Finding Our Way

Jesse James Garrett and Peter Merholz

UX design pioneers and Adaptive Path co-founders Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett discuss the evolving challenges and opportunities for design leaders.

Episodes

Mentioned books

Jun 6, 2025 • 53min

55: The Maker Mindset Connecting Product, Design, and Engineering (ft. Todd Wilkens)

Feb 8, 2025 • 49min

54: At the Intersection of Design and Business, Be The Anomaly (ft. Roger Martin)

Jan 4, 2025 • 57min

53: Leading Design Through Continual Evolution (ft. Peter Skillman)

Transcript Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities Jesse: and challenges Peter: of design and design leadership, Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. 2025 is the 100th anniversary of the Centralized Design Group at Dutch manufacturing powerhouse Philips. Current Head of Philips Design, Peter Skillman, joins us to share lessons from Philips’ century of design innovation, from light bulbs to the compact disc to healthcare technology. We’ll also talk about the cultural factors that support design influence, what he learned and had to unlearn from his time in Silicon Valley, and how the game for design leaders has fundamentally changed in recent years. Peter M.: Our guest today with us is Peter Skillman, a design leader who’s been working for quite a while with experience at Palm Computing, Nokia, Microsoft, Amazon, and now Philips. Thank you for joining us, Peter. Peter S.: It is an honor to be here after, you know, connecting with you for so many years now. Peter M.: Let’s start with what you’re up to now. What does it mean to be the global head of design for Philips? History of Philips Design Peter S.: Let’s start with, like, on January 5th, 1925, Louis Kalff was the very first head of design for Philips. And what’s kind of interesting is how his legacy is still a key part of, visible influence on, the identity. And he challenged Anton Philips back in 1925 by sending this letter. This letter essentially said the advertising that Philips makes is not have the same standing and greatness in the importance of the company. In an edited way, he basically said, the advertising isn’t good enough. Hire me to come fix it. And the Philips wordmark at that point, there were 25 different versions of it. And essentially the very first part of design at Philips, since it was a light bulb company, it all began with light, by unifying the entire visual identity. And he was around for a long time, working with some other great designers like Cassandra, who worked on the posters. And he also worked on the logo, which is stars, which represent light. And then also the waves, which represent communication. And today, data is the new light. And insights are the new communication. So it’s kind of come full circle in terms of its meaning as a health tech company, that’s looking at prediction and AI as a means of driving better care for more people. So that was, like, the beginning. And, you know, you asked me like, what does it mean? And if I’m really transparent, you know, I’ve shown some vulnerability, you know, with my team and like, maybe like most high performance people, like it’s really scary. Like, I’ve had, I may have this facade that like, I’m on top of everything, but like, sometimes I fear I’m not worthy of this place in history. And I, fear that I’ll mess up this huge legacy. ‘Cause I’m that eighth leader of design in Philips’ history. And Philips has probably won more awards than any design company in the history of the world, right? And so like sometimes the responsibility is pretty heavy. And I remind my team that I’m human and I’m trying to do my best to basically hold up to all of those great leaders over the past, you know, people like Stefano Marzano and Rainn Versema and Louis Kalff and Robert Bleich and, you know, Sean Carney, is like this long list of people that, really made a difference in influencing society. Jesse: And I would think that in addition to your own standards for your performance that come from this legacy of previous leaders and previous accomplishments, there are also certain expectations that you’re feeling as well, given the history of design at Philips and the history of design’s influence at Philips. And I wonder how those expectations, those perceptions of how design is meant to contribute at Philips, how that influences how you make decisions as a leader. Peter S.: I think that you’re inheriting this tradition, like, let’s talk about legacy first, right, that involves maintaining consistency and functionality in the design, brand unification, and a clear focus on empathy. I mean, Philips, is, like, the first company that invented ESG, like way back in 1920s Philips was doing tuberculosis screening for all of its employees and then for all of Eindhoven and then scaled that to all of the Netherlands and at the same time set up things like corporate housing and healthcare for all employees. Like that didn’t exist back then. And disability insurance, like these things were really new. And, so I feel like what’s unique about Philips is that. there’s all this legacy, but care and empathy form the basis of how decisions and trade offs are made as we look at the next hundred years of our future. ‘Cause we, respect our legacy, but we have to look forward, you know, we can’t look backwards. And, I think that has a part of how we communicate, with leaders and partners and our employees and new hires, that is really different than the ethos that I found in Silicon Valley. Peter M.: So you’re talking about looking forward. I’m curious what role design has played in Philips’s evolution and shifting, right? You mentioned it started with light bulbs. It’s now a health tech company. And what you are being tasked for in terms of that ongoing evolution, what role is design playing to drive change versus, maybe, enabling change. ‘Cause so often design can be seen as, you know, when it started at Philips, yes, it was brand. It was advertising. That’s not core value. That’s, kind of, related value. Now, it feels like design is woven into more core value realization within Philips. And, I’m interested in the mechanisms by which that happens, by which you take part in that. Peter S.: I mean, let’s talk about the evolution. So in the early years, twenties and thirties, you know, it was all about that visually identity and presenting a consistent visual identity. It’s funny, if you go back to Philips’s history, like, it wasn’t profitable for the first three years, like it was 18 93, And then they got a order for 50,000 light bulbs for the winter palace for the czar of Russia. Like that was the moment at which Philips became profitable. And people forget that there were hundreds of light bulb companies. Why did Philips survive and thrive for so long to become the innovation company that it is today? And you have to go back to Gerard Philips, and Louis Kalff and many of the leaders, like today, even Roy Jacobs today, cares about the little things. No detail is small. Gerard Philips, I’ve had his notebook in my hands from 18 98. And there are extensive notes of everything that was going on in the shop floor. So this is a place where the leaders are really into the details. I’m expected to know about everything on every project. You know, it’s an almost impossible task given the scale of the company, but, the ethos of leadership here is that you’re not a manager. You have to be a designer first or actually deeply participate in whatever your role is. Individual contributor work may be five or 10 percent of my time, but I do get involved in individual, you know, contributions. And I think that at a lot of large leadership positions, it becomes a lot more managerial or role based and, you know, we’re really about rolling our sleeves up and caring about those details, and you lead by example. So it started with that visual identity, where there was this history of leaders being involved in the details. And then, you know, from the 40s to the 80s, you know, is really a transition to product design. And we’re talking about consumer products, domestic appliances, and then, you know this design evolved with Knut Rahn and Robert Bleich into doing centralized design leadership, evolved to a point where there was a design and review process that became the model for many other large corporate companies at the time. They even had this like giant round table with like a Lazy Susan in it. They would put, like, products down on top of it and evaluate every detail and decide, like, yes, we have to change this. This isn’t ready to go. This has to go back. And of course, a lot of that was industrial design focus. And so huge transition from, you know, an industrial company making light bulbs at scale, to products that it was aesthetics as it relates to self-esteem. And then the connection from there to doing things like personal shavers and grooming, where it really had an impact on how people felt about themselves and I think that, you know, if you look at companies, it was only Sony and Braun that had that level of design orchestration that was occurring centrally at the time, where design wasn’t just a part of the organization that was like an agency producing work by order from the businesses, but this was a role that was an equal product stakeholder at the table. Which is very different than how design was treated in many early, you know, large innovation companies. And so, then there was this big pivot, you know, we’re starting visual identity, product design, the next wave is experience design. So this is when we went from product-centric to an increasing focus on healthcare technology and user experience. And I think you know, at that point, you’re delivering value by truly understanding customer needs and working backwards from the customer, trying to understand the context they’re in, doing contextual inquiry, like the evolution of the customer, co-create happened during this evolution, as we started to move into really, you know, becoming a health tech company. And that co-creation was, you know: step one, discover and research the context. And then step two is like framing and putting those needs in context. And then step three is ideating where you’re generating solutions and then, four, delivery. And I think that process, doing it with customers, together, with them essentially participating in the design work, was something that was like really, really new and led to what is, I think the fourth major transition in our history, which is from visual identity to product design, to experience design, to now predictive and insight-driven experiences. And I think that’s a really significant change. Jesse: It’s interesting also to think about what you’ve inherited from the organization and its history of design being an equal product stakeholder, as you describe it, which suggests to me that there’s a value proposition for design that’s already well understood at the executive level before you ever stepped in the door at Philips. How Philips Succeeds Peter S.: Yeah. I mean, this is amazing, but like a year ago, two years after I arrived, Roy, the CEO, and he had talked to me, so I knew it was coming, announced, What are the core impact drivers of Philips? Those are: innovation, because we’re a hundred and thirty year company of continuous innovation actually moving through and transitioning through major, I mean, we’re a TV company for a while, we produced, you know, vacuum cleaners and air fryers and, you know, like light bulbs. We don’t do this anymore. We don’t do consumer radios. We don’t do VCRs. We co-invented the compact disc with Sony, and we’re not in those industries anymore because we continuously evolve based on how the market dynamics change. And if you look at the evolution of first Japan Inc, and then Korea Inc, in many of those areas, these were areas where the supply chain ownership and cost basis didn’t allow Philips to continue having a leadership position in those segments. And so the leadership really carefully looked at what are the areas where we can continue to drive value for customers. Where we could maintain often a premium position in those markets. And health tech was one of the areas where we have and continue to show innovation that competitors can’t match. We own the majority of, you know, the hospital patient monitor market as an example. And there we’re looking at things like, with this incredible amount of data, we can predict hemodynamic instability in a patient hours before a life threatening event occurs, and then recommend a protocol to take action that saves that person’s life. That’s not something that was even possible before large language models emerged. But very quickly, we can take advantage of our position to actually deliver better care for more people. And I think, you know, going back to your original question, like, how did Philips maintain its position? Well, it came from that history of innovation, and then the other two impact drivers. Those other two impact drivers are design and sustainability. And so we have a comms framework where we are investing in the legacy of communicating those impact drivers, innovation, design, sustainability, because that’s where we are differentiated from most of the other companies. And it helps us maintain a position as an equal product stakeholder, but note, we’re not design led. In fact, I really don’t like the term design-led. It’s terrible because it’s so cocky to assume that everything is going to be led by design when, you know, all of the other influences, clinical, marketing, brand, you know, product, marketing, engineering, et cetera, matter so much. And so we’d like to think of a model more where it’s overlapping circles. And so I want engineering and marketing in design space doing some design work. I want the designers coding and working on product specs and PRDs and basically influencing that. And so we play our position, but we also are often really outside of our swim lane. Which is threatening to the organi–, this is not easy. There’s conflict that comes from doing that. Psychological Safety Peter M.: Is that an intentional conflict? Is that a positive creative tension that you sometimes hear about in organizations? Or is this just kind of a byproduct of your leadership and prior design leadership and how you operate? Peter S.: You know, I think if you go back to, you know, what is psychological safety, you know, and look at Amy Edmondson’s stuff, you know, on psychological safety, it doesn’t mean that everyone’s being nice. It actually means that you are openly challenging people, but in a very transparent way. You are never attacking them. You’re only challenging them and in a unique way, it’s so central to Dutch culture. Like this is a Dutch company originally, and those value systems are part of every site, right? And this comes from John Locke and Spinoza and a culture where there wasn’t an entrenched king or elite class that drove decision making, and since a third of the country is actually under sea level. Amsterdam is like two meters under sea level. It meant that any one region or small village could basically break through a dike and wipe out a third of the country. And so power became distributed. So what that means is this thing called poldering. A polder is actually the land that’s below a dike is a polder. And poldering means that everyone has to become aligned, and listened to, and challenged in this really open egalitarian way. And so, you know, often it means a ridiculous amounts of alignment to get decisions done, but then everyone really marches forward. And so it’s not top down, hierarchical the way European, maybe many German companies are more top down. Many West Coast companies are top down, but the Dutch companies are not. And I think that is a unique competitive advantage because it’s also highly tied to a tolerance for other people in terms of equality, access to health care, and how people take care of its citizens, et cetera, and a freedom to express yourself without judgment. It’s like that empathy actually becomes a competitive strength in how we care for our customers. And the transcendent purpose of better care for more people. Philips’ Distinct Culture Jesse: So this definitely suggests to me that you had to change some of your ways of doing things when you came into this organization, that the models from your years in Silicon Valley perhaps were not directly translatable to this new cultural context. And I wonder where you found yourself having to adapt the most in leading in this sort of decentralized fashion. Peter S.: Great question. That is a great question. First, let’s talk about why I came here in the first place. I came here because of the transcendent purpose that what you do matters. And there are many examples where we’re saving people’s lives, every day. Like there are moments where you actually have goose bumps from the stories that you hear about that man who falls off of an exercise bike in Seattle and has a heart attack, and then he’s saved by a Philips defibrillator. And you know, they, stand back and nobody knew how to use this thing before. And it’s so clear and they rip off the pads and put them on his chest and, press the button and it describes, you know, three, two, one clear, move out of the way. And that saved his life, right. But that’s not the end of the story. Part of the story that is unique about Philips, tied to purpose, is they scan the device. And then they got everyone who assembled that product, with him, personally, to connect to, like, what you do as it relates to patient safety and quality, saved your life. And like, there’re moments where, like, I’m almost in tears about how deeply personal that stuff is and, that’s not manufactured, that’s like really authentic, but so okay, there’s my example of purpose. The second reason I came is because the people, and I was lucky that Roy was actually one of the people that interviewed me, and I’ve never met a CEO like him, other than Satya, he, those two together are, are at the same level, I think, in terms of excellence and leadership and empathy and values and integrity and yeah. Like, one, I’ll tell you a story as it relates to people. Like, one night that we were doing a a user test. And that user test, there was a video, you were dialing into somewhere in Germany, there was a clinician who had this 3D printed housing with an iPad in it, you know, with a new UX that we have been working on for hospital patient monitoring. And it was going pretty well. And I just thought, you know, I’m just going to see if Roy is interested in seeing this, you know, it’s like taking a risk to the, how often do you message the CEO? But I just thought it was really interesting that he understands what… how things are built and process and made at Philips. And so I sent him a message on the internal Teams channel and he replied in like five milliseconds and he was waiting for a plane, you know, he’s at the airport and he dialed into the meeting and then the other designers in the call, it was like an 8:30 at night, really weird, you know, testing with, you know, there’s Roy Jacobs, you know, pops up on the header and they’re like, what, you know, like the CEO is like watching it and he never turned on his camera and he didn’t say anything, but he just listened, right. And so like the fact that you have a leader that’s willing to dive down into that level of Gemba, it’s one of the reasons why I’m proud to be here. Okay. So, purpose, people. And the last reason is that there is so much work to do here. And I felt like I could really drive impact. We have a lot of work to become a first class software company, because we’re an innovation company that now is maybe almost two-thirds software. Building Better Software Peter S.: We are world class at the hardware. We have a lot of work to do and the reason why Roy and others wanted to recruit me here is because of a digital acumen, you know, around things like DORA metrics and software quality and UX telemetry and design language adoption and how we deliver platforms and really up our game digitally. And, what struck me is how little resistance I get to driving those changes. The other thing is that… let’s take the best things that I’ve learned from Amazon. Amazon is the highest execution acumen I’ve ever seen in my career. It was two very difficult years that I had. It is not easy. There are moments where you’re grinding your teeth, right? And the psychological safety at Philips is vastly higher. But I will say that, like, if you want to see excellence in execution, AWS is a great place to look at. Amazing depth of mechanisms. And so some of those mechanisms, so, you know, captured in my head, you know, preserved all their intellectual property, of course, I haven’t challenged that. But those things that in terms of thinking about how you drive excellence in interviewing, or even writing. I started a Powerful Writing at Philips class to up the level of our communication. And so like you asked me, how did I change? And what is so amazing is I didn’t really have to change. The culture’s so welcoming of that challenge of raising the game. It’s the least conceited culture I’ve ever been part of, in terms of people are not threatened by ideas. You know you will be asked and challenged and like people will argue with you, but, it’s not political or personal nature ever. And so that makes it, you know really easy. And then the other thing that I think has helped, because, you know, it’s always hard when you’re trying to bring about evolution or change in a particular area, is that we built a design agenda and the design agenda is a response to the business strategy as a compass for everything that we do and it’s composed of four themes: care, unite, simplify and elevate. And each of those four themes, Care, Unite, Simplify, Elevate, have a set of guiding principles that each design leader thinks about. And it’s how we evaluate the trade offs that we’re making so that we maintain the excellence that Philips has delivered for the next 100 years. And I think that being able to communicate and tell those stories has been a really powerful and important part of how we’ve driven, you know, those kinds of changes and… But I would say that the one place where I have changed substantially is maybe less related to coming here, but part of my own lessons, is that I’m not focused at all on my own position anymore. I’m more focused on unlocking the creative potential of other people. And I don’t care about my ego. I don’t care about comp, you know, like, I realized in, maybe too late, maybe 10 years ago, but I started to, but like, it’s really true today that my ego is not wrapped up around the role and I’m really having so much fun recognizing that the more that I give back to others, the better the outcome is. Peter M.: I want to go back to the design agenda. Agenda is something that, Jesse and I talk a fair bit about, and you mentioned these four principles. I’m curious though, what is the Peter Skillman agenda, right? You have been granted… Peter S.: yeah. Peter M.: …a role, an authority, a leadership position, and with that typically comes some idea of where you would like to take things, right? You’re not there simply to mind the store. You’re there to realize some evolution or change likely. What is that? Peter S.: I have four priorities right now and it comes from how can we deliver the best industry leading experiences to deliver better care for more people. And it’s always grounded in that transcendent purpose, right? And so if I look at what are the threats to the next 100 years right now, it’s around software quality, UX telemetry services, experiences, and design language adoption. Like, how do we ensure that every single component is code backed with design tokens so that we increase agility by 50 times. And, you know, that effort at Amazon took four and a half years. At Microsoft, it took seven and a half years to drive full adoption of things like, you know it’s called Polaris at AWS, it’s called Fluent at Microsoft. And there’s a lot of infighting about that adoption. But then some folks at Microsoft, with Satya’s support, delivered on One ES, or one engineering system. What happened when they executed on that, is that they were able to deliver Copilot in like three months, across all of Office. That level of agility was never part of the Microsoft platform level software that was completely disunified. You know, look at Outlook. I was the head of Outlook when I was at Microsoft. And If you look at Win32 and Mac and OWA and mobile, though all those code bases were completely disunified, every single button had a separate instance of code. And so it meant that when you want high agility, you couldn’t deliver on that. And it took them seven and a half years. But then what I saw was the insane amount of agility that you get. Now, one thing I love is that, you know, Satya and Roy, they talk every quarter, right? So they’re talking about this stuff that like Roy knows what DORA metrics are, you know, for developer productivity, you know, like, how cool is that, you know? So my agenda is about