Finding Our Way

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17 – Design leadership lessons from bicycling (ft. Sally Carson) Sep 29, 2020

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Transcript Cold Open Sally: Reflecting on it now, I learned so much about my relationship with anger and it really helped me. You know, cause people are trying to kill you. Intro Peter: I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And I’m Jesse James Garrett, Both: And we’re Finding Our Way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. Jesse: On today’s show, design leader Sally Carson of Duo Security joins us to talk about her path to design leadership, growing a design team inside a fast scaling startup, managing your boss, managing burnout, and a whole lot more. Sally: So I currently lead product design and user research for Duo Security, and Cisco acquired Duo about two years ago now. So I’m now part of Cisco. Yeah. Peter: And how long have you been at Duo? Sally: I joined Duo five and a half years ago. Dug Song, the CEO, hired me to build out product design from scratch. They had one user experience designer at that time. But I renamed it to product design at that time, very deliberately… Peter: From user experience? Sally: From user experience, yeah. Part of my rationale, why I renamed user experience to product design was to recast it internally within the company, because the engineers and the product managers did have some familiarity with working with the one user experience designer. And I was coming in with a different approach and I wanted to say this isn’t the way that you’ve been operating. This is a different thing, different flavor. Peter: What was your different approach? How did your approach differ from what they were doing? Sally: One fundamental difference. I was just able to get resources and budget to actually staff up because I think by the time I joined, it was one designer for maybe 30 engineers and just, you know, that ratio really limits what you’re able to do. I also was intent on bringing in a user research competency and building that out. So any expectations that had been set in the prior years about how they had operated with the single user experience designer, I wanted to make it clear to everyone that this was going to be a different way of operating, in part, just because we were going to have healthier ratios to start with. So that really changes the type of work that you’re able to engage in. Peter: So you really wanted just a clean break from the before time to your leadership time. Sally: Yeah. I’ve found that in general, it’s some of the most challenging work that we do. And we’re talking about driving cultural change. I find it’s easier if you’re working with someone who has no sense of what it means to work with design. It’s almost more difficult if you have someone that has a really strong preconception. They’re like, “I understand exactly what this is,” but their conception of it is different from what you’d like it to be. Jesse: Enough knowledge to be dangerous, right. Sally: Yeah. I’ve been interested in, sometimes you all mentioned, change management as opposed to transformation and that nuance, if I remember it’s like the way you defined it, Peter, change management is more like the end state is known and it’s just the process of getting there. Whereas transformation, the end state may not be as well understood. Is that it? Peter: Right. Exactly. And well, has that been your experience with Duo? Like, were you continually transforming into states that people weren’t quite sure where you were headed? Sally: It was definitely transformative. There’s an improvisational aspect to it where I sort of had a vision of what we wanted to get to, but the way that I staged it progressively, it did take some, just adapting to the environment at the time, because we were also going through hypergrowth. So the context was changing. At least every six months, it was a different company. Peter: Was that a vision that you established when you joined, when it was just you and that one other designer? Sally: What I came in with was a hodgepodge of what I had seen as best practices throughout my career. Like I think at that point, I would have been about 15 years into my career. And so I had seen one particular shop had done agile really well, and had found a way to integrate design fairly well into agile. A different shop had healthy ratios, a different shop had really strong research. So I was trying to pluck from the best that I’d experienced and put it together and basically create the design team that I always wanted to work within. Peter: Had you primarily been in startups up to that point, what was the nature of your background before joining? Sally: So let’s see. I’m an army brat. I moved all around. Eventually we settled in Virginia and I did go to college. I got a BFA in communication, arts and design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Peter: So you’re a graphic designer. Sally: Yeah, I got graphic design training. It was really a mixed bag of video, animation, illustration, graphic design, and then amazing faculty that had us reading, you know, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky, which for my 19-year-old brain was probably mostly over my head. But as I reflect back, it’s come in handy quite a lot, you know, just to make sense of, like, the changing media landscape, for example. Jesse: How did you find your way into digital? Sally: So I would have been at VCU in the mid-to-late nineties and there was no web component to my schooling, but I was interested in the web and yeah, I just started doing what a lot of folks at that time did, which was just view source, copy, start hacking it, and figure out FTP. And then I got really lucky because my first job out of school was a small, educational startup In Charlottesville. And they hired me as a full time illustrator, which is pretty extraordinary. But then when I joined, they found out I knew how to code. And they were like, “Oh, you’re upgraded to multimedia developer.” I’m really fortunate where I have this career arc, where if you trace my job titles through the years, it’s a complete parallel to what was happening at large within the industry. Like, I was a multimedia developer. I later was a web designer, interaction designer, user experience designer, product designer, like that is how we all do about our titles through the years. Peter: Sadly those, Radford surveys that everyone has to use, in order to base industry compensation on, still refer to us as, like, web designers. Cause they’re like way out of date. Sally: Gosh, yeah, come on, Radford. Get it together. Jesse: Hey, taxonomy. It’s hard. Sally: It is. Yeah. Peter: So, how do you go from being a multimedia developer to a design leader? Sally: I had plans to move up to New York in the summer of 2001. I rented an apartment up there. And I, found a Polish cyber cafe, and they had satellite internet and that was the only high speed in Greenpoint at the time. And I bartered with them to get high-speed satellite internet on the roof of my Greenpoint apartment building, by redesigning their website. Peter: Nice. Sally: And I worked it out with my boss at the time. That startup in Charlottesville, I was like, I have high speed internet up in New York. Let me keep working remotely. And so I moved up. I lost my job within, I don’t know, three or six months. They were just like, this remote thing is odd and it’s not really working out. And I was like, okay, that’s fair enough. And then there were no jobs. In New York City in particular, there are no jobs. I was unqualified to wait tables, to, you know, be an assistant, to do any kind of administrative work anywhere. At the time in New York City, the job ads for anything web-related were like secretary / webmaster. Isn’t that so odd where they’re like, this is just pure administrative work and yeah, I couldn’t… Jesse: And also, can you configure IIS for us… Sally: Yeah. Yeah. Peter: How well can you navigate the shell? Sally: Yeah, very poorly. So I became a bike messenger and did that right after 9/11 in New York for about a year. It was such an amazing job and it’s such an amazing time to have that work, to get to see every secret pocket of the city that most people don’t have access to. It was just an adventure. Reflecting on it now, I learned so much about my relationship with anger and it really helped me, you know, ‘cause people are trying to kill you when you’re a bike messenger in New York. Like the taxis hate you there. They are trying to kill you. People are doing dumb things that are dangerous. They’re doing scary things that are dangerous, on purpose. And I just learned how much, the more I would engage and get angry and feed into it, it would build my anger, but if I could just let it go and let it wash over me, and not replay the bad incidents in my mind over and over, just really changed my relationship with how I can deal with difficult people or difficult moments, that was helpful for life and for my career. Peter: For becoming a manager. Sally: It’s not like I’m fully enlightened. I do notice now, if I’m replaying a situation that made me angry, it just feeds into it. It makes me more upset. You know, I carry that bad emotion with me. It drains me. Peter: Right. Right. So you’re a bike messenger. At some point you must get back into design and into design leadership. Sally: Yeah. I was doing a lot of bartering to get things that I needed, still doing design work. And then, the grand finale of my bike messenger career, I did a East Coast bike trip with two friends of mine, two girls from Virginia. We were raising money for cancer research. And the three of us rode our bikes from the border of Canada to Miami in three weeks. Jesse: Wow. Sally: It was too, it was too much, it was too hard, it was nearly a century, which is a hundred miles, every day for three weeks straight. And the first day of that trip was my first century I ever did. Yeah. That trip just taught me, How do you do a hundred miles? You really do it a mile at a time. You know, you’re like, okay, five more miles. And then five more miles. And then five more miles you’re just chopping it up into these little bits. Thanks for indulging me on all the bike stuff. Jesse: Well, I think that bike stuff is relevant, honestly, because I hear a lot of preparation for leadership there in your various travails on two wheels, whether it’s, shaking off the moment-to-moment bad feelings of contending with aggressive drivers in New York City, or just getting up every day and facing another hundred miles on that long ride. Those are lessons in resilience, honestly, that I think are essential for any leader to learn if they’re going to be successful. Sally: That’s great. Yeah, it certainly gave me confidence. As we went through the Virginia portion of that ride, some pals of ours rode that leg with us. And this one guy, Ed, was working at a company called Crutchfield at the time in Charlottesville. And I was just chatting with him, riding next to him. And he’s like, you know, we’re hiring a web designer. So call me up when you get back from this trip. So then I became a web designer. Crutchfield is an eCommerce shop and they sell high-end audio and video equipment. And I joined right as they were transitioning away from a print catalog business into an eCommerce business. We were borrowing a lot of ideas around qual and quant from what Amazon is doing at the time. So we were doing funnel analysis, AB testing, tracking conversion metrics. So that was great for just learning chops around quant informing product decisions. And then we also partnered it with qual. Music break 1 Peter: You mentioned, when you joined Duo, the ratios were out of whack. There was one designer for 30 engineers. So I’m guessing early on, you knew you needed to recruit and hire and build out a team. That was five and a half years ago? Sally: Yeah. Peter: I’m wondering if there are stages of your job, stages of your team, how you evolved, how things evolved around you. Sally: Definitely. But early on, we just needed to grow and we needed to build a team pretty quickly. And I had joined Duo at… I was four months pregnant with my first and only kiddo, so there was also an external deadline, you know, I needed to build up a little nucleus of a team quickly. Peter: Five months before you were going to be gone for a while. Sally: Yeah. Yeah. So I was able to make some hires and got a couple of product designers in, got a user researcher in. And really what I wanted to emphasize with the org was the power of user research. And to quickly try to get us to a place where we’re getting beyond strictly usability testing. Peter: What was the opportunity for user research? What did you witness that was lacking that you felt user research could address? Sally: Happily Duo was already so customer centric, they really were, so the stage was set in a really great way for me. Because when we’d bring engineers and product managers to observe the usability testing, it, like, pained them to hear the customer struggling and to watch the customer struggling, which was great. You know, I didn’t have a team that was dismissive of that kind of feedback. Peter: I’m curious how you framed the advocacy for user research. I think we’re seeing that it’s easy to build out design orgs because more designers means more assets. The value of user research is less clear, I think, for these organizations, because they’re not making anything, they’re not producing material… Jesse: It’s less quantifiable at least… Peter: Yeah. And so how were you able to advocate for user research and going beyond the expected usability, into stuff that’s more generative? What were the stories that you found that worked? What were stories that maybe you tried that didn’t work? Sally: One thing that’s been really beneficial for us is to come and present short consumable research nuggets at all-hands meetings. What I really wanted to get away from was, user research goes off for six weeks and comes back with a 30 page PDF. It’s very participatory. So I think that’s a high level theme. How can we make design and research as participatory as possible, and really bring people along for the ride, co-create together so that they’re truly invested in it. What that might look like for those early days of usability testing are bringing those engineers and product managers into the room and having glass on one side of the lab. In a hallway where people are walking by, including our cofounders, so that they can see what’s happening in there, generates a lot of interest. Jesse: So kind of raising the literal physical visibility of the work. By not having it take place off site or in a sealed off soundproofed room that nobody even knows what’s going on behind that door. Sally: That’s right. Yep., really exposing it. And then, because we’re bringing them along for the ride, getting them excited about it as a unique differentiator for us. Like, I’m not aware of other cybersecurity companies that have this rich investment in design research. So it becomes a point of pride. Peter: So you mentioned the CEO’s name… was it Dug? I’m curious to hear more about your relationship with him. If you’ve listened to some of our past episodes, we talk a lot about relationships and in particular for leaders in the position you’re in, there’s a lot of need to manage up and get, maybe not just Dug, other executives also understanding what you’re doing and onboard. How have you approached that? Sally: I had done my own internet of things hardware startup prior to joining Duo, for about three years. And he was an advisor and a mentor to me as a first time founder. So I was learning from him directly through him mentoring me, but also just the modeling, watching how he was running Duo as a super successful startup and doing it in a way that’s so humane and customer-centric and people-centric for the employees. So that was wonderful because coming in, already having had a foundation with the CEO and a relationship there. Chester’s…

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16 – How can a designer grow in their career without becoming a manager? (and more) Sep 15, 2020

