though, because with a team of this size, what I don’t want to do is the swoop and poop, where I’m over here doing my executive stuff, and then suddenly I come and mess with people.
You know, people do design reviews with me and I give feedback. And the feedback that I try to give is typically not as much around fit and finish. It’s more around, “Oh, they’re not aware that there’s this whole other thing happening with product over here. But if they were able to find a way to weave that together, we could do more with what they’re working on right now. So let me make sure that they’re aware of that they have the right connections, they’re having the right conversations.”
It’s sort of like being a cross-pollinator, being a bridge, doing that organizational wayfinding and having the super high-level context for what’s happening and bringing that into the detailed-level design work.
Where I do get involved, I do try to be kind of unapologetically opinionated about anything we design that’s gonna be for the end-user. So we’re a B-to-B company. We sell into the enterprise and we have a couple of key personas and one is like an IT administrator who’s going to deploy and manage Duo, but then he’s going to deploy as a company, and all of his employees have to use Duo as a two-factor authentication device to login to their work. So that’s sort of like the B to B to C in a way, like we are designing for the consumer. We’re selling into the enterprise.
I have a background in consumer web, so I spend a lot of time bringing that consumer web lens to enterprise security, which is kind of cool. And my theory, my belief, is, if we can make the end-user successful, and make that a really great, super friction-free, experience, the value builds up.
It makes the IT administrator successful. It makes the buyer successful. The Chief Information Security Officer successful. So what we’re trying to do is shape good security behaviors, it’s a gross term, but in the security space, they call it security, hygiene, you know, good, security hygiene make that end user successful.
And that’s where I spend a lot of my attention and time to make sure that’s right.
Peter: That sounds like a conscious choice that you’ve made in terms of where you’re devoting that creative energy.
Sally: Yeah. And part of it is because those people have not opted into Duo. Duo has been foisted upon them, and I’m thinking, too, that your first encounter with Duo might be as a part of onboarding into a brand new job, you know? So you’re so inundated with new stuff when you start a new job, and Duo is one of a couple dozen things that you get introduced to you on your first day of onboarding into a new job. So understanding that as a context, as opposed to the buyer or the IT administrator, who’s done the research, done a little bit of competitive analysis, and has decided to choose Duo to deploy at their company.
So I’m really focused on the person who didn’t opt into this experience and making it great for them.
Peter: You mentioned less interest in the more management and operational aspects of your role. In my experience, those are the things, though, that, you know, keep the engine humming, keep the lights on, and if they’re not attended to, the organization starts kind of falling apart. How have you accommodated your less interest in those functions?
Is that one of those things where you just occasionally suck it up and like, “Okay. Today is my operational day and I’m just gonna kind of power through that.” Or strategies have you adopted to make sure that that’s getting attended to.
Sally: Yeah, I think one is, I’ve just built the self-awareness that those just don’t tend to be things that give me energy. They deplete my energy, but I can do them. And then, finding great leaders and great people who I trust that I can delegate work to who tend to thrive doing that type of work.
Like, that’s the magic is when you find the peanut butter to your jelly, right? Like someone who’s like, “I love doing the ops stuff. That’s my jam. This is what gives me life.” And then it’s a win-win, you know, it’s like every time there’s taxes and I’m like, I can’t believe there’re CPAs and they love doing this.
It’s so great. What a gift to humanity, these people. But yeah, they exist, and finding people who are great, almost like when you hear about CEO/COO partnerships and like the role of the COO is so varied and it’s so much depends on essentially, like, the psychographic profile of the CEO. They need to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Jesse: And this is part of why I always advise leaders to tune into what they need for themselves, rather than trying to model the structure of their leadership on what somebody else created for themselves. Because, you know, your strengths are different. The complements that are going to support you are going to be different.
So one of the themes I feel like throughout this conversation, has been the need to continue to be flexible in the face of ongoing change. And as we’re winding up here, I am curious about what changes you see around the corner? Is there a process of change that you’re in the middle of right now that you’re looking forward to seeing through?
Sally: Hmm, that’s good. Yeah. I’m in a reflective place right now and I am reflecting quite a lot on… I’m so proud of the work that we’ve done as a team, as a company, I’m really proud of the value that we’re creating in the world. Honestly, it’s such a joy to deeply believe that if more people buy the stuff that we make, the Silicon Valley cliche is, like, “make the world a better place.”
It really does. We help with election security. We help with critical infrastructure. We help the trains run on time. It’s that part that is so cool. And I’m so proud that a design team can have positive impacts on the safety and trust that people feel when they use the internet. Like that is so cool.
Earlier this year, before the pandemic set in, I was pushing myself to explore what it means to savor. And that was, like, a new thing for me. I’m feeling proud, I’m still working, I’m not disengaging from the work, but what does it mean to really savor a big accomplishment that I feel proud of? And, now I’m just reflecting forward on, What is the next chapter? I don’t know. It’s neat to talk to you all right now, because I do feel like I’m in a moment of trying to spend time to understand what that could and should mean for me.
Peter: You were referring to some of the societal context that we find ourselves in, and clearly this, this year has been a…
Sally: A Whopper.
Peter: A difficult one. And I’m wondering how that has interceded into your and your team’s work lives, or do you try to keep a little wall around your team, and there’s work time and not-work time. Like, for eight hours, let’s focus on this and then, and then not, as opposed to, oftentimes, work and non work-life bleed together. How has that manifested within you and your team and how have you approached that?
Sally: I try to be really honest with what I’m struggling with right now, you know, so if I’m having a one-on-one conversation, I try to be really honest about what’s tough right now as an offer of vulnerability. If they feel the need to share, I want to make sure they feel like they can share with me in a way that’s safe.
I don’t want to dump on my team and create more stress for them, but I just want to show up as a real, fully-formed human, and, especially because the lines between personal and work life have blurred, if not completely dissolved for a lot of us, and then also trying to remember to bring some joy back.
The thing I did yesterday morning was I spent some time over the weekend playing with gouache, and I hadn’t done that in quite awhile. It’s like a more opaque, watercolor-type of paint. So, if you enjoy pushing color around on paper, gouache is a lot of fun, and I’m just playing with it and getting to know it.
And so I just posted that on our team Slack Monday morning, just to remind them, we’re all creative people, and what are you doing to maintain your own creative practice? I try to share a bit of my personal life just to give them permission, if this is something that you would find to be restorative, even in the middle of your workday, giving them permission to do it.
When we’re not having fires, if I step away for a 10-minute walk, I’ll post that to the group Slack and say, “Hey, I just need to take a bit to recharge. And I’m going to go for a little walk.” And it’s not important that they know I’m walking. It’s more about modeling and give them permission to do what they need to do to take care of themselves too.
‘Cause that’s so important to me. One of the joys of leadership is getting to have these long-term form relationships with folks that extend beyond the time that you spend managing them. What a joy it is to see someone in the first few years of their career, and then even after they leave your company, getting to see what they do, and they check in with you, and seeing where they go from there.
Peter: I think that was a remarkably, positive, affirming note to wrap this discussion on, so, at least for me, thank you, Sally. Thank you for taking the time. It was great having you and I don’t want to speak for Jesse.
I actually, because I actually have to bounce.
Jesse: (joking) I had a terrible time.
Fantastic. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.
Peter: And that wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. As always, you can find Jesse and I on Twitter. I’m @peterme he’s @jjg. You can also find us on our website, https://findingourway.design/, where you can find past episodes with complete transcripts, as well as a contact form. We read everything that comes through there. It’s a great place to send any comments or questions that you have about the show, anything you’d like to hear us talk about in future episodes and with that, thank you for your attention and as always keep on finding your way.
16 – How can a designer grow in their career without becoming a manager? (and more)
Sep 15, 2020
In which Jesse and Peter dig into a few emerging trends we’ve seen in product design teams, including the rise of the senior individual contributor, the increasingly tangled relationship between design, engineering, and product management, and what it takes to lay the foundation for lasting change.
Transcript
Peter: Oh, shit. Design leaders are spending all their time managing and recruiting and hiring and, caring and nurturing for their teams, but they’re not spending any of their time leading design.
Peter: I’m Peter Merholz,
Jesse: And I am Jesse James Garrett…
Together: …and we are Finding Our Way…
Peter: …Navigating the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership.
Jesse: On today’s show Peter and I dig into a few emerging trends we’ve seen in product design teams, including the rise of the senior individual contributor, the increasingly tangled relationship between design, engineering, and product management, and what it takes to lay the foundation for lasting change.
Peter: One of the things that I think is interesting that I’ve seen more of during our break is a legit establishment of this design leadership role that doesn’t assume management. So, one of the companies I’m working for, a big bank, is hiring up to 20 people who are true senior design leaders. They would be senior manager or director level, but with no expectation of management and direct reports. They are organizational leaders, they are creative leaders, they are strategic leaders. They are there in large part because those folks who do manage are so overwhelmed with their relationship responsibilities, that they need support from folks who can focus on the work.
I’m seeing it more and more, and I’m hearing from other design leaders that I’m talking to a desire to establish that role within their organizations. It’s almost like, wait, can we do that? We can have someone who’s really senior, but not manages people? Will they allow that to happen? And it’s like, yeah, if you want it.
Jesse: Well, it depends on where you are, and it depends on cultural context that you’re in because, in a lot of cases, one of the challenges with the senior individual contributor is, How do you measure the impact that they’re having beyond the work that they’re delivering? How do you measure the leadership dimension of what that person does so that the organization can know if they’ve got the right people in those senior roles?
Peter: How would you measure that if they had direct reports?
Jesse: Well, if they had direct reports, then you’ve got a broader set of data to consider in terms of the contribution that the individual is making and the success that they’re finding in the organization. It becomes about team cohesion, team success, team delivery kinds of metrics.
Peter: You measure these senior IC leaders similarly, it’s just the team doesn’t report to them. So way this is structured, and I think this is why we’re starting to see this more and more, management is functional, you’ll have design managers managing designers, and design directors managing design managers, and often not just functional within design, but like research managers managing researchers, and content strategy managers managing content strategists. This individual contributor design leadership role is a principal designer role, and s leading a team that is cross-functional within design. So there will be product designers, researchers, content strategists.
So it’s around leading the work, not leading, not managing the resource to put it another way. And then additionally, as they get more senior, they’re very active in leading cross-functionally. So they’re not necessarily directing product people and engineers, but definitely influencing them.
And in terms of accountability, these folks are ultimately held accountable for the output of the teams that they are directing.
Jesse: So tell me about how formal authority works in these situations because what happens generally is that authority tends to hew pretty closely to reporting structures.
Peter: You’re seeing that less and less, I think, in these product development organizations where reporting is functional, but delivery is cross-functional. This is becoming an accepted just way of being. So a design director has less creative authority than the design lead within a cross functional team often, right, because the design lead in a cross functional team, working with the product manager and engineer, is making the design decisions at that level of delivery. And that is where the authority thus resides.
Jesse: Yeah. If you don’t have the ability to actively direct the work of a designer, if it is, as you describe, influence, then how do you assess how much influence you have had?
Peter: It depends on where you locate creative authority within these structures. So you can imagine at the simplest level, you have two structures: you have your reporting structure of design and engineering and product reporting up through their functions; and then you have the work structure, which is cross-functional teams. Think of that as squads, pods, whatever, where you have a mix of product managers, designers, engineers, working together.
Now in some organizations, they are using that work structure as the management structure. But I’m frankly seeing that less and less. What I’m seeing more and more of is a recognition that we should organize reporting structures by function, because there’s value there: Professional development, recruiting and hiring, there’s value in making it clear how you grow within your function.
But the work is being organized in these cross functional teams, which have their own structure.
When I’ve worked in marketplace models, you’ll have a team dedicated to the sell side of the marketplace and a team dedicated to the buy side of the marketplace. and those become these work structures. And so the creative authority resides on the work side, not on the reporting side.
Design directors aren’t coming over necessarily to the work side. They are seen primarily as organizational minders, because there’s plenty of work to do recruiting and hiring, professional development, and one-on-ones, and all that kind of stuff.
But you still need creative leaders. There can be a different authority structure specific to the work from a reporting structure. And so these super-senior ICs might report to a design director, but they lead a set of work in the work structure.
Jesse: Who looks after design as a practice in this model?
Peter: Oftentimes those leaders will also be practice leads.
So you’ll have your content strategists or UX writers reporting to a manager of content strategy, possibly reporting to a director of content strategy. Director and manager of content strategy own the practice and the reporting relationships. The issue that arises is: I’m a director of product design. And I have product design leads, who report to me who are in the workstream leading work.
They are the creative authority for work in their area. What is my job as a creative authority as a director of product design?
And my take on it is that the practice leads—director of product design, director of content strategy, director of user research—they establish a framework for quality. So they create the shared understanding of what quality is. The people doing the work are then expected to deliver at those levels of quality.
Jesse: And who evaluates that?
Peter: So evaluation becomes an interesting question, because in my worldview, and this goes back to our work at Adaptive Path, that creative lead needs to be the sole authority over what gets launched.
That director of product design might look at what that lead product designer’s putting out there and saying, “That’s not living up to our quality standards.” There’s a disjuncture here. In the moment, the director of product design, and unless it is truly egregious and they want to pull the emergency cord, doesn’t really have the authority to stop that work in the construct that I’m putting out there. If the lead in the moment is like, “No, this is what solving the problem. We’re going to launch it.”
Then, if there is a disconnect between an established understanding of quality and what is actually getting shipped under a particular lead product designer, Then there’s a conversation about what’s going on there. Often, what you find going on there is that there are a lot of conditions within that cross-functional team that inhibit that designer’s ability to deliver at the level of quality that the practice lead has established. So then it becomes this other challenge of, “Do we need to encourage new organizational practices to enable us to achieve the level of quality that we are establishing?”
Jesse: Right, right. This is a thing that I’ve seen organizations struggle with figuring out, where that line is, how involved the senior most leader is in looking at the details of the creative work being produced by the leads underneath them.
And how do they influence practice and process based on that, because a lot of what you’re talking about is stuff that emerges out of the negotiations across a cross-functional team, as they are figuring out how to balance all the considerations in order to deliver. This role, as you’re describing it, that has responsibility for those practices and processes is also pretty far removed from them, and is also really just kind of seeing things after the fact. What I’ve seen is that that loop never gets closed. Energy and attention of the senior-most leader is so focused on things like budget and resources and things like that, that they don’t have the space to be able to actually take stewardship, take ownership of design as a practice in these organizations.
Peter: That is definitely an issue, especially as these organizations scale.
But, that’s where Design Operations plays a part.
I was actually just talking with one of the heads of product design that I work with. He has a team 80 or so, and he’s been able to get himself, right now and for the next month or so, where two days a week he’s doing what you would expect a design leader to do: going to meetings, one-on-ones, recruiting, hiring, that kind of stuff.
The other three days a week, he’s working with a small team, small cross-functional team, on building out a vision, a product vision, a North-Star type work for the company. And he recognizes it’s temporary, right? It’s time boxed. This couldn’t be his job forever because he does need to get back to it. But he’s able, for a while, to only do two days a week doing what people consider his job-job. So he can spend three days a week being the creative leader that no one else can be in this organization.
And one of the reasons he can do it is he delegated all of his budgetary activity to his head of design ops. Just, like, “You own it. You do it. If you need me to check in, provide direction, give you guidance, whatever, happy to. It’s my org, so I care about this stuff, but literally you are going to all those meetings with the finance people. You are in charge of that now.”
And so I think we don’t do enough to decompose the responsibilities of design leaders, and really recognize all the things that they need to be doing, and, What are those things that really the design leadership should be focused on? And what are the things that they can delegate or put off their plate?
That’s why DesignOps is emerging, is this recognition that design leaders were spending all their time operating and none of their time leading design. But now this other thing is happening is, “Okay. So we’re delegating design operations, oh, shit, design leaders are spending all their time managing and recruiting and hiring and caring and nurturing for their teams, but they’re not spending any of their time leading design. So how do we shift those activities and responsibilities among a set of leaders so that everyone can deliver well on some aspect of this, instead of one person, half-assing a whole bunch of things.
Jesse: Right. Right.
Peter: And I hear you in terms of we’re not caught up there. And so loops don’t get closed. People are far away from the work and that’s still a problem to solve.
Jesse: It takes a village to lead design, right?
Peter: Essentially. Yeah. And I think we recognized this 20 years ago in engineering, you’ve had a VP role of engineering, which tended to be the org minder. You had your CTO or architect roles that tended to be what we would consider creative leads or technology leads, the ones figuring out how to solve the problems, the technical problems.
So there was that bifurcation happened a long time ago. You had technical program management, is this other function that was then essentially there to support engineering. With the agile revolution, you have agile coaches and scrum masters and all these other people figuring out how to keep the work engine humming.
So there had already been this recognition of all these different things that need to get done and a decomposition of activities across roles to enable that to get done, and design is just behind. ‘Cause it’s taken us longer to get to a similar scale.
Music break 1
Jesse: Part of this really has to do with the culture of leadership within the larger organization that you’re a part of, especially how collaborative, how consensus-driven, how consultative the decision-making culture of the organization is, because in an organization that broadly asks its leaders to take a more command-and-control kind of stance, approaching leadership in this way can be really challenging, because even if it feels, to the design leader, like there is a better way to do this, that is more hands off, that distributes power and authority at a lower level in the organization more effectively, they may be contending with a larger culture that looks at what they’re doing, and it looks to them like they’re fucking it up because they’re not leading according to the model that the rest of the entire organization, including the CEO, potentially leads.
Peter: Totally. What’s interesting to me– the problem I’ve seen is actually the inverse, where the cultural direction was more bottom-up. It was autonomous product teams. Do whatever you want. The output is crappy, for any number of reasons: it’s not coordinated across these teams, plus there’s not a shared understanding of what quality looks like. And, in this one instance when leadership would review the work of these teams and say, “It’s not good enough, don’t ship it,” these teams would ship it anyway. And there was no accountability.
There was no…
Jesse: …that loop closing. Yeah. Right.
Peter: Some organizations could stand to have a little more top-down, command-and-control, to drive quality.
What’s happened in this organization, is they’re at some stage in their cycle where they need a shock to the system to improve quality, and that shock is not going to come from the bottom-up. It’s too fractured. The amount of effort it would take to kind of dial up all these individual teams would be too great.
But one of the benefits of hierarchies, when you can wield them appropriately, is to do a hopefully positive shock from the top-down and say, “No, that’s not appropriate. Here’s some new standards of quality. And if your work is not measuring up to these handed-down standards of quality, then it is not shipping, and we need to take this approach because the problem is so severe that we need to almost explicitly work in a way that we don’t want to work, work to overcome this issue in an effort to reset.”
Try to get a new normal understood within the organization so that after you do this top-down, command-and-control for a while, there’s the understanding, the awareness, the appreciation of that built so that you can then pull back and have some faith that the teams will continue to deliver it, that new level of quality.
So I, I almost, I long for command and control. Which goes against my, a lot of my philosophy as I was saying earlier, the authority has to be given to the person who has accountability for delivery. And that’s usually someone at that level of a product team, shipping stuff.
Jesse: So, typically, that locus of power either resides with the creative lead for the particular piece of work as you’re describing, or the person who is that person’s manager, that person’s performance manager. And this third element that you’re talking about, this senior-level individual contributor without
performance management responsibilities,feels like this extra thing in these organizations that they’re trying to figure out. How this third center of authority fits in with these other two. And organizations are struggling to give it teeth because the larger organizations are looking at design teams alongside their technology teams and the various other teams that are responsible for delivering all of the functions of the business, and trying to figure out how to make the design team look more like their other teams as much as they can, to simplify their management of a complex cross-functional ecosystem.
Peter: In the case of this one company, they have an engineering team that actually is serving as a positive model.
What I’m sensing based on this conversation is what we’re all part of, is there is a shift occurring from whatever was standard, let’s say 20 years ago, that I think was much more like you were saying: a lot more command-and-control, the reporting organization was also the delivery organization. Your manager was responsible for your performance and your output, and their manager was responsible, and, and it was cleaner in some way.
And then what happened essentially, is this recognition of, in the 21st century, to succeed in doing work requires cross-functional teams. You cannot go inside an organization that doesn’t recognize the importance of a truly cross-functional team. We’re talking design and engineering and product management and data science and marketing, like true cross-functional teams. And the model before was you didn’t collaborate cross-functionally, you did your work and then you handed it off to the next function, and you handed it off to the next function. And so that, it’s not even waterfall model so much as this kind of yeah, the production line model.
It doesn’t work when you’re trying to be nimble, responsive. When you’re working in a world of software as a service and, you’re constantly shipping and all that kind of stuff. And so they’ve moved to this cross-functional team where you have representatives of those functions present at all times.
We still don’t quite know how to manage complex cross-functional delivery. We know how to manage functional organizations. Certain aspects are still being managed functionally—your professional development and, and your, performance reviews and the skills growth and all that kind of stuff
We don’t have clear, well-understood models of how you manage cross functional teams, particularly at scale.
To take what you said moving forward: I just think we’re not there yet. There is not an answer. We’re still figuring it out.
And what I think we’re seeing is that issue, the challenge, conflict, that soreness that is happening with design leaders is because we’re trying to manage cross-functional work teams akin to how we managed perhaps in the past, these hierarchical teams and it’s not quite working.
And so now we’re trying, let’s go the other direction and it’s all autonomous and every team’s on its own and that’s not working. And we’re stumbling toward what is a model that allows functions to work well together as teams at scale. And no one has really solved that in a clear, repeatable way that people can feel pretty good about.
Jesse: It’s interesting that you keep referring back to development methodologies, in that I think that for most of my career, if not all of my career, the conventional wisdom among designers would have been that you should not attempt to manage design the way that you manage engineering, that engineering management practices are too factory floor production line oriented.
They don’t have enough flex or space in them for the creative exploration that’s necessary for design. That design as a practice was fundamentally incompatible with the way that technical development gets managed. And it feels like you’re saying that if that was true, that maybe is not as true anymore, or even perhaps that the folks who have been doing this work to define these approaches to technical development have lapped us basically, and gotten out in front on these issues of how to get multiple functions actually integrated together effectively, which is really different from, frankly, most of what I’ve heard from most designers for most of my career.
Peter: So they’ve lapped us. I wouldn’t say that they’ve solved it though. If you ever hear of a designer embedded in a product team, squad, scrum, et cetera, that is a model created for engineering delivery. And, it is not a model that leads to good design, but they got out in front of us.
They’ve been dealing with these problems longer because engineering orgs tend to be bigger. The value of engineering was more evident to internal leaders. And so they built out engineering orgs sooner. But these, what are meant to be cross-functional, organizational frameworks definitely skewed towards supporting engineering over the other functions. That’s actually one of the reasons we wrote the book, was I saw this occurring and I was frustrated because you are right. Design works best in its own way, not by adopting engineering processes. But when design got subsumed into these, what were supposed to be cross-functional, team structures, that were really about how do we help engineering be as effective as it can be, and to heck with anyone else, design suffered in that regard.
People often forget that much of what we think of as agile is simply a way for engineers to to assert the authority over their work, because it had gotten away from them. They were being told by managers, who didn’t actually understand what it took to deliver, what to do. And the engineers were like, no, we’re taking the reins back. Right? It was their own form of, frankly, a kind of quasi-Marxist maneuver. What’s happened, though, is designers haven’t yet done that themselves. Designers haven’t taken those reins.
Music break 2
Jesse: All of this makes me very curious about the work that was done by technology leaders, you know, 15 years ago to start pushing the
process and organizational change in these organizations, away from the way that software had traditionally been made up to that point. And how they were able to make the argument for such a radically different style to their leadership. Because, frankly, that is one of the things that we as designers and as design leaders have had the hardest time doing, is simply convincing our leaders that there is a different way to do things and we should be given the permission to try.
Peter: Part of their ability to make that change is the phrase, “Double the work in half the time.” And what CEO isn’t going to like pause for a second.
Jesse: “Tell me more,”
Peter: “Yeah. I want some of that.”
I think the challenge, I hadn’t thought about it this way, but it kind of goes back to what you were saying about the difference earlier, but just between engineering practices and design practices, engineering is measured on productivity and how they define quality, which is uptime, no bugs, stability, performance. All very mechanized outputs.
Engineering is not held accountable for business success. Engineering is not held accountable for customer engagement. Engineering is not held accountable for all those fuzzier, squishier impacts on users and customers. Engineering is held accountable for, Are our machines able to do what we want the machines to do?
If all you want from design is more design, then, yes, you can put design in a similar context and you will get more design, but that’s, yeah, it’s laughable ‘cause it’s meaningless and, there’s just this fundamental difference in the paradigm of what the value is that design delivers and the value is that engineering delivers.
Jesse: And I think it comes back to how that value is communicated to and understood by the senior business leadership.
Peter: I thought tou were going to say, “Senior bean counters.”
Jesse: That, yes, those, too. So, as you describe the agile transformation, it sounds like those people were able to speak to value in a way that their nontechnical leaders could understand, right? You didn’t have to understand the ins and outs of technical development processes in order to be able to understand the value of “double the work in half the time.”
And we don’t even have ways to talk about the value that we’re delivering now, nevermind talking about increasing that value in the future. They already had a reference point for engineering when agile came onto the scene. They had ways of evaluating. They were maybe not the best ways, but they had ways of evaluating that were needles that they could see would be moved by a move to a different approach.
And they don’t have that for us. They don’t have needles that they can look at and go, well, this, and this, and this will obviously change if this works the way that you guys say it will.
Peter: They do and they don’t. Unfortunately the needles they have for us are productivity needles. That’s why I think much of design as it has scaled has also been reduced to output. My question or my, my wonderment based on what you’re saying is, nor do they have metrics to justify more product management, but they invest in it.
Jesse: Okay. So what’s that about?
Peter: That’s a good question. I think about this.. I found myself thinking about it again more recently. I find myself wondering why companies keep hiring product managers. They love hiring product managers, but what ends up happening is from a ratio standpoint, you get these ratios out of whack, where you get multiple product managers for a single designer.
And I’m like, “Why do companies keep hiring product managers when they don’t have the team to deliver what the product manager is working on?” And I think the reason they keep hiring product managers is that product management is a promise of future value.
Jesse: And design is not even that, is it?
Peter: It’s not recognized as that. We know it is, but it’s not recognized as that. So, by hiring a product manager, you believe you are enabling the ability to deliver more product, new product. And with that delivery of more, a new product, the generation of increased value. So, you hire product managers because for every product manager, we can launch another feature and another feature.
For some reason, what’s not fully understood or appreciated is when you have product managers, the job of a product manager is to make work for other people.
Jesse: Hmm.
Peter: And so you have all these product managers generating work, but if you’re not also hiring engineers and designers and others at a similar clip, what ends up happening is, and I’ve seen this, I’ve been in environments where product managers almost literally are walking the halls with requirements, looking for someone to execute on them, just like, “Do you have time? Can you, can you help me build this thing?”
And now everybody else is somehow pulled into this person’s insanity. It leads to all these problems. That said, thinking about what you were saying in terms of design and the ability to cleanly and clearly value design, design’s value is
essentially the same as product management value. When you want to look at it from a business lens, designers help you with acquiring new customers, help you with retaining customers, help you engage customers, help you potentially get those customers to spend more while they are engaged. So, you know, unlocking more revenue or whatever, right?
Those are all metrics that a business cares about. That doesn’t take a lot of imagination to connect a designer’s work to those metrics. Those metrics though, tend to be owned by product, but product doesn’t actually deliver on those metrics or do anything to make those metrics happen.
Usually they rely on their teams. And their job is to coordinate the efforts of those teams towards those business goals. As we said, though, the engineers, their metrics aren’t really product metrics. Engineers’ metrics are engineering metrics with this assumption that, I guess, a magic in the system, that if the engineers focusing on their metrics keep machines running and product is focusing on their metrics and value creation, then it’ll all work out.
Now, this is a thought I hadn’t had before. And I think that the hidden connection that hadn’t been realized was the designer is the person who turns that engineering quality into value realized by the product manager.
Jesse: And is cut out of the equation altogether themselves.
It feels like there is, is a lack of things for designers to uniquely own that have value beyond the aesthetic, beyond the subjective.
Peter: That is basically true. There is no meaningful design metric that isn’t also a product metric.
You’re making me want to look up a tweet. Hopefully it won’t take long.
On February 23rd, 2020, Jared Spool wrote, “I’m of the belief that in a few years, product management and UX design leadership will be indistinguishable. In some orgs they already are.” And that, I think, speaks to what we’re talking about.
Jesse: Yeah. I think most of the time, if you look at two different functions in the organization and they are impacting the same metrics, that seems like a pretty good argument that those functions should be combined in some way. You know, maybe design is an adjunct to product management, maybe there is a space for a design practice that is more fully integrated with product management as a way of sort of borrowing that understanding of value and being able to transfer that to the design work. Should designers be reporting to product managers?
Peter: Product managers. Hmmm, no. At least not the way that it is typically practiced in most organizations. I think this is another area, as the tweet suggests, we’re seeing change and evolution.
There’s no reason that that product manager can’t be a designer or could not have once been aa designer. And we’re seeing that all throughout the industry, more and more designers are turning into product managers. It’s still the vast minority, but we’re seeing a greater and greater acceptance of designer as product manager, as opposed to historically it was MBA as product manager or
engineering lead as product manager. We’re now seeing companies realize like, oh, the product is this thing that people use. Maybe the person who’s managing the product should have a ability to understand that use.
Jesse: I have been advocating for at least 10 years now that designers who actually want more authority, want more power, need to move toward product management. They can do product management from a design sort of stance. I don’t think it means leaving behind that creative influence. And in fact, I feel like there is something missing in the practice of product management, as I’ve seen it, that designers bring, which is this holistic experiential sense. That is not something that I’ve seen a part of how product managers do their jobs.
Peter: Right. No, that’s and, that is, I think, largely true. It is changing, but still largely true. It was probably about 15 years ago that you created a talk called The Experience is the Product. Which I don’t think we realized at the time what we were saying. Organizationally, we were just commenting on what we saw in the world, and that instead of focusing on products as these one-offs, we wanted to encourage people to think about a broader experience context in which these products sat.
I have a 2020 version of that talk still called The Experience is the Product, which makes much more explicit that connection between user experience of the word experience, and product management of the word product and that user experience and product management are essentially the same thing.
Music Break
Peter: One of the companies I’m working with has come to a realization that the quality of the product that they are delivering is subpar. A few years ago, they brought on a very senior design leader who came in, was given a mandate, looked around, was like, “This isn’t great. I gotta do a lot of stuff. I got to fix this,” and wasn’t able to get traction. Wasn’t able to make kind of change happen that they realized needed to happen. And three years later, this team is still producing crap. As I started digging around, I found out that there had also been, within the last couple of years, a new head of product management and a new head of product marketing hired, who similarly came in, looked around, said, “Oh, I gotta make some changes.” And realized much greater success in making changes in their part of the organization.
So, my initial concern was that it was some type of broadly cultural thing, but no, this new head of product was able to do a real reorg, make some real changes. Their new head of product marketing basically changed how they do product marketing, like the processes by which they operated. And I was like, “Why is it that this new senior design leader wasn’t able to realize their vision, the way that this person’s peers did?” And as I unpacked it, I found out that this new design leader, their leaders didn’t have their back the same way that the product management and product marketing leaders basically ran cover for these new leaders that they brought in.
So when the new product leader or the new product marketing leader is making these changes and ruffling feathers and pissing people off, and the message is going back to their boss, “What’s what’s going on here? So, and so’s doing all this stuff. This is new, it’s different. It’s not right.” Those leaders were like, “You know what? That person’s in charge. If this is what they think needs to happen, they have my full support.” in this design context, when that happened, those super senior design leaders told this new design leader, “Hey, Hey, you need to back off a bit. You’re upsetting people. You’re not doing it the way we work here.”
And what it pointed out to me is, however senior you are as a leader, you need another leader to support you in the change that you are trying to make.
We tend to think that leaders are almost operating on an island or like if they have a strong enough vision they can just carry people forward.
And in reality, leaders need leaders to protect and cover and enable and support them. And it’s not something I had been as cognizant of, until seeing this side-by-side compare-and-contrast of a leader who’s been given that cover and the change they were able to make, and a leader not given that cover and them getting stonewalled.
And now years later, I’m hearing that this leader maybe isn’t delivering up to what would be expected. And it’s like, “Yeah, because they weren’t given the support they needed when, they were like, ‘Hey, we should do these things.’”
Jesse: You didn’t let them optimize the environment for their own success…
Peter: Yeah, yeah…
Jesse: …so don’t be surprised when they’re not successful. Yeah. Yeah. And, this goes back a little bit to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, about the early days of agile and how those folks made the case for that change in those organizations.
And it did eventually take somebody up top who didn’t understand the deeper implications, who didn’t understand the reasons for all of the changes, say, “I don’t care that I don’t understand it. I believe in you. And I believe in what you’re doing and I believe you’re the right person to orchestrate this.”
And that I think is a level of credibility and trust that engineering leaders had circa 2005 as they were starting to push agile as process change, as cultural change, in these organizations, that designers haven’t gotten to yet. And in fact, product managers have stepped in and they’ve already got more power than we’ve got and they just showed up.
Peter: Yeah, I think it ties back to what we talked quite a while ago about trust and about relationships. And I think a lot of design leaders don’t know how important it is to manage up and manage those relationships well, in order to then manage down to get what you want.
They come in, look around, they see the problem. They feel it must be evident to everybody and they start trying to make change and it tends to be out and down. ‘Cause that’s where they’re seeing problems are. And they haven’t done the work to manage up, to play the politics, to get the relationships, to get the connections, to get the cover so that when they then do manage down, it’s going to ruffle feathers, right? Change, upsets people. So you need to have prepared yourself and others for that disruption and seeded the ground appropriately to make sure that when there’s the hue and cry about change, you are enabled to continue that change.
Not encouraged to just roll it back.
Jesse: And I think it’s on the design leader as well to accurately assess the organization’s true appetite for disruption.
Peter: Appetite for disruption!
Jesse: Our new album.
By the way, you have to know that your leadership is already on board with the chaos that’s going to come with change before you start trying to make it, because if you start trying to make that change when you’re not sure if your boss wants it or is ready for it… I mean, we ran into this over and over again, as consultants at Adaptive Path, where would come into organizations, we would be working directly with a client who was very motivated to create change, had gotten the budget to bring us in and had spun up a whole bunch of work around creating that change. But had not accurately assessed their leadership’s appetite for it. And the work ended up dead in the water as a result.
Peter: Totally. Totally. Yeah. and while it would be easy to point fingers at the super senior leaders for not providing the cover for this new leader to realize the changes they wanted, I did also realize that this new leader hadn’t done their diligence in making sure they’d had the relationships established.
They had gotten very problem-focused and “I’m just going to solve the problem,” which designers do and had lost sight of the people parts around that.
Jesse: And this is really what was behind my pivot toward leadership coaching, helping individuals maintain that level of awareness and that level of engagement beyond the tactics of delivery, toward: look around the room, who are the people in the room and how are you engaging with them? Because it’s very easy to think that these problems can be solved with more process when actually what you need to be doing is having conversations with people.
Jesse: Well that wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. Thanks, Peter.
Peter: You can find us on our website at https://findingourway.design/, where you can also find past episodes and complete transcripts of every episode, as well as a contact page where you can send us your thoughts. We read everything that comes through, and those submissions have often spurred further discussions.
Jesse: Thanks, Peter.
Peter: Thanks, Jesse.
Peter: Me me, me, me, me… Do you have a top knot or back knot or something?
Jesse: I have a, I have a high pony.
Peter: Is that what it’s called?
Jesse: That’s what I’m calling it.
Peter: So you have a pony that is high.
Jesse: Yes. Yes.
Peter: It’s those Oakland oats.
Jesse: It’s, it’s wandering around my backyard. Just sort of like eating everything.
15: Mailbag—Funding models; from output to impact; personal safety and security
Jul 24, 2020
In which Jesse and Peter answer questions on funding models, shifting from output to impact, demonstrating value, and the challenges of being a design leader right now.
Questions addressed:
(01:00) “How does a good business fund design activity?”
(09:28) “How can one handle being a good lead designer, when in the company where you work, the majority of product owners don’t understand their role.”
(12:43) “[How can] design influence their orgs to move from an artifact/output-based model of design to a practice/impact one?”
(16:40) “How [can] a design team better frame their unique value inside an organization that is crowded out by engineering voices and investment. How can I articulate the value that the design team creates as being as critical as sound software engineering?”
(26:34) “How can I help my team feel secure and supported when my own world is adrift on stormy seas,” and “How to help my designers feel safe and secure in rocky times.”
Transcript
Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse invite you on their journey as they navigate the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz. And, as always, with me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello Peter.
Peter: Hi, Jesse. So today as we enter a kind of summer hiatus, we thought we would take questions from listeners. We polled listeners across Twitter and LinkedIn and got a number of questions.
To start, thanks to everybody who offered a question, we read them all.
We won’t be able to get to them all.
There were a set of questions that came in that were essentially around the idea of how to value design
Lar Veale on Twitter asks us: “How does a good business fund design activity?”
Jesse: Where does the money come from?
Peter: This is one of those topics that when I think about understanding what’s really going on behind the scenes, one of those moments for design leaders, at least for some design leaders, is when they realize that finance runs everything.
Those design leaders have never been equipped to handle that conversation, but the budgets that they get, the headcount that they get, the resources that they get, all of that gets reduced to money. And that money is controlled by those folks over there in finance and in order for design to succeed, the design leader now needs to figure out how to bridge with finance.
Jesse: Right. A whole new audience, a whole new language, a whole different set of things than the leader has ever had to engage with as a designer, most likely.
Peter: When I read this question, I actually thought about a company that we are both familiar with. The funding model was an interesting one. They have a massive centralized product design team.
And the funding for those designers comes from the different lines of business. And so even though the team is managed centrally, the money is contributed, essentially, in a decentralized fashion. And it led to what I considered to be the existential crisis of the design organization, which is a lack of control over how many people they hired and what they had those people work on, because a design leader needs to be able to make a decision around what are people working on, based on the priorities of the business as they understand it.
But if your funding presupposes your headcount, you have now had a key lever of your decision making taken away from you. And then that further puts you in a subservient relationship to that line of business, because you’re basically their work for hire.
Jesse: That’s an interesting take, because it suggests that if you can’t get close to the sources of funding, if you can’t get in a position of power around your funding, you’re never going to have the strategic influence as a design organization that you want to have, is that true?
Peter: I think that’s true. But my ideal world is… Let’s say taking that example where you have different lines of business who all recognize that they need design. Instead of enabling this kind of transactional relationship between that line of business and design, now all those lines of business, somewhat blindly, maybe based on a percentage of their revenue, or percentage of their effort, or some algorithm separate from all of this, that line of business basically pays a tax to the centralized design function. And that goes into a big pool of money that is managed by this design function.
The design team, then looking across the entire business, identifies what matters, what’s important, what are we going to act against, and figures out how to shape its teams and resources to deliver on what the whole business has deemed important.
One of the things that you get with this, that is hard to do when you’re working in this transactional relationship, to answer your other point around being able to make a strategic impact, is that ability to work across the lines of business.
Jesse: You know, I do think that there is a concrete value for businesses in having those purse strings controlled by product owners rather than by design organizations, because those are the people who are currently engaged at that peer level with each other to do that strategic coordination across your product lines.
Unless you’re going to invest design with that responsibility, which really means in some ways elevating design above product management, you’re not going to get there. And so I’m curious about how you do get there.
So the question is, How does a good business fund design activity? What’s the best funding model for design that you’ve seen in your experience?
Peter: The best model is essentially tied to general company growth. When I was at Groupon, we didn’t have lines of business that funded me or whatever. We had an understanding of how we wanted to grow as an organization, and there was an appreciation of what was needed from a product development standpoint, not just design, but product managers, engineering, data analysis, dev ops, all that kind of stuff.
And design just kind of gets carried along with that growth. Now that ends up leading to ratios often, which is a heuristic for design funding. So if we’re going to hire eight engineers, we’re going to hire one designer. That kind of thing. And those ratios, I’m not against, but I’m not a huge fan of. I find that they are a proxy for understanding growth.
What I’ve tried to do is, when you’re engaged in these headcount planning points in the second half of the year, you’re doing the planning for the next year and you understand what the strategic direction is, and thus what all the programs are. I then plan my designers against those programs, regardless of what other decisions are being made. If we’re going to engage in these five programs of work, well, I’m going to need 10 designers, roughly two per program. And that’s what I asked for.
What I’ve also learned is you always have to ask for twice as many resources as you actually think you need.
Jesse: The secret ratio.
Peter: Yeah, well, you know, it’s negotiation.
When you start operating in these funding models, typical for any large enterprise, you’ve probably already lost the plot, because those funding models end up becoming very transactional and it doesn’t only affect design.
So you were talking about product management and others. What you’re starting to see is… lines of business. You have your line of business over there. And they’re responsible for P and L of a different business. And then separate from those lines of businesses are technology services. And so these UX designers say are part of a technology service that includes development, engineering, product owners, QA, and dev ops and all that kind of stuff.
Jesse: So everything about product is construed as basically a service organization to the business.
Peter: Exactly. These product development organizations, say they embrace agile at scale, maybe Scaled Agile.
The problem is baked into agile, baked into scrum. It assumes that that team has autonomy. But if that team is really in service to the line of business, they don’t have autonomy. They’re getting their requirements from outside of their bubble, from people who don’t actually understand what’s happening, but just have these expectations and that really puts the product owner in a difficult position.
This is one of those challenges, I think, product owners or product managers face that designers often don’t respect or understand—is how much of the decision making has been done before the product owner even starts their work. And they’re just expected to execute on a set of requirements that have been handed to them. One of my clients has been operating in this way and they’re starting to take people from the line of business and make them the product owners.
You know, that’s one of those key distinctions between quote unquote tech, companies, your FAANG companies, and your legacy firms. In tech, those product owners, those product managers are the business there. It’s not a distinction between a line of business and a product.
In these legacy enterprises, you have lines of business and tech as these distinct entities within the business. And once you have that, you’ve basically already lost it. You’re done. You might as well go back to waterfall.
Jesse: Wow. that’s I think a bold statement. It’s interesting that you mentioned this just because we actually have an email here that is related to this, coincidentally.
Marina writes in via email, “How can one handle being a good lead designer, when in the company where you work, the majority of product owners don’t understand their role? They are merely order takers for a higher level of the company.”
And that’s exactly what you’re talking about. She’s sharing the frustration of being in the lead designer role and having to be the person who is chasing down the true meaning behind the requirements that they’re being handed, where the product owners can’t articulate it for them, because it’s not a conversation that they’ve even had with the people in the business that they’re engaging with.
And so then it ends up falling, not on the lead designer, as much as it does on the design leader to reach out into those other parts of the business and start that engagement, but that’s challenging when, to your point about funding models, the funding model that you’ve been set up with creates a prejudice in people’s minds about the nature of the value that you deliver.
There are all kinds of assumptions about your value that are built into how you are funded. And so when you’re engaging with these new parts, these organizations, when you’re diving deeper into the business to have these conversations about the true meaning of these requirements, it’s really hard to engage them in these strategic conversations, when their perception of you is colored by this funding model that puts you in a purely tactical service-oriented role.
Peter: All of that is exactly right. To address Marina’s question, you know, these product owners, they may understand their role, they might be delivering their role. Their role is to execute on what the higher levels of the company have told them. So order-taking might be their role.
Now, that’s not what we believe is what product owners should be doing, in an ideal context. But that might be what they are expected to be doing in that specific context. And so this is no longer a design and delivery problem.
This is a change management issue. You need to start working with your product peers and engineering peers and, developing arguments for why you should be working differently with those higher orders of the company. You need to help those higher orders of the company understand how they are constraining opportunity from square one with how they are behaving, and that if they want to realize greater potential, need to change how you all work together.
So, it’s not a straightforward design problem. It is this organization, process-oriented change management problem, that’s going to be really hard, it’s not going to be straightforward. It’s a quick thing to say, and it will take years, it will take literally years to deliver.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, when framed that way, what I hear is a lot of politics and politics is a slow and messy business and anything that requires a lot of politics to bring about is not something that’s going to happen on a six-month timeline. It’s going to be 18 months to two years to lay the groundwork for that kind of change at that scale that you’re talking about.
Music break
Peter: I think we can connect this thread to another question, from Pavel Samsonov, who asks, “It’d be great to hear your thoughts on how designers can influence their orgs to move from an artifact/output-based model of design to a practice/impact-based one.”
When I was working with Capital One, many years ago, I ended up talking a little bit with Aradhana Goel, who developed an approach to trying to address this funding model, to make it less directly transactional—“I give you money. You give me heads.” And instead, because her background was consulting, she was able to draw on that consulting practice and say, “You’re not giving me money for heads. You’re giving me money for results. And here’s my commitment to you. I will deliver this kind of impact through this work. So let’s have that agreement in terms of figuring out what are essentially metrics of our success that I am committing to in exchange for this money. And so you will give me that money. I will spend it as I see fit to deliver that impact. And that’s my commitment to you. And if I don’t deliver on that, you can hold me accountable.”
And so you change the conversation away from money for heads to money for results. And that’s, I think, essentially what Pavel was asking about. How do you frame it, not so that it’s about artifacts and outputs, but practice and impact.
And the mechanism I’ve seen that works best, it still takes quite a fair bit of management in order to realize its success, but is, OKRs, objectives and key results.
I had a boss, Jocelyn Mangan, she hired me at Snagajob, and she was a firm believer in OKRs. And OKRs done right focus an organization, not on output, but on impact. Key results should be about, How are we making an impact? Key results aren’t, “I shipped something, check.” Key results are “20% of people are engaged in a new activity” or, ”Revenues have gone up 35%,” or whatever, and you focus on those results and whatever it takes to get to those results, that’s up to the team to figure out.
That might be a mechanism that you can introduce to shift that orientation away from output and towards outcomes. And if you’re looking for resources on that front, Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke is probably the best handbook for OKRs that I am familiar with.
Jesse: It’s a good one. You highlight an interesting challenge in this, which is that in a lot of organizations, the way that design work is framed is not actually that much in the control of the design leader. That the way that the value is framed by the executive leadership of the organization is often filtered through the perception of design by your peers, particularly your peers in technology as, as you were talking about, design often ends up lashed to technology, as an enterprise level service in these organizations, then the models by which development and engineering are managed, then become the models that design inherits, because that’s what the executive leadership is used to consuming from their technology organization.
It then entails a reframing of what a performance metric even is in some of these organizations, to bring about the kind of conversation that you’re talking about to shift that perception.
Peter: I like your use of the verb lashed, like somehow we’re kind of manacled or otherwise like literally bound to these technologies. So what you just said, I think connects, to Chris Jones, who sent us an email:
“I’m curious how you would consult a design team to better frame their unique value inside an organization that is crowded out by engineering voices and investment. How can I articulate the value the design team creates as being as critical as sound software engineering?”
This is part of why, a number of episodes ago, we talked as much as we did about charter-building and team definition. Design teams don’t do enough to define themselves, which means in the absence of that, they are defined by the others around them and those that preceded them.
Unless a designer is a founder who is establishing a design practice, when the design practice is established, it’s established by a non-designer who has a set of expectations that are likely not as robust or sophisticated as we would hope. And so as design blooms within an organization, it needs to take that time to define itself in a fashion that’s distinct from the other parts of the organization.