ensuring that we have the foundation to build an amazing future, right? Like, I’ve become a software evangelist and that’s where I’m honestly quite often out of my swim lane. And that gets to like how design leaders of the future– and you can ask me later about the design freak out, I have some super opinionated thoughts on that one– but like, I think that all of these things represent how I have to ensure that we have the conditions for success. Peter M.: When you say “out of your swim lane,” do you mean you’re now swimming in engineering waters? ‘Cause software seems to be your swim lane. Peter S.: If you look back historically, you might think that my swim lane would be industrial design. Industrial design is amazingly, like, superb. Color materials and finish thinking and, you know, we had a thousand colors. We went down to 100, and that saves incredible amounts of money and improves sustainability, like all of our systems and mechanisms around, you know, production and evaluations of first shots. And I mean, you know, I was forged in the cauldron of collecting first shots out of multi-cavity injection molding tools in Asia and Taiwan and Mexico and, absolutely getting into details about different aluminum grades, you know, and, how they anodize… Peter M.: over chamfers… Peter S.: You’re right, that was part of my DNA. And I don’t have to weigh in on C2 surfaces here, and ellipses rather than radii on, you know, surface continuity. Like, everybody knows how to do that here. Like, they’re really good. But on the software side, I really have to work on providing industry backed examples of how we achieve that level of agility that you see at AWS and Amazon and the big magnificent seven, right? Because, those other companies are really truly world class at that. Managing At Scale Jesse: I wonder about how you manage all of this at the scale that you’re operating, and especially as you have a leadership that expects you to be conversant with detail. Sometimes you are right there in the weeds as an individual contributor. Sometimes you have to maintain kind of a higher altitude and I wonder how you set those priorities for yourself and how you choose where you lean in and how you lean in. Peter S.: This is where again, being reforged in the cauldron of AWS, I learned some really excellent mechanisms about how to communicate. We have a QBR quarterly, like we review every single project in a condensed form and a document and all the design extended leaderships review have visibility into what’s happening across 18 different businesses, right? So that kind of clarity allows us to help maintain things like simplify, unify, elevate and care, like, the design agenda then becomes part of that. Like, Oh, you’re working in a very similar kind of use case. Let’s share Figma files and make sure that, you know, we’re, leveraging the same module or that we’re delivering a unified experience. Because what you want is you want every experience at Philips to be unified. I mean, obviously the consumer side, a little bit different in personal health, but you want to ensure that you have communication to ensure that that excellence happens. So that’s one mechanism and we do that both at the central team level and all also at the business team level. And then we have guilds. So we have nine guilds. Data and AI and we have product and spatial and we have design thinking and we have operations and tools and we have digital and all of those, sustainability, all those guilds meet to raise the bar on that particular specialty so that anyone in the company, regardless of whether they’re in design or not, can invest in ensuring exactly what is the top, most relevant, most meaningful thing happening in the industry and they learn and share so that we continue to raise the bar. That’s elevate. Then we have obviously all hands. Then we have some really amazing mechanisms around the career ladder. We communicate to people, here’s how you get presented. We have a set of six lenses that we use to evaluate promotion. We do promo docs. I learned this from Amazon. Amazon has the best mechanisms for evaluating talent of any company that I ever experienced. And so I can leverage things that I learned there, and recreated from memory with, and then optimize them and change them, so that they’re relevant in the Philips context, because the Philips cultural context is very, very different. So it’s unique. It’s not Amazon’s thing, but it’s what the things I learned about those mechanisms for delivery for communication. Also, for writing strat facts, strategic narratives, PR, FAQs. That’s actually been adopted. Because working backwards from the customer through a structured document of high information density with like an open commenting culture in the document. So if you’re not in the meeting, if you missed it for some reason, you go back and read it. It’s far more inclusive. So this is also really good for, inclusion and diversity and ensuring that people that are neurologically diverse or introverted become part of it. Peter M.: You, mentioned the guilds and that made me realize that we hadn’t kind of level set just in terms of, like, what design means at Philips, like, where are you situated? Who is your boss? What are your areas of, what are your functional areas, right? If we think of design as an organizational function, it sounds like industrial design, software design, maybe design thinking, like give us some, clarity in terms of your organizational situation and kind of size and scale, just so we have a… Peter S.: sure. Peter M.: baseline to work. Peter S.: When I assumed Sean Carney’s role, I had you know, over 600 and we went through a pretty substantial reorganization under Roy’s leadership and there, it was really important at that time that we go from a horizontal organization to a verticalized organization. This has happened many times throughout our history. And the design leadership, regardless of whether you’re vertical or horizontalized, so, what’s really interesting is that unifying leader, regardless of whether they report to you or not, has always been present. And I was part of a group, along with my boss, who is the head of innovation and strategy. So I’m one layer away from the CEO, right? I’m an L3, level three. and honestly, nobody, no design leader, should report to the CEO. It is way better being one layer away. It means that you have an escalation path. It means that you’re not pulled into a lot of discussions that are not relevant to ensuring you raise the bar. The best place to be as a design leader in any organization is L3. Peter M.: Just so we’re clear. L1 is the CEO. L2 is your boss and you are L3. Peter S.: That’s correct. Right. Exactly. So I had all 600 in 12 different studios, 35 different nationalities all over the world, you know, it’s Blumenau, Bangalore, Shanghai, Haifa– experiencing a rather intense, obviously, tough place to be in that studio, so we are highly empathetic with what’s happening there. Then we have Eindhoven and Amsterdam, which is kind of treated like one studio, and Bothell and Cambridge, Massachusetts. So it’s a distributed team worldwide. And so, for example, we have other mechanisms. When we do all hands, we have to do two, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We always have two, so that we are mindful of double time zones. And then we have you know, quarterly all hands and we share information and then there’s, like, newsletters and there’s all kinds of these mechanisms. Shifting from Horizontal to Vertical Peter S.: So we went from horizontal, right, and what happened is we got really, really big, and there was a lot of research that design was doing unilaterally that the business didn’t necessarily want done. And so by verticalizing… so design evolved a little bit as an agency during that period. And so by embedding design back into the business, it absolutely doubled down on trust, and that alignment, like now that we’re verticalized and I don’t have, you know, I have a third of the reports or, you know, a little less than a third of all the reports. I have more influence now than I did before because of the trust that has resulted from that restructuring. And honestly, there is no one best structure. You actually need to move from one to the other based on what is happening on the ground and what the organization needs at that given time. I used to be quite opinionated about this, but then I learned that you actually want, you want both. The Big Design Freak Out Jesse: So let’s talk about the freak out. You brought it up. Peter S.: Yeah. Jesse: What’s going on out there, Peter? Peter S.: So, I think that, first of all, at Philips, design is an equal stakeholder. We sit at the table and there is no design freak out at Philips. And for listeners, the design freak out, there was this Fast Company article that came out, and several others, that essentially said that design has lost influence and power and provided a bunch of examples. And I think that those examples might’ve been true. You know, my thesis is that that article about the destruction of the creative class got it wrong. It isn’t the erosion of leaders. It’s that the existing leaders, in that cohort failed to recognize that the game had changed. And I can give you some examples. You know, like actually what’s amazing is you have a new series of significant growth in amazing female leaders like Daniela Jorge, we talked about Kat Holmes. Amy Godee, you know, is an example at Publicis and Sapient, you know, she’s a designer that, has a huge organization, right. And these are the designers that are thriving, and they’re the ones that are actually jumping out of their swim lane. And I think that there was a cohort of design leaders that got a little bit less humble about their position, and you could apply that they’ve lost a sense of their humility. You know, I think there are exceptions in the noose and the knives and the sort of Damien Hirst level of boutique influence that, but that stuff, you know, that doesn’t scale though. But when we’re talking about mainstream business, I think what’s changed is that bias to action and ownership for execution with a willingness to jump out of your swim lane, and absolutely be addicted to the learning associated with every single detail of how the business operates. There are great examples of, if you look at the fashion, Yves Saint Laurent and Anna Wintour and Coco Chanel and, Miuccia Prada, like all these people. Alexander McQueen. They’re in control for long periods of time. But now there’s a lot of turnover in fashion. You know, Virginie Viard just left Chanel. So if you look, the optics might suggest that there’s, you know, that’s happening in a lot of places. But I think that what happened is that the job requirements for CDO or for a leader of design really changed, because, it’s, everything is focused on execution. And I’m a judge for the IF UX design awards. And so this weekend I spent like 22 hours judging 375 UX entries. It’s insane. And I will tell you, it’s fascinating because it’s a window into what’s happening in UX in the next two years. And I will tell you that the Chinese and Korean, like, the amount of innovation that is happening there is crazy. There is a huge amount of entries that focus on the fact that, you know, ChatGPT blew design thinking and, you know, people are adding all these irrelevant AI things to the products. But I think that there’s a hunger and a competitiveness that is really starting to influence the work of others. And I think that basically some of us got complacent and we need to double down on the unavoidable truth in this world, is that there is no substitute for putting in that intense hard work and really focusing on doing whatever you need to do to drive the business. It’s interesting that you call out innovation in this because it seems to me that, for a lot of design leaders, innovation is the piece of the value proposition for design that gets lost with this focus toward execution. And so I wonder about how can design leaders keep the spirit of innovation alive in an environment where there’s so much focus on delivery. There was a period for Philips when there was a vast amount of money and time invested in doing long range vision projects. And I think that I’ve arrived at a different time in our business need. And, like, there is an incredible amount of innovation happening, but it’s focused on where we can drive unique value for better care for more people and, not like, okay, let’s envision, you know, the future of kitchens and, you know, 50 years and, spend, you know, a lot of money on, you know, custom copper, you know. Like those investigations, I think we’re part of that era and I’m not critical, in fact, you know, some of it is kind of lovingly, you know, produced work that gave people, you know, maybe a sense of their context and culture and how I should think about, you know, some esoteric thing that they’re working on, but, like, the world has changed. It is so radically competitive. It’s still innovation. It’s just not open ended exploration, right? I think that you’re just naive if you’re going to assume that that’s what leadership is like in today’s context. Every company, even look at Google, like Gen AI could potentially threaten the very existence of Google search as the dominant part of their revenue stream. I don’t know that to be true, but, that is certainly being discussed and so, like, constantly innovating means, like Philips has done for 130 years, that we’re gonna continue to evolve and find the place where we will deliver meaningful value to our… really to the customers that we care about. That’s where the heart, our heart is. Design Evolving Peter M.: You’re speaking the heart. I find myself wondering, as the game is changing, as you’ve explained it, right, a focus on execution, a focus on kind of nearer term relevance, and the need for designers to be more business conscious, you mentioned the complacency, right? Where it felt like these design leaders had kind of drifted away from a certain reality, a feet on the ground reality. I find myself wondering, what then is the heart of design? Design starts bleeding in to these adjacent functions as it gets more business savvy. And I’m wondering where you see that center of design being, is it empathy? Is it craft? Is it creativity? It… like, how do you talk about it? ‘Cause design can be, I mean, you mentioned a design thinking practice, right? Design thinking is about letting everyone else embrace design. Design can have a squishiness. And so I’m wondering what you do to kind of reify it so that there’s at least some center that holds when you talk about design at Philips. Peter S.: Well, let’s talk about what leadership is first. For me, leadership is creating clarity, delivering results, and then the third and most underappreciated part of this is, generating energy and enthusiasm. So like, what we do is to unlock the imagination and potential of everyone in the business. And I don’t think that having those constraints, that we’re focused in a given area and making sure that we’re also driving the execution means that you’re not doing exploration. We have this amazing research group you know, that’s about Hermione, my peer, and who is the next great leader of research. You know, Philips has a set of tools and business mechanisms to invest in new things. Basically it’s almost like Y Combinator, you know, like a startup farm, you know, to invest in those. And so there are a bunch of ways that you can do that, but they’re not unilateral decisions by somebody that wants to just try something out. There’s a structure and governance for evaluating those ideas, and ensuring that they either receive or, if they don’t hit their milestones, and they don’t get money moving forward. And it’s no different at Amazon. I mean, you would say that is also an innovation company. They have a part PRFAQ process and they allow for multiple products to be launched at the same time. I mean, at one time there were probably five different products that were doing anomaly detection and AIML, and they just wait and see which ones win and they keep them. Super frugal investment. I think that that’s, like, a great way to think about how you invest overall in your portfolio. Abby Godee, this incredible design leader at Sapient Publicis, and she’s also involved in, you know, organizational transformation, right? So, like it is design almost applied to HR, right? And so I think that, that’s, what’s different today to be effective as a design leader, what makes it really hard, is you have to master a radical number of things if you’re going to manage at this scale. Because you have to have fluency, and it’s not a narrow area of UX or industrial design or experience or even co-creation, etc. But it’s also like how you look at HR and how you look at like, you know, business and organizational structure. And it does mean that at this scale, that the personal commitment is pretty high, right? It’s not an easy job. You know there’s absolutely no substitute for doing the hard work. You never think small. Luck favors the prepared mind. You have to sell, sell, sell. Your ideas are your marketplace. You have to reframe failure. You have to break the rules. You have to shut your mouth and listen and learn and focus on others and not yourself. And doing all that simultaneously is really hard. And I’m still learning. And I just fear, like I, let’s go back to the beginning of this conversation. Like, I’m always afraid that I’m not going to be good enough. This is so big historically. Like, I refuse to be the person that let design down, our hundred years of legacy. Jesse: Peter, what do you think other design leaders should be paying closer attention to here as design enters this next phase? Peter S.: I think that there’s one unavoidable truth. There’s no substitute for putting in the work. That means a bias to action and ownership for execution. Execute, execute, execute. There are tons of expensive vision projects that don’t belong in a modern company. And if I look to Asia, the pace of that execution is insane. It’s just moving faster, right? So, we cannot get complacent, right? and I think that next leaders have to become vastly more focused outside of their domain swim lanes, HR, PM, dev. I think that everyone has to become fluent in AI, because it’s just fundamentally changed how we do work. AI Peter S.: I mean, for us, there’s three big things with AI. It’s amazing, we haven’t talked about AI yet. Isn’t that great? Let’s celebrate. The three things are the design tools have radically changed. You know, we’ve got AI and Morone, we’ve got our own internal enterprise version of, you know, C hat 4.0 and GPT. And we have Amazon Bedrock, and we have multiple models and we can produce an amazing persona that’s better than any of my career in like 30 seconds. I can just type in a new name, electric cardiologist, and it pops out the entire persona with a picture and pain points and everything. It’s like, it’s insane how much faster it’s made certain kinds of work happen. But it does not threaten our jobs at all. It does not. You just have to be able to use them or else you will get hurt. Spun out by others that do. The second thing that’s changed is insights and prediction. It allows us to deliver insights and deliver products with those insights. It’s called clinical intelligence. It’s like the idea of using data to make predictions, and that becomes a game changer in healthcare. The third thing that’s changed is that it’s radically personalized. First, at the cohort basis, you know, we would hope that we have data that’s based on female or male and, and that we leverage that personalized care to become even more detailed. If it gets all the way to your DNA, we’ll need to make sure that we’ll have pretty good security so that maintains your degree of privacy. But in the beginning, it should at least be cohort based. And then mechanisms for ensuring safety such as bump stops and human in the loop to know that you have, you know I think I’ve already agreed to some summary, or I’ve read it, and, yes I agree with that AI prediction or action that’s being taken. The second of course is that you have visibility that something is AI generated. And it could be through a blue ring, or it could be through an animated icon, so that you know whatever’s being served to you, it’s clear, it’s transparent, and that there’s also traceability for the people. But, okay, so there’s those tools. It’s personalization, and insights, and it’s radically different tooling for us. But then I think that the role of design is also to focus on the beautiful essentials, simplicity and speed, bridging the gap, it’s still, you know, an everyday fight to ensure that we focus on doing less better. What you remove is more important than what you put in. You should invest in building agility before you invest in new features. The unconventional wisdom is that if you address customers’ frustrations, rather than adding new features, often fixing and making better what you’re selling in the truck today, that’s far better then adding a bunch of new stuff. It’s just optimizing workflows in healthcare. There’s a crisis for our clinicians that spend 40 percent of their time entering data. And they’re getting farther and farther away from what brought them to the field in the first place, which is caring for people, right? And so that burnout is leading to a threat to the quality of care, and it’s also to the cost of care. And, the thing we need to focus on, the main task for Philips, right, for this, it’s workflow, and simplifying their lives, minimizing the number of clicks so that they’re more efficient. And when you apply AI, most of the… 95 percent of our value is just in treating the mundane, beautiful essentials. It’s not doing some extra high acuity AI task with a very expensive, complicated model. A lot of it is just, like, improving search. And so I think it’s really important to stay focused on the basics. It’s really easy to forget that. That’s the core of what design does. Peter M.: You’ve been at this for over 30 years, as Jesse and I have. You talk about the amount of work and effort it takes, even for you now, today, to maintain a level of your performance that you would consider acceptable. And when I hear that, I get exhausted. And so I’m wondering, what is driving you? Like what, what’s motivating you? Why are you still willing to, I’m sure, put in the long hours and get on planes and you know, whatever it takes in order to do this, what’s driving you? Peter S.: Let me ask you this. What motivates ambitious and creative people? Both Peter and Jesse. Tell me. Jesse: Growth, purpose, Peter S.: Okay. Jesse: Making things real. Peter S.: Awesome. I’ve been asking this question in interviews for 30 years. So I’m really interested in how people respond. Peter. Peter M.: I mean, when Jesse said purpose, your own sense of purpose, whatever, what, you know, we each have a thing that drives us that gives us meaning. And so that’s what… usually that. And so I’m curious if, is that it for you? And if it is, what is, that purpose for you? Peter S.: For me, I am on this earth to unlock the creative potential of other people. I figured out about 15, 16 years ago that that is the funnest thing for me. And when I’m done with Philips at some point in the future, I’m going to go teach part time. I love to teach. It’s really fun. And I mean that, that’s how I derive energy. That’s my purpose. The second thing is, Jesse, what you said so beautifully is growth, mastery. Like I am addicted to learning. And this place is an amazing place to learn. So that makes it really fun. And the work-life balance is still a lot better. I do not wake up at three in the morning, grinding my teeth. And I also have people that are so empathetic, you know, my weakness is that sometimes I can overwhelm people with my passion, and so I sometimes need to meter it back a little bit. And the second thing I have is that if I feel like I’m being undermined, I can become a little fragile, and then become less self aware. And so in cultures where I felt undermined, I’ve been less self aware and sometimes that’s run into problems. But, Philips is like, it’s really loving. And so it just makes it easy, like, because it’s fun. It’s just like relaxed. So anyway, we get to purpose and mastery. And then the third is self-direction, right? Autonomy. This is now, I’m referring to, you know, Steve Pink, you know, RSA.org. The autonomy is the other highly motivated thing is… I am not micromanaged at all by my boss. My boss is like completely like, you got it. Go drive it, right? Here are the constraints. And that makes it really fun cause I have a leadership team that is like welcoming of these changes. And so, you know, all those things like combined together, like that’s what’s driving me. Jesse: Peter, thanks so much for being with us. Peter S.: It was just an honor. Peter M.: This has been fantastic. Peter S.: Thank you so much. It was really fun. Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched the Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.