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In which Jesse and Peter dig into a few emerging trends we’ve seen in product design teams, including the rise of the senior individual contributor, the increasingly tangled relationship between design, engineering, and product management, and what it takes to lay the foundation for lasting change. Transcript Peter: Oh, shit. Design leaders are spending all their time managing and recruiting and hiring and, caring and nurturing for their teams, but they’re not spending any of their time leading design. Peter: I’m Peter Merholz, Jesse: And I am Jesse James Garrett… Together: …and we are Finding Our Way… Peter: …Navigating the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership. Jesse: On today’s show Peter and I dig into a few emerging trends we’ve seen in product design teams, including the rise of the senior individual contributor, the increasingly tangled relationship between design, engineering, and product management, and what it takes to lay the foundation for lasting change. Peter: One of the things that I think is interesting that I’ve seen more of during our break is a legit establishment of this design leadership role that doesn’t assume management. So, one of the companies I’m working for, a big bank, is hiring up to 20 people who are true senior design leaders. They would be senior manager or director level, but with no expectation of management and direct reports. They are organizational leaders, they are creative leaders, they are strategic leaders. They are there in large part because those folks who do manage are so overwhelmed with their relationship responsibilities, that they need support from folks who can focus on the work. I’m seeing it more and more, and I’m hearing from other design leaders that I’m talking to a desire to establish that role within their organizations. It’s almost like, wait, can we do that? We can have someone who’s really senior, but not manages people? Will they allow that to happen? And it’s like, yeah, if you want it. Jesse: Well, it depends on where you are, and it depends on cultural context that you’re in because, in a lot of cases, one of the challenges with the senior individual contributor is, How do you measure the impact that they’re having beyond the work that they’re delivering? How do you measure the leadership dimension of what that person does so that the organization can know if they’ve got the right people in those senior roles? Peter: How would you measure that if they had direct reports? Jesse: Well, if they had direct reports, then you’ve got a broader set of data to consider in terms of the contribution that the individual is making and the success that they’re finding in the organization. It becomes about team cohesion, team success, team delivery kinds of metrics. Peter: You measure these senior IC leaders similarly, it’s just the team doesn’t report to them. So way this is structured, and I think this is why we’re starting to see this more and more, management is functional, you’ll have design managers managing designers, and design directors managing design managers, and often not just functional within design, but like research managers managing researchers, and content strategy managers managing content strategists. This individual contributor design leadership role is a principal designer role, and s leading a team that is cross-functional within design. So there will be product designers, researchers, content strategists. So it’s around leading the work, not leading, not managing the resource to put it another way. And then additionally, as they get more senior, they’re very active in leading cross-functionally. So they’re not necessarily directing product people and engineers, but definitely influencing them. And in terms of accountability, these folks are ultimately held accountable for the output of the teams that they are directing. Jesse: So tell me about how formal authority works in these situations because what happens generally is that authority tends to hew pretty closely to reporting structures. Peter: You’re seeing that less and less, I think, in these product development organizations where reporting is functional, but delivery is cross-functional. This is becoming an accepted just way of being. So a design director has less creative authority than the design lead within a cross functional team often, right, because the design lead in a cross functional team, working with the product manager and engineer, is making the design decisions at that level of delivery. And that is where the authority thus resides. Jesse: Yeah. If you don’t have the ability to actively direct the work of a designer, if it is, as you describe, influence, then how do you assess how much influence you have had? Peter: It depends on where you locate creative authority within these structures. So you can imagine at the simplest level, you have two structures: you have your reporting structure of design and engineering and product reporting up through their functions; and then you have the work structure, which is cross-functional teams. Think of that as squads, pods, whatever, where you have a mix of product managers, designers, engineers, working together. Now in some organizations, they are using that work structure as the management structure. But I’m frankly seeing that less and less. What I’m seeing more and more of is a recognition that we should organize reporting structures by function, because there’s value there: Professional development, recruiting and hiring, there’s value in making it clear how you grow within your function. But the work is being organized in these cross functional teams, which have their own structure. When I’ve worked in marketplace models, you’ll have a team dedicated to the sell side of the marketplace and a team dedicated to the buy side of the marketplace. and those become these work structures. And so the creative authority resides on the work side, not on the reporting side. Design directors aren’t coming over necessarily to the work side. They are seen primarily as organizational minders, because there’s plenty of work to do recruiting and hiring, professional development, and one-on-ones, and all that kind of stuff. But you still need creative leaders. There can be a different authority structure specific to the work from a reporting structure. And so these super-senior ICs might report to a design director, but they lead a set of work in the work structure. Jesse: Who looks after design as a practice in this model? Peter: Oftentimes those leaders will also be practice leads. So you’ll have your content strategists or UX writers reporting to a manager of content strategy, possibly reporting to a director of content strategy. Director and manager of content strategy own the practice and the reporting relationships. The issue that arises is: I’m a director of product design. And I have product design leads, who report to me who are in the workstream leading work. They are the creative authority for work in their area. What is my job as a creative authority as a director of product design? And my take on it is that the practice leads—director of product design, director of content strategy, director of user research—they establish a framework for quality. So they create the shared understanding of what quality is. The people doing the work are then expected to deliver at those levels of quality. Jesse: And who evaluates that? Peter: So evaluation becomes an interesting question, because in my worldview, and this goes back to our work at Adaptive Path, that creative lead needs to be the sole authority over what gets launched. That director of product design might look at what that lead product designer’s putting out there and saying, “That’s not living up to our quality standards.” There’s a disjuncture here. In the moment, the director of product design, and unless it is truly egregious and they want to pull the emergency cord, doesn’t really have the authority to stop that work in the construct that I’m putting out there. If the lead in the moment is like, “No, this is what solving the problem. We’re going to launch it.” Then, if there is a disconnect between an established understanding of quality and what is actually getting shipped under a particular lead product designer, Then there’s a conversation about what’s going on there. Often, what you find going on there is that there are a lot of conditions within that cross-functional team that inhibit that designer’s ability to deliver at the level of quality that the practice lead has established. So then it becomes this other challenge of, “Do we need to encourage new organizational practices to enable us to achieve the level of quality that we are establishing?” Jesse: Right, right. This is a thing that I’ve seen organizations struggle with figuring out, where that line is, how involved the senior most leader is in looking at the details of the creative work being produced by the leads underneath them. And how do they influence practice and process based on that, because a lot of what you’re talking about is stuff that emerges out of the negotiations across a cross-functional team, as they are figuring out how to balance all the considerations in order to deliver. This role, as you’re describing it, that has responsibility for those practices and processes is also pretty far removed from them, and is also really just kind of seeing things after the fact. What I’ve seen is that that loop never gets closed. Energy and attention of the senior-most leader is so focused on things like budget and resources and things like that, that they don’t have the space to be able to actually take stewardship, take ownership of design as a practice in these organizations. Peter: That is definitely an issue, especially as these organizations scale. But, that’s where Design Operations plays a part. I was actually just talking with one of the heads of product design that I work with. He has a team 80 or so, and he’s been able to get himself, right now and for the next month or so, where two days a week he’s doing what you would expect a design leader to do: going to meetings, one-on-ones, recruiting, hiring, that kind of stuff. The other three days a week, he’s working with a small team, small cross-functional team, on building out a vision, a product vision, a North-Star type work for the company. And he recognizes it’s temporary, right? It’s time boxed. This couldn’t be his job forever because he does need to get back to it. But he’s able, for a while, to only do two days a week doing what people consider his job-job. So he can spend three days a week being the creative leader that no one else can be in this organization. And one of the reasons he can do it is he delegated all of his budgetary activity to his head of design ops. Just, like, “You own it. You do it. If you need me to check in, provide direction, give you guidance, whatever, happy to. It’s my org, so I care about this stuff, but literally you are going to all those meetings with the finance people. You are in charge of that now.” And so I think we don’t do enough to decompose the responsibilities of design leaders, and really recognize all the things that they need to be doing, and, What are those things that really the design leadership should be focused on? And what are the things that they can delegate or put off their plate? That’s why DesignOps is emerging, is this recognition that design leaders were spending all their time operating and none of their time leading design. But now this other thing is happening is, “Okay. So we’re delegating design operations, oh, shit, design leaders are spending all their time managing and recruiting and hiring and caring and nurturing for their teams, but they’re not spending any of their time leading design. So how do we shift those activities and responsibilities among a set of leaders so that everyone can deliver well on some aspect of this, instead of one person, half-assing a whole bunch of things. Jesse: Right. Right. Peter: And I hear you in terms of we’re not caught up there. And so loops don’t get closed. People are far away from the work and that’s still a problem to solve. Jesse: It takes a village to lead design, right? Peter: Essentially. Yeah. And I think we recognized this 20 years ago in engineering, you’ve had a VP role of engineering, which tended to be the org minder. You had your CTO or architect roles that tended to be what we would consider creative leads or technology leads, the ones figuring out how to solve the problems, the technical problems. So there was that bifurcation happened a long time ago. You had technical program management, is this other function that was then essentially there to support engineering. With the agile revolution, you have agile coaches and scrum masters and all these other people figuring out how to keep the work engine humming. So there had already been this recognition of all these different things that need to get done and a decomposition of activities across roles to enable that to get done, and design is just behind. ‘Cause it’s taken us longer to get to a similar scale. Music break 1 Jesse: Part of this really has to do with the culture of leadership within the larger organization that you’re a part of, especially how collaborative, how consensus-driven, how consultative the decision-making culture of the organization is, because in an organization that broadly asks its leaders to take a more command-and-control kind of stance, approaching leadership in this way can be really challenging, because even if it feels, to the design leader, like there is a better way to do this, that is more hands off, that distributes power and authority at a lower level in the organization more effectively, they may be contending with a larger culture that looks at what they’re doing, and it looks to them like they’re fucking it up because they’re not leading according to the model that the rest of the entire organization, including the CEO, potentially leads. Peter: Totally. What’s interesting to me– the problem I’ve seen is actually the inverse, where the cultural direction was more bottom-up. It was autonomous product teams. Do whatever you want. The output is crappy, for any number of reasons: it’s not coordinated across these teams, plus there’s not a shared understanding of what quality looks like. And, in this one instance when leadership would review the work of these teams and say, “It’s not good enough, don’t ship it,” these teams would ship it anyway. And there was no accountability. There was no… Jesse: …that loop closing. Yeah. Right. Peter: Some organizations could stand to have a little more top-down, command-and-control, to drive quality. What’s happened in this organization, is they’re at some stage in their cycle where they need a shock to the system to improve quality, and that shock is not going to come from the bottom-up. It’s too fractured. The amount of effort it would take to kind of dial up all these individual teams would be too great. But one of the benefits of hierarchies, when you can wield them appropriately, is to do a hopefully positive shock from the top-down and say, “No, that’s not appropriate. Here’s some new standards of quality. And if your work is not measuring up to these handed-down standards of quality, then it is not shipping, and we need to take this approach because the problem is so severe that we need to almost explicitly work in a way that we don’t want to work, work to overcome this issue in an effort to reset.” Try to get a new normal understood within the organization so that after you do this top-down, command-and-control for a while, there’s the understanding, the awareness, the appreciation of that built so that you can then pull back and have some faith that the teams will continue to deliver it, that new level of quality. So I, I almost, I long for command and…

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15: Mailbag—Funding models; from output to impact; personal safety and security Jul 24, 2020

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In which Jesse and Peter answer questions on funding models, shifting from output to impact, demonstrating value, and the challenges of being a design leader right now. Questions addressed: (01:00) “How does a good business fund design activity?” (09:28) “How can one handle being a good lead designer, when in the company where you work, the majority of product owners don’t understand their role.” (12:43) “[How can] design influence their orgs to move from an artifact/output-based model of design to a practice/impact one?” (16:40) “How [can] a design team better frame their unique value inside an organization that is crowded out by engineering voices and investment. How can I articulate the value that the design team creates as being as critical as sound software engineering?” (26:34) “How can I help my team feel secure and supported when my own world is adrift on stormy seas,” and “How to help my designers feel safe and secure in rocky times.” Transcript Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse invite you on their journey as they navigate the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz. And, as always, with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello Peter. Peter: Hi, Jesse. So today as we enter a kind of summer hiatus, we thought we would take questions from listeners. We polled listeners across Twitter and LinkedIn and got a number of questions. To start, thanks to everybody who offered a question, we read them all. We won’t be able to get to them all. There were a set of questions that came in that were essentially around the idea of how to value design Lar Veale on Twitter asks us: “How does a good business fund design activity?” Jesse: Where does the money come from? Peter: This is one of those topics that when I think about understanding what’s really going on behind the scenes, one of those moments for design leaders, at least for some design leaders, is when they realize that finance runs everything. Those design leaders have never been equipped to handle that conversation, but the budgets that they get, the headcount that they get, the resources that they get, all of that gets reduced to money. And that money is controlled by those folks over there in finance and in order for design to succeed, the design leader now needs to figure out how to bridge with finance. Jesse: Right. A whole new audience, a whole new language, a whole different set of things than the leader has ever had to engage with as a designer, most likely. Peter: When I read this question, I actually thought about a company that we are both familiar with. The funding model was an interesting one. They have a massive centralized product design team. And the funding for those designers comes from the different lines of business. And so even though the team is managed centrally, the money is contributed, essentially, in a decentralized fashion. And it led to what I considered to be the existential crisis of the design organization, which is a lack of control over how many people they hired and what they had those people work on, because a design leader needs to be able to make a decision around what are people working on, based on the priorities of the business as they understand it. But if your funding presupposes your headcount, you have now had a key lever of your decision making taken away from you. And then that further puts you in a subservient relationship to that line of business, because you’re basically their work for hire. Jesse: That’s an interesting take, because it suggests that if you can’t get close to the sources of funding, if you can’t get in a position of power around your funding, you’re never going to have the strategic influence as a design organization that you want to have, is that true? Peter: I think that’s true. But my ideal world is… Let’s say taking that example where you have different lines of business who all recognize that they need design. Instead of enabling this kind of transactional relationship between that line of business and design, now all those lines of business, somewhat blindly, maybe based on a percentage of their revenue, or percentage of their effort, or some algorithm separate from all of this, that line of business basically pays a tax to the centralized design function. And that goes into a big pool of money that is managed by this design function. The design team, then looking across the entire business, identifies what matters, what’s important, what are we going to act against, and figures out how to shape its teams and resources to deliver on what the whole business has deemed important. One of the things that you get with this, that is hard to do when you’re working in this transactional relationship, to answer your other point around being able to make a strategic impact, is that ability to work across the lines of business. Jesse: You know, I do think that there is a concrete value for businesses in having those purse strings controlled by product owners rather than by design organizations, because those are the people who are currently engaged at that peer level with each other to do that strategic coordination across your product lines. Unless you’re going to invest design with that responsibility, which really means in some ways elevating design above product management, you’re not going to get there. And so I’m curious about how you do get there. So the question is, How does a good business fund design activity? What’s the best funding model for design that you’ve seen in your experience? Peter: The best model is essentially tied to general company growth. When I was at Groupon, we didn’t have lines of business that funded me or whatever. We had an understanding of how we wanted to grow as an organization, and there was an appreciation of what was needed from a product development standpoint, not just design, but product managers, engineering, data analysis, dev ops, all that kind of stuff. And design just kind of gets carried along with that growth. Now that ends up leading to ratios often, which is a heuristic for design funding. So if we’re going to hire eight engineers, we’re going to hire one designer. That kind of thing. And those ratios, I’m not against, but I’m not a huge fan of. I find that they are a proxy for understanding growth. What I’ve tried to do is, when you’re engaged in these headcount planning points in the second half of the year, you’re doing the planning for the next year and you understand what the strategic direction is, and thus what all the programs are. I then plan my designers against those programs, regardless of what other decisions are being made. If we’re going to engage in these five programs of work, well, I’m going to need 10 designers, roughly two per program. And that’s what I asked for. What I’ve also learned is you always have to ask for twice as many resources as you actually think you need. Jesse: The secret ratio. Peter: Yeah, well, you know, it’s negotiation. When you start operating in these funding models, typical for any large enterprise, you’ve probably already lost the plot, because those funding models end up becoming very transactional and it doesn’t only affect design. So you were talking about product management and others. What you’re starting to see is… lines of business. You have your line of business over there. And they’re responsible for P and L of a different business. And then separate from those lines of businesses are technology services. And so these UX designers say are part of a technology service that includes development, engineering, product owners, QA, and dev ops and all that kind of stuff. Jesse: So everything about product is construed as basically a service organization to the business. Peter: Exactly. These product development organizations, say they embrace agile at scale, maybe Scaled Agile. The problem is baked into agile, baked into scrum. It assumes that that team has autonomy. But if that team is really in service to the line of business, they don’t have autonomy. They’re getting their requirements from outside of their bubble, from people who don’t actually understand what’s happening, but just have these expectations and that really puts the product owner in a difficult position. This is one of those challenges, I think, product owners or product managers face that designers often don’t respect or understand—is how much of the decision making has been done before the product owner even starts their work. And they’re just expected to execute on a set of requirements that have been handed to them. One of my clients has been operating in this way and they’re starting to take people from the line of business and make them the product owners. You know, that’s one of those key distinctions between quote unquote tech, companies, your FAANG companies, and your legacy firms. In tech, those product owners, those product managers are the business there. It’s not a distinction between a line of business and a product. In these legacy enterprises, you have lines of business and tech as these distinct entities within the business. And once you have that, you’ve basically already lost it. You’re done. You might as well go back to waterfall. Jesse: Wow. that’s I think a bold statement. It’s interesting that you mentioned this just because we actually have an email here that is related to this, coincidentally. Marina writes in via email, “How can one handle being a good lead designer, when in the company where you work, the majority of product owners don’t understand their role? They are merely order takers for a higher level of the company.” And that’s exactly what you’re talking about. She’s sharing the frustration of being in the lead designer role and having to be the person who is chasing down the true meaning behind the requirements that they’re being handed, where the product owners can’t articulate it for them, because it’s not a conversation that they’ve even had with the people in the business that they’re engaging with. And so then it ends up falling, not on the lead designer, as much as it does on the design leader to reach out into those other parts of the business and start that engagement, but that’s challenging when, to your point about funding models, the funding model that you’ve been set up with creates a prejudice in people’s minds about the nature of the value that you deliver. There are all kinds of assumptions about your value that are built into how you are funded. And so when you’re engaging with these new parts, these organizations, when you’re diving deeper into the business to have these conversations about the true meaning of these requirements, it’s really hard to engage them in these strategic conversations, when their perception of you is colored by this funding model that puts you in a purely tactical service-oriented role. Peter: All of that is exactly right. To address Marina’s question, you know, these product owners, they may understand their role, they might be delivering their role. Their role is to execute on what the higher levels of the company have told them. So order-taking might be their role. Now, that’s not what we believe is what product owners should be doing, in an ideal context. But that might be what they are expected to be doing in that specific context. And so this is no longer a design and delivery problem. This is a change management issue. You need to start working with your product peers and engineering peers and, developing arguments for why you should be working differently with those higher orders of the company. You need to help those higher orders of the company understand how they are constraining opportunity from square one with how they are behaving, and that if they want to realize greater potential, need to change how you all work together. So, it’s not a straightforward design problem. It is this organization, process-oriented change management problem, that’s going to be really hard, it’s not going to be straightforward. It’s a quick thing to say, and it will take years, it will take literally years to deliver. Jesse: Yeah. Well, when framed that way, what I hear is a lot of politics and politics is a slow and messy business and anything that requires a lot of politics to bring about is not something that’s going to happen on a six-month timeline. It’s going to be 18 months to two years to lay the groundwork for that kind of change at that scale that you’re talking about. Music break Peter: I think we can connect this thread to another question, from Pavel Samsonov, who asks, “It’d be great to hear your thoughts on how designers can influence their orgs to move from an artifact/output-based model of design to a practice/impact-based one.” When I was working with Capital One, many years ago, I ended up talking a little bit with Aradhana Goel, who developed an approach to trying to address this funding model, to make it less directly transactional—“I give you money. You give me heads.” And instead, because her background was consulting, she was able to draw on that consulting practice and say, “You’re not giving me money for heads. You’re giving me money for results. And here’s my commitment to you. I will deliver this kind of impact through this work. So let’s have that agreement in terms of figuring out what are essentially metrics of our success that I am committing to in exchange for this money. And so you will give me that money. I will spend it as I see fit to deliver that impact. And that’s my commitment to you. And if I don’t deliver on that, you can hold me accountable.” And so you change the conversation away from money for heads to money for results. And that’s, I think, essentially what Pavel was asking about. How do you frame it, not so that it’s about artifacts and outputs, but practice and impact. And the mechanism I’ve seen that works best, it still takes quite a fair bit of management in order to realize its success, but is, OKRs, objectives and key results. I had a boss, Jocelyn Mangan, she hired me at Snagajob, and she was a firm believer in OKRs. And OKRs done right focus an organization, not on output, but on impact. Key results should be about, How are we making an impact? Key results aren’t, “I shipped something, check.” Key results are “20% of people are engaged in a new activity” or, ”Revenues have gone up 35%,” or whatever, and you focus on those results and whatever it takes to get to those results, that’s up to the team to figure out. That might be a mechanism that you can introduce to shift that orientation away from output and towards outcomes. And if you’re looking for resources on that front, Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke is probably the best handbook for OKRs that I am familiar with. Jesse: It’s a good one. You highlight an interesting challenge in this, which is that in a lot of organizations, the way that design work is framed is not actually that much in the control of the design leader. That the way that the value is framed by the executive leadership of the organization is often filtered through the perception of design by your peers, particularly your peers in technology as, as you were talking about, design often ends up lashed to technology, as an enterprise level service in these organizations, then the models by which development and engineering are managed, then become the models that design inherits, because that’s what the executive leadership is used to consuming from their technology organization. It then entails a reframing of what a performance metric even is in some of these organizations, to bring about the kind of conversation that you’re talking about to shift that perception. Peter: I like your use of the verb lashed, like somehow we’re kind of manacled or otherwise like literally bound to these technologies. So what you just said, I think connects, to Chris Jones, who sent us an email: “I’m curious how you w…