I just did this with a product design team. And there were two aspects that I think are interesting in this regard. One is, and I’m biased towards this term, as you’ll see in a moment, one is we define the design team as essentially bearing the torch for humanism within product development. That recognition that there are people at the other end, those people lead messy lives, and it is the design team’s responsibility to make sure that what we build connects with the humanity that we are serving, because frankly, no one else in product development is in this organization.
The product managers are primarily held responsible to revenue goals, and engineering is held responsible to software delivery. And so no one actually has that empathetic view of the customer. There’s an extractive view of the customer as a source, as a source of revenue, but not an empathetic view of the customer. And so let’s make explicit design exists to serve the customer in that way, because nobody else in this context is.
And then the other thing you can do is, be very clear in your measures of success, the value that you see yourself bringing. I think there’s some concern that designers, you know, don’t want to be held accountable. It’s like, no, here’s a set of metrics. Hold us accountable. Please hold us accountable. But hold us accountable to stuff that we think that matters, that we can now get others to agree matters. We’re happy to sign up for them. Yeah. So you have to make the time and effort to be explicit about defining design within your context yourselves, and not let others define it for you, or allow it to have happened through neglect or ignorance.
Jesse: Yeah, you can’t just leave it out there and hope that it’s going to be all right. You have to take active control of the message about design and its value within the organization. And I think this comes back around to something that we’ve talked about in the past, which is honestly the need for a design leader, especially early on, to be something of a salesperson for design as a practice, more broadly, and not simply for the value that their team delivers, but the value of design itself.
Peter: Yeah. Looking at Chris’s question again, I think it ties into Pavel’s. “How can I articulate the value the design team creates as being as critical as sound software engineering?” And I think the way you do that is try to understand what does the company value. So in this instance that I was talking about before, the company valued revenue obviously, but, okay.
So if that’s the highest order bit that the company is oriented on, well, then connect what you’re doing to revenue. Show how the efforts of your team will generate more revenue. Maybe reduce the bottom line. It shouldn’t be that hard to connect the efforts of design to those levers that the business is most interested in, you just have to do the work.
When we did that ROI of design report a thousand years ago at Adaptive Path, we had this thing called the linking elephants. Where you connected a business problem with a desired behavior, you measure that behavior, you connect a value metric to that behavior, and then you identify a financial metric.
And so you can say, if, you know, we did this for a financial services client, if we can get 20% of our existing customers to open one additional account, so you have a checking account, we want you to open a savings account, or we want you to have a credit card with us. So the desired behavior opening an account. And then there’s modeling there that should allow you to spreadsheet that out.
But, it requires designers and design leaders to be willing to put on their business hat and work with spreadsheets, which is not something many are comfortable with. But if you want to make the kind of change that people are asking for in these questions, you now need to be part of that conversation.
Jesse: I think that’s true. I will say also though, that models like the linking elephants model presumed that there is a trail to follow there. That it presumes that there is something concrete that you can nail down and name at every stage of that investigation into the underlying value of the work.
But the truth is that that’s not always there. And sometimes the value that’s delivered really is not identifiable in as concrete away. And I think in cases like this, it becomes a question of culture, because the truth is that as much as we think of design as being unique in these organizations, in the sort of weirdness of design as a function, the truth is that most organizations have some functions for which the value and the impact are not tangible in this way. In these organizations, there will be a culture of decision making around how they measure the unmeasurable, how they qualify the unquantifiable, how they come to decisions about areas where there is value that they can perceive, but that value is intangible.
And if you can figure out where the other intangible sources of value are in the organization, learn about the culture of how the organization makes decisions around those things, you can then start to leverage those patterns in how you make the case for the intangible value of design.
Peter: My sense, based on the questions, is that these folks are in an environment where before they get to be culturally intangibly valuable, they need to be explicit and demonstrate some hard value first. I don’t think it’s an either/or, I think it’s a yes-and.
Jesse: I think these questions do come into play to different degrees based on the maturity of the design organization within the larger organization that they’re a part of because yes, in the early days, there is going to be a lot of proving tactical value. Getting those delivery wins in order to start to gain more attention. But then having to push it toward that broader strategic holistic intangible impact conversation because you can’t rely on your executives to do it for you.
Peter: That’s right. That is exactly right. My point was only that you can’t only pursue the cultural intangible.
Jesse: Oh yeah. Yeah. Just, sometimes there is no trail of evidence to follow.
Peter: Right. Yeah. If I think of engineering as really about building, maybe the challenge here is that there’s a building aspect of design, but then there’s the generative and creative aspects of design.
I think the challenge that we see within the world of quote design unquote, is that there are two components of it that are kind of represented by both sides of the double diamond. There’s design work that can be used in a strategic fashion that identifies opportunities, that’s generative and creative and harder to measure. That’s where you’re going to be more in the intangible. And then there’s the design work in the second diamond. And that’s much more about delivery, much more about production, much more about tweaking to realize incremental gains.
Both are valuable, both are called design, but they’re really different parts of the value chain. They don’t think that that function that helps with delivery, you can take those same practices and generate that strategic understanding.
In either way, design gets dismissed. Design, if seen as a delivery function, design is not brought in to help with the strategic kinds of questions. But if it’s seen as primarily strategic, then design is sometimes just seen as a bunch of hand-wavy management consultants who don’t really know what it takes deliver value in the very end. And it’s just like, we can’t win either way.
Jesse: Right, yeah. I think that’s true. And I think that this leads to some of the confusion in the marketplace about what a UX role even entails. So we have these young people coming out of these UX programs and boot camps and so forth who think that they’re going to get to do soup to nuts UX out there in the world. And the roles that are available, you’re going to be kind of shunted to one side or another.
Music break
Peter: So two questions that came in, both on Twitter, both addressed the challenges of being a design leader right now. Austin Govella asked about, “helping my team feel secure and supported when my own world is a drift on stormy seas,” and Joie Chung asked, “The main thing top of mind these days is maybe getting advice on how to help my designers feel safe and secure in rocky times, and especially keeping the morale up after dealing with layoffs of other teams and reorgs because of those layoffs. The key thing is there’s a lot of change and I can’t promise them there won’t be more.”
Jesse: Hmm. Stormy seas.
Peter: So we’ve got stormy seas, rocky times, its a lot of weather, and, nautical references.
Jesse: Well, there’s a lot of weather for sure.
Helping people hang in through layoffs and reorgs is tough. I think it puts everybody into a questioning mindset, and they start questioning things that are not actually up for grabs, but it can feel that way. It can feel like everything about a company is suddenly questionable when the leadership starts making these unexpected and rather dramatic moves. You know, this is where I come back to the stuff that I’ve been talking about all season, which is building emotionally resilient teams. And that has mostly to do with the people that you interact with every day and whether you feel like they are on your side and whether you feel like you are on theirs.
And if you were feeling strong alignment with the people around you, and if you feel like you can show up honestly and vulnerably with what’s challenging you, and can feel supported by the people around you, that goes a long way, because you can’t actually promise as a design leader that there won’t be more change. You can’t promise that that change won’t be really very difficult for people. You can’t insulate them. You can’t keep them safe.
Peter: You can’t promise that you’ll be there.
A glib answer to this that I still think has some merit is, it is up to the leader, even in difficult times, rocky and stormy times, to maintain positivity. If we extend the nautical metaphor, to point the way forward towards calmer seas, to orient people on not getting stuck in this muck, but problem solving around how are we going to get to a more desirable outcome and how do we focus our energies now. Not on worrying about what’s happening around us, that we don’t have control over, but on doing what we can on the things that we do have control over, to make progress and to chart that progress and to recognize the steps that you’re taking to move things forward, and even if it’s very near term or very seemingly minor, getting folks focused on those steps towards something better.
Jesse: Yeah, I think that what you’re speaking to is a kind of a leveling up that the leader can do. To step back away from the immediate tactical churn of the moment and remind the team, if you’ve done charter work, as we’ve talked about on this show, then you have something to fall back on to talk about shared purpose. And if that charter seems to be in doubt in the current environment, then you have your own sense of purpose to fall back on. And this is something that I think is really critical for maintaining that positivity that you’re talking about, which I agree is absolutely essential, which is that you, as the leader, have to take care of yourself, you have to maintain your own resilience.
You have to maintain your own ability to bounce back in the face of these things. And what that means is making sure that you are, even in the uncertainty, even in the doubt, even in the face of all of it, remembering for yourself, why you do what you do and giving yourself whatever space, whatever time, whatever ritual you need to maintain that connection for yourself so that you can show up for your team.
Peter: Yeah, I… one) try to get plenty of sleep. I find that that has more impact on my personal mood than literally any other thing in my life. As you were talking, it reminded me of a leadership coach that I worked with through this former boss of mine through Jocelyn, she had an executive coach that she brought to work with all of her directs, including me. And this woman had a model that maybe you’re familiar with. I don’t know where she got it from, but it was this idea of the line. And there’s below the line and above the line, and below the line is that initial, emotional, visceral reaction that often is frightened, negative, worried, and her point is to acknowledge that which happens below the line, but don’t let that drive your behavior. Like sit with it, recognize it, work through it. But if you behave based on your below-the-line feelings, you are going to lash out.
You are going to yell, you are going to engage in negative behaviors that bring others down. And so what you need to do is figure out, how do you get yourself above the line, into a more, progressive, positive, optimistic, forward-looking space, that’s still true to the concerns that you were feeling below the line, but now your response is more measured and is one of taking charge, of taking positive action, of problem solving, of, again, that kind of forward motion.
So it’s not a simple reaction. Sometimes, it’s the simplest thing of, like, what we say to a five-year-old before they react: count to 10, take belly breaths.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What you’re talking about is behaving intentionally and not reflexively. And those reflexes don’t always look like a big lashing out or yelling at your team or anything like that. Those reflexes can also look like procrastination. They can also look like suddenly becoming really, really vague in your communications or avoiding particular people or particular conversations.
There are lots of counterproductive reflexive habits that are driven by these emotional states that we find ourselves in, and yeah, there’s definitely a lot to leadership that involves simply being able to manage your own emotional states. And being able to process whatever comes up for you and to be able to hold yourself in non-judgment in the same ways that we’ve talked about holding others in non-judgment. In order to maintain, and this fear of trust and mutual support.
First, you’ve gotta be able to give that support to yourself.
Peter: Part of, I think, giving that support to yourself, whether it’s something you invest in directly, or your organization invests in for you, is recognition that you need your outlet, you can’t bottle this stuff up. You need a way to get this out.
I mean, this was something that Maria touched on when we spoke with her, which is at some point you get to a point where simply talking to your manager isn’t enough. They’re not going to be the ones to help you. And maybe, depending on your relationship with your manager, maybe you can be frank about the challenges you’re facing. You can, you can expose a little bit of that negativity upwards, because you need their help. You need some guidance.
Jesse: And a good leader should expect that, and be ready for it.
Peter: Exactly, exactly. So that they can then help you work through that. Maybe even just talk it out. Sometimes it’s one of those things, it’s like therapy. Just getting it out of your head and into the world or sharing that challenge with someone else makes you realize like you’re not alone in it.
And that is enough to help you get from below the line to above the line. But then hopefully they have strategies for thinking about how to address whatever the specific situation is. If you don’t have that, that’s where you might need to find coaches, mentors, but it is incumbent upon you to identify people that you can turn to when things become difficult, or folks are just going to suffer with what you were just talking about, Jesse, in terms of kind of bringing it on themselves and kind of becomes this vicious cycle, even if it’s not aggressive, it might be, procrastinating or literally passive but it’s, it’s problematic.
Jesse: Yes, there are a million paths to self sabotage.
Peter: How many have you taken?
Jesse: I’m, I’m, I’m trying to catch them all just like Pokemon.
Uh, you and I, over the course of this first season of this show have often talked about the path of the leader as a fairly lonely one and a fairly isolating one and a fairly solitary one. And we often talk about what do you do when you’re the only one who can do the thing that needs to be done. And I think that what you point out is really essential for all leaders, which is not to stay alone. But to go find yourself a peer group and find some folks that you can turn to for support.
Peter: Right. I want to, refocus on a word that both Joie and Austin had, which was the word “secure,” and Joie asks how to help designers feel safe/secure. Austin asks, “helping my team feel secure and supported.” And I think… I’m not certain… I’m thinking through this… I’m not certain that it is the design leader’s job to provide security, particularly in the face of this rockines, if that security feels like a false promise, right?
You don’t want to mislead, and security might literally be misleading to your team.
Here, that security would be, “Everything is going to be fine. You’re not going anywhere. You’ve got a good job. Do work and it will all be okay.” That might not be true. And you might know that might not be true. And so don’t provide a false sense of security if that’s not going to help your team actually do what they need to, to address whatever the situation is. Austin used the word “supported.” That, you can do. That is within your control. You can support your team a hundred percent and you should do everything you can to support your team. Get them the resources they need. Give them the time that they need, give them guidance around how to move forward in the ways we were talking about. Maybe it’s baby steps on project work, and just focus on what we do control and try to ignore what we don’t control to make your way through, Right?
So you can support them. But I don’t think you can help them feel secure. Their security is their responsibility. Through your supporting actions, through your nurturing actions, through your leadership and guidance, you are going to affect their security, but you cannot provide security. They are not your children.
Jesse: You can definitely undermine a sense of security through your choices.
Peter: Well, right. And you will undermine that sense of security if you provide a false sense of security that then is not delivered on. As we discussed, then
they’ll just lose trust, and then all bets are off. So, what I would say is focus less on security and focus more on trust. And engage in behaviors that encourage your team to trust you. ‘Cause that’s about all you’re going to have control over, and one another, because that’s all your going to have control over.
Jesse: Yes. Beautifully put.
Peter: Does that distinction make sense to you?
Jesse: Oh, yeah, that does make sense to me. Yeah, I actually don’t have anything to add to that. That was great. So with that, I think we ought to just say thank you to folks for sticking with us through these first 15 episodes.
Peter: Yeah, this is 15, huh? Wow.
Before we go, I do want to shout out folks who sent us questions that we did not yet get to. This is going to be like Magic Mirror on Romper Room. I’m not going to give people’s full, I’m not going to give people’s full names. But Dan, Daniel, Shelby, Sharon: Jesse and I see you, we read you, we appreciate your questions. Some of those questions frankly are episodes in and of themselves. And we expect to get to them when we’re on the other side of this hiatus, we will not lose them, but we couldn’t get to it.
Jesse: All good questions, some of them we were so confident we would come back to, we wanted to give them enough space.
Peter: Exactly. Exactly.
So with that, we are wrapping up another episode of Finding Our Way, and wrapping up what Jesse and I have referred to as this first season, this 15 episode chunk. We are taking some time off for the summer. And so…
Jesse: Get out in the sunshine!
Peter: That’s right. get some vitamin D, limit our exposure to COVID and episodes should be be coming out again, sometime, we think in the late-ish August timeframe.
Jesse: Right around Labor Day, plus or minus.
Peter: Yeah. And so until then, we thank you for joining us on our journey, as we have been figuring out how we find our way through some of these challenges of design and design leadership.
And just because we are not publishing doesn’t mean we’re not around, feel free to hit us up on Twitter. I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg. You can find us through our website, https://findingourway.design/, where you can also find all of our episodes, transcripts of every episode, and then a contact form that we read.
That’s where some of the questions that we have received came through. And until then have a great summer, take care of yourselves. Take care of those around you. And we look forward to further discussions in the future. Thank you, Jesse.
Jesse: Finding our way.
Hidden Track
Peter: [Singing] How many roads must a man walk down before he is a…
Jesse: Is the, this is the musical episode, finding our way.
Peter: [Singing] A whole new world.
Jesse: Peter, what are you doing?
Peter: I’m singing. I had a, I had a double espresso, on top of my morning coffee, so I am good to go.
Jesse: Oh man. Well, I should have been more prepared, I guess…
Peter: You can…
Jesse: I thought we were going to sort of take it easy here for the last…
Peter: You can be yin to my yang.
Jesse: Isn’t this where we came in?
14: “If your team’s work isn’t good, you didn’t set clear expectations,” and other Design Leadership Truisms
Jul 15, 2020
In which Peter shares some of his Design Leadership Truisms (inspired by the work of Jenny Holzer), and Jesse reacts.
The image that spurred the episode:
Truisms discussed: “People are not their job titles.” “If your team’s work isn’t good, you didn’t set clear expectations.” “Bad design is a result of context, not individual aptitude.” “If you focus on the organization, quality will take care of itself.” “You cannot calculate an ROI for design.” “If you haven’t pissed someone off, you are not doing your job right.” “For someone who talks a lot about empathy. You show little for your colleagues.” “Introversion inhibits design’s ultimate impact.”
Transcript
Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hi Jesse.
Jesse: So we were riffing on in email other things that we could talk about today and sort of almost in passing, you shared this image with me, which, is this a slide from one of your talks?
Peter: Yeah. So, last October I spoke at the Design Leadership Summit and I gave my design leadership talk called “Coach, Diplomat, Champion, Architect: The Four Archetypes of the Design Leader.” And when I first gave this talk, at the very end, I tacked on what I called “hard truths about design leadership,” and it was a series of statements.
And I realized before this event, because this event was a little more homegrown, a little less polished, I felt I could play with it a bit more. I actually ended up pulling up those statements at the very beginning. And what I did was essentially a cold open, so I walk out on stage, you can see in this… there’s a YouTube video, I walk out on stage wearing all black. A black shirt, black pants. And the title slide says “Design Leadership Truisms, from mer-Holzer” because I’m trying, I’m playing on Jenny Holzer, and her work with truisms. And then I just state each of these truisms.
And then the slide I gave you was all those truisms on one slide, just like, here’s everything that I just shared. And I ended up doing that as this preamble to my normal talk.
Jesse: I love this. So, first of all, I definitely, when I was reading the slide, detected the Holzer-ian nature of it. Her work is something that I’ve admired for many, many years. And I think anybody who has read any amount of what I’ve done can detect a trend toward the aphoristic.
Peter: Declarative aphoristic.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. The desire to reduce ideas down to their most potent and concise expression. And that is something that I’ve always admired about Jenny Holzer’s work as an artist as well. And so you sent me this thing, and that sounds awesome by the way, dressing all in black. I think it’s always a smart look.
And I just started reading a couple of them and I was like, I have opinions about these. And then I put it away. And I was like, I want to talk about these opinions later. So there were a couple of these that I’ve glanced at for a while…
Peter: So is now later?
Jesse: Later has arrived, Yes. And I thought it would be fun for us to just read through them and talk about them and see how many we get through in the time that we have. And, maybe see if there are any of them where we have any particularly interesting reflections or points of contention.
Peter: Why don’t I read them? Since I wrote them.
Jesse: Okay. In fact, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put the slide away, so I’m not looking at it. So I’m just listening to you read.
Peter: Great.
People are not their job titles.
Jesse: Implicit in this, I sense, is the idea that you should not treat people like they are their job titles.
Peter: Yes, basically, too often we are encouraged, particularly as managers, to reduce people to their job title and then swap people with the same job title and treat them the same, treat them interchangeably.
And we need to engage with everybody as individuals. A job title should not define anyone.
Jesse: Well, I think, especially when you’re talking about design roles, where the particular background, the particular creative strengths of the individual are going to very, very strongly influence the results that you get, I think that is definitely true.
I think there is a spectrum. That there are some roles that are more operational, that are processes that can be taught. But in the case where you are looking at people who are going to make a creative contribution to where the entire endeavor is going, in those cases, you do want to look more closely at the individuals and what they bring to the table. So yeah. Yes. And yes.
Peter: I’m not going to read them all. I’m realizing I’m going to skip a couple.
Jesse: You should definitely choose because there are too many.
Peter:
If your team’s work isn’t good, you didn’t set clear expectations.
Jesse: I’m going to say no to this one. I think that there are lots of ways in which a team’s work can go wrong. I also think expectation setting from leaders can go awry when the leaders themselves are not clear on what they want. So there’s knowing what you want and then there’s communicating it. And those are separate skills.
Peter: Right. So that would be not setting clear expectations.
Jesse: Okay. Fair.
Peter: Behind this, is talking to design leaders who are frustrated by the quality of the work their team is producing, but then when you ask them what they have done to help people understand what is acceptable in terms of quality, you realize the answer is, “Nothing.”
I’ve literally had conversations with design leaders who basically imply that they feel other people should read their minds as to what is an acceptable level of quality and deliver on that.
Jesse: I hear that. And I definitely have seen that. And. I know that I have gotten impatient in the past with designers when I felt that I had to explain something to them that I felt they should already know about what constitutes quality in design, and that impatience for me came from an expectation that I wouldn’t have to be teaching as much as I found myself teaching in that role, in that context, in that moment, especially in the context of consulting work, where there was potentially not really enough time to teach skills along the way as we were trying to meet client deadlines.
So I think there’s an element in this of how much mentorship is the leader willing to take on, in bringing people along with understanding their expectations. And what do you do when that gap really does exist, when there is somebody who simply doesn’t understand the baseline thing that you thought you wouldn’t have to explain.
Peter: There is no universal standard for quality when it comes to design.
So when I talk to these design leaders and I ask them, so how does someone deep within your team know what good looks like? And when they think about it, they respond, “Well, I guess that’s their manager helping them, like through direction or critique or review.”
So design quality, two things there. One, it becomes very localized, and so different managers with a different understanding of quality might be managing towards different quality within the same organization. And two, it’s largely folklore, it’s spoken. It is not codified, and that raises its own challenges. Because something that’s not codified can become quite arbitrary. It can change, and that’s not great.
One assumes that, if you are hiring someone, they know what they’re doing, right? You’ve gone through some process to vet their ability. And if they’re not doing good work too often, I find the design leader thinks that they don’t know good design. When in fact they don’t know what good design looks like in this environment or what is expected of them.
Jesse: So definitely I hear in that, the trap of assuming that your standard is a universally held standard, that is therefore universally understood by your fellow professionals. Right?
Peter: Right. I have a few elements here on this that are related to quality. Let me read the next one.
Bad design is a result of context, not individual aptitude.
Jesse: So what you’re saying is a good designer can produce bad design if they are in the wrong context. And it seems to be letting the designer off the hook a little bit in terms of what they bring to the table. This seems to imply that individual performance issues are more often a sign of organizational dysfunction. Either that dysfunction exists at the level of recruiting and hiring, or it exists at the level of performance management and mentorship and skills development.
Peter:
If you focus on the organization, quality will take care of itself.
Jesse: Hmm. I don’t think I believe that. In fact, I think that articulates a gap that I am trying to fill in my work, in that I think the quality arises out of high-trust, collaborative relationships and not out of organizational structures.
Peter: I don’t disagree. I think I would place that as an organizational matter, the point of this being, design quality is often not addressed until you’re looking at output. When, in fact, what drives that output was heavily determined by a series of factors long preceding that output, that I am maybe broadly labeling is organizational, but I would also argue organizational as opposed to say procedural, or a matter of process.
Jesse: Okay. So what is the distinction between organization and process in your view? Because I guess that those things are very much intertwined to me.
Peter: So I wrote a whole book on organization and never really addressed process, except for including the Double Diamond briefly. When we talk about design, we often talk about process—that’s a thing you can talk about ‘cause it’s set of activities, it’s a set of methods, it’s a shared understanding that we can bring to the conversation.
What we often don’t talk about are the organizational factors behind the scenes that lay a foundation for the activities: how you recruit and hire, how you manage, how you mentor, how you grow, how you value, how you coordinate in relationship with one another within design, and how you coordinate In relationship between design and other functions. All of those things are the organizational matters.
Your internal agency organization can be practicing user centered design.
It’s just going to find itself highly constrained because all that user research is almost for naught because it’s not actually able to drive the upfront thinking because, organizationally, the designers aren’t in the right relationship with their peers, with the power to make that change.
Jesse: I guess there were a few different ways to think about it. So, there is a football analogy that comes to mind, which is that you have the players on the field and the players are playing certain positions. And you have different ways you can line those players up according to those positions. And there are different positions you can deploy on the field, according to your needs. And so that feels like the organizational stuff. Who are the players on the field? What are the skills that I’m putting out there to accomplish my goal?
And then you’ve got process, which is the playbook. Once you get the players on the field, how do they interact with each other? How do they move in an organized way toward a goal?
And then you’ve got the people stuff at the individual level of the stuff that you’ve been talking about, recruiting and hiring and making sure that the guy that you have brought in as wide receiver is actually somebody who is suitable to be a wide receiver.
But I think there’s this other level, too, of team cohesion. And this is something that I’ve heard you talk about, about how the coordination, the orchestration of the individuals who are performing these roles in the context of this process and ensuring that they stay in sync with one another along the way. And that’s the rocky shoal that I’ve seen too many corporate ships run aground on. They got all the organizational stuff right. They got all the process stuff right. But no one was looking after the people. No one was looking after the relationships and it all fell apart along the way.
Peter: Hmm, I guess I would say if you’re not looking after people and relationships, you’re not looking after the organizational stuff. You might be architecting an organization.
Jesse: I guess that’s the thing that I hear in this that I would push back against, is the architectural impulse to think that you can solve all of these problems, a priori, before any people show up in the door.
Peter: Yes, that I believe. Part of my point is to shift the focus, though, away from process and even, again, individual aptitude, towards matters of organization. And I would include relationship within that, because as I see it, when you have an organization, you don’t only have the structure, but you have the connection between those elements and, yes, you could even look at that architecturally, but there’s a relationship there that I think matters and is part of what I intend when I talk about organization.
Jesse: Okay. Well, thank you. That’s clarifying to me.I don’t know if I have a particularly narrow view of it, or if I have inherited a particularly narrow view of it from the things that I’ve read, but I tend to think of the organizational stuff, in terms of let’s figure out management reporting, performance management, incentive structures, that will ensure a certain quality of outcome.
And I don’t think that stuff goes far enough. And I agree with you. I don’t think the process stuff goes far enough either.
Peter: Well, and my sense is folks focus on that which they can get their hands around, and the structural organizational stuff is easier. But insufficient. It’s the same reason that one of the challenges that we have in delivering good designed experiences is we end up getting nudged towards delivering only on that which can be measured. Through monthly active users. And, how far down a funnel someone gets, et cetera, et cetera.
And we lose sight of this stuff, which can’t be measured, but which is as important in terms of the nature and the quality of the experience. And that comes from a bunch of ineffable details that someone is having engaging with an experience. And the same thing happens with organizations where they over-focus on that which can be measured and modeled, and lose sight of the messy stuff that, as you’re pointing out, is kind of the beating heart of those organizations.
Jesse: I think a corollary of this is the tendency of leaders, when they find themselves challenged by their circumstances, to fall back on those areas where they feel the most empowered, and often the areas where they feel the most empowered are the areas where they feel they have the most control, where they feel like they can dictate circumstances rather than be subjected to them. And so this is where you have leaders run into challenging times and declare it’s time for a reorg, and the team is like, great, this is another challenge on top of the challenges that we were already facing, because reorgs create just immense waves of chaos and confusion through organizations.
But from the leadership perspective, it can feel like they’re taking control of the situation, when in fact all they’re doing is retreating to the things that they do feel some level of control over, because they don’t know what to do about the things that they don’t.
Music break
Peter:
You cannot calculate an ROI for design.
Jesse: Ooh, I suspect that’s almost certainly true, but I’d love to hear your articulation of an argument for it.
Peter: So in 2002, Adaptive Path attempted to unpack the notion of an ROI for design, an ROI for user experience.
What we found was that you couldn’t calculate an ROI for design because design is too integrated with too many other activities, that you can’t isolate design in any meaningful way. That said, what we saw was when you consider design as a lever for business value, when it was involved in the right conversations, when those activities of design were informing strategy, then those businesses both seemed to fare better, and the design teams were much happier, were much more engaged and did what was believed to be better work.
Jesse: I think a lot of this has to do with how UX design has always grown up in the shadow of engineering and engineering management practices and the strong cultural trend within engineering management to attempt to quantize and reduce the work to something that is measurable factory-like piecework.
I mean, one of the most legendary pieces of writing in software engineering management is a book called The Mythical Man Month, which is about, in fact, how you can’t effectively quantize a lot of these things, because you can’t reduce software engineering to that kind of piecework. Software engineering management methods have adapted a lot in the time since that book was written, but there is still this desire that I see in waterfall and agile and everything that’s come since to try to squeeze the work down.
And design is even weirder. A very small amount of design can deliver a vastly disproportionate amount of value across an entire product in a way that the same chunk of development time can’t accomplish the same thing.
And I think that is the disjunct between engineering management practices and design management practices that leads to these breakdowns that we see in these organizations.
Peter: Totally. That’s exactly—…
Peter:
If you haven’t pissed someone off, you are not doing your job right.
Jesse: I think that’s true for as long as design leaders continue to be forced into the role of cultural change agents within organizations, for as long as we are continuing to have to fight for the voice of user research in strategic decisions. As long as we are having to continue to argue for experimentation and collaboration and iteration and adaptation in business strategy and design strategy and technology strategy, we are going to continue to be in this position of resident gadfly within organizations.
My hope is that eventually we get to a place where we have more leaders who understand where we’re coming from, and we don’t have to piss as many people off in order to make our points. It’s an outstanding question for me, whether that is actually possible.
Peter: Right. And there’s a kind of double-edge to this because, you’re talking mostly around a design leader, working with non-designers, and pissing them off as part of change. There’s also, if you haven’t pissed someone off within your team, you’re probably not doing something right.
Jesse: Okay. This, I would like to hear more about.
Peter: Well, right? Because leadership requires making hard decisions and you’re taking a lot of different stuff from different people. But as the leader, you are the one with the authority to make a decision and set a direction.
And that will likely go against somebody’s input that was delivered to you.
I’ve hired people over the objection of folks who were part of the process, because I felt that their contribution, while informative, was essentially misguided, and I had to make a hard call of who to hire between two candidates.
And I made a call that ended up pissing some people off.
I could have either tried to make a more popular call, hiring the person who people were more aligned with, but I didn’t feel that was the right call.
I could have tried to ameliorate, maybe, say, “Let’s not hire anyone.” Let me make a decision by not making a decision. that probably wouldn’t piss anybody off. They might not be happy about it, but they wouldn’t be angry about it. But instead, I made a decision that actively upset someone.
I think too often design leaders, in trying to get along, in trying to make everybody happy within their team, either defers decisions, or doesn’t commit to hard decisions because they’re afraid that they’re going to make somebody on their team unhappy.
Jesse: Yes, I think that’s a risk, but I think this goes against some of the things that you’ve been saying in terms of recruiting and hiring and bringing people into the team that you feel are strongly aligned with you as a leader, people who are strongly aligned with your values.
If you, as a leader, are regularly making decisions that are pissing off your team, you don’t have the right people on your team. There’s some breakdown in alignment there between your intentions, your values, your perception of the problem, your perception of what’s needed for the solution, and the perspective of your team.
And if you aren’t bridging that gap, you probably are working with the wrong people.
Peter: That’s fair. I see what you’re saying. If in a group of eight, four or five folks are upset, then yes, you clearly have a misalignment. And if in that group of eight, one or two folks continue to be upset over many months, that’s, I think, the kind of misalignment that you’re talking about is likely happening.
If in that group of eight, over the course of a year, you try to never make anyone mad, so that what you value is not making anyone mad over making the right decision, that’s where the problem is.
Jesse: Yeah. So I might flip this statement around and say, “If you’re never pissing anyone off, you’re probably doing something wrong.”
Peter: Okay. That’s fair.
For someone who talks a lot about empathy. You show little for your colleagues.
Jesse: Ooh. Yeah, I definitely feel this one. I’ve definitely seen this one a lot.
Peter: Have you done this one?
Jesse: Oh, yes, I, yes, definitely. I, I have definitely fallen into the trap of the us versus them. The sense that we, as the designers, have some unique Batphone to heaven that communicates to us the absolute truth of things, and everybody else is misguided and in need of education and possibly angling against us.
And, yeah, I think that’s definitely a real risk, especially if you’re, if you are a design leader who has to fight against the cultural tides all the time to demonstrate that you belong at the table to prove the worth and the value of the work that your team is doing. If you are contending with that stuff all the time, this is a very easy mindset to fall into.
Peter: Yeah, one of the things I say, both when I give this talk formally, and then it’s been coming up over and over again with this team definition work I’ve been doing with some design teams, is the phrase “assume good intentions.” And I think when we say it, we’re like, Oh yeah, of course. We’re all trying to do the right thing. And we’re engaging from wherever we’re coming from.
It’s easy to say, it’s harder to remember.
Jesse: I think that’s a really important overarching point. In general, that generosity of spirit that I think is necessary to maintain the optimism that this work requires of design leaders. If you are going in every day with the attitude that the whole world is against you, it’s going to be hard for you to muster and maintain the positive energy required to motivate a team toward creating something new and valuable in the world. And I think that that is a lesson that really underlies so many of our relationships as leaders, whether they are relationships with the leaders above us in organizations, whether they are the relationships with our peers, whether they are the relationships with our teams to try to assume good intentions as much as possible, I think is essential.
Peter:
Introversion inhibits design’s ultimate impact.
Jesse: Oh man. We could do a whole episode about introversion because I think that introversion has become a fucked-up trap psychologically for creative people. And I think that people’s commitment to their identities as introverts is undermining their success broadly in the world. So, yes, I totally agree with this one.
Peter: Wow. And here, I thought, as my favorite, highly introverted colleague, that you…
Jesse: Oh, yeah, but I’m a self-hating introvert. I think my own introversion is absolutely maladaptive and I actually have a lot of judgment toward other introverts. I think that introversion as a cultural identity provides a very safe way for introverts to run away from their own insecurities and interacting with other people. And it does them a disservice to allow them that escape.
That’s pretty harsh. I know.
Peter: No, no, because, well, this is the one of the 25 that I actually heard back from more, probably than any other one, like, in the hallway or, you know, maybe on a Slack message.
Because, well, one) design as a profession tends towards introversion. Understandably, right? In order to be able to sit, often by yourself, for long periods of time producing work, that takes an introvert’s mindset and capacity. As you grow as a designer, at some point, introversion becomes a challenge. If you’re not able to speak up, if you’re not willing to put yourself out there, if you have trouble communicating your rationale, as you become a leader that introversion becomes this deficit.
Because in order to lead, as we’ve said, you need to relate. You need to communicate, you need to put yourself out there. Introverts have a harder time of that. And what ends up happening, the reason for this phrase is, functions that are more extroverted–marketing functions, product manager functions–when you’re in those contexts where cross functions are getting together, it might be to do the work, but it might also be kind of an all hands and an evangelism moment, extroverts tend to dominate those spaces
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: Product managers then grab the mic at the all hands and talk about the great work that their team has done. And the designers don’t see their design leader doing something similar. They don’t feel that the product manager represents them, even if their work supported the work that product manager was doing.
But the design managers, if they’re an introvert, is, like, “Well, the product manager is speaking for the whole team,” or, “I just don’t, I don’t like, it feels fake to get up there and go rah rah, I’m a designer. I’m going to play it cool.” All that kind of stuff.
We probably should take an episode to dig into this because I want to be respectful of introverts. I work with them, I live with them. And as part of a desire to be big-tent, to accommodate all neurotypes of backgrounds and experiences, it’s not fair, for lack of a better word. It’s not fair that introverts are put in an uncomfortable position that in order for them to continue to succeed, they have to overcome this aspect of their personality now. But it’s also, at least in the current moment, real. Extroverts thrive in this professional environment in a way that introverts do not.
And I’m mostly just trying to call attention to it. My hope was that in 5 to 10 years, we can figure out contexts in which introverts and extroverts can be their full selves as introverts and extroverts. And neither is advantaged.
What you said suggests that you might not feel that way, and that introverts need to get over themselves and their introversion.
Jesse: My perception, and this may be ungenerous, and it may be that my own status as an introvert qualifies me to make this assessment and maybe it doesn’t, but my perception is that most introversion comes down to a frankly, very childish, “I don’t wanna. I don’t want to have to explain my work to other people.
I don’t want to have to figure out from moment to moment what somebody else is thinking of what I have to say. I don’t want to engage,” and that’s not productive and that’s not how humans get anywhere together as a species and this privileging of your own comfort over the success of your work is never going to serve you as a creative professional. So that’s my point of view.
Peter: Kind of like we did when we wrapped up that one episode, talking about trust and realized that we had a lot more to get to. I have a feeling, I have a feeling that is true with this topic as well.
Well, we didn’t get through all the design leadership truisms. We probably got to about maybe a third, probably a quarter of them. So this can be…
Jesse: We can do another round, maybe next season.
Peter: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But that wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. As always you can find us out on the internet in various forms. On Twitter, I am @peterme. Jesse is @jjg. You can also find us on our website, https://findingourway.design/, where we have all the episodes posted, including with full transcripts, and there is a contact form that Jesse and I read everything that comes through. And that is how many people have reached out to us so far, which has been great. We’ve had some interesting feedback, from folks through those means. So, yes, please reach out, let us know what you think. Give us ideas for future conversations.
And until then, we hope that you are doing well on your journey as you continue finding your way.
Jesse: Finding your way. Thanks Peter.
13: Facing Systemic Racism in Design
Jul 09, 2020
In which Jesse and Peter discuss their relationship to systemic racism, as individuals, as leaders, and as members of the design and UX communities.
Transcript
Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jessee welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hello, Jesse. What are we going to talk about?
Jesse: Well, yeah. I mean, I think there’s an elephant in this room that is getting larger by the day. And, I think it would be useful… What we hear, what I have heard, what I have read from people of color about the conversations that need to happen about race in this country. One of the big things that I have heard is, “Don’t come talk to me about your racism. Go talk to each other about your racism.” So I think it would be great for us to talk to each other about race and how race has played out in our careers and how we see race playing out, all around us. But especially, you know, you and I are in a position where we have, quite a history of choices to interrogate as designers and as collaborators and as design leaders. And I think that all of those are topics worthy of exploration.
Peter: I agree. The subject has come up with some of the people I work with, where, particularly, the white men don’t quite know how to navigate this conversation with their teams. They’re like us—they’re middle aged white dudes whose hearts are in the right place, but, almost don’t know where to begin.
Which is frankly kind of where I am, okay, when it comes to this.
I gave a presentation yesterday to UX Waterloo, a local IXDA chapter in Waterloo, Ontario, which is about an hour outside of Toronto. And during the Q and A, it came up, you know, basically asking, “What should we be doing during these strange times?”
And, I don’t have a good answer beyond, “Listen” at this point, still, though. It’s probably time to start turning that corner from listening to acting. I’ve been thinking about how I could act, but then I allow myself to get distracted ‘cause it’s hard. And, there’s, you know, any number of things competing for my attention.
And I choose to deal with the things that I feel like I have a handle on.
Earlier this week, I took part in San Francisco Design Week. Every one of their sessions has a link to the Inneract Project. I N N E R A C T, which is a cause to support bringing more Black and Brown folks into the design field, going into schooling and then supporting them all the way into joining the profession. So getting involved with Inneract, I actually signed up to conduct pseudo job interviews for early stage Black and Brown designers.
Jesse: Like practice interviews for them to sharpen their skills. That’s awesome.
Peter: A link had come across, in one of the community Slacks I’m part of, and it was really easy to sign up and say, “Hey, I’ll do this.” And here’s the time.
Those are small ways, but it’s not something I’ve really sat down to work through. I know that you are going through these coaching classes and are developing a toolkit or an approach to tackle and work through some more challenging stuff. And I’m wondering whether from that or stuff you’ve learned prior to that how you are thinking about this, what tools you have for yourself and perhaps for others you’re working with to ddress these challenges.
Jesse: Yeah. This stuff intersects, in that the work that I’m doing is about how leaders show up day to day and how they navigate these more flexible, more fluid, more challenging kinds of situations. And this stuff actually started coming into play for me in my role at Capital One.
Peter: You say “this stuff,” specifically, matters of diversity and inclusion, racism. Yeah.
Jesse: Well, yeah. I mean, diversity and inclusion, I think, is the nice corporate frame that we put on what we’re actually talking about, which is systemic racism.
Peter: Yeah, yeah. D & I became this initiative that we have a director of it. So we’re doing what we can…
Jesse: Yeah. I mean, it’s an easy way for an organization to flag, you know, this is important to us. We’ve heard you. And so we have appointed a person, and I ended up as that person for the team that I was supporting. I was coaching the leaders of a group of teams that were all under one umbrella that was collectively about 80 people.
And as coach to the leadership team, I was charged with thinking about, as we’ve talked about, these holistic systemic issues going on across the team that were impediments to the team success. And this bubbled up, it really was something that the staff took the leadership to task basically, and said, “We don’t feel like you guys are taking this seriously enough. We don’t feel like the answers that we’re getting are satisfactory, and we don’t feel like we’re seeing cultural change in the ways that we want to see,” in terms of, especially, whose voices got heard, how recognition happened, and then ultimately, obviously, how, power and authority get distributed in an environment like that.
And the leadership turned to me and went, “Well, you’re our holistic systemic problem solver. Here’s one.”
Peter: ”Can you, can you solve racism for us? Can you model it?”
Jesse: Well, it wasn’t exactly that. It was like, we know that this is not how we want to show up as an organization, and, we want to be the vanguards of this change. We don’t want to wait around for somebody else to tell us how to create it or tell us at a corporate level what the official approach was going to be. We felt we needed to generate something of our own. And so we jumped in with both feet, and set out to create some safe spaces for these conversations to happen.
And I would say we got very, very mixed results with that.
In fact, I would say that the people of color on our team probably would say that “mixed results” is a generous assessment of how that went.
Peter: What were the obstacles for, what were the barriers?
Jesse: I think the major mistake that I made was not fully understanding what, creating these formalized structures, what position that put the people of color on the team in, in terms of having the spotlight put on them and their experiences in a way that they may or may not be ready or willing or eager to share, or the feeling that they are going to be put in the position of having to explain systemic racism to a room full of white people and that they are going to have all of this extra stuff put on them, this extra emotional burden of having to talk through their past traumas,
Peter: Right. “It’s not bad enough that we’re subject to the systemic racism our entire lives. We now have to educate you about it.”
Jesse: Right. And in an effort to create a sense that the leadership was actively engaged in this process, and actively engaged in listening, we had our leaders facilitate these conversations and our leaders did not have the skillset to facilitate these conversations, first of all. And secondly, we did not, I did not, really fully appreciate how the power dynamic in that room, when you have the leader facilitating the conversation, was going to skew things. And so, there were a couple of really fundamental misunderstandings that I had of what I was doing that led to that whole approach not working for us.
Peter: Yeah, there are times when leaders should be playing the role of facilitator in an effort to quiet their voice and elevate others. And sometimes it’s the right solution. But I think when it’s charged, if there’s an emotional tenor to it, even if they try to be as dispassionate or blank as possible, just the fact that they are the leader colors this, and you need, probably, ideally someone who has almost no context, no agenda that they could be accused of falling back on.
Jesse: Well, and I think part of the reason that I was tapped for that role was that I was not a leader of a team. So I was not in that same position, but I wasn’t facilitating sessions.
But yeah, honestly, and this was the reason I had to get out of Capital One altogether, I was, at the end of the day, embedded in the power structure. And could not play that outsider role to the extent that I needed to in order to be successful as a coach.
Peter: Right.
Jesse: So what we did after that, then, was we went and got some help, and we hired a consulting group out of Oakland called Circle Up. And they do consulting and workshops around helping organizations have these kinds of difficult conversations. And they led us through a process that was very helpful and enlightening to us.
And we were just starting the process of engaging with them to actually train up leaders, to have better facilitation skills around this stuff, at the time that I left the organization and handed that work off to others.
Peter: Right. How do you get people to expose themselves? Candidly, honestly, frankly, in an environment like that, where even if it is a safe space, there’s a fair degree of risk. Whether you feel risk based on your employment status or just risk in terms of exposing your own ignorance. I have to imagine that no one is being open and honest in these conversations. Were you able to get there?
Jesse: It’s challenging. It is tremendously challenging. It comes back to the stuff that we’ve been talking about actually, which is that when you have a high trust, high interpersonal connection environment, these kinds of conversations are easier. When you have people who are habitually, practicing things that we’ve talked about. Non-judgment. People who have practices of curiosity in their work. If these are your cultural values, then it’s going to be easier to get there, but still it is touchy stuff. But it’s too important not to do. And so I think that as leaders, we have to be willing to acknowledge what we don’t know and acknowledge that this is a problem that is not going to be solved in our lifetimes. And so we can’t ever craft what we as designers always want, which is that perfectly honed, eternally right solution. It is all satisficing what we’re doing right now. It is cobbling together little bits of things and making mistakes and learning from them. I do think that relationship as a frame is really important for this because when you talk about leaders as facilitators, what I’m thinking about are all of the relationships that that leader has with each individual in the room and how all of those dynamics get piled up on top of each other.
And the effectiveness of that group environment in a lot of ways depends on How is the leader doing in their relationships with their people individually? And are there things that are unsaid in those relationships that have been bottled up waiting to come out? If that stuff is all there and then you ask that of people in a group environment it’s going to be really hard.
So one question that I would put to leaders is how are you one-on-one’s going?
Peter: So a project I’m about to start, there’s a leader who is extremely eager to get going and solve a problem and dive into the mechanics of solving the problem. And based on my initial assessment of the situation, I feel like the people who would be engaging in solving this problem, many of whom are direct reports of this leader, will not bring their full selves, if it starts with problem solving, and I’m like, “I need to have one-on-ones with all these individuals and try to get at some of the underlying stuff. ‘Cause I think there’s basically relationship stuff, relationship baggage, et cetera, that is affecting people’s abilities to act in their fullest. And if we don’t acknowledge the relationship stuff, yeah, we can kind of muddle along and talk about some solutions and probably, make things better, but the ultimate effectiveness will be blunted. And there are times, and this is one, where it’s not about great design. It’s about how we are engaging with one another. We have to resolve that and then we can get to the great design. But if we just start with, let’s just make design great, without acknowledging the underlying relationship stuff, you will never actually get to great design.
Jesse: That’s right. That’s the premise of my whole everything I’m doing right now.
Music break
Peter: Something you said though, you’re talking about power dynamics. One of the things that has occurred to me, as we’ve had these conversations about leadership, and which has forced me to just think more intentionally and reflectively about leadership at all times, is that I don’t think many leaders recognize the responsibility that they take on as leaders. That their actions have all these knock-on follow-on consequences. They don’t receive it as a responsibility beyond, “Let’s make something great. Let’s get to the next place, I am leading us towards something.”
Jesse: It’s almost as, as if all of their sense of responsibility is directed upward in the organization, their responsibility to their leaders, rather than their responsibility downward toward their teams.
Peter: Right, right. Yes. You know, there’s the line from Spider-man, “With great power comes great responsibility.” And I think a lot of leaders don’t recognize that the power they wield has these impacts on people throughout their organizations, intentional or otherwise, that they should be responsible for, but it’s not often seen as a responsibility.
I think people assume to be a leader is to do good things, is to take us to good places, and through all of my actions, that is what will happen. And like, on all this stuff I ever hear about, or read about, or am thinking about, when it comes to leadership, there’s this lack of a recognition that your actions will affect people, and might affect people negatively.