Dec 1, 2024 • 46min

52: Design at a Crossroads (ft. Audrey Crane)

Transcript Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities Jesse: and challenges Peter: of design and design leadership, Jesse: Welcome to the next phase. Joining us today to talk about what’s next for design is veteran Silicon Valley design and product strategy consultant Audrey Crane, who will share her perspective on the changing mandates for design among her clients, the power that consultants wield that in house teams don’t, and why sometimes the most effective design leaders are those who talk the least about design. Peter: So Audrey, excited to have you here to work through some of the topics that Jesse and I have been discussing for a few episodes now, on kind of where things are going, for design, design leadership. But before we dive into that, I think it would be helpful for our podcast audience who might not have met you, read you, heard of you, how do you introduce yourself? What do you do? How should people think of you out there in the world? Audrey: Yeah. Well, so Audrey Crane, I’m a, partner at DesignMap. So we’re a consultancy. Do I say we’re a design consultancy? I don’t know. I think that’s one of the things we’re going to be talking. Let’s say product strategy, with some design support, company. So we’re San Francisco based. We’ve been around for 18 years, and we do a lot of B2B, B2B2C, like, complex product strategy. But I’ve been around for a long time. I was working at Netscape in the mid-90’s. So I consider myself, I flatter myself, a graybeard of Silicon Valley. Peter: Does that mean you’ve been doing this work for almost 30 years? Um, Audrey: That can’t be right. But I was super lucky to be, you know, at Netscape with Marty Cagan. With, I worked for, for Marty. I worked for Hugh Dubberley. I was in the room when Marc Andreessen first started talking about the famous “good product manager, bad product manager” stuff. So it was the olden times, but those people are, in a lot of ways, I think more relevant. And I was super lucky to get to do that. Like most theater majors, you know, just like somehow landing in the middle of Silicon Valley during the dot com boom of the late nineties. Jesse: Your company, is called DesignMap, but you hesitate to call your work design. And obviously there’s, there’s something going on in that. And I’m curious about just your own relationship to design yourself as a creative professional. Audrey: I did study theater in college and I studied math as well. I studied a form of mathematics that’s like very theoretical. And so growing up, I think a lot of kids still are like, they’re good at math or they’re good at English. They’re good at one or the other. But theater in particular, as a creative outlet is really, really bounded, right? You have like the script and what you say and what other people say. And then on the other hand, the kind of math that I was doing, which was really like, by my senior year of college, we’re just writing proofs. Like there’s no numbers left anymore. And there’s actually a lot of intuition and creativity that goes into that. ‘Cause like of all the things that we know to be true about whatever kind of math we’re doing, like, what’s the next thing that’s going to get me to where I want to go. Even to the point where I mean, this is like the nerdiest thing I could possibly say, but like reading proofs that gave me goosebumps because they were just like so elegant, you know, and, and so smartly put together. And so when I graduated from college and I was like broke and happened to be able to, have done some tech work because my dad was an engineer, way in the olden days, I landed at Netscape. Solely because Hugh Dubberly saw my resume and was like, math and theater, like, that’s super weird. I got to meet this person. And then I got to work for him. And through him, I found that this design thing, which for me, at least is like a perfect match of empathy and creativity, but also like problem solving within boundaries towards a particular goal. And so it, matched my brain pretty well, that for me is like the creativity of constraints is really, really fun. And design is a place where I think still, like, a lot of people don’t know that it exists, that you, don’t have to be just like a highly creative, quote, unquote, right brain person or the other. Jesse: What’s your relationship to design these days in your practice? Audrey: I think that you can apply a design process or design thinking, if you must, to pretty much anything. So a lot of times now the design work that I’m doing is like, this client really needs this thing and understanding what the thing is that they really need like that by itself is like a listening and learning process. Sort of like when somebody goes to the doctor and says, I need this medicine. There’s a lot of questions to understand, like, what’s really going on and is this medicine really going to help you? Or is it something else? That and figuring out, like, what do we do that might help solve that problem, and can we do it within this timeframe and this budget, is actually like a pretty fun, creative process for me. It maybe sounds horrible and dry, but I really love it. And if we can’t help them, figuring out who can help them, and brokering that introduction. But at the end of the day, it’s still a problem. And I want to understand the problem and think through lots of different ways to solve it and figure out a path there. So that’s not to say that I don’t work on projects specifically. And sometimes I do, and that’s really fun. But a lot of times it’s more at that kind of second order, third order of design, if you like, from the, product. Now, is that strategy? I don’t know. Yeah. Peter: Well, and, reflecting on something you said at the outset, where you weren’t sure what to call DesignMap, which has the word design in its name, but you’re like, are we a design consultancy anymore? Which, you know, Jesse and I started Adaptive Path in 2001, and we called ourselves a user experience agency, and we didn’t use the word design in how we defined our work for years, because of associations with that word that we didn’t feel were appropriate for us. So let’s, get to that, you know, your company is called DesignMap, but you’re not sure if you’re a design consultancy. What’s up with that? Audrey: OK. We are a design consultancy. So I say that a little bit tongue in cheek, but if we think about what the market wants, does the market want design? You know, I’m not sure that if, I just approached somebody and I said, Hey, we offer design services, that anybody in the market at the moment is going to be like, “Oh, great, I need design services. That’s what I need. I need design services.” Right? They might need help with stakeholder alignment. They might need help kind of articulating a vision. They might need help solving you know, a problem where the usage of a product has plateaued and they need it to improve. All of these are things that can be solved with design. But I posted about this recently, and I think that what I’m seeing is that people are using the word design less, and it’s not just quote unquote, “speaking the language of the business,” which I think we’ve been talking about as a design profession for a while now, right? It’s not just being articulate in you know, whatever, TAM, what’s the total addressable market, but actually just only using those words and design just happens to be the tool that we’re using to solve whatever problem or opportunity we’re talking about. Peter: When you mentioned people are not using the word design anymore, who people are not using the word design anymore? Is it that prospective clients aren’t using the word design anymore? Is it the designers are wary of that word? Audrey: Who’s the they? Yeah. I mean, I think famously Katrina Alcorn, like, really put her finger on it when she left IBM and said whatever my next job is, is going to have the word product in the title. I remember a part of what she said was, I feel like I’m doing so much of what is maybe traditionally considered product anyway, like I might as well take the title and have a bit more control and it’s almost like the word product is hard and the word design is soft, somehow. So I think that was kind of the first famous moment. But then I have a lot of, friends who are VPs of design and at DesignMap, we have a voice of the customer program where we pay a recruiter to recruit VPs of design. And we sit and we talk with them for an hour. We do this as like a regular practice, like taking our vitamins, as they say, right? And when I hear my friends talk about it, see decks from VPs of design, it’s so striking. And they don’t even point it out to me, but the word isn’t even there. Like, I, just saw a VP of design, it was her budget for next year and her proposed budget had foundations, and investing in foundational work, and acceleration and all these other things. And I commented to her, you know, you’re a, she is a trained, like, dyed-in-the-wool career designer, like, and the word design doesn’t show up here. And she said, “Oh God, no, you know, absolutely not.” No, what this actually is, is it’s a design debt. What this thing over here is, is design systems and like heuristic review and improvements. So she like almost code switched with me. But when I’m talking about investing money in my team and in external support, that’s not the word that I’m using. It’s super interesting. And there’s, something about all of these things, right? Like how many years have you heard designers complain that they are having to do product managers’ jobs? Like not every designer and not every product manager, but I mean, I’m sure that I’ve heard designers talking about that for 15 years, right? And then, on top of that, this, not just being able to speak business-ese, but that’s all you’re speaking in, is really interesting to me. Peter: So yesterday I was onsite at a company for their internal design celebration that very much used the word design. Public company, 84,000 employees, lot of hardware, manufacturing. So when they talk design, they actually were talking a lot about industrial design. They had their Chief Product Officer show up at this event and talk about how he wants this business to be design-led. And I’m saying this not to disagree. I’m saying this to suggest, I think, the conversation is really scattered and lumpy. And in some contexts, design has become a dirty word or it has become minimized to mean production. And so like the leader that you were talking about, right, if they want to talk about stuff that isn’t pumping out assets for engineers to code, they have to use new language to get at what we used to call design or, you know, user experience practices. But then there’s still other companies that are celebrating the opportunity of design and want to be design-led and talk about Apple as a standard bearer. And I guess I’m trying to make sense of, this polyphony around the concept of design. This company that is celebrating design, when this Chief Product Officer talks about design, he had a fairly, I would say, narrow view of what it is. And he talked a lot about the emotional connection and the emotional engagement that design drives. So, while you’re talking about how design can be a tool to help I don’t know, roadmaps and all this kind of strategic thinking and all, this leader is still seeing design as how do we create something that people love, in this kind of visceral, emotional way that feels very product-y, feels very, you know, Apple… Audrey: Like fonts and colors… Peter: Yes. As opposed to, like, what you were talking about, which is design as a means to solve all kinds of problems. Audrey: Articulate a strategic vision. Peter: Well, yeah, the opportunity of design thinking was this recognition that design is a set of practices that can be applied to literally any problem. Audrey: Yeah. Well, were you surprised that the design celebration happened, that it was so design forward that the product, head of product talked about it that way? . . Peter: I was a little surprised. I mean, many companies still host internal design and user experience summits, right? And so, you know, I expect that community to come together. I was a little surprised that this Chief Product Officer took, I think, at least an hour out of their day to communicate to this group about the importance that he sees this group of people having for the future of the business and his commitment to it. It was also interesting, you know, hearing how he talked about design in a way that was very, again, product-oriented and, frankly, kind of hardware oriented. Whereas this was a group of people who were mostly working on software. But what I reflected to the group when I spoke at this event, you know, listen to how your leadership is talking about design, right, and, what kind of purchase does that give you? How can you start with where they are in terms of that understanding of design and then, and then move them along? So there’s an opportunity there. Audrey: Yeah. It’s interesting that they use the phrase design-led and also seem to talk about it just in, like, the product emotional appeal way. It’s very interesting. I’m super interested in the overlap of the Venn diagram between like designers and product managers or designers and engineers, or just, you know, designers and the rest of the world. And you know, there’s so much designers talking to designers about design. I wish we talked more outside of that. It’s interesting though. I, I’m friends with Marty Cagan and I was at his book launch a couple of months ago for his latest book. And, I think like the shorthand of it is that I actually think it might only be designers that are not wanting to use the design word. Right? Because I can’t think of any product leaders who have done that, or even really that know what’s going on. And so when I chatted with Marty, and then I was lucky enough to have drinks with Dan Olsen as well. He runs like a big product leadership get together at Intuit on the peninsula…. I can’t remember where, but there was like no awareness about the big design freak out at all. And so I’m like, oh my gosh, like whole design teams are being let go, like amazing design leaders are looking for their next job for actually years. Like, designers are changing their titles from design leader to product leader. Like it’s a whole big thing. They weren’t aware of that. And I think that’s interesting, especially because those two folks, Dan and Marty, are like talking to everybody all the time. Right. So that was interesting. And also one of the things that Marty said, you can see the video of this in the talk that he gave at his book launch ,was I was just chatting with a CEO and he said to me there’s 200 product managers in this organization, and if I let them go tomorrow, I’m not sure that anything would be any different. I can’t tell you what it would be. And Marty was using that as like a, Hey, you guys, you got to pay attention and start doing great product management. To me, that sounds like what’s happened to some friends, frankly, where like the whole entire design team did get chopped off in places because, I don’t know, Elon Musk, like, I don’t know why there’s just this like, oh, we can let everybody go and we can still operate in the black, and so why not? Two points, I guess, right? One is maybe, like, trying not to use the D-word is maybe something that’s only happening in the design community and that other people aren’t aware of that or concerned about it. But that also maybe this is impacting other roles that have, you know, arguably potentially similarly squishy impacts on outcomes for businesses. I’m sure a product manager wouldn’t like to hear me say that, but… Well, Jesse: it’s interesting to think about it from the product management point of view, because it’s true that if you look at the discourse, such as it is, on LinkedIn, if you look at what design leaders are talking about, they are constantly talking about improving the relationship with product and making the relationship with product successful. If you look at what product leaders are talking about, they are almost never even referencing a relationship to design, never mind investing in strategies for improving that relationship. And so I find myself wondering about the cultures that both sides have now inherited, you know, in the 30 years since Netscape, that kind of bake in a bunch of assumptions and a bunch of expectations of the other side that are creating these blind spots because, yeah, seems impossible for all of this to be going down on the design side and the leadership in the product community, not even recognizing that it’s going on there. Audrey: Having no idea. Jesse: Yeah. So I wonder about, like, what’s it going to take to build some bridges between these communities so that we can at least have that sense of mutual visibility. Audrey: Gosh, I mean, I think that’s an amazing question, Jesse. I, you know, I’m in the Leading Design Slack channel and I’m in the Mind the Product Slack channel, and Mind the Product has, like, product and design, like, within there and nobody ever posts there. And similarly, there’s a similar channel in Leading Design, nobody ever posts there. And, you know, I mean, I think it’s great, Christian Crumlish wrote his book, Product Management for Designers. My book, Design for CEOs, is about, like, trying to talk to other people about the tangible value of design and just the basic language. I mean, hopefully neither of you have ever read that book, because it’s so 101-y, but what we were finding is that CEOs were asking us why wireframes didn’t have color in them, or saying, like, when are we going to get the design maps? Like, we just didn’t even have the most basic shared understanding of language and process. But also, every time I go to a design conference, if there’s a non-designer speaking, like, that’s one of the most interesting talks, right? So, I don’t know why we don’t reach out more. But also, just talking about like product managers and designers working together, like, I sort of looked for a while for like, here’s a framework that we can say, this is what we expect of product managers and this is what we expect of designers. Like surely there’s a framework, right? And so I reached out to, I don’t know, 40 designers and I said, tell me the best thing that you ever got from a product manager and why you liked it. And I’m a pattern finder. I love models and concept maps. It’s like totally my jam for making sense of the world. And what came back was total chaos, just all over the place. Absolutely, I couldn’t find a pattern in it anywhere. And, I mean, the reflection that I had is that these are two individuals who have their own experience, their own, things they love, things they hate, strengths, weaknesses, training, expectations, and that kind of like three-in-a-box idea, or like dedicating teams that get to work together long term so that they can storm and norm is maybe the only way to do that because, there’s too many different things that need to be done at any moment in time, the product discovery and design and development release process and people are just too unique, and maybe we can’t do that. But, I agree with you, it seems very odd to me that there’s not more conversation across disciplines and, business, strategy, product, and we’re so sophisticated, I think design, I mean, you guys are giving PhD level talks at conferences, like we’re, we, I feel like we’re pretty good at it, you know, but what we’re not good at is, like, working across teams. And I really don’t know how to make that work better. Peter: I find myself wondering… The anthropologist comes out in me, and how much of this is cultural and, and the cultures of design and design practice and design as a function. And I’m having trouble saying the culture of product management because I, think product management isn’t nearly as coherent a culture and a function as design, right? So many different paths into product management, so many different flavors of product management, depending on what kind of organization you’re in, right? To be a consumer product manager at a social media company is very different than to be a B2B product manager at an enterprise SaaS firm, or to be a product manager at a bank or whatever, like, I think there’s a less shared culture. But there’s something in terms of where folks are coming from, and then when they’re brought together, no work is being done to bridge those gaps. It’s just like, you got to work together and please start producing value tomorrow. Audrey: Right. And you got six weeks and then you’ll be on something else. Peter: Right, And you mentioned storming and norming… There’s a whole category of assumptions I had…. So Jesse and I, you know, we worked at Adaptive Path. I left Adaptive Path at the end of 2011. And as I entered the world of in-house product building, this was the start of things like Spotify squad models and stuff that was written about in 2012, Amazon two-pizza teams was also at least kind of popularized in 2012. And I was under the assumption that like, Oh, when you go in house, you get this stable team of folks who are working on a problem together for, weeks, if not months, on end. And they’re no longer working on projects. That’s the bad old way. That’s an internal services model. They’re working on a program and a product, and they’re just always endeavoring to make it better. This is over 10 years ago. This was what I had been hearing as the prevailing model of… Jesse: right, Peter: balanced teams, empowered teams, agile teams. And then you go in house and you’re like, no one is operating anything nearly like that. Audrey: I mean, a few companies, but yeah. Peter: So few. Audrey: Yeah. Right. You got six weeks to do this and then you’ll be in the next thing. And, oh, by the way, you have 20 percent of your time to do it. And for whatever it’s worth, I think the kind of… “strategic sacrifice” is a phrase I learned from one of these VPs of design, I’m like, I’m just going to call bullshit. Like there’s no way that with 1/16th of their time, that this designer is doing anything except for going crazy and maybe getting complained about, right? So like, I’m just not going to resource it. And we all know that like an engineer or product manager or somebody somewhere was designing it anyway. But we’re pretending like this poor schlub is spending 1/16th of their time? Like, no. And I, agree with you. I mean, I’ve been internal too, and with our clients as well, we ask them these questions, but it’s just like a resourcing shell game. I mean, I agree with you about the differences between the design and the product culture, but we’re kind of all doing the same thing, right? We’re, like, trying to