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14: “If your team’s work isn’t good, you didn’t set clear expectations,” and other Design Leadership Truisms Jul 15, 2020

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In which Peter shares some of his Design Leadership Truisms (inspired by the work of Jenny Holzer), and Jesse reacts. The image that spurred the episode: Truisms discussed:“People are not their job titles.”“If your team’s work isn’t good, you didn’t set clear expectations.”“Bad design is a result of context, not individual aptitude.”“If you focus on the organization, quality will take care of itself.”“You cannot calculate an ROI for design.”“If you haven’t pissed someone off, you are not doing your job right.”“For someone who talks a lot about empathy. You show little for your colleagues.” “Introversion inhibits design’s ultimate impact.” Transcript Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hi Jesse. Jesse: So we were riffing on in email other things that we could talk about today and sort of almost in passing, you shared this image with me, which, is this a slide from one of your talks? Peter: Yeah. So, last October I spoke at the Design Leadership Summit and I gave my design leadership talk called “Coach, Diplomat, Champion, Architect: The Four Archetypes of the Design Leader.” And when I first gave this talk, at the very end, I tacked on what I called “hard truths about design leadership,” and it was a series of statements. And I realized before this event, because this event was a little more homegrown, a little less polished, I felt I could play with it a bit more. I actually ended up pulling up those statements at the very beginning. And what I did was essentially a cold open, so I walk out on stage, you can see in this… there’s a YouTube video, I walk out on stage wearing all black. A black shirt, black pants. And the title slide says “Design Leadership Truisms, from mer-Holzer” because I’m trying, I’m playing on Jenny Holzer, and her work with truisms. And then I just state each of these truisms. And then the slide I gave you was all those truisms on one slide, just like, here’s everything that I just shared. And I ended up doing that as this preamble to my normal talk. Jesse: I love this. So, first of all, I definitely, when I was reading the slide, detected the Holzer-ian nature of it. Her work is something that I’ve admired for many, many years. And I think anybody who has read any amount of what I’ve done can detect a trend toward the aphoristic. Peter: Declarative aphoristic. Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. The desire to reduce ideas down to their most potent and concise expression. And that is something that I’ve always admired about Jenny Holzer’s work as an artist as well. And so you sent me this thing, and that sounds awesome by the way, dressing all in black. I think it’s always a smart look. And I just started reading a couple of them and I was like, I have opinions about these. And then I put it away. And I was like, I want to talk about these opinions later. So there were a couple of these that I’ve glanced at for a while… Peter: So is now later? Jesse: Later has arrived, Yes. And I thought it would be fun for us to just read through them and talk about them and see how many we get through in the time that we have. And, maybe see if there are any of them where we have any particularly interesting reflections or points of contention. Peter: Why don’t I read them? Since I wrote them. Jesse: Okay. In fact, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put the slide away, so I’m not looking at it. So I’m just listening to you read. Peter: Great. People are not their job titles. Jesse: Implicit in this, I sense, is the idea that you should not treat people like they are their job titles. Peter: Yes, basically, too often we are encouraged, particularly as managers, to reduce people to their job title and then swap people with the same job title and treat them the same, treat them interchangeably. And we need to engage with everybody as individuals. A job title should not define anyone. Jesse: Well, I think, especially when you’re talking about design roles, where the particular background, the particular creative strengths of the individual are going to very, very strongly influence the results that you get, I think that is definitely true. I think there is a spectrum. That there are some roles that are more operational, that are processes that can be taught. But in the case where you are looking at people who are going to make a creative contribution to where the entire endeavor is going, in those cases, you do want to look more closely at the individuals and what they bring to the table. So yeah. Yes. And yes. Peter: I’m not going to read them all. I’m realizing I’m going to skip a couple. Jesse: You should definitely choose because there are too many. Peter: If your team’s work isn’t good, you didn’t set clear expectations. Jesse: I’m going to say no to this one. I think that there are lots of ways in which a team’s work can go wrong. I also think expectation setting from leaders can go awry when the leaders themselves are not clear on what they want. So there’s knowing what you want and then there’s communicating it. And those are separate skills. Peter: Right. So that would be not setting clear expectations. Jesse: Okay. Fair. Peter: Behind this, is talking to design leaders who are frustrated by the quality of the work their team is producing, but then when you ask them what they have done to help people understand what is acceptable in terms of quality, you realize the answer is, “Nothing.” I’ve literally had conversations with design leaders who basically imply that they feel other people should read their minds as to what is an acceptable level of quality and deliver on that. Jesse: I hear that. And I definitely have seen that. And. I know that I have gotten impatient in the past with designers when I felt that I had to explain something to them that I felt they should already know about what constitutes quality in design, and that impatience for me came from an expectation that I wouldn’t have to be teaching as much as I found myself teaching in that role, in that context, in that moment, especially in the context of consulting work, where there was potentially not really enough time to teach skills along the way as we were trying to meet client deadlines. So I think there’s an element in this of how much mentorship is the leader willing to take on, in bringing people along with understanding their expectations. And what do you do when that gap really does exist, when there is somebody who simply doesn’t understand the baseline thing that you thought you wouldn’t have to explain. Peter: There is no universal standard for quality when it comes to design. So when I talk to these design leaders and I ask them, so how does someone deep within your team know what good looks like? And when they think about it, they respond, “Well, I guess that’s their manager helping them, like through direction or critique or review.” So design quality, two things there. One, it becomes very localized, and so different managers with a different understanding of quality might be managing towards different quality within the same organization. And two, it’s largely folklore, it’s spoken. It is not codified, and that raises its own challenges. Because something that’s not codified can become quite arbitrary. It can change, and that’s not great. One assumes that, if you are hiring someone, they know what they’re doing, right? You’ve gone through some process to vet their ability. And if they’re not doing good work too often, I find the design leader thinks that they don’t know good design. When in fact they don’t know what good design looks like in this environment or what is expected of them. Jesse: So definitely I hear in that, the trap of assuming that your standard is a universally held standard, that is therefore universally understood by your fellow professionals. Right? Peter: Right. I have a few elements here on this that are related to quality. Let me read the next one. Bad design is a result of context, not individual aptitude. Jesse: So what you’re saying is a good designer can produce bad design if they are in the wrong context. And it seems to be letting the designer off the hook a little bit in terms of what they bring to the table. This seems to imply that individual performance issues are more often a sign of organizational dysfunction. Either that dysfunction exists at the level of recruiting and hiring, or it exists at the level of performance management and mentorship and skills development. Peter: If you focus on the organization, quality will take care of itself. Jesse: Hmm. I don’t think I believe that. In fact, I think that articulates a gap that I am trying to fill in my work, in that I think the quality arises out of high-trust, collaborative relationships and not out of organizational structures. Peter: I don’t disagree. I think I would place that as an organizational matter, the point of this being, design quality is often not addressed until you’re looking at output. When, in fact, what drives that output was heavily determined by a series of factors long preceding that output, that I am maybe broadly labeling is organizational, but I would also argue organizational as opposed to say procedural, or a matter of process. Jesse: Okay. So what is the distinction between organization and process in your view? Because I guess that those things are very much intertwined to me. Peter: So I wrote a whole book on organization and never really addressed process, except for including the Double Diamond briefly. When we talk about design, we often talk about process—that’s a thing you can talk about ‘cause it’s set of activities, it’s a set of methods, it’s a shared understanding that we can bring to the conversation. What we often don’t talk about are the organizational factors behind the scenes that lay a foundation for the activities: how you recruit and hire, how you manage, how you mentor, how you grow, how you value, how you coordinate in relationship with one another within design, and how you coordinate In relationship between design and other functions. All of those things are the organizational matters. Your internal agency organization can be practicing user centered design. It’s just going to find itself highly constrained because all that user research is almost for naught because it’s not actually able to drive the upfront thinking because, organizationally, the designers aren’t in the right relationship with their peers, with the power to make that change. Jesse: I guess there were a few different ways to think about it. So, there is a football analogy that comes to mind, which is that you have the players on the field and the players are playing certain positions. And you have different ways you can line those players up according to those positions. And there are different positions you can deploy on the field, according to your needs. And so that feels like the organizational stuff. Who are the players on the field? What are the skills that I’m putting out there to accomplish my goal? And then you’ve got process, which is the playbook. Once you get the players on the field, how do they interact with each other? How do they move in an organized way toward a goal? And then you’ve got the people stuff at the individual level of the stuff that you’ve been talking about, recruiting and hiring and making sure that the guy that you have brought in as wide receiver is actually somebody who is suitable to be a wide receiver. But I think there’s this other level, too, of team cohesion. And this is something that I’ve heard you talk about, about how the coordination, the orchestration of the individuals who are performing these roles in the context of this process and ensuring that they stay in sync with one another along the way. And that’s the rocky shoal that I’ve seen too many corporate ships run aground on. They got all the organizational stuff right. They got all the process stuff right. But no one was looking after the people. No one was looking after the relationships and it all fell apart along the way. Peter: Hmm, I guess I would say if you’re not looking after people and relationships, you’re not looking after the organizational stuff. You might be architecting an organization. Jesse: I guess that’s the thing that I hear in this that I would push back against, is the architectural impulse to think that you can solve all of these problems, a priori, before any people show up in the door. Peter: Yes, that I believe. Part of my point is to shift the focus, though, away from process and even, again, individual aptitude, towards matters of organization. And I would include relationship within that, because as I see it, when you have an organization, you don’t only have the structure, but you have the connection between those elements and, yes, you could even look at that architecturally, but there’s a relationship there that I think matters and is part of what I intend when I talk about organization. Jesse: Okay. Well, thank you. That’s clarifying to me.I don’t know if I have a particularly narrow view of it, or if I have inherited a particularly narrow view of it from the things that I’ve read, but I tend to think of the organizational stuff, in terms of let’s figure out management reporting, performance management, incentive structures, that will ensure a certain quality of outcome. And I don’t think that stuff goes far enough. And I agree with you. I don’t think the process stuff goes far enough either. Peter: Well, and my sense is folks focus on that which they can get their hands around, and the structural organizational stuff is easier. But insufficient. It’s the same reason that one of the challenges that we have in delivering good designed experiences is we end up getting nudged towards delivering only on that which can be measured. Through monthly active users. And, how far down a funnel someone gets, et cetera, et cetera. And we lose sight of this stuff, which can’t be measured, but which is as important in terms of the nature and the quality of the experience. And that comes from a bunch of ineffable details that someone is having engaging with an experience. And the same thing happens with organizations where they over-focus on that which can be measured and modeled, and lose sight of the messy stuff that, as you’re pointing out, is kind of the beating heart of those organizations. Jesse: I think a corollary of this is the tendency of leaders, when they find themselves challenged by their circumstances, to fall back on those areas where they feel the most empowered, and often the areas where they feel the most empowered are the areas where they feel they have the most control, where they feel like they can dictate circumstances rather than be subjected to them. And so this is where you have leaders run into challenging times and declare it’s time for a reorg, and the team is like, great, this is another challenge on top of the challenges that we were already facing, because reorgs create just immense waves of chaos and confusion through organizations. But from the leadership perspective, it can feel like they’re taking control of the situation, when in fact all they’re doing is retreating to the things that they do feel some level of control over, because they don’t know what to do about the things that they don’t. Music break Peter: You cannot calculate an ROI for design. Jesse: Ooh, I suspect that’s almost certainly true, but I’d love to hear your articulation of an argument for it. Peter: So in 2002, Adaptive Path attempted to unpack the notion of an ROI for design, an ROI for user experience. What we found was that you couldn’t calculate an ROI for design because design is too integrated with too many other activities, that you can’t isolate design in an…