And that just doesn’t resonate. And I don’t know why we hold our leaders accountable, but we don’t hold them responsible, and…
Jesse: They’re accountable when things go sideways, right? When a team blows up, because this stuff came into play in a bad way, then it’s like, “Oh, leader, you should’ve known.” But until that happens, the organization is happy to pretend that none of this stuff ever exists. And I think that you’ve hit on something really important, which is that leaders are not just there to perform and deliver. Leaders are cultural stewards for their organizations and have to cultivate cultures that do not harm the people who are in those organizations.
Peter: That’s right. I think that’s exactly right. You know, in prior episodes we talked about the distinction between management and leadership. And I think with management, there’s this recognition, because you have direct reports and, part of your job is to grow your team, that management has a responsibility, in this way.
But somehow we don’t use the same language or the same frame when we talk about leadership. But I think, to your point, successful leaders, because they are these cultural stewards, because they become models within the organization, often have a greater impact on these factors than the managers do.
But again, they don’t see that as part of their responsibility. And something that I’m starting to come to terms with.
Another theme that’s emerging for me is that I want to discourage most people from embracing leadership, because not only is it hard, it has these outsized impacts that I think most people assuming leadership are not ready for. And are not aware of and are not cognizant of, and, because of that, it’s the baby with the gun. They’re wielding this influence and not doing so, appropriately.
Jesse: Right. But, with these issues, I feel that an overabundance of caution represents a different kind of harm.
Peter: Well, it’s a challenge that I feel personally. I am over-abundantly cautious when it comes to speaking about racism, systemic racism, my privilege. I will defer to, “Let’s listen to the Black and Brown folks.” ‘Cause what could I have to contribute as a middle aged white guy? And partly that’s true. I haven’t had those experiences. Idon’t want to take the stage away from others who are better suited to address it. But part of it is I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing. I am abundantly cautious because I have had a career of speaking my mind, and getting into trouble often for it.
But the trouble is around whether or not everyone is a designer or the trouble is around information architecture versus visual design, and subjects that were not truly charged in the same way that this is. And, a fear I have is that, with all good intentions, I will put my foot in it and get called out and I’ll get canceled or whatever, right? Because I’ll say the wrong thing. And that is what I’m seeing happening with some of the people I’m working with. Middle-aged white dudes running these sizable teams who are paralyzed when they’re at their all-hands.
They’re just like, “Can I just have the person of color, who’s maybe one of my directors, talk now because that’s the right thing to do, right, is to make a space for them? Problem solved.”
‘Cause they don’t know how to act or what to say, because they’re afraid if they say the wrong thing, now they’re going to get canceled in some way in their organization.
Jesse: Congratulations. Welcome to leadership. Leadership entails stepping into unknown situations with uncertain outcomes and choosing a course and taking action. And it’s this lack of action from leadership that led to the diversity and inclusion initiative that I led at Capital One, that the staff were like, you guys all look like deer in the headlights here. That’s not enough for us. It’s not going to be enough for any leader to continue to show up that way.
If you want some credibility as a white guy, you have to be able to be honest with yourself about your privilege and I’m still working on this. I mean, it’s a path that never, I think, really ends, because it’s so deep and so layered and so complex. But, you and I are design leaders because of our privilege. I think I can confidently say that.
Peter: I can’t dispute it, right? Like I, you know…
Jesse: Well, let’s talk about, let’s talk about UX as a whole and the early days of UX and the moment at which you and I were engaging with this work, what we did in diving into a new medium, trying to define an unknown field that no one had ever heard of, turning around and trying to sell that to people in power, convince them that it was something that was worth paying a lot of money for, even though you couldn’t go out and get a degree in it. There were no books on the topic until we started writing them.
No person of color could have done anything like that. It would have been way too risky from the start. And they would have had enormous obstacles that you and I never faced in order to get to that place that we got to.
Peter: I’m, I’m, I don’t have anything much to say because I don’t, I don’t have anything much to add. I think, I think…
Jesse: Tell me about your perspective, like, your experience, like, where has privilege played a role in your career, do you think?
Peter: Well, it’s played a role in my entire life. I remember, it must have been an email ’cause I’m sure my dad wrote it to me. I was in my mid-twenties. Maybe I was living in New York or, after I moved back to San Francisco, and he wrote to me, “it’s great to be young, white, and have plastic,” meaning credit card, with the recognition that as a 24-year old white guy with a credit card, the world was my oyster. Society kind of existed essentially to enable me. And that phrase has stuck with me, because I have never feared materially. And, I’ve just kind of doubtless been buoyed along by privilege that I hadn’t even recognized.
And there were times when I, could pat myself on the back for certain career choices. My first full-time design job at Studio Archetype, men and women, roughly equal proportions, the senior, most leadership, the CEO is a man, but, like, women in leadership roles, women as executive creative directors.
Studio Archetype was also, being in San Francisco, gender and sexual orientation equity as well, open out gay people in leadership, bringing their partners to work…
Jesse: Studio Verso was the same way. Studio Verso had women in leadership, was led by a gay man. And we had several other queer folk, in leadership roles as well. So, yeah.
Peter: Yeah. So I was like, “Look at me! I chose a career in a field that is like super open and super inclusive!” Pat myself on the back. And it was probably not until starting to go to conferences like the IA Summit, 2000, 2001, and you look around that room, and you see a lot of women, see a lot of men, you don’t see any black people or like two, and then that’s, that’s obviously not right. But I also didn’t do anything about it. I tended to figure, you know, what, we’re an open hearted, big hearted, liberal minded, touchy-feely community. It’ll work itself out. We’re not putting up the barriers. We’re not inhibiting anyone from joining our community.
Jesse: We’re just waiting for them to show up.
Peter: You know, it’s early, so, as the crank turns, and things evolve, I’m sure it’ll work itself out.
Narrator: it didn’t.
You can get so daunted, the issues that we’re talking about obviously are deeply societally systemic, not even specific to the United States, though they’re probably greater here, but we’re seeing demonstrations around the world. And so the next question is what to do about that. Do I engage at a societal level? Do we engage in an industry level?
Jesse: I think that, certainly, there are some of us that are wired for activism that want to be and have the motivation, the interest, the acumen, the wherewithal to be active change-makers at a societal level.
And God bless those people cause we need them. We need lots of them. But there are lots of roles to play in this. And all of us, I think, have to continue to look at ourselves, continue to root out the racism in our own makeup. To notice when we are contributing toward these systemic effects.
Here’s a great example, actually. I was reflecting on my time at Adaptive Path and we did not have many people of color at Adaptive Path during its lifespan. We were much better on gender equity than we were on any other kind of equity within Adaptive Path.
But when I was at Adaptive Path, I hated the idea of myself as this creative director who was going to present all of the teams’ work to the client. And so one thing that I was always doing as a project team lead was orchestrating our client presentation so that everybody got to present their own work.
So, everybody got practice in presenting. So the person who was closest to the work, had the opportunity to speak to it. And so if you knew that you were presenting the work, you were also thinking about, how you were going to talk through your ideas. And what that meant was I was sometimes putting very junior people in front of very senior people and telling them, “It’s okay, you’ve got this.
It’s all good. I’ve got your back.”
But I was not taking into account the way that these kinds of dynamics and the past histories that those designers brought to those experiences might have affected their ability to show up and be successful. I put some people in over their heads by not acknowledging the fact that their status changed the dynamic.
It was not the same as me as a white guy, just showing up and presenting the idea, similar to the founder privilege that you were talking about a few episodes ago.
Peter: I don’t have much to add apart from, looking back at Adaptive Path and, frankly, feeling a little ashamed at the lack of racial diversity. I’m trying to think if we had, I don’t know if we had any, at least in the design staff, Black or Brown folks, some of the administrative, back office folks, yes, but, our designers were largely white as the driven snow. And that’s been a challenge even since leaving Adaptive Path. I never until very recently made diversity and inclusion priority in my work. I would hope fairness in the process would lead to equity in the outcome.
Jesse: Yeah. And that’s a trap that I think a lot of us fall into. I think it’s a very comfortable, safe thing to fall back on to say, “If my intentions are good and I stick to those intentions that everything is going to work out in the end.” And the existence of systemic racism is proof that that is false.
Peter: Right, right, right, right. Totally. There’s two things I’ve learned, which are hard for me because the ways I’ve been successful in recruiting and hiring are: I have a big network. And I a nose for talent. And two things I have learned are, if you hire only in your network, you’re not going to provide access, you’re constraining access.
And, if you rely on your intuition to guide you through choosing candidates, you are subject to your own bias. And, learning how to still tap into that, which allows me to succeed, but recognizing that I need to do it in the context of some of these structures that hopefully remove the bias that I bring to the situation. That has been a challenge. You know, I’ve gotten to appreciate bureaucratic HR recruiting and hiring approaches, which exists mostly to cover the ass of the corporation. But, done right, also should be providing fairness for candidates.
Jesse: Well, and I think that this is similar to the trust thing in that it’s something that can’t just be addressed at the level of systems and processes and all of the machinery that HR creates to try to prevent these outcomes from happening. It can’t just be about that. It also has to be about how you conduct the interviews, how you, as a leader, approach engaging with people of color. If you have a hard time engaging with people of color, you’re going to have a hard time leading them.
Peter: Right.
Jesse: And at some point you do, I think, just have to double down on it and say, this is going to be a priority.
Music break
Jesse: So at Adaptive Path, years ago, we did an event which was not an event that I had programmed, but I was attending and at the end of the day, I was speaking to some attendees and they talked about the fact that every speaker on the stage that day had been a man. And I looked at the program and I was like, what happened here?
And there were women speakers on the overall program, but they were later in the show. They were not on the opening day. And I was pretty angry, honestly, that we had not caught that. And at that point, going forward with the events that I programmed, I made gender equity on the stage of priority. Despite the fact that I had a series of event managers, all women, who would, complain about the ways in which I was slowing down the process and creating more work for them in seeking out that equity. I just felt it was necessary and worked very hard, for UX Week, for the last several years to create that, and got very good at patting myself on the back for it, and completely had my blinders on to the people of color issue. I would say, you know, it was great anytime we had managed to find a person of color to come speak. That was awesome. And, I was grateful to see it there, but I never prioritized it.
It wasn’t until the final year of UX Week that, in conversation with some of the folks I was working with on the programming, that it became clear to me that this needed to level up to the same level of focus for us as a programming team. And that last UX Week, honestly, is the brownest panel I’ve ever seen at any user experience conference.
Peter: Yes, definitely, thinking a little bit about Adaptive Path, I actually want to give a shout out to one of our co founders, Janice. So of the seven founders, one of them was Janice Fraser.
Janice wrote one of the things that I’ve taken, probably, myself more away from, and maybe it’s as a white person speaking to another white person, she’s helping me think about how I’m showing up. And, so she wrote this post on LinkedIn, June 6th, and basically what she was able to recognize about herself, and I think this is true about me as well, is that it’s easy to try to come across as an ally. You say the right things. You put a Black Lives Matter icon on your Twitter feed and you use the hashtag. But to really commit, to really make the effort to de-center yourself in this conversation can be hard.
And I think what she hits on is part of the reason about that is simply fear. She has a line here: “I was selfish because I was so, so very afraid.” And I, when I read that, that struck me to my core. I know I can be quite selfish in my practices. As a primary breadwinner in a household, I seek opportunities to speak, to write, to be exposed, as a way to support my business and thus support my family. And there’s a selfishness to that, because, I’m afraid if I don’t continue to get speaking opportunities, my star will decline. The phone will stop ringing (no one actually calls me), the emails will stop coming in, and I’ll lose part of my livelihood. And, I can intellectualize that that is likely not true.
Jesse: Hmm.
Peter: I’m almost 50. I’ve got a moderately successful book. People will still pay attention to me. Yeah. People will still pay attention to me, but one of the things we have to overcome is that there seems to be a human condition, that your gain is my loss. There’s somewhere in our psyche, the zero-sum-ness. And I can occasionally find myself feeling that when I reach out to a conference organizer and say, “You’re programming your event. I would love to take part,” and they respond, “We have our fill of white dudes,” and I’m like, “But you didn’t reach out to me before you filled up with white dudes!”
And I get it. I can intellectually understand it. And if I was in their shoes, I’d probably do the same thing, much as the same way you discussed, in programming UX Week. But there’s limbic system, lizard brain, something core, that’s like, “I now feel threatened because I don’t have access to the things that I assumed I should have access to, that I’ve always had access to before. And now I don’t.” And that leads to a fear of relevance, legitimacy, and it’s something I need to overcome, to recognize that immediate gut response for what it is, and how to moderate it. And also, frankly, to be more generous, that’s something that I personally have a challenge with, is generosity.
When I’m invited to speak on a panel, to not jump at the opportunity, but, instead to be, like, “You know what, let me introduce you to other people I know who don’t get those opportunities, who aren’t the first person reached out to when there’s an opening on a panel,” and let me encourage these organizers to consider them. And that’s a change I have to make. And maybe by saying it in this somewhat public forum, others can hold me accountable to that.
Jesse: One thing that comes up on this topic of selfishness is the way that leaders behave when their power feels threatened in some way. And how that can lead them to kind of fall back on these shortcuts, try to hold onto that power, and not maintaining that level of awareness of how their choices are playing out around them.
I think that, like a lot of the other things that we’ve talked about, this has to be approached as both an organizational problem, and a problem at the level of leaders and their relationships and how they show up day-to-day. You have to be able to address it from both perspectives.
Peter: I guess I don’t want to tell leaders what to do, ‘cause I don’t know what to do. But going back to that responsibility notion, leaders need to recognize, intentionally or unintentionally, how they show up has an impact, but like, doing nothing is not a strategy.
Being afraid and being aware that you’re afraid, you might think that you’re actually contributing by pulling back. and that’s not how we get through this. Nor is it, though, that you grabbed the mic and tell everybody what to do.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not one or the other. In fact, I think what you’ve touched on here is one of the most critical things, which is self-awareness. It’s like, how much are you paying attention towWhat you talked about, that gut instinct, that reflexive reaction that you have, and questioning it, interrogating it, challenging your own thoughts. You know, I grew up in the South. There is a raging racist asshole in my brain. I can hear that voice, and the more I listen for it, the more I hear it. And every time I hear it, I can go, okay, that can fuck off. And the more that I do that, yes, practicing that awareness, it’s just like, noticing if you’re meeting a new team for the first time and assuming that, Oh, the young woman at the end of the table, she’s probably the admin, right? Or the junior project manager. It’s exactly that same kind of thing. Only just extending that level of awareness to all of our interactions, in all of our lives, and noticing the places where we take those convenient shortcuts, noting the places where we fall back on what is easy, what is comfortable and noticing where we can change our attitudes, change our perspectives, change our approaches.
Peter: So that about wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. Thank you for joining us on this journey. Jesse and I grappled with some pretty challenging issues, and not come to any specific resolution, but, I think, that speaks to there’s no easy solution. This is an ongoing process. And so we thank you for joining us as we think through it ourselves, and we’ll continue to do so.
As always, we are eager to hear what you have to say. You can find us through a number of ways. On Twitter, I am @peterme. Jesse is @jjg.
You can also find us on our website, http://findingourway.design, use the contact form there. We continue to receive emails through that. We read all of them and appreciate all the questions and contributions that people are making. That about wraps it up. So again, thank you for listening and thank you, Jesse, for a good conversation,
Jesse: Thanks, Peter. Finding our Way.
12: Ands Not Ors (ft. Maria Giudice)
Jul 01, 2020
In which we are joined by Maria Giudice, founder of Hot Studio, former design executive at Facebook and Autodesk, for a whirlwind discussion of her career, design leadership, and coaching.
Topics: Frank Frazetta; Working Girl; art school; white designer dudes; New York in the mid-80s; Richard Saul Wurman telling us we’re all full of shit; designing guidebooks; command-and-control leadership style; San Francisco in the late 80s; becoming a design leader; hiring misfits; match between leader and the team; inheriting teams; the brutality of corporate America; learning from mistakes; change-making at scale; consulting vs in-house; the need for executive sponsorship; where we find joy in our lives; meaning and purpose in our work; leading and coaching in a fashion authentic to you; the value of coaching for senior leaders.
Transcript
Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast on design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz. And with me as always is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: And today we have a special guest, Maria Giudice.
Maria: Hi, everybody. Peter. I’m so happy, you know how to pronounce my last name.
Peter: I’ve known you for, has it been 25 years? 1997. And so, we’re excited to have you with us today. Maria, I think you’ve, as… as we were saying, have a lot of lived experience as a design leader…
Maria: Yes we have…
Peter: I also am interested in your experience with other design leaders, maybe even earlier in your career before you became one. So, you know, I want to kind of cede the floor to you to let you talk about yourself and how you would like to introduce yourself to, to our audience.
Maria: So my journey, boy, it’s like if you look at it in terms of timeline, it’s a lot of years, but the good thing is I always feel like, because things are always changing, it feels like it’s a relatively short timeline in weird ways. Does that make sense? It’s sort of like, that’s the beauty of the industry that we’re in, that we have had the gift of constant change throughout the courses of our career.
Jesse: You can’t get bored, for sure.
Maria: No, you can’t. So, but when I started out, I thought I was going to be a fine artist. My uncle was a pretty well known fantasy painter named Frank Frazetta, and some people right now who are hearing this…
Peter: I bet Jesse had some of his posters in his dorm room…
Jesse: I was not that guy, but I was friends with that guy.
Maria: Yeah, exactly. Some of your people on your podcasts are like, their mind is blown right now, but most people on your podcast don’t know who he is, but some people it’s like, a secret code. If you know, Frank Frazetta’s work.
Jesse: If you have any visual memory of the classic poster of Arnold Schwartzenegger as Conan, the Barbarian, Frank Frazetta painted that poster.
Maria: Yeah. So I grew up with a famous uncle who was a painter. And that just was like permission to want to be a fine artist as well. So I never thought of fine art as something that was a nice-to-have. I saw I had models early on that you could follow your dreams and make money doing those dreams.
And in my senior year of college, I was taking design classes. And I was really struggling with design in general. I thought it was incredibly formulaic and I was like, “Ugh.”Iit was all about the Bauhaus, was all about like grids and white space and hierarchy and find a nice image and use Helvetica and wear black and be a white man. It was like, these are all the formulas of what it meant to be a designer. It wasn’t until my senior year when Richard Saul Wurman came in and gave a talk to our class.
And did you guys ever see the movie Working Girl? With Melanie Griffith.
Maria: Yes, I, I was that girl. I was that girl working from Staten Island. Yeah. I did not look like a typical designer. And so I grew up in the era of Vignelli and, Rudy de Harak and like these, the New York, Pushpin Studio. Yeah. Yeah. Milton Glaser. I grew up in that era and those were all men who had basically harems of people, peons, working for them. So first model of leadership, command and control. And it was really formal and you had to look and act a certain way.
But then in my senior year, Richard Wurman walks into our class, who does not look like a designer. He’s short, he was overweight. He had a big scarf and he was cursing up a fucking storm. And I fell in love. I totally fell in love. That was like, Oh my God, this is the first person that doesn’t follow and conform to the norms of what typical design leadership was like.
And he basically yelled at us. He basically said you’re all full of shit. And he talked about design being in service to others. And I’ve said this story over and over again. I don’t think he used those words, but this is my version of the story because It just hit me over the head. It was one of those moments in life that we all have, you can reflect back on it, where suddenly something gets hit on the head and you go in a different path. And that was a very seminal moment in my life where he said the right thing at the right time. And design started making sense to me. That my job, my purpose, was to help people navigate life through the lens of design. And I went to work for him. I graduated college and I worked for him designing guidebooks in New York City.
I started working with Richard in 1985 as a graphic designer, but it was really a human-centered designer. It’s that philosophy of thinking about who you’re serving and what is the appropriate way to deliver that content? What’s the appropriate medium, what’s the appropriate format, what’s the appropriate way to categorize information? It’s still the same stuff that we do today. It’s the same thinking process. Like, I have not deviated from my thinking process and the way I think about design since that lightning bolt struck me in the head in 1985.
Peter: You mentioned the primary model you had seen was this command and control model. And then there was Richard, what was Richard’s approach to leadership? Was he…
Maria: Command and control, too.
Peter: So he was a creative director. You were an extension of his brain.
Maria: Oh yeah. Yeah, I remember. I’m rough around the edges. I’ve always been rough around the edges. I was really rough around the edges back then. ‘Cause I had the lack of experience and the nuance and I loved the way he saw the world and the way he looked at information at different lenses and different
categories and different scales. I just was soaking that in.
That’s command and control style back in the day where you had a creative director and then you were his pair of hands. Right. And I would just argue with him constantly about the layouts, or I would give him alternative layouts. I would redesign the cover and he just would never, ever listen to me. And I just remember at one point sitting in his office, just crying and saying, “You know, why can’t you listen to me? Like, why can’t I have a point of view?” And he just dead-pan looked at me and he said, “Maria, I’m 50 years old,” I was like 25, “I’m 50 years old. Chances are, you are not going to change my opinion anytime soon.”
Jesse: [Laughs].
Maria: I accidentally moved to California because he opened an office to redesign the Pacific Bell yellow pages, and I knew that if I didn’t get out of town, I was going to get fired, that, you know, like, our relationship was souring pretty fast, and just so happened that my girlfriend was moving to California and I was thinking, oh, I could do a road trip and hang out with her for six months.
I had no intention of living in California. I didn’t even care about the yellow pages. I was just like, “Free road trip. I’m going to go.” And it was the best move of my life because I went and I worked with a small group of people who had to create the office, which became The Understanding Business.
And it wasn’t until I had distance from Richard, where I had leverage.
Peter: So, how long were you at The Understanding Business?
Maria: I was there from 1987 to 1990, and by the end of the three years, I was a creative director with like 25 people reporting to me.
Peter: So you were now a design leader.
Maria: I was a design leader because I was in charge of maps and then it was like, I can’t do all the maps myself. So we started hiring people and then I became in charge of all the maps. And so suddenly I had a group of people working with me on maps and this is where I first discovered that I was really great at being a good leader.
Like, if I really am honest about myself, I used to throw great parties. I’m great at getting people together around some sort of purpose and I became really great at motivating and inspiring people to work really hard and believe and hit a high bar of quality.
Peter: You felt, you demonstrated good design leadership. Were you operating as a command and control leader the way that you had seen and if not, what was your mode and how did you develop your leadership style?
Maria: it was totally intuitive. It was really just maybe because I was not like most people. And I felt very intimidated when I was in college by not looking like a white male with good clothing. I felt very empathetic to other people who didn’t fit the format.
I looked for the weirdos. I look for the edge cases. I looked for the misfits. I looked for people who really wanted to learn, had a voracious appetite to learn, had incredibly good, great design and production skills. I cultivated that and I really acted more as a coach and a teacher and collected good ideas.
I never thought of myself as a great designer. I still don’t think I’m a great designer. I think I’m a really good designer. I think I have a great eye for design, but I don’t think that I’m the best designer. So because of that, I cultivated and looked for people who were better than me and I mined for the best ideas.
And then we adopted the best ideas as a collective. So I really was very focused on the collective body of the people that worked for me.
Music break
Jesse: I think there’s something in your story about the match between a leader and the people on the team. You talk about the way that you were seeking out the people who maybe didn’t quite fit the mold of what a traditional designer looked like, or maybe who didn’t come from the same kind of background.
And I think that if you had inherited a team that was full of those more traditional graphic designer-type people, it would have been much more difficult for you to be successful as a design leader. So there was something about you also selecting for people that you could lead and bringing them into the team.
Maria: Yes. Yes. I had the ability to continue to hire people that I wanted to work with. It wasn’t until I went to Facebook where I started inheriting people. And that’s a whole nother ball of wax when you have to inherit people.
Peter: Well, let’s talk about that for a little…
Maria: Yeah.
Peter: ‘Cause you know, we have some similarities here, like you, Jesse, and I started a consulting business, doing design. We hired people we wanted to work with. We, I think, similarly had our flavors of misfits, which might be different than your flavors of misfits, but still certain misfit personalities.
Maria: We all had our own brand of misfits. They all found their home in the misfit land of agencies.
Peter: Something we’ve talked about before is inheriting teams. I’ve had to do it, after I left Adaptive Path. And, so I’m wondering, what your experience was when you inherited teams at Facebook and then I’m assuming again at Autodesk.
Did you have to adopt or adapt your style or did you just try to get rid of as many of the people who were there as you could and bring in your own misfits, or, like, what’s your approach when it comes to inheriting teams? How has that worked for you, or did it not?
Maria: Yeah, boy, I really struggled. I don’t know about you guys, but to go from like master of your own queendom to suddenly in corporate America where you have to fit into a system, that was a really rude awakening for me. But, I want to jump from Facebook to Autodesk because Autodesk was really interesting in that it was kind of brutal.
And I think this happens a lot in corporate America, where I get hired, and I have to assume that this is the test of a lot of like C-level people. Or, you know, SVP level people. Right. I get hired in as VP of Design and I don’t have like a budget. I don’t have like staff.
Peter: Are you the first VP of design they’ve ever had?
Maria: Yeah, first VP and this is a company that’s rooted in traditional engineering thinking for 30-something years. And I just had an enlightened boss who wanted this change, and also Carl Bass is very creative. So I get in and they didn’t budget me in. Like in corporate America, right, they budget you, you get head count.
So suddenly I get hired and I’m not in the plan. So, an SVP wanted to get rid of his design team. And so he gave me his design team, so basically they moved money from his over to my new org by giving me this design team.
So he gives me this team, which has nothing to do with my mission. This is a product team and I’m in charge of weaving design throughout the company. My job was still unclear at that point. I had a three-month period to define my job, but they give me this group of people who didn’t fit any of the profiles that inevitably what I needed.
So they gave me this team. Woohoo. I don’t have a plan for them. And this is the move. This is the perfect move, Maria. This is your head count. This is the budget you’re getting. In order for you to hire new people, you have to fire the people that you have.
Jesse: Wow.
Maria: Fucking brutal.
Peter: So how do you approach that?
Maria: And I didn’t even know who these people are. Right. But this is what they do when you’re a VP, they want to test you. Okay, let’s talk about, like corporate America, corporate America can be brutal at the top.
So it’s like, okay, how tough is she? She’s going to lay people off.
It’s true. It’s the same way at Facebook. This is what I didn’t like about Facebook. Facebook considers it an act of strength when somebody is struggling, they feel like you are a strong leader, if you can get rid of the weak people, right?
Peter: Up or out, is what I’ve heard.
Maria: And that’s true. You’re only as good as your weakest person. We all know that. But give people a chance to grow and succeed. What happens in corporate America, if you’re struggling, they put you on a PIP, right? Maybe you get “meets most” two or three times and you get put on a PIP.
Right. But once you’re in “meets most” you’re basically feeling so unconfident, you’re feeling like you suck, you’re in the dog house when you’re in “meets most.” So your mindset is already in this really low point. And then it’s like, fuck you, corporate America, here’s the list of things you gotta do to pull yourself out. And if you don’t do it, we’re gonna push you out. And it’s a sign of strength when the leader can push those people out. It didn’t sit with my values. It doesn’t sit with my values.
Peter: I hear you. I’ve inherited a few teams and, I’m not the only design leader who’s inherited a team and had either your boss tell you or your peers tell you, part of the job is going to have to be managing a couple of these people out that are underperforming. And you’re like, why, why did you wait–?
Maria: Passing the buck to you, right. Passing the buck to you.
Peter: But what I often found is that the designers that I inherited were often capable, but they had been put in a context that, that didn’t allow them to be a good designer. So it wasn’t about the designer. It was about the stuff surrounding them.
Maria: Exactly. And that’s how I feel like you got to really unpack why somebody’s not doing well. Sometimes, it’s not a good skill match, but sometimes it’s because they had a shitty leader who, like, knocked them down. But in Facebook, if you don’t push that person out, you are considered weak.
And it really killed me because I wanted to give those people time to. Evolve or if it wasn’t a good match, what is a better humane way to give them dignity and get them out on their own timeline?
Peter: Let’s rewind a bit then. You ran hot for, what, 15, almost 20 years? How long did it last?
Maria: Over 15 years
Peter: 15 years.
So you then had Richard Saul Wurman as a model, good or bad.
Maria: Yes. Yeah. Good and bad.
Peter: Then you went out on your own (good or bad). Then you went out on your own and you were intuiting your way through design leadership and, and, I’m assuming largely self-taught.
And then, you know, Hot gets acquired at Facebook. You’re there for a couple of years. You’re at Autodesk for a couple years. You’ve clearly had some challenged experiences, but I’m wondering coming out of Autodesk, you know, those four to five years in corporate America, what did you learn that you were able to take away and actually grow from?
Maria: Yeah. Great question, Peter, because, and, you know, my exit at Autodesk, wasn’t, like, lovely, right? I was kicking ass at Autodesk and making great change at scale. And then there was a change in leadership. Carl Bass steps down, my champion steps down, a new leader comes into place and basically tells me to my face that I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He basically said, “We’re not ready for somebody like you. You’re Autodesk three years from now.” The things that I care about were not their priority.
Fair enough. But it hurt. But it gave me a lot of time to self reflect. Like, what are the lessons? What are the opportunities? What were the things that I did really well? What was the things I really fucked up because really, I was so ill-prepared for corporate America and I made so many mistakes. And then when I got to Autodesk, I was like, I’m not going to make those mistakes again. So I made a list of all the things I fucked up and I was like, don’t do those things at Autodesk, do the opposite. Right. But now, like two years at Autodesk, there was a whole bunch of things that I fucked up that I could reflect on.
And so this got me really passionate about change-making at scale, that there are people like me who are entering companies at the VP level, they’re told that their job is X, but their job will really be Y. There’s no playbook for being that person.
So I started getting curious and I started interviewing design leaders, VPs and above, and I’ve collected like 25-30 stories from people in all different industries. And now I’m ready to write a book on change-making at scale. I speak about it.
It led to coaching. I want to bring these lessons to light so that somebody like me who is entering a new company could read, and better prepare for the change that will inevitably hit them. And so there’s tons of lessons there that I want to share, not only from my own life experience, but the people who are living it now.
Jesse: I’m interested in this idea of change-making because I feel like for my entire career, I have been, and Peter has been in, you have been constantly driving change in one way or another. We’ve been a part of this wave of digital media and the internet and all of the evolution of user experience design that has sprung out of that.
And I find myself wondering, like, are we condemned to forever be change agents? Or does user experience design at least get to some place where somebody coming into an organization as a design leader no longer has to carry the assumption that they’re going to have to do a whole bunch of change-making work in order to be successful.
Maria: Really depends on the maturity of the organization in terms of how they’re embracing design and human-centered design. Most companies, design is not part of the culture. Design is a new phenomenon that people are learning about and embracing and this was where I got very cavalier. It’s like, Oh yeah, I’ve worked for hundreds of companies over my 20 year tenure, working in an agency.
It’s nothing like when you’re inside a company, because when we’re working in an agency, people are hiring us to do change. They know time is money, we like basically go in and have sex and leave. We don’t stay the night. We’re like, that was great. Get the clothes back on, go home, sleep in your own bed. Right.
When you’re inside a company, you are living in the house
Music break
Peter: I want to pursue one thread there. You were brought in by a CEO at Autodesk, Carl Bass, who recognized it.
Maria: Yes.
Peter: Now, most people are working at companies where the CEOs don’t get this. So do they have any hope or are they…
Maria: Are they, are they fucked? Are they fucked?
Peter: Are they, like, what is the opportunity for change when you don’t have the CEO providing some cover? Or, and how can you get this? How do you help a CEO understand…
Maria: See, this is the thing, if you look up and you don’t see people who believe in your agenda, you are pushing water upstream. You need somebody at the high levels or you gotta look for those tradition holders, those people who’ve been in companies a long time who have some cache and power. And if they can believe in it and give you time.
If you look up and you don’t have somebody who believes in your mission, that is a huge red flag and it may not be worth your time. So you have to really decide, are you at the right place at the right time in your career?
I’m an executive coach and I spent a lot of time helping people. Figure out that they have to quit their job.
Peter: Oh, that one’s tough, right? ‘Cause we all need jobs. You know, when Jesse and I were younger and maverick and running Adaptive Path and we’d speak at conferences or hold our own events and we would talk about the glories of good UX practice and inevitably someone would raise their hand and say, “There’s no way I can make this happen in my company” or “How can I make this happen in my company, ‘cause conditions aren’t allowing it.” And I was the glib privileged white dude who was like, quit, get a job elsewhere.
Maria: Yeah, I know. Yeah. That is a very privileged place to be. I always ask people, “Why do you have your job? What’s important to you. What brings you joy? How can you bring joy into your life?”
Some people bring joy into life after they leave their job. Some people say, “There’s enough there for me to be interested and I’m going to go and leave. And I’m going to paint for three hours a night.” That’s valid. You have to find your purpose in life, and figure out what are the baseline ways that you need to survive.
So you can’t just say, “Look, you hate your job, quit it.” Some people can’t, okay? But then what are some other mechanisms that you can do to bring joy into your life?
People might say, “That’s my job. My joy is my children.” And then I would ask, “How can you bring joy into your work life?” So that it’s not something that you hate going to, and I knew that I was not happy at Facebook because I was so happy when Friday came along and I was so miserable when Monday started.
Jesse: Telltale signs.
Maria: So I had to cope with being in a company that wasn’t really congruent with my values. Was it the right move? Absolutely. Was I prepared for it? No fucking way.
Jesse: Well, I think that we’re all looking for our right fit, right? Regardless of where you are in your career, whether you’re a designer or a leader, designers are looking for leaders who are going to be the right fit. Leaders are looking for people to join their teams who are the right fit. And they’re looking for larger organizations to be a part of that are the right fit.
Maria: Yeah. So you have to really weigh everything and you have to find the joy because life is short. Life is short. If you are waking up every day miserable, you have to figure out what do you need to change in order to bring some joy into your life, some purpose and meaning, and you might not get it from your job. And that is okay, but that means you have to get it somewhere else.
Jesse: You mentioned meaning and purpose. And these are concepts that Peter and I have talked about a few times now, because in the coaching work that I do, I am trying to connect leaders with their own personal sense of purpose, because that is what energizes them to be able to connect other people with a sense of purpose, and galvanize a team.
And although I agree with you that you gotta find your joy somewhere, I do feel that if you are doing work that is meaningless to you, that feels purposeless, even though you may be finding great joy in other parts of your life, that is eventually going to drag you down. The weight of that purposelessness.
Maria: It will. When you talk about purpose, coming full circle, when I talked about how that lightning bolt hit, when Richard said “Design is about being in service to others,” it hit because that ultimately is my purpose in life. And thenmy intuitive leadership when I was running The Understanding Business as a creative director, it was congruent in my purpose in life, which was to be in service to others.
Jesse: I think that you can find a sense of purpose in your work without it being the highest purpose in your life.
Maria: Yeah. I think that that’s fair. If you are going to a job and you are miserable, you really have to weigh the cost of that. You have to weigh what that is worth.
Peter: So another podcast I listen to, which I’m assuming neither of you do, is a podcast with sports coaches.
Maria: Hmm.
Peter: Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors and Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks.
And it’s not about being a sports coach. They talk about coaching and leadership generally, and their own success. And one of the things that they have recognized in their own success is that there is no ideal for coaching or being a leader. That there are maybe principles that work and strategies that work, but neither of them became successful until they figured out how to be authentic to whom they are, right.
Steve Kerr talks about, he learned under Phil Jackson, who was Michael Jordan’s coach, Gregg Popovich, the coach of the Spurs. So he had models as great coaches, but Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich were very different people, but both successful. And he’s been successful as a third different type.
And I’m curious on both of you, ‘cause I’m not a formal coach, you guys are both formal coaches, but something that I suspect is that not enough leaders reflect on what is authentic to them. They might have models, they might have seen other types of leadership and just kind of adopt it as opposed to really stepping back and trying to figure out how do I lead authentically as me, even if that’s different than what I’ve seen succeed, but I can’t do what that person does. So how do I do what I do and still succeed?
Jesse: Yeah, it’s huge. I mean, the unlearning that people have to do. I’m trying to think of a good metaphor. It’s like the kid who shows up in a suit for the first day of school with the briefcase, they feel like there’s this way of being that is asked of them. I remember years ago having a conversation with somebody who was, running a small interactive agency and they were really entrenched in Jack Welch’s ideas from GE, and, like, he had this whole model, which was how he ran General Electric, another giant hundred year old company. And I’m like, you got like 20 people doing something very, very different, trying to emulate Jack Welch is not how you get successful at this, in this context. And it’s not even who you are. And the more that you try to be this thing that you aren’t, the more, you’re actually fucking up doing the thing that you think that thing is going to do for you.
Maria: Yeah. You treat everything like a design process, right? I mean, when you were saying that, Jesse, I was thinking about our old clients that would come to us and say, Hey, we want to be like that… Everybody wanted to be like Apple, right?
Peter: Wes. I want to be the Apple of whatever I do. The Apple of… yeah… time-tracking software.
Maria: And your job is to be different than, not to be the same. Don’t shoot for parity. Right? So what is authentically you? So it actually comes back to design. I really do believe that you could treat everything like a design process.
It’s collecting stories. And looking for patterns and then finding out the things that resonate with you that match your authenticity.
I took a short course on business, but most of it was research and then making it your own. So get intelligence about the domain and then pick the 10 to 20% that you need and figure out the rest based on your own authenticity.
You know, I know a lot of people look at me now and they go, “Oh my God, Maria is so authentic.” You know, like, I love hearing that feedback, but it really started with just feeling like an outcast. I started out feeling really bad that I wasn’t the same.
And then there was some point in my career where I went, this is design. The beauty about design is being different. Like back when I was competing against Adaptive Path and we were competing against Method and we were competing against Phoenix-Pop, most of those leaders were men. Most were men. And I realized. I’m a woman. Holy shit. I am different now. There were tons of pitches that I went on where they didn’t want to see a woman that’s when I sent Rajan in.
I’ll stay in San Francisco, you stay in Silicon Valley. We can laugh about it now, but it’s kind of brutal.
Peter: No, it’s, it’s terrible, right? Yeah.
Maria: But at some point I doubled down on the difference and I realized, let’s celebrate our difference. So people can pick us for who we are, not parity. So being different is a gift. But on the journey, you don’t always feel that way. You feel like an outcast.
Peter: I’m wondering, What exposure did you have to coaching, as you were a leader? You’ve been a coach, but were you coached?
Maria: The first coach I ever had was at Facebook.
Peter: So you didn’t, so all, all throughout Hot…
Maria: No. No, I had, I had peers like you where we would meet for drinks and share war stories and ask each other advice. That’s our coaching. We had peer coaching back in the day.
A lot of people I coach now, they are looking to their bosses for inspiration and motivation. I’m like, look, when you get to a certain level, you’re not getting that from your boss. You have to pay for a coach.
When you’re starting out your career, your manager becomes your coach. But as you move up the ladder, chances are, you’re going to report to somebody who’s not somebody who you’re going to learn from. So it’s just a reality.
Or even if you do, you can get re-orged out of that person, right? There’s no guarantee that you’re going to find, keep, have somebody who can really help you grow. So coaching is super important as you get to a certain stage in your life. So I had a coach at Facebook and then I brought that coach in to Autodesk, but instead of me getting coached, I used the budget to coach my directs because I felt like it was important for them to have a different perspective.
But all of the things that I’ve learned in my life add up, they’re all ands, they’re not ors. All of these life experiences are ands. And that is the only good thing about getting older, by the way, that’s the only good thing. Your body breaks down. You’re closer to death, your hair’s turning white, your belly is getting bigger.
But the thing that you gain is wisdom, and that is invaluable. And I love that. I love that I can now talk about my life experience with confidence. I couldn’t do that when I was in my twenties.
Jesse: Excellent. Well, thank you for sharing so much of your life experience with us.
Maria: It’s so much fun. I love you guys so much. You guys are so much fun.
Peter: Well, that completes another episode of Finding Our Way. I want to thank, deeply, I want to thank you, Maria, for joining us, in this conversation and joining us on our journey. As always you can find me on Twitter @peterme, Jesse is @jjg, and our website is http://findingourway.design.
Maria, come back. How can people find you? How do you like to be found, if at all, on the internet?
Maria: Well, best way to reach me is through LinkedIn, Twitter and, there will be a new Hot Studio website emerging, in the next month or so, which talks about all of my coaching and workshop offerings. But in the meantime, you can just find my email there.
Peter: Great. So feel free to reach out to any or all of us about anything we’ve discussed, during this conversation. And, we look forward to having you continue to join us as we continue finding our way.
Maria: Whoo! Fun.
Peter: So what has been your quarantine pastime or hobby?
Maria: I’m painting and I’m getting back to doing some art, but not full time. I’m not ready to be like… an artist.
Peter: Have you, is this your first painting since like you left school, 30 years ago?
Maria: I, I, it’s funny. I, when I left Autodesk last year, I, I, I said, I’m going to paint, I’m going to do an oil painting. I haven’t done that since I was like 17, so 40 years. So I made an oil painting and it turns out that next week I’m actually taking a three-day painting retreat with a friend of mine who’s a professional painter.
He’s in Marin.
Peter: You will be social distancing, right??
Maria: We will be socially distant, there’s only five of us, but he and I went to art school together and I’m tickled and I’m going, and I’m studying painting with him.
Jesse: Wow. That’s wonderful.
Maria: Yeah. You have three days in Marin, outside in plain air. So we got to like stand with the easel and like an umbrella. And we got to paint what we see.
Peter: Are you going to wear a beret? Do you wear it to the left or right?
Maria: No beret. It’s gotta be like shade situations. So…
Peter: Do you have a palette? I want this to be a stereotypical as possible…
Maria: It’s going to be very stereotypical. It’s going to have, like, I have a palette, I got an easel. It’s like, have you ever like gone on a hike and seen people painting in plain air, I’m going to be that person. I’m going to be one of those people that you walk by and you look at them and go. Yeah.
I’m gonna be one of those people.
Peter: That sounds great. That sounds awesome.
Maria: Yeah.
11: The Leadership Plateau and the Marketing Vortex
Jun 24, 2020
In which we address the how to grow as a design leader when the opportunities thin out, and then take a hard turn and address the culture of marketing and the problems it poses for designers.
Topics: Imbalance of leaders at different levels; don’t determine what’s interesting for someone else; the pace of career growth; designers who have found their way; discouraging people from desiring to be a leader because doing it right is fucking hard; dual-track leadership models; UX for marketing and product used to be the same; marketing design wants to work more like product design; brand beyond design; service design; marketing, as it’s commonly practiced, is bullshit; #notallmarketers; product marketing; data-driven marketing; functions have distinct cultures that cross-functional teams don’t address; Jesse’s hair.
Transcript
Peter: Welcome to another episode of Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse navigate their way through the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and, as always, joining me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hello, Jesse.
So this episode: the first 15 minutes or so we discuss the leadership plateau. This challenge that design leaders have as they grow in their organizations, they reach a point where it’s not clear how they can continue to grow and what to do about that. Then our conversation took a bit of a turn into the differences between design for marketing and design for product. We consider some ways forward, more holistically incorporating design for marketing and design for product in an overarching approach, looking at the entire end-to-end service experience.
Peter: If you look at design leadership I think we have more people who could do VP design work then we have VP design roles. Whereas five years ago, there weren’t enough design leaders who could be design executives, you now have almost too many design leaders who could be design executives and where you have a shortage, an imbalance, is more at this director level. So you have this glut of opportunities and not enough people to do that work.
Jesse: And is that, do you feel like that’s just sort of an accident of history, or like that is a moment that we have passed through, are passing through, we’re going to move beyond? Or do you see this as being in the nature of this work, that there are always going to be not enough executive level positions to go around.
Peter: I don’t think there are going to be enough executive level positions to go around for quite a while. I have to assume this is true of most functions. ‘Cause if you’re operating in a hierarchical organization, the way most of us are, you’ll have one VP, that one VP will have five directors reporting to them, so you get this pinch.
Something I’ve started to see, and I think we’re going to see more of it, is this recognition that design leaders don’t need to keep climbing the ladder in their career because there’s only so many places to go.
Whereas I’ve witnessed people who have considered hiring design leaders, like it’s a VP of design of an 80 person team and they’re looking to hire a design director for one of their offices that would probably oversee about 20 folks. And they’re getting applications from people who have run teams of 150. This type of thing I think is going to continue to happen because there’s only so many true design leadership roles, of a certain level.
And if you need a job and you are qualified to do the work, you very well will be like, “Hey, you know what, I’d be happy to run a team of 20, rather than be unemployed or rather than hold out for the rarer VP of design role.” And one of the issues I’ve seen in talking to leaders about this is the leader hiring for that director-level role is suspicious of a candidate who seems overqualified. And a piece of advice I actually gave this guy is, it is not your job to assume what they want better than they do. If they are applying for that role, take it at face value.
Don’t speculate about their circumstances. If they say they want to get closer to the work, then assume they want to get closer to the work. If they say the size of the team doesn’t matter and they just want to do good work at a good company, don’t assume that it’s something other than that, I know I’ve actually been discounted or dismissed from opportunities where the hiring folks were just like, “Oh, this wouldn’t be interesting for you.” And I’m like, “Why are you determining what’s interesting for me?” I should get to make that determination. And instead, if I know full well what the role is, and I’m still invested and engaged, appreciate that. Don’t think you know more about the candidate than the candidate does.
And I think a lot of hiring managers feel they know more about the person that they are bringing on than that person themselves. And that I think is a trap.
Jesse: So that raises an interesting question for me, which is what pace of career growth, and I mean this in the sense of expanded responsibility, greater authority, more pay, moving on up in the world, career growth. What pace of career growth do you think is reasonable for designers and design leaders to expect and are those different between designers and design leaders?
I find myself wondering if designers get accustomed to a certain pace of getting promotions, getting more authority, getting more responsibility, extending, expanding their skills in new directions. And then you get to design leadership and the cadence is different. The pace is different.
You might be spending a longer time at each of these levels before you eventually make your way up to VP.
Peter: I think that’s exactly right. A pretty common pattern is: you’re a junior designer for a couple of years, right out of school. Then you’re a mid-level designer for about three or four years. And then once you’ve hit your fifth or sixth year of being a designer, you’re now a senior designer, and the expectation is you’re in that role for a few years. From your fifth or sixth year to your ninth or 10th year at the most. And then it’s usually time to move on from being a senior designer that you either choose a management path or an individual contributor path.
And then those stages after that are longer-lasting. You could be a manager for five to 10 years. You can be a director for five to 10 years. Such that you get to be a VP usually when you’ve had roughly 20 years experience. And I mean, there are VPs of design of much smaller teams and they might not have had as long a career.
A couple things to acknowledge here. Years experience is a correlate for this but should not be a determiner. Unfortunately, so many HR practices use years experience as an easy quantifiable metric by which they can screen people in or out of a role. And the other thing I’ve seen is, people move at their own pace. And some designers, after 20 some years, are still senior designers. Maybe they’re a lead, the next level above senior, and they’re perfectly happy.
As a design manager, one of the things I appreciate most within my team are those older designers who figured out what they wanted and what they wanted wasn’t to keep climbing the ladder, but to find a groove that they were happy with and that they just settled right in. And they did really good work. It’s not like they were resting on their laurels. It’s not like they had given up. They’re just like, “You know what? I want to do this job. And, I’m fine that I’m not earning more money, that I’m not giving more responsibility because I’m happy.”