help somebody somewhere do something with this company, product, or service. And we’re telling and testing stories about how we’re going to do that. Our tool for storytelling is Figma, their tool for storytelling is Excel, but otherwise, you know, I just don’t think it’s that different. A big question is like, how are people incented in the organization, right? Jesse: Yeah. When Peter was talking about the cultural diffusion in product management, I think it largely has to do with the very diverse range of incentives that exist in product management, depending on the category, depending on the product space, depending on the problem space. Whereas design seems to have some kind of sense of its own center in a way. It has a sense of purpose in the world beyond what somebody told us it was, you know? Audrey: I mean, it would be super interesting to try to map out the product management culture. I think it’s, it’s easy to say from the outside, like, Oh, there’s no real culture. It’s very diverse. Jesse: Yeah, of course. Audrey: But when I hear you say, Jesse, like we have a center, I don’t know if this is what you’re thinking of, but certainly one that I could think folks might go to is like, we are the advocates for the user, right? That’s our role. I’ve heard product managers say, I do not ever want to hear a designer say that ever again. We are all advocates for the user. Like I’m not anti-user. That’s what we’re all trying to do. You guys don’t own that. Peter: But then I hear one of my client’s Chief Product Officer, where I was helping him hire a VP of Design, saw Design’s primary role as the voice of the customer within the product development process, right? And so that’s again, like. there’s, not an agreement or alignment more within product. All designers see their responsibility as being a voice of the customer and a representative of the user in the process. Within product. Some do, some don’t. Audrey: It might be to meet a deadline. Peter: Some think it’s a good thing to delegate it, right? Like it’s not like they don’t think the customer matters, but they’re like, well, the product person’s got so many things to deal with, thus, the designer is the one who’s best responsible for that right? I don’t think it’s out of neglect or disinterest. It’s, how do we get all these people to get things done without overwhelming them? Audrey: Yeah. I think that that product manager was reacting to the idea that, like, there’s some high ground that the designer could stand on, or they had a veto because they were the advocate for the user versus the product. I think it’d be, like, super fun to have a conference where engineers and product managers and designers came and all the talks were my favorite, or my worst, experience with other disciplines. And that would be really interesting. And at least we’d be like, listening more, you know, outside of our little talking bubble. Jesse: You know, in your client work, you have the opportunity to directly observe both design leaders and product leaders as they do what they do in organizations. And I wonder what you’ve seen has helped design leaders have that broader influence and drive that broader vision of what design has to offer. What’s helping design leaders be successful as cross-functional partners? Audrey: I think a lot of “yes, and”-ing, Ooh, I, you know, kind of being opportunistic about ways that they can help. And I don’t want to say being nice to work with, but I honestly have, heard and seen designers say, I used to be an asshole, and now I just try to be nice to work with, that’s what I tried to do. And then if there’s an opportunity where I can help, then I do. And one person in particular was talking about like, we used to just like really focus on the products and just like, we were just product design, but I started to see opportunities where people are having trouble making decisions or getting alignment or just making time for whatever. And so I started to offer to help. And this is a VP of design saying, like, can I facilitate a workshop for you? Like, I would be happy to help. And these conversations, they were, I think, again, a bit opportunistic about, like, these like more senior strategic level conversations, only casting themselves in the role of facilitator, but being in the room, being perceived as helpful, perceived as being able to support progress. And at the same time, like, that person sort of grew that into almost like a practice inside of their organization, where folks would come to him and say, Hey, we’re having trouble with this, can you, like, lend me somebody to help with this conversation? And so he’s doing a bit less product design, and at least, has a bit more visibility into more strategic conversations. So there’s two parts to that. One is like the gatekeeping, fighting, you know, for the seat at the table. That language and that stance is gone. They’re like nice to work with. And then just looking for opportunities to help in a way that gives them more influence and visibility in the organization. Which also I wrote about it on LinkedIn and, a couple of people were like, Oh, so acting like grownups is what you’re saying. Peter: I was about to say like, how, who the fuck were we, that we could show up as if our shit didn’t stink and expect people to just like engage with us? Like, if that’s how people are showing up, then yes, no kidding design is going to be excluded. Audrey: But didn’t you work in organizations or haven’t you seen organizations… like I certainly did, and then what happens is like the product manager tries to go off piece, and like hire their own designer because it’s so hard to get a resource, and you have to go through this central blah, blah, blah, and they get in trouble for that too, and it’s just, it’s really like controlling and there’s the whole bottleneck thing and like, but we did, we did act like that. Some of us. Sometimes, probably not me or you guys, but you know. Jesse: Well, no, I mean, I think that it’s a cultural pitfall, really, of the entire field. I think that, you know, if you come up as a practitioner, you have to invest a bit of your ego in your work. You have to be willing to stand behind it and defend it and argue in favor of a point of view just to be successful at the design part. Then you get into design leadership and that same stance kind of gets carried forward. Only now it’s not about the craft anymore. It’s about strategic direction, and things like that, where the weight that you carry in the room is a little bit different, right? Once you’ve kind of reached that leadership level, and the ego that served you in shoring you up to defend your creative ideas is now a disservice because it, it’s a wall between you and your partners. Audrey: What I love about working with designers who have been to design school, honestly, is that they spend four years getting criticized. And so they have like, a tenuous relationship with their work, where it’s not that they don’t care, and it’s not that they don’t feel good about it, but also there’s like a separation, and I flatter myself that being a theater major, I also got criticized for four years, but I hadn’t thought of it the way that you’re talking about it Jesse, and I think it’s interesting and there’s got to be some merit in that. You’re putting yourself out there in a way that nobody else in the room would be willing to do, right? How many times are people like, I don’t want to draw on the whiteboard, much less all this, right? And it’s just, it’s very different from like what happens in a code review, for example. I also think, like, the profession is just so new that we had to spend some years being like, no, no, no, we’re here. We’re here and we do stuff and the stuff that we do is important and helpful. We want to do it. Like it’s important. What I do is important and I can help the company. And I’m going to keep saying that over and over and over and over and over again. And it just got kind of like rigid, like fighting for his seat at the table. And now maybe we’re here. And if we want to stay here, then we got to act like grownups. I mean, I remember the AIGA was, like, involved and wanting to talk about like, what are all the specific titles and what’s the difference between user interface and user experience and interaction design and wait, interface design, wait, and I just went in a whole circle. I was at a conference once, this is probably in the early 2000s, where there were like three talks and all of them, it was a design conference, all the talks had like a Nelson clock, like, you know, that iconic Nelson clock with a big circle in the middle and then the balls on the outside. And each talk was like, My role, insert role here, information architecture is the center of the design universe. And then the next one was like, user experience is the center of the design universe. So I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favors with I mean, especially like UX, UI, like my gosh, like I can’t tell you how many times people say, oh, we need a UX/UI designer. And I’m like, hmm. So you would think that I would know what you’re talking about, but I actually have no idea what you’re talking about when you say you need a UX/UI designer. So some clarity sounds good. And you’re right, like who would want to say like, no, I just do like digital product design. I don’t do strategy. That’s not me. That’s not what I do. Like all consultancies that I know of, that are more than a person or two, have been in decline for the last two years. So there are fewer people coming and asking these questions. So if I tick off, like, the last five clients that came to us, who are not heads of design, one person has a giant B2B product that has been around for 10 years and the usage has plateaued and they wanted to get better. So I’m very glad that they’re coming to a design consultancy for that. One, similarly, kind of, like, how to go with an IT product that, basically, like, customers are hating. And so we’re picking some more key workflows and obviously, like, looking at customer support calls and things like that. Another one is a head of product where they have a homepage and then this wild hare, that’s like a favorite idea of the C-suite, is competing basically with the homepage, and he’s like, I don’t know how to make sense of these, and it is a pretty strategic conversation, right? It’s not just like, what do they look like? But who are they for? And why would they use them? And I’m kind of stuck with this pet project and I need to make sense of it so that it doesn’t suck, because I have to. I don’t know if you can draw any conclusions from what I just rattled off there. One is a regional bank who’s moving off of the white label stuff that they use. So, from their point of view, they have a product team. Like they have a CIO, not a CTO. They have product managers who are really product owners that work for the CIO. They have two designers that work, actually, for the marketing team. And they’re kind of ready to move into, like, rolling their own products. But even though, obviously, they have digital services, it’s like a digital transformation problem, like the whole organization needs to change. So they came to us to like design the product, but what we’re talking to them about is like, you’re not going to, this isn’t going to work, and we’re not just going to give you a, like, a prototype that you’re not going to be able to build. So it’s kind of all over the place. But a lot of what we’re doing, actually, I can draw one conclusion is we’re doing more and more, like, vision work, where either there’s one guy, let’s say he’s a founder and he used to be able to get all of his employees in a room and get them excited. Now he can’t do that anymore. And he has a clear vision of where he wants to go, but he can’t articulate it and get people excited about it. Or there were a bunch of acquisitions and now we’ve got to figure out like how the whole is going to be greater than the sum of its parts. And so there’s, like, a somewhere that we need to be in a year or two or three, and we want to get clear on where we want to be, and we need to communicate where we want to be. So you could call that a visiontype if you want, like some of it is so near term that it’s a prototype and it’s, I flatter myself maybe, that it’s kind of what you would get from a management consultant that you trusted, where it’s like, we talked to customers, we talked to stakeholders, we looked at the competitive landscape, we’ve got these eight bullet points. And then like everybody nods because they’re just bullet points, right? But then we actually do a prototype that illustrates where those show up and that difference between, like, quote unquote “strategy,” which I think would just leave off at the bullet points, and like design, where we can make it tangible and you can click through like how that key insight shows up in the product and shows up for the customers. You can touch it and feel it and get excited about it. You could show it to your CEO or your board or your customers. Like that is something that we’re getting more traction around and people are more interested in. And also is something that I think design is uniquely qualified to do, because that tangible bit is really important. Jesse: It’s interesting that you bring up this tension, because it really does kind of circle back to what I think of as the original promise of user experience design, when that term came to the fore, which was the idea that there was an opportunity in the synergy between the conceptualizing, the ideation and the execution. And if you had that unified as a single function, that there was value to be gained there, that there were better outcomes at the end of it. If the people who did that early conceptualizing were the same ones who ultimately specified what shipped. I can see that in the context that you’re talking about still absolutely being a viable value proposition for a lot of in-house teams that hasn’t really been proven out. And in fact, their structures have evolved to a place where there isn’t really space for the people who are responsible for shipping your pixels to participate in ideation. We don’t have the processes for it. We don’t, we literally haven’t hired the right people for it. And so I’m wondering about what you see as the future prospect of that value proposition. Audrey: Yeah, that’s a drag. I, you know, for sure have been in-house and it’s, awful, right, when you’re in house, you probably even have ideas, right, that’s the kind of work that you want to do. But then honestly, the mere fact that dollars are being spent outside is what makes it possible because it seems like we can say that this is a priority until the cows come home, but as soon as we see a highly paid consultants invoice, or even a moderately paid or a lowly paid consultants invoice, like somehow those dollars feel different. It gets prioritized. You get time with the stakeholders that you need to meet with. It gets time boxed, right? It doesn’t get, like, drug out because, oh, we have these internal resources on it, but now there’s this feature and this customer is demanding it and they have to go over there and it just like fizzles out. It’s a bummer and I, I’m quite sensitive to it, because I have been internal, and my take is, like, strategy without implementation is just bullshit and nobody wants to be in the bullshit business, right? But I have been internal and gotten a strategy with no thought, not a second thought to whether we could actually implement that. Jesse: Mm-Hmm. Audrey: And then they got to go and they didn’t have to live with it. And it’s not a good position to be in. You know, there’s at least two things that can make that different. One is, is working with a consultant who can point you to people who have received their deliverables. And because , we can all say, Oh yeah, no, the internal team will be highly involved and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But until you can hear the impact on the internal team, like you don’t really know. So that’s one part is there can be like really great co-creation, skills exchange, and also the work that the external consultant does is worth so much more to the organization if somebody internal was there and understands why the decisions were made and, you know, can really steward the work. So there’s a lot more value there. And then I think the other bit is, I do see VPs of design, like the guy I was talking about before, that’s kind of started up like a little, like innovation facilitation service internally. Like, I’m not saying, like, spin up a greenhouse or anything, like, incubator. I’m not saying that at all, but I’m saying, like, provide an internal service, which is an innovation service. And there’s all kinds of complicated questions about how that gets budgeted and how that budget is managed. But, you know, I definitely have seen teams do that sometimes, like, even with their own brand and stuff, and they market themselves internally to the organization. And it’s sort of an agency model, but they’re in there. It’s a lot more porous because designers can come into those teams or go out of those teams and they’re still there when you’re trying to implement. They haven’t taken off to the next client or whatever. Jesse: Right. Audrey: Yeah Well, I see you just like picked up what I put down and ran all the way to the end with it, ’cause sometimes we’re the ones receiving what the management’s consultant left the client with, right? Like the management consultant is like, here you go. You will be making 250 million by this time next year. Bye. And then they’re like, Oh shit. Like, I don’t know what to do with this. And so we come and we help with that. And it’s not the most pleasant experience ever. And then I go back and I talk to these management consultants and I say, Hey, do you want to see what we did with what you left here and like, and how it went, you know? ‘Cause I always want to know, like, I always want to know the impact of the work that we do. And they usually say yes. And we have those conversations and it baffles me that they don’t do that stuff, but surely some of them must, I just haven’t seen it. What I’ve seen mostly are like spreadsheets and feature lists and deadlines. And then, you know, they’re like, here’s your certainty. Like you’ve paid them for certainty and they’ve given you certainty. If you release this list of features by this date, the TAM is this. And if you get X percent of the TAM, here are the dollars. So I don’t see management consultants do that. I don’t understand why. It definitely is a lot more compelling to click through an interface than to look at a spreadsheet. I don’t know. I guess if you’re the board, maybe that’s not true. But then also management consultants don’t have a very good reputation. But, you know, McKinsey has a design arm, right? Maybe they do that stuff. I don’t know. I don’t think that they have a very good reputation amongst anybody below the C suite. The whole point of Marty’s last book, right? It was like that PDE were coming to him and saying, we want to work like these empowered teams, but we can’t because we just are in an environment in which it’s not possible. And so how can we change that environment? And that’s why he wrote the book. You know, he didn’t get done with Empowered and say, I know what my next book will be, like, he got done with Empowered and then he listens. I think he spends like four hours a day answering emails and on the phone with people. So he’s really got an ear to the ground. So I say that, and then I’ll go back to describing that, like we can’t do that with internal teams because they’ll get sucked away, you know. And some organizations that do this successfully, they manage their budget that way. And they say, okay, we’re gonna spend this money, meaning these people’s resources, it’s allocated for this quarter to that. And it’s not going to this over here. Like we’ve made that the stuff that we’re not going to do. And that’s hard to do if you’re swallowing an elephant, especially, right, if it’s like, what’s our three year vision. You know, we don’t need that long term. So I think of like a snake that’s swallowed an elephant. So we’ve got this big hump. And are we going to carve that out of our features and releases, or are we going to get somebody else to swallow the elephant that we can just let go. But I think there’s a huge amount of value in swallowing it internally. That metaphor went further than… swallowing the elephant with an internal team, because they get to do that stuff. It’s fun. It keeps them engaged. They’re invested in the long term health of the business. You know, again, it’s vitally critical that the external team is working closely with the internal team so that you don’t get this, like, you guys are crazy. We can’t do this. We’re not doing this. There’s a hundred things that you haven’t thought through, and how you know that you’ve brought in a consultant that’s not going to do that stuff is an interesting question for another podcast, I guess. Jesse: Audrey what is one question that is foremost on your mind as we enter this next phase? Audrey: I’m really curious to see how and where the decline in investment in design, that I think is happening, shows up. Like, maybe the recent Sonos release was the canary in the coal mine. I don’t know if you guys read about that. Yeah. But we’ve been saying, and I said it in the book, right, design is there to have a positive impact on the business. And if we lay off a bunch of designers and design teams, then the inverse should be true, right? You don’t have designers. And so there’s going to be a negative impact on the business, but how and where that first starts to show up and we notice and can… not point to it, but reference it as like, Oh, this is where we had the most immediate impact or the lack of design had the most immediate impact, is something I’m really thinking about, or cover your ears, it doesn’t happen. Jesse: Mm hmm. Audrey: In that, like, Oh, we, let all these designers go and like, nothing happened. It was fine. Jesse: Well, I guess we’ll all find out together. Audrey, thank you so much for being with us. Audrey: It was absolutely my pleasure. I’m so excited to get to do this with you guys. Thank you for having me. Jesse: Audrey, if people want to connect with you and your work, how can they do that? Audrey: They can go to designmap.com or they can email me, Audrey at designmap. com. Connect on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to chat. I’m really interested in cross functional conversations, especially about all of this stuff. So please reach out. Jesse: Awesome. Thank you so much. Peter: Yes. Thank you. Audrey: My pleasure. Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.