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13: Facing Systemic Racism in Design Jul 09, 2020

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In which Jesse and Peter discuss their relationship to systemic racism, as individuals, as leaders, and as members of the design and UX communities. Transcript Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jessee welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hello, Jesse. What are we going to talk about? Jesse: Well, yeah. I mean, I think there’s an elephant in this room that is getting larger by the day. And, I think it would be useful… What we hear, what I have heard, what I have read from people of color about the conversations that need to happen about race in this country. One of the big things that I have heard is, “Don’t come talk to me about your racism. Go talk to each other about your racism.” So I think it would be great for us to talk to each other about race and how race has played out in our careers and how we see race playing out, all around us. But especially, you know, you and I are in a position where we have, quite a history of choices to interrogate as designers and as collaborators and as design leaders. And I think that all of those are topics worthy of exploration. Peter: I agree. The subject has come up with some of the people I work with, where, particularly, the white men don’t quite know how to navigate this conversation with their teams. They’re like us—they’re middle aged white dudes whose hearts are in the right place, but, almost don’t know where to begin. Which is frankly kind of where I am, okay, when it comes to this. I gave a presentation yesterday to UX Waterloo, a local IXDA chapter in Waterloo, Ontario, which is about an hour outside of Toronto. And during the Q and A, it came up, you know, basically asking, “What should we be doing during these strange times?” And, I don’t have a good answer beyond, “Listen” at this point, still, though. It’s probably time to start turning that corner from listening to acting. I’ve been thinking about how I could act, but then I allow myself to get distracted ‘cause it’s hard. And, there’s, you know, any number of things competing for my attention. And I choose to deal with the things that I feel like I have a handle on. Earlier this week, I took part in San Francisco Design Week. Every one of their sessions has a link to the Inneract Project. I N N E R A C T, which is a cause to support bringing more Black and Brown folks into the design field, going into schooling and then supporting them all the way into joining the profession. So getting involved with Inneract, I actually signed up to conduct pseudo job interviews for early stage Black and Brown designers. Jesse: Like practice interviews for them to sharpen their skills. That’s awesome. Peter: A link had come across, in one of the community Slacks I’m part of, and it was really easy to sign up and say, “Hey, I’ll do this.” And here’s the time. Those are small ways, but it’s not something I’ve really sat down to work through. I know that you are going through these coaching classes and are developing a toolkit or an approach to tackle and work through some more challenging stuff. And I’m wondering whether from that or stuff you’ve learned prior to that how you are thinking about this, what tools you have for yourself and perhaps for others you’re working with to ddress these challenges. Jesse: Yeah. This stuff intersects, in that the work that I’m doing is about how leaders show up day to day and how they navigate these more flexible, more fluid, more challenging kinds of situations. And this stuff actually started coming into play for me in my role at Capital One. Peter: You say “this stuff,” specifically, matters of diversity and inclusion, racism. Yeah. Jesse: Well, yeah. I mean, diversity and inclusion, I think, is the nice corporate frame that we put on what we’re actually talking about, which is systemic racism. Peter: Yeah, yeah. D & I became this initiative that we have a director of it. So we’re doing what we can… Jesse: Yeah. I mean, it’s an easy way for an organization to flag, you know, this is important to us. We’ve heard you. And so we have appointed a person, and I ended up as that person for the team that I was supporting. I was coaching the leaders of a group of teams that were all under one umbrella that was collectively about 80 people. And as coach to the leadership team, I was charged with thinking about, as we’ve talked about, these holistic systemic issues going on across the team that were impediments to the team success. And this bubbled up, it really was something that the staff took the leadership to task basically, and said, “We don’t feel like you guys are taking this seriously enough. We don’t feel like the answers that we’re getting are satisfactory, and we don’t feel like we’re seeing cultural change in the ways that we want to see,” in terms of, especially, whose voices got heard, how recognition happened, and then ultimately, obviously, how, power and authority get distributed in an environment like that. And the leadership turned to me and went, “Well, you’re our holistic systemic problem solver. Here’s one.” Peter: ”Can you, can you solve racism for us? Can you model it?” Jesse: Well, it wasn’t exactly that. It was like, we know that this is not how we want to show up as an organization, and, we want to be the vanguards of this change. We don’t want to wait around for somebody else to tell us how to create it or tell us at a corporate level what the official approach was going to be. We felt we needed to generate something of our own. And so we jumped in with both feet, and set out to create some safe spaces for these conversations to happen. And I would say we got very, very mixed results with that. In fact, I would say that the people of color on our team probably would say that “mixed results” is a generous assessment of how that went. Peter: What were the obstacles for, what were the barriers? Jesse: I think the major mistake that I made was not fully understanding what, creating these formalized structures, what position that put the people of color on the team in, in terms of having the spotlight put on them and their experiences in a way that they may or may not be ready or willing or eager to share, or the feeling that they are going to be put in the position of having to explain systemic racism to a room full of white people and that they are going to have all of this extra stuff put on them, this extra emotional burden of having to talk through their past traumas, Peter: Right. “It’s not bad enough that we’re subject to the systemic racism our entire lives. We now have to educate you about it.” Jesse: Right. And in an effort to create a sense that the leadership was actively engaged in this process, and actively engaged in listening, we had our leaders facilitate these conversations and our leaders did not have the skillset to facilitate these conversations, first of all. And secondly, we did not, I did not, really fully appreciate how the power dynamic in that room, when you have the leader facilitating the conversation, was going to skew things. And so, there were a couple of really fundamental misunderstandings that I had of what I was doing that led to that whole approach not working for us. Peter: Yeah, there are times when leaders should be playing the role of facilitator in an effort to quiet their voice and elevate others. And sometimes it’s the right solution. But I think when it’s charged, if there’s an emotional tenor to it, even if they try to be as dispassionate or blank as possible, just the fact that they are the leader colors this, and you need, probably, ideally someone who has almost no context, no agenda that they could be accused of falling back on. Jesse: Well, and I think part of the reason that I was tapped for that role was that I was not a leader of a team. So I was not in that same position, but I wasn’t facilitating sessions. But yeah, honestly, and this was the reason I had to get out of Capital One altogether, I was, at the end of the day, embedded in the power structure. And could not play that outsider role to the extent that I needed to in order to be successful as a coach. Peter: Right. Jesse: So what we did after that, then, was we went and got some help, and we hired a consulting group out of Oakland called Circle Up. And they do consulting and workshops around helping organizations have these kinds of difficult conversations. And they led us through a process that was very helpful and enlightening to us. And we were just starting the process of engaging with them to actually train up leaders, to have better facilitation skills around this stuff, at the time that I left the organization and handed that work off to others. Peter: Right. How do you get people to expose themselves? Candidly, honestly, frankly, in an environment like that, where even if it is a safe space, there’s a fair degree of risk. Whether you feel risk based on your employment status or just risk in terms of exposing your own ignorance. I have to imagine that no one is being open and honest in these conversations. Were you able to get there? Jesse: It’s challenging. It is tremendously challenging. It comes back to the stuff that we’ve been talking about actually, which is that when you have a high trust, high interpersonal connection environment, these kinds of conversations are easier. When you have people who are habitually, practicing things that we’ve talked about. Non-judgment. People who have practices of curiosity in their work. If these are your cultural values, then it’s going to be easier to get there, but still it is touchy stuff. But it’s too important not to do. And so I think that as leaders, we have to be willing to acknowledge what we don’t know and acknowledge that this is a problem that is not going to be solved in our lifetimes. And so we can’t ever craft what we as designers always want, which is that perfectly honed, eternally right solution. It is all satisficing what we’re doing right now. It is cobbling together little bits of things and making mistakes and learning from them. I do think that relationship as a frame is really important for this because when you talk about leaders as facilitators, what I’m thinking about are all of the relationships that that leader has with each individual in the room and how all of those dynamics get piled up on top of each other. And the effectiveness of that group environment in a lot of ways depends on How is the leader doing in their relationships with their people individually? And are there things that are unsaid in those relationships that have been bottled up waiting to come out? If that stuff is all there and then you ask that of people in a group environment it’s going to be really hard. So one question that I would put to leaders is how are you one-on-one’s going? Peter: So a project I’m about to start, there’s a leader who is extremely eager to get going and solve a problem and dive into the mechanics of solving the problem. And based on my initial assessment of the situation, I feel like the people who would be engaging in solving this problem, many of whom are direct reports of this leader, will not bring their full selves, if it starts with problem solving, and I’m like, “I need to have one-on-ones with all these individuals and try to get at some of the underlying stuff. ‘Cause I think there’s basically relationship stuff, relationship baggage, et cetera, that is affecting people’s abilities to act in their fullest. And if we don’t acknowledge the relationship stuff, yeah, we can kind of muddle along and talk about some solutions and probably, make things better, but the ultimate effectiveness will be blunted. And there are times, and this is one, where it’s not about great design. It’s about how we are engaging with one another. We have to resolve that and then we can get to the great design. But if we just start with, let’s just make design great, without acknowledging the underlying relationship stuff, you will never actually get to great design. Jesse: That’s right. That’s the premise of my whole everything I’m doing right now. Music break Peter: Something you said though, you’re talking about power dynamics. One of the things that has occurred to me, as we’ve had these conversations about leadership, and which has forced me to just think more intentionally and reflectively about leadership at all times, is that I don’t think many leaders recognize the responsibility that they take on as leaders. That their actions have all these knock-on follow-on consequences. They don’t receive it as a responsibility beyond, “Let’s make something great. Let’s get to the next place, I am leading us towards something.” Jesse: It’s almost as, as if all of their sense of responsibility is directed upward in the organization, their responsibility to their leaders, rather than their responsibility downward toward their teams. Peter: Right, right. Yes. You know, there’s the line from Spider-man, “With great power comes great responsibility.” And I think a lot of leaders don’t recognize that the power they wield has these impacts on people throughout their organizations, intentional or otherwise, that they should be responsible for, but it’s not often seen as a responsibility. I think people assume to be a leader is to do good things, is to take us to good places, and through all of my actions, that is what will happen. And like, on all this stuff I ever hear about, or read about, or am thinking about, when it comes to leadership, there’s this lack of a recognition that your actions will affect people, and might affect people negatively. And that just doesn’t resonate. And I don’t know why we hold our leaders accountable, but we don’t hold them responsible, and… Jesse: They’re accountable when things go sideways, right? When a team blows up, because this stuff came into play in a bad way, then it’s like, “Oh, leader, you should’ve known.” But until that happens, the organization is happy to pretend that none of this stuff ever exists. And I think that you’ve hit on something really important, which is that leaders are not just there to perform and deliver. Leaders are cultural stewards for their organizations and have to cultivate cultures that do not harm the people who are in those organizations. Peter: That’s right. I think that’s exactly right. You know, in prior episodes we talked about the distinction between management and leadership. And I think with management, there’s this recognition, because you have direct reports and, part of your job is to grow your team, that management has a responsibility, in this way. But somehow we don’t use the same language or the same frame when we talk about leadership. But I think, to your point, successful leaders, because they are these cultural stewards, because they become models within the organization, often have a greater impact on these factors than the managers do. But again, they don’t see that as part of their responsibility. And something that I’m starting to come to terms with. Another theme that’s emerging for me is that I want to discourage most people from embracing leadership, because not only is it hard, it has these outsized impacts that I think most people assuming leadership are not ready for. And are not aware of and are not cognizant of, and, because of that, it’s the baby with the gun. They’re wielding this influence and not doing so, appropriately. Jesse: Right. But, with these issues, I feel that an overabundance of caution represents a different kind of harm. Peter: Well, it’s a challenge that I feel personally. I am over-abundantly cautious when it comes to speaking about racism, systemic racism, my privilege. I will defer to, “Let’s listen to the Black and Brown folks.” ‘Cause what could I have to contribute as a middle aged w…

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12: Ands Not Ors (ft. Maria Giudice) Jul 01, 2020