And so many other designers, I think, especially those who continue to climb the ladder, which probably means you have a bit of ambition, a bit of ego, a bit of that desire. Those leaders look at someone who’s found their groove, and are kind of suspicious. Like, “There must be something wrong with you if you don’t have the kind of ambition I do.” And that’s not true, that’s just a different mindset, a different personality.
Jesse: When you talk about this archetype of the designer, who knows what they want, I’m reminded of our old friend and former colleague Tim Gasperak, and a conversation that I had with Tim as he was parting ways from Adaptive Path many years ago. And he was very clear. He was like, you know what? This is the kind of team in which I know I can be successful. And this is the kind of environment in which I can be an effective leader and Adaptive Path at that point was turning into something that he could see was not for him. And I really appreciated his clarity about that and not, just mindlessly seeking additional opportunities within a system that wasn’t the right fit for him.
Peter: Yeah. Where, for me, it really crystallized was when I was leading design at Groupon and. We were building out our Chicago team. And there was a guy who was my age, our age, he’d been doing this type of work at that point for 20 some years. And at the company he was working for, he had been put into a manager role almost against his will, but because there was no one else around to do the work, and he was the senior most person on the team. And when we were able to offer him a straightforward senior interaction designer roll, a product designer role. He was so grateful that there was a place that he go and focus on the work. Not manage people, not be seen as some galvanizing leader, just someone who’s like really into the craft of design, wants to do good interaction design work, but also wants to work eight hours a day. Had his family, had his life. Wasn’t a striver and that was just a personality type. And he was by far and away the most well adjusted person on the team, because, probably because he’d had this experience and maybe Tim had this as well. He had an experience where he realized like, “Oh, I don’t like that.”
Maybe you don’t realize it until you’ve done it. And you’re like, “Oh, okay. I need to back off from that.” I guess my point to all of this is 1) don’t assume that you know other people’s conditions better than your own, like, take people at their face value. And 2) don’t assume that everyone else has the same drive and motivation that you do.
We’re all differently wired or inclined. And that’s great. And your role as a manager or a leader is to respect and recognize that, not try to mold and shape people all into a set of similar strivers.
Jesse: I think on the part of some of these very senior skilled people there is a question of whether this individual contributor path is going to be enough. Is it going to give them enough authority? Is it going to give them enough autonomy, to be able to actually grow into leadership from that perspective. I think that a lot of senior designers feel like in order to become leaders, they have to become managers and that the power structures that they’re a part of in fact favor the managers over the individual contributor leaders in a lot of the organizations that I’ve seen.
Peter: I think it is generally true that organizations find their leadership from those who manage, even in an organization that has dual track career ladders, where you can become a more senior IC or a manager, if you find you’re really wanting to have that influence and authority, there is a nudge towards management. That said, one of the things that I’m realizing, I hope our podcast can do, and it’s actually an unstated desire of my design leadership talks and workshops, is to subtly, and now I’m being unsubtle….
Jesse: Yeah, I don’t know how subtle you can call it anymore.
Peter: …is to subtly discourage people from desiring to be a leader if you’re not ready for it, because leadership is fucking hard. And I think too many people feel that leadership is just the next step on the ladder. It’s the next thing that I should be doing. There’s, again, this societal or professional pressure to grow into these leader roles, but to do leadership right is hard. But if you’re going to be a leader, it is incumbent upon you to be a good leader because now you’re responsible for so many more people other than yourself.
You have to take it seriously. And I think a lot of leaders don’t recognize what they’re getting into. They don’t approach the leadership aspects of their role with the seriousness or gravity that it’s warranted. And that’s bad, that’s harmful. I would rather folks who are not willing to sign up for the pain-in-the-ass that is true leadership to recognize, like, “You know what, I’m out. I don’t need to be a leader.” Like this guy that I was referring to earlier. “I’m happy being a really strong contributor. Maybe I’m not going to make as much money, but you can still make pretty good money.”
I think fundamentally much of what we’re talking about is wrapped up in capitalism and the challenges that we face in terms of needing to work in order to survive as a society, but separating some of that, you can make good money as a senior designer that is still primarily a contributor and not bear the psychological burden of real leadership.
We should encourage folks to not feel compelled, to keep growing in that progressive way and adopt leadership modes. There is something that I have seen happen in certain firms where they do have dual-track career growth, where you can be a manager and then a director, and then a VP, or you can be a lead designer, and a principal designer, and even like a distinguished designer. Sometimes what happens in those environments is the management track becomes seen as all you’re doing is people management as you elevate. And that actually is seen as less strategic and less value-add, within the organization.
Jesse: It becomes almost like an administrative function.
Peter: Exactly. The language I heard– There was one company I did some consulting for where they had this dual-track model and the people who were these design directors, they would have 10 to 15 people in their organizations. They felt that they were seen, essentially, this was their language, as babysitters.
Their job is to nurture and care for the humans.
And then they had a peer who, the role was, I think, a design architect, and those folks were the strategic and creative leaders and all of the energy outside of the design team, in terms of that cross-functional engagement was focused on the design architect. So your engineering peers, your product management peers, the executives. Because the design architect is the one talking about the strategic and creative problems in play. They’re getting all the attention and the design director who is running the team of all the people who are ultimately delivering this work is set aside because they’re not seen as strategic.
So there’s a risk there, that you turn your management class into, yeah, some form of admin and not someone who is also respected for their ability to lead a group towards delivering valuable solutions.
Music break
Design for Marketing vs Design for Product
Jesse: In more traditional marketing, branding, advertising agency environments, these strong high level performers are, I think, culturally more elevated because these are the workhorses of those companies as businesses. It’s your really super-skilled video editors and graphic designers and copywriters that can drive the creation of these highly polished artifacts, that is the basis of your business. And, so I’m curious about, how contextual this is in terms of the elevation of the individual contributor versus the elevation of the manager, depending on what business you’re in and what you’re delivering.
Peter: One of the companies I’m working with, right now I’m supporting their recruiting and hiring efforts. And they’ve been looking for design directors. And one of the people we were introduced to was someone who had predominantly a marketing background, and the design director role that I was recruiting for was going to have management as its primary function. This was going to be someone responsible for a team of 10 to 20 folks. There was going to be a lot of care and feeding and nurturing of that team.
There was going to be recruiting and hiring that they were going to have to do in building out the team. So I’m interviewing this guy, and it was interesting to me because he was coming at this from a background in marketing and creative. When I would ask him questions, he would always respond with experiences that he had in doing project work, and his stories were not about leading user experience teams. It was about delivering user experience work, and he never talked about his teams. He never talked– I couldn’t get him to talk about recruiting and hiring. Like, I didn’t want to lead him as a witness, right? I was trying to get a sense of where his head was, but I gave him many opportunities to talk about recruiting and hiring, to talk about building a team, to talk about coaching others and bringing them up. And he was clearly just– it didn’t occur to him that that was the thing to do. What occurred to him was I created deliverables for a client and that was my value. And it struck me just how, to the point you were just making, this cultural distinction between design for marketing and traditional creative and design for product and user experience.
And, it became clear to me that this gentleman was not going to be a fit for what we needed, because of this cultural difference. And I’m one who’s usually pretty accommodating of different backgrounds and perspectives, but there was a chasm that was just going to be too wide to cross here, in order for this person to succeed in the organization I was trying to recruit for.
Jesse: How separate do you think those worlds are at this point? Years ago, when all of this was getting started, there was a sense that these practices might not be that different. That UX was going to be UX was going to be UX, regardless of the context in which it was practiced. And since then, I think that we have seen a stronger divide between marketing, branding, content-oriented UX versus product UX, and those cultures and practices, I think, have been diverging for a little while now, maybe the last 10 years or so.
Peter: I have…
Jesse: And it used to be that a lot of people would go back and forth between them. Now, a lot of people had these resumes that were a mix of different kinds of UX work, and I don’t know how much that’s happening anymore.
Peter: Wow. Okay. I feel like I’m about to go for five to eight minutes.
Jesse: Great.
Peter: Well, so. When Adaptive Path started, our work was primarily in support of marketing user experience: big, hairy websites that needed help figuring out their structure to be more understandable to potential customers.
And we always wanted to do the product side, what happened once you logged in, but there just wasn’t as much demand for that. Marketing had budgets for user experience in a way that product teams at that time, in 2001, 2002, did not have budgets for user experience.
Jesse: Right.
Peter: What our experience was at Adaptive Path is exactly what you said. We were able to use basically the same methods for doing marketing UX as we did for doing product UX. And I think we were quite successful. That said, there has been a bifurcation. I mean, it’s basically the split in your Elements diagram, right, right down the middle.
Jesse: [Laughs]
Peter: There’s been a bifurcation…
Jesse: You got me.
Peter: …possibly less in practice, but definitely in culture. In the last year, I’ve really felt a certain, almost upheaval about this. Because I think marketing design teams are frustrated. Marketing design teams, I believe, would love to work more like what they see happening on product design teams, but the internal partners that brand and marketing designers have are marketers and the marketing mindset is built around campaigns. It’s built around launches. It’s built around days, weeks, and months primarily. Whereas I think the product mindset is built around weeks, months, quarters.
The timeframe tends to be different. So marketing design teams tend to be turning around work much faster. They don’t get to dig in the way that product design teams get to. And it’s a frustration on their part. I’ve been working with some marketing design teams over the last five or six months, and they don’t like being on this hamster wheel they don’t quite know how to get off because that is the set of expectations.
Whereas the product designers, there’s just this recognition that software takes longer, and that there’s a certain complexity to software that requires upfront deeper thinking. The research and the modeling and the understanding of the problem before you can then start building the experiences to deliver on it. Whereas marketing is not seen as a similarly complicated space to grapple with. But what I’m starting to hear more from one of my consulting clients right now, I have been working with both the brand design team and the product design team, but separately, right.
Brand design reports up through marketing, product design reports up through product. But I’ve heard from both design teams that they want to be working together and that they want to coordinate their efforts and there’s actually been some conspiratorial thinking that the higher levels of the organization are trying to keep these two teams down by keeping them separated, which I don’t believe to be the case. I think this is simply an artifact of decades of design practice.
But I think in terms of this convulsion, a different brand design team that I’m working with is trying to figure out how they push beyond brand design, to being essentially the brand ambassadors for the organization. And with this recognition that in order to deliver a brand experience, it’s not just around events production and marketing design and video testimonials and all the things that a brand design team works on. It’s about helping the frontline be better. Engage better with their customers, because that is a brand touchpoint. Or the customer service people, the salespeople, all those folks who represent the company. Our reps are thus representing the company’s brand. And the leadership of this brand design team wants to have an influence there, and they don’t quite know how to get there, but they recognize that their ultimate impact is limited, until they are able to have that influence.
And that for me is the sign that this is a team that’s trying to solve that brand problem, that is as, if not more, complicated than the product design problems that we’re talking about.
Jesse: When you start talking about orchestrating brand identity and brand attributes across these multiple touchpoints, at that point, you are starting to talk about service design practice. So I can definitely see where these things are colliding. I think that part of this bifurcation that you’re talking about has to do with how the value of design is construed by the partners that you’re working with, that when you’re engaged in this marketing branding context, there is a certain set of assumptions about what design is bringing to the table that nudge you toward that project orientation, that delivery orientation. And you talked about the early days of Adaptive Path and the work that we did as we were straddling the marketing and product spaces and we did a lot of marketing work early on because that’s where the value was being recognized. The value of design as a contributor to product development had not yet been recognized to the same degree. That recognition then came, but their perception of the value of design was different from the perception of the value of design that our marketing oriented clients had. And they were asking for different things as a result of putting the emphasis on different things. So there would be more emphasis on the more user modeling and requirements development kind of stuff than we would see from our marketing clients, because the way that product owners saw our value was fundamentally different.
Peter: We ran away from marketing as fast as we could at Adaptive Path. The moment we didn’t have to take on marketing jobs anymore, we were happy. And I think there is a challenge in corporations, corporate America, at least. Marketing as it has been commonly practiced, particularly around marketing communications, is largely bullshit. It’s, it’s, it’s not well considered. It’s not intellectual. It’s not thought through. It’s, “We’ve always done it like this. So let’s just keeping doing it like this.” It’s throwing shit against the wall and hoping something sticks.
And the people who are in leadership roles gravitating towards marketing are often not the sharpest knives in the drawer and they’re not people that I want to be partnering with.
And this is, I’m just putting this out there. Right. I’m, I’m gonna piss off a bunch of folks and I’m sure #notallmarketers. But there is a problem in companies that marketing is often handled by folks who are not tackling these problems with the level of depth and rigor that it is due.
And I think marketing over time has kind of trifurcated–you have marketing communications, you have product marketing, and now you have, what is this newest form of marketing, kind of a growth marketing, like a data driven marketing, let’s call it that.
And one of the challenges with marketing is marketing hasn’t figured out what it is. After 20 years of the 21st century, it’s confused. And the companies who get it best are setting marcomm aside and focusing on the data-driven marketing, because they actually can see there is a degree of thought and rigor that is happening there.
Product marketing is an interesting one because, 30 or 40 years ago, the design work that you and I do, that client would have been the product marketers. Product marketers were responsible for understanding their audience, modeling the audience, and then figuring out what you create in order to serve that market.
That was product marketing. And something happened over the last 30 or 40 years where that part of marketing withered away. There’s bits and pieces of it. You see it more in enterprise software companies than consumer focused companies, but it’s not what it once was.
I think there’s an interesting opportunity for product marketing to be reborn. I have found in over the last few years, some of my best advocates for what I was trying to do within an organization were product marketers. These folks who we’re trying to get the right thing done, but they’re not marcomm, they’re not, these data-driven marketers, they’re sitting in the middle. One of the things that’s happened is with “agile transformations,” you get these highly atomized product delivery teams. And one of the unfortunate byproducts of that is there is no holistic view of the customer anymore, except potentially with product marketers, if you have them, they were still around. They have this view, there was one client I was working with where the product marketers, they literally said our reason for being is to be the voice of the customer within this organization, ‘cause no one else is, and I’m like, shouldn’t that be design or product?
And they’re like, maybe, but it’s not happening here. So it’s on us.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: I think one of the challenges is brand design has been so tightly aligned with marketing communications, it has narrowed the space within which it plays and the tools that are being brought to bear in terms of designing marketing experience. Whereas product marketing is actually a better relationship for design in terms of embracing all that design has to offer
Jesse: And part of it, too, I think, has to do with the history and the legacy and the existing culture of the organization. So at Capital One, the design group, as it was starting to come together, faced some real cultural obstacles because so much of Capital One’s historical success had come from the work of the brand team that had built up this huge, really highly recognizable consumer brand.
Peter: ”What’s in your wallet?”
Jesse: Exactly, and that colored everyone’s understanding of what design was and what the value of design was that we then collectively, as a product design team, had to reeducate and re-re-educate and remind people that we were there to do something different, all the while wanting and striving for that relationship with brand that you’re talking about. There were people on both sides, on the brand side and the design side at Capital One who were working toward, tighter coordination. And it is something that, as far as I know, the folks at Capital One are still trying to unravel.
Peter: Yeah, I would love an ethnographer or ethnographers to study the cultures of these different functions. I think there’s something fundamentally broken at the heart of marketing and marketing culture and it’s not anything that marketers are even necessarily cognizant of anymore because it’s, it’s the air they breathe.
Jesse: …the water they’re swimming in.
Peter: Todd Wilkens, when he was at Adaptive Path, had this series of Interpretations of users from different parts of the business, and marketers, he said, saw their customers as sheep. You frightened them towards a certain direction and then they’ll just go in that direction.
And so the role of marketing is to just either scare or otherwise persuade. You can, just through stories and through messaging, get people to do what you want them to do. And I think that is deep within the mindset of marketing and advertising.
And you know, you and I, and the others at Adaptive Path, so part of the reason I think we wanted to run far away from marketing is that is not the values we hold. We want to enable, we want to empower. And there was more opportunity to do that on the product side. Now, product has demonstrated a whole host of it’s own ethical issues, largely trying to turn digital media into slot machines and triggering people’s personalities.
As companies, we’re still struggling with cross-functional, cross-departmental coordination. For the longest time, for decades on end, functions could work in isolation of one another. Strategists come up with the goal of an organization. They pass that off to marketing. Marketing takes those goals, studies the market, comes up with a set of requirements for new offerings that will deliver the value that the strategists had identified. And then they pass those requirements on to designers. The designers take those requirements, create a bunch of specifications based on those requirements and pass that off to the engineers or manufacturers to take those specifications and figure out how to do it at scale.
Jesse: And we all have our place in the great waterfall.
Peter: In the last 20 years, as we’ve tried to embrace cross-functional, balanced-team, digital ways of working, where you’re not handing something off from one to another, but these folks are coming together, I think something we haven’t resolved are the cultural differences between these teams.
This gets at some of what we were talking about last time with trust, like the meaningful cultural differences between these teams and how do we create that integument, that space within which they can coexist and collaborate. And I don’t think you can do that successfully until we have a shared understanding of where each team is coming from, what it is they value, what impact they want to have, how they behave.
And we haven’t done enough to appreciate that from these different teams. So culturally, the teams are still behaving as if they’re in a waterfall isolation, but practically, they’ve been thrown together. And I think that may be some of the tension that we see in these organizations.
Jesse: Well, I think in a big way, what you’re talking about has to do with shared values. And when you talk about what you see as this problem, this sickness in the culture of marketing, I feel like part of what you’re reacting to is the fact that it seems to be embodying some values that go against human centeredness. As an underlying value underneath everything that we’re doing, which is to bring that understanding of the user, but also respect for the user and the user’s humanity and the user’s human sovereignty to the work and not just push them around like sheep.
Peter: Well, that wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way. Thank you for joining us as we continue to grapple with the challenges of design and design leadership. As always you can find us out in the world. On Twitter, I am @peterme and Jesse is @jjg. You can also reach us on our website, https://findingourway.design/. We have a contact form and we have been thrilled to receive communications from listeners. It not only makes our day, it gives us ideas for what we should be talking about.
So please continue to join our journey as we continue finding our way.
Jesse: Finding our way. Thanks, Peter.
Peter: Your hair is looking normal.
Jesse: Yeah, I was, I was, I realized this morning that it’s time for the second round quarantine haircut because the first round is now grown out. I, yeah, I can’t cut my own hair.
Peter: All right. Well, cause I know you, I mean like that, that, that side, your left side left. Yeah. You kind of clipper, right? You shave that.
Jesse: Weah, it’s actually, it’s a, it’s all the way around. It’s clipper all the way around in the back as well. So on both sides and in the back. Short back and sides.
Peter: What’s it like having hair?
Jesse: it’s, you know, it’s kind of like having a pet, you have to wash it. You have to take care of it. Check up on it.
Peter: Feed it.
Jesse: Mine likes, sirloin burger.
Peter: Oh, okay. Sure.
Jesse: Tartar.
Peter: Only the finest. You just rub it right in?
Jesse: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just sort of mash the ground beef into your scalp. It’s really, it’s wonderful for the texture.
Peter: Do you use a, a lean, or a higher fat ground beef for that?
Jesse: You know, it depends on the time of year. In the winter time, the higher fat is better. It kind of moisturizes the hair. It gives it a little bit more suppleness, a little bit more body in those, you know, those cold winter months, but in the summertime you can go with something leaner.
Peter: Yeah, probably in the summertime, you don’t want too much fat on your scalp, ‘cause that would just like, you know, lock it, lock it in and you need to be able to sweat. You need to be able to cool off. So…
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. It also has a little bit of a, sort of a tanning oil effect. You end up with those, that scalp tan that’s really awkward.
Peter: Again, see, I don’t, I don’t get these pleasures without hair…
Jesse: Yeah, no, I know. I know, but you have, you, you can cut your own hair.
Peter: Well, Stacy cuts my hair. I could, it’s, it’s helpful if she does it just to make sure it’s even like everywhere. When I’ve tried to do it myself, I get little patches, like teeny patches, patches, all the same.
Jesse: Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s why I’m terrified to try to do my own hair for sure. Ah, so.
Peter: “On this episode of…” I’m trying to think. It’s not, it’s not shaving our way, clipping our way, finding our hair.
Jesse: Grooming our way.
10: We Have Trust Issues
Jun 16, 2020
In which we grapple with the multifarious concept of trust, in light of how important it is for leaders to establish, build, and maintain it in their relationships.
Topics: Leadership coaching, psychological safety, resilience, conditions leading to trust, Michael Jordan’s uncompassionate leadership tactics, critique, bestowed authority, Brené Brown, non-judgment, leaders speak last, “being right” behavior, earning trust, maintaining positivity and authenticity in the face of difficulties; integrity; whether organizations can earn trust; trust falls; Amy Edmondson; Google’s Project Aristotle; accountability; trust as an emergent property; why all these models and theorists never mention trust; trust within a team; trust between teams; trust as an integument that enables cross-functional teams to collaborate; Drive by Daniel Pink; operationalizing trust is like eating soup with chopsticks or trying to capture a candle flame.
Transcript
Peter: Remember this from episode seven:
We’re wary of bringing trust into this work environment because my guess is because we think we fear we will have to break it. At some point, we are going to have to make a decision that breaks that trust. And so we almost don’t want to start that conversation for fear of where it will go.
But in order for us to make the–
Jesse: Wow. That’s just, well, I want to, I want to allow some space for that. ‘Cause that’s a pretty powerful statement, what you just said. And, the notion that leaders are carrying around with them, this burden all the time of the knowledge that whatever trust they build, they might at some point have to destroy, as part of doing their job, it’s a challenging place to be.
It’s interesting that we came to this place just because trust actually was a big component of the work that I was doing in the last couple of years at Capital One. And, it’s an area that I’ve been digging into, and trying to figure out how to bring a greater understanding of to my practice with leaders. So I have a lot of things to say about it.
Peter: Well, maybe that becomes the subject for our next conversation.
Peter: That’s what we’re actually going to talk about today.
Jesse: On Finding Our Way.
Peter: You just love saying that, don’t you?
Jesse: I don’t know. It just seems—
Intro
Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hi Jesse.
What were you thinking or what were you referring to when it came to the matter of trust in design leadership at Capital One?
Jesse: Well, as I was transitioning into leadership coaching, part of what I was really trying to do was look at the larger systemic patterns across the various teams whose leaders I was working with, and trying to figure out what I could do to push the culture forward in meaningful ways from a non-leadership position, but rather from this position of coach to the leaders.
And so I got interested in this concept of team resiliency and what helps teams stick together, hold together, pursue a vision together and see it through. And in reading into that kind of stuff, I started getting into issues of interpersonal relationships in the workplace and not just resiliency, but the safety that is created by the leaders of these teams.
So, psychological safety is a phrase that we’ve started hearing a lot about in workplace contexts, in terms of how much space do leaders create for a diversity of opinions. How much room is there for dissent in organizations, things like that.
And it turns out that all of these things track really strongly with the set of ideas that I was thinking of as team resilience and digging into this whole subject area eventually came down to the question of who do you trust and how was that trust created and how does that trust develop and grow over time?
And this takes place really purely at the level of two individuals, any two individuals in the team. There is a question of what is the existing trust relationship between those individuals? And in a lot of ways, I see the responsibility of the leader of the team to foster those trusting relationships, not just with the people that they’re engaging with, but among the people that they’re responsible for.
Peter: Tell me a little bit more. You used the word resilience, which is a word I like. but I want to make sure I understand what you mean by it. I see resilience as an ability to hold together come what may, primarily through challenges.
Jesse: I do see resilience as the ability of the team to hold together, come what may, and what you’re really talking about is the teams. Collective ability to face uncertainty together and to find a way through to a solution together and staying together as a team.
You know, I think about these really enduring product teams, that we see in some of these longer standing organizations where somebody will move into a leadership role and they will gather around them their best collaborators, and they’ll take those collaborators with them from project to project and sometimes from organization to organization, where they’ve got a lot of trust built up there already, and they’re able to leverage those relationships and carry those forward into brand new areas where they don’t know what’s going to happen.
But ultimately those places where the trust is thin are the places that eventually become fractures and fissures that break up teams and that create these breakdowns in unity of vision, unity of purpose.
Peter: What are the conditions that you saw that prime a team for higher trust, or maybe behaviors and activities?
Jesse: What we’re looking for, what trust ultimately is, is an internal barometer, a compass by which we evaluate other humans and how much confidence we can have in the predictability of their choices in their behavior.
Peter: It’s like brand. Sorry.
Jesse: Well, yeah, I mean, we talk about brand promises and, and yeah.
Peter: Its promise. Yeah.
Jesse: But it’s not necessarily a specific promise in that it’s not that I need to be able to predict exactly what you’re going to do in order to be able to trust you, but in order to be able to trust you, I do need to feel that whatever choices I see you make are internally consistent, are compassionate toward other humans, and are undertaken with a degree of care and awareness. And so we’re looking for, in other people, we’re looking for these signs that whatever decisions this person is going to make in the future are going to come from a place of groundedness in themselves. Awareness of what’s really going on around them.
A certain degree of clarity there, right? And compassion toward the impact of their choices on the people around them. And so we’re looking for signs and signals of these things all the time.
Peter: Interesting. Having just finished watching the 10-part ESPN docu-series on Michael Jordan in “The Last Dance,” I would argue that his teammates trusted him, but they did not find him compassionate. He was an asshole who would ride you very hard in order to get the best out of you.
Now, you could trust Michael Jordan in the ways that you’re talking about. He was highly predictable. You knew where he was coming from. You understood what his goals were, and he never wavered. So there was that solidity. But, the desire to meet the goal overrode everything else for him. And if his way to get there was to goad you through belittling, because he felt that was the lever by which you would perform better, you would be willing to do that.
Jesse: I did use the word compassion, but I think that what I’m really talking about more is simply a level of human awareness. That is to say, Michael Jordan knew the effects of the choices that he was making on the other players and whether or not that contributed toward trusting relationships. Maybe with some people that did more than others. For some people, if you push me really hard to get me to a place that I want to get to, that I can’t get there by myself, that actually is a way of seeing me, serving me, supporting me, and for some people, if we can do that in a way that resonates, then it can be productive. If the leader is tuned out, not noticing the emotional effects of their choices on their team, that’s what creates the damage.
Peter: Hmm. Yeah. Well, it’s, it’s funny. So, I think the reason many organizations, many even design teams struggle with critique, is that critique requires this trust that you’re talking about. In order for it to work, in order for you to be direct, in order for you to be honest, frank, forthright with one another such that the person receiving it doesn’t wilt in the face of the criticism, there needs to be that shared understanding, shared respect, and trust in one another. And I think what lacks in many of these organizations is that trust, is that sense that we are all aligned, we all have the same goals, and we all have this respect for one another, and so when you tell me that this design isn’t working, it’s not about me. It’s about the work. And in organizations where that hasn’t happened, when you told me this design isn’t working, I feel it’s about me.
Jesse: One of the people who’s done a lot of research in this area is Brené Brown, who is a psychological researcher, who’s done a bunch of TED talks and has written a bunch of very popular, successful books. And in her research on the qualities of these trusting relationships, one of the qualities that she talks about is non-judgment, which is to be able to engage with someone about a situation, without holding a judgment about them as a person, through it. And so this is one of the behaviors that she’s identified in her research that contributes toward that sense of trust that you’re talking about.
So you’re touching on all of the same things. I do think there is an element that comes into play here that is maybe not as obvious to talk about, which is power and the way that power is used to force trust. Or to override mistrust. And again, that can go up to a point. But when you have these leaders who impose their will through authority rather than connecting people with meaning and purpose and bring them along, that is in the long term not a recipe for a trusting relationship.
Peter: Yeah, I was thinking of that when I was thinking about critique because critique is a method that you learn in design school. And it surprises me then when you get out into the real world and you engage in critique, and designers often find themselves feeling attacked. And I think it’s in part, my hypothesis would be is that in design contexts for time immemorial, critique was predicated on this assumption of trust, particularly on the part of leadership, this power dynamic that you’re referring to. Leaders felt comfortable critiquing the work of their team without ever having established the needed underlying relationships, because they were in authority and the team members just kind of had to take it.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: And that there’s probably been this toxic dynamic for decades, centuries, in terms of how this was handled and like the abused child going on to abuse their children, it just kind of kept getting carried down ‘cause that seemed to be the way it had to be. Whereas, environments where, what did you call it? The non-judgment, Brené Brown’s non-judgment kind of quality will lead to better critique, than prior modes. The other thing, oh, the other thing I was thinking of when you talk about power, it’s a story that I tell that comes from my time at Adaptive Path that I then baked into my leadership training. Where we started Adaptive Path, there were seven equal partners. We were comfortable arguing with each other, fighting with each other, intellectually.
Jesse: Hmm.
Peter: And that was just part of how we worked. And then we started bringing people in. And the earlier folks we brought in tended to be okay with this dynamic. We tended to find folks who were strong-willed, who were eager to engage with this kind of rough-and-tumble intellectual discourse.
But as we grew, we ended up, as one does, you just find different personality types and some people who were clearly not comfortable with that way of engaging, and I hadn’t realized it. I tend to not be the most immediately empathetic person. And so I would engage as I always had, which, you know, people are showing work or giving a presentation and looking for feedback.
And I would give my feedback very directly ‘cause I want to make it better. And what I didn’t know was happening was that people were receiving that poorly, and it was shutting them down.
And it was one of our colleagues, Laura Kirkwood-Datta, who I remember pulled me aside and basically said, she said, “You can’t do that.” I’m like, “Do what?” She says, “You can’t talk, you can’t engage in that way in these group sessions when we’re working through things,” and I’m like, “Why not?” I’m like, “It’s just ideas. We’re all here with our ideas. We’ve always talked about our ideas. We’ve always said best idea wins,” and she’s like, “You’re the boss,” and I’m like, “No, I’m not. We’re all equal.” Then she’s like, “No, no, no, no, no. You’re the boss. You’re a founder. You’re in a position of power and authority, and when you talk, it stops the conversation.”
And it took me a while, like I was defensive at first. After a couple of days, I realized the wisdom in what she said.
And, what this has turned into in my leadership practice is that leaders speak last. In any room, the most senior person should be the last person to talk. If the leader talks earlier, then that becomes an edict that people feel like they have to follow. What usually happens is at some point in the conversation, someone will say whatever the leader wanted to say, but because it emerged from the group, now it doesn’t feel like an edict.
It feels like something we believe, and they are much more likely to carry it forward with vigor as opposed to just feeling like it’s a command.
Jesse: I think there is definitely a not small amount of the leader’s job that simply involves listening intently until someone says something that you agree with and then agreeing.
Peter: Which can be hard for a certain kind of leader. I mean, you and I, I think we’ve talked about this, like all throughout our lives, we were lauded and given good grades and celebrated for being right and making good arguments. And, there’s a culture that supports that behavior. But when you’re getting into these group contexts, that kind of behavior, that “being right” behavior, that “smartest person in the room” behavior can actually be defeating and deflating for a team.
Jesse: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. and we’ve talked a little bit about how the stance of the leader needs to be different from the stance that they held as a designer in the room. They have to recognize that their words have a different weight now than they did before.
The truth is that every leader is going to bring baggage from their previous experiences to the role, whether you’re a design leader or a technology leader or any kind of a leader, and those things can be unconscious patterns that, to your point, can be undermining your ability to effectively earn trust from your team.
And I think that word earn is really important because it is an investment that you’re making toward the future when you are engaging in these trust-growing activities. And you know, when we all find ourselves under psychological pressure, we fall back on our shortcuts.
And for some leaders, when they find themselves in those positions, they fall back on shortcuts that undermine their ability to engage in these trust-growing behaviors. It becomes a little bit harder for them to be as entirely open with the team as maybe they want to be. It becomes a little bit harder for them to be as compassionate in their communications. it becomes a little bit harder for them to show up with the consistency that drives trust among a team. Those kinds of things.
Music break
Peter: Leadership is hard. And I don’t think a lot of leaders understand just how hard it is before they get into it. And I don’t think a lot of them necessarily realize how hard it is to do right once they’re in it. And one of the key places it’s hard is this balancing of information that you now have access to at a leadership level, oftentimes, which can be quite difficult. You’re part of a company. The company may be struggling. You’re not meeting your numbers. There’s an HR violation or some, whatever it is, you get access to all kinds of information.
And you as a leader have to figure out, How do you engage your team, now, knowing what you know? Because one of the things that I am firmly in belief in is that leaders have to maintain positivity with their teams. It does them and their teams no good, for leaders, if they hear that Q1 sucked, to then in the next team meeting to talk about how sucky Q1 was, right? ‘Cause that’s just going to crumble everyone else on the team. And so one of the biggest challenges that leaders face is how do they maintain authenticity, honesty, their own integrity, given what they know, while maintaining positivity when times are tough.
Jesse: Hmm. That is hard.
Peter: And that’s something that I’ve struggled with, ‘cause you don’t want to put on rose-colored glasses. You don’t want to snow people into thinking, like, “Don’t worry, everything’s fine.” And then they find out, you know, three weeks later that they’ve been laid off.
But you also don’t want to say in three weeks, a third of you are going to be laid off. So you start figuring out how to be truthful. You never want to lie. How do you be truthful?
Jesse: Obviously one factor that is related to trust is honesty. And it can be really challenging for a leader not to commit a thousand sins of omission every day, in terms of the information that they’re leaving out of their communications, but I will say that what people are looking for is a degree of clear-headedness. Are you being, not just honest with me, but are you being honest with yourself about the reality of the situation? And are you operating from. a self-aware stance? You know, when you talk about rose-colored glasses, that’s another way of undermining trust. You don’t even have to lie to do it if you are not being truthful with yourself about the reality of the situation. And then how do you motivate people in that case? Again, I think it’s a matter of are you connecting back to the sense of meaning and purpose that drives your engagement in the work in the first place.
Peter: I want to circle back to something you said earlier about earning trust, because I agree with you. I think that was my a-ha moment when I was at this conference and we were talking about, How do we get employees to be more fully engaged in their work? And we do that by connecting them with meaning and purpose. And as I was noodling on that, I realized, yes, you might engage people through meaning and purpose, but if you don’t earn their trust, then that meaning and purpose kind of washes away.
Jesse: Well, and another thing related to what you’re talking about here is the notion of integrity, which is, are you acting out your values? Are you walking your talk? And, if you say that something is important to you and I see you do something else, even if we have previously aligned around that value, I can still hold that value, but what is lost is the sense that I share it with you.
Peter: Right, right, right. So trust needs to be earned. It’s earned. Gradually over time it builds. it’s one of those things that probably build slowly and then can be taken away quite quickly. But, my question for you, ‘cause you also mentioned at the heart of trust is the relationship between two individuals, and I’m wondering about trust in organizations, What is an employee’s trust? Even a leader’s trust, much less a member of their team’s trust with the organization, the company that they work for. And I’m just curious if you unpack that at all in your research around trust.
Jesse: Well, I mean, yes, people have relationships with the organizations that they work for, but not in the same way that I’m talking about. You can’t build a trusting relationship with a system.
Peter: It’s funny though, because these companies are trying to be that. They want to earn your trust, right? All of these very you know, pro-employee organizations, that are trying to look out for you as an employee and, and where they want you to feel like this is your family. And it’s your home away from home…
Jesse: And I can tell from your tone of voice that you think it’s a bunch of empty rhetoric, which is exactly what it is, which is exactly what it sounds like, because it’s not a substitute for the thing that actually keeps people in organizations, which is working with people who have their backs, and that’s what trust is.
Peter: What, so what then? Hmm? Is it not possible for an organization to earn a team members trust?
Jesse: I don’t think so because as soon as you change the leadership of that organization, the trust is reset.
Peter: I think I agree. It’s just intriguing for how many people that becomes this startling notion when that trust is lost.
Jesse: If organizations want to build trust with employees, they need to be elevating trustworthy leaders and making the qualities of trustworthy leaders cultural values within the organization.
And I would say that, coming back to the notion of resilience, organizations that tend to hold teams together for a long time tend to do so because those trust relationships are not just with the leadership. They are matrixed, and there’s a broad web of trust relationships across the organization that doesn’t just follow reporting structures. That doesn’t just follow the shape of the organization itself.
So, I think that the most effective leaders, the ones who are able to create these more resilient teams, are not just creating trusting relationships of their own, but they are helping the people who are in their care create trusting relationships with each other and with the people that they have to engage with—their business partners, their technology partners, whoever they are.
Peter: Right.
Jesse: It is fostering a culture of trust-building that is the thing that makes organizations trustworthy.
Peter: Yeah. For some unfortunate reason, maybe because I’m a glib, cynical mofo, you know, all I can think of are trust falls, and hackneyed team building exercises.
Jesse: That stuff doesn’t work either. And because it’s not a substitute for these things that I’m talking about, it’s not a substitute for showing that you know what you’re doing. It’s not a substitute for showing up in consistent ways over time. It is not a substitute for being honest and clear with people. It’s not a substitute for showing that you care about the impact of your decisions on others.
Peter: It’s funny. So you mentioned psychological safety, which I believe is a phrase that was brought forth to the world by a researcher at Harvard, Amy Edmondson, did a lot of work on teams and teaming and recognized the power of psychological safety. It probably, at least in our universe, caught wind when Google did a project, trying to understand what led to teams being successful. Their People and Culture group did some internal research. And their hypothesis was that the best teams were the teams with the best people on it. And because Google had had kind of this mindset that, you get really brilliant people, throw them together, give them a problem, and, and let them run with it. And that is how you achieve success.
And the research showed that… I don’t even know if talent measured on the top five factors of team success. And there were two things that were overwhelmingly important. One was psychological safety. It was far and away… It was like tier one, far above tier two, and then tier two was far above three, four, and five.
Tier one was psychological safety, essentially, that you will not be threatened or at risk within a team based on your actions. You can speak freely, you can try things and if they don’t work, you are not going to be humiliated. You were not going to be demoted. You are not going to be fired or whatever fear that might be in other contexts if you were to have not great outcomes. And instead, it was going to be recognized. Like, you know what, that’s just part of the process and you are safe here. And that safety led to better performance. The second most important thing, which is something you just touched on as well, is accountability.
That you are accountable to one another as team members and that you follow through on what you say you will do. Essentially those two things were far and away the most important factors of team success, at Google.
Jesse: And so in Brené Brown’s research, she refers to these two qualities as accountability and reliability. Reliability being the consistency with which you show up and accountability being simply your willingness to own your mistakes and to take responsibility for the consequences of your choices.
Peter: There’s a lot about team building that we can talk about and could unpack here. That’s been a subject of my research interest for the last year and a half. Though, it’s funny, I never really poked a trust as a factor. I guess it’s an emergent property of these other aspects, but it’s almost never discussed in and of itself as a goal or an objective or a necessary criteria. For some reason, that word, it’s almost like a third rail word.
Jesse: Yeah, it is. Because if you’re going to talk about trust, then you have to admit the possibility of mistrust, and then that becomes, I think, a dangerous thing for organizations to consider. Having to actively manage it really makes them uncomfortable. Maybe dangerous is not the right word, but uncomfortable.
Peter: Definitely uncomfortable. So one of the challenges that I’m currently facing is, supporting a team where there is by-and-large trust internally, though there are some misgivings, there are some challenges with communication and transparency. As I was unpacking that, what I believe to be true is that the issues are less within this design team and more within the organization as a whole. And I kind of want to create this safe space for the team, this bailiwick, this home for them where they can be their fullest, best, completist, most trusting selves, and we can probably get much of the way there.
The issue is these teams don’t exist in isolation, these teams are part of larger organizations that don’t necessarily share the value of this particular design team. We’re running up against that boundary line of, yes, we can be safe when we’re in our cave, but we often have to venture out of the cave and we have to go talk to the people in other caves, or we have to meet on the field and build a fire together.
And we don’t all have the same sense of how to build that fire. And now we’re arguing with each other. And that affects how that person, then, when they go back to the cave, yes, they can get affirmation and stuff, but when they spend most of their time out on the field arguing with the other fire tenders, I have trouble figuring out how to solve that issue as a design leader, because much of that is outside of my control.
Jesse: And it’s this indirect empowerment of the team members with the trust-building skills, with the relationship-building skills to give them the skills to do that. So imagine, you know, out there in the wilderness around the fire, like you’re talking about, if somebody is going to get all those groups organized and aligned and to agree with each other, who do you think it’s likely to be?
It’s going to be the people who came from the team that had the strongest practices like that internally to begin with. So in a lot of ways, I feel like we have to take these practices out to the larger organization because that’s the only way we get that larger scale alignment, which is essential to our larger scale success.
Peter: My hope was, I actually said this, my shining hope for us is that by doing it right ourselves, we become a model. We can model behaviors that others will adopt, when they see how well it works for us. There is a challenge though in that, the behaviors that work well for a design team aren’t necessarily going to be the behaviors that work well for an engineering team, for a marketing team, for a sales team.
Part of the reason I like to think about protecting design, is you almost need to keep these other cultural practices at bay because they might work for their teams, but if design were to try to behave like an engineering team, if design were trying to behave like a product team, design loses its spark.
And so how do you maintain those distinct qualities that serve this group behaving at its most effective, while allowing that group to successfully integrate with these other teams whose values and cultures are themselves distinct?
Jesse: Well, I think that’s what this process of growing trust is all about. This is about people with differences and how we figure out how to get along and move in coordinated fashions despite differences of perspectives and differences of experiences and differences of backgrounds and all of those things.
Music break 2
Peter: So I guess, trust then becomes a medium. Like we talked about relationships a few episodes ago. Trust becomes a medium that allows different groups with different cultures, different backgrounds, different priorities, to not just co-exist, but to collaborate. And it doesn’t matter that my team has a different set of values and behaviors than your team. What matters is I can trust you and your team in the solidity, in the predictability, in terms of some higher-order values that we are aligned on. There might be some team specific values, designers are going to be empathetic in some way, and engineers are going to be about speed or performance…
Jesse: Well, again, then the question is one of integrity. Are you living your values? Do I see you living your values?
Peter: Well, there’s probably two orders of values. There’s going to be some higher order values that should bind us all together. And then another level of values for each of us in our teams. You don’t need a lot of those higher order values, but as long as people on other teams share those higher order values, and have that dependability, solidity, predictability, integrity as you said, it almost doesn’t matter that we behave differently in our own groups. This trust becomes this integument, becomes this medium, becomes this binding force…
Jesse: Yes, yeah…
Peter: That allows us to successfully engage with one another.
Jesse: Yeah. If you think of the people on the team as being these sovereign city-states, each with their own culture and resources and all of it, and we want to connect those city-states together, we need to pave some roads like the Romans did. And those roads are paved with trust. It is the foundation that connects us. And that trust is put in place one cobblestone at a time as we exhibit these behaviors.
And I think that when you’re going to take up that role that design often takes up that we’ve talked about design in some cases needing to take up in organizations. That role of being the contrarian in some ways, of holding a distinct set of values separate from those of your partners in the organization because that brings something to design as a practice or that brings a perspective that the other functions in the organization don’t have.
When you are taking that on, it is extra incumbent on you to be the one who is investing in the trusting relationship because these people are automatically gonna walk in with a lot of reasons to mistrust you, a lot of reasons not to be clear on your priorities or your intentions because you are coming in from a clearly acknowledged different place culturally.
I think the biggest takeaway that I’m taking from this whole conversation is the way in which these trust issues, they’re, they are multifaceted. There are lots of different kinds of issues that when you look at them more closely, they are actually trust issues. And they are pervasive at all scales in the organization.
Whether you’re talking about the one-on-one relationship, or the relationship with the leader of the team, or the relationship of teams to teams, or the relationship of leaders and teams to entire organizations, trust and all of these different facets of trust are going to be factors throughout all of those.
Peter: This study out of Google talking about psychological safety and accountability still doesn’t use the word trust. Or another resource that I really like is the book Drive by Daniel Pink, which is where this concept of autonomy, mastery and purpose became popularized as a way to encourage employee engagement.
He never discusses, at least I don’t recall, trust either. And I’m wondering if trust was something that you found someone out there discussing, or if that was an insight you had as you were mulling over this material that you’re like, this all seems to be building up to this notion, oh, this notion is trust.
Jesse: I think when you look at team resilience, team cohesion, team happiness, psychological safety, trust, all of these things track very closely together. They’re all tangled up together. I think that if you polle dany random half a dozen articles on one keyword, you would find most of the other keywords tangled up in there somewhere, you know.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. My modeling brain though is trying to develop the set of relationships between them.
Jesse: It’s not like that. It is more gestalt than that.
Peter: Okay. ‘Cause part of me, in a pragmatic way, wants to think about, “How do we operationalize this understanding of trust?”
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: Is that something measurable? Is this something that, you know, these other, aspects can build up to?
Jesse: I would say you don’t operationalize it in the ways that you were describing. It is not something that gets managed through processes. It is something that is a matter of how leaders show up day-to-day. How are they engaging with that team, meeting after meeting after meeting.
It’s about the individual skills and capabilities of those leaders and their ability to manage themselves and to show up in their most effective ways day in, day out.
Peter: That’s not a satisfying answer. I want to, I want to model this so that I can, I can teach it.
Jesse: Well. I would say, you can do that. You can do that, and it won’t actually do what you want to do because it’s a skills development thing. It’s like writing down Michael Jordan’s, you know, key insights on, on completing the flying dunk. It doesn’t work that way. You got to get out on the court.
Peter: Right, right, right, right. I hear that. I just.
Jesse: I hear your frustration.
Peter: If I believe in the modeling and measurement, if I believe, or at least the unpacking of, things like psychological safety and accountability and autonomy and mastery and purpose. And maybe these are components that are more bounded, manageable, specific. And as you said about this gestalt is what happens when you pull all this together and something emerges. Something grows out of that that isn’t as easy to define, or in and of itself is multivalent because there’s so many trust vectors and trying to capture it, it’s like trying to capture….
Jesse: It’s eating soup with chopsticks.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. Eating soup with chopsticks. I was thinking capture a candle flame ‘cause the act of capturing it snuffs it out.
And maybe that’s the reality, which… that doesn’t sit well with me.
Jesse: Well, I mean, this is, it’s all continuing and ongoing and unfolding. You know…
Peter: Fuck you. I’m going to model trust.
Jesse: I trust your model. I’m sure I will.
Peter: Well, and maybe trust is too, it’s not ephemeral, it’s real and it
exists. But is it is unbounded. It’s like how people used to think of the ether, right?
It’s kind of everywhere. It kind of just pervades, and there’s degrees of it, but it’s not a thing you point at and go, yes, I have trust. Okay.
I will have to, uh, there’s something, almost Zen koan-like about this where you just kind of have to accept the…
Jesse: Yeah, I feel like we’ve brought you to the point of spiritual crisis and, I should let you integrate this new understanding of the cosmos.
Peter: I need to, I need to meditate now or at least take a walk.
Well, that has been a somewhat mind-bendy and at times challenging episode of Finding Our Way. Thank you, Jesse.
As always, we are interested in what you have to say. Maybe you have models for trust that you can share with us or resources that we should be digging into.
You can find us on Twitter. I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg. You can find us on our website, https://findingourway.design/. We have a contact form there. That we eagerly read what people send us, and we’d love to hear what you think. So, please reach out and thank you again, for all those who have been giving us feedback as we’ve been getting this off the ground, it’s been great to hear from you and we look to hear from you more.
So with that, we say goodbye to another episode of Finding Our Way.