Nov 20, 2024 • 43min

51: Design-led Innovation in Emerging Markets (ft. Gaurav Mathur)

Transcript Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities Jesse: and challenges Peter: of design and design leadership, Jesse: Welcome to the Next Phase. On today’s show, we’re joined by Gaurav Mathur, VP of Design for Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart. He’ll share with us his perspective on the big issues facing design leaders in India today, including hiring and training for junior designers, as well as design leaders making the case for the business impact of design, and the opportunities for design-led startups in the Indian market. Peter: Thank you so much for joining us today. Gaurav: Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Jesse, for having me here. I’ve been a follower since Adaptive Path, and it’s wonderful to be speaking with both of you. Peter: Oh, awesome. Jesse: Thank you so much. Peter: It would be good to get a sense of who you are and what you do. So, how do you introduce yourself and how do you talk about your career? Gaurav: Sure. So currently, I’m the VP of Design at Flipkart. So Flipkart is a e-commerce company in India. Before Flipkart, I headed design for Myntra. Myntra is also an e-commerce company, but focuses on fashion and lifestyle. And it also happens to be a Flipkart Group company. So I have been in the e-commerce domain for probably, like, nine years or so now, and before that I worked with the SaaS division of Citrix. The SaaS division used to make products like GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, et cetera. I also had a brief entrepreneurial journey where I was the co-founder of a design company and we were providing design services, to get our bread and butter essentially, but also building some educational products on the site. I studied design and architecture a long time ago. So I have been a designer at heart. Peter: Excellent. Let’s focus on your more recent experience, both Myntra and Flipkart. One of the reasons we were interested in speaking with you is, you know, our viewpoint is very North American. So, I sometimes work with companies that have design teams in India, cause they’ve got some development teams in India, but they’re usually still like doing design for a North American or European audience. And I know with Myntra and Flipkart, you’re really focused on working within the Indian market. So , tell us a little bit more about these businesses and what your role is, specifically let’s say with Flipkart, leading design there. Gaurav: Sure. So Flipkart is a horizontal e-commerce platform, and it’s a marketplace that allows sellers to come on board and sell all kinds of products. We categorize these products under categories like fashion, beauty, electronics, mobiles, large air conditioners, refrigerators, et cetera. And Flipkart also manages the supply chain, warehouses, logistics, and the last mile delivery of products so that we can deliver a better customer experience overall. So the design team at Flipkart has the product designers, or UX designers essentially, that work across all kinds of products. We also have a visual design team that works on visual merchandising for various category stores. This team also manages the design of sale events. We have a UX research team, and we’ve recently integrated the market research function, so that we are able to create a unified research and insights op for the company. Peter: And that’s within your team? Gaurav: Yeah, that’s all within the design team. We call it the One Design Team at Flipkart. Besides this, we also have a small content team, because Flipkart is available in 11 other languages, 11 Indian languages besides English. So there’s a bunch of content work that we do, and I feel that my primary role is essentially to act as an orchestrator for this multidisciplinary org. And I also engage with product and business leaders in the company to achieve org goals. Peter: How many people are in your org? Gaurav: We are about 100… 110 people across UX, visual design, research and content. Peter: So you have a little over a hundred folks in your org. It sounds like you’re designing for all the audiences in this marketplace, the merchant side, the seller side, internal. You mentioned this one design team. Has that always been the case or, has it kind of evolved to this single unified design organization over time? Gaurav: Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think it has evolved over time. So when I joined, for example, the team that works on the seller platforms was not part of this team, and we eventually integrated it. And that’s been a process, I think, it’s been a journey of integrating different parts into a single One design org. So we think of users in three broad buckets. The first is shoppers that come on Flipkart to buy products. And the experience that we give to our shoppers is primarily on mobile devices because that’s where most Indians shop. They shop on mobile devices, not so much on the desktop website. So that’s a large, large base that we cater to. The second set of products that we build are for sellers. And this is essentially our seller platform where sellers come and manage their listings, their catalog. They’re able to place ads, configure offers, et cetera. The third set of users are essentially the partners that work in warehouses, in the logistic space, and the delivery partners that manage the last mile delivery. So we create a lot of products that get used in the warehouses also apps for the delivery agents. So these are products that get used across the supply chain. And in terms of the teams we have a part of the product design team that focuses on the B2C experience. So it builds all the features and products in our mobile apps and on the mobile website as well as on the desktop website. And then we have a team that works on the B2B or the enterprise product. So these are products that the sellers use and our partners use. So my time is split across these teams. I just love to get into the details of what we are building. And the design details, so I’m really passionate about solving navigation, interaction design, and visual design. So I have time set up in my calendar review all the key projects that are happening across all these products. Jesse: In such a complex environment, what do you think is important for design to advocate for? Gaurav: Yeah, I think both these areas have slightly different kinds of goals. So when we think of shoppers, I think we want to deliver a very, very delightful experience to them. We want to ease their shopping journey. We want them to find the products fairly quickly, and get to the right set of products with ease, and people come with very specific requirements. Sometimes a person may have a very specific requirements and sometimes they may just be window shopping. So we need to cater to all these kinds of users. When we think of enterprise products, I think the primary goal is to just make them really, really efficient. So think of someone whose product’s at the warehouse, and putting the label and then just getting them ready to be shipped. Now, this is a very repetitive task, and if you’re able to shave off even those few seconds for this person, we just make the whole process very efficient. Jesse: What do you see is your role as design leader in creating the environment where these kinds of experiences can be delivered? Gaurav: Yeah, I think, building a really competent design team, I think is the first goal that I have. And also growing this team. It’s not just enough to build a team, but then to grow this team and grow the people in this team as well. Also, to facilitate or to kind of bring together people from different domains together. So, for example, if you’re solving for grocery, we may have a product designer looking at grocery. We may also have a visual designer looking at grocery we’ll also have a researcher looking at grocery. So getting this pod created and facilitating this journey with the product managers and with the engineers so that we are able to build and deliver a really high quality product. I think my job comes into play in different kinds of forms. I also want the design team to do a lot of innovation, and I call it design-led innovation. So I believe designers are at the right intersection because they are able to understand user needs fairly well and then they’re also able to visualize what the product could be. And so therefore, they could be these facilitators, or the catalyst for driving innovation in the org. And therefore, as one of the north stars that I’ve set for the design team, design-led innovation is also one of them. We also want to build our reputation within the org through the work that we do and through the impact that we create. So I think, just like I said, like just orchestrating and facilitating some of these becomes a very critical area for me to focus on. Besides this, obviously, like engaging with the product and business leaders is the other area that I kind of spend a lot of time. So we have product leaders that work across these products and just within the app we have multiple product managers looking at, for example, how do we acquire new users, retain them? How do we facilitate journeys across categories? How do we optimize our core shopping funnel, et cetera? so just working with them, understanding their strategic areas of investment and aligning the design team’s work with these strategic areas becomes a goal. Jesse: So it sounds like you’ve been able to build up this really operationally robust design function, this really fairly mature design function. You’ve got a range of different design capabilities from visual design through to research. Those capabilities are being integrated in meaningful ways that are kind of driving this broader impact. It feels like what you’re describing is a fairly mature state for a design team. I wonder about what it took to get to that place to bring the business along with, or maybe just to capitalize on, the opportunities that presented themselves to demonstrate the value to make the case for a robust mature design function like this. Gaurav: Yeah, I think I have to give credit to a lot of consumer apps that kind of exist out there. And they’ve set a really high bar for design in the industry. Specifically, if you look at the consumer Internet industry, the design bar is fairly high. And so design is today a very well recognized function in these orgs. So the role of evangelizing is kind of come down for me. I don’t have to really sell design. We get requests from product managers, from business teams to go and dig deeper into specific areas and solve for them in a better way. But I think why that part has been easier, I think, influencing some of the decisions from a very customer centric view has been the focus area. And I think within the tech function, if I look at, for example, product management and engineering they are very familiar with how design operates and they collaborate with us day in and day out in building and shipping products. But as I move away from the tech team, I feel that the awareness of design kind of slightly goes down. And specifically, when I talked to some of the business leaders they may not be as aware as, for example, a product manager about the role of design. And for awareness building, in the past I’ve just put the work out there and we’ve done it in different ways. We’ve done it in a format of a road show, for example, we’ve also done it in the form of just a UX open house where we would transparently share the work that we are doing as the design team and let people come in view this work, comment on it, critique it, give their feedback and in the process we are able to build partners across the org, and once they see what design can bring to the table, and how design could impact their objectives, how it could enable their functions, they’re fairly eager to cooperate and collaborate, and also invest in both design and research. Peter: Where are you located within the organization, within the org chart? To whom are you reporting and who are your partners? Gaurav: So I’m part of the larger tech team at Flipkart. I report to the chief product and technology officer at Flipkart, and my peers are some of the other product and engineering leaders in the org. So there are different views that look at different kinds of products that we’re building, like for shoppers or sellers for partners. And my stakeholders would primarily be the product managers and engineers, but also the business leaders. And these business leaders primarily drive category functions. So they could be leaders leading one or more categories. For example, fashion or mobiles and electronics. Peter: You mentioned how you’re wanting to show impact, build a reputation and showing impact, but a challenge that design teams often have is demonstrating impact of their own accord, right? Because typically design’s value is realized through partnership and collaboration. So I’m wondering how you navigated that. If your boss, the CPTO has specific expectations of you and design that you are held accountable for, like, you know, this is something we hear from a lot of design leaders, which is around, how do I demonstrate value? How do I show my impact? Like what has that journey been like for you and clarifying design’s distinct impact? Gaurav: Yeah. So I’m accountable for certain common company level metrics, for example. And these metrics are around customer and engagement. And also some new growth areas. The second area that I’m accountable for are a number of product metrics. And I kind of co-shared metrics with the product team members who are running some of these strategic initiatives and experiments. And then third are like the people goals that include just the team health, how are we growing and retaining people, things like that. I also have some like more inward looking goals as part of the design team. And these tend to be around like driving more efficiency within the design team with the design system that we’re building, getting the design system adopted across different parts of the product. And since it’s a fairly large product, the adoption is not a very straightforward activity. So we look for opportunities, you know, whenever we are updating a part of the product, we also adopt the new design system. There are also responsibilities around enabling research. And getting research to influence some of the key decisions in the org. So there are different kinds of activities that the research team does and kind of leads ahead. We evaluate our products, but we also do some formative work, and influence the product roadmaps. Jesse: Influencing the product roadmaps is one of these things that we hear from design leaders over and over again, that they are desperate to try to find some way to create in their organizations. And I’m curious about your thoughts about how to create that influence over the product roadmap, where is it appropriate for design to be leaning in and contributing toward these strategic decisions that, in a lot of people’s minds, technically sit outside the domain of design. Gaurav: Interesting question. So, I don’t think there is one way to look at it. I think different products are at different points in their journey. And there are different kinds of opportunities to influence them. So, for example, if you are making incremental changes on a product, I think a lot of influencing happens in the way the designers and product managers collaborate and shape it together. If you’re looking at something that’s fairly new, a new initiative, something we’ve not done before, I think a lot of influencing can be done through research work and through some of the early prototyping work that we do and validate with our customers. So I think there are just different kinds of models that work in different situations. But broadly having this thought of influencing and representing the customers in every discussion. Having that thought at the back of your minds, as a designer in these discussions, really. Another area that I’ve often found where designers play a key role is kind of safeguarding the customer interests and also safeguarding the design to some extent. We, we often get into discussions about where all can we highlight the offers that we have on different products? What’s the right space? What’s the right kind of tonality for it? How large should it be, et cetera. And that’s another area where I feel designers play a key role, in safeguarding the experience Jesse: I think one of the challenges in that is engaging with audiences who don’t necessarily have design as a language, and helping them see, honestly, sometimes just see the difference between two different design directions and to be able to help them see the potential impact of that. How do you support and elevate your teams in their ability to build those bridges with people who don’t necessarily share the same language, so to speak, of design? Gaurav: I don’t think we’ve done anything special here. I think a lot of the design awareness gets created through the discussions that we are part of, and how we present the designs, how we present the customer viewpoints. But we’ve not looked at special workshops, training programs or design thinking workshops, anything of that sort, in the organization. It’s just the collaborative style of working that kind of leads to this. Jesse: So you keep, kind of, keeping it alive day to day, rather than kind of making these big bold statements with these big training programs or initiatives and so forth. Peter: But kind of to that point, something I’ve been wondering is the purview of design. You know, you mentioned it’s a unified design team, one design team, product design, visual design, both UX research and market research, which to me suggests there’s a potential for design to be even broader than your boss’s organization. Like, there could be touchpoints outside of product and technology. Maybe I’m mistaken, but, given the complexity of the ecosystem that Flipkart is operating in, there’s a lot of potential for design as a practice to influence all kinds of things, to influence… you mentioned last mile, it could be even potentially real world customer facing interactions or something, which might not be part of, you know, a product and technology group. And I’m just wondering how you see the scope of all the things that design could touch. Are you fairly circumscribed within technology, or are you, you know, working on things outside of what would be considered typical product and technology? Gaurav: Yeah. Well, I think if you look at purely from a product perspective and the kind of products we are building, then they tend to remain in the tech space largely. But if you look at some of the interactions that we have with our customers, so, for example, researchers and designers together often run researches with our CX teams, and we reach out to customers through them. We go and look at how the warehouse operations work, how the delivery partners are delivering, the kind of challenges that they have, when they are operating in different kinds of environments. Tier Two cities are very different from metros in India. And what kind of challenges do these people have in navigating through the day? So designers do go out and interact with a varied set of users. All the three sets that I mentioned earlier. But when it comes to building products, I think it still remains in the purview of what the larger tech team does at Flipkart. We do interact heavily with our business teams. We understand how they work with some of our suppliers, sellers as well. And, what are their goals? How are they meeting their P&L goals? And we figured out innovative ways of kind of working together in this journey. Peter: Earlier, you mentioned design-led innovation, which was a goal for you, an objective that you’ve set for the team. And I’m wondering, like, literally how that works in terms of what is necessary to make a space for your team to propose, new opportunities, new solutions, right, that might not be on anyone’s roadmap yet, right? Are you able to peel away a group of people for two or three months to have them work on something? Like, there’s an investment there that has to be made, right? If people are working on design-led innovation, they’re not working on the next iteration of the product experience. So like, how do you make the space to enable that and, get whatever approvals you need from your boss or whomever in recognizing that, that is a worthwhile effort? Gaurav: Sure. So I actually feel that a lot of innovation comes when designers actually spend a lot of time with the problem at hand. So for example, if I’m a designer working on a specific project at Flipkart. And if I’m able to wrap my head around that problem together with the researcher, then I may have unique insights that will help me innovate much faster than what the rest of the org is kind of thinking about at this time. We do create some special time as well for designers. We do what we internally call as a design jam. So this is just, it’s like a hackathon, but for designers. We give time and space to designers to come up with new ideas. We ran this one year and then we also realized that there is also like a tech hackathon that happens at Flipkart. And so the next year, we ran this before the tech hackathon so that some of these design ideas could then feed into the tech hackathon. With that kind of a process, we are able to see something end to end. We are able to see something that got started in the design hackathon, but also got carried forward in the tech hackathon, and we were able to build a POC out for people to play with. And once it’s tangible, people are able to react to it a little better and it also has a higher potential to to see the light of the day in the hands of the customers. So that’s an activity that we’ve been doing every year now. And it’s been quite successful so far. Jesse: So, you know, it’s interesting what we’ve been hearing for the last couple of years from design leaders especially in North America and Europe, but I would say also to