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In which we are joined by Maria Giudice, founder of Hot Studio, former design executive at Facebook and Autodesk, for a whirlwind discussion of her career, design leadership, and coaching. Topics: Frank Frazetta; Working Girl; art school; white designer dudes; New York in the mid-80s; Richard Saul Wurman telling us we’re all full of shit; designing guidebooks; command-and-control leadership style; San Francisco in the late 80s; becoming a design leader; hiring misfits; match between leader and the team; inheriting teams; the brutality of corporate America; learning from mistakes; change-making at scale; consulting vs in-house; the need for executive sponsorship; where we find joy in our lives; meaning and purpose in our work; leading and coaching in a fashion authentic to you; the value of coaching for senior leaders. Transcript Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast on design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz. And with me as always is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: And today we have a special guest, Maria Giudice. Maria: Hi, everybody. Peter. I’m so happy, you know how to pronounce my last name. Peter: I’ve known you for, has it been 25 years? 1997. And so, we’re excited to have you with us today. Maria, I think you’ve, as… as we were saying, have a lot of lived experience as a design leader… Maria: Yes we have… Peter: I also am interested in your experience with other design leaders, maybe even earlier in your career before you became one. So, you know, I want to kind of cede the floor to you to let you talk about yourself and how you would like to introduce yourself to, to our audience. Maria: So my journey, boy, it’s like if you look at it in terms of timeline, it’s a lot of years, but the good thing is I always feel like, because things are always changing, it feels like it’s a relatively short timeline in weird ways. Does that make sense? It’s sort of like, that’s the beauty of the industry that we’re in, that we have had the gift of constant change throughout the courses of our career. Jesse: You can’t get bored, for sure. Maria: No, you can’t. So, but when I started out, I thought I was going to be a fine artist. My uncle was a pretty well known fantasy painter named Frank Frazetta, and some people right now who are hearing this… Peter: I bet Jesse had some of his posters in his dorm room… Jesse: I was not that guy, but I was friends with that guy. Maria: Yeah, exactly. Some of your people on your podcasts are like, their mind is blown right now, but most people on your podcast don’t know who he is, but some people it’s like, a secret code. If you know, Frank Frazetta’s work. Jesse: If you have any visual memory of the classic poster of Arnold Schwartzenegger as Conan, the Barbarian, Frank Frazetta painted that poster. Maria: Yeah. So I grew up with a famous uncle who was a painter. And that just was like permission to want to be a fine artist as well. So I never thought of fine art as something that was a nice-to-have. I saw I had models early on that you could follow your dreams and make money doing those dreams. And in my senior year of college, I was taking design classes. And I was really struggling with design in general. I thought it was incredibly formulaic and I was like, “Ugh.”Iit was all about the Bauhaus, was all about like grids and white space and hierarchy and find a nice image and use Helvetica and wear black and be a white man. It was like, these are all the formulas of what it meant to be a designer. It wasn’t until my senior year when Richard Saul Wurman came in and gave a talk to our class. And did you guys ever see the movie Working Girl? With Melanie Griffith. Peter: I have not. Maria: You should look that up because I Peter: Melanie Griffith and, Sigourney, Sigourney Waver… Maria: Yes, I, I was that girl. I was that girl working from Staten Island. Yeah. I did not look like a typical designer. And so I grew up in the era of Vignelli and, Rudy de Harak and like these, the New York, Pushpin Studio. Yeah. Yeah. Milton Glaser. I grew up in that era and those were all men who had basically harems of people, peons, working for them. So first model of leadership, command and control. And it was really formal and you had to look and act a certain way. But then in my senior year, Richard Wurman walks into our class, who does not look like a designer. He’s short, he was overweight. He had a big scarf and he was cursing up a fucking storm. And I fell in love. I totally fell in love. That was like, Oh my God, this is the first person that doesn’t follow and conform to the norms of what typical design leadership was like. And he basically yelled at us. He basically said you’re all full of shit. And he talked about design being in service to others. And I’ve said this story over and over again. I don’t think he used those words, but this is my version of the story because It just hit me over the head. It was one of those moments in life that we all have, you can reflect back on it, where suddenly something gets hit on the head and you go in a different path. And that was a very seminal moment in my life where he said the right thing at the right time. And design started making sense to me. That my job, my purpose, was to help people navigate life through the lens of design. And I went to work for him. I graduated college and I worked for him designing guidebooks in New York City. I started working with Richard in 1985 as a graphic designer, but it was really a human-centered designer. It’s that philosophy of thinking about who you’re serving and what is the appropriate way to deliver that content? What’s the appropriate medium, what’s the appropriate format, what’s the appropriate way to categorize information? It’s still the same stuff that we do today. It’s the same thinking process. Like, I have not deviated from my thinking process and the way I think about design since that lightning bolt struck me in the head in 1985. Peter: You mentioned the primary model you had seen was this command and control model. And then there was Richard, what was Richard’s approach to leadership? Was he… Maria: Command and control, too. Peter: So he was a creative director. You were an extension of his brain. Maria: Oh yeah. Yeah, I remember. I’m rough around the edges. I’ve always been rough around the edges. I was really rough around the edges back then. ‘Cause I had the lack of experience and the nuance and I loved the way he saw the world and the way he looked at information at different lenses and different categories and different scales. I just was soaking that in. That’s command and control style back in the day where you had a creative director and then you were his pair of hands. Right. And I would just argue with him constantly about the layouts, or I would give him alternative layouts. I would redesign the cover and he just would never, ever listen to me. And I just remember at one point sitting in his office, just crying and saying, “You know, why can’t you listen to me? Like, why can’t I have a point of view?” And he just dead-pan looked at me and he said, “Maria, I’m 50 years old,” I was like 25, “I’m 50 years old. Chances are, you are not going to change my opinion anytime soon.” Jesse: [Laughs]. Maria: I accidentally moved to California because he opened an office to redesign the Pacific Bell yellow pages, and I knew that if I didn’t get out of town, I was going to get fired, that, you know, like, our relationship was souring pretty fast, and just so happened that my girlfriend was moving to California and I was thinking, oh, I could do a road trip and hang out with her for six months. I had no intention of living in California. I didn’t even care about the yellow pages. I was just like, “Free road trip. I’m going to go.” And it was the best move of my life because I went and I worked with a small group of people who had to create the office, which became The Understanding Business. And it wasn’t until I had distance from Richard, where I had leverage. Peter: So, how long were you at The Understanding Business? Maria: I was there from 1987 to 1990, and by the end of the three years, I was a creative director with like 25 people reporting to me. Peter: So you were now a design leader. Maria: I was a design leader because I was in charge of maps and then it was like, I can’t do all the maps myself. So we started hiring people and then I became in charge of all the maps. And so suddenly I had a group of people working with me on maps and this is where I first discovered that I was really great at being a good leader. Like, if I really am honest about myself, I used to throw great parties. I’m great at getting people together around some sort of purpose and I became really great at motivating and inspiring people to work really hard and believe and hit a high bar of quality. Peter: You felt, you demonstrated good design leadership. Were you operating as a command and control leader the way that you had seen and if not, what was your mode and how did you develop your leadership style? Maria: it was totally intuitive. It was really just maybe because I was not like most people. And I felt very intimidated when I was in college by not looking like a white male with good clothing. I felt very empathetic to other people who didn’t fit the format. I looked for the weirdos. I look for the edge cases. I looked for the misfits. I looked for people who really wanted to learn, had a voracious appetite to learn, had incredibly good, great design and production skills. I cultivated that and I really acted more as a coach and a teacher and collected good ideas. I never thought of myself as a great designer. I still don’t think I’m a great designer. I think I’m a really good designer. I think I have a great eye for design, but I don’t think that I’m the best designer. So because of that, I cultivated and looked for people who were better than me and I mined for the best ideas. And then we adopted the best ideas as a collective. So I really was very focused on the collective body of the people that worked for me. Music break Jesse: I think there’s something in your story about the match between a leader and the people on the team. You talk about the way that you were seeking out the people who maybe didn’t quite fit the mold of what a traditional designer looked like, or maybe who didn’t come from the same kind of background. And I think that if you had inherited a team that was full of those more traditional graphic designer-type people, it would have been much more difficult for you to be successful as a design leader. So there was something about you also selecting for people that you could lead and bringing them into the team. Maria: Yes. Yes. I had the ability to continue to hire people that I wanted to work with. It wasn’t until I went to Facebook where I started inheriting people. And that’s a whole nother ball of wax when you have to inherit people. Peter: Well, let’s talk about that for a little… Maria: Yeah. Peter: ‘Cause you know, we have some similarities here, like you, Jesse, and I started a consulting business, doing design. We hired people we wanted to work with. We, I think, similarly had our flavors of misfits, which might be different than your flavors of misfits, but still certain misfit personalities. Maria: We all had our own brand of misfits. They all found their home in the misfit land of agencies. Peter: Something we’ve talked about before is inheriting teams. I’ve had to do it, after I left Adaptive Path. And, so I’m wondering, what your experience was when you inherited teams at Facebook and then I’m assuming again at Autodesk. Did you have to adopt or adapt your style or did you just try to get rid of as many of the people who were there as you could and bring in your own misfits, or, like, what’s your approach when it comes to inheriting teams? How has that worked for you, or did it not? Maria: Yeah, boy, I really struggled. I don’t know about you guys, but to go from like master of your own queendom to suddenly in corporate America where you have to fit into a system, that was a really rude awakening for me. But, I want to jump from Facebook to Autodesk because Autodesk was really interesting in that it was kind of brutal. And I think this happens a lot in corporate America, where I get hired, and I have to assume that this is the test of a lot of like C-level people. Or, you know, SVP level people. Right. I get hired in as VP of Design and I don’t have like a budget. I don’t have like staff. Peter: Are you the first VP of design they’ve ever had? Maria: Yeah, first VP and this is a company that’s rooted in traditional engineering thinking for 30-something years. And I just had an enlightened boss who wanted this change, and also Carl Bass is very creative. So I get in and they didn’t budget me in. Like in corporate America, right, they budget you, you get head count. So suddenly I get hired and I’m not in the plan. So, an SVP wanted to get rid of his design team. And so he gave me his design team, so basically they moved money from his over to my new org by giving me this design team. So he gives me this team, which has nothing to do with my mission. This is a product team and I’m in charge of weaving design throughout the company. My job was still unclear at that point. I had a three-month period to define my job, but they give me this group of people who didn’t fit any of the profiles that inevitably what I needed. So they gave me this team. Woohoo. I don’t have a plan for them. And this is the move. This is the perfect move, Maria. This is your head count. This is the budget you’re getting. In order for you to hire new people, you have to fire the people that you have. Jesse: Wow. Maria: Fucking brutal. Peter: So how do you approach that? Maria: And I didn’t even know who these people are. Right. But this is what they do when you’re a VP, they want to test you. Okay, let’s talk about, like corporate America, corporate America can be brutal at the top. So it’s like, okay, how tough is she? She’s going to lay people off. It’s true. It’s the same way at Facebook. This is what I didn’t like about Facebook. Facebook considers it an act of strength when somebody is struggling, they feel like you are a strong leader, if you can get rid of the weak people, right? Peter: Up or out, is what I’ve heard. Maria: And that’s true. You’re only as good as your weakest person. We all know that. But give people a chance to grow and succeed. What happens in corporate America, if you’re struggling, they put you on a PIP, right? Maybe you get “meets most” two or three times and you get put on a PIP. Right. But once you’re in “meets most” you’re basically feeling so unconfident, you’re feeling like you suck, you’re in the dog house when you’re in “meets most.” So your mindset is already in this really low point. And then it’s like, fuck you, corporate America, here’s the list of things you gotta do to pull yourself out. And if you don’t do it, we’re gonna push you out. And it’s a sign of strength when the leader can push those people out. It didn’t sit with my values. It doesn’t sit with my values. Peter: I hear you. I’ve inherited a few teams and, I’m not the only design leader who’s inherited a team and had either your boss tell you or your peers tell you, part of the job is going to have to be managing a couple of these people out that are underperforming. And you’re like, why, why did you wait–? Maria: Passing the buck to you, right. Passing the buck to you. Peter: But what I often found is that the designers that I inherited were often capable, but they had been put in a context that, that didn’t allow them to be a good designer. So it wasn’t about the designer. It was about the stuff surrounding them. Maria: Exactly. And that’s how I feel like you got to really unpack why somebody’s not doing well. Sometimes, it’s not a good skill match, but som…

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11: The Leadership Plateau and the Marketing Vortex Jun 24, 2020