Jesse: Thanks, Peter.
9: Consultancy Rat Blues, Part 2
Jun 09, 2020
In which we continue to grapple with in-house vs design consultancy distinctions, and see promise in the creation of senior strategic design roles within some companies.
Topics: working in teams; working like a consultancy; Metropolis; the lie of design schools; the reality of in-house design practice; cycles of abuse; working in truly high-performance design contexts; the stage model of cook apprenticeship; the capacity of design programs; rotation programs within and across companies; the emerging role of Principal Designer.
Transcript
Jesse: Previously on Finding Our Way:
Letter
Peter: We’ve asked listeners to send in their thoughts, and we have one from a gentleman who referred to himself as Consultancy Rat. And, his email to us goes as follows.
“I have spent the bulk of my design career in consulting… However, I am sensing a growing divide between design consulting and in house design… The design students in a master’s program in which I have taught for a few years, increasingly find the notion of production and shipping digital product…to be the penultimate.
Whereas wrestling with ambiguity in new and unfamiliar spaces, exploring different methods and modes of design, craft, working with Anna mitts, other designers, while spreading the gospel of design seems less and less the ideal to most students… But I find this shift troubling at a community slash craft level as well as the personal level of my career in design leadership… How does the design consultancy leader better sell and genuinely augment their training to be more attractive to in-house teams?
Jesse: And now, the conclusion.
The Show
Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hi Jesse.
I wanted to circle back. I’ve got a thing that I want to talk about, related to Consultancy Rat’s initial email that occurred to me as I was reading it,and recognizing his frustration, which is, frankly, my frustration with how in-house design has largely been reduced to just people who are pumping out assets to feed into the engineering furnace to power these product development engines. A couple of weeks ago there was this Remote Design Week conference, and I gave a talk called, “The Atomic Unit of Design is the Team.” One of my biggest frustrations with in-house design, and has been for a decade now, is how it has elevated this notion of the unicorn product designer, this individual designer who’s going to work on a cross-functional team, some type of scrum team or squad, you know, you have a designer, you have a product manager, and you have a set of engineers.
And that is what design looks like in most of these companies And, there’s a ton of problems with that. Where I come back to is one of the things that you learn in a consulting context is that design is best done in teams. Pretty much all work is best done in teams, but design is best done in teams.
Adaptive Path almost never staffed a project that wasn’t a team, even if it was just two designers.
Jesse: Oh, yeah, “Nobody flies solo,” I think was the way that we always framed it.
Peter: Because there’s power in teamwork. You can’t expect any individual to have suitable competency across the range of skills needed for digital product design. No one person is good at interaction design, visual design, information architecture, copywriting, user research, in terms of the craft skill sets, as well as the communication, the leadership, all the professional skills that you need in order to succeed.
Jesse: I would say even beyond that, even if they had the whole smorgasbord of possible skills, they still are hamstrung by their own perspective and always, always, always in any kind of creative work, having a second perspective in the room strengthens the work.
Peter: Exactly. So, in this talk I talk about how pretty much since I moved from working in Adaptive Path to in-house, I’ve tried to, as I put it, team-ify my design teams, often within an environment that does not naturally support it. A lot of these product development environments are essentially built on some flavor of scrum or the Spotify squad model, which is these small teams with the idea of being one designer, one product manager, and a set of engineers.
And so I’ve tried to figure out how can I pull designers out of those scrum context and into a design team that works across a set of scrums. But, there’s a, phrase that I wrote on a slide when I gave this talk that I think is relevant, to what we’re talking about, which is “Much of my career since leaving Adaptive Path has been trying to figure out how to bring relevant aspects of an environment dedicated to quality design into corporate contexts.”
At Adaptive Path, our mission was to deliver the best design. That’s all anyone paid us for. And so we optimized our environment to deliver great design. You go in-house, now you’re in a context where the best design isn’t the ultimate goal, There’s other things that that business is about. What I’ve tried to do is figure out how do I bring the qualities, and frankly, the organizational thinking that we had at Adaptive Path, that allowed us to do great design work, and find ways to imbue, integrate those ideas within a corporate context. The one thing that doesn’t work is that internal agency model, right? This internal services firm, we know that doesn’t work, so design can’t be a black box, that briefs come in one side of and assets come out the other side of, right? It has to be woven into the practice, but how can you weave it into an existing product development structure without design kind of getting dissipated and dissolved into that environment. How does design maintain its integrity?
And that has been my professional challenge for the last 10 years or so now. And one of the key issues that I see is maintaining design in teams. I’m saying all this though, to kind of speak to, when I empathize with Consultancy Rat, it’s this recognition. I think he’s right that much of in-house design has been reduced to this factory model, because it seems to serve the existing product development structures and processes. But what it ends up doing is, frankly, inhibiting or constraining design’s potential within these contexts.
And so, figuring out how do you create a safe space for design to be at its fullest in the face of the forces that Consultancy Rat is recognizing, I mean, that’s been my mission.
Jesse: As much as I’m interested in the impact of this on organizations and on leaders, I’m also interested in the impact of this on the designers who are a part of this larger machine, these factory UX workers.
Peter: I’m imagining, you know, Metropolis or something. Right.
Jesse: Yes, exactly. Lots of clanging going on. I’m reminded of an exchange I had on Twitter last year, with a young designer who was in his first job out of college, as a product designer at Instagram and was offering up a bunch of really sharp, really cogent advice for being a product designer in an environment like that.
And most of it boiled down to: forget most of the things that you were taught in school because you are never ever going to use them. Forget about user needs analysis. Forget about anything connected to design thinking. Get good at prototyping, get good at prototyping fast, get good at encapsulating requirements in ways that product managers can easily consume them.
And this was his advice for being successful in user experience. So there’s that data point. I also have conversations with young designers all the time about what they’re seeing out in the market. And what I am hearing from people is a lot of frustration and a lot of burnout, especially if you went to what you and I would consider a good UX program. One that really taught the whole soup to nuts of traditional UX practices. And then you came out into the marketplace with this dream of the strategic work that you’d be able to do, and then the only jobs that you could find that anybody would consider you for were these production jobs, people feel betrayed. They feel let down. They feel like they’ve been sold snake oil by the entire field of user experience. They’ve been set up for something that’s never going to materialize for them. At least that’s how it feels. And then they get into a role like this and it’s like, well, you’ve got to, you know, buckle down and find your place on the factory floor, or you’ve got to get out and find something else to do with your life, and that sucks.
Peter: Yeah, it’s frustrating, too, because bringing these early career designers into contexts like this where perhaps they did have a breadth of understanding because of however they were taught, but then they are only engaging with a quarter to a third of that practice, and the remaining elements start to atrophy ‘cause there’s just not a need for it.
Thinking about it from a design leadership standpoint, you know, 10 years later, as these folks are starting on managing and leading teams, either they are not set up to succeed because at that level, they are expected now to re-engage with matters of strategy and vision, and they’ve lost that muscle, or, it becomes this vicious cycle where they end up leading design as essentially a form of plumbing where it is this factory work where my job is to have my team be the most effective and efficient widget builders there are. And that’s how I’m valued and that’s what I understand my value to be.
Jesse: Right, right.
Peter: I mean, that becomes perilous for the future of design as a practice because it is so reductive.
Jesse: Yeah. Well this is the thing is… When I read this guy, his name is Joe Kennedy, his thread about his experiences or what he learned from being a designer at Instagram, I read that and I was like, “There is nobody looking out for this guy.” There is no design leader who is taking care of this person as a creative resource and nurturing their development as a creative contributor to the organization.
Peter: And that might be because that design leader didn’t know any better.
Jesse: But that’s because they’re… That, that’s the thing, is because they’re not hiring design leaders, they are hiring product managers to oversee product designers and they don’t know, and they don’t care and they’re not interested.
Peter: You would hope the design manager would be the one to look out for that designer. But again, that design manager probably came up through the system. And this was one of the struggles that I’ve had, like even back when I inherited that team at Groupon of a bunch of dudes in their mid-twenties who thought they were great designers and thought they understood what great design was.
And I’m like, you’ve never been in an environment where there’s actually legitimately great design, but they didn’t know that. Literally I had 25 year olds who thought they had reached the pinnacle, that there was nowhere for them to go. When they did self-evaluations, they were like scoring themselves five out of five on everything. Cause they didn’t know.
Jesse: Crushing it.
Peter: And I’m like, what’s going on here? And that’s one that I don’t quite know how to break that wheel. Because until you’ve been in an environment where you’ve experienced truly elevated design, you don’t know what it looks like.
I was fortunate that I had two formative career experiences. I worked at a CD-ROM company called Voyager that hired amazing designers to work on their CD-ROMs. And we were all figuring it out as we went along. And what they were mostly amazing at was visual design.
And then my next job was at Studio Archetype. Similarly, the focus tended to be on the visual design, though Lillian Svec was building out an information architecture practice. And Studio Archetype was one of the earliest to have a substantial information architecture and interaction design practice for a consultancy.
But these were environments that were, where design was loved, truly loved, supported, cared for, given the space for, was not an afterthought, was not, “How do we cross that line item off?” but was instead a focus. And so I was fortunate very early to see what it took to deliver amazing design.
Jesse: High performing design organizations have always been a rarity, that’s just sort of the nature of it, especially as the work itself has been evolving so rapidly in the spaces that you and I work in.
Peter: The issue was design generally operated at such small scale compared to all these other functions. that it wasn’t a big deal. and if you did want quality design 15 years ago, you went to a consultancy, that’s where all the best designers were. That’s where the best understanding of design was. And over the last 15 years, we’ve had this fundamental shift of the energy for design moving in house. And then we’ve had design as an industry just scale rapidly and massively.
So 20 years ago, most practicing designers, and let me say at least half of the practicing designers likely would have been in an environment where good design happened ‘cause they were working in a consulting company context doing good design. It’s just that the field was super small.
Now, 20 years later, most designers have never been in an environment where truly good design has been practiced. They don’t know what it looks like. They don’t know what it is. And, I don’t know what to make of that. It’s almost like what we need is some place where all these designers can go and spend three months.
It’s like in restaurants, the stage process in restaurants. Whereas you’re coming up as a cook, you can go stage for the best restaurants in the world, working in an environment where great cooking is happening, and then you can come back and, we don’t have that kind of rotation for designers to go to the great places where design is happening, to see what it really takes to do great design and then return to wherever you were and bring those practices back.
But we always need something like that if we’re going to see design reach the potential that is expected of it.
Jesse: I think the closest thing to that that people have right now are these college degrees or certificate programs that are exposing them to these practices, but they’re doing it in this sort of hermetically-sealed
sterile-sandbox kind of fashion that doesn’t necessarily map to real world design delivery.
Peter: If you look at the top design programs, your CMUs, your Institute of Designs, your whatevers, they just don’t operate at scale nearly big enough to process the number of designers, that the world needs.
So now you have these General Assembly or other types of UX boot camps…
Jesse: CMU has just added an undergraduate degree in HCI, by the way.
Peter: That’s a start.
Jesse: Yeah, they’re moving in that.
Peter: The, the issue is literally every college could possibly have a design program and it wouldn’t be enough right now. Just given the need. So now you have these General Assembly and other UX boot camps that are not teaching this highest order design. They’re teaching what we said at the outset: What are the things you need to know so that you can get a job? You need to know how to work these tools and you need to know these basic practices and boom, you can now get a job you can plug into the factory model.
And I think what’s missing, thinking about that restaurant analogy, is this recognition of design as a craft. We talk about craft a bunch. Design is a craft. The way you learn craft is through apprenticing and guilds and mentorship relationships and that kind of thing.
I do see about UX mentor programs out in the world, but they’re few and far between. And most people are not getting exposed to those. And I hadn’t thought about this, but I wonder if there’s some deep cultural change that needs to occur within the development of designers to almost reengage with some type of guild model, master/apprentice model. I don’t know what it looks like to do it at the kind of scale that we need, but it feels like that’s a direction that could work.
Jesse: I agree with you and I, in fact, I have advocated for a long time for, going back at least as far back as the early days of Adaptive Path, when we first started talking about bringing new designers in, I was interested in instituting something like an apprenticeship rotation kind of a model, which was one idea that we talked about at that time. And I think more broadly…
Peter: Though, like between us and other design firms, or…
Jesse: No, no. It would be that new designers coming in would have an opportunity to partner with a founder for a period of time and then rotate it so that they could learn how you worked and then learn how I worked,learn how Jeff worked…
Peter: Ah, within the business they’d get a rotation, right? ‘Cause what I’m talking about is like how you get someone going from company to company…
Jesse: Yeah. As, as a means of skill building, but, yeah. So you take that, and then you scale that out to the, to the scale of the entire design community and you get what you’re talking about. I don’t know how to create that. I think it would be a really compelling way to level up the entire practice of design at every level, not just at the level of junior designers, but eventually those junior designers become design leaders.
And to have those design leadership practices, imbued and enriched with that experience as well, I think would be super valuable.
Peter: To take a hopeful view, and I’m hopeful because of some stuff I am seeing, where they’re hiring principals, they’re hiring architects, they’re hiring senior designers to be explicitly creative and strategic and to mentor their teams. And I think one of the things we’re seeing potentially is that up until a couple years ago, everyone was on this hamster wheel of design-as-delivery, but some people who had been doing this long enough were like, “Wait a moment, we’re missing something here. Now I’m leading a team of 40, 80, 150, and all I have are squads of crank turners. That’s not right.”
And I think what we’re starting to see is this recognition that we need to bring back this more senior strategic design role, and my hopefulness is that we’ve gone through this period of pain that was largely a reflection or reaction to this scaling of design within this somewhat mechanistic product development environment and a feeling that we had to accommodate to that mode. And what I’m starting to see in some of my conversations with design leaders is we don’t need to accommodate to that mode. We don’t need to have designers embedded on scrum teams. We can have designers working in teams, working across scrum teams. We have a big enough organization where it makes sense that I can hire someone who’s been doing this type of work for 15, 20 years, potentially in a consulting capacity, bring them in-house and they can do very similar work: Being strategic, being a leader, synthesizing across user understanding, developing practices and processes for doing great design and then teaching that internally and leveling up this whole organization.
Where I’m hopeful is that we’re at the outset of that realization. That we almost have to do this. That we’re essentially stuck. If these leaders are recognizing that if they want design to be as effective and to reach the potential that they know it can.
Oftentimes these leaders don’t have capacity to do it themselves. They’re running big organizations, but they recognize that they can bring people in whose focus is on that creative and strategic leadership, that can pay immense dividends internally.
And again, I know a number of companies that now have principal product designer, principal user researcher roles. And that to me suggests that there is a path forward, at least in these larger companies.
Jesse: Are these principals running teams? I mean, are they… I mean, there , there’s reporting structure and then there’s the day to day. Are they leading teams or are they…
Peter: They are leading teams. They’re not running teams. It’s kind of what we talked about a few episodes ago in terms of that distinction between management and leadership. These principal designers are leading large efforts. There might be another 5 to 10 designers involved. And then the product managers and engineers as well. And these principle designers are the primary creative leadership, for a big set of work. It could be an end to end app, right? You might have a principal designer whose job is to lead the design of that app.
You need dozens of people, potentially hundreds of people to do all the work, building that app. But you can have an individual who is that creative leader who’s hanging all that together. And they are not managers. The designers that are working with them are not reporting to them, but the designers working with them are looking to that principal to lead them like, at Adaptive Path and another consulting environments. We always had a creative lead and the other practitioners looked to that person as leader of that work, but they weren’t reporting to them.
I think that can be a path forward. Yes, you can have this type of strategic, big picture, creative design practice internally that they set the vision, they set that North Star that you were referring to, and then they work with other design leaders and product leaders throughout the organization to figure out how to segment that work so it can be picked up by the delivery mechanisms and turned into something that ships.
Jesse: How much do you think that role is able to influence design process of design practice in these organizations?
Peter: Potentially a lot. When I’ve written job descriptions for this role, one of the key expectations and responsibilities is mentorship. And is developing practices and processes for how to do the work, either at the basic level, bringing in the best practices, just making sure that you’re doing your user-centered design stuff, right? But then, potentially there’s some expectation that they’re going to be developing new practices, probably specific to the context that we’re in, but figuring out, “We can’t just do off the shelf, quote unquote UCD. We need to figure out a way to make that work within our context.”
So, they’re bringing in these processes and practices. They’re leading the creative work. And as part of that creative leadership, key to their role is that cross-functional education. They need to help product people and engineers understand why we should work this way and how to work this way.
Jesse: So it sounds like, when Consultancy Rat is yearning for wrestling with ambiguity and new and unfamiliar spaces, exploring different methods and modes of design craft, working with and amidst other designers while spreading the gospel of design, sounds like that is still very much alive out there in these in house positions.
Peter: There’s potential for it. I wouldn’t say that they’re the norm. I wouldn’t say that they are typical, but they exist. it’s too early to tell if this is the start of a trend that’s growing, but there is that potential, and that’s what I would encourage him and anyone in a similar situation to consider.
Jesse: Thank you, Peter.
Peter: Thank you, Jesse. Well that about wraps up another shining episode of Finding Our Way, the podcast about design and design leadership. Thank you for taking the time to listen. This time, I want to actually thank listeners for the feedback we’ve been getting, whether it was the email from Consultancy Rat that proved to be enough to encourage Jesse and I, or feedback we’re getting on Twitter, feedback I’m seeing on LinkedIn. It means the world to us to see that people are listening and getting something from this. We want to continue to, deliver, and be relevant. So, again, you can find us, on Twitter: I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg.
You can find us on our website at https://findingourway.design/. and there’s a contact form there. That’s actually how Consultancy Rat reached out to us.
Jesse: Fill out the form, send us some email. We respond.
Peter: Yes, we do. And not only do we respond, we record entire episodes for every email that is sent.
Jesse: No, we don’t. We..
Peter: No, we don’t. No. Um, but, yes, we want this conversation not to just be between Jesse and I, but be part of a larger dialogue. So thank you to Consultancy Rat for inspiring today’s conversation and we look forward to others, reaching out to us as well.
And with that, I’m going to sign off and say thank you, Jesse.
Jesse: Thank you, Peter. Finding our way.
Peter: I’m just, I’m reviewing the, I think we’ve actually got, maybe we hit the high points on the on the Consultancy Rat email. I don’t think, I think beyond validating his concern, I don’t know if we’ve addressed it,
Jesse: I mean, we..
Peter: …we’ve solved it.
Jesse: We haven’t solved this problem. We haven’t solved this problem for him. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s something that we are all doing together as we continue finding our way…
Peter: I see what you’re trying to do there. I don’t know if I’m buying it.
8: Consultancy Rat Blues, Part 1
Jun 05, 2020
In which an email from a design leader self-labelled “Consultancy Rat” spurs a wide-ranging discussion on strategic design leadership, product management, and the differences between in-house and consultancy design.
Topics: consulting vs in-house design; FAANG+; the bifurcation of UX design; product design; design as a handmaiden to engineering; why not both?; product management and product strategy; product management as UX practice from 15 years ago; the craft of product management; making the shift from consultancy to in-house; strategic and principal in-house design roles.
Transcript
Intro
Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hello, Jesse. Good afternoon. On today’s episode, we’ve got a letter from a gentleman named Consultancy Rat, asking us questions about some of the pros and cons or the challenges of shifting from being a design leader in a consulting practice and being a design leader in-house, and some of the challenges and frustrations that he’s experienced.
And, what I can say is that, it led you and I into a bunch of interesting threads talking about in-house design, consulting, design, product management, agile development, principal designers, and a whole bunch of stuff.
Jesse: Just say, check it out. There you go.
Letter
Peter: So, here on Finding Our Way, we’ve asked for listeners to send in their thoughts about what we’re discussing.
And we have one from a gentleman who referred to himself as Consultancy Rat. And his email to us goes as follows:
“I have spent the bulk of my design career in consulting (frog and others.) I came up through the design ranks and was promoted into creative direction and management
I generally operate under the assumption that in-house opportunities love to bring in design leaders from design consultancies.
However, I am sensing a growing divide between design consulting and in-house design. In-house design seems to be rapidly engineering itself into highly efficient, highly optimized, and highly atomized, quote design, ops unquote
The design students in a master’s program in which I have taught for a few years, increasingly find the notion of production and shipping digital product at FAANG+ (for those who don’t understand, that’s Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, et cetera.) to be the penultimate.
Whereas wrestling with ambiguity in new and unfamiliar spaces, exploring different methods and modes of design craft, working with and amidst other designers, while spreading the gospel of design seems less and less the ideal to most students.
But I find this shift troubling at a community slash craft level as well as the personal level of my career in design leadership.
I would love to hear your perspectives on this, having shifted in your careers from consulting leaders to in-house leaders. Does the shift I am referring to resonate with your experience? If so, do you think the shift is in the correct direction? How does the design consultancy leader better sell and genuinely augment their training to be more attractive to in-house teams?
I am very much enjoying listening to the podcast and look forward to what’s in store. Thanks a ton for putting it together and out there.”
Okay, so that was his email. There’s a lot to chew on there. And Jesse, it sounds like you’ve got, you’re just bursting with responses and notions.
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: Set forth!
Our Thoughts
Jesse: Well, thank you very much, Mr. Rat for sharing your perspective. This definitely resonated with me a lot. This phenomenon that Mr. Rat is seeing from his perspective as a design leader who has worked in consulting who assumed that in-house opportunities would be fairly available to him given the skill set that he’s developed, and now discovering that those in-house opportunities are looking for something different because the practice of design in-house has evolved into something very different than, I think that’s true.
I feel like the term UX, UX designer as a role, and UX as a function in the marketplace, has bifurcated, that depending on the organization that you’re looking at, and depending on the way that they have structured the work that they do and their priorities as an organization, what that UX role is and what that UX function is, can be a couple of very different divergent things. One is UX as our Mr. Rat is describing, as it has been practiced in consultancies, which has to do with highly collaborative blended teams.
You’re going through user needs analysis and concept development and lightweight prototyping, this traditional UX process as Adaptive Path taught for many years, as has been taught in a variety of interaction design programs out there over the years.
We’ve seen UX blow up into something that a lot of organizations can point to as a real driver of value and really kind of table stakes for them to even be in the market. But this highly collaborative and much more fluid exploration of ideas was not necessarily a clean fit for the way that those organizations went to market generally, especially in these tech companies that he’s talking about, the FAANG+ companies where they are these huge, digital product production lines. And that whole messy bundle of things that we call UX, and consultants continue to practice as UX, it’s really hard to fit into that production line. The production line needs design to be something that is atomic, something that is repeatable, something that is a lot less bespoke, ideally, that can fit designers into a larger process that makes them look as much like engineers or other kinds of interchangeable, replaceable production line workers.
And so this production UX is the UX that you learn if you go to a bootcamp. It’s the UX that you learn in a lot of these “Get your UX certificate in 90 days” kind of programs that are training people for a very specific production job.
Which is focused almost entirely on high-fidelity prototyping. And to Mr Rat’s point, the management background required to run that team is something very, very different from the skills that he’s developed as a leader in consulting. But I’d love your thoughts on it as you have been on your own journey with in-house leadership and the transfer of what you learned as a consultant to being an in-house leader.
Peter: I think, one, I want to validate Mr. Rat’s thesis. I think what he’s seeing is generally true or a totally fair read on the situation. And Jesse, what you’ve just laid out holds with much of what I’ve seen. There’s, when I first left consulting and went in-house, my first significant in-house job being a Groupon, I inherited a team of product designers who looked at companies like Facebook as the model for how design should work. And that model was largely around visual interaction design, with the ability of these product designers to do some coding so that they could build their own designs.
And that was it. That was the the Alpha and Omega of design to these product designers that I inherited. And I was taken aback, because it left out 75% of what I consider design, and not only was this common view of product design much narrower, there was a smug superiority that these in-house product designers had with respect to consulting designers because they shipped stuff, man. They built stuff that people used, and consulting design, you know, you get to work on pretty stuff, you get to work on signature concepts and ideas, but that stuff never gets shipped. And consultants just, you know, hand over a design and then they leave and they’re not there to really put their shoulder in and to get something out the door. And the superior smugness that the product designers had about that I took issue with, but they raised a legitimate point, around one of the big challenges of designing within a consulting context. And part of the reason I left consulting to go in-house was to be where those thousand little decisions are made that affect what ultimately goes out the door.
So, at Adaptive Path, we often were brought in as consultants, because the existing internal team didn’t have the strategic capabilities that design leaders realized they needed for tackling some piece of work.
Jesse: Right, right…
Peter: We were told, like, we don’t have anything like you in-house, we have a bunch of perfectly good UI designers, but when we need to figure out kind of where we’re headed, we don’t have the horses internally to do that. So that’s why we’re bringing you in. So in-house digital design has, I think, always tended towards production and delivery orientations. And in-house digital design has always found itself as essentially a handmaiden to engineering and development processes. It exists to make technology go; it did not exist to realize new business value. And what’s starting to happen though, and I think there’s some interesting confusion around this, is some companies do recognize that design can unlock new business value.
So they’re trying to bring in folks with that bent and that orientation. But then you get this internal conflict or contradiction, where these companies bring in visionary strategic designers to pull the company forward, but the practices for doing that run contrary to the standard practices of a technology-driven or business-driven company. And one of, I guess, three things happens. Often as not, the design leader just decides it’s not worth the fight and figures out how to accommodate with the dominant culture. And so you lose some of that magic.
Sometimes the design leader just bounces out. It’s just like, “this won’t work and we shouldn’t have tried this.” And they leave and they go back to old practices. And very rarely, but occasionally, a design leader is, I think, able to unlock and demonstrate a new way of working and help others realize that, yeah, there are other ways of tackling these kinds of problems.
That last one is by far the rarest…
Jesse: Yeah…
Peter: …because it requires culture change and transformation in some of the stuff we’ve talked about earlier. And that’s just–that’s just hard.
Jesse: Hard. Slow.
Peter: It’s time consuming. And these design leaders are often like, “Why am I spending so much time and effort trying to push this boulder up the hill when I could go somewhere else that actually understands what I’m doing and just do what I do.”
What I’m starting to see are at least companies of a certain size, figuring out how they can have their chocolate in their peanut butter. How they can have strategic visionary customer centered design that’s driving new business value.
Jesse: Sort of big UX.
Peter: Yeah, big UX and the more delivery oriented UI slash UX working in scrum teams executing on the specific features and functionality that need to be shipped.
So I think when you achieve a certain size, and you have savvy enough leadership, there’s a recognition that it doesn’t need to be one or the other. You can have both. But I think what often happens is, particularly in these tech companies, they’ve never been in an environment where there was strategic design. They don’t know what they’re missing.
Jesse: Right? Well, yeah, that’s true.
Peter: It’s asking a fish to understand what it’s like to breathe air when all they’ve ever done is breathe water, they’d have no idea what even what you’re talking about.
Jesse: There’s another part of this, that I, I feel like I’ve witnessed. I have a feeling you’ve witnessed as well, over the last decade or so, which is the rise of the fetishization of the concept of “product” in the Valley and among those companies that are strongly influenced by what happens in the Valley.
The reason that they don’t have experience with strategic design work is that those decisions that would be made in the course of a strategic UX, human- centered design process are being made by these product guys (and they are guys by and large.)
Everybody was trying to figure out the secret of Steve Jobs’ alchemy as a leader, and the consensus that came out of it was that he was the ultimate product guy. He was looking at everything through the lens of how do we compose these software technologies and hardware technologies and all of the new manufacturing processes and all of the different stuff that goes into making Apple’s products and was able to bring that together into a holistic view of what the ultimate product should be that got delivered to people. And so the VCs looking to fund startups got to asking, like, who’s your product guy? Where’s your product guy? And every company started having a chief product officer or a VP of Product or product became a function where it wasn’t before.
And all of those things that were already underway as part of strategic design processes, the product guys, which basically this is a role that owns nothing but somehow also owns everything, decided that that piece was the piece that they could own.
Which was setting strategic direction and definition of a product vision and north star, those kinds of things. None of them are doing it from a place of design because none of them are designers, none of them have design experience. None of them have design education. They are using the tools that their VC advisors are giving them.
And none of those have anything to do with design or, frankly, with human centered principles.
Peter: What I find funny, having spoken at a few different product conferences, is how product leaders, on stage, when talking about how they need to develop a craft of product management, end up re-inventing user experience practice from 15 years ago.
Jesse: Yeah, because that’s the domain that they’ve claimed for themselves. That’s the…
Peter: That’s the problem. Exactly.
Jesse: They aren’t aware of all the work that’s been done to actually develop ways to solve these problems.
Peter: I think that’s true. I gave a talk, the first time I gave it was at UX Week.
It was originally titled “UX is Strategy, Not Design.” The thesis of the talk is that the practices of UX had gotten too closely aligned with design and delivery when in fact, much of the value of user experience work, the research, the prototyping, the ideating, the figuring out what the problem is, was strategic.
And when I first gave this talk at UX Week, the first response came from, when she raised her hand, Christina Wodtke said, “What you defined was product management,” and I had not worked with any product managers who worked in the way that I had been discussing, which was around formulating strategy developing customer centered business cases, considering a lot of ideas, figuring out the one and then as you go through delivery, kind of orchestrating that experience. And she said, “Well, that’s product management.” And I’m like, “Not that I’ve ever seen.” And this was a couple years into having left Adaptive Path.
What I’ve seen over time, though, is that there is a subtle strain of product management that does do some of these UX things.
You have conferences like Mind The Product and this rise of a community of product managers, and I think what they’ve realized, as they’ve started interacting with one another, is that there is no consistent practice for product management. Over the last 20, 25 years, digital product design, UX design, has developed a practice such that you can take a designer in any one of these companies and they can move to any one of these other companies, and within a week they are able to be productive because the standards and practices of how we do design work have been pretty well established in this industry.
You can’t do that with product managers. How a product manager behaves at Facebook is different than how they’re going to behave at Slack, is different thing to how they’re going to behave at Microsoft is different than how they’re going to behave at Google. Product management in each of those organizations is distinct, so I think this community of product managers is trying to figure out what like, what is product management then? And it’s been interesting watching them try to articulate the craft of product management because, until recently, the way that I saw product management was defined, is product management was whatever was left after all the other practices took there bits, right?
So engineers are doing engineering things and designers are doing design things, and business analysts are doing business analyst things and data scientists are doing data scientists things. And now with Scrum, you might have scrum masters and agile coaches and they’re doing their things, and product managers were just kind of filling in the gaps of “What are the activities that no one’s picked up? I guess that’s what I’ll do.” So if you had UI designers, product managers were then doing workflows and wireframes because no one was around to do that. So they thought that was their job. But if you had a UX designer, well, okay, someone’s doing your workflows and wireframes. so what’s my job like? They were trying to find their role, in the space left.
One of the ways they’re defining it is very similar, as we were just saying, to this old-school UX practice, to the degree to which at this conference I was at in Australia last August, which was a product management conference, there was an opening keynote for day two. And he’s talking about his work and how he leads product. And in his 45 to 50 minute talk, he spent a good 10 to 15 minutes talking about the “design the box” exercise as a way to articulate strategy and get a group of people together to understand the direction that we want to take this product in. And Jesse and I conducted “design the box” exercises 15 years ago for clients as a UX, a UX tool…
Jesse: Right? Yeah.
Peter: …to get a team of people together.
Jesse: We were teaching design the box at least 10 years ago, and probably longer ago though.
Peter: in some organizations that more strategic and visionary UX practice is seen as the responsibility of the product person and those product people are usually either technical or business folks.
So they’re not doing it, which is why now the design teams are like, “Oh, no one is doing this work. We need to now hire strategists internally, service designers, people internally who can drive that conversation.” So it’s still being figured out.
Jesse: That’s great. ‘Cause I have not been hearing about that. I have been hearing mostly about, you know, the trend in the other direction,
which is toward production line UX.
Peter: With the 500 designers at Capital One, I’m assuming there were some design strategists in there. I’m assuming that there was an opportunity for people who’d been doing this for 20 years, that they were able to flex their muscles. Did you see that?
Jesse: Well, Capital One is a difficult organization to characterize in any holistic fashion because it is a highly federated set of businesses each with their own unique needs, especially from a design perspective. And so the answer to that question simply depends on who you’re working with, depends on what part of the business you’re in and what their needs are, and, how sophisticated their stakeholders are.
To your point about product management seeking its center, there were a bunch of different approaches to product management across different groups at Capital One, and they were all in their cases trying to optimize for the problem that was right in front of them.
Peter: So that’s the product management world, but what about the design world? To what degree were design teams pushing forward…
Jesse: Well, the design teams, to your point, design fills the space that product management allows them, because product management is still, you know, calling the shots.
Peter: I mean, the other thing I’ve gotten to learn about product management as a practice, particularly as you get more senior in that role, you’re running product, you’re running a specific product, you’re maybe a director level all up to VP level and above is, it is a really stressful role, because they’ve got stuff coming at them from all sides.
And in particular, from the top down. They’ve got executives leaning on them with their expectations of what they’re delivering, usually outcomes, usually metrics. And so the product manager’s just like, “I am accountable to deliver on some set of, OKRs, I’m going to do whatever it takes to make that work. Because I am the one who’s accountable. You all have to listen to me because it’s my butt in the sling if this doesn’t work. So I need to feel that sense of ownership.” So you get that on one side. On the other side, you get, where product managers on one side have executives barking in their ear about what they need and on the other side, have designers barking in their ear the question, “Why? Why? Why? Why?” and they’re kind of in the middle, like, I have to do this thing, this, like, they’re not given enough time in the day.
One of the leading thinkers on product management is this guy, Marty Cagan.
And he wrote a book called Inspired, and he says, flat out, product management is more than a full time job. If you’re looking for simply a 40-hour-a-week job, product manager is not the job for you, because in order to do that job right, you need to be able to work 60 hours a week, which is insane.
But this expectation is that you’re now this superhero contributor who’s managing all these different functions, all these different sets of expectations. And it feels like the way the job has been defined, or ill-defined, the only way to succeed is if you put in these 60-hour weeks.
So it’s no wonder these folks are having their struggles, given the context in which they’re operating. And one of the things I’m looking forward to as this product management community starts to gel and develop its own sense of self, is that they start kind of defending or protecting themselves from these unreasonable expectations that others have on them. We could go down a pretty long rabbit hole there, but I actually want to get back to some of Consultancy Rat’s points…
Jesse: Well, I actually do want to ask you a question about product management as it relates to Consultancy Rat, because his central issue is like, “I thought all of this consultancy experience was going to set me up for an in-house job when I get tired of all of the things that come with the consultancy lifestyle, which is also not an easy lifestyle.” And one that a lot of people do for a while, and then they get out of. At some point you want to get out of that hamster wheel, or at least many people do.
And so his question is “What are the opportunities that exist for me now as someone with this experience leading design from a consultancy footing.” And it sounds to me like implicit in what you’re saying is that if you want to have that same level of influence, if you want to be engaged in and driving those same strategic processes that you were a part of as a consultant, the place to go in-house is not design, it’s product management.
Peter: That is not not true. It’s going to be really hard for a consulting design leader to be seen as a credible product manager.
Jesse: Then his other question was, “How does the design consultancy leader better sell and genuinely augment their training to be more attractive to in-house teams?”
Peter: It depends on the nature of the role that you want in-house. If you want to work in a fashion where the work that you do looks not unlike the work you did as a consultant, i.e., probably more strategic, more big-picture, meatier projects, what you need to do is find companies, and they are usually going to have to be of a certain size, that are hiring principal-level product designers or, as we call them, at one of the companies I’m currently serving, a UX architect. So some of these bigger companies, we have friends at Zendesk who are principal product designers.
It is a director-level role, but it’s an individual contributor role and it is meant to be that product strategy, design strategy, experience strategy type of role. Coordinating the efforts of a lot of other people under the umbrella of a single vision and customer journey, some understanding of the experience.
So you are starting to see in-house roles that provide that opportunity. Let’s say you’re in a consultancy and you’re a creative director or an ECD, and you’ve got however many people reporting to you and you like that management relationship and you want to do that in-house, that’s in some ways a harder shift to make. Just because I think a lot of companies, whether you’re tech or not even tech, but just companies who are hiring folks for in-house design teams, they are going to default by looking for people who have run in-house design teams.
There is a perception, and it’s not untrue there, that the challenges of running an in-house design team and the challenges of running a design consultancy team are different. Occasionally, people make that switch. I’ve seen startups hire as a head of design someone with a consulting background. Usually, that person has been very senior in that consulting capacity and probably most importantly has worked on shipping product, and has had a consulting relationship with a client where they were maybe an agency of record and were able to release a stream of products for a client.
Jesse: It’s not just a matter of finding a role that’s a good fit for your skills and experience. It’s also that knowing that you’re not going to fit the mold, you have to be looking for a company that wants to break its mold, it has to be something of a strategic move on the organization’s part to bring you in because you’re not just going to be drag-and-drop into their organization.
You’re not going to look like a typical product manager, or you’re not gonna look like a typical production design leader. In either case, you have something else to offer and you need to be working with an organization that recognizes that something else. I do think also that those opportunities to oversee that design production work definitely still happen.
Even in the context of Adaptive Path, I personally have overseen some pretty extensive screen delivery in my day.
Peter: This is actually where external recruiters are playing an important role. in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, there’s a couple that we actually mentioned in the org design book. Amy Jackson, Talent Farm, who we worked with, Karen and Marta. There’s a bunch of others. Anyone who was in the position of Consultancy Rat who’s interested in making a shift in-house, recognizing how difficult it’s going to be to just try to submit resumes and portfolios directly to in-house opportunities because that person doesn’t really have the profile that is typical for these in-house opportunities, a recruiter can be, a helpful bridge. These recruiters have relationships with in-house companies. But they often understand the backgrounds and the experiences of consulting designers, and they can make translations for those in-house companies to help them understand how a particular candidate’s consulting experience would translate.
Also vice versa. Right? They can help these people with consulting backgrounds. sharpen their story when it comes to how they engage with these in-house opportunities and help them figure out what to focus on in terms of their experience that will resonate with that in-house team. And so, if you’re finding yourself in a situation like this, I would encourage you to work with recruiters, too, as a means by which you can manage that gap between the in-house and consulting worlds.
Jesse: And yeah, I think across the board in any kind of transition like this, your storytelling is really essential. but especially as you are potentially making the leap, both from the consulting context to the in-house context, as well as from a more strategic frame to a more delivery-oriented frame. Being able to orchestrate the details of your own story. To be able to sell yourself as a leader is really key.
Outro
Peter: Our response to Consultancy Rat’s email proved to be longer than we can fit in a single episode. So listen to the next installment of Finding Our Way to hear more of what we have to say about these subjects. In the meantime, you can reach out to us on Twitter. I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg, or through our website at https://findingourway.design/, where you can send us an email and maybe we will spend an hour talking to each other about it.
Something else I’m wondering is whether or not you prefer our episodes to remain in these roughly 30 minute chunks or for something such as this where we have about an hour’s worth of stuff, you would prefer that to just be one hour-long episode. Let us know. And look for that next episode of Finding Our Way.
Hidden Track
Peter: So you’ve been thinking, you have notes…
Jesse: …Tuning up. Oh, well, yes, I’ve been, I’ve been thinking about the letter. I have actually have quite a lot to say about the letter. I’d be surprised if we got to anything but the letter today…
Peter: …from Consultancy Rat?
Jesse: Yeah. Consultancy Rat.
Peter: I think that’s what we call him because–
Jesse: No, it’s a, it’s, it’s like when, you know, when people write into Dear Abby or Dan Savage or whoever your favorite advice person is, you give yourself a cute name.
7: Leading From Home
May 26, 2020
In which we discuss the challenges of relationship management when leading from home, and then start a potentially promising discussion on the subject of trust.
Peter: Welcome to “Finding Our Way,” the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hi Jesse.
We’re about in our first full week of #OaklandSlowStreets, and that one act that the city has done has measurably increased my mood positively. The major street that is nearest to us, which is this pass through street for a lot of cars because of freeway access, is now a slow street. And it is, throughout the day, overtaken by bicyclists and pedestrians.
And it is like a little town square and it is awesome and it just makes me very happy and I just walk up and down it. And I want this to always be there. There are things that we are learning about our neighborhoods and communities in what is otherwise a dark time. I get nervous glowing about some of these things ‘cause I know for a lot of folks that there is almost no upside but there are things we are developing in our communities that I hope we are able to learn from and maintain.
Jesse: I agree with you. I think that, despite all of the darkness, despite the, really the, the scale of senseless tragedy unfolding in slow motion all around us, yeah, it is forcing all of us to take a step back from all of the routines and all of the assumptions and all of the scripts by which we have organized our lives and the systems around us.
And Oakland Slow Streets is really interesting because it’s an example of the kind of thing we talk about in design all the time, which is, the emotional or psychological effects of system choices on the people who move through those systems. And, we have gotten to a certain level of baseline tolerance of a lot of systems that maybe when those systems come back online, we’re not going to be so tolerant of anymore and we’re going to start asking for different things. And that, I think, is going to potentially create a lot of exciting system-level design opportunities across a wide range of different fields and disciplines and areas of enterprise.
Peter: Well, yeah, for all of us symbolic analysts who find ourselves working from home when we would otherwise be in offices, it is unclear why anyone who is a symbolic analyst would be expected to go into an office again, at least every day. The amount of money companies spend on housing people in commercial real estate, that they could probably spend half of that, and just literally hand employees money and say, kit out your house how you see fit. And people could buy nice cameras and secondary displays and standing desks with treadmills or whatever they want. And it would still be far cheaper than housing them with commercial real estate. And that’s one of those where I don’t see how we go back to those assumptions.
And it’s funny because in design, so I’m on all these design leadership mailing lists, or community slacks. No one’s on a mailing list anymore. Sorry, I’m showing my age. I’m on listservs. I’m on all these leadership listservs,
Jesse: ”design leadership-l”
Peter: Hyphen L, of course. You know, that one. And, I’m on all these design leadership community slacks where people are still hiring and people are interviewing and one of them has a channel called a job-search-vent.
And right now, the biggest job search vent is how these companies are still expecting folks to live in a particular area, to go to an office every day when we come back from this experience, even though we know folks, at least with the kind of work we’re doing, are doing actually pretty well without going to an office.
Jesse: One factor behind the historical insistence on physical colocation is in part because what it would have taken to make that change would have been so disruptive to any organization that attempted it that what would happen would be it would get a bunch of people fired before it actually killed the organization. In this case, the disruption has already happened. So the question is simply, Where do we go from here?
Peter: Right, right.
Jesse: And I think in a lot of cases, the cultures and the processes of these organizations were so embedded in that physical context that the flexibility to evolve toward the digital and virtual wasn’t there.
But having cut all of those processes off rather abruptly, there’s now the opportunity to create something new in their place.
Peter: I use the phrase symbolic analysts, and I’m being both, silly, but, particular ‘cause a symbolic —
Jesse: What we used to call knowledge workers,
Peter: –workers well and knowledge workers were symbolic analysts. I remember it was like the mid nineties that was the generic term for the kind of work we do. All now the people working on computers doing this type of stuff.
And often before this pandemic, there were folks who still worked remotely or would promote their perspective that we should do much more to enable distributed work.
And this was my experience when I was leading design at Groupon, I would drive an hour to an hour and a half to Palo Alto to not sit at a desk. I had a desk there, but I wouldn’t sit at the desk. I would go from conference room to conference room to sit on a video call with people in Chicago, Seattle, the cities that we operated, and my entire day from nine to five would be moving from conference room to conference room to be part of conversations where a significant portion of the folks we’re not in the room with me.
Jesse: Right.
Peter: And so work had already gotten to this distributed notion. People–
Jesse: And I’ve seen many organizations that work exactly that same.
Peter: Yeah. If you, if you look at even people at their desks, they’re often staring at a screen on a call with other people. We were operating in this distributed fashion. We just sat near one another. I’ve come to believe that the reason we were still using offices is because we’d stopped being intentional about that. That was not an intentional decision. In the same way that we work in these bureaucratic hierarchies because it’s how we always have, we worked in offices because that’s how we always have, and we do a bunch of things because it’s how it’s always been done.
And now we have a break point. My concern is that too many people will try to return things to the way they were, as if that was better, or superior or natural, instead of really taking stock and taking advantage of how we can operate in new ways that are better suited to our current reality.
Jesse: I completely agree with you. And, as this has gone on, I’ve heard that sentiment from more and more people that people are, in their own lives, taking stock and reassessing how they’ve structured their lives and the priorities that have been, to your point, unintentionally, or at least unconsciously, built into those choices.
And I can see organizations doing the same thing for sure.
Peter: I’m working for a 150 year bank right now, and they’re all having to work from home.
And it has been clearly a painful transition for them from an infrastructure standpoint. But I have to imagine that they now are realizing that there are new and potentially better ways of working that they will need to adopt.
Jesse: I want to come back to the cultural issue, around presence in the office because I think this is one that has a particular meaning for leaders in organizations, in that presence in the office for leaders often is about maintaining a certain level of visibility, especially visibility among people that you don’t directly interact with.
Maintaining a degree of visibility with your weak ties, with those peers whom you may not be collaborating with day in, day out, but who you see once a month, once a quarter, and who you need to maintain relationships with.
Peter: The most obvious casualty of distributed work is serendipity, is the hallway conversation, is running into someone in the break room. And leaders more than other folks within an organization benefit from that, given the nature of their roles.
Something we’ve talked about in earlier episodes is how the medium of leadership is relationship. Those relationships are built both through scheduled and intentional interaction, but also through passive serendipitous interaction. And we’re now carving out a significant chunk of that, when you’re looking at things in a purely distributed fashion. That said, in my experience… So my last full time role, at Snagajob, I was part of an office of 30 people in Oakland, and the other 470 people in the company worked in Virginia and South Carolina. And I still felt I had a decent leadership relationship. You know, part of that was, five days a month, I traveled to the largest office and like literally just kind of hang around, sit around, see…
Jesse: That’s what I’m talking about though. Like that hanging around has value…
Peter: And I made serendipity happen just through my presence. And I would let people know when I was there, “I’ve cleared my calendar, don’t need an agenda, just here to hang out.” But, being distributed doesn’t mean being physically isolated. And that’s where intent becomes important, right? There’s opportunities to pull people together. So as a leader, you can say, “Hey, let’s get everyone together in your org, to meet, and in those company-wide gatherings, you reintroduce those opportunities for serendipity and for unintended connection.
Music break
Peter: The companies I know that have distributed teams, offhand, the design isn’t great. What ends up happening, I think is, it is harder to build a design culture. And in those distributed workforces, the work gets highly atomized. You get a lot of little product teams doing a lot of stuff. And so the overall quality of design throughout an organization is, on average, lower than I’d like. There might be spikes where certain teams are doing it well, because there’s a good design leader, good designers in that area. But it’s not something that you can generally, across the board bring up.
Jesse: Well, the distributed context places so much emphasis on the communication skills of the team and the ability to clearly get an intent across to a collaborator and be able to receive and incorporate and integrate whatever feedback you get from that.