some extent in South America and in Asia as well, we’ve been hearing a lot about kind of a shift in the way the design is valued, a shift in the way the design is perceived in these organizations, and a shift in the way the design is approached in these organizations. And it’s interesting to hear you talk about innovation, reflecting a point of view that, honestly, I think has been a mainstream point of view within the user experience community at least for a long time, which is the idea that the people who are really deeply immersed in the use cases, the people who are really in there, sleeves rolled up, crafting the interfaces are going to be your best source for insight for new opportunities to serve those audiences, because that immersion gives them a view on the problem that an external, you know, innovation lab jumping in for the first time is never going to have. However I feel like what I’m hearing from a lot of people is a shift away from that as a value proposition, and toward a scope of the design role that stays much more focused on delivery. And I’m curious about what you’re seeing in the landscape in India right now, in terms of approaches to design, ways that other organizations are managing design, and where are things going these days in how design is being framed among Indian companies. Gaurav: Great question. So when I look at the landscape in India, I, I see designers working in three kinds of companies The first would be companies that are building products for India from India. These are essentially product-led organizations, building core products. The second would be what are called as GCCs or Global Capability Centers. And these are essentially multinational orgs, large companies that have setups in India to tap into the rich talent pool in India. And the third would be tech and design service orgs. So these traditionally provide services to other companies. And they also employ a large set of. Designers. I think the work kind of differs in each of these buckets. I think the first two that I spoke about, like companies that are building products out of India and GCCs, have a very similar kind of a profile, I would say. They’re essentially focused on scaling and building product. And very similar kinds of roles exist in these organizations. you would typically have product designers, researchers, UX content writers, et cetera. I feel that the, scope of innovation also kind of varies, with the kinds of responsibilities that each of these orgs have in India. I feel that the largest opportunity for innovation lies with the startups in India, startups that are trying to build new products, grounds up. So these are zero-to-one initiatives. And I think here the designers have the opportunities to work with the founders and the key stakeholders in that organization, and help shape the experience for the end customers. In the process also learn a lot about the business that these companies are operating in, what kind of problems are they trying to solve, figure out MVPs for products and also get into the details of actually building it. Like really, really working deeply with engineering teams because these kinds of setups tend to be small. And so designers end up wearing like multiple kinds of hats in these setups as well. That’s largely how I see the Indian landscape today. I think historically probably the first companies to hire design talent in India would have been the tech and design services orgs, because they’ve existed for about three decades in India. While the first set of consumer internet companies building products out of India… When we started in about 2008, 2009. And some of those entrepreneurs laid the foundation for building and designing products out of India. The designers that we have today in India also come from varied backgrounds and that’s probably very similar to how things operate in the US as well. We have designers who have a formal education in design, some that are kind of like self taught, and some that kind of migrate from other domains of design into UX. So it could be architecture, industrial design, graphic design, etc. There is a vibrant design community now in India, and, and these platforms and these events are a great opportunity for designers to kind of connect, share experiences, share the work that they’re doing. Peter: What you just mentioned is, one of the values of events, right? The shared experiences, people talking with peers and sharing kind of the challenges they’re facing. And I’m wondering what you see, let’s focus it on a design leadership level, right? You’re a design executive, a VP of design, leading a decent sized team. I’m guessing that, you know, other people in similar roles whether in Bangalore or other parts of India, what do you all talk about when you gather, or you get on a call, or you’re messaging each other, like what are those topics among the Indian design leadership community, at least that you’re part of? Gaurav: I think there are some things that always kind of remain the center of discussions. Some of these are around hiring and challenges around hiring. While it’s fairly easy to hire at junior levels, I think it becomes extremely challenging when it comes to senior roles and especially leadership roles in India. I think the talent pool that exists at senior roles in India is fairly small. And with all kinds of companies operating out of India, this is a talent pool that gets a lot of attention as well. So hiring and discussing hiring challenges always is a topic of interest for people. The other one I would say is, it’s just about kind of sharing challenges of influencing stakeholders in different kinds of forms and the kind of challenges that people have around, sometimes, frustrations around what would enable them to do better work at their organizations and what could be the learnings out of different scenarios, different organizations. So that’s another, topic. I recently been involved in a lot of discussions at Flipkart and also elsewhere, where I’ve seen when designers at a certain level of seniority start thinking about how they should grow further. And a typical path that they pursue tends to be the people management role and growing as a people manager. Senior IC roles are kind of missing in India at this moment. And these opportunities also kind of missing. Flipkart, we’ve laid down career paths for senior ICs and build that track as well. But I think many young start ups are not yet aware of them. There are GCCs that have fairly well documented paths for senior ICs. They also have a lot of senior ICs in the org. So that’s another topic of interest that has recently cropped up in conversation. Jesse: I meet a lot of design leaders who say, I’d love to elevate ICs. I just don’t know what I would do with a bunch of principal ICs now. I don’t have a place for them in my processes or in my organization. And then I end up meeting a lot senior level ICs who haven’t been set up for success because the role hasn’t been defined clearly enough. Their influence hasn’t been defined clearly enough. Their measures of success haven’t been defined clearly enough. And I’m curious your thoughts on how you set up a senior IC for success. Gaurav: This was a very passionate debate that happened within the organization while we were defining this path and laying down the competencies for the senior IC track. We leveraged a lot of work and a lot of documentation that exists for senior IC engineers, actually, and architects, as part of laying down the competency for engineers. Engineering being a slightly more mature or… across the world actually has spent a lot of time defining these roles and defining how they differ from the people management roles. So we leveraged a lot of that work. I see it as a technical mentorship role as opposed to people management role. And that’s the key difference in my head, at least where these people will then lead a lot of technical mentorship and large scale design operations roles as well. So they would, for example, anchor the design systems. They would make sure that we build coherence across very different parts of the products that we’re building, which otherwise the two designers working on them may not even think about. So helping connect the dots across different parts of design and research is how we frame the role. Peter: Something you mentioned at the outset when you were talking about your vision for the design team was growing the people on the team. And I think that connects with what we’re discussing now. And, I’m just wondering, what are the approaches you are taking to grow people? Is it formal, you know, classes and training? Is it quasi-formal, kind of, like mentorship, that senior ICs could do? But yeah, just how are you operationalizing growing people in your team? Gaurav: It’s a mix of both. So we do have some formal trainings that are led by the Learnings and Development team at Flipkart. And then we do some informal trainings from within the team. Actually last year, we spent a lot of time figuring out people from within the team who could then train a lot of other people across the team. So, for example we could have a person who’s really good with motion design. And now we want to take this skill set across a large set of designers so that we just raise our bar on motion design overall in the product. And so we’ve identified such people and enabled them to train others and kind of mentor them in this process. Peter: You mentioned earlier the hiring challenge. And I’m wondering if that’s related to your incentive to focus on growth. Are you putting these growth plans in place? Because it’s easy to hire people with less experience, but now you need to train them up. Is this a strategy for kind of addressing this gap in the market of senior design talent that is really hard to hire. And so you’re growing them from within, or is there a different motivation? Gaurav: No, I think we look at both areas. We look at growing people from within, as well as we constantly look at the market as well, whenever there are opportunities to hire from outside. So it’s not one versus the other, I would say, but a combination of both. We do have a large base of designers at junior levels, and a lot of training and mentorship while the senior leaders kind of run on their own, they do need training at different levels. For example, new people managers need training around managing people, having difficult conversations, giving feedback. Some of the more administrative work that people managers end up doing. You know, performance conversation, stuff like that. So there are different kinds of trainings based on the role and the skill sets of designers that we look at. Peter: One thing I hear all the time, from design leaders I’m working with or design orgs I’m supporting, is they have trouble making space for junior designers, right? They can’t hire junior designers because of the environment that they’d be bringing them in. They wouldn’t be able to support junior designers as needed, right? ‘Cause designers are expected to be embedded in teams, possibly on their own, they might not have a management structure that can bring them up. And so, at least in North America, a lot of companies just have kind of forsaken the junior designer and start, sometimes they start at senior designer, right? You know, five to eight years experience, because they know they can just throw them at problems and not worry about them. It sounds like you’re taking a different approach, right? You mentioned a decent, you know population of junior designers within your organization. How intentional was that? Like some companies, that’s an intentional strategy to hire juniors and grow them up. So is that part of it? And, what have you put in place to make sure that you’re setting up these junior designers to succeed, that they’re not flailing and sinking, right, in the sink or swim metaphor, being given too much responsibility too soon, and then they’re struggling. Gaurav: Yeah, I think it’s also one of the differences between US and India. I think it’s also got to do with the kind of market dynamics and the supply of designers that exist in the market. So there is definitely a shortage of senior designers in India at this moment, while there is an abundance of junior designers, I would say. There are a lot of design schools now in India with… that has courses in interaction design and UX design. So, I think we are producing designers in great quantities at the moment. So it’s just easier to hire at junior levels. In terms of you know, not letting them sink, we do pair them up with senior designers. So as they learn about the organization, learn about the business. they are able to work with senior designers, with the managers, and kind of learn the ropes, and mature in the organization. But I would say it’s just a factor of the Indian market at this moment. Peter: In the North American market, the complaint that you hear from junior designers is like, there’s a lot of us, but no one is willing to hire us, right? So there’s something different about how many North American companies are approaching hiring because I think the conditions are not all that dissimilar where you’ve got a sizable population of potential talent. But whereas in North America, they’ve just kind of chosen to neglect them in hopes of hiring that senior designer, it sounds like, at least in the Indian market, there’s a recognition like we’ve got to make this work. So… Gaurav: Yeah. And about the challenges in the US, where the junior designers complain about not having enough opportunities, I was also thinking about the organizations and how the organizations are kind of set up. So the designers in each of these organizations, who are they kind of collaborating with? What kind of seniority of product people are they collaborating with? For example, in my organization, if I have to collaborate with the senior product leader, then it would be really hard for a junior designer to kind of voice a design stand. And therefore, I think it’s also critical to look at the kind of setups, and the kind of stakeholders that are building this product. Maybe in some of these companies, there aren’t enough junior product managers as well, and therefore, the designers end up collaborating with fairly senior product leaders. So if that happens at Flipkart, for example, I’ll have a senior person, a senior designer or a lead designer or even a manager in those conversations. Jesse: In so many organizations, design faces a fundamental cultural gap with the people who are in control of the business. The business has its way it likes to do things. It has its way it likes to communicate. In a lot of cases, these are practices that are inherited from legacy businesses, pre-internet businesses that are now entering digital spaces. And I didn’t hear you talk much about kind of legacy businesses and, where they fit into that landscape. But I’m really more interested in how design culture runs up against business culture in the context of your experience. And what you notice about the challenge of bridging that gap. Gaurav: I think designers are traditionally not great with business, and it’s also got to do with how designers are trained in design schools. For example, business schools have adopted design thinking as part of their curriculum. There’s very little business exposure that designers get when they get trained. And often this seems to be at odds, business thinking, and the way kind of designers approach a problem. But actually in large companies, I think both need to work together fairly closely. And it’s important for designers to build that business acumen as well, to understand this company in the space that it operates in. What makes a business successful? How’s the company generating revenue? What are the levers for the company to make profit, etc. And I think that background helps designers actually design better and helps designers collaborate better with business folks. If designers only take the user perspective and don’t look at the business, I think that’s where kind of conflicts arise. But if they are able to effectively wear both these hats, the hat with which they are able to think user first and also think about the business, I think that’s where really powerful products emerge. Jesse: Couldn’t agree more. Peter: Towards the beginning, you mentioned how you like to keep your hand in for lack of a better word, the craft, the details, right? You mentioned the visual design, the interaction design, the research, understanding what’s going on in those details, but given, the conversation we’ve had since and just now, talking about business, business culture, relating to the business, right, you only have so much time in your days and so many days in a week, and you have to figure out where it is most valuable for you to spend your time. And I’m wondering, particularly you’ve been in this role now for three or four years, right? Almost four years, how spending your time has evolved over these past four years, and kind of what that trajectory has been like, have there been themes or stages of your leadership since starting at Flipkart and, where are you now in that evolution? Gaurav: Yeah, there have definitely been very distinct stages. I joined Flipkart in the midst of the COVID lockdown. And when I joined, it was a very inward-looking journey that I initially took. Inward-looking as in inward-looking towards the design team Fixing issues and gaps within the design team. I also felt that there were certain parts of the product that needed attention. So for example, the core navigation of the product and how we laid out the core navigation for our users, it was kind of in different parts of the screen. And I thought that we were not enabling users to build habit on our product, and not letting them use Flipkart with ease. So these were some of the areas that I focused on heavily. Also some parts of visual design. So we ended up changing the typeface that we used on Flipkart. We ended up uplifting our visual design language through the design system that we were building. And these were immediate changes that everyone in the org and hopefully our customers could also look at, and reflect that. Just looking at the team, I think they were just areas of, for example, building our competencies, figuring out a track for senior ICs, defining that career ladder, defining how we wanted to use competencies, not just for reviewing and for performance, but also for hiring. So these were some of the initiatives that I took early on. And I think once some of these elementary things, I would say, kind of settled, that’s when I started engaging more deeply with, especially, with the business stakeholders. I don’t think in a product org, you can live without engaging with the tech stakeholders, but definitely with business stakeholders, the engagement kind of increased also, the ending of COVID lockdown had a big role as well because then it was easier to meet people face to face, bump into them and have these conversations. Peter: And so what stage are you at now in your leadership journey at Flipkart? You mentioned starting with, like, managing down, getting the best out of the team. Once that’s settled, you kind of look up and out a bit more and partner with those business stakeholders. Are you still in that phase, or is there almost like a lean forward now, almost four years in, like, are you at a different point in your journey here? Gaurav: Yeah, no, I think there’s definitely a lean forward. We are looking at creating more strategic impact. We are also looking significantly redesigning certain parts of the experience. We’re in a space that’s constantly evolving. So we are also creating new products for our customers. We’re getting into quick commerce and how do we look at these kinds of experiences. Satisfying customer needs in a very short time. So there are different kinds of areas now that we are looking into and playing an active role in building these in a, in a fairly delightful manner, I would say. Jesse: Gaurav, what are you looking forward to in this next phase for design? Gaurav: I think I would like to see the Indian startup ecosystem kind of mature and grow and also design create a larger impact in this journey. Flipkart is a large player in this space, but I think there are also a lot of other companies doing some really good work in India. And I think there is a huge opportunity for designers to design for Indian needs. India is a very, very diverse country. We have a population of about 1.45 billion, but it’s actually made up of many different Indias. We have 22 recognized languages in India, and we have diversity in terms of the affluence, in terms of technical savviness. We still have people in India who are just experiencing the Internet for the first time on their mobile devices, and so their trust levels with the platform are quite different from someone who’s been using lot of digital products for a fairly long time. For example, there is a small population in India, which is primarily in the urban centers of India, okay, that behaves very similar to Californians, in terms of how they use digital products and the ease with which they use digital products and the frequency at which they use digital products. And at the same time, there is a population in Tier Two, Tier Three, and rural parts of India that is very different in terms of their taste preferences, rootedness in the Indian culture, and trust on the platforms. So it’s a very diverse space. There are lots of problems for designers to really solve for. And I would love to see more digital products built out of India and addressing these needs. Jesse: Love it. Thank you so much. Gaurav: Thank you. Jesse. Peter, for having me on the podcast. Jesse: Where can people find you if they want to know more about you? Gaurav: LinkedIn would be the best place. I do have a website that I don’t update very frequently, but that would be the other word other way to reach out to. Jesse: All right. Thank you so much. Peter: Thank you, Gaurav: Thank you. Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched the Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.