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In which we address the how to grow as a design leader when the opportunities thin out, and then take a hard turn and address the culture of marketing and the problems it poses for designers. Topics: Imbalance of leaders at different levels; don’t determine what’s interesting for someone else; the pace of career growth; designers who have found their way; discouraging people from desiring to be a leader because doing it right is fucking hard; dual-track leadership models; UX for marketing and product used to be the same; marketing design wants to work more like product design; brand beyond design; service design; marketing, as it’s commonly practiced, is bullshit; #notallmarketers; product marketing; data-driven marketing; functions have distinct cultures that cross-functional teams don’t address; Jesse’s hair. Transcript Peter: Welcome to another episode of Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse navigate their way through the challenges and opportunities of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and, as always, joining me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hello, Jesse. So this episode: the first 15 minutes or so we discuss the leadership plateau. This challenge that design leaders have as they grow in their organizations, they reach a point where it’s not clear how they can continue to grow and what to do about that. Then our conversation took a bit of a turn into the differences between design for marketing and design for product. We consider some ways forward, more holistically incorporating design for marketing and design for product in an overarching approach, looking at the entire end-to-end service experience. Peter: If you look at design leadership I think we have more people who could do VP design work then we have VP design roles. Whereas five years ago, there weren’t enough design leaders who could be design executives, you now have almost too many design leaders who could be design executives and where you have a shortage, an imbalance, is more at this director level. So you have this glut of opportunities and not enough people to do that work. Jesse: And is that, do you feel like that’s just sort of an accident of history, or like that is a moment that we have passed through, are passing through, we’re going to move beyond? Or do you see this as being in the nature of this work, that there are always going to be not enough executive level positions to go around. Peter: I don’t think there are going to be enough executive level positions to go around for quite a while. I have to assume this is true of most functions. ‘Cause if you’re operating in a hierarchical organization, the way most of us are, you’ll have one VP, that one VP will have five directors reporting to them, so you get this pinch. Something I’ve started to see, and I think we’re going to see more of it, is this recognition that design leaders don’t need to keep climbing the ladder in their career because there’s only so many places to go. Whereas I’ve witnessed people who have considered hiring design leaders, like it’s a VP of design of an 80 person team and they’re looking to hire a design director for one of their offices that would probably oversee about 20 folks. And they’re getting applications from people who have run teams of 150. This type of thing I think is going to continue to happen because there’s only so many true design leadership roles, of a certain level. And if you need a job and you are qualified to do the work, you very well will be like, “Hey, you know what, I’d be happy to run a team of 20, rather than be unemployed or rather than hold out for the rarer VP of design role.” And one of the issues I’ve seen in talking to leaders about this is the leader hiring for that director-level role is suspicious of a candidate who seems overqualified. And a piece of advice I actually gave this guy is, it is not your job to assume what they want better than they do. If they are applying for that role, take it at face value. Don’t speculate about their circumstances. If they say they want to get closer to the work, then assume they want to get closer to the work. If they say the size of the team doesn’t matter and they just want to do good work at a good company, don’t assume that it’s something other than that, I know I’ve actually been discounted or dismissed from opportunities where the hiring folks were just like, “Oh, this wouldn’t be interesting for you.” And I’m like, “Why are you determining what’s interesting for me?” I should get to make that determination. And instead, if I know full well what the role is, and I’m still invested and engaged, appreciate that. Don’t think you know more about the candidate than the candidate does. And I think a lot of hiring managers feel they know more about the person that they are bringing on than that person themselves. And that I think is a trap. Jesse: So that raises an interesting question for me, which is what pace of career growth, and I mean this in the sense of expanded responsibility, greater authority, more pay, moving on up in the world, career growth. What pace of career growth do you think is reasonable for designers and design leaders to expect and are those different between designers and design leaders? I find myself wondering if designers get accustomed to a certain pace of getting promotions, getting more authority, getting more responsibility, extending, expanding their skills in new directions. And then you get to design leadership and the cadence is different. The pace is different. You might be spending a longer time at each of these levels before you eventually make your way up to VP. Peter: I think that’s exactly right. A pretty common pattern is: you’re a junior designer for a couple of years, right out of school. Then you’re a mid-level designer for about three or four years. And then once you’ve hit your fifth or sixth year of being a designer, you’re now a senior designer, and the expectation is you’re in that role for a few years. From your fifth or sixth year to your ninth or 10th year at the most. And then it’s usually time to move on from being a senior designer that you either choose a management path or an individual contributor path. And then those stages after that are longer-lasting. You could be a manager for five to 10 years. You can be a director for five to 10 years. Such that you get to be a VP usually when you’ve had roughly 20 years experience. And I mean, there are VPs of design of much smaller teams and they might not have had as long a career. A couple things to acknowledge here. Years experience is a correlate for this but should not be a determiner. Unfortunately, so many HR practices use years experience as an easy quantifiable metric by which they can screen people in or out of a role. And the other thing I’ve seen is, people move at their own pace. And some designers, after 20 some years, are still senior designers. Maybe they’re a lead, the next level above senior, and they’re perfectly happy. As a design manager, one of the things I appreciate most within my team are those older designers who figured out what they wanted and what they wanted wasn’t to keep climbing the ladder, but to find a groove that they were happy with and that they just settled right in. And they did really good work. It’s not like they were resting on their laurels. It’s not like they had given up. They’re just like, “You know what? I want to do this job. And, I’m fine that I’m not earning more money, that I’m not giving more responsibility because I’m happy.” And so many other designers, I think, especially those who continue to climb the ladder, which probably means you have a bit of ambition, a bit of ego, a bit of that desire. Those leaders look at someone who’s found their groove, and are kind of suspicious. Like, “There must be something wrong with you if you don’t have the kind of ambition I do.” And that’s not true, that’s just a different mindset, a different personality. Jesse: When you talk about this archetype of the designer, who knows what they want, I’m reminded of our old friend and former colleague Tim Gasperak, and a conversation that I had with Tim as he was parting ways from Adaptive Path many years ago. And he was very clear. He was like, you know what? This is the kind of team in which I know I can be successful. And this is the kind of environment in which I can be an effective leader and Adaptive Path at that point was turning into something that he could see was not for him. And I really appreciated his clarity about that and not, just mindlessly seeking additional opportunities within a system that wasn’t the right fit for him. Peter: Yeah. Where, for me, it really crystallized was when I was leading design at Groupon and. We were building out our Chicago team. And there was a guy who was my age, our age, he’d been doing this type of work at that point for 20 some years. And at the company he was working for, he had been put into a manager role almost against his will, but because there was no one else around to do the work, and he was the senior most person on the team. And when we were able to offer him a straightforward senior interaction designer roll, a product designer role. He was so grateful that there was a place that he go and focus on the work. Not manage people, not be seen as some galvanizing leader, just someone who’s like really into the craft of design, wants to do good interaction design work, but also wants to work eight hours a day. Had his family, had his life. Wasn’t a striver and that was just a personality type. And he was by far and away the most well adjusted person on the team, because, probably because he’d had this experience and maybe Tim had this as well. He had an experience where he realized like, “Oh, I don’t like that.” Maybe you don’t realize it until you’ve done it. And you’re like, “Oh, okay. I need to back off from that.” I guess my point to all of this is 1) don’t assume that you know other people’s conditions better than your own, like, take people at their face value. And 2) don’t assume that everyone else has the same drive and motivation that you do. We’re all differently wired or inclined. And that’s great. And your role as a manager or a leader is to respect and recognize that, not try to mold and shape people all into a set of similar strivers. Jesse: I think on the part of some of these very senior skilled people there is a question of whether this individual contributor path is going to be enough. Is it going to give them enough authority? Is it going to give them enough autonomy, to be able to actually grow into leadership from that perspective. I think that a lot of senior designers feel like in order to become leaders, they have to become managers and that the power structures that they’re a part of in fact favor the managers over the individual contributor leaders in a lot of the organizations that I’ve seen. Peter: I think it is generally true that organizations find their leadership from those who manage, even in an organization that has dual track career ladders, where you can become a more senior IC or a manager, if you find you’re really wanting to have that influence and authority, there is a nudge towards management. That said, one of the things that I’m realizing, I hope our podcast can do, and it’s actually an unstated desire of my design leadership talks and workshops, is to subtly, and now I’m being unsubtle…. Jesse: Yeah, I don’t know how subtle you can call it anymore. Peter: …is to subtly discourage people from desiring to be a leader if you’re not ready for it, because leadership is fucking hard. And I think too many people feel that leadership is just the next step on the ladder. It’s the next thing that I should be doing. There’s, again, this societal or professional pressure to grow into these leader roles, but to do leadership right is hard. But if you’re going to be a leader, it is incumbent upon you to be a good leader because now you’re responsible for so many more people other than yourself. You have to take it seriously. And I think a lot of leaders don’t recognize what they’re getting into. They don’t approach the leadership aspects of their role with the seriousness or gravity that it’s warranted. And that’s bad, that’s harmful. I would rather folks who are not willing to sign up for the pain-in-the-ass that is true leadership to recognize, like, “You know what, I’m out. I don’t need to be a leader.” Like this guy that I was referring to earlier. “I’m happy being a really strong contributor. Maybe I’m not going to make as much money, but you can still make pretty good money.” I think fundamentally much of what we’re talking about is wrapped up in capitalism and the challenges that we face in terms of needing to work in order to survive as a society, but separating some of that, you can make good money as a senior designer that is still primarily a contributor and not bear the psychological burden of real leadership. We should encourage folks to not feel compelled, to keep growing in that progressive way and adopt leadership modes. There is something that I have seen happen in certain firms where they do have dual-track career growth, where you can be a manager and then a director, and then a VP, or you can be a lead designer, and a principal designer, and even like a distinguished designer. Sometimes what happens in those environments is the management track becomes seen as all you’re doing is people management as you elevate. And that actually is seen as less strategic and less value-add, within the organization. Jesse: It becomes almost like an administrative function. Peter: Exactly. The language I heard– There was one company I did some consulting for where they had this dual-track model and the people who were these design directors, they would have 10 to 15 people in their organizations. They felt that they were seen, essentially, this was their language, as babysitters. Their job is to nurture and care for the humans. And then they had a peer who, the role was, I think, a design architect, and those folks were the strategic and creative leaders and all of the energy outside of the design team, in terms of that cross-functional engagement was focused on the design architect. So your engineering peers, your product management peers, the executives. Because the design architect is the one talking about the strategic and creative problems in play. They’re getting all the attention and the design director who is running the team of all the people who are ultimately delivering this work is set aside because they’re not seen as strategic. So there’s a risk there, that you turn your management class into, yeah, some form of admin and not someone who is also respected for their ability to lead a group towards delivering valuable solutions. Music break Design for Marketing vs Design for Product Jesse: In more traditional marketing, branding, advertising agency environments, these strong high level performers are, I think, culturally more elevated because these are the workhorses of those companies as businesses. It’s your really super-skilled video editors and graphic designers and copywriters that can drive the creation of these highly polished artifacts, that is the basis of your business. And, so I’m curious about, how contextual this is in terms of the elevation of the individual contributor versus the elevation of the manager, depending on what business you’re in and what you’re delivering. Peter: One of the companies I’m working with, right now I’m supporting their recruiting and hiring efforts. And they’ve been looking for design directors. And one of the people we were introduced to was someone who had predominantly a marketing background, and the design director role that I was recruiting for was going to have management as its primary function. This was going to be someone responsible for a…

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10: We Have Trust Issues Jun 16, 2020