And to be able to handle those volleys of ideas within a team more smoothly. In a physical context that often is a matter of interpersonal attunement, right? So you’ve got a group of designers around the table that are all working together on a problem and everybody is sort of tracking everybody else in these really subtle ways in terms of, “Is everybody on board with this idea? Is there somebody who’s like, maybe resisting it a bit? You get all of this stuff from body language and all of these micro cues that are more available to us in a physical environment that I think leaders are struggling with right now, especially if you’re the kind of leader who makes decisions from a place of synthesizing and integrating these signals of attunement and alignment from your team to be able to say, okay, this feels like the direction that is going to best address the problem as I understand it from the perspectives of all the people in this room right now. When they lose access to that rich real time information source about their collaborators, it becomes a lot harder, and it’s a lot harder to do that over a video conferencing app like Zoom, and it’s even harder to do that when everybody’s attention is focused on something like a virtual whiteboard, and you may only be hearing voices in your head and seeing little pointers flying around on a screen.
Peter: The voices. The voices.
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: In my last role, there was a problem that ended up being localized to the Oakland office. and we addressed it because we were all there and I could be pulled into a conference room in a moment’s notice and say, “Hey, this and that and the other thing isn’t working. There’s some sensitivities. There’s some, personality clashes,” et cetera, et cetera.
And you could do five minutes here and five minutes there and you can kind of feel your way through addressing this problem in the moment.
Whereas problems that arise among a distributed team, because you need to be so much more intentional and much more explicit in your communications, well, now you need to grab time on someone’s calendar, and when you talk to them, you need to like have your case made about here’s the nature of this problem.
And now as the leader, in order to resolve the problem, you can’t just pull people aside. You now have to set up a series of meetings yourself and it just turns everything that could have been handled in a humanistic rhythm….
Jesse: Yeah, and in a graceful and informal and humane way, rather than turning it all into these formalized artificial structures that feels like you’re being sort of fed into this big machine instead of just having a conversation with the person.
Peter: And so my concern is that there is going to remain a set of lower-lying problems that don’t hit that threshold, that you as a leader might not even realize are happening, right? That just don’t break through the surface. And then once it does hit this threshold, it becomes this thing that now has to be projectized.
Jesse: Yeah. Triggers a whole bunch of sort of formal processes around it that may be totally ill-suited to the nature of the problem at hand. I completely agree with you and I think that this environment makes it particularly important for leaders to be continually pushing down that threshold of how big a thing needs to be in order for their people to come talk to them about it, and for them to be able to feel like they can casually shoot you a DM in Slack and feel like that’s not going to spin up into something that’s completely out of scale with the scale of the problem itself.
Peter: Yeah. It might not align appropriately given the nature of the challenge that you’re trying to address.
Jesse: I think also for design leaders, this technology introduces new challenges, as remote facilitators of processes and as orchestrators of conversations. And running people through exercises and taking them through the process of generation and synthesis and driving decision making, doing all of those things, in the context of virtual environments is another skillset that most of us are still learning. And, as the tools evolve, we’re going to have to evolve to keep up with them.
Peter: Definitely. One of the skills that help designers facilitate those types of conversations is a certain empathetic quality, but also a certain ability to improvise. And one of the challenges, is you still need to improvise.
You need to be able to realize in a context of a conversation like, “Oh, we should go in this direction. And I have to put aside the plan that I had and pursue it.”
Running these types of workshops virtually, I find requires me to be way more prepared ahead of time, and understanding what the activities are going to be, how they’re going to proceed. And the challenge is you have to be both more explicit upfront in terms of how you structure the sessions, but you still, you don’t want to be rigid and you still need to have that ability to flex, and that, that’s just harder. I think it’s just harder.
Jesse: Yeah, it is harder. And part of it I think, again, comes back to how closely are you able to stay in tune with the other people that you are collaborating with? And how, are you able to track their reactions moment to moment to the evolution of the ideas? And, that improvisation is such an important skill.
Peter: Design leaders are kind of being thrusted back almost into conscious incompetence like they’re having to start over their practices and what works and the things that they had internalized that they could kind of rely on. They’re now having to call into question, much as we said at the very outset like how businesses are having to call into question some fundamental aspects of how they operate. And it would be interesting to consider what are those aspects of leadership practice had become unconscious or subconscious that are now needing to be made explicit again. And I think one of them is this ability to improv. It’s this ability to flow. It’s this ability to react and realize something that has bubbled up, an issue has developed or an opportunity has arisen, and now you’re going to lean forward and tackle that.
Jesse: You got me thinking again about this great reset that is happening at all scales. It’s happening at the scale of the individual as individuals are reassessing how they relate to their lives and the world and purpose and meaning and all those kinds of things, that’s happening at the scale of small groups of people, whether those are families or teams or whatever and the whole reconsideration of how those interaction patterns work. And then it’s happening at the larger scale of larger organizations and eventually institutions and governments and whole societies. So, I think that what you’re talking about is one expression of a larger reconsideration of everything that is happening. I think that this may be an area where a newer leader has certain advantages in that they haven’t yet had the opportunity to build up a lot of habits and practices that are rooted in the pre-distributed context.
Music break 2
Peter: So I’m thinking about this in the context of a particular initiative that I ended up being responsible for when I was at Groupon, about six months into my time there, I was told by my boss, the SVP of Product, that in six weeks time he was expecting me to present at the company all hands to all 12,000 employees a vision for the future Groupon shopping experience. It’s one of those things, it wasn’t out of the blue. It had been bubbling, but it was like, now is the time. Because he was looking at the whole calendar of 2013. We show a vision in April, and then by October of that year, five months later, we start launching the first steps towards realizing that vision. And we wanted to get those first steps out before the holiday break. as eommerce, ecommerce is very seasonally minded. And we did a code freeze, basically, right before Thanksgiving.
And so, he had done a lot of work to develop a product strategy. And so it’s like, we know the product strategy. Make that go. And he was looking to me to lead that. I, in turn, thankfully had hired an extremely capable design director, who’s now the head of design at Doordash, Helena Seo, I leaned on her and I’m like, I’m still running a design organization, so I can’t spend all of my time doing it.
I think I was able to devote about a quarter of my time over those six weeks to this, but I tasked her and she in turn had one or two other designers supporting her, and it was kind of their 50% plus job building this vision, and the vision was simply going to be essentially a series of comps that told a story of a future experience.
Part of why we were able to succeed is after that conversation with my boss, I could go over to her desk and say, “Hey, I need to talk to you about a thing.”
We could start that planning. She could go to two people who worked near her and she could say, “Hey, we’re going to be doing this together.” And the bulk of the effort took place between the four of us, co-located working every day, moving this thing forward.
Now I’m coaching, this design leader who wants to prepare a similar vision, his ability to pull together a skunkworks, a strike team to do that is just way compromised because now all of this stuff, again, has to hit that threshold of “It’s a project” and, it was a project for us, but we were still able to be kind of off the books and scrappy about it.
Jesse: It’s hard to feel scrappy when you’ve got an official Jira board. Right.
Peter: Yeah. And, as I’m thinking about what this leader is going to try to do, it’s just not going to be as flow-y as I had it when I was in a similar situation six or seven years ago, and I could just pull together this little strike team to make it happen.
Jesse: Yeah, I agree with that. It seems like for design leaders it’s going to be really key to find ways to create those opportunities for serendipity, opportunities for serendipitous interaction, whether with their peers or amongst the members of their teams. And also to try to find ways to culturally encourage and technologically enable more kind of looser ad hoc conversations, you know? There was a time not too long ago when people would just pick up the phone and call you without having scheduled anything to have a three minute conversation about something and then hanging up the phone when they’re done. And this was a common way that a lot of human interaction happened in the 20th century in business. And we managed to have those ad hoc conversations in these relatively informal ways, still using distributed technological tools.
Peter: Slack is not a means for galvanizing, I don’t think.. That, that doesn’t mean…
Jesse: …Tell me what you mean by galvanizing in this way…?
Peter: Galvanizing, right? How do, how do I get two, three, four people together and light a spark and make work happen and seed…
Jesse: You’re talking about activating groups of people as opposed to individuals.
Peter: Yeah. Slack is great once those groups have been identified and you need to give them a tool to enable their ability to work together. But to spin up, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, maybe people are doing this on Slack, but, to me, that feels very much like a face-to-face, that could be distributed-face-to-face, but face-to-face set of interactions or, or at least voice-to-voice interactions.
Right.
Jesse: It sounds to me like what you’re yearning for is a way to gauge and help create buy-in for people that you want to get motivated, get excited, get engaged, pour their energy into what you’re putting forward. And what I hear you saying is that that’s a lot more difficult to do in a text chat environment as opposed to face to face or even a phone call.
Peter: I suspect so. A few episodes ago, we talked about leadership rarely has authority. Leadership is about influence. Management is about authority. And so the manager approach to activating and galvanizing is, “John. Mary. Joseph, you are now working on this thing, go!” and they’re like, “Okay, it’s my job. This is what I do.” You’re not going to get the best work out of John, Mary and Joseph in that context. You know, we know that people work best when they feel that connection to purpose. That’s why we spent so much time talking about purpose.
We know that people work best when they feel like there is a higher order mission, and opportunity that they are realizing. People work best when they feel self-directed, when it doesn’t feel like someone has told them what to do, but someone has said, “Hey, here’s this really amazing opportunity to make significant change.” And that person now is like, “I’m in because I want to be part of an amazing opportunity.” And that’s what I mean by galvanizing. That type of galvanizing is done through, I mean, you’re now starting to speak to their emotions. You’re trying to speak to their higher selves.
And I think, you know, an all-caps shout out on Slack doesn’t spur that kind of followership that’s that passionate, engaged, “I’m in” quality that face-to-face does.
Jesse: I think that trust is an element in this too, that the real-time, face-to-face interaction provides for the opportunity to build some trust in the relationship. That is, again, not impossible to do through other channels, but just harder because we have less access to the physiological cues of emotional states that help us stay attuned to one another from moment to moment.
And in the absence of that, it can be hard for team members to really fully buy into a leader’s vision at a deep emotional level because the leader doesn’t have the ability to calibrate the communication of that vision to the emotional responses that the leader is getting to in that improvisational fashion.
So the ability to have an improvisational conversation with somebody where you are responding moment to moment, to their emotional reactions, to what you’re saying, is how you build that baseline of trust that is going to allow both the team member and the leader going forward to trust in each other’s intentions.
For the team member to feel like the leader has a vision that they can invest in, that they can believe in and for the leader to feel like the team members get it enough that they can turn their back and trust that that thing is going to go where they wanted it to go.
Peter: All I have to say to that is, is yes to all that.
One of the things that we don’t do enough within organizations is earn our team members’ trust, earn our employees’ trust. Oftentimes we approach things from a stance of assuming trust, that if I am engaging with you, I assume you trust me. And in fact, trust has to be earned. It has to be earned over time, particularly when you’re dealing with these types of sensitive emotional aspects of meaning, of purpose, of connection, of engagement, you can’t assume trust. If you start by assuming trust, you’re not going to get anywhere almost from the outset. And it’s funny cause trust has to be two ways, right? The individual needs to trust the organization, that the organization is living up to that purpose that it is talking about. And that their effort is connected to that higher purpose. It’s one thing when a company is selling these humanistic values of community and neighborhoodliness and all that. And then you find out that they treat their workers terribly. If anyone’s trust is to be assumed, it is the employee’s trust. Whereas the company tends to think their trust is the one to be assumed and that employees…
Jesse: Right…
Peter: … have to earn the company’s trust, right. Through their performance and through their effort. And I would argue it’s exactly the opposite…
Jesse: …Showing up at the office…
Peter: Yeah. And I would argue it’s the opposite, that companies need to earn team members’ trust because so often team members have been taken advantage of by the companies that they work for.
Organizations, companies, individuals, leaders don’t pay nearly enough attention to trust that they should. Even more than purpose and meaning, and some of these other things, trust is as, if not more, important and far less well understood.
It’s almost never made explicit. It’s almost like we’re wary of bringing trust into the work environment because, my guess is, because we think we fear we will have to break it. At some point, we are going to have to make a decision that breaks that trust. And so we almost don’t want to start that conversation for fear of where it will go. But in order for us to make the….
Jesse: Wow. That’s just, well, I want to, I want to allow some space for that. Cause that’s a pretty powerful statement, what you just said. And, the notion that leaders are carrying around with them, this burden all the time of the knowledge that whatever trust they build, they might at some point have to destroy as part of doing their job it’s a challenging place to be.
It’s interesting that we came to this place just because, trust actually was a big component of the work that I was doing in the last couple of years at Capital One. And, it’s an area that I’ve been digging into and trying to figure out how to bring greater understanding of to my practice with leaders. So I have a lot of things to say about it.
Peter: Well, maybe that becomes the subject for our next conversation…
With this strange fractured conversation that I think reflects a certain reality of our world today. Trying to keep on top of a bunch of different threads in new ways, in new contexts. That wraps up another episode of “Finding Our Way.” We thank you for taking the time to listen to what we have to say. We look forward to your thoughts and input. We are happy to announce that as of this recording, we actually have a website, https://findingourway.design/ Probably the best way of getting a hold of us. There’s a contact form there. It’s also where you can find all past episodes and, links to podcatchers and all that kind of good stuff, how to subscribe. So, find us there, send it to your friends.
And, we look forward to having you join us on our journey as we continue finding our way.
Jesse: Finding our way. Thanks Peter.
Peter: The sound is so much warmer now. Can’t you tell?
Jesse: Yeah. It’s like you’re right inside my head.
Peter: Either that or it’s because I’m using my FM DJ voice?
Jesse: You seem to be in good spirits today. They are all computers now. I think, actually that’s not true. I know someone who was an FM DJ, so…
Peter: But, but at this point, Alexa could basically run radio across the country and most people wouldn’t care.
Jesse: No. Most people wouldn’t notice. Yeah.
Peter: I guess I’m in good spirits. I find that my spirits track with the quality of sleep. I had a good sleep, so I’m in good spirits.
Jesse: Mm. Excellent. Well, that’s good.
Peter: Yeah. I’m pretty simple.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, you know, on some level we all are. Right.
Peter: if we had known where we were going with this conversation, we could have invited that design leader focused on distributed teams and…
Jesse: if we had known where we were going for this conversation, we never would have gotten here.
Peter: And maybe that’s for next time.
6: Defining Your Charter, Part 2: The How
May 19, 2020
In which we break down the components of a team charter, and the ways it helps design leaders, particularly with people matters of recruiting, hiring, and retention.
Transcript
Jesse: Previously on Finding Our Way:
Peter: Today we’re going to dig into how design teams define themselves
Jesse: If you keep doing the same things that you’ve always done, you’re not going to be successful anymore, and you are selling your skills rather than your purpose you have just sort of instantly commoditized yourself right from the start
you can get a long way without, defining a sense of purpose for yourself.
Peter: The idea behind purpose is to answer this question. Why do you exist? Why does this team exist? Why do we have a team doing design, product design, brand design, whatever kind of design? Why?
Jesse: So I think that the big question that I would have in response to that as a design leader is, “How do I get started? Like what are the tactics for arriving at this thing that is obviously going to be really important to my success as a leader, having never done this before. Where do I start?
Peter: I think it’s going to take me longer to answer that than I currently have time for. Hold that thought…
Jesse: Great. That’s great. Well, we will hold that question for next time.
And now, the conclusion.
Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett. In the last episode, we teed up the importance for a design leader to be explicit about defining a purpose for their team to better establish that team within the organization.
In this episode, we dig into the specific steps you can take to articulate a charter.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hi, Jesse.
There are a set of steps that you can take to get there. When I’ve led this exercise, I tried to involve as much of the design team as I can. So when I joined Snagajob, at the beginning of 2017, it turned out that the entire design team was together in one spot. We usually were in multiple different offices, but there was an all-hands for the whole company, so we were able to take advantage of that. And I had 17 people participate in what I’m about to talk about. If your team is larger than that, you probably need to pick and choose, just to make it manageable. But it’s essentially either a workshop or, more recently in the era of everybody working from home, a series of work sessions, close to one another,
just because it can be hard to focus on a video conference for eight hours.
But it’s essentially to go through a series of exercises to define six things. The most important is being clear about your purpose. Sometimes you would call that a mission statement. And the way that you get at your purpose or mission statement is actually fairly straightforward or even simple.
Conceptually, it’s hard to do. But it’s to answer the question, “Why does this team exist?” Literally, that’s it. Why do you exist? Usually, you put that question out there, [then] What I have them do is have everybody come up with three or four answers to that question, and then we do grouping exercises and discussions and all to kind of get a sense of where the patterns are.
So we had all these types of topic areas and then we did some voting to identify what were the top three that we would want to move forward on and have our purpose statement rest upon.
So you don’t come out of it having written the purpose statement, you come out of it with phrases and clauses and concepts to inform our purpose statement. The act of actually writing it you do separately.
It’s also, I find, typically a job for one person to do a draft of. If you do have kind of content strategists or strong writers on your team, usually the executive working with a writer to craft this.
Jesse: You know, this is interesting to hear you talk about this just because I think a lot of the advice, and frankly I think a lot of the instincts, especially of the new design leader who is moving into this role for the first time and taking on new responsibilities, the instinct is to step up, take charge, take ownership, take authority. And to the extent that you do end up engaging the team in a scenario like that, it’s often simply in the role of providing targeted validation of certain aspects of what you’ve developed or perhaps recruiting them to support the socialization of these ideas to the team in some way.
And so it’s interesting to hear you describe a different kind of a process and approach that is more collaborative, that is more broadly inclusive than the lone genius design leader slaving away at the details of the charter by themselves in their office. But I find myself curious about that need to assert that authority and to assert that authorship and I find myself wondering whether it’s enough for the design leader, from that position of facilitator of a more collaborative team-based process, is it enough for them to be able to hold the authority and wield the authority effectively within that context?
Peter: I think that is what’s enough. So, so, as a design leader, you could choose to articulate your team’s charter all by yourself. I would discourage that as I think you want the team to feel that sense of ownership. And so the design leader is in a position of unique power and authority in the group and what I’ve done as the head of design is to get out from everybody else what they’re thinking. That helps me understand where their heads are at.
Oftentimes the team comes up with stuff that I hadn’t thought of. That is great. I remember at Snagajob, one of the value statements. So, that’s another exercise that you do is come up with a set of value statements. And one of the value statements that came out of that team was “fearlessness.” That’s not anything I would’ve come up with on my own. But I really liked it and it became one of the value statements that we, we, utilized moving forward. So I think there’s a role for the design leader to create the space that allows the team comfort in generating these ideas.
And then the design leader becomes the editor essentially of this. They take all this input and they help nudge it and guide it towards the strongest outcome possible. Because you’re going to get more input from your team than it makes sense to put out there. You’re not going to simply reflect everything that the team has contributed. there’s two mechanisms by which you focus all that content. One is dot voting. We had all these themes for what could be in the mission statement. We had 15 different themes. We can’t have a mission statement with 15 clauses. So what are the two or three that we really want to focus on? Dot voting helps you get a pulse check in the room. But then the other mechanism for refining is that leader’s judgment. And I always allow for that executive privilege, in these contexts. Because the leader has an awareness of things that not everybody knows, right? The leader’s in certain conversations with other leaders and just has a broader view that is important and should be brought to bear. A good leader is often more pragmatic than their team members.
The team members, through these exercises can be very blue sky and, “We’re going to change the world!” and, high-minded about the impact that they want the team to have, and leader can be more pragmatic, not to, you know, squash these dreams and ideals, but to recognize that there’s also a reality that this is all taking place in. That they are accountable for it as the leaders, so that they need to manage that.
When I was running the design team at Snagajob and we did our value statement, we had these four values that came from the team: fearlessness, quality, evidence, and humility. Those all came from the team. And I realized there was an additional value that I wanted us to uphold and to continually be thinking about, which we called context. And did that because I was trying to get this design team to be approaching their work in much more of a service mindset as opposed to a series of screens.
And at the heart of the service mindset is recognizing the context in which any interaction is taking place, or rather every interaction is taking place within a broader context and to be continually aware of that broader context as you make your decisions. And so that was the one thing that didn’t emerge. Not a lot of people voted on it, but I’m like, “This is important.”
And so I’m not going to overrule on these other things, but I’m going to add my contribution that I think speaks to something that, frankly, the team wouldn’t have generated themselves.
Jesse: You know, you touched on this idea of the leader having an awareness of things that not everybody knows, and I find myself wondering about the potential risk or, you know, the possibility of a pitfall there for the design leader in potentially over-exercising, not even necessarily intentionally, over-exercising that executive privilege, that ability to tip the scales in favor of one idea or another.
In particular, when the leader is using their elevated awareness of what’s going on in the larger organization to influence their own mandate toward organizational norms in a way that may not actually serve the needs of the design team. In a lot of cases design teams need to be at the cultural vanguard.
They need to be change makers. And that means, in some cases, they need to define the ways in which they are not in step with the larger culture of the organization.
But I think that in a process like this, it can be very easy if you’re the only person in the room who sees something, and everybody else doesn’t see it or doesn’t have the same information that you have, you can develop a distorted sense of how important that information is, how important that perspective is, and especially if you are someone who has the unilateral authority to put things into the final charter, the temptation to exercise that authority, to represent those viewpoints that are not represented by everyone else in the room can become pretty strong and it can lead to, I think, a distortion of the charters. So I wonder what you think about the potential risk or concern there.
Peter: I think that’s a reasonable concern and risk. The design leaders should be engaged in this process from the perspective of the design team looking out, When you’re doing your charter work, including this purpose statement, you want it to be from the inside out. What does the design team believe and know and understand about itself that it wants to project out into the world?
To help others recognize how the design team wants to contribute. And so while that design leader is balancing this broader awareness of the organizational reality with the desires and aspirations of the design team, I would encourage design leaders to weigh the design team’s desires greater than that organizational reality.
And to instead encourage a purpose statement and this charter work generally to push beyond what the rest of the organization outside the design team would be comfortable with. That’s okay. That’s probably a sign that you’re doing it right? If you’re a design team, and the charter plugs right into whatever this broader organizational system is, you’ve probably done too much editing ahead of time, and you’re not enabling the design team to express and realize its potential.
Jesse: Well, yeah, and obviously at the same time, and this may in some way contradict what I was saying a few minutes ago, but at the same time, the design leader can’t be held in thrall to the desires of the design team. The design leader does have a role to play in this process beyond simply being the authority in that they do have to bring their own perspective to it. But that broader perspective that the leader brings to the process has to be kept in balance with the view from inside, the view that is oriented toward the team’s values and the team’s sense of its own identity.
Peter: Right. And, you’re hitting on what I think is another core element for any successful design leader, which is an ability to know how to strike the appropriate balance in everything they do. We were talking about how, earlier, one of these core elements was that the medium of design leadership, and probably any leadership, that medium is relationship.
So I think that’s a core element. Another core element for any successful design leader is knowing how to balance a set of, not necessarily conflicting forces, but mitigating forces in whatever decision they’re trying to make.
Design leadership is decision-making. As you become a design leader, now you’re balancing being a good team player. It’s important for design, in order to have the impact it wants to have, designers must be seen as integrated into the product development and/or marketing efforts of the broader organization.
And so there’s a need to be a good team player, but it’s also important for the design team not to lose its identity as it integrates with these others because there’s a particular perspective, a particular set of practices and skills, a way of working that is distinct to design and that is valuable.
So you don’t want to be unicorns and rainbows on one end, and it’s all sparkle, and no practicality. But on the other end, you don’t want to be crank turning, designs by the pound, simply to help product development release the next feature on time.
And so, in everything a design leader is doing, they’re making judgment calls between these different forces. And the other thing to recognize is you’re going to do it poorly at first, probably. Your judgment is something that you build over time through doing it. So it’ll take you a while to hone that judgment.
For the sake of what we’re discussing here, in particularly returning it to this notion of defining a team, defining its purpose, there is going to be a push and pull between, the team’s aspirational goals for itself and the impact it can have on the world, and the organization’s kind of pragmatic expectation of what the team is delivering and how it fits within those broader organizational goals, and it’s the design leader’s role to navigate that balance.
So getting back to, what are the components of a charter? How does a design leader build a charter? I went into some detail in talking about the purpose statement. The structure is basically the same. It’s just the content that’s different. So the first thing to do: Articulate your reason for being in that purpose statement. Answer the question,”Why do you exist?”
The next thing to do is to articulate your team’s values. What are the principles of your team? What is it that they uphold? What do they value? What do they align behind? So at Snagajob, the, I mentioned the, the five values that we had, humility, evidence, quality, context, and fearlessness. These were the things that we were going to uphold, particularly in light of difficulties, right? Values are what you use to return to, to know where you’re not willing to bend, much less break, but what you’re going to hold fast on. So you do a similar exercise generating values.
Then, it’s important to understand how you work. Values are about a mindset.
So how do those values turn into a set of practices? You want to articulate a set of internal norms for how the team relates to one another, and then a set of external norms for how the team conducts its business with other groups, either within the business or possibly people outside the business.
A popular understanding of internal norms these days is that of radical candor. So this is a norm that teams are developing in an effort to be able to work together directly and honestly. In design, it’s usually in contrast to what in the radical candor model is called ruinous empathy.
One of the design teams I’m working with right now, in fact, scores very high on the empathy front. When I was asking them to talk about their internal norms, they talk not only about kindness and empathy, they even talked about love. Like this is how they want to be able to relate with one another, which is awesome.
But if that stuff goes too far, essentially people are unwilling to call one another out. They’re unwilling to criticize one another directly. And so the work isn’t as strong. People aren’t developing. And that’s what Kim Scott refers to as ruinous empathy. So, that’s an example of an internal norm.
An example of an external norm, and this also came up in this workshop that I just did, is when you’re working with other parts of the business. Before you get anything done, making sure you know what your team’s role is. What are you delivering in this project? Making sure there’s alignment on goals, saying we are not going to start work until we understand the rationale behind this work.
So an external norm would be, let’s get alignment on those goals before we do any work so that we know that this is the right thing to do. So that’s norms.
There’s two more sections in charter building that I do. The next is to define the work the team does. This seems very basic. And it can be quite boring, but it’s also helpful to know, like, literally, “What do we deliver?” if we’re a product design team. The work we do is usually kind of around our process, our methods, our deliverables. We engage in certain practices. We conduct user research and we talk to users. We develop insights. We have analysis, we develop strategies.
We make prototypes. Then at some point, maybe we’re doing wireframes and documentation and comps or detailed prototypes. And that’s like literally, you just define all that work that the team does. The idea being there’s probably work the team does that the team shouldn’t do.
And so you can call that out as a way to articulate we’re no longer doing, say, usability tests. We’re going to outsource that. That is not a good use of our time. So you catalog the work you do in an effort to be able to say what work you no longer do, what work you should keep doing, and then to start identifying work that you think you should do. And the one that comes up with every design team I’m working with is that they want to be doing more strategic work, but they often don’t have the capabilities to do strategic work. So then that becomes an opportunity for growth that you identify.
So the fifth section is around the work, and then the last section, which might be the second most important after defining your purpose, is “How do you know you’re successful?” And this is really hard for designers and design leaders to figure out, because we need put a set of clear, no-fooling success metrics for the design organization, and designers tend not to be comfortable quantifying or timeboxing those types of efforts. But it’s important, it’s key in prioritizing. If people are asking us to do work that doesn’t drive our success, then we are less likely to do it. But if they’re asking us to do work that does drive our success, then we can prioritize that as something, worth doing, worth our effort.
So you have these six areas all pulled together, become this charter, become this definition of the team that you can use for any number of things. It helps the team just look within itself and understand what they’re up to, why they exist, what they’re doing. It helps the team communicate with other functions when they start asking for things that aren’t appropriate. You say, “No, this isn’t what we deliver. Here’s what we deliver. This is what we’re up to. Ask us about these things.”
And if there’s complaints, if they’re like, But you should be doing those things,” then that becomes something you can elevate and escalate and talk about. But it’s important that you’ve made it explicit so that it’s not just kind of a he-said/she-said type of thing or just kind of in the moment, arbitrary, but it has been written down.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, and also if you are in a situation where you as the design leader can’t always be there in the room to represent design, you need your senior people to be embodying those priorities, those values as much day to day as you do. It totally makes sense that you would define the success metrics last.
You talked about it being second only to purpose in terms of importance and there’s a sense in which the end of this chain that you’ve laid out here brings us all the way back around to the beginning, because what those success metrics should be validating is whether or not you are fulfilling that purpose and finding concrete measures and concrete evidence that that fulfillment of purpose is happening.
Whereas the definition of what the work is actually happens pretty late in this narrative that you’ve described. Whereas I think a lot of people would lead with that and say that the success metrics are there to validate whether we are doing the work correctly and assuming that purpose will take care of itself.
Peter: Yeah, so the success metrics. The reason they come last is they can help tie together all that has happened before, including, and perhaps you’re right, most importantly, the purpose. But as you’ve built this story along the way, as you’ve identified your values, how do you know you’re living up to your values?
As you’ve identified your norms, both internal and external, how do you know you’re demonstrating those group norms and practicing, as you have said, as you ought to. And then when it comes to the work, particularly, how do you know you’re growing into the kind of work you’ve set up for yourself as a goal to begin to practice? The success metrics come at the end to make sure you can capture all that. If you do the success metrics early and then you continue to build out your charter, you’re not giving yourself a chance to hold yourself accountable for those other elements. So the success metrics lead to accountability for everything that has come before. The last thing I want to say about this charter: So, I mentioned how it’s good for helping the team just understand itself, helping your colleagues better understand the team. Where I ended up using a charter most is in recruiting and hiring, is in having a clear, concise story when I am talking to a prospective candidate about our team and why that person should join our team, or maybe why they shouldn’t join the team.
I see the whole charter as a kind of beacon and it’s a beacon that should attract those who are sympathetic to the culture and values and practices that are communicated. And it’s a beacon that should discourage those who don’t want to work that way.
And by making it explicit, you make it very clear what you have to offer, what it will be like to work with you. And I find that can help me recruit and hire in competition with other companies that might be able to pay more or might have sexier brands, but they can’t make the cultural commitment to the candidate that I can because I’ve done the work of making clear what we stand for.
Jesse: I think this is an important constituency that we’ve come close to, but haven’t really directly addressed yet, which is the constituency of prospective candidates to join your organization. We talked a little bit about Scott Zimmer at Capital One, and how he made some strategic moves that were able to change the story he was telling the candidates, that enabled him to scale that organization from 40 to 400. And that’s just one example of, I think, this broader way that design leaders need to be thinking about these charters and these expressions of culture and purpose, that they will be the filter that determines who joins your organization in the future.
And, to craft a charter that is authentic and true to who you are, while also acknowledging who you are becoming, who you want to be, and the kind of people who are going to get you to where you want to be and making sure that you are already embodying those values before those people even walk in the door.
Peter: That’s much of the reason that I co-wrote that Org Design for Design Orgs book was because every design leader, knowingly or not, is on the frontline of a global war on talent, or global war for talent, not on talent. That would be
bad. But it’s on the frontline for this global war for talent, and you need every advantage that you can muster to both attract great talent, and then to retain talent. And activities like building these charters attract talent because it makes it very clear what you’re about, but it also helps retain talent because now the people within the team, especially if you’ve inherited a team, or you’re doing a charter kind of later stage where there’s an existing team, if those team members start getting a little, maybe they’re starting to look around, getting a little antsy, the creation of a charter helps re-energize their focus within your organization because they’re like, “Oh, right, this is what I’m signing up for.”
And by making it explicit, it gives them something to hold onto. If you don’t make it explicit, it enables them to look elsewhere more easily, because there’s no kind of higher order or greater purpose within the company that they’re working for, that they can latch on to.
And so much of what motivates me is about talent retention, because if you were to poll heads of design at most companies, the number one problem is recruiting and hiring and retention. It’s talent, across the board. The way that most of them tried to address it is through turning the crank of recruiting and hiring.
That’s obviously important, but many of them forget that there are foundational things to do, such as charter building that sets them up for success. When they do turn that crank, that crank will be more successful because they’ve done the foundational work to define who they are as an organization.
Jesse: And I think this kind of comes back to what we were talking about earlier with the way in which designers frequently will instinctively believe in the intuitively self-evident nature of the value of what they do. And operating on that gut reaction level can again be a disservice to you when you have to engage in these larger relationship building, community building, brand building kinds of activities.
You pointed out that’s Zimmer’s background in branding and marketing gave him an advantage and then he was able to sort of brand design as an endeavor at Capital One and was able to carry that branding forward into the recruiting process. That, is an element of the branding guy mindset that carried over very naturally from his earlier work that someone coming from a UX design background may not have.
Peter: Exactly. Exactly.
Jesse: I feel pretty good about this. I feel like there’s a lot more here about charters and their uses and especially the role of having purpose as a touchstone for your organization on an ongoing basis. So I have a feeling that this topic of purpose is going to be one we’re going to be hearing a lot more about in the future, but thank you, Peter.
Peter: Sure. My pleasure.
That wraps up another episode of Finding Our Way, and as always, Jesse and I are interested in what you have to say. Find us on Twitter. I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg. Send us an email through our website, https://findingourway.design/ and let us know what you think of this episode, what you’d like us to talk about or anything else that comes to mind.
Jesse: Thanks everybody.
5: Defining Your Charter, Part 1: The Why
May 15, 2020
In which we look at the purpose behind defining purpose, and discover some unexpectedly useful new frames along the way.
Transcript
Peter: Welcome to “Finding Our Way,” the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James. Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hi, Jesse. Today we’re going to dig into how design teams define themselves within their companies and the challenges design leaders have balancing the team’s desires with the organization’s expectations.
Jesse: You know, we’ve been talking about the challenges of the new design leader and often the new design leader is the first design leader that an organization has had. And that carries with it its own challenges in really setting the tone for how the design organization is going to be received by and interact with the rest of the organization for probably a long time after you’re gone and other leaders have taken over. There is a really, I feel like there’s this strong sort of imprinting process that happens with early leadership teams where aspects of how they approach problem solving, how they frame what they do, how they, engage with each other, the tone that they set for their teams, all sort of carries forward far beyond them. And so the choices that a new design leader is making as they are leading the formation of a new design team are particularly critical, I think, because they have long term consequences that can’t always be seen upfront.
Peter: I think that’s true. I think there are a few different types of design leadership challenges when it comes to team definition. I think there’s what you addressed, which is that initial design leader, possibly, you know, first, second, third designer, maybe more senior than others.
The company they’re working for starts growing. They start recruiting and hiring and at some point, the team gets beyond what can be handled informally and they need to figure out, “How do I manage this? Now we used to all be able to sit around a table and now we’ve got 15 people in three countries. And we can’t lean on the informal practices anymore.” So that’s one model that I see.
But there’s different challenges that you face when you’re the new design leader inheriting a team that has evolved before you showed up and what you end up doing in order to help the team grow from the point at which you’re taking it on to wherever you’re going with it. And even, in both of those contexts though, as I reflect on it, I think what ends up being valuable is the same thing, because, it’s this matter of definition. I think perhaps the second type of leader, who is assuming leadership of another team is probably more conscious of the need of this, because they’re often assuming the leadership of a team that has not been well-defined.
But it’s 10, 15, 20 folks in there and so an obvious kind of quote “leaderly thing to do” is to do some work to define it. What I think is less well appreciated is for those folks who are that first leader who’s been building something where the informal practice has worked so well for so long to then come to a realization, three years, four years into this, “Oh, this has gotten bigger than I can handle directly. What do I do?” Sometimes those folks realize, “Oh, there are practices I can engage in to help define the team.” That’s, that’s been my experience now as a consultant, where I literally have one company that I’m working with in one design leader in particular who fits this profile almost to a T. They were the first or second designer… it’s a tech company. I’m not gonna give too many specifics, but, they were the first or second designer. they were more senior, when they joined, than the other people on the team. They might’ve even led design in prior contexts, I think in an agency context. They had it built and hired a real design team. And so as design–, as this company grew and design grew, they were the ones growing it, and they’ve gone from two to now, I want to say 16 or 17 designers. This is all product designers, in three or four different locations, including overseas, including in Europe. And, at the beginning of this year, this design leader did a check in with his group to see how things were going and what emerged from those conversations was a recognition that they needed to do work to define themselves better. That it had just kind of tipped probably somewhere, in that going from 10 people to 15 people that it tipped to where their lack of clarity around who they are as a team, what value do they serve, what value do they deliver? What are their values that they uphold? How do they recruit and hire? How do they know what work to take on? All that kind of stuff that, again, they could handle informally when they were smaller fairly easily. You know, this guy now has managers who are managing people and he’s not able to engage with all those people directly and he needs to put practices in place and have a reference point to shared understanding that can represent the definition of the team when he is not there because he can’t always be.
Jesse: Right, another case in which this chartering activity comes up is when there’s a change of executive leadership above or beyond the design group. If you have major shifts of executive leadership among your peers, whether that’s, you know, engineering or marketing or whatever the other, organizational functions are, there is potentially a need to reintroduce yourself to people and to establish a baseline for a new relationship. and if you’re not walking in the door with a clear sense of who you are, that relationship can really get screwed up right out of the gate and can take a lot of effort to untangle down the line.
Peter: I think that’s exactly right. Upon reflection, I haven’t had that experience but I know that experience is true. And I know what often happens is if your design leader has a new boss, new head of product, new head of marketing, new CEO, if they are not out in front of establishing a positive relationship with that person, what almost inevitably happens is that new boss brings in someone that they feel comfortable with from prior relationships. So there is an opportunity to. get out in front of that and establish that relationship. But, if it isn’t done with intention and explicitly, that existing design leader might find themselves–I think what happens is they’re, they’re usually not let go, they just find themselves having a new design leader brought in over them. That is this new executive’s connection that they’re, that they are bringing in.
Jesse: That is a pattern that I’ve seen where the executive leadership knows that the design leader has the trust of the design team and has the operational capability to continue to deliver, but doesn’t trust them as a strategic partner. And so we’ll introduce a new layer into the organization, maybe something that feels sort of fabricated, really in some cases, to create a reason for there to be this interstitial layer that diminishes the design leader’s influence. And ultimately, I think, paves the way for the design leader’s exit. And bringing in somebody who is somebody that the executives can more easily relate to.
Peter: I think that’s right. I think it speaks to a challenge that many design leaders will face, particularly those early ones who grow a team, is that the folks around them continue to associate that person with who they were when they started and not who they have become.
So it’s important for that design leader to reintroduce themselves with some frequency as they evolve so that they’re not being put in boxes by other people.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, that’s a huge challenge. It’s a huge challenge because we all carry these unconscious biases and assumptions about who people are. We create shortcuts in our brain all the time, just to help us deal with the number of people we have to deal with in our daily lives, and we don’t often consciously review those shorthand ideas that we develop about people, especially those first impressions or those early impressions.
I’m curious though, why aren’t designers naturally sort of good at this, right? We’re used to telling stories about our work. We’re used to being able to articulate rationales for things. Why does this prove challenging for so many organizations, do you think, for so many design leaders, to carry that capacity for explanation, that capacity to illuminate, into defining a sense of purpose for themselves?
Peter: One thing I would potentially push back on is that designers are at least universally good at providing a rationale…
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: …for their work. That’s a skill that many develop. In any design leader, hopefully if they are seen as a leader, they have developed that skill where they can help others understand the rationale behind a set of design decisions.
I think, though, a couple of things get in the way here. Designers and design leaders are frustrated that what is obvious to them is not obvious to others, in terms of evident value,
Well, they get frustrated at first. They think it’s obvious that there’s this value, that this team is able to deliver certain–, is able to do good work, is able to deliver a certain impact, is valuable. Many design designers and design leaders feel that their value should be intuited, when in fact more work needs to be done to make it explicit. But because we as designers recognize the value in what it is we’re doing and we understand somewhat viscerally or at a gut level how we are contributing, at first, we think others have that same understanding and so we don’t realize when others don’t share that understanding of the value that designers are delivering in the same way. Then we get frustrated when we realize that, and we get kind of peeved that like, “Really? I have to convince you that I’m worth it? I have to convince you that design matters?” And depending on the environment, the answer often is yes, you do. So, to answer your question, the designers and design leaders recognize their own value and assume others do as well. And so they don’t get out in front of crowing about their value and evangelizing the good work that they’re doing and evangelizing the impact that they’re having, because they don’t think they need to.
When I teach workshops on design leadership, one of the things I stress is the need to evangelize and over-communicate, that the design leader’s job isn’t done until they hear back from others what they’ve been saying to them.
And it might take five, 10, 15 iterations of you saying that thing, you talking about the work that your team did on delivering some project and the impact that it had, or talking about how important it was to conduct this user research because it led to insights that led to some innovation.
You need to say that over and over again. And you know it’s working when you finally start hearing it back from others. But design leaders feel, 1) that again, the impact should be evident. “Why do I have to tell you why I’m valuable? When it’s there, it’s in the data. It’s obvious.”
So that’s one frustration. Another frustration is that a lot of design leaders feel sheepish about selling. They think it’s marketing. It’s, it’s sales-y. It’s not authentic to evangelize. You know, we roll our eyes when the sales team does their high fives and shout outs, when they ring the bell, when they make a sale, we think that’s all kind of hokey.
And so we don’t do that kind of thing ourselves because it feels inauthentic. So we get in our own way that way. Right? ‘Cause we have to keep it cool, man. Cause we’re the designers. And then designers often tend towards an introverted way of engaging with others where they don’t speak up unless directly asked. If asked, they’ll say what they’ve done and they’ll talk about the team’s good work, but if they’re not asked, they won’t put it out there. And design leaders need to get over that quietness and that willingness to just kind of hang back and let the product people, let the marketing people, let the sales people have the mic at the all-hands. The design lead has to get that mic and talk about what it is they’re doing and be explicit and intentional in that communication, because no one else is going to do it for them.
Jesse: Well, what do you think that’s about? What is it? ‘Cause it sounds like what you’re describing is something that is in the personality makeup of people who do this job. And that is you know, an interesting thing if we collectively as a group have to get some self-confidence training.
Peter: What is it about, well, that’s, there’s some deep psychology going on there, right? I think a lot of people end up in design because they like to make, and making is largely a solo endeavor, right? There’s collaboration and there’s coordination and there is working with others, but as a designer you can spend a lot of time with those headphones on, focused on a problem and just digging deep. And so it attracts a personality type who can spend literally hours on end by themselves working through these types of problems. You know, if you’re a glad-handing social person, you’re not likely to end up willing to do what it takes to be a good designer, and so you find a different direction to go in that accords with how you engage with the world.
Now, I don’t want to oversimplify it. There are extroverted designers, there are introverted salespeople, right? These are tendencies. These are not rigid, hard and fast rules. But one thing I have noticed, ‘cause I’ve talked to a lot of designers and a lot of design leaders in a lot of different teams and a lot of different environments, is that inevitably the designers who bubble into these leadership roles and succeed are those leaders who are more comfortable in that engaged mode. I’m thinking of a few of the leaders I’m currently working with right now. They’re all very personable. They’ve got a certain charm and a charisma. I sense it in their interactions with me and I can see it in their interactions with their teams and they’re not necessarily better designers than anybody else. They’re not better creative directors than anybody else. But the reason they’ve been able to elevate into these leadership roles is because of their personability and that has what’s given them that leg up on their peers in terms of who gets promoted, who’s put in charge. You want to put someone in charge who is able to work well with others.
Jesse: So it sounds like you’re also speaking to the–, there’s a necessary degree of salesmanship that is needed, not just in the development of a charter, but it is needed on an ongoing basis in order to be a design leader.
Peter: Yes, definitely. I mean, as we, I think, talked about a couple of episodes ago, some of the most successful design leaders we know were not designers, but were really good sales people, right, and, so, the challenge for that more modest design leader, or person who aspires to be a design leader, is to figure out– you used the word self-confidence before, and I think that’s part of it, but I don’t think that’s the only aspect of it.
I think yes, they do need to develop that self-confidence and self-esteem, but they might have that. They just need to recognize how others perceive them and how their behavior enables or inhibits their desired impact. They need that kind of self-reflexiveness.
Jesse: One thing thematically that I hear us coming back to, as this conversation continues to unfold, is that if you are a design leader who has come up out of design, there are going to be ways in which being a design leader is very much like being a designer, and they’re going to be ways in which being a design leader is nothing like being a designer. And in fact, you may need to unlearn some of the things that served you well as a designer in order to be successful as a design leader.
Peter: Totally. I don’t know how much you need to unlearn. I don’t think a designer’s education and designer’s upbringing teaches you bad habits necessarily. But, they’re insufficient for continuing to progress from a designer into a design leader.
Jesse: Yeah. I think that’s true, but I do think that there are ways in which if you keep doing the same things that you’ve always done, you’re not going to be successful anymore.
Peter: I think that’s right. Right. That’s true.
Jesse: And it sounds like one of the things that you’re calling out is the need to have an intentional approach to relationship building. Which is maybe something that people never really needed as a designer, right, as they were hunkered down over Photoshop or Sketch or InDesign or Figma or whatever the thing was, and didn’t need to invest that effort.
And so their relationship building has always been sort of unconscious as a result. And then they take those unconscious habits into design leadership where that relationship building is now really critical. You talk about taking off the headphones and getting out there and talking to people and talking up your ideas, and all of that, again, requires some intentionality for a designer to move away from the habits and patterns that have, if not served them, at least been comfortable for them in roles that they’ve had in the past.
Peter: I think that is a key. I hadn’t quite thought about it in this way, but, that shift from being the design practitioner into the design leader, the primary change, I think can be reduced to—, that in leadership’s role the medium is relationships, right?
Jesse: Yes.
Peter: Whereas the designer’s role, the medium is the work.
And relationships in all manner of, of, forms. Relationships with your team, relationships with your peers, relationships with executives, relationships with customers. Leaders are constantly navigating these relationships.
And if you don’t have an explicit set of understanding rules, practices, values that guide you and your team in how they conduct those relationships, it gets chaotic. And, you can get away with not being explicit, again, when the team is small, you can talk it out and you can kind of nudge people back towards what’s appropriate when there’s four or five, six people on a team.
But when you start hitting 10, 15, 20 people on a team and you have people in other offices, you now need to make those relationship practices explicit. Everyone needs to understand what is expected of them, as they relate with others.
Jesse: Yes. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think you can get a long way without defining a sense of purpose for yourself and your team. I think that’s why these chartering exercises come up is that the team gets a sort of an initial push off of shore. It’s like canoeing on a lake, right? And that momentum carries them out a pretty good distance. But at some point you got to pick a point on the shore that you’re headed for and start heading there. And figuring out how to get there under your own momentum. And that definition of purpose is the need that these leaders then have to try to figure out how to address.
I absolutely agree with you. I, you’ve, heard me use this phrase before. I don’t think I’ve said this yet on the podcast, but when I talk about all of this stuff, what I often say is leadership is relationships. Leadership only really exists or functions within the sphere of relationships.
When you say that relationship is the medium within which design leaders work, I think that’s exactly right. There is no leadership without relationship.
So it feels like over the course of these last few conversations, we are starting to arrive at a couple of clear things that we agree on. That design leadership is a craft. As a craft, it needs to be approached with intentionality and a sense of purpose. And the medium within which you are practicing that craft is relationship.
Peter: So I have a contention that most companies have no idea how to hire design leaders, particularly the senior most design leader. And it’s because they see the medium that a design leaderiIs operating in as one of the work, as one of output. But the work of a design leader and the medium that they’re operating in is different. And so when you hire a design leader who is simply a strong creative director and savvy about making design decisions, that is important, but insufficient for the leadership role.