Oct 26, 2024 • 57min

50: Balancing Design and Business as a Utopian Pragmatist (ft. Leslie Witt)

Transcript Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz. Jesse: And we’re finding our way, Peter: Navigating the opportunities Jesse: and challenges Peter: of design and design leadership, Jesse: Welcome to the Next Phase. Joining us to talk about what’s next for digital product design is Leslie Witt, chief product and design officer for mental health care platform Headspace. Along the way, she’ll share with us her journey from designer to design leader to P&L business leader, she’ll also talk about building the credibility for a broader mandate for design as well as for yourself as a leader, and what to do when your intellectual tendencies get the better of you. Peter: Hi, Leslie. Thank you so much for joining us. Leslie: Thank you so much for inviting me. Peter: So we always start these conversations in pretty much the same way, which is who are you, what do you do? Leslie: I mean, that’s like an existential question, yes? Maybe I’ll start with the concrete answer. My name is Leslie Witt. I am the chief product and design officer at Headspace, which is the world’s largest, most accessible, and, I would say, increasingly most comprehensive mental health care platform out there. And I also am a mom to twin 13-year-olds. Peter: Excellent. Jesse and I are on a exploration. There’s been a lot of conversation in the community around some of the challenges of design leadership. We’ve engaged this topic on the podcast a few episodes ago, on this thing we call the phase shift, and what we’re interested in is trying to figure out, or maybe do some sense-making around what’s next, right? Where are things headed? And so we noticed that your job had changed from a VP of design to a VP of design and product, and we thought, oh, well maybe that’s, at least, a way forward. So, love to hear that story of what that shift has been like, from a design leader to a design and product leader. “Utopian Pragmatist” Leslie: Look, titles matter–and they don’t. And so I say that just… I’m going to, I’m going to go a little side path first, and then I promise to get back to your core question. I started my life with a very clear title and role. I trained as an architect. I got three degrees in it. My entire self identity was as an architect, and I discovered 10 years in that I really disliked being an architect. Oh. And I decided to take a plunge into the world of what I would say, the unnamed. Now, many would call what I plunged into… I became a designer. I joined the company IDEO and one of the things that I most loved in that and kind of connecting to your, you know, I am now a this, was that we got to pick our own titles. And, you know, in their ecosystem, I was at the time an environments designer, that was the non-formal way of saying architect. But I didn’t put environments designer on my business card. Instead, I picked a title that I would say through all my career permutations is probably what I most see myself as. And I picked “utopian pragmsatist.” And I think many designers are utopian pragmatists, which is that we’re in this game because we believe we can change the world for the better, and that the better is possible, and that we’re then ruthlessly pragmatic about navigating the vicissitudes of now, the technical capabilities and possibilities, the compliance constraints, the commercial constraints to actually make something come to life. And that’s the kind of designer I’ve always been. That kind of designer has woven into many categories and incarnations and titles. And as I transitioned out of a consulting world that is very flexible about what you call yourself and how you show up and who you are and what you can be and in many ways has a model that benefits from that flexibility, into a corporate world that really likes to see people aligned against a skills matrix, loves to see things kind of crossed off and ticked off and told who, you know, owns decision making criteria, what I found was that my style of design was sometimes in direct conflict with the way in which the organization operated. And so I spent six, seven years as VP of design at Intuit. Thankfully at a company who saw design as a strategic function on par with product on par with engineering. It wasn’t a subdiscipline. And one where design was chartered with core service innovation, something that many other companies is kind of the provenance of product. What I came to feel was that I had a designer’s approach to problem solving, but in a world that largely ascribed that level of authority and decision making and kind of rights to drive change to a title called product. And so, as I shifted over into another discipline, another organization, a different sector and industry I kind of, you know, had a brief, like, mourning and grief moment of kind of stopping my fight against the fact that these were the rites and rituals and promises of the design discipline, but instead to take a designer’s hat and approach and ethics into the world defined as product. So, well, a little bit of a long narrative, but I would say, like, for me, this was coming to grips with the fact that the way I approach design, is largely mapped to the role of product in many tech organizations. Peter: Follow on that, when we had our podcast that we called The Phase Shift, we actually talked about ego death. That designers need to be willing to let go of that identity as a designer and possibly embrace, and be willing to embrace new identities where they can still be whoever they are, but they might be known in a different way. And it sounds like that’s what what what has happened for you. I’m wondering though… Leslie: Can, can I, can I like slight, slight parsing on language? ‘Cause I actually think, like, the identity of the designer is important. I, I definitely feel like it’s, it’s my, it’s my soul and it’s a huge part of my arsenal and worldview, but the title doesn’t necessarily map. And I think that there’s a difference between say an ethos and an approach, and a titled role. And that the designerly approach, you know, the power of divergent thinking, the ability to take behavioral insight and transform it into new propositions to actually have an aesthetic value that takes things beyond the utilitarian, like, a lot of these kinds of core ethos are things that don’t always map to the title designer. You can still hold those to be true as you navigate a range of different disciplines. Product + Design vs just Design Peter: Totally. I’m just wondering if, if what you are doing is any different with the title product and design than it was with the title design, or are you kind of showing up the same way and it’s just a different label? Leslie: I, I would say a bit of both, to be fair. I think that as wearing the design hat and title, you are commissioned to be agent provocateur, right? And I would say, especially for me, like, coming from an innovation background, like you are expected to present with some level of future visioning, novelty, operating outside of constraints. Yes, understanding commercial value, but not necessarily being foundationally constrained by it. You add a lot of value in that frame by kind of helping the group expand what could be very kind of here-and-now analytical thinking into a divergent possibilities-oriented space. Now, I have to navigate more schizophrenia that impulse to do so, but with the power to actually be the person making the decisions on what we do or don’t prioritize, and it’s hard to do both well, and to own when you’re kind of stepping in which role, and that’s something that I’ve had to get much better at is when I’m not the person that’s commissioned to act in a particular way. And so instead say, I’m going to have my head of design actually lead a visioning exercise, and then I’m going to be the person helping to deconstruct that and look at capability buildings, and data that we want to collect in order to prove out path X, Y, or Z. That the power position, you know, if I’m if I’m being honest of the product leader, it wields more authority, but then with that comes a level of constraint that doesn’t naturally sit with the role of design. Jesse: I think that for a lot of design leaders, it’s just very difficult for them to square the role that they see over on the product side with their identity as designers. Now this seems like it’s been an easier bridge for you to cross in part because of what your design practice has always been. But I find myself wondering what you did have to reconcile yourself to as you were making this transition. What was maybe hard to accept having to leave behind as you are squaring your identity as a designer with this new role, and what was maybe hard to accept that you had to take on. Leslie: Yeah, no, that’s a, that’s a great push. A few things, you know, I would say like, I would have been out there in the early 1900s as like a suffragette. Like, I, I am the person that wears the banner that is the champion. And I’ve always been, and I do continue to be, a champion for design. And I mean, design here with like a capital D. Like the art of, the practice of, the craft, and I would say what I’ve had to reconcile, even in a company that has a high premium on quality, is that there are dimensions and places where it matters a lot less. And so where do I fight that campaign and where do I say, actually, this is a workaday problem. This is something that is motivated by a very different set of need states, both organizationally and even from a member. And it’s not where there’s outsized value from levying design craft towards a challenge. So I would say like that, that stepping aside and viewing things more clinically has been a change that I’ve had to make versus being the person who’s chartered to act as the champion. And another that I would say has been a dimension to reconcile, is the level to which I have to lead with analytical thinking. I’ve always been, you know, I was a mathlete. I love numbers. I love data. But I historically was able to use it to reinforce a point, versus to kind of operate within a data landscape, first and foremost. And to use that to construct possibility versus to kind of throw out ideas that are either subjective or qualitative and to use experimentation only as a means to kind of prove or disprove. And so a very different relationship to data, metrics, and numbers, and then a deeper level of responsibility. I mean, one thing I didn’t mention, I also am the head of our consumer channel. And so that level of responsibility for delivering the business and needing to make those decisions on prioritization with you know, an accountability to deliver a number as top of mind. Peter: Does that mean you’re a operating as a general manager? Like you have P&L? Leslie: Essentially. Yeah. I own the P&L for our consumer business. Jesse: Accountability is an interesting thing when we think about the evolution of design. Because I think that on the one hand, design leaders would love to have more accountability. They just want to have accountability for things that actually matter. And there’s a lot of a sense that the business doesn’t know how to create accountability for design because the business doesn’t know how to evaluate design’s contribution to the business. And I wonder from your perspective, kind of, both wearing your general manager hat and your designer hat and your product hat. That’s a lot of hats, but like… Leslie: …it’s a lot of hats. Jesse: …yeah, what, what can you see from all those different perspectives? Leslie: Yeah. I mean, I think that when I only wore the designer hat or mainly wore the designer hat, as a designer, largely, the qualities that you are caring most about aren’t necessarily always the ones that you are most accountable to deliver. And they’re not far apart, but would say most designers I know, and I put myself in this category, care first and foremost about member value or customer value. Is this thing that I have brought to life actually doing something meaningful and important? Did it fulfill its mission? And the range of proxy metrics that we sometimes use for those things, say, like, adoption or engagement, don’t necessarily prove out that you’ve actually added value. There are also things that most people realize can be gamed to deliver a result that looks good on a dashboard, but isn’t necessarily getting to the core point. So like, I’ll give an example from the world that I live within, which is our core member value is that we help you feel better, that you’re less stressed, that you’re less anxious, that you have lower symptoms of depression, that you sleep better, right? Those are actually like the values that we deliver. Now, I will always say, like, engagement is like the a priori to be able to deliver value. So I am pro-engagement, but it’s not the goal. And simply by delivering engagement, I don’t prove out that I actually delivered on value. By delivering on value, I don’t necessarily deliver value to the business. And so what I have focused on, and where I see these worlds coming together and how designers can kind of bridge the synapse is one, to understand how the business makes money, to understand what value an end user derives from a service and to try their damnedest to bridge between those worlds and realities. And sometimes that means actually getting into business model design. So, in a world where you want heavily for the reward to the organization to be that you built something of value, how do you actually think about the ways in which that either saves money or earns money, or, you know, kind of does, does something that actually sustainably means the organization is incented to actually align to that. And I think that those dimensions… proving out that you understand the mechanics, that you are focused on durable value and that you can connect the bridge between those things, I think that’s where designers both gain a lot of credibility, and maybe that credibility supplants what often I think accountability translates to, which is I got autonomous decision-making authority. I think very often that’s what, what folks would like accountability to mean. I think it’s that I am going to be someone who shows up and says, I’m going to move this number. I’m going to do this thing and no matter what, that’s the end outcome. And I’m going to move mountains in order to do so. Jesse: It’s interesting because it also suggests sort of taking accountability for outcomes more than activities. Leslie: I believe so. And now I’m talking at different levels of the food chain, right? Jesse: How’s it different? Leslie: I think that if you’re someone who’s on a working team that’s assigned a set of tasks, and asks if you’re, you know, a junior I C, independent of function, like, that set of arguments and kind of conceptual resolution has to have happened above your pay grade largely so that you are actually empowered to do that thing. But that thing, doing that action and doing it well, and understanding how it ties up is something that you can be accountable for no matter what level of hierarchy you are at. Peter: In conversations that I have with clients and just people out in the industry, and I’m wondering your take on, is as design attempts to identify how it can be held accountable, how it can be seen as valuable, those measures are, at least in anything that is used by people, the same as a product managers’ metrics, right? Design and product end up driving towards the same thing, which maybe speaks to why you’re in the role you’re in, but then, how have you, have you had to, how do you encourage others to navigate this tension where, at least in some organizations, functions need to prove themselves in order to like, you know, get headcount or whatever. But if design doesn’t have a value distinct from product, how have you navigated that? Or how do you counsel others to navigate that? Leslie: Yeah look, I think right now it’s shifting. So I could tell you how I navigated it in the past and we still, by and large, have, you know, a triad or a quad model where we’re looking at having, you know, a product leader who is, you know, establishing the product requirements and really kind of prioritizing attributes of the of the process in tandem with an engineering leader, who’s, you know, building out the kind of capabilities and scoping, and a designer who is, you know, anchoring exactly how that comes to life concretely within the user experience. Like we largely fall along a kind of traditional triad model. But I’d say that, you know, with the rise of AI, right, and the reason I bring that up is that some of the technical dimensions of what have held those two disciplines apart are falling away as barriers. You know, I have a very, like, experimentation and data oriented designer on one of our membership teams who loves to build dashboards and technical experiments. Well, that’s something that used to be the kind of technical skill set of the product manager. I’ve got a pretty young and very ambitious product manager who has learned a lot about how to set things up in Figma, and is able to kind of take modern tools and, increasingly, content generation and like put together some pretty compelling flows and prototypes. And so the blur that used to kind of exist between craft skill sets and things that I’d say had like a technical barrier to entry–and this is very much true for engineering as well, right? You know, it was like code, code was like the Holy Grail that no one could cross. And, and, you know, like that, that key to the castle that was locked up by computer science capabilities is, is it’s getting unlocked at least partially. And so, what do you do with folks who, yes, have different potential biases, but come in with a lot of shared skill sets or lower barriers to entry on those skill sets? And I’d say we’re still very much navigating that reality. More apparent in certain sectors than other. Peter: What do you mean by certain sectors? Leslie: I mean, like depending on the problem that a team is chasing, there are ways in which the unique skillset of a craft based designer, it’s like we just defined and designed a new AI bot, but we’re joining the crew. The skillsets of conversation design, and even like brand design, we created a character. It has a complete tonality and a name. Like, that’s a more craft-oriented challenge and one that it’s incredibly important to have someone with expertise nail, then say an adaptation of a set of flows and a simplification of clinical intake. It has a form. It has examples out in the world. I don’t necessarily need someone with deep finesse and deep craft expertise to tackle that. I need someone who knows how to build and test and use tools. The Distinct Role of Design Jesse: As I imagine this playing out, into the future, it seems to me that if you’ve got, like, craft level design work that’s now happening in lots of different parts of the organization across a range of roles, some of which are not design roles and not participating in design processes per se, then it seems to me that the role of design leader, someone who’s going to be that champion for design as a practice, design as, as a value driver in the organization, it almost becomes more like governance. Leslie: Maybe it’s governance and inspiration. I mean, I think like anyone, who’s played in the space of more traditional, like, graphic design. Often this still is the reality of say, like brand creative. That world has existed for a long while in defining guidelines. And then acting as enforcer, you know, brand police, they’re here like, you did it wrong. And, you know, while the team is deputized to do X, Y, and Z, if they have the skills, like the rest of everybody needs to align to a particular zone. And not to say that that doesn’t have some real value. But I think it’s, I think that’s a depressing role. If what you’re out doing is kind of guard… it’s a retrograde role, right? Like, you’re almost by default, then, protecting the status quo versus pushing and defining the future. And so I would argue that you might have less dominion, right? Like, there may not be 300 designers on your team who are involved part and parcel in everyone’s work streams or in a subset of work streams, but in some ways you have potentially more influence. And so, how are you out there now that everybody is cracking open ChatGPT to apply their hand at conversational design now that everyone is playing around with a variety of different tools and seeing what they can bring to life. How are you, one, inspiring them with what quality looks and feels like, and how you think about a design process? How are you out there showcasing what good looks like? And then I’d say where I’m more interested in design-led governance is on questions of ethics, and, what is that insight into human behavior? What is that foresight, into the way that technology can evolve possibility, doing in terms of driving us to a better future? I think design kind of owes itself the responsibility of having an ethical viewpoint on it and helping an organization think in that capacity. Peter: Why does it feel like design is often the one that raises its hand to care about ethics and the rest of the organization let’s it slide? Like this comes up a lot that that designers feel like they’re the ones who… Jesse: why do we have to be the ones all the… Peter: …yeah, who like, how is not everyone concerned with the ethical implications of what we’re doing, but designers, at least in my experience, are the loudest in the room, reminding people… deceptive patterns, right, was, was a concept that emerged from the design community, right? It didn’t come from somewhere else. So yeah… Leslie: To be fair, I don’t think designers are the only ones who care, but on the flip side of what we were talking about earlier, which is that designers are often not held accountable to a metric, I think there’s amazing freedom that comes with that too, because it’s freedom to operate outside of behaviors that are dictated by achieving a number. Like, let’s say I’m a marketer who is going to be gold and bonused on whether or not I was actually able to increase sign up by 5%. I’m going to do my damndest to increase sign up by 5%. I’m going to do my damndest to increase sign up by 5%, right? And out of probably very seldom actually bad intention, I’m going to chase doing that in such a way that might have a lot of unintended consequences. And designers have the right and the responsibility to point out what are the things that we’re systemically avoiding or how are we taking negative advantage of human behavior and motivation and, in a way, because designers also know those tactics, they are the ones most able to come back and say, hey, we’re actually like weaponizing,right, human psychology, we are doing something that sits opposed to our values basis. Now that’s like one thing to do when what you’re talking about is you know, a tactical marketing campaign. It’s quite another, and I think it takes a level of intention and it absolutely takes buy in by other disciplines, and it takes both good intentions as well as mechanics to audit what actually happened when you’re talking about applications of LLMs, when you’re talking about what data privacy rights and consent are we putting in place of our members? Are we as explicit about both the intended use and the actual use of this as we need to be? And, like, kind of holding up that lens of inspection for the organization. I think design often is one of the few disciplines that has both the skill sets to do so, and in many ways operates enough adjacent to the litany of metrics to be able to have the oxygen to do so. Jesse: It seems to me the gap, then, here is really one of credibility, that the designers have the capability, they have the mindset and the appropriate, you know, resources to take on these challenges but they’re not being asked to, and when they do bring these things up they’re kind of like shunted aside. Like, don’t bother me, kid, I’ve got a business to run here. And so a lot of these Design leaders feel like, if I talk about anything other than corner radii and button placement people think I’m talking out of turn. And so I wonder about, how to make the case that design has something to contribute here, even in cases where that alignment is possible, you know? Connecting Design to the work of the Business Leslie: Yeah, I mean, I’ll be honest. I have not personally had that experience. So well, I respect that many have. I do think there’s a dimension of, what are the values of the place that you work and, that no one’s perfect, right? Like, but are you working in a place that has some level of precondition to care, right? I mean, because there are places that surely don’t, and then I think you’re trying to run something up the flagpole that never going to stick. But I think most places, like, there’s an intention. There’s a set of positive intentions, at least at a like mission declaration level, but then bridging the gap between the operational metrics of how that business runs, and it’s ambitions, there’s a wide vacuum of definition between what those things are. And you know, I think it’s incumbent, especially on a design leader to foundationally understand the commercial mechanics of the business that they work within, so that they can bridge that gap. I mean, the same thing is true here. Why should the business care? To be able to speak in the language, not just of like, Hey, all we should care and we should do the right thing. Why? Like, what happens if we don’t? Because what is often being seen if we don’t is, I either just cut costs, well, that sounds great, or I just put a little bit more money in the coffer. Well, that sounds great. So you’re going to tell me a different narrative about why I shouldn’t. I think you need to do two things in tandem, like paint a concrete picture of the risk, okay, of continuing, and then create a concrete pathway of what else, like, if I don’t do this, what should I do? And so I think you can get into a position where you’re the person that’s flagging, why not, but you’re also not painting the path of possibility. Peter: From what I can tell you have worked in pretty high design maturity environments, right? IDEO, Intuit. Now Headspace. And I think some of the challenges that we’re seeing are with design leaders who are operating in lower design maturity environments, where they have designers, but they, kind of, don’t know why. They just got them because that’s what you were supposed to do. I’m wondering though, What can help people in these lower maturity environments, get some purchase, get some traction? Leslie: A lot of the companies who hired IDEO back in the day, and I was there 2005 to almost 2014, were coming because they were not high design maturity environments. They were organizations that lacked these infrastructures and capabilities, and they often did have design organizations within them, but they were extremely tactical design. You know, it was maybe one step different, one step more technical than a brand creative team. And that’s not to slam any of those things, but like, it was not design as a strategic function. Design didn’t