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In which we grapple with the multifarious concept of trust, in light of how important it is for leaders to establish, build, and maintain it in their relationships. Topics: Leadership coaching, psychological safety, resilience, conditions leading to trust, Michael Jordan’s uncompassionate leadership tactics, critique, bestowed authority, Brené Brown, non-judgment, leaders speak last, “being right” behavior, earning trust, maintaining positivity and authenticity in the face of difficulties; integrity; whether organizations can earn trust; trust falls; Amy Edmondson; Google’s Project Aristotle; accountability; trust as an emergent property; why all these models and theorists never mention trust; trust within a team; trust between teams; trust as an integument that enables cross-functional teams to collaborate; Drive by Daniel Pink; operationalizing trust is like eating soup with chopsticks or trying to capture a candle flame. Transcript Peter: Remember this from episode seven: We’re wary of bringing trust into this work environment because my guess is because we think we fear we will have to break it. At some point, we are going to have to make a decision that breaks that trust. And so we almost don’t want to start that conversation for fear of where it will go.But in order for us to make the–Jesse: Wow. That’s just, well, I want to, I want to allow some space for that. ‘Cause that’s a pretty powerful statement, what you just said. And, the notion that leaders are carrying around with them, this burden all the time of the knowledge that whatever trust they build, they might at some point have to destroy, as part of doing their job, it’s a challenging place to be.It’s interesting that we came to this place just because trust actually was a big component of the work that I was doing in the last couple of years at Capital One. And, it’s an area that I’ve been digging into, and trying to figure out how to bring a greater understanding of to my practice with leaders. So I have a lot of things to say about it.Peter: Well, maybe that becomes the subject for our next conversation. Peter: That’s what we’re actually going to talk about today. Jesse: On Finding Our Way. Peter: You just love saying that, don’t you? Jesse: I don’t know. It just seems— Intro Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hi Jesse. What were you thinking or what were you referring to when it came to the matter of trust in design leadership at Capital One? Jesse: Well, as I was transitioning into leadership coaching, part of what I was really trying to do was look at the larger systemic patterns across the various teams whose leaders I was working with, and trying to figure out what I could do to push the culture forward in meaningful ways from a non-leadership position, but rather from this position of coach to the leaders. And so I got interested in this concept of team resiliency and what helps teams stick together, hold together, pursue a vision together and see it through. And in reading into that kind of stuff, I started getting into issues of interpersonal relationships in the workplace and not just resiliency, but the safety that is created by the leaders of these teams. So, psychological safety is a phrase that we’ve started hearing a lot about in workplace contexts, in terms of how much space do leaders create for a diversity of opinions. How much room is there for dissent in organizations, things like that. And it turns out that all of these things track really strongly with the set of ideas that I was thinking of as team resilience and digging into this whole subject area eventually came down to the question of who do you trust and how was that trust created and how does that trust develop and grow over time? And this takes place really purely at the level of two individuals, any two individuals in the team. There is a question of what is the existing trust relationship between those individuals? And in a lot of ways, I see the responsibility of the leader of the team to foster those trusting relationships, not just with the people that they’re engaging with, but among the people that they’re responsible for. Peter: Tell me a little bit more. You used the word resilience, which is a word I like. but I want to make sure I understand what you mean by it. I see resilience as an ability to hold together come what may, primarily through challenges. Jesse: I do see resilience as the ability of the team to hold together, come what may, and what you’re really talking about is the teams. Collective ability to face uncertainty together and to find a way through to a solution together and staying together as a team. You know, I think about these really enduring product teams, that we see in some of these longer standing organizations where somebody will move into a leadership role and they will gather around them their best collaborators, and they’ll take those collaborators with them from project to project and sometimes from organization to organization, where they’ve got a lot of trust built up there already, and they’re able to leverage those relationships and carry those forward into brand new areas where they don’t know what’s going to happen. But ultimately those places where the trust is thin are the places that eventually become fractures and fissures that break up teams and that create these breakdowns in unity of vision, unity of purpose. Peter: What are the conditions that you saw that prime a team for higher trust, or maybe behaviors and activities? Jesse: What we’re looking for, what trust ultimately is, is an internal barometer, a compass by which we evaluate other humans and how much confidence we can have in the predictability of their choices in their behavior. Peter: It’s like brand. Sorry. Jesse: Well, yeah, I mean, we talk about brand promises and, and yeah. Peter: Its promise. Yeah. Jesse: But it’s not necessarily a specific promise in that it’s not that I need to be able to predict exactly what you’re going to do in order to be able to trust you, but in order to be able to trust you, I do need to feel that whatever choices I see you make are internally consistent, are compassionate toward other humans, and are undertaken with a degree of care and awareness. And so we’re looking for, in other people, we’re looking for these signs that whatever decisions this person is going to make in the future are going to come from a place of groundedness in themselves. Awareness of what’s really going on around them. A certain degree of clarity there, right? And compassion toward the impact of their choices on the people around them. And so we’re looking for signs and signals of these things all the time. Peter: Interesting. Having just finished watching the 10-part ESPN docu-series on Michael Jordan in “The Last Dance,” I would argue that his teammates trusted him, but they did not find him compassionate. He was an asshole who would ride you very hard in order to get the best out of you. Now, you could trust Michael Jordan in the ways that you’re talking about. He was highly predictable. You knew where he was coming from. You understood what his goals were, and he never wavered. So there was that solidity. But, the desire to meet the goal overrode everything else for him. And if his way to get there was to goad you through belittling, because he felt that was the lever by which you would perform better, you would be willing to do that. Jesse: I did use the word compassion, but I think that what I’m really talking about more is simply a level of human awareness. That is to say, Michael Jordan knew the effects of the choices that he was making on the other players and whether or not that contributed toward trusting relationships. Maybe with some people that did more than others. For some people, if you push me really hard to get me to a place that I want to get to, that I can’t get there by myself, that actually is a way of seeing me, serving me, supporting me, and for some people, if we can do that in a way that resonates, then it can be productive. If the leader is tuned out, not noticing the emotional effects of their choices on their team, that’s what creates the damage. Peter: Hmm. Yeah. Well, it’s, it’s funny. So, I think the reason many organizations, many even design teams struggle with critique, is that critique requires this trust that you’re talking about. In order for it to work, in order for you to be direct, in order for you to be honest, frank, forthright with one another such that the person receiving it doesn’t wilt in the face of the criticism, there needs to be that shared understanding, shared respect, and trust in one another. And I think what lacks in many of these organizations is that trust, is that sense that we are all aligned, we all have the same goals, and we all have this respect for one another, and so when you tell me that this design isn’t working, it’s not about me. It’s about the work. And in organizations where that hasn’t happened, when you told me this design isn’t working, I feel it’s about me. Jesse: One of the people who’s done a lot of research in this area is Brené Brown, who is a psychological researcher, who’s done a bunch of TED talks and has written a bunch of very popular, successful books. And in her research on the qualities of these trusting relationships, one of the qualities that she talks about is non-judgment, which is to be able to engage with someone about a situation, without holding a judgment about them as a person, through it. And so this is one of the behaviors that she’s identified in her research that contributes toward that sense of trust that you’re talking about. So you’re touching on all of the same things. I do think there is an element that comes into play here that is maybe not as obvious to talk about, which is power and the way that power is used to force trust. Or to override mistrust. And again, that can go up to a point. But when you have these leaders who impose their will through authority rather than connecting people with meaning and purpose and bring them along, that is in the long term not a recipe for a trusting relationship. Peter: Yeah, I was thinking of that when I was thinking about critique because critique is a method that you learn in design school. And it surprises me then when you get out into the real world and you engage in critique, and designers often find themselves feeling attacked. And I think it’s in part, my hypothesis would be is that in design contexts for time immemorial, critique was predicated on this assumption of trust, particularly on the part of leadership, this power dynamic that you’re referring to. Leaders felt comfortable critiquing the work of their team without ever having established the needed underlying relationships, because they were in authority and the team members just kind of had to take it. Jesse: Yeah. Peter: And that there’s probably been this toxic dynamic for decades, centuries, in terms of how this was handled and like the abused child going on to abuse their children, it just kind of kept getting carried down ‘cause that seemed to be the way it had to be. Whereas, environments where, what did you call it? The non-judgment, Brené Brown’s non-judgment kind of quality will lead to better critique, than prior modes. The other thing, oh, the other thing I was thinking of when you talk about power, it’s a story that I tell that comes from my time at Adaptive Path that I then baked into my leadership training. Where we started Adaptive Path, there were seven equal partners. We were comfortable arguing with each other, fighting with each other, intellectually. Jesse: Hmm. Peter: And that was just part of how we worked. And then we started bringing people in. And the earlier folks we brought in tended to be okay with this dynamic. We tended to find folks who were strong-willed, who were eager to engage with this kind of rough-and-tumble intellectual discourse. But as we grew, we ended up, as one does, you just find different personality types and some people who were clearly not comfortable with that way of engaging, and I hadn’t realized it. I tend to not be the most immediately empathetic person. And so I would engage as I always had, which, you know, people are showing work or giving a presentation and looking for feedback. And I would give my feedback very directly ‘cause I want to make it better. And what I didn’t know was happening was that people were receiving that poorly, and it was shutting them down. And it was one of our colleagues, Laura Kirkwood-Datta, who I remember pulled me aside and basically said, she said, “You can’t do that.” I’m like, “Do what?” She says, “You can’t talk, you can’t engage in that way in these group sessions when we’re working through things,” and I’m like, “Why not?” I’m like, “It’s just ideas. We’re all here with our ideas. We’ve always talked about our ideas. We’ve always said best idea wins,” and she’s like, “You’re the boss,” and I’m like, “No, I’m not. We’re all equal.” Then she’s like, “No, no, no, no, no. You’re the boss. You’re a founder. You’re in a position of power and authority, and when you talk, it stops the conversation.” And it took me a while, like I was defensive at first. After a couple of days, I realized the wisdom in what she said. And, what this has turned into in my leadership practice is that leaders speak last. In any room, the most senior person should be the last person to talk. If the leader talks earlier, then that becomes an edict that people feel like they have to follow. What usually happens is at some point in the conversation, someone will say whatever the leader wanted to say, but because it emerged from the group, now it doesn’t feel like an edict. It feels like something we believe, and they are much more likely to carry it forward with vigor as opposed to just feeling like it’s a command. Jesse: I think there is definitely a not small amount of the leader’s job that simply involves listening intently until someone says something that you agree with and then agreeing. Peter: Which can be hard for a certain kind of leader. I mean, you and I, I think we’ve talked about this, like all throughout our lives, we were lauded and given good grades and celebrated for being right and making good arguments. And, there’s a culture that supports that behavior. But when you’re getting into these group contexts, that kind of behavior, that “being right” behavior, that “smartest person in the room” behavior can actually be defeating and deflating for a team. Jesse: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. and we’ve talked a little bit about how the stance of the leader needs to be different from the stance that they held as a designer in the room. They have to recognize that their words have a different weight now than they did before. The truth is that every leader is going to bring baggage from their previous experiences to the role, whether you’re a design leader or a technology leader or any kind of a leader, and those things can be unconscious patterns that, to your point, can be undermining your ability to effectively earn trust from your team. And I think that word earn is really important because it is an investment that you’re making toward the future when you are engaging in these trust-growing activities. And you know, when we all find ourselves under psychological pressure, we fall back on our shortcuts. And for some leaders, when they find themselves in those positions, they fall back on shortcuts that undermine their ability to engage in these trust-growing behaviors. It becomes a little bit harder for them to be as entirely open with the team as maybe they want to be. It becomes a little bit harder for them to be as compassion…

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9: Consultancy Rat Blues, Part 2 Jun 09, 2020

Show notes

In which we continue to grapple with in-house vs design consultancy distinctions, and see promise in the creation of senior strategic design roles within some companies. Topics: working in teams; working like a consultancy; Metropolis; the lie of design schools; the reality of in-house design practice; cycles of abuse; working in truly high-performance design contexts; the stage model of cook apprenticeship; the capacity of design programs; rotation programs within and across companies; the emerging role of Principal Designer. Transcript Jesse: Previously on Finding Our Way: Letter Peter: We’ve asked listeners to send in their thoughts, and we have one from a gentleman who referred to himself as Consultancy Rat. And, his email to us goes as follows. “I have spent the bulk of my design career in consulting… However, I am sensing a growing divide between design consulting and in house design… The design students in a master’s program in which I have taught for a few years, increasingly find the notion of production and shipping digital product…to be the penultimate. Whereas wrestling with ambiguity in new and unfamiliar spaces, exploring different methods and modes of design, craft, working with Anna mitts, other designers, while spreading the gospel of design seems less and less the ideal to most students… But I find this shift troubling at a community slash craft level as well as the personal level of my career in design leadership… How does the design consultancy leader better sell and genuinely augment their training to be more attractive to in-house teams? Jesse: And now, the conclusion. The Show Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hi Jesse. I wanted to circle back. I’ve got a thing that I want to talk about, related to Consultancy Rat’s initial email that occurred to me as I was reading it,and recognizing his frustration, which is, frankly, my frustration with how in-house design has largely been reduced to just people who are pumping out assets to feed into the engineering furnace to power these product development engines. A couple of weeks ago there was this Remote Design Week conference, and I gave a talk called, “The Atomic Unit of Design is the Team.” One of my biggest frustrations with in-house design, and has been for a decade now, is how it has elevated this notion of the unicorn product designer, this individual designer who’s going to work on a cross-functional team, some type of scrum team or squad, you know, you have a designer, you have a product manager, and you have a set of engineers. And that is what design looks like in most of these companies And, there’s a ton of problems with that. Where I come back to is one of the things that you learn in a consulting context is that design is best done in teams. Pretty much all work is best done in teams, but design is best done in teams. Adaptive Path almost never staffed a project that wasn’t a team, even if it was just two designers. Jesse: Oh, yeah, “Nobody flies solo,” I think was the way that we always framed it. Peter: Because there’s power in teamwork. You can’t expect any individual to have suitable competency across the range of skills needed for digital product design. No one person is good at interaction design, visual design, information architecture, copywriting, user research, in terms of the craft skill sets, as well as the communication, the leadership, all the professional skills that you need in order to succeed. Jesse: I would say even beyond that, even if they had the whole smorgasbord of possible skills, they still are hamstrung by their own perspective and always, always, always in any kind of creative work, having a second perspective in the room strengthens the work. Peter: Exactly. So, in this talk I talk about how pretty much since I moved from working in Adaptive Path to in-house, I’ve tried to, as I put it, team-ify my design teams, often within an environment that does not naturally support it. A lot of these product development environments are essentially built on some flavor of scrum or the Spotify squad model, which is these small teams with the idea of being one designer, one product manager, and a set of engineers. And so I’ve tried to figure out how can I pull designers out of those scrum context and into a design team that works across a set of scrums. But, there’s a, phrase that I wrote on a slide when I gave this talk that I think is relevant, to what we’re talking about, which is “Much of my career since leaving Adaptive Path has been trying to figure out how to bring relevant aspects of an environment dedicated to quality design into corporate contexts.” At Adaptive Path, our mission was to deliver the best design. That’s all anyone paid us for. And so we optimized our environment to deliver great design. You go in-house, now you’re in a context where the best design isn’t the ultimate goal, There’s other things that that business is about. What I’ve tried to do is figure out how do I bring the qualities, and frankly, the organizational thinking that we had at Adaptive Path, that allowed us to do great design work, and find ways to imbue, integrate those ideas within a corporate context. The one thing that doesn’t work is that internal agency model, right? This internal services firm, we know that doesn’t work, so design can’t be a black box, that briefs come in one side of and assets come out the other side of, right? It has to be woven into the practice, but how can you weave it into an existing product development structure without design kind of getting dissipated and dissolved into that environment. How does design maintain its integrity? And that has been my professional challenge for the last 10 years or so now. And one of the key issues that I see is maintaining design in teams. I’m saying all this though, to kind of speak to, when I empathize with Consultancy Rat, it’s this recognition. I think he’s right that much of in-house design has been reduced to this factory model, because it seems to serve the existing product development structures and processes. But what it ends up doing is, frankly, inhibiting or constraining design’s potential within these contexts. And so, figuring out how do you create a safe space for design to be at its fullest in the face of the forces that Consultancy Rat is recognizing, I mean, that’s been my mission. Jesse: As much as I’m interested in the impact of this on organizations and on leaders, I’m also interested in the impact of this on the designers who are a part of this larger machine, these factory UX workers. Peter: I’m imagining, you know, Metropolis or something. Right. Jesse: Yes, exactly. Lots of clanging going on. I’m reminded of an exchange I had on Twitter last year, with a young designer who was in his first job out of college, as a product designer at Instagram and was offering up a bunch of really sharp, really cogent advice for being a product designer in an environment like that. And most of it boiled down to: forget most of the things that you were taught in school because you are never ever going to use them. Forget about user needs analysis. Forget about anything connected to design thinking. Get good at prototyping, get good at prototyping fast, get good at encapsulating requirements in ways that product managers can easily consume them. And this was his advice for being successful in user experience. So there’s that data point. I also have conversations with young designers all the time about what they’re seeing out in the market. And what I am hearing from people is a lot of frustration and a lot of burnout, especially if you went to what you and I would consider a good UX program. One that really taught the whole soup to nuts of traditional UX practices. And then you came out into the marketplace with this dream of the strategic work that you’d be able to do, and then the only jobs that you could find that anybody would consider you for were these production jobs, people feel betrayed. They feel let down. They feel like they’ve been sold snake oil by the entire field of user experience. They’ve been set up for something that’s never going to materialize for them. At least that’s how it feels. And then they get into a role like this and it’s like, well, you’ve got to, you know, buckle down and find your place on the factory floor, or you’ve got to get out and find something else to do with your life, and that sucks. Peter: Yeah, it’s frustrating, too, because bringing these early career designers into contexts like this where perhaps they did have a breadth of understanding because of however they were taught, but then they are only engaging with a quarter to a third of that practice, and the remaining elements start to atrophy ‘cause there’s just not a need for it. Thinking about it from a design leadership standpoint, you know, 10 years later, as these folks are starting on managing and leading teams, either they are not set up to succeed because at that level, they are expected now to re-engage with matters of strategy and vision, and they’ve lost that muscle, or, it becomes this vicious cycle where they end up leading design as essentially a form of plumbing where it is this factory work where my job is to have my team be the most effective and efficient widget builders there are. And that’s how I’m valued and that’s what I understand my value to be. Jesse: Right, right. Peter: I mean, that becomes perilous for the future of design as a practice because it is so reductive. Jesse: Yeah. Well this is the thing is… When I read this guy, his name is Joe Kennedy, his thread about his experiences or what he learned from being a designer at Instagram, I read that and I was like, “There is nobody looking out for this guy.” There is no design leader who is taking care of this person as a creative resource and nurturing their development as a creative contributor to the organization. Peter: And that might be because that design leader didn’t know any better. Jesse: But that’s because they’re… That, that’s the thing, is because they’re not hiring design leaders, they are hiring product managers to oversee product designers and they don’t know, and they don’t care and they’re not interested. Peter: You would hope the design manager would be the one to look out for that designer. But again, that design manager probably came up through the system. And this was one of the struggles that I’ve had, like even back when I inherited that team at Groupon of a bunch of dudes in their mid-twenties who thought they were great designers and thought they understood what great design was. And I’m like, you’ve never been in an environment where there’s actually legitimately great design, but they didn’t know that. Literally I had 25 year olds who thought they had reached the pinnacle, that there was nowhere for them to go. When they did self-evaluations, they were like scoring themselves five out of five on everything. Cause they didn’t know. Jesse: Crushing it. Peter: And I’m like, what’s going on here? And that’s one that I don’t quite know how to break that wheel. Because until you’ve been in an environment where you’ve experienced truly elevated design, you don’t know what it looks like. I was fortunate that I had two formative career experiences. I worked at a CD-ROM company called Voyager that hired amazing designers to work on their CD-ROMs. And we were all figuring it out as we went along. And what they were mostly amazing at was visual design. And then my next job was at Studio Archetype. Similarly, the focus tended to be on the visual design, though Lillian Svec was building out an information architecture practice. And Studio Archetype was one of the earliest to have a substantial information architecture and interaction design practice for a consultancy. But these were environments that were, where design was loved, truly loved, supported, cared for, given the space for, was not an afterthought, was not, “How do we cross that line item off?” but was instead a focus. And so I was fortunate very early to see what it took to deliver amazing design. Jesse: High performing design organizations have always been a rarity, that’s just sort of the nature of it, especially as the work itself has been evolving so rapidly in the spaces that you and I work in. Peter: The issue was design generally operated at such small scale compared to all these other functions. that it wasn’t a big deal. and if you did want quality design 15 years ago, you went to a consultancy, that’s where all the best designers were. That’s where the best understanding of design was. And over the last 15 years, we’ve had this fundamental shift of the energy for design moving in house. And then we’ve had design as an industry just scale rapidly and massively. So 20 years ago, most practicing designers, and let me say at least half of the practicing designers likely would have been in an environment where good design happened ‘cause they were working in a consulting company context doing good design. It’s just that the field was super small. Now, 20 years later, most designers have never been in an environment where truly good design has been practiced. They don’t know what it looks like. They don’t know what it is. And, I don’t know what to make of that. It’s almost like what we need is some place where all these designers can go and spend three months. It’s like in restaurants, the stage process in restaurants. Whereas you’re coming up as a cook, you can go stage for the best restaurants in the world, working in an environment where great cooking is happening, and then you can come back and, we don’t have that kind of rotation for designers to go to the great places where design is happening, to see what it really takes to do great design and then return to wherever you were and bring those practices back. But we always need something like that if we’re going to see design reach the potential that is expected of it. Jesse: I think the closest thing to that that people have right now are these college degrees or certificate programs that are exposing them to these practices, but they’re doing it in this sort of hermetically-sealed sterile-sandbox kind of fashion that doesn’t necessarily map to real world design delivery. Peter: If you look at the top design programs, your CMUs, your Institute of Designs, your whatevers, they just don’t operate at scale nearly big enough to process the number of designers, that the world needs. So now you have these General Assembly or other types of UX boot camps… Jesse: CMU has just added an undergraduate degree in HCI, by the way. Peter: That’s a start. Jesse: Yeah, they’re moving in that. Peter: The, the issue is literally every college could possibly have a design program and it wouldn’t be enough right now. Just given the need. So now you have these General Assembly and other UX boot camps that are not teaching this highest order design. They’re teaching what we said at the outset: What are the things you need to know so that you can get a job? You need to know how to work these tools and you need to know these basic practices and boom, you can now get a job you can plug into the factory model. And I think what’s missing, thinking about that restaurant analogy, is this recognition of design as a craft. We talk about craft a bunch. Design is a craft. The way you learn craft is through apprenticing and guilds and mentorship relationships and that kind of thing. I do see about UX mentor programs out in the world, but they’re few and far between. And most people are not getting exposed to those. And I hadn’t thought about this, but I wonder if there’s some deep cultural change that needs to occur within the development o…