And what I’ve seen again and again, are companies that hire creative visionaries who don’t really understand the relationship aspects of the role and those design leaders kind of get rejected like an organ that doesn’t take, because they are not developing the relationships down with their team, so they’re not creating an environment that their team is enjoying, that’s really growing the team.
They’re not relating well with their team members. They’re not creating a relationship with them. Or peers, helping their peers understand what it takes to deliver good design, hearing from those peers, what they need from design, and managing practices and processes across functions. They’re not relating well with their bosses and with executives, and so eventually all the creative, visionary-ness in the world runs dry, right? That momentum, and to use your canoeing metaphor, that might br your push off, but then you’re just stuck in the middle of the lake and people are looking at you like, okay, where are we headed?
And it loses its steam and it only goes so far. And I’ve seen again and again, design leaders who don’t appreciate the organizational, operational, managerial,
diplomatic functions of their job end up being removed and the company often doesn’t even know how to articulate these shortcomings, they just know this isn’t working and “We need something else.”
Jesse: Again, I think this comes back to the way that designers can often intuit the value that they are contributing in ways that can be invisible to other people. And if you aren’t helping surface the signals of your success, then the people who don’t have that intuitive relationship to design, that gut response that we, as designers, have to well-designed objects. We think everybody has that response, but they don’t, you know, and for other people, these are subtle things that don’t jump out at them at all. And the need to be able to build relationships that allow you to bring people along to help them develop that sense for themselves.
But again, coming back to tone-setting. If you are coming out of the gate and you are selling your skills rather than your purpose, you have just sort of instantly commoditized yourself right from the start and it’s going to be very difficult to pivot toward a purpose conversation later. Barring some kind of catastrophe that requires reevaluation of the group and its reason for being. But, if you give people the impression that you are, right from the start, Design Depot Wireframes-by-the-Pounds, that is not going to serve you in the long term, because you need to be able to articulate that sense of larger purpose, that sense of larger value that’s being delivered, in order to maintain the credibility to stay in the room for some of these conversations.
Peter: What I ended up doing with many of these teams that I’m working with is helping them articulate a purpose that doesn’t constrain the potential of how they can deliver. The idea behind purpose is to answer this question, “Why do you exist? Why does this team exist? Why do we have a team doing design, product design, brand design, whatever kind of design? Why?” And you could say the answer is to produce designs-by-the-pound to solve other people’s problems. Or you can articulate a purpose that is more internally directed.
We actually wrote one for the book, and it’s not a bad place to start. Let me find it.
Jesse: I love that you have a copy of your own book at the ready, so you can quote yourself at any time.
Peter: So here’s, here’s one that we wrote in the book as a kind of starter mission statement, purpose statement for a design team. “We’re not here just to make it pretty or easy to use. Through empathy, we ensure meaning and utility with craft. We elicit understanding and desire. We wrangled the complexity of our offering to deliver a clear, coherent and satisfying experience from start to finish.”
So, that’s an attempt for a product design team to elevate themselves from being seen as design-by-the-pound, and shift their relationship to the work and to their peers as people who are bearing the torch for this end to end experience.
And anything that might have an impact on that experience is what this team should be involved with. And when you do that, “Oh, okay. Now I’m, maybe I have a relationship with my customer care center, my customer service, customer support, member service,” right?
Because they’re delivering on the experience. And maybe I have a different experience now with my marketing folks, ‘cause they are there at the outset, connecting with potential customers. Now I have a different experience helping our salespeople think about how they’re interacting with our customers because how they interact with their customers affects the customer experience.
So I’m no longer just being given a set of briefs and told to produce a set of deliverables. I’m now saying we ought to be involved in thinking about how we solve these experience challenges every step of the way, and then what
that ends up doing, as you frame an explicit purpose for your team that isn’t defined by, say, its current state of skills and abilities, that starts opening the opportunity to figure out how the team might grow. You might have a purpose statement like what I’ve written here and realize, “Oh, we should be doing customer journey work. We haven’t been doing customer journey work, but if we’re going to deliver on this purpose, we need to be doing customer journey work. So are those skills we need to develop? Do we have people who could do that work, but we need to grow them to be able to do it better? Are those roles that we need to open if we’re going to be delivering on this end to end experience? Do we need to open up a new role for some type of service designer to join the team?”
These statements provide opportunities for thinking about how you and your team can grow in a way that no one else is necessarily going to ask of you, but which will benefit them. If you’re a product design team growing in response to what product management and engineering is asking of you, you are going to grow by producing more design-by-more-pounds. If you’re a brand design team growing in response to what your marketing and sales folks need from you, you’re going to grow by producing more banner ads and more sell sheets because that’s what they need. But if you are able to articulate your own purpose in a way that you can deliver greater value than what these folks recogniz, you need to kind of seize those reins and define what that purpose is and then put that out there, so that you can change the conversation with your peers in these other functions, marketing, product, et cetera, so that they start going, “Oh, wait a moment. You can do that, too? It never occurred to me that we should have you involved in some of these, like, customer experience councils.” And designers are often not involved in customer experience councils. It’s where customer support is. It’s where customer success is. It’s where people in the front line, people who touch the customer are, and they don’t recognize that you and your designers and your researchers should be part of that conversation because you’re directly affecting it. But if you frame your purpose to make it clear that that is part of your charter and what you stand to deliver, you can now use that as a means to get invited to the conversations that you should be part of.
Jesse: Yeah. I agree. So I think that the big question that I would have in response to that, as a design leader, is, How do I get started? Like, What are the tactics for arriving at this thing that is obviously going to be really important to my success, as a leader, having never done this before? Where do I start?
Peter: I think it’s going to take me longer to answer that than I currently have time for. Hold that thought…
Jesse: Great. That’s great. Well, we will hold that question for next time.
Peter: I don’t have a thirty second response to…
Jesse: Yeah, I knew I was asking a bigger question than we had time for. Can you just give me an intro and an outro real quick and then we can… Oh, you did. That’s right.
Peter: That about does it for another episode of Finding Our Way. We appreciate you taking the time to listen to us. As always, we are eager to hear from you. so please, find us on Twitter, find us on our website, send us an email, let us know what you think. Let us know what you’d like us to talk about, and, we look forward to you continuing to join us on our journey as we continue, I’m just going to keep saying continue over and over again, as we continue finding our way.
Jesse: Finding our way.
Jesse: I imagine that your son found this a, a, a, a transformative experience, like a milestone, like, just knowing what I know about him and his personality and that film, I feel like he probably was like a discovery of something that was always meant for him all of these decades. Just waiting.
Peter: Well, I think it, I think The Naked Gun is meant for every 11-year-old. I hadn’t, I mean, I saw it as an adult. I know, not as an adult, as a teenager, and I remember enjoying it, but watching it again, you realize just how it’s perfectly dialed in to that preteen-but-not-a-kid anymore. Oh, it’s, it was gold. He loved it. He, he liked it more than Airplane and Airplane is a better movie. But…
Jesse: That’s for him to discover. Yeah.
4: Management Leadership Jazz
May 06, 2020
In which reflections on the coronavirus pandemic spark a freeform conversation ranging from Trump to Jobs on management, leadership, power, uncertainty, and more.
Transcript
Welcome to “Finding Our Way,” the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership.
As always, I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hi Jesse. Good afternoon. How are you?
Jesse: I’m, I’m, doing well, all things considered. Yeah–
Peter: And there, there’s a lot to consider…
Jesse: There is a lot, there’s a lot of context. Just a lot. We’ve got some extra context these days for everything.
Peter: It’s funny. I haven’t had enough time to go meta on the current situation, but I think there is, there’s something about this situation that is interesting and revealing. My normal mode would be to reflect on it and I just haven’t had time to do that. Have you been able to step back and think about what we might be learning through this uncommon experience?
Jesse: Oh, wow. That’s a, that’s kind of a big question. I, so just as a point of reference, for our listeners’ context, it is Thursday, March the 26th, 2020. And so that’s where we are in the overall timeline of this extraordinary year, as it has just begun to unfold for us. And you know, I don’t think anybody really can get enough distance on any of this yet to extrapolate learnings from it, except for some very broad learnings about the systemic nature of cause and effect in our modern globalized world. The ways in which systemic structures and the choices that we make in our individual lives are actually intertwined in terms of the outcomes that they create. And, I think that when we look at the differences in how the Covid–19 virus has propagated across cultures and across societies, and the dramatic differences that we’ve seen across the various countries in which the pandemic has taken hold, come back to issues of culture, issues of governance. Frankly, a lot of the stuff that we’re interested in talking about here at the scale of design and design leadership, but really at the global scale. There are these factors at play that influence how an event like this unfolds, that are hard to see in advance because they are these second order, systemic kind of effects. And then it ends up expressing itself in these really unusual ways.
Just before we started recording, I was watching video of, you know, in cities all over the world, there are parks and plazas and public squares that have resident populations of feral animals that rely on the presence of humans to sustain their populations. And now there are these packs of animals kind of roving the empty streets of cities around the world looking for tourists to give them bread.
And there are none coming. And so it’s a schooling in unintended consequences that has really just begun. Yeah.
Peter: Raccoon apocalypse.
Um, one of the things that this has done is make evident different kinds of leadership, and different responses that leaders can have in situations that are kind of revealing. There’s the leadership as demonstrated by President Trump,
there’s the leadership demonstrated by Governor Gavin Newsom here in California.
As Covid was starting to land in the United States, Trump’s leadership mode was to tell people what he thought they wanted to hear, which sometimes can be an okay strategy depending on the seriousness of the incident, but in this case was not the right strategy because telling people what they wanted to hear did not allow them to prepare as they needed to for the reality.
This was in marked contrast to here in California, governor Gavin Newsom, who came out in front of this very early on and started talking about the seriousness and how we’re going to need to start shutting things down and that this is going to take awhile and, his leadership approach was to be upfront with the citizens of California, and he told us stuff we didn’t want to hear. I don’t want to hear that I’m going to have to be in my house for weeks, if not months, on end. But it is good for me to hear that if that is the reality, if that is a reality that I need to get accustomed to and start preparing for.
Right. And thinking about design leaders, I was in a session yesterday where we were talking about “radical candor.” And, there’s a book by that title by Jill Scott. And, you know, the idea behind radical candor is that you are forthright, you are frank with people, with the situation, the issues in play. You are respectful. You are not aggressive. You are not rude or mean, but you are direct, because it is through that communication of information that we are able to understand the situation and then develop strategies for getting better.
Whereas a more common approach, probably the most common approach that I’ve seen in design teams and with design leaders is what she refers to as “ruinous empathy,” which is, because we want to be nice to one another—and designers, at least the ones I’ve worked with, often tend towards the nice, the polite, the pleasant—because we want to be nice to one another, we don’t tell people what they need to hear. We instead tell them what they want to hear, and they don’t realize that they might be underperforming or that this work could be done better or that somehow they are not reaching their potential. And so then these folks end up stuck at a particular level and they’re not growing because in order to get them to grow, we would have to critique them and tell them that they are not measuring up, and that would be not nice. And we kind of get in our own way in doing that, and so it was interesting to think about these leadership styles, both at the micro level of teams and at this macro level of states and societies.
Jesse: You know, and I would argue that, what all of that comes back to is, how effective are the interpersonal skills of the leader. You know, obviously there’s a lot to be said for, you know, vision and operational acumen and all of those kinds of things that are, that are asked of leaders.
But I think, in order to mobilize people around a common cause, people who have a diverse range of skills to bring, a diverse range of perspectives, to mobilize them around a common cause requires being able to speak to them in ways that resonate with them and bring them along. And that’s something that design leaders get used to doing in the context of defending design work as designers, and then as they are elevated to leadership, they sometimes kind of lose their way a little bit, in terms of knowing how to bring people along with ideas that aren’t design concepts.
Peter: I would say there’s a difference there. I guess it’s easy to react in a situation and provide a rationale as you said, a kind of defense of something that you have created. It can be harder to proact, right, when there isn’t a thing to react to, but you have an idea of where things should be headed.
And it can be very, disconcerting for folks to make that kind of commitment.
And I think particularly for design leaders who often feel disempowered, feel like they don’t have access to enough levers to ensure that they are able to see what their vision is forward. To that, I guess I would say don’t worry about that disempowerment. Our job, particularly as design leaders, is to articulate a clear vision forward, and work with our peers and in the organization to figure out how to rally towards that goal.
Jesse: I’m interested in this idea of reactivity because I think that it is something that can be a challenge to navigate as one is moving into leadership for the first time or early in the journey of being a leader, of figuring out how much to react versus how much to push against the organization or against your team.
Right. How much are you a first responder there to put out the fires and clear the path for design, like you’ve talked about in your work as a design leader, versus how much do you push. So you’re a leader, you have some authority. That means you have some permission, some latitude, to take steps as you see fit. But if driving organizational change is a necessary part of driving success for your design team, then you have to be sort of working at the edges of that permission.
You have to be working along the boundaries of your authority as it is currently defined in order to orchestrate the new, to draw the organization toward what it is eventually going to become. And so there’s a balance there that I see leaders having to walk between. Being what has been asked of you versus being what the organization actually ultimately needs.
Peter: I think what you highlighted, which I hadn’t quite thought of in this way, is that most design managers are design managers and probably a very small subset of them are truly design leaders, because I think that leadership is about
pushing against those boundaries, taking people into, if not unknown territory, less well known territory, less well understood territory, taking them to someplace uncomfortable, with the idea that that is where ultimately success will be realized.
Leadership can kind of happen almost at any level as long as that person is demonstrating these qualities of pushing, of challenging, of coercing, persuading, bringing people along towards something new that they might not be familiar with.
Jesse: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. At Adaptive Path, we saw inside a lot of organizations, where the power in the room and the power on paper were two very different things. And it had to do with the level of respect and trust that people had for the viewpoints of certain people and how effectively those people use their power.
And people who were able to cultivate a broad base of respect and trust and were able to use their power in responsible ways, were able to maintain that power without necessarily being in a position of authority. Power may be a different thing again, I guess that when I’m talking about power here, I’m talking about the ability to influence an outcome.
Peter: Right. A manager’s impact is through their granted authority, and a leader’s impact is through the adoption of a new mindset that continues without them needing to be around.
Jesse: Yeah. When we talk about, maybe not the manager versus the leader, but management versus leadership, there are management oriented responsibilities that people have. And then there are leadership, I think, opportunities.
I think in a lot of cases people can be set up to fail if they are, given a management mandate for a leadership problem, it’s like having the ops team lead your strategy development. They’re great at a different thing, and this is not that thing.
Peter: This actually reminds me of an experience I had last year, in support of Kaiser Permanente. One of the things I learned, and I was working with a consultant there, who had a master’s degree or a certificate in change management. And when we work in design, we often think about change management, right? As designers, one of the things we are doing is helping people imagine new futures and then figuring out how do we get to those new futures. So there’s actually a reasonable connection or overlap with the act of design. But one of the things she pointed out, is that oftentimes people apply change management practices to what is actually transformation management. And this speaks to kind of what you were saying before, where you will apply management approaches to what is actually a leadership problem. People will apply change management approaches to what’s a transformation problem. And there’s a fundamental difference between change and transformation.
Change management is going from a to B, where B is known. They call it agile transformation, but it’s an agile change basically, right? We are currently working in waterfall. We’re going to work in agile. We’re going to now change to people broken up into squads of eight. They’re going to work in these two weeks sprints, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? So you’re going from one known to, another known, even if you haven’t practiced it yet, you generally know where you’re headed.
Transformation management is where you’re going from a current state of known to, you don’t know, it is unknown where you’re headed. And, If you apply change management practices to transformation management, what you end up doing is trying to, I think you said, kind of operate your way towards a new future and that just doesn’t work.
It ends up getting rejected because you don’t know where you’re headed and you need a different set of practices to transform. But the uncertainty in transformation ends up often running contrary to an organization’s desire for certainty. So they apply the change management approach, because there’s a certainty implied in the change management approach.
Transformation management, you don’t actually know where you’re going to end up. That’s kind of the point. So you get this conflict of certainty and uncertainty fighting one another. And the certainty usually wins, right? Cause the certainty is part of the dominant existing culture.
And the attempts to create something new gets squashed because it requires an organization to live in the uncertain for longer than they’re comfortable.
Jesse: Right.
Peter: And then, it just gets rolled back and it never happens.
Jesse: Yeah. Certainty wins out because certainty is comfortable and certainty makes the fear go away and executives carry a lot of fear around, all the time. It’s just sort of the nature of the job. This is interesting though, because this connects back to something that you were talking about earlier when you were talking about the design leader pushing the organization into the unknown. And what I got from what you were saying was that it is always the design leader’s role to be pushing the organization in these ways.
And I wonder how true that actually is because I can see that being true in a startup environment, where the goal is to invent the product as you go and to discover your market opportunity as you go. And certainly that same pushing into the unknown was an important part of Adaptive Path’s value proposition to its clients as well as a part of our internal culture to continue to innovate our practices and keep inventing new stuff.
But I find myself wondering if it’s not mostly the case for most design leaders that the job doesn’t really ask for this kind of boundary pushing stuff. It asks for them, you know, to run the team and to run the team really well. Do you think that’s true?
Peter: Yes, and that’s fine, especially when you get to a larger organization in a more stable organization. It’s about keeping that organization humming and running, and so you’re tweaking and you’re fiddling and you’re trying to, you know, continue to improve effectiveness. But if we’re going to be talking about leadership as we did last time, as a practice and a craft, I think we have to recognize that leadership is distinct from management in terms of that pushing.
And in my experience, and I think this is true of most of the design managers I know, while most of their job is management, for most of them, there’s at least 10%, 20% of their job that should be leadership. They might not all be embracing that opportunity, which is a separate issue, but I think that opportunity does exist.
One of the things I’m starting to see a lot more is design managers, directors, senior directors, who are bringing on principal designers. So, these are kind of director-level designers, but who are not expected to manage people, but expected to be a creative leader in a realm of work. Because I think these design managers and executives even recognize that they don’t have the time, the bandwidth to do the creative leadership as well as the executive engagement and the people management and all the other things that are expected of them.
Jesse: It’s interesting because there are some leaders that I think really start to run up against limitations in terms of their potential to grow and to move up in organizations because they are able to practice the relationship building and the management and the alignment and the orchestration and the leadership within the context of their own teams. But then when they have to do that outside of the context of design process and design decisions as they are representing design on a larger stage, they become uncertain about where their power is and they become uncertain about, “How do you use it effectively?”
It kind of comes back to something that we were talking about earlier about how people end up becoming design leaders in the first place, which is that the skills that got you the job aren’t necessarily the skills that are gonna let you keep the job.
Peter: Right. a challenge that many design leaders have that might be somewhat unique to design compared to other functions, is that their peers and their bosses say they want new thinking, new ways of working, the creation of new value that design can bring through its practices.
But then, as designers or design leaders attempt to deliver on that, it pushes the organization into this uncomfortable and uncertain realm. And there’s this snapback, where it’s like, “Wait, whoa, whoa. When I said we wanted innovation, I didn’t mean that. I meant something that I could put on a spreadsheet and better understand and you’re giving me something that is different than that.” And I think this is in part because companies are still trying to figure out what to do with this function that is design, and how to, for lack of a better phrase, capitalize on it. I think there’s this internal conflict where like they want one thing and they asked for one thing, but then when you give it to them, they pushed back and they get upset.
And so you don’t do it, and then they’re mad at you because now you’re not delivering the innovation that they asked for. And, and, they don’t realize that the people outside of design don’t often realize that they’re getting in their own way when it comes to what they’re asking for. And that leaves design leaders who are often not particularly well versed in navigating these types of things, their heads are just spinning, trying to figure out what is expected of them, and then it becomes easy to retrench or retreat into that which is safe, which would be the management aspects of their role.
Jesse: I feel like the things that you’re describing are almost artifacts of this stage in the development of UX as a practice, if you are a design leader in an organization that hasn’t had design before and you are trying to engage with a whole bunch of peers and stakeholders who have never had to engage with design before.
You are, by definition, trying to pull the organization into a new place, which by definition is going to be uncomfortable for people and it’s going to require a great deal of diplomacy.
I wonder at what point we start to turn a corner where those fights become less and less relevant because you don’t have to do so much of that educating, bringing people along, helping them figure out how to talk to you in a way that helps them get what they want from you.
Peter: I appreciate and wish for what you say to be true. I am dubious of that happening anytime soon and I’m dubious for that to be happening anytime soon because a challenge that I believe design has in these organizations is that it is a function unlike literally any other in that it is this kind of creative function, that is being granted some measure of real influence and authority.
There’ve been creative people in organizations for a long time. But often, it was designers maybe in a marketing context who received a brief, executed on the brief, and weren’t really driving the business in any meaningful way. They were
executing on a fairly narrow remit, in some small part of the business as needed.
And now design as a function, and it’s a practice is being brought in one or two levels below the CEO with real executive authority, with large teams that cost a lot of money to hire, and with real influence over the success of a business in terms of the nature of their output driving core fundamental business value.
The issue there though is that the dominant cultures of these businesses tend to be mechanistic, analytical, reductive, business driven, numbers driven. Engineers and MBAs, frankly, share a mindset of how to approach problem framing and problem solving, which is, which is fairly analytical and rigorous and, and detail oriented and predictable and certain.
It’s a lot about removing uncertainty and, and being certain, but I think there’s this feeling in many organizations, it might even be unconscious, that those approaches have reached their limits. And design seems to offer an opportunity to unlock new value. And so they’re bringing design in ‘cause they, they want that innovation. They want that magic. They want whatever design has to offer, but they don’t recognize that when they’re asking for design to enter into these contexts that they’re bringing in a fundamentally, deeply different way of looking at the world, approaching the world, framing problems and solving problems that isn’t analytical.
it tends to be more, synthetic, more generative, more creative, more experimental, less certain. It’s not blasé, it’s not dismissive to business realities and a need to generate value. It’s just a different way of getting there. And it is deeply in conflict with that dominant culture.
And so, I am hopeful that we can get to what you’re asking for. I think the way we get there though is when more and more people with design backgrounds are in senior enough positions of leadership and recognize, the opportunity and the potential of this, what can feel uncomfortable, approach and give it the space
to deliver as it can. And until then, design is going to find itself straitjacketed.
I don’t know how much education you can do of existing broader organizational leadership, versus, is this one of those things that we just need kind of a new generation of leaders…
Jesse: Right.
Peter: …be okay with this lack of certainty, right? I mean, we’re coming out of 120 years of Taylorism, and management science, that was all about breaking things down to their details and creating repeatable, efficient processes, and design runs highly contrary to that. And it’s going to take a while before this more creative, generative, uncertain approach to value delivery is appreciated by these organizations.
Jesse: It feels like what you’re describing is, this thing of, like, caging the wild beast. Right, this natural creative force of design that we’re trying to figure out how to, like, fit it into this Taylorist mechanistic metropolis like, sorry, mega-machine, that we can take this wild organic element and kind of plug it into somehow.
And I find myself wondering whether the wild beasts can ever be truly tamed, or if it is always like, “Are you the zookeeper from now on?” Basically, regardless of how the organization’s changed, and is design always going to bump up against the practical mindedness that is necessary for successful management of a business.
Peter: I don’t think so because I think much of that wildness can be practiced safely; practice safe wildness.
You know, thinking about Apple, particularly under Steve Jobs, because he obviously understood design, had a passion for design, and was willing to let that uncertainty manifest as long as necessary until the uncertainty eventually turns that corner and becomes something that is now more certain and feels real.
There’s a way to approach it where you do it in a safe context where you’re not, you’re not launching this stuff. You’re not shipping this stuff. but you’re trying a bunch of stuff. You’re iterating on it. You’re weeding out 99, possibly 99.9% of the ideas until you get to those germs that catch on and then you’re building on that. And, that requires a degree of patience, a degree of confidence that most leaders simply don’t have. But, if you can see it through to that point, Apple demonstrates what the potential is of allowing that unbridled energy to be realized.
Jesse: You know, one of the adjectives you’ll see most frequently associated with his name is mercurial. In that, yesterday’s great work is suddenly not good enough today. and the ways in which he would let people know that, not necessarily the most constructive…
Peter: No, I, and I’m not going to, I have no desire to be a hagiography of Jobs…
Jesse: …and, and this is I, yeah, no, I know that that’s not–. And my point was simply that, Jobs often, famously, couldn’t tell you exactly what he wanted until he saw it. But as soon as he saw it, then he knew and was, was very decisive in that respect. But it’s almost like the vision was actually sort of a created out of the best little bits of work of many different people rather than Steve Jobs being able to picture the whole thing in his head and then just like giving direction to a team, which is how I think people thought he was working.
Peter: That’s right. One of the interesting things about Jobs is how little vision he actually had. He was not imagining…
Jesse: Yeah.
Peter: …these crazy futures. He didn’t come up with the graphic user interface, but when he saw it at Xerox PARC, he realized that is where things are heading, and figured out a way to take something someone else had come up with, and he figured out how to evolve that into something that would be accessible for everybody. But you’re right. He needed other people to show him that vision.
And this kind of gets back to designers, right? When they’re working best, they are creating visions, most of which are bad. Maybe not bad, but, but, but, but ineffective or infeasible or not going anywhere…
Jesse: Not right. They’re just not right in one way or another. Yeah.
Peter: One of the challenges that companies that want to quote “be like Apple” have, is that their leaders aren’t able to navigate all these quote, “not right” ideas, to realize what are the right ones, the pearls within there, that are worth investing in.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, one of the things that comes through in the various anecdotes about Jobs is, that one of his superpowers was discernment that, in a wide range of different areas, whether that was visual design or industrial design, or the nuts and bolts of software and hardware architecture, he had the ability to wrap his head around a problem well enough to be able to tell the difference between a good solution and a bad solution in a wide range of different areas. And he was able to use that skill to orchestrate the work of all of these different people toward something that eventually added up to a compelling product.
So I think that that cultivation of discernment, that development of taste on the part of the leader, is an essential part of that orchestration of vision.
Peter: I would like to think that, that quality of discernment exists in the world in many people. Jobs had developed it and refined it. I’d never considered discernment, as you phrased it, as its own skill, but, it is, there’s a quality there that can be developed though some people probably have a higher amount of it or a higher degree of it than others, as an inclination and, how can an organization identify its higher discerning individuals and engage with them, grant them some degree of influence and authority to practice that discernment, in value to the business.
Jesse: That is an interesting question and I think an excellent place for us to leave off and…
Peter: The biggest question we’ve had so far, and we’re just…
Jesse: …something deep to think about. I’m just going to let it hang there. I’m going to sleep on it. For, for a bit. Thank you so much, Peter. This has been wonderful. I think it’s probably time for the outro.
Peter: I believe it is. So, once again, Jesse and I thank you for listening to another episode of Finding Our Way. As always, we are interested in hearing from you, whether through Twitter, email, carrier pigeon, whatever means you have at your disposal, let us know what you think about the show, or let us know what you would like us to talk about.
We want to be open and responsive to this community, as we feel it’s not just Jesse and I finding our way, but all of us finding our way together.
Jesse: Finding our way. Thanks, Peter.
Peter: Nope. Nope. That just didn’t work. That didn’t work. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I feel like Orson Welles yelling…
Jesse: I thought you were doing, I thought it. I thought it was…
Peter: It was going for awhile and then I, I spun out and feel again, like Orson Welles…
Jesse: We know a farm in the South of England. Sorry…
Peter: What is this fucking drivel! Why am I reading this shit?
3: Range and Craft
Apr 29, 2020
In which a discussion of David Epstein’s book Range leads to a consideration of craft, practice, and the medium of leadership.
Transcript
Jesse: On that note, would you like to take us out?
Peter: I never took us in.
Jesse: I know. Well, you can do the intro first if you like.
[theme music]
Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I am Peter, and with me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hi, Peter.
Peter: So I actually was wondering, are you on Twitter at all right now?
Jesse: Am I on Twitter? Intermittently? Obviously, there’s a lot there that, at some point you have to turn it off, but yes.
Peter: I’m asking cause I recently posted to Twitter, I’m reading the book Range by David Epstein. Are you familiar with this book?
Jesse: No, I don’t know this book.
Peter: So it’s a book that basically makes a case for generalists in a world of specialisms. and there’s a lot of different stories about a lot of different things, but the basic theme is, people should sample many different things before choosing what it is they do, work-wise. And it also talks a little bit about where I’m at, is kind of “career winding.” And anyway, the reason I bring it up, the reason I tweeted about it, is it has caused me to reflect on design and engineering programs in colleges and it kind of reaffirmed my distaste in undergraduate design and undergraduate engineering programs as they get people to focus in on something fairly narrow early on before they actually understand what is out there. I’m wondering what you think.
Jesse: Oh, well, I mean, so there are several different ways that we could go with this. You know, generalism versus specialism is, I think, an interesting thing, especially as you think about how you scale design teams and different approaches that, that we’ve seen taken to, to that question of how much generalism versus specialism do you encourage or support on your teams, and how do you structure your teams to support each of those different types of designers?
I have my own complaints about design education and how design education is done. And we can certainly–
Peter: That’s probably a whole other episode.
Jesse: There was a, there, there was a phrase that you used in there that I’m curious about. You, you said “career winding,” is that what you said? Tell me more about that.
Peter: Well, in the context of this book, he talks about how within society, there’s this assumption that it’s better to lock into a career choice earlier on and then hammer away at that. Right? You go to school, you’re pre-med ‘cause, you know, you want to be a doctor and you just kind of stay on that path.
And one of the things he points out is that that’s actually not true in terms of that being the best way. And oftentimes many of the people who are most successful are folks who did, maybe not very different things, but different things in their career before landing on whatever it was that, this idea of matching your interests and the career world. And the issue is when you specialize or determine too early before you’ve had a chance to explore, your match might be off.
And so one of two things happens. You either continue persisting in a path that you just don’t like, but you end up doing it anyway, or you end up feeling, you, you at some point you just break and you move to something else and then take on a lot of guilt about that. And, I, you know, as I’m reading this book, one of the things that I find myself reflecting on occasionally is, is how, when we started Adaptive Path, none of us had formal design degrees.
We all had different backgrounds. And I think that is something that has been lost in successive waves of design and designers, kind of creating designers. That as design has gotten more professionalized, as more and more universities offer design degrees, we’re missing that generalist.
Liberal arts or even engineering, whatever.It was, science background that people who, when we came up, there weren’t design degrees, so we had to have one of those backgrounds anyways. But I actually think it’s a, I think there is something lost, when folks aren’t able to draw from a broader foundation before choosing to focus in design. The last thing I’ll say that’s kind of more relevant perhaps to the theme of our podcast is one of design leadership. You know, I think, as a designer grows, and this is one of the key things that Range points out, is that when you get a design degree or an engineering degree, you are immediately worth more in the market because you have a marketable skill.
But over time, people with more generalist backgrounds actually catch up to and surpass folks with more specialist education. and I suspect it’s because it’s easier for them to grow in kind of management and leadership capacities because they’re able to oversee a breadth of activity.
Whereas if you’ve been on this narrow. Design or engineering track from day one it’s harder for you to interact with, engage with or oversee other functions.
Jesse: I can see that. I can see that. I think also, that overseeing a multiplicity of functions requires a certain flexibility and adaptability of mindset and of management style. That someone who has previously worked in a variety of different roles or functions is going to have a little bit more of that kind of facility than someone who has come up within a single function in the organization.
And so who has never had to do that sort of rapid hat switching that is asked of someone in a management role where they’re overseeing a diverse range of functions? This is very interesting and it speaks to, I think, some of what you and I’ve been talking about recently about the different kinds of design leaders and how people get to be design leaders.
What are the various paths to design leadership that are emerging and what those leaders end up bringing to the role and how the role ends up being shaped to reflect the strengths of those leaders as a result.
You had an initial wave of generalists, moving into these leadership roles who were generalists by necessity because there was no way to specialize in digital product design, there was no way to get any kind of formal training in it. So you had to piece it together. You had to adapt. You had to find mentors or people that you could learn from and you had to sort of make your own education, and so they are going to bring a certain sort of a management style as a result of that path, which is going to be a little bit pieced together from a lot of different sources and is going to be a little bit, scrappy and a little bit DIY, let’s see what we can lash together from, what bits of things that we can find to get the job done. Because that was how they got the job done to get where they were.
Another sort of pattern of the design leader that you and I have talked about is the design leader who actually doesn’t have any background in design, formal or otherwise, who finds themselves, it’s like, “Hey, congratulations. You’re running the design team now because you seem to be good at something that we, the executive leadership, considered to be vaguely adjacent to design” and people who’ve had to adapt their management skills from other areas, notably, I think from, from technology, and, to some extent from the sort of the marketing and advertising and branding worlds, had to adapt those to this skill set in between. And so how they are going to manage it, it’s going to be different again, because it’s going to be rooted in the doctrine that they came from.
And somebody who spent, you know, 25 years in brand marketing before they took over a UX team, they are going to have a whole frame for that work that they’re going to bring to it. And that’s going to influence how decision making happens. And that’s going to influence how they define the roles on their teams and the processes. And all of those kinds of things are all going to be informed by this background culture that the leader has come from.
Peter: And then I, I was wondering if there was another path forward. Cause I can think of one other one which is emerging, which, I don’t know enough about the implications of, but it is, you know, now that for the last 15 to 20 years, you do have people who were trained as designers in undergrad, or at least in grad school getting jobs, working as designers, becoming design managers, becoming design leaders.
I haven’t read her book. I should, Julie probably will mispronounce her last name. Julie, Julie Zhuo, from Facebook. I believe Facebook was literally her first job out of grad school, as a designer and she was there for quite a while and grew to being a VP of design. She wrote this book, The Making of a Manager, which is about her experience and her path forward. And in this regard, and now I really want to read the book as I’m thinking about, I wonder, given what you said, how her background steered her in a way that would be different from me as someone who fell into design early in my career, but don’t have a formal design background.
And, and I’ve definitely kind of had a bricolage approach to how I’ve managed my career that other archetype, which, I’m assuming this is who you had in mind. Who came to mind for me in terms of the person who leads design without any real design background or having really worked in design, was Scott Zimmer at Capital One, he was the head of design who acquired Adaptive Path, and he led a design team. When he joined to lead it, there were about 40 people. His background was in brand marketing. There are about 40 people in Capital One’s design team, and when he left Capital One, they were about 400. And he had a very, I thought, interesting, approach to leading a design organization that was directly informed by being a brand guy. In particular, I remember him talking about, ‘cause he knew he needed to scale his organization. So one, he was able to sell design internally better than most design leaders because he’s a branding and marketing person. So he knew how to frame design to the other executives in a way that they realized they wanted more of it.
But then he realized in order to recruit and hire, he had to be a compelling place to work. And so he was very attuned to how brand influenced people’s decisions on where they worked. Then, acquiring Adaptive Path that had a brand name in the industry. And so, because he knew he could get press basically about how this bank is hiring all these design leaders from these companies you’ve heard of, and that allowed designers to go, “Oh, that’s a place I can work and feel comfortable at, ‘cause I recognize those brands.” So that brand marketing approach was one of the most successful I’ve seen as a design leader, and from a person who has never practiced design, that’s not in his background.
Jesse: There is an interesting sort of continuum that you highlight here between the person who has no formal training in design, but a lot of experience in design, versus the person who really is coming in from a complete outside perspective.
And so it feels like there’s this, like, tipping point, beyond which you can’t call yourself an outsider anymore because you’ve been doing design work in some form…
Peter: For too long…right, right, right.
Jesse: …And so like, somewhere along the way, Scott Zimmer became a design leader by sort of inventing…
Peter: …And, and, and inventing a role is that at the time was, exceedingly uncommon. Not being ahead of design, but being a head of design for a 400 person design organization. I mean, you could probably, at the time he left Capital One, there were maybe ten companies that had a design team that large, and one of them happened to be this bank that isn’t even one of the anywhere near the largest banks in America.
Jesse: So, you know, we’ve been talking about how people who find themselves in find…
Peter: Sometimes it feels like it’s an–
Jesse: …accident…
Peter: …accident I, I don’t, I don’t know how intentional I was in becoming a design leader, but yes.
Jesse: Hmm. Well, that I, hmm.
Peter: I mean, we…
Jesse: That is an interesting question…
Peter: Right? I mean, when we started Adaptive Path, I mean, we had the kind of experience where when we started Adaptive Path, there were seven of us. We were equal. And then over time, As we grew, okay, I guess we’re the leaders now. And I think that’s true for a lot of folks. Leadership kinda just happens as things happen around you and you have to figure out how to accommodate to that.
Jesse: I think that’s true. And actually, you know, that leadership can take a lot of different forms. I think about some of our earliest clients at Adaptive Path when user experience was a very new idea and needed champions, needed advocates, needed people to take an intellectual or a strategic leadership position in the organization, regardless of their position. regardless of the authority that their position held. So you had people who were very close to UX problems by virtue of whatever role they did hold. You know, you’re a webmaster, right? And, nobody asks you to think about this stuff, but it keeps coming up. So you start researching it and you realize there’s something there, and then, congratulations, you’re now running the UX department, when you just happened to be the person who was closest to the problem at the time.
Peter: Right.
Jesse: And I think that to some extent the intent of formal design training is to give somebody that foundation so that they don’t have to piece it all together out there in the wild from, you know, whatever people they can find on the street who will strike up a conversation with them about design leadership.
[music break]
Peter: Something we were talking about and maybe we can get into now, is this idea of what is the craft of design leadership? Designers talk a lot about craft, possibly more than any other role. I guess engineers might talk about craft. I don’t know if that’s the language that they use to talk about the work they do, but essentially it’s a craft discipline as well. And then as designers become design leaders, there’s this question of, well, what is the craft of design leadership? What is my relationship to craft? Do I let go of my old craft? Is there a new craft to embrace?
Something kind of in parallel that I’m starting to see, is around product management. People talking about “What is the craft of product management?” ‘Cause I think there’s a recognition that there is an opportunity to make clear what that role does. Because so far, that’s a role that has been defined by doing what anyone else is not doing. That is what product managers do. And that’s not any way to, that’s not any way to define a practice or craft.
But, similarly for design leaders, maybe because we’re so wired to think about craft and think about technique and think about process as we become leaders, we kind of fall back on those models and those frameworks of how to work and it’s not clear how, how applicable they are.
I teach a workshop on how to design your design organization and I’ve taught workshops for, I dunno, shit 20 years now. And we taught a lot of them in Adaptive Path. And when we taught workshops at Adaptive Path, they were about craft design. Strategy is a craft, design research as a craft, interaction design is a craft. And you could teach methods and you could teach technique. And when you teach those workshops at the heart of the workshops are activities, right? We were always very activity-based, usually group activities. Sometimes you did them on your own, but they were ways that we could teach methods and you could teach a discrete method. Here’s how you conduct an interview. Here’s how you construct a persona. That’s very teachable.
A challenge I’ve had, in teaching my new workshop on designing your design organizations is, it’s not a process, it’s not a method. It’s not really a craft. I’m not teaching them how to draw a better org chart. I’m just, like, using it as a way to get their head in this game. But the bulk of the workshop is a deep conversation. Right now, my hypothesis is that the craft of design leadership is conversation and communication.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, I think there is a lot there. You know, if you went to design school, what you were taught was that what they were teaching you, What’s the source of your power? That is, that your, your strength and ability, your capability as a designer was rooted in your mastery of craft.
And, for people to get so good at that, that people want to take it away from them as they ascend to a leadership level and to have management basically say, “All of that stuff that you’re so good at, we’re so impressed by, please stop doing all of it,” it can be a really jarring transition and can leave the designer feeling unmoored and adrift and without that source of power that they have, come to rely on, to drive their work and their sense of confidence in their work. I think it’s interesting that you call out conversation and communication, in part because, I feel like we have talked about that as an element of the designer’s craft for a long time from a very pragmatic standpoint that you can’t sell an idea that you can’t explain to people. And the necessity of persuasion and politicking, to some extent in order to get creative ideas realized and get them off of the mood boards and out there in the world. And I think that’s been a theme for us because it tends to be something that is almost an invisible craft on the part of many of these designers who are good at it, that because their definition of their craft doesn’t include it, they might not even realize how critical that conversation and communication stuff is.
Peter: So that skill is actually not specific to management. Definitely not specific to design. Right? Anyone benefits from better communication skills, and I think it’s a matter of figuring out how do you apply these non-design skills to what you do in your new practice as a design leader.
Companies don’t pay nearly enough attention and provide nearly enough resources for new leaders, new managers, new leaders in terms of training them up on new skills that they need in order to succeed. ‘Cause as you said earlier, the skills that got you there to whatever this leadership position are no longer the skills that will carry you forward.
But, you’re just kind of, most companies put you in a sink or swim mode. when it comes to figuring out how you can excel.
It’s one of those fixed mindset versus growth mindset things. I think a lot of folks assume that those non-craft skills, you know, You can either lead or you can’t, and I’m here to tell you that, Nope, you can grow those skills like you grow any other, you just need to recognize that they are growable, that they are not fixed within people, but that we can all learn how to do them better.
Jesse: I think that for me, regardless of how much you believe the skills are growable, you have to act as if they are or else they definitely won’t be, right. You have to approach it as if you can develop new abilities because the belief that you can’t is going to guarantee it.
Peter: I think, you and I unknowingly, had a benefit in our careers in terms of becoming design leaders, which is that we worked in a consulting capacity for so long and consulting is all about communication and conversation.
There’s things that you develop as a consultant that you might not even realize that you’re developing, but consultants are constantly having to sell their work, sell their ideas every day because of your relationship with your client.
There is almost a negotiation happening that is different than when you’re simply in-house. And I think some of the more successful in-house design leaders are those that have that consulting background, because they’ve learned how to communicate with non-designers, right? ‘Cause as a consultant, often your clients were not people who were designers, so you learn how not to get so caught up in your own thing and to speak other people’s languages. And you learn the presentation and storytelling aspects that allow people to be brought along. And so while I’m not going to encourage necessarily everyone to become a consultant, or to spend some time consulting, there’s something about that experience that probably needs to be brought to bear in an internal context where people think, well, I don’t have to do that because I’m internal and these are my coworkers.
But those practices and those habits of communication that you learn as a consultant become immensely valuable.
Jesse: One thing that I’m hearing that’s implicit in what I think both of us are saying about this is that design leadership needs to be approached with the same level of intentionality as a practice as design is in the same way that designers are encouraged to think about how they develop their practice, how they cultivate their practice, how they continue to keep their practice alive, you’re not leaving that behind when you become a design leader. Your practice is a new practice now.
And it’s going to involve the integration and synthesis of some new skills and maybe, some reevaluation, and, reassessment of your existing skills to see how those can be applied in these new contexts. So one of those has to do with conversation and communication, some of those skills that we develop, in consulting context.
But also I think that it’s about kind of looking at what all of your strengths are as a designer and figure out kind of what is the version of this that exists in this new realm of design leadership?
And this, I think, is one of the key functions of the design leader, of anyone in any kind of a leadership role, which is to create shared understanding. And so the designer having this natural strength in creating shared understanding now has the opportunity to take that into this new realm where they’re creating understanding around different ideas, toward different outcomes, but they’re still using that same tool set that they’ve developed. And I think the other thing that comes up, when you are someone who’s done a fair amount of consulting work, is that you’ve had to use these tools in a range of different contexts, which is to say that you’ve had to explain a range of different kinds of problems and a range of different kinds of solutions to a range of different kinds of people. And I think that’s really key because I think it’s really easy for our communication skills to get sort of super-optimized for the people that we communicate with the most or the most regularly, which is how, when a communication style sort of becomes the dominant communication style of an organization, people can get really good at that, and be really successful in that organization. And then as soon as you take them out out of that organization, that skill set doesn’t transfer because they were too good at working within that highly specialized context, to bring it all the way back around to generalization versus specialization, and they haven’t had the opportunity to grow those communication skills in a diverse range of contexts. So for designers who want to become design leaders who want to develop those skills that they will eventually need as design leaders, I think resisting that, that natural tendency to over-specialize our communication style and to cultivate the habit of learning how to communicate in different ways according to different people’s needs, I think is a skill that you can use as a designer.
That eventually as you move into design leadership is going to serve you even more.
Peter: What does it mean to be a design leader? Different from a business leader, different from, a technology leader, right? There’s going to be shared leadership practices perhaps around communication, but what are the interesting things based on these different people’s different backgrounds that they can bring to that function.
It’s a distinct component of what it means to be an organizational leader, with a design background. You can bring facilitation, you can bring visualization, like what are those things that given your design background, you’re bringing to this organizational leadership conversation that maybe others aren’t.
So I’m now kind of circling back to craft, cause I still think there’s a role that design leaders play in leading design, even if they’re not hands on in the craft anymore, they’re leading a team and a design leader still has a responsibility in that context.
You know, things like mentorship, teaching people how to do the craft. I think critique becomes very important in this regard. And through critique you can communicate elements of craft and practice, and help people think about how they refine how they behave Right.
Let’s say you’re a design leader. Let’s say you’re a head of design. How do you make sure that your team is delivering quality work? The quality work that your team is doing is a result of their craft. You’re no longer practicing craft. So how do you bridge that gap? And so there’s a lot of work that a design leader needs to do to establish quality. What does quality look like? What expectations do we have around quality? That’s it’s not a craft, so much for a design leader, so what might be an opportunity for them to still keep a little bit of their craft in play, right? I think for me, I discouraged design leaders from quote, practicing their craft, because it means that they’re no longer leveraged.
Leadership is about leverage, and if you’re delivering assets, you’re not being leveraged anymore. But if you’re practicing your craft in a way that is, explicitly about influencing others then, yes, there is an opportunity for you to practice your craft. So anyway, thinking about leadership, it’s thinking about maintaining quality. And then how do you help your teams deliver at that level of quality?
The only model I can think of that is relevant would be the military model that kitchens use. Right, where your most senior chef is someone who has made their way, literally touching every station over the course of their career before they become that most senior chef.
Now, as the most senior chef, they are responsible for the quality of everything that goes out the door. But they are not at the fish station. They’re not at the sauce station. They’re not at the grill station, right. People doing that work, but it is up to the executive chef to make sure all those folks are doing it to a level of quality and a level of craft that is appropriate.
Now there are problems with applying the restaurant model to the work we do. It’s not practical to expect a design leader in the contexts that you and I operate in to be, an excellent visual designer, and excellent interaction designer, and excellent information architect, and have gone through all those stations with a level of technique such that when we are now the ultimate leader, we can teach anybody how to do any of those things.
Whereas that is more achievable in a restaurant context.
Jesse: I find myself wondering how much personal responsibility for mentorship is sensible for a design leader to take on, because, assuming that they got where they are because of not just their abilities, but their taste, right? Their ability to discern a good solution from a bad one. And that’s the part of the craft that they continue to exercise in those critiques and so I guess my question is, to what extent is it appropriate that a design leader try to pass on their taste, their judgment that critical skill in some way. As opposed to simply, here’s how you, you know, get that wicked effect in Photoshop or After Effects or whatever.
Peter: Well, the way I get that wicked effect is through Kai’s Power Tools. the most wicked. Speaking of taste and aesthetics, I think it’s still the responsibility of the design leader to articulate why they would make a decision and maybe they are the ones responsible for it. So why they are making a certain decision. “Of these eight solutions, this is the one we’re going with.” And then they explain their reasons, their rationale. But being explicit about it, not just saying we’re going with, we’re moving on, but providing a reason for why we’re going for direction four out of eight, so that others can start understanding that leader’s taste, because that becomes important.
