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27: Choose Yourself—Making up your career path as you go (ft. Abby Covert) Mar 20, 2022

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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 t…

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26: Chief Design Officers and Design Executive Effectiveness (ft. Gordon Ching) Mar 12, 2022

Show notes

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, w…

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25—The Reckoning Jan 22, 2021

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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…

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24: Delving into digital design—craft, teaching, lessons from architecture, standards and certification (ft. Jorge Arango) Jan 05, 2021

Show notes

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…

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23–Make UX truly human-centered by addressing trauma, power, and other necessary and uncomfortable realities (ft. Vivianne Castillo) Dec 10, 2020

Show notes

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…

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22: “Right problem, right solution, done right”—The Vanguard of User Research (ft. Jen Cardello) Nov 17, 2020

Show notes

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,…

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21—Creativity, banishing inner critics, impostor syndrome, and systemic racism (ft Denise Jacobs) Nov 05, 2020

Show notes

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, a…

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20—The business model is the new grid, and other mindbombs (ft. Erika Hall) Oct 27, 2020

Show notes

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 engine…

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19 – Growth mindsets, vulnerability, sociopathy, totalitarianism… that escalated quickly (ft. Billie Mandel) Oct 20, 2020

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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 collectivel…

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18: How Agile and Scrum ruined product management, and other things (ft. Melissa Perri) Oct 08, 2020

Show notes

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,…

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