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8: Consultancy Rat Blues, Part 1 Jun 05, 2020

Show notes

In which an email from a design leader self-labelled “Consultancy Rat” spurs a wide-ranging discussion on strategic design leadership, product management, and the differences between in-house and consultancy design. Topics: consulting vs in-house design; FAANG+; the bifurcation of UX design; product design; design as a handmaiden to engineering; why not both?; product management and product strategy; product management as UX practice from 15 years ago; the craft of product management; making the shift from consultancy to in-house; strategic and principal in-house design roles. Transcript Intro Peter: Welcome to Finding Our Way, the podcast where Peter and Jesse welcome you to their journey as they navigate the opportunities and challenges of design and design leadership. I’m Peter Merholz, and with me is Jesse James Garrett. Jesse: Hello, Peter. Peter: Hello, Jesse. Good afternoon. On today’s episode, we’ve got a letter from a gentleman named Consultancy Rat, asking us questions about some of the pros and cons or the challenges of shifting from being a design leader in a consulting practice and being a design leader in-house, and some of the challenges and frustrations that he’s experienced. And, what I can say is that, it led you and I into a bunch of interesting threads talking about in-house design, consulting, design, product management, agile development, principal designers, and a whole bunch of stuff. Jesse: Just say, check it out. There you go. Letter Peter: So, here on Finding Our Way, we’ve asked for listeners to send in their thoughts about what we’re discussing. And we have one from a gentleman who referred to himself as Consultancy Rat. And his email to us goes as follows: “I have spent the bulk of my design career in consulting (frog and others.) I came up through the design ranks and was promoted into creative direction and management I generally operate under the assumption that in-house opportunities love to bring in design leaders from design consultancies. However, I am sensing a growing divide between design consulting and in-house design. In-house design seems to be rapidly engineering itself into highly efficient, highly optimized, and highly atomized, quote design, ops unquote The design students in a master’s program in which I have taught for a few years, increasingly find the notion of production and shipping digital product at FAANG+ (for those who don’t understand, that’s Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, et cetera.) to be the penultimate. Whereas wrestling with ambiguity in new and unfamiliar spaces, exploring different methods and modes of design craft, working with and amidst other designers, while spreading the gospel of design seems less and less the ideal to most students. But I find this shift troubling at a community slash craft level as well as the personal level of my career in design leadership. I would love to hear your perspectives on this, having shifted in your careers from consulting leaders to in-house leaders. Does the shift I am referring to resonate with your experience? If so, do you think the shift is in the correct direction? How does the design consultancy leader better sell and genuinely augment their training to be more attractive to in-house teams? I am very much enjoying listening to the podcast and look forward to what’s in store. Thanks a ton for putting it together and out there.” Okay, so that was his email. There’s a lot to chew on there. And Jesse, it sounds like you’ve got, you’re just bursting with responses and notions. Jesse: Yeah. Peter: Set forth! Our Thoughts Jesse: Well, thank you very much, Mr. Rat for sharing your perspective. This definitely resonated with me a lot. This phenomenon that Mr. Rat is seeing from his perspective as a design leader who has worked in consulting who assumed that in-house opportunities would be fairly available to him given the skill set that he’s developed, and now discovering that those in-house opportunities are looking for something different because the practice of design in-house has evolved into something very different than, I think that’s true. I feel like the term UX, UX designer as a role, and UX as a function in the marketplace, has bifurcated, that depending on the organization that you’re looking at, and depending on the way that they have structured the work that they do and their priorities as an organization, what that UX role is and what that UX function is, can be a couple of very different divergent things. One is UX as our Mr. Rat is describing, as it has been practiced in consultancies, which has to do with highly collaborative blended teams. You’re going through user needs analysis and concept development and lightweight prototyping, this traditional UX process as Adaptive Path taught for many years, as has been taught in a variety of interaction design programs out there over the years. We’ve seen UX blow up into something that a lot of organizations can point to as a real driver of value and really kind of table stakes for them to even be in the market. But this highly collaborative and much more fluid exploration of ideas was not necessarily a clean fit for the way that those organizations went to market generally, especially in these tech companies that he’s talking about, the FAANG+ companies where they are these huge, digital product production lines. And that whole messy bundle of things that we call UX, and consultants continue to practice as UX, it’s really hard to fit into that production line. The production line needs design to be something that is atomic, something that is repeatable, something that is a lot less bespoke, ideally, that can fit designers into a larger process that makes them look as much like engineers or other kinds of interchangeable, replaceable production line workers. And so this production UX is the UX that you learn if you go to a bootcamp. It’s the UX that you learn in a lot of these “Get your UX certificate in 90 days” kind of programs that are training people for a very specific production job. Which is focused almost entirely on high-fidelity prototyping. And to Mr Rat’s point, the management background required to run that team is something very, very different from the skills that he’s developed as a leader in consulting. But I’d love your thoughts on it as you have been on your own journey with in-house leadership and the transfer of what you learned as a consultant to being an in-house leader. Peter: I think, one, I want to validate Mr. Rat’s thesis. I think what he’s seeing is generally true or a totally fair read on the situation. And Jesse, what you’ve just laid out holds with much of what I’ve seen. There’s, when I first left consulting and went in-house, my first significant in-house job being a Groupon, I inherited a team of product designers who looked at companies like Facebook as the model for how design should work. And that model was largely around visual interaction design, with the ability of these product designers to do some coding so that they could build their own designs. And that was it. That was the the Alpha and Omega of design to these product designers that I inherited. And I was taken aback, because it left out 75% of what I consider design, and not only was this common view of product design much narrower, there was a smug superiority that these in-house product designers had with respect to consulting designers because they shipped stuff, man. They built stuff that people used, and consulting design, you know, you get to work on pretty stuff, you get to work on signature concepts and ideas, but that stuff never gets shipped. And consultants just, you know, hand over a design and then they leave and they’re not there to really put their shoulder in and to get something out the door. And the superior smugness that the product designers had about that I took issue with, but they raised a legitimate point, around one of the big challenges of designing within a consulting context. And part of the reason I left consulting to go in-house was to be where those thousand little decisions are made that affect what ultimately goes out the door. So, at Adaptive Path, we often were brought in as consultants, because the existing internal team didn’t have the strategic capabilities that design leaders realized they needed for tackling some piece of work. Jesse: Right, right… Peter: We were told, like, we don’t have anything like you in-house, we have a bunch of perfectly good UI designers, but when we need to figure out kind of where we’re headed, we don’t have the horses internally to do that. So that’s why we’re bringing you in. So in-house digital design has, I think, always tended towards production and delivery orientations. And in-house digital design has always found itself as essentially a handmaiden to engineering and development processes. It exists to make technology go; it did not exist to realize new business value. And what’s starting to happen though, and I think there’s some interesting confusion around this, is some companies do recognize that design can unlock new business value. So they’re trying to bring in folks with that bent and that orientation. But then you get this internal conflict or contradiction, where these companies bring in visionary strategic designers to pull the company forward, but the practices for doing that run contrary to the standard practices of a technology-driven or business-driven company. And one of, I guess, three things happens. Often as not, the design leader just decides it’s not worth the fight and figures out how to accommodate with the dominant culture. And so you lose some of that magic. Sometimes the design leader just bounces out. It’s just like, “this won’t work and we shouldn’t have tried this.” And they leave and they go back to old practices. And very rarely, but occasionally, a design leader is, I think, able to unlock and demonstrate a new way of working and help others realize that, yeah, there are other ways of tackling these kinds of problems. That last one is by far the rarest… Jesse: Yeah… Peter: …because it requires culture change and transformation in some of the stuff we’ve talked about earlier. And that’s just–that’s just hard. Jesse: Hard. Slow. Peter: It’s time consuming. And these design leaders are often like, “Why am I spending so much time and effort trying to push this boulder up the hill when I could go somewhere else that actually understands what I’m doing and just do what I do.” What I’m starting to see are at least companies of a certain size, figuring out how they can have their chocolate in their peanut butter. How they can have strategic visionary customer centered design that’s driving new business value. Jesse: Sort of big UX. Peter: Yeah, big UX and the more delivery oriented UI slash UX working in scrum teams executing on the specific features and functionality that need to be shipped. So I think when you achieve a certain size, and you have savvy enough leadership, there’s a recognition that it doesn’t need to be one or the other. You can have both. But I think what often happens is, particularly in these tech companies, they’ve never been in an environment where there was strategic design. They don’t know what they’re missing. Jesse: Right? Well, yeah, that’s true. Peter: It’s asking a fish to understand what it’s like to breathe air when all they’ve ever done is breathe water, they’d have no idea what even what you’re talking about. Jesse: There’s another part of this, that I, I feel like I’ve witnessed. I have a feeling you’ve witnessed as well, over the last decade or so, which is the rise of the fetishization of the concept of “product” in the Valley and among those companies that are strongly influenced by what happens in the Valley. The reason that they don’t have experience with strategic design work is that those decisions that would be made in the course of a strategic UX, human- centered design process are being made by these product guys (and they are guys by and large.) Everybody was trying to figure out the secret of Steve Jobs’ alchemy as a leader, and the consensus that came out of it was that he was the ultimate product guy. He was looking at everything through the lens of how do we compose these software technologies and hardware technologies and all of the new manufacturing processes and all of the different stuff that goes into making Apple’s products and was able to bring that together into a holistic view of what the ultimate product should be that got delivered to people. And so the VCs looking to fund startups got to asking, like, who’s your product guy? Where’s your product guy? And every company started having a chief product officer or a VP of Product or product became a function where it wasn’t before. And all of those things that were already underway as part of strategic design processes, the product guys, which basically this is a role that owns nothing but somehow also owns everything, decided that that piece was the piece that they could own. Which was setting strategic direction and definition of a product vision and north star, those kinds of things. None of them are doing it from a place of design because none of them are designers, none of them have design experience. None of them have design education. They are using the tools that their VC advisors are giving them. And none of those have anything to do with design or, frankly, with human centered principles. Peter: What I find funny, having spoken at a few different product conferences, is how product leaders, on stage, when talking about how they need to develop a craft of product management, end up re-inventing user experience practice from 15 years ago. Jesse: Yeah, because that’s the domain that they’ve claimed for themselves. That’s the… Peter: That’s the problem. Exactly. Jesse: They aren’t aware of all the work that’s been done to actually develop ways to solve these problems. Peter: I think that’s true. I gave a talk, the first time I gave it was at UX Week. It was originally titled “UX is Strategy, Not Design.” The thesis of the talk is that the practices of UX had gotten too closely aligned with design and delivery when in fact, much of the value of user experience work, the research, the prototyping, the ideating, the figuring out what the problem is, was strategic. And when I first gave this talk at UX Week, the first response came from, when she raised her hand, Christina Wodtke said, “What you defined was product management,” and I had not worked with any product managers who worked in the way that I had been discussing, which was around formulating strategy developing customer centered business cases, considering a lot of ideas, figuring out the one and then as you go through delivery, kind of orchestrating that experience. And she said, “Well, that’s product management.” And I’m like, “Not that I’ve ever seen.” And this was a couple years into having left Adaptive Path. What I’ve seen over time, though, is that there is a subtle strain of product management that does do some of these UX things. You have conferences like Mind The Product and this rise of a community of product managers, and I think what they’ve realized, as they’ve started interacting with one another, is that there is no consistent practice for product management. Over the last 20, 25 years, digital product design, UX design, has developed a practice such that you can take a designer in any one of these companies and they can move to any one of these other companies, and within a week they are able to be productive because the standards and practices of how we do design work have been pretty well established in this industry. You can’t do that with product managers. How a product manager behaves at Facebook is different than how they’re going to behave at Slack, is different thing to how they’re going to behave at Microsoft is different than how the…

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