But another aspect of this is, How does a leader help their team members develop their own senses of taste? Right? You don’t want to dictate taste. You want folks to develop their own aesthetics and their own understanding of how to navigate these decisions, figuring out how to communicate your taste in a way that breaks it down to these components. I know when I’ve provided critique around designs, I do so by communicating, if something’s not working for me, it’s not just, “It’s not working for me.”
It’s, “Oh, that’s not working for me because it feels unbalanced. There’s a weight issue on this screen where this component on the left is overwhelming the components on the right,” or whatever it is. You talk about it in a way that folks can develop a language for their own critical eye.
I guess this is part of design as a reflective practice, as we design, to be able to, upon looking at something we like, why do we like it? Being able to unpack that and communicate that, that becomes part of what you are teaching your teams, is that ability to talk about their work, not just a, “I followed these procedural steps. And so my design must be fine because I did the process,” again, ‘cause you could have any number of outcomes of those processes there. There is that last stage of the process where it’s not just, did you follow the steps, but has it come together? Has it jelled? Has it cohered into something compelling, interesting, desirable? And that’s where we need this language to be able to articulate, why something is working, why it isn’t, why you think it’s working.
And then that becomes this thing that you can start talking about when it’s not just like, “Because I said so, because it feels right.” But because of these reasons.
I think design leaders offer mentorship and critique, at the level that they are at. So if you are a new design leader, if you’ve recently been a practitioner and now you’re a manager, you are offering the craft help that you have just come from. But as you get farther and farther away from that, as you become a manager of managers, what you are mentoring, you’re not mentoring those designers anymore, but you’re mentoring managers on how they can do their new craft better.
Jesse: Yeah. I think it’s really true that you and I might have a different point of view on whether a particular design solution is, you know, visually balanced to use your example. But we can’t even have a conversation about that if we don’t have a shared understanding of the concept of visual balance itself. So, In a lot of ways, the question is, does your design process have built into it opportunities to educate designers as to the considerations that go into your critique.
Educate your designers as to the considerations that went into your craft that they should be mindful of. And it’s more about enhancing their mindfulness, enhancing their awareness, making sure that they are continuing to ask themselves the right questions as they’re going, so you don’t have to ask them, ideally. So this is a way of kind of commoditizing your own expertise in a way so that you can level up and be focusing your attention on more meaningful things.
Peter: I mean, that’s the heart of leverage. Leverage is commoditizing your expertise.
Jesse: Mm. Yeah. A lot of good stuff there.
[theme music]
Peter: Well, once again, we’re wrapping up another episode of Finding Our Way. As always, Jesse and I are interested in hearing what you have to say and think about what we’ve discussed today. So, find us on Twitter. Send us an email, and tell us what you think, and if you have ideas on what you would like us to talk about, please share those with us.
We are looking forward to hearing from you and reflecting on your thoughts and comments in our future episodes. So thank you for taking your time to listen to us.
Jesse: Thanks everybody.
Jesse: What’s it called again? What are we doing here? Our podcast is called, “Help. We’re lost.”
Peter: That’s right. We were finding our way and look what good it did. Look what good that did.
Jesse: Our podcast is called “Send someone to fetch us. We’re in Saskatchewan.”
2: Elements Turns 20
Apr 29, 2020
In which we learn more of Peter’s recent adventures in design leadership, and we reflect on 20 years of Jesse’s Elements of User Experience.
Transcript
Peter: Let me do it.
Jesse: All right. You got it.
[theme music]
Peter: Welcome to “Finding Our Way,” the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you on their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. As always, I’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Hi, Jesse. On today’s show, we’re going to follow up a little bit on our first episode. Jesse realized he had some questions for me about some of my work after Adaptive Path that we didn’t get to, that he was wondering about. And then we’re going to be talking about Jesse’s “Elements of User Experience” diagram, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in March.
Jesse: Hooray. So at the end of the last episode, you were talking about that word balance and the need for balance between the design perspective and the business perspective, in the work of the design leader, and that they often are called upon to wrangle these creative energies, within a larger organizational context.
So I’m curious about when you left Adaptive Path at the end of 2011, what were the problems that you felt like needed solving or that were really interesting or compelling to you, out there in the world as you were figuring out what your next step was after Adaptive Path.
Peter: Yeah. So I left Adaptive Path, and I left consulting because I felt that the energy for design and user experience has shifted in house. You were seeing more and more companies building in-house design teams, but also kind of, I had felt a frustration, and I think you’ve shared it, right, working in a consultant capacity where you deliver great work that never sees the light of day. And I realized I want it to be inside the organization that is responsible ultimately for delivering these experiences and to be there when those thousand little decisions are made as something is getting delivered.
And it’s those thousand little decisions that slowly but inexorably blunt the quality of the work that is ultimately shipped. And I realized I would be more useful in-house protecting design, protecting the work, protecting the quality. That that would be a better location for me.
Jesse: Right, right. So you had been working as a consultant obviously for many years. You felt sort of stymied in terms of what you could deliver from outside, and do you want to be better positioned to clear a path for success for design, it sounds like.
Peter: Yeah, I mean, my–. So I’ve always had a personal mission and that personal mission evolved in bits and pieces, but tends to return to making the world safe for better user experiences. And I realized that in order for me to live out that mission, I needed to go where the decisions were being made that affected those user experiences, `and that just isn’t in a consulting capacity. You can influence them in a consulting capacity. You can try to get the ball rolling, and, and get good positive energy into the process. But really when we’re talking about delivery, it’s, again, all those little decisions that are made along the way, all the compromises you make to satisfy timing requirements, to satisfy engineering limitations, to satisfy regulatory or compliance needs, whatever it is, there’s all these things that, as a consultant, you’re not aware of, you don’t have access to, you’re not around to help think through, typically. And so if I was going to uphold my personal mission of making the world safe for user experience, I needed to go in house and do them. You know, I recognized that I was sacrificing a vision, sacrificing kind of that big, bold ideas, right? ‘Cause when you’re working in-house, you tend to be more incremental. You tend to be more iterative. Whereas in a consulting capacity, you’re usually brought in to think big and bold. And I was going to be sacrificing that top end of my creative potential in the interest of making sure that the things that actually get launched don’t suck. And that was the trade off I was not only willing to make, I was eager to make.
Jesse: What constituted the kind of environment that you were able to learn from most effectively? What were you going after, in terms of what was going to drive your growth?
Peter: I was headhunted for a role as the VP of global design at Groupon.
And Groupon was a company that had actually interested me for a while, even though at the time their media presence was really negative, right? It was when there were all these news stories about how these small local businesses were being overwhelmed by a thousand people showing up with the groupon, on the same day, and they couldn’t deliver on the demand that the Groupon had realized. And so there’s a lot of negative press around Groupon at the time. But, I have a passion for neighborhoods, local businesses, small businesses, that kind of thing. And so when I found out about that opportunity, I was intrigued.
I didn’t know what I was stepping into. You never really do until you’re inside. The leadership at Groupon were a lot of people who had been at Amazon and they brought many of those Amazon ways of working to Groupon. So it was a trial by fire on that kind of two-pizza-team approach to product development ’cause that was the Amazon way that they were bringing into Groupon. I got to oversee both product and brand design, and so I was able to take on a more holistic view of design. And then me being me, I was able to kind of treat this as a bit of an experiment. It was a Petri dish that I could try things out with because at the time, there were no kind of standards and practices really. They had grown so fast that there was little rationale behind how the company was organized internally.
Where I ended up developing a lot of my thinking around organization design in-house was the work I did at Groupon trying to figure out, How do I structure my teams to deliver coherent, consistent user experiences, in an environment that otherwise wasn’t really set up to do that. And what I ended up doing was bringing a lot of what we had learned at Adaptive Path in terms of What does it take to deliver quality design? And I tried to figure out how can I abstract some of those principles and approaches, and then embed them into this more, quote unquote tech company, Silicon Valley way of working.
Jesse: So it’s interesting to think that, the team at Groupon had to be in a certain shape in order for you to even really be able to realize that this set of problems existed for the organization because it’s like if they had brought you in to build a team from scratch, you would have had a sense of what to do and you would have built up something new.
On the other end of the spectrum, if they had had a mature design team, a mature design function in place, with a leader, with a well-defined role in place that you could just inherit and drop into, that would have shifted your focus in a different direction.
Peter: That’s right. When I joined, I inherited a group of about, at least on the product design side, about 12 men in their mid-20s. And having worked at Adaptive Path and other design contexts where I’d always had a gender equity in design, I had always had a range of ages, it was very bizarre stepping into this.
This is October 2012 when I joined. So, end of 2012, beginning of 2013, and that was when I was first made aware of this job title, Product Designer, and that’s how they did it at Facebook, and at Facebook, designers own the design and there’s one designer working with a product manager and some engineers, and that’s the way we should do it, is what I was hearing from some people. And when I was looking at that, I’m like, that doesn’t make sense to me.
One designer can’t do all the things that need to be done well, and I found myself just kind of, pushing back against what was becoming accepted wisdom. And so my challenge and my opportunity as we were growing the design team was, how do we allow designers to have their emphases right?
Not every designer is going to be great at everything. Some designers are going to be stronger at interaction, and some at visual design and some at IA, they can be great at one thing, and pretty good at a bunch of things, but they’re not going to be great at everything. So how do we get designers working together in teams, like we had at Adaptive Path, right? Where you’d have two, three, four designers on a team with complementary skill sets. How do we do something like that internally? Became kind of my mantra, my thinking, my approach. And so my team at Groupon was, was basically built on a series of teams, that we’re meant to have this type of spread of skills in that they were meant to work together and collaborate on the designs that they were delivering.
And then the challenge there though is that product development was happening in these two-pizza teams, or think about Spotify-style squads, right? Product development is happening, with a product owner and a group of engineers on a fairly small problem or a feature. And so I didn’t want a designer embedded on those teams. I wanted a group of designers working across these features. If I’m at Groupon, I’m engaged in a shopping experience. That shopping experience is hitting a bunch of these feature teams. I want my design to make sure that that experience is coherent.
And that was the fundamental difference between how I’m working at Groupon, and how, say, things worked at Facebook, right? At Facebook, there was no expectation of coherence across products, ’cause if you dipped into the newsfeed and then you dipped into messenger and then you dipped into photos, that wasn’t a flow, right? It was this portfolio of apps. At Groupon, there’s a flow, there’s a journey that you’re on and I need to make sure that journey is coherent. And so that was my operating principle. And what led me to shape the teams at Groupon the way I did, which was not typical, right? I had to kind of invent it, drawing from my experience with Adaptive Path and how design teams work, and then figuring out how can I hook that into how a contemporary product development organization operates.
Jesse: I think it must have been a real challenge for you to, confront Silicon Valley orthodoxy in that way, especially when you’re up against the culture that is, I don’t want to say eager, but definitely ready to marginalize design, and definitely feels the gravitational pull of giving all of the power back to the engineers.
And so I guess I’m imagining a lot of ideological evangelism on your part, with your peers, just to create space for them to go from, you know, from the zero designers per team to something like four designers per team.
Peter: Right. Right. I was fortunate that most of my interactions and relationships were with product leaders and they were just grateful that a grownup had come in who had a vision for how this could work and could see it through. And so, understanding their concerns, making sure they knew they could reach out to me directly and immediately to address those concerns if something did come up, but just saying, “Hey, this is how we’re going to do it. Trust me. Let’s try it out.” The primary pushback I got, at least initially, was from my team.
Right, I mentioned I had all these kind of cowboys in their mid-20s and they loved this maverick product designer role and, and mindset that they’re the designer and that they wield this special magical power within their squads when it comes to design. And I was moving away from that. I’m like, no, you’re not going to be the person, the owner, you’re going to be part of a team that’s working together. And some of my designers really reacted negatively to that. They liked working alone. They liked being the point person for design. And what ended up happening is those folks left, and that’s pretty typical. I’ve seen over and over again when a new leader comes in, some percentage of the existing team will leave, and that makes sense. The new leader has a different way of working, and then the people who are there are going to realize, like, “Oh, that’s not how I want to work. I came because of how it was before.” And that’s changing. And especially in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot of fluidity and mobility when it comes to work.
And so people who don’t want something, they, they move on. But I was, I was easily able to, replace them, and beyond, with folks who did understand this way of working. Since leaving Adaptive Path, my year and a half with Groupon was probably the most informative and the greatest learning opportunity I had as a design executive.
Jesse: When you were at AP, I feel like your focus was really on developing a robust design practice, and that was the orientation, it sounds like, you took forward into these executive leadership roles, and then through those experiences, that evolved into a more of an organizational orientation.
Peter: So while I was at AP, I was more involved with practice, but, you’ll recall, a lot of work done trying to figure out the architecture of AP project teams, creative lead, program lead, what their distinct roles and responsibilities were, what it meant to be a practitioner on those teams, as you and I became executive sponsors, what our relationship to those teams was, and I kind of had led that because as we grew AP, we had more and more people who wanted to be. creative leads, and we hadn’t defined the role well, the role, up for the longest time, the role was, well, however, a founder does it, as more and more people were doing it, we needed to be very explicit about what that role entailed. And so, I had done a bunch of org design at AP. When I went in house at a place like Groupon, I was still aware of process. And one of the ways I was able to make that realized was through whom I hired, right? I made sure to hire people who had a user centered design background. All the folks who I’d inherited were these product designers who had kind of taught themselves on the job, but had been very much, for lack of a better word, and this is going to sound dismissive, kind of these Dribbble designers, right?
They were really good at polished shots, but they weren’t really good at thinking about structures and systems of interactive media. And so, there was almost no user centricity. There was a small user research team, but they had largely been doing heuristic evaluations. And so from a methodology standpoint, when I came on, I made sure to bring on people who understood human-centered practices and processes, and I kind of let them do what they needed to do in their context.
As a VP, your job is organizational, especially as you’re trying to recruit and hire and scale and grow. And that was when I realized there weren’t any resources for a design leader, scaling a team. You looked out on the web, you looked out in the world, and there was nothing for me to provide me a guide for how to do this. And that was when I realized there was something here to continue to pursue.
So, so while I was mindful of practice and yes, at AP I had been very, very practice and process and methodology-oriented, I also had that understanding of organization. And then in my role as the design executive, I delegated the practice leadership to the people I hired and focused on the organizational design in my role.
Jesse: I think that, sometimes it’s a question of scale. Sometimes it’s a question of the level of maturity of the organization and sometimes it’s a question of the culture of leadership of an organization in terms of how close the design leader stays to the design work over time.
Awesome. Thank you so much.
[theme music]
Peter: March 2020 is an interesting time, a special time, because it is the 20th anniversary of your diagram of “The Elements of User Experience.”
If you go to, I believe, let me see if I can do the URL off the top of my head, http://jjg.net/ia/elements.pdf, you can see, “The Elements of User Experience” PDF, and it will say on it that it was published the 30th of March, 2000. And so, we wanted to, as we’re kicking off this podcast, we wanted to recognize this milestone. It was actually, that diagram was core to how you and I went beyond just knowing one another as bloggers and started to become professional colleagues and on the path to working together. How did the Elements emerge and what were you hoping to accomplish with it?
Jesse: Well, you know, it’s interesting to reflect on because the state of web design at that time, at the turn of the century was such that there was a great deal of attention paid to aesthetics and to technology, but the practices that eventually would become known as user experience, we’re just sort of starting to bubble up around the edges. And, this was just starting to become sort of a legitimate job. At this point in my career, I had been doing content work on the web, writing, editing, managing editorial teams, and had started to see where content and design issues intersect and had transitioned into what was at the time called an information architecture role. And so I was the first information architect hired into a traditional, to the extent that there were traditions in web design consulting at that time, a traditional web design consultancy, which was very, very much modeled on a graphic design consultancy.
It was very much how they structured the work that they did. And so I had to explain to a lot of people who had a more sort of traditional design background, what kind of work I did and how it fit into the larger picture of what we were delivering to organizations.
And I found myself having to have this conversation over and over again, really just to sort of justify my existence at the table, and found myself in need of a visual aid to help myself understand the relationship between these ideas and to help communicate that relationship, and the elements model emerged out of that over the course of a few months of sort of noodling on it in late 99 and early 2000.
Peter: So your initial desire, what you were hoping to accomplish was simply to help your colleagues understand what it was you do.
Jesse: Well, yeah. And hopefully to help the organization be able to communicate to clients my value so that we had a clear shared understanding of what we were trying to accomplish and how we all participated.
Peter: You release it, it catches on within a web design and user experience community, it gives you an opportunity to write a book that you’ve written a couple of editions for, based on the diagram, where you can flesh out the thinking behind it in greater detail.
It’s now 2020, and people still use it. It is still, you still see it, it’s used in courses, I’m wondering what has most surprised you about the longevity of that diagram? If anything? Maybe you’re like, Nope, I expected this to have a 20 year life span…
Jesse: Oh no. I mean, I–But…
Peter: If you didn’t, what, what, if anything, surprises you about its continued relevance?
Jesse: You know, one reason that I put a date on it so prominently on the original diagram was that I expected it to change. And, I expected to want to, iterate and evolve it. But I got it out there and, you know, so what happened was, I had been using it internally, and then I sent it to you, and you were like, “Hey, this looks pretty cool. Can I share it with some friends?” And I’m like, “Sure.” And then the next week we went to the first IA Summit. And somehow everybody there had already seen it. So it had kind of already taken on a life of its own before I even really got a chance to think about like, how I might want to, you know, change it.
And then once it was out, I really felt like I shouldn’t mess with it too much. What has been surprising to me, is that, with very few changes, somehow it continues to speak to how people see and understand this work, all these years later, even though the work itself is dramatically different.
Peter: How does it remain relevant? So this comes out, it’s a web world. It’s still a, I think largely, CRT world, we’re not that far removed from 8-bit Netscape, color cube, dial-up web, right? And it’s not a broadband world yet by any stretch.
And now we’ve got mobile, we’ve got emerging platforms, everyone has a high speed connection in their pocket. Yet somehow it remains relevant. And I’m wondering what you attribute that to, and if you’ve ever considered updating it, given all these kind of technological evolutions.
Jesse: I haven’t felt a need to update it. I think, in part, it’s not in my nature to want to spend a lot of time dwelling on things that I’ve done already. My inclination would be to make something new rather than going back and trying to continue to sort of stretch and extend the old thing to fit whatever has changed.
Okay. So my philosophy has always been that, Elements has a life of its own, and that life is going to have its own cycle that I can’t really do anything about. And, it’s up to other people as to whether or not Elements, you know, stays alive, as long as they continue to find it useful.
Peter: Right. What impact did you hope to have, developing this, this model, this diagram, this framework for thinking about user experience?
Jesse: I wish I could say it was that strategic. I think you have to separate the diagram from the book in some ways in that they are slightly different tools. That are created to meet slightly different needs. The diagram is really something that you would sit down with somebody and use as a tool. Whereas the book exists more to, sort of empower and enlighten the designer.
And so in terms of big picture impact, it’s trying to empower as many designers as possible. But again, the thing got away from me so quickly that I don’t feel like I am really the one driving the boat here.
Peter: So there was this need in the late 90s / early 2000s as more and more people are recognizing they need this type of work done. There’s folks who are like, “You don’t really understand what you’re getting into. Let me, let me make sure you understand kind of the breadth and depth of the situation here.” All right.
And just simply providing that kind of map of the territory. You thought you were just living on the city block, but it turns out there’s this whole neighborhood around you that affects what you’re doing and you need to be familiar with.
Jesse: You know, I think Elements was very much a product of its time for something that has turned out to be as enduring as it has. I think that it would be very difficult for something like this now to have the kind of impact that this had, at that time, there is just so much stuff now. It’s really, it’s kind of hard to imagine a diagram taking the field by storm at this point, which makes it even stranger to reflect that, that ever happened at all.
I have these experiences all the time with strangers, because of the book. I was in a parking lot here in Oakland about, mm, three, four weeks ago, loading groceries into the back of my car, and a woman, black woman probably in her mid-thirties approached me in the parking lot, and she had her like six-year-old little girl with her.
And she walked up to me and she asked if I was me and I told her that I was, and she thanked me for the book and thank me for the impact that the book had on her as she was trying to find her place in the world. And something in the book spoke to her and gave her a direction. And, now she’s leading a design team, and having that experience over and over again has been an extraordinary gift. Yeah. To see the impact that it’s made on individual people in their lives as they’re finding a sense of direction and a sense of purpose through the way that I have articulated this set of problems in this set of ways of thinking about it.
That’s been far and away the best part of all of it.
Peter: I realized that I’ve been emphasizing using the diagram because that’s what I have a relationship with much more than the book,how evergreen has the book proven to be, and is that something that 10 years after the second edition, do you get a sense that people are still buying it? The people are still finding it relevant? Tell me a little bit about that journey with the book.
Jesse: The book is doing great. It sells a very consistent, sort of steady, number of copies every year. Entirely accidentally, it turns out that the framework of elements is a great introductory text for a UX program. So, many people find themselves reading this book in school, as they are first exploring this career path, which is how it’s been able to have that kind of impact. And then they keep it, and they take it with them and they refer back to it and they bring it to their jobs and they recommend it to their coworkers and all of this stuff.
So, I can’t really speculate as to the breadth of impact of either the book or the diagram, but I will say that I feel like the book has probably had a deeper impact on people.
Peter: What has been the most common legitimate criticism that you’ve received? Either of the diagram or the book that you would like to address now.
Jesse: Well, you know, it, it always smarts for me when the content people look at the diagram and say, what about content? Because I’m a content guy, you know, as I said, my roots are in content, and there are many, many considerations involved in content strategy that I would not attempt to put into this diagram.
And I think they do have a legitimate complaint in that it’s not comprehensive.
Peter: But, it looks, as I’m looking at the diagram right now, there’s something almost Kubrickian about it, right? It’s symmetric. It’s evenly weighted.It feels so whole and internally consistent that it doesn’t really invite, like, “How do I engage with it?” I just receive it.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, that’s true. I mean, there have been many people who have done, you know, rifts or elaborations or extensions, of the model. There are people who have, like, seven layer versions and nine layer versions and stuff…
Peter: No kidding.
Jesse: Yeah, yeah. I, I don’t, I, you know, there’s, I, I have seen so much of that stuff flow by over the years, so many student projects. So many conference poster sessions many of them really smart and interesting and thoughtful, some of them a little sort of, overenthusiastic perhaps.
Peter: I mentioned Kubrickian right. And now thinking about the monolith, right. It feels like just this perfect jewel that you can look at it, but don’t touch.
Jesse: Yeah. Well, you know, honestly, it feels a little bit like that to me too. I mean, it does sometimes feel like Elements is kind of a thing that happened to me. And having made this sort of perfect, hermetically sealed little structure. I don’t know that I can crack it open any easier than anybody else could, you know?
Peter: That’s fair. That’s fair. You know, I remember talking to you probably pretty early on when we were working together, and I remember you saying like, “This is just how I see things,” which is not how I work.
I’m a very verbal person. I tend to process initially through writing and if I diagram, it’s not a highly visual diagram. It’s at best, maybe a two by two here or there. But I got the sense that your initial mode of analysis as you look at the world around you, there was just a kind of visual information processing that was going on there. Do you still find that, that, visualizing mode that you’ve have had, does that still come to bear? Do you still see these things in pictures? I guess that’s another way of saying, are we to expect to any thing like that anytime soon?
Are you working on any models?
Jesse: “When are you going to make another one?”
Peter: Yeah. Not that specifically, but, ‘cause I’m guessing you’re trying to make sense of the world around you and the way you do that is through these visualizations. How is that going right now, if at all?
Jesse: Yeah, I mean, I do tend to use a lot of diagrams in my work. Sometimes they are more useful to me than they are to the people around me.
I Understand the relationships between ideas geometrically. When I am working through a problem, I am often working with abstractions that had been made concrete, in a visual way in some way, and I, this is not uncommon, I mean, this is a way of working that’s familiar, I think, to a lot of people who do design work. And so it’s always naturally going to be a part of what I do.
I do think that the spirit of Elements, which is, tools for conversation, tools for creating shared understanding, tools for creating a common language. I mean, we hadn’t really talked about the way in which this work at the time didn’t have an overarching label. Before Elements. A lot of these various terms were used in muddy ways.
You may remember the three conflicting definitions of information design that were floating around circa 1999. At least three. There was a lot of muddiness in terms of the terminology…
Peter: Well, I’m glad all that terminology stuff has been cleared up now.
Jesse: [Laughing] It gave us a place to move forward from. And I think that is a theme that continues for me is trying to find ways to crystallize and instantiate, our current understanding of things to give us something to push off of and something to move forward with as we continue finding our way.
Peter: Is that your sign that you need to sign off?
Jesse: Well we have about 90 seconds.
Peter: Well this is great. I actually learned some stuff I didn’t know about the diagram inandyour process and experience resonates a lot with me. I think if there is a lesson to be learned and it’s one that you, and I, I think, have preached for years, is, share, just share with the world the things that are rattling around in your head that you might think are really only relevant to you.
And many of them will only be relevant to you, but occasionally something will, get out there and really catalyze and crystallize with a broad swath of people, and honestly help move things forward.
Jesse: It’s how we move forward together.
Peter: Yeah, exactly, as we find our way together. So on that note, that’ll wrap up this episode of Finding Our Way. As before, we are eager to hear from you. We are easy to find. I’m @peterme on Twitter. Jesse’s @jjg on Twitter. You can go to the website. We will have an email address there.
We would love to hear from you. We would love to hear what you are thinking about what we’re sharing, other stuff that you would like us to share, especially here at the outset of what we’re doing, as we’re finding our way to finding our way. So, with that, thank you Jesse, and, goodbye.
Peter: A minor, slow motion, anxiety attack. That pretty much lasted through the evening a little bit into my sleep. So I’m great. How are you?
Jesse: Oh, I, I, you know, I don’t have your emotional investment in the NBA, but, I had a similar experience last night, of, yeah, just sort of this mounting helplessness, that, I decided to burn off by going to Safeway and, finding out what kinds of things, they might have that I might want to have around. So I got myself some toilet paper and some paper towels and some acetaminophen, and I came home feeling better.
1: The Story So Far
Apr 29, 2020
In which we learn a little of Peter and Jesse, their past history together, and their more recent history apart.
Keywords: Exploring in public, leading design agencies, leading design teams, organizational design, leadership coaching, Adaptive Path, meaning, purpose, creativity, resilience.
TranscripT
Peter: I’m like, wait, a moment what do we call it?
Jesse: We gotta have something to, we’ve gotta choose some theme music. We’ve got a lot still unanswered here for sure, but we can just make the first episode about: “What should we call this thing?”
Tape is rolling by the way. So literally anything that you say right now can just go into the podcast.
Peter: And so I… just kind of free associating, critic, critique, studio, charette, alignment, white space, negative space, wayfinding. And I was like, wayfinding. Wayfinding. I liked that one.
Jesse: I feel like I thought of that and looked and I found another podcast called that or something. I don’t know. Maybe.
Peter: I couldn’t find one called that.
Jesse: I don’t know why I dismissed it then.
Peter: I couldn’t find one called that. And I don’t know if it, if that in and of itself is the right title, because it sounds like, okay, we’re your, you know, environmental design podcast, or interior architecture podcast. But if you flop wayfinding to “finding our way,” that I felt speaks to a sense of a journey that you and I are on, grappling with these ideas, as we try to figure out, we grapple with, a sense that the existing conversation, that old models, prior models, whatever, are not quite right, but we don’t know what is.
Jesse: I–I–I I love this name. I think you’ve nailed it. I love the multiple meanings of it. I love how it’s like each of us individually finding our way, plus the two of us together finding our way, plus us as a community finding our way, figuring out how our way is different from the old way or old ways. And it also communicates some of that sort of no agenda-ness that I liked about some of our earlier ideas.
Peter: Right. We– we recognize we don’t have the answers. That was the challenge with the–
Jesse: It still evokes that same, that same adaptivity and improvisational quality that the original Adaptive Path name had. So it’s got resonance on a bunch of levels. I really, I dig it. Let’s do it.
[theme music]
Peter: Welcome to finding our way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett.
Jesse: Hello, Peter.
Peter: Good day. So, this is our first episode of a new podcast. We probably need to explain what we’re about.
Jesse: Yes, we do.
Peter: What do you see this podcast about, Jesse?
Jesse: So to my mind, design and design leadership finds itself at a really interesting crossroads at this point in its evolution, as the challenges that we’re facing are getting more complex. You and I are part of a generation of designers who are in leadership roles now who did not necessarily come up through traditional design education, who, you know, came up through the school of hard knocks and are finding ourselves facing new challenges as our influence is growing, and as the strategic value of our work is becoming more and more apparent.
And so “Finding Our Way” is about, in part, about how all of us collectively are finding our way through this present moment as design practices are continuing to evolve as the value of design in business is continuing to be recognized, and as the potential for us to do real harm in the world is continually being recognized more and more. And I think that those kinds of things, and how our practices and how “how we do our jobs” needs to continue to evolve to meet those challenges, I feel like is a big part of what we’re about here.
Peter: That’s right. I think we’re in a moment, somewhat liminal, with how organizations are embracing design, and doing so with more alacrity than they ever have. And, I think you and I have a sense that these organizations, as they’re embracing design, don’t really know what it is they are embracing, don’t really understand the implications of what it is that they are bringing on, and I think the people who are leading the charge, specifically the design leaders, don’t quite understand their own leadership potential, don’t understand how to be the most effective leaders they can be, because that isn’t often their background, their orientation, right, they came up through craft and practice, and now they’re expected to lead.
And so you have this… collision of organizations embracing design, not quite understanding the implication of that, and design leaders leading this charge who don’t really understand the nature of their influence and opportunity within these organizations. And it’s created a bit of a, of a muddle to be honest, which has in turn led to a whole host of support structures that have emerged very organically: Conferences like Adaptive Path’s old Managing Experience and Leading Experience conference, the Leading Design conference that Clearleft puts on. I was just at a design leadership summit in Toronto. Like, every region is now launching their own design leadership event. Active community Slacks, et cetera, as there’s this community of people, this group of people who are trying to figure out what does it mean to be a good design leader right now because it’s not clear. Whereas in other functions leadership, I think, it’s probably way clearer, in this one, it definitely isn’t.
Jesse: Yeah. And I would say that it’s not at all homogenous in terms of what a design leader looks like from organization to organization. I don’t know if it’s settled out into a few broad archetypes yet, But there’s definitely a wide array of different ways of doing this job, and different organizations ask different things of design leaders. And I think, that we are just starting to, as a community, engage in the task of sort of synthesizing all of these different perspectives and all of these individual experiences into a more holistic sense of what the role actually is, what the role actually entails, and what leadership looks like even among those people who might not be formally tasked with it, which is something that I think is going to continue to be an influential factor over the development of the entire field. So, yeah, I love that. I love that you and I are finding our way and design and design leaders are finding our way together, and that spirit of exploration, and discovery, I think is what this podcast is all about.
But why should anybody care about what you and I think about these topics?
Peter: We have, for over 20 years, found our way in public. You and I started, with five others, Adaptive Path in 2001, and really gave ourselves an opportunity to not just do design work, but think hard about the context in which design work takes place, in an effort to, in our own selfish interest, of having that design work be realized and have an impact, and so we’ve spent a lot of time in the intervening 20 years thinking about how do we allow, how do we enable design to realize its potential, in a world that often feels like it’s hostile to the work of design and designers?
Jesse: You mentioned, this exploring in public thing, which has been a characteristic of both of our careers and of our work together. And that did start, back, in the context in which we first met, which was not a professional context at all, but we met as hobbyists on the internet maintaining personal websites, who happened to be on similar trajectories until we finally found our trajectories intersecting a couple of years later.
The practice of blogging at that time, which was very much something that, where everybody was sort of lashing together, their own technology, and it was all very, very primitive. And, there was a great deal of, of experimentation with what new forms were possible, in this new medium of the web, that maybe weren’t possible before. And, that exploration was what led to the evolution of blogging. And then eventually, pretty much all of social media comes out of that.
I think that it was that same sort of curious hobbyist mindset that then informed the work that we did together when we started Adaptive Path in 2001. That it was as much an experiment as any of our tinkering with web publishing in the 90s was, in that it was a vehicle for figuring out what was possible.
Peter: Right. I mean, we were very explicit as we were forming Adaptive Path that we didn’t want to be the kind of consulting company that we had worked for prior.
And that we saw as an explicit objective of Adaptive Path was, I believe the phrase was, “advance the field of user experience.” And we saw the mechanism by which we would do that to be around writing and speaking and publishing, not just through the work, because doing the work, yes, we could benefit our clients, but we couldn’t benefit the community. And the thing that brought the seven of us together was a desire to have a platform for tackling these issues at the level of community, and again, kind of connecting with what we’re continuing to do with this podcast here, be very exploratory, be experimental, put ideas out there, get feedback, refine our own thinking based on that public feedback.
Neither of us come at this as trained designers, we both have other backgrounds. My background is in anthropology, yours is in journalism, right? That we recognized that our approach to problem solving was aligned with the work of design, particularly kind of a software design and web design.
But, we don’t necessarily identify as quote unquote designers has given us this perspective around design.
Jesse: Let’s do the career recap real quick, because I do want to provide some bonafides and reassure folks that we are not just writers and speakers, but we’ve also been, you know, active working designers and design leaders for all these years as well. So, we met through our mutual interest in blogging the late nineties.
Through that, we discovered that we were interested in some similar things, from a career perspective. After that, we co-founded the company Adaptive Path in 2001 with a whole bunch of–a whole bunch, well it seemed like a whole bunch–seven co-founders, we started the first what I call the first user experience consultancy.
Obviously, there were other consultancies that were doing UX or UX-adjacent work before that, but we really sort of staked a claim to user experience as the umbrella term for the work that we were doing as opposed to web design or interaction design or software design or…
Peter: Or usability…
Jesse: Usability was, yeah, that definitely, usability was a dominant factor in the market at that time. We felt user experience really expressed what we were trying to do, and we adopted that label for our work. We were doing that work as an agency on a client basis, as well as, as Peter mentioned, we ran conferences and workshops for, for user experience designers for many years. Our flagship conference UX Week ran for 16 years. And we did a bunch of other related stuff as well. Peter is the coauthor of the books Subject to Change and Org Design for Design Orgs. I wrote a book called The Elements of User Experience.
Along the way, these are some of the tools that we’ve tried to put out there to… The way that I think of it is I’m always trying to help other people have better conversations about the work that they’re doing through this stuff. But you know, I think what might be interesting to people is that we worked together for a long time, and then we have not worked together for a long time.
It has been nearly a decade since you and I have worked together or have, really had, more than the occasional in-depth conversation about design. And so I think this is going to be interesting for us to discover how our viewpoints have evolved in the intervening years.
Peter: I’m currently doing some work with Wells Fargo, and the first project that you and I ever worked on together was for Wells Fargo.
2002-2003. Exactly. And so, I did consulting work for Wells Fargo, PeopleSoft, Ameriprise, SKT, Samsung, I know you did a bunch of work in journalism, CNN, I remember, comes to mind.
Jesse: CNN, Disney, Skype, Microsoft. yeah.
Peter: Right. And then 2011, I left Adaptive Path to go in house. I was kinda done with consulting. I wanted to be where I felt the action was and where the heat had moved and it had moved, I believe, from kind of the design consulting realm into the in house world, companies were starting to recruit and hire and build internal design teams.
And my journey, there has been a lot of companies in nine or so years, probably most notably Groupon, where I ran design. Jawbone, where I helped run design. And then most recently, my last full time job was at a company called Snagajob, where I was the VP of design. And then I had projects and clients. I worked with OpenTable and, and other companies along that way. Capital One, actually, after the Adaptive Path acquisition. And so my career has been largely one of being a design executive, being the senior most design person in an organization needing to establish, grow, and kind of up-level design and design practice within these organizations. Make it a healthier function than usually what I found when I joined. And that’s what directly inspired the book that I co-wrote with Kristin Skinner, Org Design for Design Orgs and, and kind of the current mission I’m on as I’ve gone back to being an independent consultant, I work on my own, but, where I’m now trying to help design leaders do right by the design organizations they are building. So that’s kind of been my trajectory.
When I left Adaptive Path at the end of 2011, what did you end up, you stayed there, you were there in 2012, through the acquisition by capital one in 2014 and then for five years at Capital One, yeah, since that acquisition. So what has your journey been like?
Jesse: Well, you know, as, as you mentioned around that time that you left Adaptive Path, the market was really shifting for user experience consultancies, as internal teams were getting more robust, they were getting more mature. They were just needing us less, or they were needing us for different things that we were not necessarily optimized for. And so the business was, was solid and was stable, but was also not really growing. And we kind of felt like Adaptive Path had reached a certain level of maturity, and that was right around the time that Capital One came around in 2014, to see if we were interested in an acquisition that would help them jumpstart the development of some mature design practices and a mature design culture for them as an organization.
We were, we were somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 people. I think at the time, they already had about, I want to say, about 120 people. So we were, we were not in any way, you know, the majority of the Capital One design talent, but we were a huge injection of team and culture to that organization. And when the acquisition happened, I kind of took the attitude that no matter how this went, it was going to be interesting to watch. It was going to be interesting to see, you know, how these two cultures came together and to see the nuts and bolts of how you build, an enterprise design team at scale, from, from some core ideas about how to do the work effectively. And then, over the course of that five year period, I watched the Adaptive Path team go through various evolutions as it moved toward becoming a fully integrated part of the Capital One design organization.
And I got to sort of help nudge things along in terms of establishing cultural practices that I hope were going to be, uh, really a part of how that organization does design for a long time to come. And that process of integration had kind of run its course around the middle of 2019, as everything sort of wound up.
And I realized that I had, I’d seen the movie that I’d come for at Capital One, and I’m really happy to report that the acquisition and the transition I think went very well across the board. And now in the course of that journey, I have found myself really interested in the way that the dynamics among the individuals on design teams influences the quality of the outcomes, the way in which how we work together, how we collaborate, how we interact, from day to day and moment to moment, determines whether this is a team that can deliver consistent results, iteration over iteration. It determines whether or not this is a team that can deliver new thinking. It determines whether this is a team that can survive, you know, a technical setback, those kinds of things. And so, within Capital One, I started moving into an inhouse leadership coach role where I was supporting design leaders, helping them untangle those problems of the interpersonal dynamics of teams, to help them figure out how to make those teams more resilient and more successful.
Peter: Were you working primarily with leaders or were you working with whole teams? Was it primarily at that leadership layer? What were you observing that allowed you to help those leaders maybe be better understand their role?
Jesse: Yeah. I was working with team leads. A lot of it was, really sort of being like ship’s counselor, being the person that you can come and sit down and say, “Hey, I just had a difficult conversation with somebody,” or “I’m about to have a difficult conversation with somebody, and I just need to kinda hash it all out and have somebody to do that with.”
Peter: So, so you’re a Betazed then?
Jesse: Hopefully. Yeah. That’s the, that’s the aspiration.
Peter: In terms of your work supporting leaders, was this something that you kind of fell into? Was this something that you identified as where you wanted to be? How did you arrive there as opposed to, like, when we last worked together, your focus was on creative leadership for design, right? You were the Chief Creative Officer of Adaptive Path. You are helping set creative agenda for the company. You are leading projects for clients like Disney, doing creative work. So what was your journey from creative leadership to this organizational therapy, and how intentional was it versus if you just kind of ended up there? Yeah.
Jesse: Yeah, I would say there are two parts of that. One part of it is Capital One’s organizational journey. As they were maturing as an organization, they were minting a lot of fresh design leaders and those leaders didn’t have mentors, didn’t have development support, didn’t really have anything because, you know, it was all new. And so, Somebody would say, “Hey, you know, maybe you should talk to Jesse about that kind of thing.” And then I would have these little side counseling conversations with people that then eventually got to a place where the executive leadership at Capital One looked at what I was doing and said, “Hey, why don’t we just make that your job?”
And that was my job for the last two years that I was there.
Peter: I’m still trying to better understand your passion for this subject.
Jesse: Oh, well, so, that’s the one half of it, which is the organizational half of it. The second half of it is my personal journey, which is the occasion of the acquisition. And my transition from having been in an executive leadership role in a company that I founded for 13 years to being one of a large number of leaders with voices that had to be balanced in the mix of setting strategy for Capital One.
And, realizing that I, I didn’t really understand how to work effectively in that dynamic. I knew how to work effectively in the dynamic that we’d created at AP. I realized that effective leadership in this context where you’ve got a multiplicity of peers, and a diverse and complex set of agendas to navigate required much more sophisticated relationship management skills then I had developed as a leader, and so it was my digging into what would improve my effectiveness as a leader. That led to me starting to share some of that perspective with the people around me.
Peter: Interesting. What is the influence or impact you hope to have through your work? I mean, it could be as grand as the Steve Jobs “What is the dent in the universe you want to make?” or something, you know, perhaps more quotidian and practical.
Jesse: How big do you want to go? I mean, my sense is that when creative people are connected to their personal sense of purpose and feel a sense of connection to the people that they work with on a day-to-day basis, they produce their best work and the best work of our most creative people can change the world. And so my point of view is that if I can help a leader create an environment in which the people around them feel connected to their own sense of purpose in the world and that they feel that they are working with a leader who is connected to their own sense of purpose in the world, and that connection is authentic and mutually supportive, that is a team that is going to be resilient to any number of reorgs, or shifts in product strategy.
That is a team that is going to be able to take more chances creatively, that is a team that is going to be able to advocate for itself more effectively. The strength and resilience of the team, I think, ultimately, is the biggest determining factor of the long-term quality of the outcomes.
And that ultimately comes down to the tone and the practices that the leader puts forward.
Peter: Yeah. So I think where we strongly overlap is a recognition of an untapped opportunity for organizations to draw value from the work of creative people, right? Organizations are really bad at that. They’re really good at squashing creativity. Almost kind of famously so. And really poor at enabling creativity. And I think that’s this common ground that you and I share that’s our probably our single highest degree of overlap.
I’m sensing your emphasis is on the individuals, their abilities, capabilities, relationships… Really empowering, really kind of going deep down into the human, to the humans that make up these creative organizations and helping them realize their potential.
My orientation has been more structural, systematic, and organizational. How do I get these groups of people operating with one another and with the other functions in an organization to enable that creativity to flourish. And so I think I hadn’t known that before. And I suspect that those distinct orientations will guide how we tackle this subject moving forward.
Jesse: Yeah, I think it’s true. And I think that you have to have both things, right? I mean, you know, I often draw on examples from the arts, but if you think about, let’s say a musical performance, you’ve got to have somebody who has figured out the set list, and you have to have somebody who has figured out the lighting, and somebody to run the sound board, and somebody to put all of the things in place that support the musician in that moment of performance and make all those structures fit to support that moment.
Peter: That’s called MusicOps.
Jesse: [Laughing] Exactly.
None of that has anything to do with the musician as a musician, right? It’s all the things that make the musicians successful at being a musician, but it also has nothing to do with the core sort of activity, which is the moment to moment performance, and it’s that moment to moment performance that I think is the other side of it that has to go along with the organizational structures that support creating that creative environment. It’s an imperfect metaphor.
Peter: No, it’s, well, something I’m coming back to when you talk about creativity, creativity by its nature is uncertain, is unpredictable. When enabled leads to the highest heights. But the practice of which is paralyzing and intimidating for most organizational leaders who want to better understand what they can get and when they can get it, which runs contrary to creativity and I suspect a theme that will be recurring throughout our conversations moving forward. Is this tension between, certainty, and the certainty that organizations require, feel they require in order to do their work and, and the creative condition. I mean, almost as I’m saying, and I’m almost getting to this point where it’s like, is this even possible?
Or, or, is there a necessary blunting of creativity? Maybe creativity can still have an impact, but will it always be, to some degree, contained, below it’s potential? Within these organizational contexts that we are talking about, right? It’s one thing if you’re a band, it’s, uh,one thing if you’re a theater production, I mean, there’s constraints in all these types of things, but those areas where the purpose is the creative expression, right? That’s distinct from what we’re talking about, which is trying to bring some of that energy that you see in those areas and figure out how do you shape it and activate it within these organizational contexts that aren’t really geared towards that type of output.
Jesse: Right. Right, right. Yeah. I think it is paradoxical and I think that the role of the design leader is to hold that paradox and continue to walk that line and always to be in that place of not allowing the creative concerns to override the business concerns and have, you know, the designers go become rogue divas who are in so in love with their own creative vision that they don’t understand or appreciate or take into consideration the practical constraints that influence whether or not the design can actually be delivered. You don’t want that. And then on the other hand, you don’t want the business factors driving things too much either. So, I think that it is a balance that needs to be held on an ongoing basis rather than a problem to be solved one and done.
Peter: I like the word balance there. One of the few business books that I think speaks to our industry well is called Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar. And he uses the concept of balance as opposed to stability.
He sees stability as brittle, and that what you don’t want is stability, you want balance, where there’s an ongoing management of equilibrium and the pendulum is always going to swing. You can’t stop the swinging. And in fact, you don’t want to stop the swinging. The swinging is fine. You want to manage the swinging, but finding, striking that balance as you move forward becomes the challenge of the leader. Maybe that’s not to cut us off here, but it feels like that’s a good capstone for, as we discussed, the mission of what we’re about here is this ongoing conversation around that type of balance as you’re on these journeys as we are finding our way forward, always kind of bobbing and weaving, trying t, stay true to our objectives.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Continuing to walk that tightrope. Well, thank you, Peter. This has been great.
Peter: This has been.
Jesse: What do we say at the end of our show?
Peter: [Sighs]
Jesse: Isn’t this where we came in?
Peter: So I think at the end of this, this first episode, you know, you and I have never hosted our own podcasts. I’ve been a guest on many podcasts. I’m assuming you’ve been a guest on a few yourself. But this is our first time really trying to produce and deliver in an ongoing fashion our own material. And as such, part of finding our way is going to be finding our way with this podcast and its voice and its subject matter and how we share what we’re thinking about with a broader community.
[theme music]
So I think as a way to wrap up this first episode would be, more than, than anything else Jesse and I are interested in what you’re interested in. What are the challenges that you’re facing, that you might like a perspective on? Or, experiences we’ve had, in both consulting and in corporations that maybe you’d like to hear more about, and tell us, let us know.
In our show notes, there will be ways of contacting us. You can always hit us up on Twitter. I’m @peterme, he’s @jjg. We want this to be a dialogue, so, let us know, what you’d like to hear from us, and that will help us better understand our path forward, as we figure out what it is that, well, frankly, what it is that we’re doing here.
Jesse: Join us once again as we continue finding our way.
Peter: Yeah. Great.
Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. Actually one– one name idea that I had an immediately threw out early on was Satisficing, just because I always loved that, that concept of sort of merely adequately muddling through.
Peter: Is it good enough? It’s good enough, fine.
Jesse: It’s The Good Enough Podcast.
Peter: You could listen to better podcasts, but why? This one’s good enough.
I mean, that’s how most people choose what they watch on Netflix.
Jesse: That’s right. That’s right. All right.
Peter: Well, that feels good.
Jesse: So,with that in mind, would you like to improvise an opening?
Peter: No. Hold on, let me, let me see here. Let me get back to the, ’cause it was, it was me in the intro…