own research. Design was very much, you know, there to execute. Setting Design up to succeed Leslie: And what I would say essential to do, is to understand who cares about the idea of design, slash the things that you can do through design, having more power, actually having purchase and finding that champion as high up in the organization as possible is essential. And so, you know, one of the things I learned from that time period in life was we needed two things in order to be successful as consultants within those environments. We needed like C-suite level championing, and we needed operational level advocacy buy-in and collaboration to what we were doing. Because if we had one without the other, the ideas were dead on arrival, right? Like, great, the CEO loved what we came up with, but this business leader has zero interest in executing on it. It wasn’t their idea. Thanks for the gift, but no, thanks, right. And then the opposite side, if it was just like a passionate business leader who, you know, had zeal in the organization, it tended to have no staying power. And so there’s still real value because I would say, like, well, you’d get like a demonstrable point on the board. You’d have somebody who is committed to seeing something through from like, Idea to execution, but it was very hard to then kind of harness that as a repeatable event. But, but if you can get that orchestration of a triangle, and maybe you’re doing it by proxy, you’re showing how this has worked effectively to build a business and other organizations, and as an individual, as a design leader, you’re making those relationships happen. You’re finding a high level advocate. You’re finding someone with whom you’re partnered who might have more decision making authority than you and you’re demonstrating in a tactical, tangible way that working in this capacity, where design has more influence or has more of a strategic charter, actually helped to do something meaningful, then you can start to grow that into a broader way of working. I will say for the very same reason, as I stepped from consulting into corporations, I knew and I’ve stayed very strong on this. I would never take a head of innovation role or say, like a chief design officer role at a company that did not have any type of organizational maturity around design. And for me, that was because I had seen too often the way in which, like, that was, it was novelty. It was somebody to be brought out to an investor relations group to parrot, like, really cool vision work that really had very little consequence on the way in which the organization operated. And I don’t think a singular hero can affect organizational change. Peter: A question that I’m often asked is, how do you know that the companies you’re talking to are mature? Like, what are the indicators that they’re the kind of place where design could thrive? I’m wondering, as you shifted from Intuit to Headspace, what were those indicators that you saw at Headspace that allowed you to feel like, okay, this is a place where I can actualize myself in some way. Leslie: Yeah, I mean, in that case, for pure honesty, I was recruited by someone I had worked with before, who I’d worked with at both IDEO and Intuit, at least adjacently. And so I had a trust in who would be my boss, the CEO, and that was huge because I knew that person had a visceral understanding of both me and the role that I saw design playing in the expanded field. I would say that the other indicators, you know, I could look at the product and tell that there was a care for craft. There was a demonstrated history. And then probably the kicker for me was that the conversations I had multiple times across, even like the CFO, referenced the research that design had led to understand the core landscape opportunities. And, that proof point of hearing someone else unbidden reference qualitative design research that was like, okay, this is real. And this is a place where that input is taken seriously as part of driving a business strategy forward. Jesse: Yeah… Leslie: And look, I don’t, I don’t pretend that everybody gets to cherry pick. Like, well, no, I’m not going to join that organization. And no organization is perfect. Far from it. For any role. And I would say, like, part of now wearing more and more hats, like the, person in charge of that P&L and the person in charge of our product prioritization, I see that there are frustrations and downsides and maturity issues across the continuum in a way that I probably didn’t respect as a designer who felt like I was lone man on an island and a place where everyone else had well-defined, well defined, well respected roles. this frustration I think is actually something that can be leveraged positively as a universal driver to enlist collaborators in your cause, because you can actually help them buoy their cause. Relationship with the C-Suite Peter: If my quick Googling is bearing out, you’ve had two new CEOs since you joined. So you’re on… Leslie: …that’s correct. I’m on my third. Peter: So given that you were brought in by one CEO and that relationship was so important, what has changed for you? This is something I noticed myself as a design leader, even if I wasn’t reporting to a CEO, even if the CEO barely knew who I was, who the CEO was had a very direct bearing on my ability to succeed as a design leader. And I’m wondering, kind of, how that has shifted and evolved as you’ve had new leadership come in, and how you’ve had to kind of show up, either the same or differently, given the nature of what was happening in the C-suite. Leslie: Yeah, it’s a great question. And, you know, I will say that it’s hard to navigate a managerial change. And I think about that all the time you know, I think there’s not a designer out there, there’s not anyone who’s worked in a corporation who hasn’t gone through a reorg. And then, you know, if you’re, newly mapped to a new manager, even if that person existed in the organization before, they’re new to you and establishing that level of trust and belief and knownness and shared philosophy and prioritization is hard, right? Even if at the end of the day, you have mutual respect across the continuum. And so, yeah, it’s been an interesting journey. You know, I mentioned I was recruited by someone who knew me and actually had known me at least in these kind of like off and on ways for over a decade. And so I was able to hit the ground running and I had really been hired, although my title didn’t say product, I was hired to drive our explorations around stepping into the mental health care space for us, like, running a therapeutic pilot that then led to a set of M and A evaluations and that’s actually something that I discovered when I was into it because I was leading a lot of the innovation product space. I really love actually thinking about not just organic growth, but inorganic growth and helping to drive that evaluative process. It’s itself a very, like, creative act. And that path led us to acquisition of a company Ginger. Which is how I got my 2nd boss, because as we made that decision to merge, the decision was made that that company’s CEO would become the boss. And deep respect for that individual who was with us for the last 3 years and just recently left the company, which will be the kind of 3rd chapter. But what was different foundationally was that I would say we went from an organization whose business model meant that design as an act and product as a medium were the primaries to an organization that built an enterprise benefits platform where sales was the primary, and so a very channel centric view of the world versus necessarily service centric world and a really different means by which you make money. You have to get a singular buyer to see enough value to sign up for a massive, sometimes multimillion dollar contract. And so they’re looking at like, how many boxes do you check? How confident are they that this thing is going to stand the test of time? And it deprioritizes some of the dimensions of what I had most cared about in the advocacy that was very directly mapped to our ecosystem. And so in that world. You know, as I saw how I could both shape our commercial model as well as shape what I wanted to have happen, that’s how I became the head of our consumer business. Was like looking at where does the influence that I want to have actually sit within this ecosystem and, you know, to be quite honest, I would say with our, third leader who’s come in really to help us take the world that we’ve now fully integrated, and, you know, we kind of like we have gotten through that incredible platform transformation that if any of you have ever gone through, it’s not necessarily a fun one, but it like gets you to a place where it just has different potential energy forward. Like he’s now here to act as like a maximizer. How do we take that and really take all the latent potential and maximize that energy. And I imagine that we’ll need to permute again, right? Like what are the things that the organization now cares about? How do we meaningfully shape them? And, in a world that now has a whole set of new technologies, in this world, what are the things that will matter most to an organization, both from an innovation and an incrementality standpoint? Planning for Innovation Jesse: I’m curious about where things are going, as we’ve seen innovation, as a standalone function, kind of fall by the wayside, innovation consultancies are having a hard time selling those services these days. And yet you did identify it earlier in this conversation as being something that design really has an opportunity to contribute toward, with design’s own toolkit and mindset and skill set. But then I wonder about what you said about having to embrace the spreadsheets and step into the world of the analytical in order to actually take on that role. And I’m wondering, where would you see an ideal place for some more of that old innovation magic in here? Leslie: Well, believe it or not, I actually think I’ve come to love the world of prioritization, and that where I see it able to really create space for the new, both the minor new and the mega new. You know, there’s a variety of different frameworks you can use, but the one I’ve loved for years is a horizon innovation framework, and it looks at the portfolio of SKUs and channels and kind of activities of an organization and ranks them on their maturity, and then assigns resources really based on that maturity. And what you want to have is a lot of things that are in the horizon one category, which means they’re fully mature. Like that doesn’t mean they no longer get investment. It actually means they get your most investment because you, you know, far more as you get further down the pike, the value of level of effort equals level of result. And so they’re highly predictable. You know, it’s where almost all of your go-to-market dollars should be spent, and it’s the cash engine that runs the company so that you can invest in a few things that are in horizon two and maybe one or two things that are in the horizon three hopper. And, you know, if you go to horizon three, that’s where I’d say, like, that’s where innovation sits. And as a company, you want to be placing as small, but as a complete, of a bet around a set of things that you think could be your future and giving them enough oxygen that they can deliver meaningful results that will actually be indicative so that you can decide whether or not you should fuel them or kill them, right. You know, it’s more of a. intrapreneurship type of experience and one that I’ve found a lot of pleasure in doing within the idiom of, if successful, it’s transformative, either to the way that we do business or to the way that we drive commercial value and to know that you may not necessarily, even if it’s greenlit, get permission to then build it internally. That’s a great hopper horizon three, for M&A, right? Like, okay, great. We proved this out. This actually is something that there are more mature businesses out in the ecosystem that we might decide to bring in, or this is actually something that we want to grow and scale internally. And that’s really what that middle hopper is about. So I would say, like, the space I found for innovation is to develop a kind of discipline and rigor about it that lets you allocate resources, as unsexy as that sounds, but to quarantine those resources so that they’re protected and can actually do their job. Jesse: Right. So this suggests then that if design really wants to actively participate in these processes, it means sharpening your ability to do some strategic long term forecasting from a design stance, a user value stance. Leslie: Yeah. I mean, yeah. One of the things I learned at IDEO, I mean, not like in a formal way, but by, like, peering over the shoulder of the few, we called them business designers, but basically the 10 human beings in the organization who had MBAs, was, they would do a lot of discovery driven planning, which is a fancy word for basically saying like, I don’t know what this is going to do, but I can set up a set of variables, like, and some of those are known: H ow big is this addressable market? What might we price this at? What would be a believable, you know, X, Y, and Z in terms of adoption. And I can make this machine that lets me explore possibility and see like, from an incrementality standpoint, does this matter if I get 10x more people to sign up? That passion for, I can make this so much better, has to be linked to, and if I do, does it matter? And making a model to kind of prove out to myself, okay, yeah, yeah, this is something I should continue to think is a big deal. Or, ooh, okay, even if I 5x this, at the end of the day, we’re talking about a business that’s in the single digit millions. Well, that’s probably not worth the time and effort versus something that has just a much bigger, you know, delta. Peter: As you were reflecting on some of your experience at IDEO, I found myself thinking or wondering about career development, right? You had an opportunity for career development. You were able to pivot from architect, into environments designer, into some type of general strategic business savvy design lead, who then was able to then kind of take that and go quote, unquote in house and, thrive at places like Intuit and, Headspace. And it’s not a secret that design agencies and consultancies have, whether or not they’re on the wane, the percentage of design practice happening in those environments versus in-house is way skewed. And I’m curious your thoughts on what we as a community, as an industry, as a practice are missing by not having those types of environments that tended to create a space for a certain kind of practice that you don’t get typically inside of enterprises, inside of corporations. And then, not only what are we missing, what, if anything, have you tried to institute as a design and product leader now with authority, with people listening to you, you have power. What have you tried to do organizationally within the spaces that you oversee to encourage that kind of professional development? Personal professional development Leslie: Yeah, I mean, first of all, I just want to acknowledge, I think that, you know, through no dimension of will, but through total serendipity, it was an incredible time to get to have that moment where design was a darling at the ball, where IDEO had that type of like broad stroke permission to come into spaces and to be consulting fortune 100 company CEOs about perspectives on their companies with total hubris. And like I look back on that as something that gave me probably undo confidence, but a level of confidence that certainly is valuable as we carry forward. So I want to acknowledge that as a starting point. So that’s not necessarily the reality of right now. I think, like, in exchange there has been, you know, at least up till very recently, and I believe it’s not going to like change and pivot on a dime, many more roles for folks with design backgrounds of a variety of ilks to step into high paying corporate roles. That wasn’t really the world that existed back then. And I think in exchange, however, it becomes very easy to become, you know, in the kind of ideal parlance of the T-shaped individual, where the long arm of the T is your depth and the horizontal arms, IDEO worked really hard on building those horizontal arms. And that makes it really easy to grab somebody else’s hand and skip on over and, you know, pretend for a while that you have another depth and then actually develop it. And I would say that those arms have to be very intentionally exercised in a corporate environment. You can get pigeonholed, especially in a large corporate environment, into extremely kind of technical sub-dimensions of a skill. And that might be how you get hired, right? Like, I actually got hired to IDEO because I was a good 3D modeler, and they needed somebody who could 3D model. Now, I did two projects where I 3D modeled, and then I tried my damnedest to never do it again. But I do think a lot of times why you are hired isn’t necessarily why you stay, and it’s definitely not necessarily why you move up in the world. And so, you are the one who knows both, like, who you are as a myriad individual the best, the organization doesn’t know. It doesn’t fit neatly into a matrix. Grab the thing that you’re both most passionate to learn and that you actually think you have a chance of being successful at, and raise your hand, use it as a ladder to advocate for what you think you can do, what you want. And then try your damnedest to do it well, and that’ll create opportunity. It’ll also help you understand, like, do I actually enjoy doing this? And so I think that that dimension, and that does assume that probably is some privilege wrapped around that, but like that dimension of intentional self advocacy, and not necessarily foresight on what’s going to be important, but insight to yourself is key. And being okay with the fact that I think like another design nature is like, you get bored. Seize that boredom as like the biggest thing that jets you forward. Don’t just like keep rinse repeating. Like you’ve mastered that skill, you’ve achieved mastery, move on. Keep it as part of your like, it’s part of your toolkit. What else do you want to know? What else do you want to explore? What else do you want to learn? I would say in our organization, we probably aren’t as institutional about it as we could be and should be. But we have a fair number of forums that are very democratic in the way that they work. And everything from, you know, your kind of traditional hackathon, those can be formed with teams from kind of anyone’s input, anyone can kind of propose sets of ideas forward. I make myself available weekly with an open office hours, and I would say what I see is across functions and across levels, the folks that most want to come and kind of pitch themselves in an idea, show up, they show up and they, they put themselves out there. And I do think you have to take some of those risks in order to yield the opportunities that you desire. Peter: I realized I don’t know what all you oversee. I imagine design and designers, maybe researchers, but is there like data or other product functions that are in your world as well? Leslie: Not necessarily producty functions. I also have our whole content organization. So, you know, Headspace makes, a wide variety of multimedia content. And so that organization lives within my purview in reporting structure, the brand creative team lives within my structure as does our science team. And so that is group of folks who have mostly clinical backgrounds, as well as actuarial backgrounds, who are responsible for evaluating whether we are efficacious, right? Like, do our services work? They run RCTs, they collect real world evidence, they run longitudinal studies to understand health outcome savings. And we do have a few clinical psychologists who are product managers as well, because we are making, you know, healthcare a consequential product. Peter: How did you make it clear to the C-suite that you were credible in leading clinical psychologists, right? You don’t have a background in that. You don’t have a degree in that you’re like, or… Leslie: I don’t, I don’t have a background in that. Peter: But I get the sense you must have demonstrated some ability or capability that allowed others to go, Oh, okay. She can stretch beyond the boundaries that, that she’s currently in. So let’s, give Leslie more responsibility. What do you ascribe that to? Leslie: I tend to wear a pretty strong veneer of credibility period, like, to own that. Like, I am versant, I am fairly intellectual, I’m pretty rigorous and I used to be an academic, and while I wasn’t an academic in areas like clinical psychology, you know, like with ability to speak post-structuralism and kind of go heady, you can, you know, help yourself like be nimble and appeal to the folks who have PhDs. And so that’s how I ended up inheriting the science function, was when our head of clinical at the time left the company. That team asked to report to my organization. And I think that’s because they had experienced directly that I cared about what they were doing. I valued it and I could get smart enough quick enough that I knew how to empower them. And I do think that a large part of that, you know, organizational choices tend to not just be tops down. But they’re bottoms up and which functions decide they can thrive under your leadership is a major factor in terms of where things end up sitting. Peter: I’m glad you used the word intellectual. Because it’s been evident, frankly, in our conversation that you are well read, extremely articulate, broad vocabulary. And if I am immodest, I like to think similar things about myself and that has gotten me in trouble in a lot of contexts, Leslie: Me too. Me too. Peter: I am very comfortable going very abstract, being very heady, being very conceptual, being intellectual. And I think, losing people overcomplicating situations. All of that. And I’m wondering, it sounds like you, you know, you’ve had a little bit of that experience, is this something you’ve had to kind of consciously dial in? What, what have you done to manage maybe some of these tendencies and inclinations in making sure that you’re coming across as, confident, capable, but not like overwhelming in the way that can sometimes happen to folks who get really spun up about their ideas. Leslie: Yeah I mean, I think I’m still on that journey. Let’s be completely honest. But I’ve had some great advice along the way. I had my first boss at IDEO was a gentleman named Fred Dust, who also came from an architectural background. And, a delightful human, and he would just call me out and mock me endlessly when I would use way too many multisyllabic terms. And I think one that I remember, I was talking to, like, I think American Eagle Outfitters, it was like a very workaday retailer that we were doing a project for. And I said something about perambulate and he’s like, she means walk. And so he would just, just make fun of me. And I realized that there had been this normalization, especially in architecture of speaking in a particular way that wasn’t intended to obfuscate, but did. And so I try to like tap that down. I would actually say like in a funny way, the more excited and ad lib I get, the more it comes out because then I’m not like intentionally thinking. And in my natural state, I still retreat there. I do a lot of writing and I tend to write like it’s some long form prose, Peter: For yourself or for public consumption? Leslie: Um, for all sorts of reasons. Both, I do both. But I would say, like, first and foremost, I was mentioning it because I tend to write to think. in order to process, like, what really do I think about this and how is that going to manifest in, you know, X, Y, Z sets of decisions, and I need to do the corpus you know, some people are like, I just need the TLDR. I’m like, well, to get to the TLDR, I have to write the big part first, and then, like, distill and reshape. But yeah, so I’m definitely still on that journey. I can be pithy at times. But, tend to like love a good long form debate. What’s next Jesse: Leslie, what are you most curious about as we enter this next phase? Leslie: I tend to be hopeful. And, I’m going to just kind of focus on, like, what the possibilities of technology bring. I like to imagine a world in which, like, these radically more empathetic means of interacting with technology help us address the loneliness crisis. They help us have people feel more seen and more heard and that doesn’t have them needing to navigate some obscure graphical user interface in order to find what they need, but like, just kind of surfacing the world to them is knowing what they need. And it’s kind of working in this capacity that’s helping fill the blank. I think that when I think about being an employee, kind of independent of function, that we’re not being made obsolete, but we’re becoming super-powered and that that’s, you know, allowing us to step outside the mundane, do a hell of a lot less of that and reserve time for things that creative human beings can only do, and that we’re going to understand that those dimensions of what I just articulated as kind of best case scenario are highly privileged. I’m less worried about like, do, does so and so’s profession become obsolete, do radiologists get replaced by the machine? Like, I’m less worried about that because largely all of those people will be fine. I am more worried about you know, an economic reality, a social reality, a political reality that is already harshly schismed and divided. And where both the resilience of folks who are at the bottom of the pyramid, as well as the means to take positive advantage of the evolution of technology is so much lower and how do we, as a society, as, as social engineers, how do we tackle that intentionally, so that we’re not increasing what I would say we are already, already clearly seeing, which is that it foments immense discord, violence in the world. Jesse: Well, if design leaders and design teams can do something to shift all of that, that’s a vision worth reaching toward. Peter: Most definitely. Jesse: Leslie, thank you so much for being with us. Leslie: Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. Peter: Yes. Thank you. Jesse: Where can people find you on the internet? Leslie: Sadly, I would say LinkedIn is the best place to find me You can find me and connect with me on LinkedIn. I, for whatever reason, just never hopped on the Twitter brigade. And then once it became X, like had no interest. So, you know, hit me up on LinkedIn and look forward to connecting. Jesse: Thank you again. Leslie: Thank you. Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholtz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched the Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone Else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.chrome-extension://knjbgabkeojmfdhindppcmhhfiembkeb/index.html

The AI-powered Podcast Player

Save insights by tapping your headphones, chat with episodes, discover the best highlights - and more!

Get the app